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Puerto Rico’s “massive debt”

Trump’s predictably haughty reference to Puerto Rico’s (pre-Hurricane Maria) “broken infrastructure” and “massive debt [‘billions of dollars’]” owed to “Wall Street and the banks which … must be dealt with,” should be viewed in the grim light of the country’s colonial and post-imperialist experience. A nice introduction to the relevance of this historical narrative and its lingering deleterious effects is found in this piece by Linda Backiel from the Monthly Review a couple of years ago: “Puerto Rico: The Crisis Is About Colonialism, Not Debt.”

And here is a comparatively short list of relevant literature:

• Carr, Raymond. Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
• Corretjer, Juan Antonio. Albizu Campos and the Ponce Massacre. New York: World View Publishers, 1965.
• Denis, Nelson A. War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony. New York: Nation Books, 2015.
• Enck-Wanzer, Darrel, ed. The Young Lords: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
• Falcón, Luis Nieves. Violations of Human Rights in Puerto Rico by the U.S. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Puerto, 2002.
• Fernandez, Ronald. Prisoners of Colonialism: The Struggle for Justice in Puerto Rico. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994.
• Fernandez, Ronald. The Disenchanted Island: Puerto Rico and the United States in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2^nd, 1996.
• Foner, Philip S. The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, Vols. 1 and 2, 1895-1902. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
• Lee, Sonia Song-Ha. Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
• Maldonado-Denis, Manuel. Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation. New York: Random House, 1972.
• Melendez, Miguel. We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003.
• Monge, José Trías. Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
• Rivera, Oscar López, “A Century of Colonialism: One Hundred Years of Puerto Rican Resistance,” in Joy James, ed. Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007: 160-189.
• Rivera, Oscar López (Luis Nieves Falcón, ed.) Between Torture and Resistance. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013.
• Silén, Juan Angel. We, the Puerto Rican People: A Story of Oppression and Resistance. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
• Torres, Andrés and José E. Velázquez, eds. The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998.
• Wanzer-Serrano, Darrel. The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2015.
• Young Lords Party and Michael Abramson. Palante: Young Lords Party. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.
• Zavala, Iris M. and Rafael Rodriguez, eds. The Intellectual Roots of Independence: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Political Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980.

The “Colin Kaepernick story” in context

Toward placing the “Colin Kaepernick story” in historical, sociological, and political context: a short reading list

• Bass, Amy. Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
• Carlos, John (with David Zirin). The John Carlos Story. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2013 (2011).
• Carter, Rubin “Hurricane” (with Ken Klosky) Eye of the Hurricane: My Path from Darkness to Freedom. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 2011.
• Dorinson, Joseph and Joram Warmund. Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports, and the American Dream. New York: Routledge, 2015 (M.E. Sharpe, 1998).
• Early, Gerald L. A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Edwards, Harry. The Revolt of the Black Athlete. New York: Free Press, 1969.
• Goodman, Jordan. Paul Robeson: A Watched Man. London: Verso, 2013.
• Hawkins, Billy. The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly White NCAA Institutions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Hirsch, James S. Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter. New York: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000.
• Hodges, Craig. Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017.
• Marquesee, Mike. Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties. London: Verso, 2^nd, 2005.
• McRae, Donald. Heroes Without a Country: America’s Betrayal of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.
• Owens, Jesse (with Paul Neimark) I Have Changed. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1972.
• Scott, Jack. The Athletic Revolution. New York: Free Press, 1971.
• Wice, Paul B. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and the American Justice System. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
• Zirin, David. What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United State. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015.

Evangelical Christians and Donald Trump

Many of us have wondered why evangelical Christians have stuck with Donald Trump for so long. It is, of course, child’s play to come up with reasons why they would not and should not.

Initially, I thought abortion was the main reason. Certainly, the evangelicals applauded the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch. But I had not thought about why the abortion issue was so important to evangelicals except for the obvious pro-life, pro-choice debate.

