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The Possibility of Revolutionary Change

William Connolly, a distinguished Professor of Political Theory from Johns Hopkins spoke at Cornell on Friday. He has previously deplored the power of what he calls the evangelical neoliberal resonance machine on our politics. And he has hoped for a militant democracy in response. One way of looking at his talk would be that it answered the question whether a militant democracy (Connolly hopes for mass strikes around the world) is even possible.

To put it in my words, Connolly elegantly argued that the historical political process is contingent, and frequently unpredictable, but bounded. He pointed to similar aspects in the physical sciences, and argued that human scientists have much to learn from the discussions of unpredictability and creativity in the physical sciences.  It is not surprising that our “scientists” and seers did not predict, as Connolly argues, “The rebellions in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rapid rise of neoliberal capitalism in Eastern Europe, Tiannamen Square, the birth of gay rights movements in the United States and Europe, the formation of the evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine in the United States, the claim to a right of doctor assisted suicide in a world in which many thought the list of human rights was complete, the (nearly) worldwide economic meltdown, the rebellion in Iran, the popular transformations in Tunisia and Egypt, the birth of a civil war in Libya, the eruption of protests in Wisconsin, the earthquake, Tsunami, nuclear crisis in Japan . . .”  See Connolly on the Politics of the event here.

There was much more in Connolly’s talk particularly ruminations about the effect of political events, the role of creativity and about the fragility of social and physical systems particularly the environment, and about militant democracy.

From my perspective, I take away two comments. Given the unpredictability of whether an effective revolution will come about, is not the form of the revolution also unpredictable? Sid Tarrow’s Power in Movement book about the nature of social movements traces many of the creative approaches such movements take. If neoliberalism is overthrown, mass strikes may or may not play a role. But I did not understand Connolly’s claim to be one of prediction, but of  a hoped-for scenario. He is suggesting that any such revolution could not be isolated to a single country though it could start in one. And he might hope for mass strikes on the wish that a revolution be as bloodless as possible.

Second, Connolly’s development of the many factors (too rich to explore here) that make revolutionary change possible including many changes not as attractive as militant democracy, enliven my hope in the possibility that neoliberalism will ultimately prove to be a temporary power. In addition, to the many examples discussed by Connolly (including events and beyond), I would add one mentioned in Terry Eagleton’s refreshing and accessible Why Marx Was Right. If you doubt the possibility of significant change, you don’t know the difference between burning witches and equal pay for women.

 

Epistemology and the Necessity of Intellectual Virtues

In the main, I’ve always found works in epistemology to be fairly and predictably insular in scope, abstract and idealized in a pernicious, not productive way, and thus often irrelevant (or at least not obviously germane) to other fields of philosophy, let alone the social sciences.* Ongoing debates in the field are typically structured among and between “externalists,” “internalists,” “reliabilists,” “coherentists,” and “foundationalists” (well, in truth, there’s very few of those left), perhaps with a few “Wittgensteinians” trying to be heard above the din. Of course there are some exceptions: for example (and my favorites), several works by Nicholas Rescher (as ‘pragmatic idealism’ or ‘cognitive pragmatism’), and a couple of books by Michael Williams, as well one by Meredith Williams which, while strictly speaking perhaps best classified within the “philosophy of mind,” is fraught with epistemological or epistemic implications: Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning: Towards a Social Conception of Mind (1999). In addition, the emerging field of “social epistemology” strikes me as a welcome development, best represented by Alvin Goldman’s groundbreaking title, Knowledge in a Social World (1999). Not being a professional philosopher, I’m sure there are other works that might be cited from within the profession that would likewise qualify as exceptions to the above (and somewhat crude) generalization.

And thus it’s gratifying to learn (at any rate, for someone who attended Catholic schools, has Buddhist proclivities, and is in some respects a ‘Marxist’) that there’s been no small amount of discontent from within epistemology itself, exemplified in the field of late by those articulating what’s come to be described by its practitioners as “virtue epistemology” (not unrelated, of course, to the contemporary rebirth of virtue ethics). Prominent among those responsible for this recent trend to one degree and in one way or another are Ernest Sosa, Linda Zagzebski, and Alvin Plantinga. In a rhetorically shrewd if not wise move, what is more or less grouped under the rubric of “virtue epistemology” has now been christened “regulative epistemology” by Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood in their book, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (2007). This regulative epistemology aims to be virtuous in several senses, and thus it is intended to include analytic epistemic virtues as well. Furthermore, it is best viewed as a species of practical wisdom, indeed, Roberts and Woods characterize their endeavor “as an attempt to formulate intellectual practical wisdom,” in this instance the analytic “formula” is necessarily complemented by or in conjunction with narrative examples. Axiomatic to their argument is a deep understanding and appreciation of what is meant by the notion of an “intellectual virtue.” And intimately related to this is their proposal to view “the will” as the central epistemic faculty, giving due recognition to the pivotal role played by our “concerns, desires, and emotions” in making “efforts and choices:” “The reason is that the epistemic goods are acquired, not by faculties but by agents [I would have preferred ‘persons’ here], and the will is the locus of our identity as agents.” 

From the conclusion to chapter 5 of Intellectual Virtues we find a nice summary of their overall argument:

“The substance of the living of the intellectual life is its practices, they are what the life of the mind is made of. That life is fully as much a matter of activity as the moral life, and aims just as concertedly at goods. The practices that constitute our cognitive life are extremely diverse and interwoven and, it seems, subject to historical evolution, at least in the particularities of the activities and of the auxiliary equipment that we use in pursuing them. But the need for virtues, where the highest goods are concerned, is constant across time. Virtues of character such as humility, patience, tenacity, firmness, love of knowledge, and generosity [‘autonomy,’ to which our authors devote an entire chapter, is missing from this list and thus should be included as well], or at least some approximation or facsimile thereof, need to be exemplified by the practitioners of the practices by which such goods are acquired, maintained, transmitted, and applied.”

Now this may strike some of us as common sense or readily intuitive, but that has not been the case within the field of professional epistemology. 

By way of conclusion, I’d like to mention a recent book that, I think, comes close to this idea and ideal of “regulative epistemology” for the social sciences, although the author is not aware of the possible relevance of this notion to his argument, mentioning only in passing epistemology’s comparative neglect of “practical knowledge:”Andrew Sayer’s Why Things Matter: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life (2011).

* Cf. Roberts and Wood: “The one-size-fits-all concept of justification [with regard to the analytic search for the logically necessary and sufficient conditions for propositional knowledge] that analytic epistemologists tended to seek is…a chimera, but virtually all the ideas of justification that were proposed have merit as aspects of a concept of justification. The propositional knowledge on which analytic epistemologists lavished their time is, from our point of view, an abstraction, yet, seen as such, it is an enormously important aspect of knowledge. [….] Our aim…is not to replace all the activities that have characterized epistemology in recent decades, but to let the concept of an excellent intellectual agent reshape those activities and concerns in the direction of analysis that will serve intellectual communities far beyond the borders of professional epistemology.” I think it’s safe to say professional epistemologists have evidenced little concern for what takes place beyond those borders (save, perhaps, in science) for some time now (at least they’ve been remiss in helping us to see the ‘big picture’ in the sense of teasing out the myriad possible implications and ramifications beyond epistemology proper). 