That view, however, misses the underlying sociology. More than 30 years ago, Kristen Luker wrote Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. The book drew on 200 interviews with abortion activists on different sides of the issue. She found that their position was connected to their views on sexual behavior, the care of children, and family life. So thirty three years ago, Luker discovered what I had forgotten. The abortion issue is centrally connected to the evangelical Christian’s view of gender and family life. It is all about the father as the head of the family and the place of the woman in the home.

From this perspective, it should be clear that Hillary Clinton (and the Democratic Party) had no hope with white evangelical Christians. Of course, Donald Trump is morally flawed to say the least. But the Democratic Party is centrally committed to views that contradict the views of evangelicals, and Donald Trump projects a form of authoritarian masculinity that continues to appeal to evangelical Christians.

George Padmore, né Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959)

George Padmore, né Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959) was a Trinidadian-born author, journalist, Left organizer and activist, one-time Communist Party member, socialist, and Pan-Africanist.

Books by George Padmore

• Padmore, George. The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers. London: Red International of Labour Unions Magazine for the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 1931.
• Padmore, George. How Britain Rules Africa. London: Wishart Books, 1936.
• Padmore, George. African and World Peace. London: Secker and Warburg, 1937.
• Padmore, George, with Nancy Cunard. White Man's Duty. London: W. H. Allen, 1942.
• Padmore, George (in collaboration with Dorothy Pizer). How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire: A Challenge to the Imperialist Powers. London: Dennis Dobson, 1946.
• Padmore, George. Africa: Britain's Third Empire. London: Dennis Dobson, 1949.
• Padmore, George. The Gold Coast Revolution: The Struggle of an African People from Slavery to Freedom. London: Dennis Dobson, 1953.
• Padmore, George. Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa. London: Dennis Dobson, 1956.
• Padmore, George, ed. The Voice of Coloured Labour. Manchester: Panaf Services, 1945.
• Padmore, George, ed. Colonial and Coloured Unity—A Programme of Action: History of the Pan-African Congress. Manchester: Pan-African Federation/Panaf Services, 1947.

Many—hence not all—of Padmore’s other writings are found online at the Marxists Internet Archive.

Further Reading:

• Adi, Hakim. West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998.
• Adi, Hakim. Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013.
• Adi, Hakim and Sherwood, Marika. The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited. London: New Beacon Books, 1995.
• Baptiste, Fitzroy and Rupert Lewis, eds. George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009.
• Bolland, O. Nigel. On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934-39. London: James Currey, 1995.
• Braithwaite, Lloyd. Colonial West Indian Students in Britain. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001.
• Bush, Barbara. Imperialism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919 –1945. London: Routledge, 1999.
• Cooper, Frederick. Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Cooper, Frederick. Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
• Cooper, Frederick. Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Cunard, Nancy (Maureen Moynagh, ed.). Essays on Race and Empire. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002.
• Cunard, Nancy, ed. Negro Anthology made by Nancy Cunard, 1931-1933. London: Wishart and Co., 1934.
• Derrick, Jonathan. Africa’s “Agitators”: Militant Anti-Colonialism in in Africa and the West, 1918-1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Fryer, Peter, Staying Power:The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto, 1984.
• Geiss, Imanuel. The Pan-African Movement. London: Methuen, 1974.
• Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Grimshaw, Anna, ed. The C. L. R. James Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
• Hooker, James R. Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1967.
• James, C.L.R. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. London: Allison and Busby, 1977.
• James, C.L.R. “George Padmore: Black Marxist Revolutionary,” in C. L. R. James, ed. At the Rendezvous of Victory:Selected Writings. London: Allison and Busby, 1984.
• James, Leslie. George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
• Langley, Jabez Ayodele. Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900-1945: A Study in Ideology and Social Classes. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1973.
• Langley, Jabez Ayodele, ed. Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa. London: Rex Collings, 1979.
• Lewis, Rupert and Baptiste, Fitzroy, eds. George Padmore:Pan-African Revolutionary. Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2008.
• Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
• Makonnen, Ras (Kenneth King, ed.) Pan-Africanism from Within. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
• Matera, Marc. Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015.
• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 (1983).
• Schwarz, Bill, ed. West Indian Intellectuals in Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
• Stephens, Michelle Ann. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Thompson, Dudley, with Margaret Cezair Thompson. From Kingston to Kenya: The Making of a Pan-African Lawyer. Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1993.
• Tilley, Helen, ed., with Robert J. Gordon. Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.
• Von Eschen, Penny. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
• Zachernuk, Philip S. Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Lastly, here is a link to the latest edition of my bibliography, Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism.