Cultivating Hope & Compassion at Homeboy Industries

First, a brief introduction (sans notes and hyperlinks) to Homeboy Industries from the Wikipedia entry:

“Homeboy Industries is a youth program founded in 1992 by Father Greg Boyle, S.J. following the work of the Christian base communities at Dolores Mission Church. The program is intended to assist at-risk youth and gang members with a variety of services, such as counseling, tutoring, and employment. The most distinctive feature of Homeboy Industries is its small businesses, which gives hard-to-place individuals an opportunity to be employed in transitional jobs in a safe, supportive environment where they can learn both concrete and soft job skills. Among the businesses are the Homeboy Bakery, Homegirl Café & Catering, Homeboy Merchandise, Homeboy Farmers Markets, The Homeboy Diner at City Hall , and Homeboy Silkscreen & Embroidery.

History

Homeboy Industries began in 1988 as a job training program (called Jobs for a Future) out of Dolores Mission Parish in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, California. It was created by then-pastor Greg Boyle, S.J. to offer an alternative to gang life for high-risk youth, who were living in the area with the highest concentration of gang activity in the country. In those early days, Boyle found sympathetic businesses that agreed to hire recovering gang members.

In 1992, an abandoned warehouse was converted into the first business, Homeboy Bakery, to create more opportunities for employment. The Bakery started off producing tortillas and eventually received a contract for baking bread. Eventually more businesses were added, and in 2001, Homeboy Industries became an independent non-profit.

Dolores Mission Alternative School was created to offer high school drop outs a chance for a diploma. In 2010, Learning Works became the new high school. There are currently 75 students enrolled, and in 2012 enrollment is expected to reach 105. In October 2007, Homeboy Industries opened a new $8.5 million headquarters at the Fran and Ray Stark building, in a gang-neutral downtown location.

In addition to jobs, Homeboy Industries offers training in anger management, domestic violence, yoga, spiritual development, parenting, substance abuse, budgeting, art and other areas of self-development. In addition, they offer free mental health counseling, tattoo removal, legal services, job development and case management.

One of Homeboy’s most successful programs is free tattoo removal. Young people who find that tattoos inhibit their ability to secure employment can receive treatments on site at Homeboy’s center in Downtown Los Angeles. Though tattoo removal by laser is known to be painful and takes an average of eight to ten treatments per tattoo, and in some cases up to 1 year to complete, patient retention is virtually 100%. The clinic completes about 560 treatments per month.

Homeboy Industries faced financial difficulties in 2010, but the organization has reached a strong point in 2011 and is seeing more clients than ever before. New developments in 2010 and 2011 included the launch of Homeboy Tortilla Strips and Salsa in Ralphs stores across California, and the expansion of the Homeboy social enterprises with the Homeboy Diner at City Hall and Homeboy Farmers Markets. The title of Fr. Boyle’s memoir, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion reflects Father Boyle’s unwavering focus in helping gang members walk a new path.

Homeboy currently employs between 200–235 high-risk, formerly gang-involved, and recently incarcerated youth in its six social enterprises and headquarters, though the free services (from tattoo removal to Baby and Me class) are utilized by more than 10,000 community members a year.”

And, now, from Jim Newton’s article, “Nurturing Hope at Homeboy Industries,” in today’s Los Angeles Times (April 23, 2012):

“Imagine Los Angeles without Homeboy Industries. Imagine that the 350 or so men and women who work at Homeboy’s various operations instead had no help finding jobs. Imagine that the 500 or so young people in the pipeline for work at Homeboy were suddenly deprived of that chance for gainful employment, security, support and stability. Imagine that the thousands of young men and women who every year have tattoos removed at Homeboy instead showed up for job interviews with necks and arms and shoulders boasting of a life they'd prefer to put behind them.

What cost would this city pay? How many of those young people would commit new crimes? Surely there would be scores more drive-bys, hundreds more assaults, many more dead and wounded. The county jails and state prisons, already full to overflowing, would be more packed. More children would grow up with parents missing or dead and all too likely to repeat generational patterns.

Life without Homeboy would be bleaker, meaner and more expensive in a society already too bleak, too mean and strapped for cash. And yet, Homeboy was almost finished a couple of years ago. Its founder, Father Gregory Boyle, had launched the organization’s expansion at its new facility on the edge of Chinatown, and Homeboy was inundated with applications and requests for help. Then the economic downturn squeezed benefactors and support fell as demand grew.

‘We just weren’t prepared,’ Boyle explained recently. For a moment, it looked as though Homeboy might close. But a vigorous response from some of Los Angeles’ leading business figures helped rescue Homeboy and place it back on a path to solvency and service. (Among the most important participants was home-builder Bruce Karatz, who had reason to want to restore his reputation after he was indicted — and later convicted — for back-dating stock options). Today, Homeboy raises about a third of its annual budget from its restaurant and from other sales, with philanthropy covering most of the rest of its $14-million annual budget.

That was Homeboy’s closest brush with insolvency, but the organization and its founder had weathered excruciating times before and are likely to again. Boyle refers to the years from 1988 to 1998 as the ‘decade of death,’ when gang violence tore through the city and county. In those days, Homebody was sometimes vilified for offering help to those many saw as dangerous and undeserving. Boyle never flinched.

Homeboy now has become a fixture of the city, and its founder an admired icon. As we talked the other day, tours at Homeboy shuffled outside Boyle’s glass-walled office. ‘Viewing the founder in his natural habitat,’ he said, his smile as warm as ever. In the 20 or so years I’ve known Boyle, he’s grown a little rounder and a little grayer (who hasn’t?), but that smile survives.” [….] The rest of the article is here.

See too Father Boyle’s book, Tatoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (New York: Free Press, 2010), and Celeste Fremon’s G-Dog and the Homeboys: Father Greg Boyle and the Gangs of East Los Angeles (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2008 ed.)

The Homeboy Industries website

On Women, Ordination, and the Catholic Church

[This letter--written by Professor John Shea of Boston College, who is an Augustinian priest, is publicly available elsewhere on the web.  I thought that some MOJ readers would be interested.]

The Beginning of Lent, 2012 

Dear Archbishop O’Brien, 

I am writing to you and to all the ordinaries of the dioceses in the United States to ask you and your fellow bishops in your role as teachers to provide a clear and credible theological explanation of why women are not being ordained to the priesthood in the Catholic Church.

I write not to challenge the teaching of the church as set forth in the 1994 Apostolic Letter of Pope John Paul II, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis ,  concerning priestly ordination. My concern is the theological explanation  of this teaching. Theology I take to be essentially what Anselm said it is, “faith seeking understanding.”

I teach in the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College. As you might expect, in the school we have a number of students—women and men—who are preparing for ministry of one kind or another. As serious students of theology and ministry, the issue of women’s ordination is extremely important for many of them—how this issue is now understood and has been in the past, what the requirements for ordination are, and especially what a clear and adequate theological explanation of this teaching might be. For some of our students, this issue is the most important one they wrestle with. For some of them, what resolution they come to determines whether or not they stay in the Catholic Church.

Yet, in the Catholic Church there is a rule of silence. We are told that women’s ordination cannot be discussed. The issue that cries for  theological explanation is not to be discussed in schools that have theological explanation as one of their prime reasons for being. In other settings, however, rather abstruse arguments are put forward, usually around “bride ofChrist” symbolism or with a suggestion such as ordination is “God’s gift to men.” Several years ago, as you know, Pope Benedict XVI declared that the ordination of women was a “grave crime” akin to pedophilia. My sense is that these comments are found to be more puzzling, or bizarre, or embarrassing than seriously theological. They beg the issue, raising more questions than they answer.

Reflections on Wealth

The following article has interesting thoughts challenging assumptions regarding wealth. While the author's arguments are not made in the context of Catholic teaching, several of his points seem consistent with aspects Catholic social thought. In particular, article reminded me of the the Pastoral Letter, Economic Justice for All, and last Sunday's Reading from the fourth chapter of Acts. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/16

The Spiritual Side of Resistance Movements

For some time now I have been meaning to call attention to a post by Frank Pasquale called The Virtues of Resistance at Balkinization. Pasquale draws for one theme of his post the claim by Brishen Rogers over at Concurring Opinions that the Occupy Wall Street movement cannot be understood without recognizing its commitment to opposing neoliberalism. Neoliberalism refers to the reduction of politics and all spheres of human existence to economic rationality, bereft of moral values unless morality refers to the maximization of dollars or sometimes utility.

Pasquale writes in detail about how our politics and our culture are suffused with neoliberal thought and action. He rightly suggests that neoliberalism’s vices include “consumerism, selfishness, and a brutally calculative attitude.” But the twist that I like the most is Pasquale’s point that the Occupy Movement has not only been opposed to neoliberalism, it like many resistance movements has avoided means/ends rationality in its approach to social change.

It is easy to get discouraged in 21^st century America about the possibilities of progressive social change. We live with a government controlled by corporate elites. The government has the guns. The communications structure favors the neoliberals. Hundreds of billions of dollars of advertising alone feed the materialism and selfishness of the culture. How will change come about? The script is difficult to write. The Occupy Movement certainly had no illusions that it would quickly break the back of the economic/political structure. But Pasquale observes it is common for movements to resist injustice even with little hope of success. Pasquale thinks of this as a religious perspective though he recognizes that there is a parallel secular perspective. Coming from a Catholic tradition, he notes that the Catholic Workers continue “even when the struggle for peace or the task of feeding the hungry [seems] as massive and endless as sweeping the sand from the shore . . . .” Why do movements like the Catholic Workers so often struggle when they cannot win? Pasquale maintains that the “simple insistence on doing acts because they seem right or just or sacred, without regard to consequences, is part of the beauty, mystery – and, yes, frustration generated by a religious point of view.”

It is hard to write the script about how triumph over injustice comes. But we should not think like neoliberals. Whether religious or not, we have a duty to resist injustice.

 

The Causes and Symptoms of (Our) Loneliness and Unhappiness

“But what is the sense of the question, how should we live?—where am I supposed to place the emphasis, find the intonation which reveals the fragments of the conversation? The only echo I can find: ‘then how should we live?’ But where does it come from? What has already been said or argued? ‘If we shouldn’t live like this, then how?’ The question arises out of conflict: how should we live? [….] How can we live so that we no longer go on doing this or this? (And how am I going to fill in these markers?) But it is also a challenge, come on, then, so what’s the answer? What do you really know? Who are you? [….] We have to realize how terrible it all is [as crystallized in the First Noble Truth of Buddhism] without being overwhelmed by it. We should not live like this, incapable, unable to possess ourselves of the energy that the good requires. We are sleepwalkers. [….] We are creatures working out our lives in ignorance (avidya, confident that we know), victims of cravings and aversions which mop our energies and distract our attention from the realities that surround us on every side, not knowing our alienation from the beings also there whom we may well conceive as surrounding us.”—Michael McGhee, Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Herewith my response to Stephen Marche’s recent essay in The Atlantic (May 2012), “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”:

Contemporary libertarianism (ignoring its antecedents in one strain of Liberalism), alas, owes much by way of its ideological core to the Austrian school of economics, particularly the works of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. This libertarianism, with its most recent philosophical (and therefore most sophisticated) articulation in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), is accorded a crass and vulgar literary expression in the fiction of Ayn Rand, borders on the solipsistic, and represents a species of individualism gone deeply awry, indeed pathologically so (hence the focus on ‘self-interest’ in a narrow if not selfish sense,* and the lapses into narcissism, for example). This libertarianism grants its ideological blessings to capitalism generally, stoking the fires of explosive growth in the very technologies that bewitch us, that exacerbate pre-existing conditions of loneliness and unhappiness in this country. And a popular cultural ethos of scientism amongst the intelligentsia, only fuels the flames of widespread anxiety and malaise (See, for instance, Kenan Malik’s Man, Beast, and Zombie [2000] and Ramond Tallis’s Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity [2011]). This libertarian ideology, at once obdurate, trenchant, and intoxicating, imbibed by the masses and elites alike in the United States, lacks the theoretical resources to critique contemporary (especially digital) technology and happily colludes in the post-World War II production of “unhappiness:”

“Amidst the satisfaction people feel with their material progress, there is a spirit of unhappiness and depression haunting advanced market democracies throughout the world, a spirit that mocks the idea that markets maximize well-being and the eighteenth-century promise of a right to the pursuit of happiness under benign government’s of people’s own choosing. The haunting spirit is manifold: a postwar decline in the United States in people who report themselves as happy, a rising tide in all advanced societies of clinical depression and dysphoria (especially among the young), increasing distrust of each other and of political and other institutions, declining belief that the lot of the average man is getting better, a tragic erosion of family solidarity and community integration together with an apparent decline in warm, intimate relations among friends.” (Robert E. Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, 2000)

Thus two quotes from Marche’s piece enable us to place Facebook in proper perspective, for it “arrived in the middle of a dramatic increase in the quantity and intensity of human loneliness, a rise that initially made the site’s promise of greater connection seem deeply attractive,” and, “Well before Facebook, digital technology was enabling our tendency for isolation, to an unprecedented degree.” It seems, therefore, that Facebook is best viewed as both sign and symptom, not as an etiological variable, precipitating factor, or even a secondary cause, of what ails us. At most, it merely feeds on preexisting conditions and trends, as well as the ideologies that sanction and bless them. Indeed, the Buddhist (with his fairly elaborate moral psychology centered on the relief of existential suffering), a Martha Nussbaum (in her works on Hellenistic ethics, the emotions, and social justice), a Daniel M. Haybron (in his The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being, 2008), or a Pico Iyer (in the ‘Joy of Quiet’ essay in The New York Times of December 29 last year), would attribute the root causes of our loneliness and unhappiness prior to—in a diachronic and synchronic sense (or historically and structurally)—the turbo-capitalist marketplace conditions that prevail in fashionable libertarian flights of fancy, in a fundamental failure to ask the right questions about human fulfillment, in the individual and collective inability or refusal to pose the proper questions about the philosophy, ethics, and psychology of human flourishing (or eudaimonia, along the lines, say, of Hellenistic ethics, especially the Stoics) or our assumptions and beliefs about human nature. Such questions are directly implicated in answering more immediately practical queries, such as “How does one—or we—live in a sensible manner?” or, “Do our ways of living contribute to and in turn reflect our sincere endeavors to lead meaningful and truly fulfilling lives, in other words, are they indissolubly linked to the terms and conditions of eudaimonia in its broadest and deepest sense?” In asking such questions we need to carefully consider the moral and psychological consequences of living in deference to an “unbound Prometheus,” considerations that encompass the nature and pace of technological development, as well as the relevance of democratic theory and practice to science and technology. In conclusion, within the framework of our eudaimonistic questioning, we urgently need a theory of technology that is critical (in the spirit of the Frankfurt School), environmental (encompassing the ecological sciences), and spiritually humane (in a sense that pays due homage to Renaissance humanism).