George Padmore interviews Ho Chi Minh in Paris (1946)

I was delighted to learn that George Padmore (né Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse) interviewed Ho Chi Minh (Nguyễn Sinh Cung, also known as Nguyen Tat Thanh and Nguyen Ai Quoc) while both were in Paris: Ho was there for the Paris Peace Conference (29 July to 15 October 1946), engaged in “confidential negotiations,” and Padmore was covering the conference for the Free India Press. According to James Hooker, one of the articles Padmore wrote “remains a good introduction to Vietnamese affairs,” the piece having been published by the Defender (28 September 1946, with an autographed photo of Ho!). In Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (Praeger, 1967), Hooker further describes Padmore’s article as “a concise introduction to the Vietnam tangle, one which holds up surprisingly well after nearly two decades of persistent journalistic rediscovery of the situation in South East Asia” (in this instance, Indochina). We further learn that a portion of the article was reprinted in the December issue of (Dwight Macdonald’s) politics (sic) as “The Story of Vietnam.” It seems the journal’s readers took Padmore to task for “play[ing] down Ho’s communist associations.” Padmore defended his work, decrying the “preoccupation with anti-communism which seemed so tiresomely characteristic” of the American Left. 

Finally, Hooker mentions one consequence of Padmore’s exclusive interview at the private hotel provided Ho by the French government: “Padmore became the unofficial guardian of Viet-Minh interests in London, to which city Ho despatched a representative for English language training.”

A Propaedeutic for the Question, “What to Do?”

What kind of person, holding the office of President of a country that possesses the most powerful military capacity in the world (‘the US spends more money — $601 billion — on defense than the next nine countries on Credit Suisse’s index combined’), publicly threatens to annihilate a county with more than 25,000,000 million human beings? During the same speech, Trump’s characterization of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known commonly as the Iran deal or Iran nuclear deal, as “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into,” reveals the darkest depths of his ignorance, stupidity, and arrogance. And it was of a piece with the Manichean madness splattered in spittle and blood all over his inaugural UN speech (Are the conventions of diplomatic discourse irrelevant, devoid of any normative value?).

In the words of Jack Goldsmith from his recent piece in The Atlantic, “We have never had a president so ill-informed about the nature of his office, so openly mendacious, so self-destructive, or so brazen in his abusive attacks on the courts, the press, Congress (including members of his own party), and even senior officials within his own administration.” Characterized in comparative terms, “Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.”

Hence I suppose we should not be surprised at Trump’s habitual rhetorical reliance in public speeches upon crude, hyperbolic, and often child-like adjectives and metaphors (with corresponding child-like or homologous and associationist thinking: mistaking bigness for greatness; the quantitative valuation of virtually everything; connecting competition, success and size; the attraction of novelty; a thirst for sensationalism; an overweening sense of privilege and superiority rooted in a fascination with sheer power if not megalomania, and so forth and so on), the harm of which is exacerbated by mendacious Manichean propaganda within an overarching framework of narcissistic nationalism. Alas, we don’t need the intimate privacy and authoritative atmosphere of the clinic to make a symptomatic diagnosis of narcissistic megalomania. Bearing in mind the trenchant psychological and philosophical critiques of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), it remains a source of qualified guidance for clinical judgment. As Alex Morris explains in his Rolling Stone article, “Why Trump Is Not Mentally Fit to Be President” (25 April 2017), the latest