* Examination of the notion of “self-interest” in the history of Liberalism as a moral and political philosophy reveals the fact that it once played a progressive or liberating role, unlike the far more constricted conceptions that arose within neo-classical economics (and the corresponding focus on satisfaction of ‘revealed’ preferences) and with the emergence of contemporary Libertarianism, be it philosophical, political, or economic. On this prior progressive role of “self-interest” in Liberalism, see Stephen Holmes’s Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Further Reading:

• Borgman, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
• Brown, Richard Harvey. Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
• Hacker, P.M.S. Human Nature: The Categorial Framework. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
• Kitcher, Philip. Science, Truth, and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Light, Andrew and Avner de-Shalit, eds. Moral and Political Reasoning in Environmental Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
• Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. London: Routledge, 2001.
• Mirowski, Philip. Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Mumford, Lewis. The Transformations of Man. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957.
• Plantinga, Alvin. Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Riesman, David (with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney). The Lonely Crowd. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001 ed.
• Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1997.
• Shrader-Frechette, Kristin and Laura Westra, eds. Technology and Values. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
• Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
• Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

The Health Insurance Mandate and Justice Scalia's Social Darwinism

Justice Scalia’s moral insensitivity took on special proportions during the oral argument on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Opponents of the Act including Paul Clement before the Supreme Court argued that the Commerce Clause entitles Congress to regulate activity but not inactivity and, therefore, requiring people to buy health insurance regulated their inactivity and was beyond the reach of the Commerce Clause. This is a dubious argument. For example, for many years the National Labor Relations Act enacted by Congress under the Commerce Clause has mandated that members of bargaining units pay unions for bargaining on their behalf even if they are ideologically opposed to unions and the subjects bargained for on their behalf. That their inactivity of not paying dues has been the subject of the requirement has long been thought to raise no Commerce Clause problem. First Amendment challenges to this mandate have been rejected as well except when the union is using the money for political purposes instead of collective bargaining. Of course, the Taft Hartley Act has since provided that states generally may prohibit a mandate in their jurisdiction. But this concession to federalism is constitutionally permitted. It does not speak against the constitutionality of the union dues mandate. If it did Congress would not have had the power to pass the mandate in the first place.

Is there a distinction between the union mandate and the health insurance mandate? Some Republicans argue that you can avoid the mandate by not working, but short of death, you cannot avoid the health insurance mandate. True from a formal perspective that ignores the importance of working, but from a Commerce Clause perspective, so what?

In response to Clement’s argument, Solicitor General  Verrilli argued that regulation was necessary and proper under the Commerce Clause because unlike other markets, federal law requires that those providers  of hospital services receiving Medicare or Medicaid funds (i.e., virtually all hospitals) must provide emergency care to all regardless of ability to pay. From this perspective, it makes sense to require that persons able to purchase insurance do so. And as Verilli observed, the requirement to provide care flows from  ”the social norms to which we have obligated ourselves.”

Enter Justice Scalia with a breathtaking response even from him. Scalia triumphantly replied, “Well, don’t obligate yourselves.” This week’s Commonweal editorial response is dead on, “The implication of Scalia’s remark was chillingly clear: if victims of car accidents arrive at the emergency without insurance, hospitals must be allowed to let them die on the curb . . . .”

Regrettably, Scalia is not alone. One can still hear the echoes of the applause heard in Republican primary debates when sentiments similar to his were expressed by a Presidential candidate. An odd group those Republicans. They deny Darwin’s biology of natural selection. But social Darwinism is increasingly popular. They claim to be Christians. But what kind of Christian applauds at the failure to help the sick and the poor?  I really don’t know. I do think it is sad and somewhat frightening that Christianity has been so seriously perverted by so many people.

Simplifying Sex: What Some Priests Don’t Understand About Contraception

That's the title of a great post at dotCommonweal.  Check it out, here.

ABA President Demands that US President Join Him as a Court Apologist

Wm. T. (Bill) Robinson, the President of the ABA chided President Obama in the New York Times yesterday for suggesting that the upcoming decision of the Supreme Court regarding the Affordable Health Care Act threatened to be an example of judicial activism by an unelected group of people. Robinson proceeded to invoke Marbury v. Madison and proceeded to find a duty of public officials to continually demonstrate that the Court is not a political arena.

Really? No constitutional lawyer worth his or her salt can fail to observe the politics of Marbury v. Madison, and the politicians of the time were quick to say so. Was it really a duty of public officials not to criticize the Court for its partisan decision in Bush v. Gore? The President of the ABA may think it is his duty to place his head in the legal sand oblivious to the fact that he is surrounded by political water. He may think it is his duty to pretend that there is a clear line between law and politics never crossed by judges. But he is off base inventing duties for public officials to go along with trumped up fiction. I would rather think that public officials have a duty to speak the truth about judicial power rather than join a chorus of political apologetics.

Toward an Understanding of Classical Chinese Medicine

This is the first of a series of posts I hope to make over the course of a year or two on the therapeutic value of Classical Chinese Medicine. In doing so, I’m not intending to make any claims for the (comparatively superior or otherwise) therapeutic value of “holistic medicine” in general, indeed, I believe that many of the claims on its behalf by its aficionados, be they practitioners or patients, are probably exaggerated, misleading, or, quite frequently (and far worse), false. My interest in this subject is motivated by a broader concern with the sundry questions that arise among and between modern science, religious worldviews (broadly construed), and what we’ll term the “healing arts.” I’m particularly intrigued by the philosophical and religious underpinnings—beliefs, values, orientations—that “justify” or influence these arts.  And to narrow the focus even further, it is religious worldviews of Asian provenance that intrigue me most of all, although for the time being we’ll attend to those of primarily Chinese pedigree.

In the following, I aim to sketch some epistemically sound reasons for a cross-cultural appreciation, understanding, and possible evaluation of what is termed Traditional Chinese Medicine (hereafter TCM) but, for reasons to be explained later, is better called Classical Chinese Medicine (hereafter CCM). I share with most readers a lack of disciplinary expertise on this subject, approaching it as a curious and inspired amateur, an educated layperson utterly dependent, in the end, on those in possession of the requisite professional and practitioner’s knowledge (and skill), a knowledge often assiduously nurtured over the better part of a lifetime. Perhaps the lack of expertise can be compensated by an ardent avocational interest, recalling with John Ziman (2000) that “Until…the middle of the nineteenth century, almost all scientists were amateurs” (49). What professional training I do possess relevant to our topic concerns the cross-cultural study of worldviews, a field of inquiry fundamental to an appreciation of CCM in a way that takes us in several respects us beyond the sieve of biomedicine. And I doubt we can sufficiently appreciate many of the relevant differences between Western biomedicine and CCM without some sort of minimal understanding of the worldviews from which the philosophical and doctrinal foundations of CCM emerged and its subsequent theory and therapeutic praxis has flourished. To the extent that we succeed in our preliminary investigations, we will come to understand several reasons why CCM is rightly placed under the rubric of “complementary” medicine in a manner that resists complete incorporation or subsumption within Western biomedicine while nonetheless possessing scientific stature that rightly belongs to effective therapeutic modalities. At the same time, we should also come to see why there is no compelling reason why we should characterize CCM as an “alternative” medicine in the sense that this implies a disavowal of the very real therapeutic benefits brought to us by biomedicine. As Grant Gillet has written in Bioethics in the Clinic: Hippocratic Reflections (2004), there is no need to undermine the “purpose-driven cognitive maps of a domain of praxis” found in biomedical knowledge in “permit[ting] alternative conceptualizations where the phenomena covered are complex and may be produced by the interaction of multiple factors” (61). I’m assuming that not all of the therapeutic benefits generated by CCM can be chalked up to placebo effects, such effects only now being studied in the thorough and rigorous fashion (see Brody 1980; Evans 2004; Harrington 1999; Kolber 2007; and Moerman 2002) they warrant. Nonetheless, even if it turns out that at least some of the therapeutic benefits attributed to CCM can be chalked up to placebo effects, this should not speak against our main contention, namely, that Chinese medical doctrine and therapeutic praxis should be seen as belonging within the larger corpus of scientifically respectable and medically effective therapeutic modalities.

Testimonial Reports and Presumptive Knowledge

In the West, the first exposure to Chinese medicine typically takes the form of acupuncture, and is probably motivated in the first instance under the epistemological heading of (favorable) anecdotal or testimonial reports, the sort of evidence routinely dismissed or derided in philosophical and scientific circles, and frequently for good reason. A serendipitous illustration from a deservedly popular book used in courses on critical thinking and informal logic will suffice:

“if you are deciding whether or not acupuncture is an adequate alternative to conventional medicine, someone might tell you that their friend tried acupuncture and that it seemed to work wonders. On its own this is merely anecdotal evidence. First, there is a risk that details of the story may get changed in the retelling. More importantly, to argue from this simple case that acupuncture is an adequate alternative to conventional medicine would be irresponsible: anecdotal evidence is different from a controlled scientific investigation into the effectiveness of acupuncture.” (Warburton 2000: 15-16)

Of course evidence-based medicine (EBM) enthusiasts are reflexively nodding in agreement, and understandably so. But let’s complicate matters a bit. Warburton goes on to remind us that “not all anecdotal evidence is unreliable: if you have reason to be confident in the source of the evidence, then anecdotal evidence can help to support or undermine a conclusion’’ (16). In fact, I suspect very few people argue in the “irresponsible” manner of our hypothetical example. Indeed, further vindication for some kinds of anecdotal evidence follows the realization that “many sorts of scientific enquiry begin by examining anecdotal evidence about the phenomenon to be examined” (16). 

There are other reasons we might hold for valuing anecdotal evidence or “testimonial reports.” For instance, we might, with Alvin Goldman (1999), appreciate the societal distribution and frequency of anecdotal reports in public fora outside disciplinary domains or intellectual fields of expertise insofar as they facilitate the spread of knowledge: “Communication [used here in the sense of sharing discovered facts] is an efficient mode of increasing knowledge because information transmission is typically easier, quicker, and less costly than fresh discovery. [….] Since not every member of a community observes each fact other members observe, there is room for veritistic [i.e., ‘truth-linked’] improvement through communication” (Goldman, 1999: 103). The assumption here is that testimonial reports or observations are accurate or true, but of course false anecdotal or testimonial reports occur for any number of reasons:

“False reports can issue from observational error. A second source of inaccurate testimony is dishonesty or insincerity, which can be prompted by a variety of incentives the speaker might have for deception. Similar incentives can lead a potential informant to prefer silence to either disclosure or mendacity. In fact, it is not obvious what generally motivates knowledgeable agents to disseminate their knowledge. The conveyance of information, it appears, generally profits the receiver rather than the communicator.” (106)

As non-experts, most of us at any given time are in the role of either “receiver” or “communicator,” a fact that may help motivate us when it comes our turn to be in the role of communicator, so while the conveyance of information “generally profits the receiver rather than the communicator,” that fact need not long deter us in the search for sufficient motivation or incentive for informed agents to disseminate knowledge. Nonetheless, Goldman explains why we might come to see anecdotal evidence or testimony as trustworthy in the first instance, as something we generally take for granted when it comes to the increase of true beliefs (‘veritistic improvement’). Thus the accuracy of reporters’ observations, of testimonial reports, can serve as a default presumption, the exceptions serving to entrench the rule. Goldman reminds us that the view that “people have a [natural] default disposition to speak the truth, to express their beliefs honestly and sincerely,” was well expressed in the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid’s “motivation-innateness” hypothesis (106). And although we know from personal experience that an “innate disposition toward truthful revelation can be overridden by conflicting incentives,” social mechanisms as crude as reward and punishment, by way of firmly established social norms, for example, can motivate potential speakers to increase their capacity for veritistic improvement of knowledge communication (106-107).  In addition to Reid’s hypothesis handed down from the Scottish Enlightenment, Goldman provides us with a handful of non-reductionist epistemic theories of testimonial justification found in contemporary epistemology, noting “Philosophers have been struck by how many of our beliefs are based on testimony, where it is doubtful that there is any testimony-free basis for trusting that testimony” (126). It seems we can make some progress toward exorcising dispositional skepticism toward the theory and practice of CCM, knowledge of the therapeutic benefits of which is often communicated anecdotally, in testimonial reports.

Yet another (and not unrelated) way to meet initial skepticism or epistemically motivated doubts about the efficacy of therapeutic practices and doctrinal ideas from Chinese medicine is to see the latter as taking the form of presumptive knowledge, as possessing tentative plausibility (largely pre-evidential in bearing from the perspective of EBM; I’m well aware there exists some scientific evidence for the efficacy of acupuncture as summarized, for example, in the NIH Consensus Statement on Acupuncture): “The key idea of presumption thus roots in analogy with the legal principle: innocent until proven guilty. A presumption is a thesis that is provisionally appropriate—one which can be maintained pro tem, viewed as applicable until or unless sufficiently weighty counter-considerations arise to displace it. On this basis, a presumption is a contention that remains in place until something better comes along” (Rescher 2003: 85). Presumptions have significant probative weight but are in principle defeasible, that is, ”subject to defeat in being overthrown by sufficiently weighty countervailing considerations” or by “something more evidentially substantial.” This is in keeping with the contemporary epistemologist’s conception of knowledge in general, which is “fallibilist,” meaning the possibility of error can never be logically eliminated. Moreover, “not everything qualifies as a presumption: the concept is to have some probative bite. A presumption is not merely something that is ‘possibly true,’ or that is ‘true for all I know about the matter.’ To class a proposition as a presumption is to take a definite and committed position with respect to it, so as to say, ‘I propose to accept it as true insofar as no difficulties arise from doing so’” (Rescher 2003: 92). Michael Williams (2001) likewise informs us that the presumptive “justification” of personal beliefs within a fallibilist epistemology takes the form of “what Robert Brandom calls a ‘default and challenge’ structure: entitlement to one’s beliefs is the default position; but entitlement is always vulnerable to undermining by evidence that one’s epistemic performance is not up to par” (25).

Rescher argues that there is a (default epistemic) “presumption in favor of such cognitive sources as the senses and memory—or for that matter trustworthy personal or documentary resources such as experts and encyclopedias” (Rescher 2003: 96). Williams (2001) puts it this way: “In claiming knowledge, I commit myself to my belief’s being adequately grounded—formed by a reliable method—but not to my having already established its well-groundedness” (149).  It therefore seems safe to conclude that our cognitive affairs are such that we commonly and routinely incorporate a host of fundamental presumptions of reliability, for example, and again, accepting at face value the declarations—testimony—of other people and, after Rescher, the declarations of recognized experts and authorities within their respective domains of expertise. For our purposes, the latter entail the (sometimes ‘sacred’) texts of CCM transmitted from one generation to the next by its various practitioners who transmit their knowledge and expertise in “secret,” through “personal” and “standardized” modes of transmission (cf. Hsu 1999; Lloyd and Sivin, 2002). Inasmuch as plausibility is, for Rescher, one of the criteria for evaluating presumptions, we are caught in a virtuous epistemic circle, for “the standing of an authoritative source is an important criterion of plausibility” (Godden and Walton 2007: 326). Williams (2001) reiterates this point in a way palatable to the epistemological views of both Goldman and Rescher: “The social distribution of reason-giving abilities allows us to inherit knowledge by deference to experts. In a complicated society, an enormous amount of knowledge is acquired this way” (154). This in turn enables us to appreciate precisely why, for the individual, “being [epistemically] justified is not always a matter of having gone through a process of justification” (154). That we are dealing with Chinese medical texts and Chinese experts hardly seems sufficient reason to deny them the presumptive deference we accord to the opinions and judgments of other, more familiar (i.e., ‘Western’), expert authorities. At the very least, we can concede the Chinese (and anyone socialized into its traditions) have a host of sufficient presumptive reasons for deference to CCM, reasons others outside of Asia might likewise see fit to entertain in an identical manner. In other words, “Respect duly established expertise” (Goldman 1999: 372), although one might bear in mind recent “advances” in biotechnology and psychopharmacology when heeding Goldman’s reason for