“iteration of the DSM classifies narcissistic personality disorder as: ‘A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts.’ A diagnosis would also require five or more of the following traits:

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., ‘Nobody builds walls better than me’; ‘There’s nobody that respects women more than I do’; ‘There’s nobody who’s done so much for equality as I have’).
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love (e.g., ‘I alone can fix it’; ‘It’s very hard for them to attack me on looks, because I’m so good-looking’).
3. Believes that he or she is ‘special’ and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions (e.g., ‘Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich’).
4. Requires excessive admiration (e.g., ‘They said it was the biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning had won the Super Bowl’).
5. Has a sense of entitlement (e.g., ‘When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy’).
6. Is interpersonally exploitative (see above).
7. Lacks empathy, is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others (e.g., ‘He’s not a war hero . . . he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured’). Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her (e.g., ‘I’m the president, and you’re not’).
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her (e.g., ‘I’m the president, and you’re not’).
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes (e.g., ‘I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters’).”

Both Donald Trump’s pre-political career and tenure to date as U.S. President provide ample, disturbing and compelling behavioral evidence for our non-professional (‘armchair’) diagnosis. We’re all too familiar with his behavior during the campaign and time in office, the pre-political period perhaps less so:

“Viewed through the lens of pathology, Trump’s behavior – from military-school reports that he was too competitive to have close friends to his recent impromptu press conference, where he seemed to revel in the hour and a half he spent center stage, spouting paranoia and insults – can be seen as a constant quest for narcissistic supply. Certainly few have gone after fame (a veritable conveyor belt of narcissistic supply) with such single-mindedness as Trump, constantly upping the ante to gain more exposure. Not content with being the heir apparent of his father’s vast outer-borough fortune, he spent his twenties moving the Trump Organization into the spotlight of Manhattan, where his buildings needed to be the biggest, the grandest, the tallest (in the pursuit of which he skipped floors in the numbering to make them seem higher). Not content to inflict the city with a succession of eyesores bearing his name in outsize letters, he had to buy up more Atlantic City casinos than anyone else, as well as a fleet of 727s (which he also slapped with his name) and the world’s third-biggest yacht (despite professing to not like boats). Meanwhile, to make sure that none of this escaped notice, he sometimes pretended to be his own publicist, peppering the press with unsolicited information about his business conquests and his sexual prowess.”

And yet if history provides us with any appropriate standard in such matters, it seems “having a mental illness, in and of itself, [doesn’t] necessarily make Trump unqualified for the presidency.” Again, Morris:

“A 2006 study published in the Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease found that 18 of the first 37 presidents met criteria for having a psychiatric disorder, from depression (24 percent) and anxiety (eight percent) to alcoholism (eight percent) and bipolar disorder (eight percent). Ten of them exhibited symptoms while in office, and one of those 10 was arguably our best president, Abraham Lincoln, who suffered from deep depression (though, considering the death of his son and the state of the nation, who could blame him?).

The problem is that, when it comes to leadership, all pathologies are not created equal. Some, like depression, though debilitating, do not typically lead to psychosis or risky decision-making and are mainly unpleasant only for the person suffering them, as well as perhaps for their close friends and family. Others, like alcoholism, can be more dicey: In 1969, Nixon got so sloshed that he ordered a nuclear attack against North Korea (in anticipation of just such an event, his defense secretary had supposedly warned the military not to act on White House orders without approval from either himself or the secretary of state).”

And we need to distinguish what has been called “run-of-the-mill narcissism,” which is common to more than a few politicians (and episodically, perhaps most of us), from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) proper:

“For many in the mental-health field, the most troubling aspect of Trump’s personality is his loose grasp of fact and fiction. When narcissism veers into NPD, it can lead to delusions, an alternate reality where the narcissist remains on top despite clear evidence to the contrary. ‘He’s extremely quick, like nanoseconds quick, to discern anything that could conceivably threaten his dominance,’ says biographer Gwenda Blair, who wrote The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President. ‘He’s on it. Anything that he senses – and he has very sharp senses – that could suggest that he is anything except 200 percent total winner, he’s got to stomp it out immediately. So having those reports, for example, that he did not win the popular vote? He can’t take that in. There has to be another explanation. It has to have been stolen. It has to have been some illegal voters. It can’t be the case that he lost. That’s not thinkable.’”