“why the public should reserve a healthy dose of skepticism for the new ideas of researchers and practitioners in a field—any field…. Researchers and practitioners have a built-in incentive to promulgate their own innovations: innovation is what earns them kudos and recognition [and in the case of biotechnology and psychopharmacology, lots of money]. The ‘tired and true’ does not attract much attention. Researchers and practitioners want to show the public that they can make advances in their field, and are therefore prone to exaggerated the promise or proven effectiveness of their new ideas and methods.”(372) 

In short, we’re entitled to a belief in the veritistic value of CCM until such time as we are provided with sufficiently weighty countervailing epistemic evidence. And our willingness to entertain the epistemic value of CCM could said to be enhanced to the extent we’re also willing to exercise a corresponding caution (or simply less naïveté) about the putative groundbreaking “advances” in and products of biotechnology and psychopharmacology. A measure of skepticism is reasonable on this score if we consider the invariable halo effects of Western science and high technology together with the powerful socio-economic forces that fuel the commercialization and marketing mania that increasingly define the nature of “privatized American science” (Angell 2011; Mirowski 2011). Michael H. Cohen tells us a story about his attendance at an international congress on Tibetan Medicine in 1998 in which the Dalai Lama “reflected on the hubris and ethnocentrism often described as embedded in modern scientific efforts within the Western Hemisphere to understand indigenous and other medical traditions.” This includes an inability to see beyond the presuppositions and assumptions that make up the marrow of the scientific models of modern medicine in the West (and now around the globe) and thus are essential to its dramatic success on many fronts (Thagard 1999). So, for example, Cohen notes that “even when open to exploring other medical systems,” clinicians and research scientists beholden to these models seem constitutionally unable to appreciate the “role of consciousness in mediating healing therapies, [and] tend to imagine that the medical system adopted relatively recently in human history” possesses a monopoly of privilege and a patent on authority by which to “filter, understand, and synthesize other medical traditions” (Cohen 2006: 1-2). It is for this reason I will refer to the medical significance of CCM (and, at a later date, other complementary and alternative medicines or CAMs) as “beyond the sieve of biomedicine.”

References & Further Reading:

• Angell, Marcia. “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?,” The New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011.
• Angell, Marcia. “The Illusions of Psychiatry,” The New York Review of Books, July 14, 2011.
• Brody, Howard. Placebos and the Philosophy of Medicine: Clinical, Conceptual, and Ethical Issues. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Cohen, Michael H. Healing at the Borderland of Medicine and Religion. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
• Evans, Dylan. Placebo: Mind over Matter in Modern Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Farquhar, Judith. Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994.
• Gillet, Grant. Bioethics in the Clinic: Hippocratic Reflections. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
• Goldman, Alvin I. Knowledge in a Social World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Godden, David M. and Douglas Walton. “A Theory of Presumption for Everyday Argumentation,” Pragmatics & Cognition 15: 2 (2007): 313-346.
• Harrington, Anne, ed. The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Hsu, Elisabeth. The Transmission of Chinese Medicine. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Hsu, Elisabth, ed. Innovation in Chinese Medicine. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Kaptchuk, Ted J. The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine. Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books, 2nd ed., 2000.
• Kolber, Adam J. “A Limited Defense of Clinical Placebo Deception,” Yale Law & Policy Review, Vol. 26, 2007; San Diego Legal Studies Paper No. 07-87. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=967563.
• Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books, 1999.
• Lloyd, Geoffrey and Nathan Sivin. The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
• Maciocia, Giovanni. The Foundations of Chinese Medicine. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1989.
• Mirowski, Philip. Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Moerman, Daniel E. Meaning, Medicine, and the “Placebo Effect.” Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Epistemology: An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003.
• Unschuld, Paul U. Medicine in China: A History of Ideas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.
• Warburton, Nigel. Thinking from A to Z. London: Routledge, 2nd ed., 1998.
• Williams, Michael. Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Zhang, Yanhua. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine: An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007.
• Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Thirteen Ways Government Tracks People

Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens.  The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism.  Most collect information on people in the US.  Here are thirteen examples of how some of the biggest government agencies and programs track people.

 

One.  The National Security Agency (NSA) collects hundreds of millions of emails, texts and phone calls every day and has the ability to collect and sift through billions more.  WIRED just reported NSA is building an immense new data center which will intercept, analyze and store even more electronic communications from satellites and cables across the nation and the world.  Though NSA is not supposed to focus on US citizens, it does.

 

Two.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) has more than 1.5 billion government and private sector records about US citizens collected from commercial databases, government information, and criminal probes.

 

Three.  The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times recently reported that cellphones of private individuals in the US are being tracked without warrants by state and local law enforcement all across the country.  With more than 300 million cellphones in the US connected to more than 200,000 cell phone towers, cellphone tracking software can pinpoint the location of a phone and document the places the cellphone user visits over the course of a day, week, month or longer. 

 

Four.  More than 62 million people in the US have their fingerprints on file with the FBI, state and local governments.  This system, called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), shares information with 43 states and 5 federal agencies.   This system conducts more than 168,000 checks each day.

 

Five.  Over 126 million people have their fingerprints, photographs and biographical information accessible on the US Department of Homeland Security Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT).  This system conducts about 250,000 biometric transactions each day.  The goal of this system is to provide information for national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence and other Homeland Security Functions. 

 

Six.  More than 110 million people have their visas and more than 90 million have their photographs entered into the US Department of State Consular Consolidated Database (CCD).   This system grows by adding about 35,000 people a day.  This system serves as a gateway to the Department of State Facial Recognition system, IDENT and IAFSIS.

 

Seven.  DNA profiles on more than 10 million people are available in the FBI coordinated Combined DNA index System (CODIS) National DNA Index. 

 

Eight.  Information on more than 2 million people is kept in the Intelligence Community Security Clearance Repository, commonly known as Scattered Castles.  Most of the people in this database are employees of the Department of Defense (DOD) and other intelligence agencies.  

 

Nine.  The DOD also has an automated biometric identification system (ABIS) to support military operations overseas.  This database incorporates fingerprint, palm print, face and iris matching on 6 million people and is adding 20,000 more people each day.  

 

Ten.  Information on over 740,000 people is included in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) of the National Counterterrorism Center.  TIDE is the US government central repository of information on international terrorist identities.  The government says that less than 2 percent of the people on file are US citizens or legal permanent residents.  They were just given permission to keep their non-terrorism information on US citizens for a period of five years, up from 180 days.

 

Eleven.  Tens of thousands of people are subjects of facial recognition software.  The FBI has been working with North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles and other state and local law enforcement on facial recognition software in a project called “Face Mask.”  For example, the FBI has provided thousands of photos and names to the North Carolina DMV which runs those against their photos of North Carolina drivers.  The Maricopa Arizona County Sheriff’s Office alone records 9,000 biometric mug shots a month.

 

Twelve.  The FBI operates the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR) that collects and analyzes observations or reports of suspicious activities by local law enforcement.   With over 160,000 suspicious activity files, SAR stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime but who are alleged to have acted suspiciously.

 

Thirteen.  The FBI admits it has about 3,000 GPS tracking devices on cars of unsuspecting people in the US right now, even after the US Supreme Court decision authorizing these only after a warrant for probable cause has been issued.

 

The Future

 

The technology for tracking and identifying people is exploding as is the government appetite for it.

 

Soon, police everywhere will be equipped with handheld devices to collect fingerprint, face, iris and even DNA information on the spot and have it instantly sent to national databases for comparison and storage.  

 

Bloomberg News reports the newest surveillance products “can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices,” change the contents of written emails mid-transmission, and use voice recognition to scan phone networks.   

 

The advanced technology of the war on terrorism, combined with deferential courts and legislators, have endangered both the right to privacy and the right of people to be free from government snooping and tracking.  Only the people can stop this.  

 

 

 

Paul Robeson, b. April 9, 1898

Paul Leroy Robeson (April 9, 1898 – January 23, 1976)

Thanks to Professor Eric M. Fink of Elon University Law School for the following video of Paul Robeson singing “Joe Hill.”  

I was unable to reach the Paul Robeson Foundation website this morning. I suspect it was overwhelmed by visits from around the world.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry on Robeson, with wonderful references, resources, and links, in addition to essential biographical information.

Harvard Undergraduate Speaking on Christianity and Homosexuality

Below is a link to a recent talk given by Harvard undergraduate, Matthew Vines, on Christianity and homosexuality. He has a good grasp of scripture and Church tradition on the topic, which is impressive for someone his age. However, I believe that people are responding to his presentation because of the sense of authenticity, integrity and engagement he communicates. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezQjNJUSraY

The “mindless paganism” of Impressionism, or, Impressionism as “all method and technique pointing nowhere”

The following is from a post at the Mirror of Justice blog by Marc DiGirolami titled “Clive Bell on Impressionism’s Paganism” —

The New Republic will from time to time reprint old essays on various subjects.  Here is a 1923 piece by the formalist art critic Clive Bell, whose ideas about the nature of aesthetic experience have always seemed to me nearly universally wrong.  That notwithstanding, I found his discussion in this piece of the connection between impressionism and paganism to be illuminating — one of the most concise explanations for why I have always disliked impressionism with such great intensity.  A bit:

The cultivated rich seem at last to have discovered in the impressionists what the impressionists themselves rediscovered half by accident. They rediscovered paganism—real paganism I mean—something real enough to be the inspiration and content of supreme works of art. Paganism, I take it, is the acceptance of life as something good and satisfying in itself. To enjoy life the pagan need not make himself believe that it is a means to something else—to a better life in another world for instance, or a juster organization of society, or complete self-development: he does not regard it as a brief span or portion in which to do something for his own soul, or for his fellow creatures, or for the future. He takes the world as it is and enjoys to the utmost what he finds in it: also, he is no disconsolate archaeologist spending his own age thinking how much more happily he could have lived in another and what a pagan he would have been on the banks of the Ilissus. No, paganism does not consist in a proper respect for the pagan past, but in a passionate enjoyment of the present; and Poussin, though he painted bacchanals galore, would have been quite out of place in the world of Theocritus. Your true pagan neither regrets nor idealizes: and while Swinburne was yearning nostalgically for “the breasts of the nymph in the brake,” Renoir was finding inspiration for a glorious work of art in the petticoats of the shop-girls at the Moulin de la Galette.

Herewith my response and further discussion with Marc:

I’m not an unabashed enthusiast of Impressionism as a movement or particularly fond of many Impressionist paintings, but I nonetheless have a hard time understanding how someone might, with “great intensity” no less, dislike its products. So I decided to carefully consider Bell’s argument and came away rather disappointed and thus thoroughly unpersuaded. And while it is usually gratifying to have someone concisely articulate one’s visceral response to some idea, subject matter, object, event, what have you, I think Bell was quite over-the-top in his assessment. I find it hard to criticize the Impressionists in toto for helping us better see or appreciate the light and color of our (or their) everyday world, for it seems they’re here being castigated for looking upon what God and man have created, and finding it “very good” (cf. Genesis 3:1). And while Bell proclaims “[y]our true pagan never regrets or idealizes,” he must not have been thinking of the pre-Islamic poets of the Bedouin tribes who did both in ample measure. The social and cultural impact of the Impressionists’ putative celebration of life did not run deep: witness the unprecedented brutality and carnage that made up the next century’s carnival of death, World War I. Apparently the elites of European civilization found it easier to revel in death than life. And I rather think that it is not the case that the human subject frequently found in Impressionist paintings, a pagan par excellence one would surmise, “took life as it is,” and was thus constitutionally unable to regard life “as a brief span or portion in which to do something for his own soul, or for his fellow creatures, or for the future:” look again at Morisot’s “The Cradle,” or the women and children in Cassatt’s works (indeed, the general subject matter itself), I’ve always been intrigued about the young woman in Manet’s “Pflaume:” What is she thinking? And why do we care about what’s on her mind? Or spend some time with “A Philosopher” and tell me again this signifies nothing but “passionate enjoyment of the present“ (and yet there is, I think, nothing intrinsically wrong with that, as our Buddhist friends who have assiduously cultivated practices of ‘attentiveness’ would remind us). I might proceed with more evidence for the defense, but I trust this can suffice to at least suggest that Bell may have been profoundly wrong on many counts here, albeit enabling us to better understand why the term “Puritan“ has become a purely pejorative epithet.

*       *       *

Patrick, fair points all, and far be it from me to defend Bell’s views too much, since (as I mentioned) I tend to disagree strongly with his view of aesthetic experience generally. Paganism is, as you note, too various an experience to be captured well by any single set of descriptions. But I suppose that my interest here was more in a particular cultural reaction to impressionism which I was interested to see prevalent in the ‘20s, rather than in the description of impressionism itself (Bell tries to qualify the connection with paganism as to the latter). Bell describes a kind of here-and-now-ism, a mindlessness—in the real sense of absence of mind—which I find characteristic of much of the response to (and therefore of the contemporary love for) impressionism. Surely there are exceptions both in impressionist art itself, just as there are in paganism, as you point out as to both cases. But I thought it interesting to see that the cultural reaction to impressionism that I sometimes see today was observed by somebody else almost 100 years ago. It’s that lack of mind—it’s the ready enjoyment of splashy colors and easy pictures for the immediate pleasure that they offer, and the cultural point of view that such enjoyments celebrate—which makes me dislike impressionism—even intensely. Perhaps that makes me Puritanical, but I hope not (it will have been the first time anybody will have said so about me!). It’s more the ineffably, willfully, insidiously easy appeal that I object to.

Thanks again for the good comment.

*       *       *

Marc, I suspect the “lack of mind” your refer to is more in the eye (and absence of mind) of the beholder than intrinsic to the art itself. In other words, such a response is, in a vulgar sense, purely impressionistic, and represents the inability to truly contemplate a work of art: it is to “see” without seeing, the artistic equivalent of Clark Griswold at the Grand Canyon. If one experiences one of the better products of Impressionism as a moment of entertaining instant gratification, the failure lies in the perceiver as subject, not the subject (or object) of perception. The surface enchantments (its ‘insidiously easy appeal’ in your words) are, so to speak, designed to get our attention, they’re invitations to something deeper, and thus it is the viewer’s fault if the light and colors blind him to the subject matter, if he stops at mere aesthetic feeling in a minimalist or literalist sense and fails to emotionally (and intellectually) engage the material close at hand. The Impressionists left their dark and damp studios to venture into the outside world, an experience that was, at first, and not just figuratively, often blinding or disorienting, something they in fact captured in an inimitable manner, yet they recovered their perceptual equilibrium, and so too should we: our judgments are better made from that moment forward. Its seductions are intended, in the end, to sharpen our perceptions and change our conceptions, they are not meant to leave us content with the status quo in any sense of that term. The Impressionists retained the perhaps naïve belief in the painterly possibilities of “alchemical experimentation,” unlike the cynical postmodernist artists of our time and place.