The office of the presidency has of course provided a global stage for the unavoidable and relentless exhibition of the aforementioned pathological symptoms, making it difficult for most of us to afford Trump the sympathy or compassion we might otherwise generate in the intimate realm for a person afflicted with such a personality or character disorder, if only because in his case the enhanced harmful consequences (both immediate and long-term) of such behavior will affect an enormous number of people (especially those most vulnerable to the actions of the upper classes and the politically powerful) as well as impact the wider, life-sustaining properties of the natural world.

Accompanying real or promised actions born of non-delusional grandeur or grandiose delusions, Trump’s rhetoric, as his UN speech made painfully pellucid, only serves to further muddle when not obliterating already hazy or vague boundaries in the political arena between appearance and reality, pretense and substance, deception and truth. And this only immeasurably worsens, within the prevailing polluted climate of neoliberal capitalism, existing threats to the ethos, values, principles and essential methods of democratic praxis that have been assiduously cut, chiseled, and polished over many years, in an astonishing variety of geographic locales and among peoples motivated by or tethered to different worldviews, lifeworlds, and ideologies. The convoluted and insincere hermeneutic rationales routinely if awkwardly constructed in defense of Trump’s inconsistent and haphazard rhetoric by his cronies and sycophants has only conspicuously shrunken the depth and scope of democratic political argumentation. Thus our corresponding public discourse—whether in the mass media or informal public fora—is invariably shallow and sullied, except perhaps, in those precious quarters where opposition, resistance, and rebellion is being nurtured under the protective banner of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, where the virtues of participatory and deliberative democracy have not disappeared, thereby making it possible if not probable that the thirst for social justice will one day be sated.

The Indic Contribution to Grammar, Linguistics, and the Philosophy of Language

                                      

 

 

 

 

 

 

Linguistics, insofar as it is (or aspires to be) a science, touches (directly, or indirectly by way of presuppositions, assumptions, and presumptions) on more than a few questions that fall within province of the philosophy of language (the ‘philosophy of linguistics’ is germane as well, being the ‘philosophy of science as applied to linguistics’). And the Indic tradition is a rich repository of sophisticated reflections on grammar, linguistics, and philosophy of language proper, particularly (and thus not exclusively) the “Grammarians” and the Mīmāṃsā darśana. Hence the reason for bringing this article in Aeon by Gaston Dorren to your attention: “Talking Gibberish.” Its shortcomings provide yet another piece of evidence for the imperative value of comparative philosophy.

I thought this article in Aeon by Gaston Dorren overwrought, and in some respects awful, as when it refers to the “pre-scientific era” as having “produced a lot of codswallop and hogwash,” while neglecting to mention the brilliance of Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī  (‘The Eight-Chaptered’) (150 BCE?), properly characterized by Harold G. Coward and K. Kunjunni Raja as a “very remarkable work,” “providing a model for recent and contemporary work in descriptive linguistics that can stand with the best efforts of modern analysts.” As the Wikipedia entry on Pāṇini informs us,

“Pāṇini’s work became known in 19th-century Europe, where it influenced modern linguistics initially through Franz Bopp, who mainly looked at Pāṇini. Subsequently, a wider body of work influenced Sanskrit scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson. Frits Staal (1930–2012) discussed the impact of Indian ideas on language in Europe. After outlining the various aspects of the contact, Staal notes that the idea of formal rules in language – proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1894 and developed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 – has origins in the European exposure to the formal rules of Pāṇinian grammar.  In particular, de Saussure, who lectured on Sanskrit for three decades, may have been influenced by Pāṇini and Bhartṛhari; his idea of the unity of signifier-signified in the sign somewhat resembles the notion of sphoṭa. More importantly, the very idea that formal rules can be applied to areas outside of logic or mathematics may itself have been catalysed by Europe’s contact with the work of Sanskrit grammarians.”

According to at least some experts on our subject matter, the Sanskrit grammarians and Indic philosophical schools have nothing to contribute to either the “philosophy of linguistics” or the “philosophy of language”(see too Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, eds. A Companion to the Philosophy of Language [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997]).

Well, before I could finish my response to the article, one Bjorn Merker beat me to it in the comments, taking Dorren to task for failing to mention this “giant linguist,” as well as noting that “Pāṇini’s grammar … availed itself of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology and lexicon, organised according to a series of meta-rules. This technique, rediscovered by the logician Emil Post in 1936, became a standard method in the design of computer programming languages ….”

Recommended Reading (not an exhaustive list):

• Bilimoria, Purushottama. Śabdapramāna: Word and Knowledge. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988.
• Bronkhorst, Johannes. Tradition and Argument in Classical Indian Linguistics. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986.
• Cabezón, José Ignacio. Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994.
• Chari, V.K. Sanskrit Criticism. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.
• Coward, Harold G. The Sphota Theory of Language. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980.
• Coward, Harold G. and K. Kunjunni Raja, eds. The Philosophy of the Grammarians (Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Vol. 5). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
• Freschi, Elisa. Duty, Language and Exegesis in Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā: Including an Edition and Translation of Rāmānujācārya’s Tantrarahasya, Śāstraprameyapariccheda. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
• Ganeri, Jonardon. Semantic Powers: Meaning and the Means of Knowing in Classical Indian Philosophy. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1999.
• Ganeri, Jonardon. Artha: Meaning. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Herzberger, Radhika. Bhartrihari and the Buddhists. Dordrecht: D. Reidel/Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1986.
• Iyer, Soubramania, K.A. Bhartrihari: A Study of Vākyapadīya in the Light of Ancient Commentaries. Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate Research Institute, 1997.
• Kahrs, Eivind. Indian Semantic Analysis: The ‘Nirvicana’ Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna (Jonardon Ganeri, ed.). Epistemology, Logic, and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005 (Mouton, 1971).
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna. Logic, Language and Reality: an introduction to Indian philosophical studies. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1985.
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna. The Word and the World: India’s Contribution to the Study of Language. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna (Jonardon Ganeri, ed.). The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal: Mind, Language and World. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna and Arindam Chakrabarti, eds. Knowing from Words: Western and Indian Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony. Dordrecht: Springer, 1994.
• Siderits, Mark. Indian Philosophy of Language. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991.
• Staal, Frits. Universals: Studies in Indian Logic and Linguistics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Update: Dorren has since responded as follows: “I agree that I could have mentioned Pāṇini as well as certain grammarians in China and the West, for descriptive (and prescriptive) linguistics had reached a high level before William Jones. But all sort of speculation beyond that did indeed produce little but nonsense.” [I confess to wishing he had said ‘I agree that I should have mentioned … ’]

Wedding Cakes, the Supreme Court, and the Politics of Left and Right

As you probably know, Masterpiece Cakeshop refused to afford its services for a same-sex wedding reception in Colorado on religious grounds, was found liable for its discrimination, and the case is before the Supreme Court.

A number of things bother me about cases like these. First, I am troubled by the secular left’s hostility to religious claims. Freedom of religion was fine when the freedom of religion rights of Quakers or Native Americans were at issue. Indeed, secular liberals favored the Religious Freedom Restoration Act after the Court undermined freedom of religion claims. Today, the secular liberals are hostile to the Act at the federal level and oppose new such acts at the state level.

Today the religious claimants are evangelical Christians for whom secular liberals have special contempt. Could that have something to do with it? I too have little regard for the views of evangelical Christians; nonetheless, their religious liberty deserves to be respected even though that liberty can be outweighed by more important government interests. What concerns me is the failure of secular liberals to recognize that if anti-discrimination interests are enforced in a way that compels a religious claimant to act against his or her will, the choice is tragic because two important interests cannot be reconciled.