Bell’s description of a portion of the public’s response to Impressionist works might be compared to the “cultured” response of much of the nonsense that falls under the heading of “postmodernist” art today: art is here being “consumed” as a sign and symbol of conspicuous fashion and class “taste” by a wealthy public grown accustomed to enchantment by what is on the surface, by what “shines,” by “easy” money, and so forth. The mode of artistic consumption here is not the fault of the artist or the art but the commercial world into which the art is subject and circulates. What we are witnessing here is the beginnings of a certain kind of capitalism and its cultural consequences for the art world in all its ineffable, insidious, and willful glory. In short, I share your repulsion with the cultural response to and conspicuous consumption of Impressionist art by certain social groups, but believe the forces that shaped and perhaps continue to shape that response and fuel that consumption do not inhere in the art, properly appreciated, but are instead intrinsic to a certain sort of socio-economic world defined by a form of capitalism and the class or classes that stoke its fires. With postmodernist art, we generally find artists in full-fledged and uncritical cooperation with that world, their art structurally unable to critically or sufficiently distance itself from the powers of Mammon and or what Lewis Mumford memorably christened the “Megamachine,” indeed, deliberately or unwittingly colluding in the creation of its idols, blurring if not fusing the boundaries between the everyday world of Bell’s paganism or banal reality with “creative” imagination (in which case we need, as Donald Kuspit reminds us, theory and ideology to ‘explain’ its meaning).

Impressionism is quite a distance from the fetishized and commodified art of our own time. In postmodern art we discover, as Kuspit points out, a regression to childhood and madness in the service of fun and games, of art as entertainment or marketable novelty and intellectual amusement. The art of the Impressionists is in striking contrast to postmodernist works only too proud to proclaim or parade their bewitchment by “chaos, banality, perversion, and anti-sociality,” only too eager to serve (motivated, no doubt, by the allure of fame or fortune) as a clever artistic mirror for all that is narcissistic, narcotizing, and nihilistic in a society suffused with a technocratic and capitalist ethos. Oh my, who’s the Puritan now?! 

*   *   *

Lockean Labor & Original Acquisition

The following claim was found in a review of a recent book on Fichte’s social and political philosophy by a contemporary philosopher: “On the Lockean view, property is something that belongs to us because we invest it with value.” [emphasis added]

I don’t think that’s quite correct: property for Locke clearly has value prior to our “ownership” or acquisition claim insofar as the proviso “still enough and as good left” (indeed, ‘So that in effect there was never the less left for others’!) refers to the fact that property has some sort of value prior to our appropriation (for example, we enjoy, however insecurely, possessions in the state of nature prior to the private property of society), value is a peculiar enough kind of worldly resource to prompt Locke to qualify his story with the aforementioned proviso. Labor has significance owing to its addition of “use-value” (and not, as with Marx, ‘exchange-value’) while property itself has “intrinsic value” owing to its “usefulness for the life of man” (natural resources, in addition to having intrinsic value, may, from Locke’s vantage point, have some small or insignificant amount of use-value prior to the addition of labor: fruit may fall from trees sans our labor, i.e., ‘land frequently produces consumables without any labour having been applied to it’). This has been well-explained by the late G.A. (‘Jerry’) Cohen,* who notes many (even Locke himself on occasion) are prone to confusing or conflating the “value argument” with “the argument from labour mixture: “ “If the justification of your ownership of what you have laboured on is that your labour is in it, then you do not own it because you have enhanced its value, even if what deserves to be called ‘labour’ necessarily creates value.” The “investment with value” centers on the conferring of value, not the labor by which it is conferred.

Locke later does bring the enhancement of value into the picture (and notice, this is not the same as ‘creation’ of value but the enhancement of existing value), but that is after the initial appropriation of property, the right to which is initially held in common. As Cohen explains, “in the logic of the labour-mixture argument, it is labour itself, and not value-creation, which justifies the claim to private property” (See Ch. V of his Second Treatise of Government). Locke later brings value-enhancement into the picture in an attempt “to justify the extensive inequality of goods that obtains now, when original appropriation has long ceased. The justification Locke offers is that almost all of present inequality is due not to any unequal initial appropriating but to the labour which followed after initial appropriation.”

It is interesting that both Locke and Fichte subscribed to the “self-ownership” thesis. For Locke, “every man has property in his own person,” and Fichte states that “Man can neither be inherited, sold, nor be made the object of a gift; he can be no one else’s property because he is his own property.” On this, of course, Fichte differs with Kant, the latter finding the notion of self-ownership to be incoherent (and while not subscribing to the normativity of the self-ownership thesis, G.A. Cohen argues the concept, pace Kant, is in fact coherent).

And for the specific weaknesses in Locke’s argument with regard to labor and use-value, see Chapter 7 of Cohen (below), “Marx and Locke on land and labour: “If there exists a defensible criterion for assigning relative contributions to output of labour on the one hand and the original properties of the soil on the other, then it is not Locke’s.”

* See his Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

A Constitution with No Place for Dignity

The center of the German Constitution is human dignity. Rights derive from and are interpreted through the dignity lens. On Monday our Supreme Court exhibited a deaf ear to human dignity by holding that those put in jail may be strip searched even for minor offenses like walking a dog without a leash. This is the same Supreme Court that protected those who intentionally inflict emotional distress on the grieving father as he mourned the loss of a son at his funeral. It is the same Court that prevents states from protecting the privacy of rape victims allowing a sensational press to exploit their privacy for profits.

These decisions could never happen in Germany because of its respect for human dignity. Our Supreme Court is rapidly becoming the capital of human insensitivity.

SCOTUS and the Constitutionality of the Mandate

We may fairly wonder whether the majority opinion in the mandate case will be a counterexample to Richard Posner’s (approving) observation that "American judges distinguish between how they might vote on a statute if they were legislators and whether the statute is unconstitutional; they might think it a bad statute yet uphold its constitutionality."  Richard A. Posner, "Enlightened Despot," New Republic, Apr. 23, 2007, at 53, 55.  We may fairly wonder too whether the majority opinion will display ignorance of something James Bradley Thayer wrote over a hundred years ago, namely, that the Supreme Court should

disregard the [challenged] Act when those who have the right to make laws have not merely made a mistake, but have made a very clear one--so clear that it is not open to rational question.  That is the standard of duty to which the courts bring legislative Acts; that is the test which they apply--not merely their own judgment as to constitutionality, but their conclusion as to what judgment is permissible to another department which the constitution has charged with the duty of making it.  This rule recognizes that, having regard to the great, complex, ever unfolding exigencies of government, much which will seem unconstitutional to one man, or body of men, may reasonably not seem so to another; that the constitution often admits of different interpretations; that there is often a range of choice and judgment; that in such cases the constitution does not impose upon the legislature any one specific opinion, but leaves open this range of choice; and that whatever choice is rational is constitutional.

Thayer, "The Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law," 7 Harvard Law Review 129, 144 (1893).