I am also bothered by the religious right in the wedding cake controversy. To get to this point, I need to make some general observations about the case. In the case before the Court, the baker was approached by a same sex couple to purchase a cake for their wedding reception. The baker refused to provide any baked goods for the reception on the ground that he is religiously opposed to same-sex weddings, but observed that he would design, bake, and sell baked goods to gays for other occasions. There was no discussion as to what kind of cake the couple wanted.

Despite the absence of discussion, the baker said his free speech rights were violated. Clearly, baked goods are not speech. The baker, however, ignoring the record showing that his refusal was to provide any baked good, claims he has a free speech right to refuse to provide a custom cake and that he is an artist. His bakery, he says, is an “art gallery of cakes.” He claims to be an “artist using cake as his canvas.” It, however, would be the rare baker who does not provide a design on his or her cakes. Any baker could claim to be an artist. Are all custom cakes or cakes with designs to be categorized as speech for purposes for the First Amendment? The courts are not art critics. It makes little sense to suppose that courts will decide that some bakers are artists and others are not. So it is all or none. If wedding cakes are speech because of the artistry, then what do we make of the artistic claims of florists, interior decorators, chefs, and jewelers. This is just a glimpse of the problems with the record and the claims of the bakery.

Now to the religious right. I understand why the religious right raises a freedom of religion argument even though the Court has thrown up doctrinal roadblocks to the success of those arguments. What concerns me is the uniformity with which they favor the free speech argument in this case. I would have expected that some of them would have said that the issue here is whether freedom of religion outweighs the anti-discrimination interest instead of dressing up a freedom of religion argument as a free speech argument.

The Bedouin worldview .... or, philosophy among the Bedouin

 

Historically, philosophy has been articulated in an astonishingly wide —at least from today’s vantage point—array of literary forms and genres, although I’m not aware of any systematic comparative work on this score (there is a nice entry in the SEP by Eileen Sweeney on the literary forms of ‘medieval philosophy’). For better or worse, and depending on who you ask, contemporary professional philosophy has severely narrowed the “acceptable” or normative models of philosophical expression, usually within the constraints of what is considered a proper “analytical” approach (as a generic method, Buddhists arguably excel in philosophical analysis; with the Sanskrit grammarians pioneers in this regard, blurring the lines between science and philosophy). However, sometimes philosophy is expressed obliquely, perhaps embedded in material that requires some sort of distillation or—to use a more mundane metaphor—digging, to reveal itself as “philosophy” of one kind or another: moral psychology, metaphysics, ontology, ethics, epistemology, what have you. This may simply be due to the fact that those who are responsible for this material are not sages, philosophers or even intellectuals (by vocation), and yet one may discover here and there philosophical ideas, insight, even wisdom. The three works pictured here are exemplars of the phenomenon in question from the Bedouin, the material taking the form of poetry, proverbs, and law.  

I have an introductory reading list on the Bedouin here (it includes the Bailey titles pictured above).

The Manifesto of the 121: French Intellectuals and Decolonization

As I learned this morning from my Verso Radical Diary, The Manifesto of the 121 was signed on this date in 1960:

“The Manifesto of the 121 (Full title: Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie or Declaration on the right of insubordination in the Algerian War) was an open letter signed by 121 intellectuals and published on 6 September 1960 in the magazine Vérité-Liberté [124 more intellectuals signed soon thereafter]. It called on the French government (then headed by the Gaullist Michel Debré) and public opinion to recognise the Algerian War as a legitimate struggle for independence, denouncing the use of torture by the French army, and calling for French conscientious objectors to the conflict to be respected by the authorities.

The Declaration was drafted by Dionys Mascolo, Maurice Blanchot and Jean Schuster. It stated that the cause of the Algerians was the cause of all free men, and that the struggle was striking a decisive blow to the cause of colonialism. Although the vast majority of the signatories belonged to the French Left, a few had been close in their past to the French far-right, such as Maurice Blanchot or Robert Scipion (who had been a sympathiser of the Croix-de-Feu). The signatories included figures from a variety of political and cultural movements, such as Marxism, existentialism, and a number of figures associated with the Nouveau Roman and New Wave literary and cinematic trends.” (Edited from the Wikipedia entry)

*           *           *

“[The Manifesto] was a document more read about than read since – of the journals in which it was to appear, one was seized, and the other, Sartre’s Les Temps modernes, came out with two blank pages in its place, the result of government censorship. The government didn’t stop at censorship. As a result of the manifesto, they put in place stiff penalties for those calling for insubordination; jobs were lost and careers temporarily shut down.”

David L. Schalk elaborates:

“The complete document became briefly available in France only in 1961, when it was published in Le droit à l’insoumission, a collection of texts dealing the controversy [i.e., the question of the struggle for Algerian independence and thus opposition to the war in Algeria], edited by François Maspero. This volume was promptly seized by the government.

In Le Monde during September and October 1960 there are fascinating brief references to what must have appeared to many readers as a mysterious document. When a famous intellectual figure such as André Schwartz-Bart or François Sagan added his or her name to the list of signers, Le Monde took note. Journalists also reported on the sanctions taken by the government against some of the signatories, and Le Monde published a list of the 180 who had signed through September 30, 1960, including Clara and Florence Malraux, the ex-wife and daughter of de Gaulle’s minister of culture.

Le Monde printed in its entirety a counter-manifesto of October 1960 that condemned the work of ‘the professors of treason,’ accus[ing them] of being a ‘fifth column’ that draws its inspiration from ‘foreign propaganda.’ This manifesto was signed by nearly three hundred intellectual supporters of Algérie française, including seven members of the French Academy. But at the time readers could only speculate as to the exact nature of the ‘treason’ supposedly perpetrated by these ‘professors.’”

Among the signatories of the Manifesto of the 121:

• Simone de Beauvoir, philosopher
• Michèle Bernstein, situationist
• Maurice Blanchot, writer
• André Breton, surrealist
• Guy Debord, situationist
• Jacques Gernet, sinologist
• Daniel Guérin, historian
• Henri Lefebvre, sociologist
• Michel Leiris, writer and ethnologist
• Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, philosopher and psychoanalyst
• Jean-François Revel, journalist
• Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher
• Simone Signoret, actress
• François Truffaut, film-maker
• Jean-Pierre Vernant, historian
• Pierre Vidal-Naquet, historian

For the full Declaration, see the link (along with other invaluable links), “The Manifesto of the 121,”at the History of Algerian Independence page of the Marxist Internet Archive.

I hope shortly to write more about the opposition of anti-colonialist (and later, anti-imperialist advocates for national self-determination) French intellectuals to the Algerian War as well as the intriguing later influence of this manifesto on US intellectuals opposing the American War in Vietnam. That influence was embodied in the petition titled “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” first published in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic in October 1967, and “widely circulated thereafter.” This petition “was one of the most important documents in the intellectuals’ campaign against President Johnson and the Vietnam War,” leading “directly to the establishment of the militant antiwar organization called Resist.” According to Sandy Vogelgesang, its authors, Marcus Raskin and Arthur Waskow, “borrowed consciously” from the Manifesto of the 121.

Essential Reading:

• Aronson, Ronald. Camus & Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
• Fanon, Frantz (Haakon Chevalier, tr.). A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press, 1965.
• Feraoun, Mouldoud (Mary Elllen Wolf and Claud Fouillade, tr. and James D. Le Sueur, ed.) Journal-1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000 (Éditions du Seuil, 1962).
• Harrison, Alexander. Challenging De Gaulle: The OAS and the Counterrevolution in Algeria, 1954-1962. New York: Praeger, 1989.
• Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962. New York: Penguin Books, 1979; 2^nd, New York: NYRB Classics, 2006.
• Le Sueur, James D. Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the French Algerian War. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2^nd, 2005.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul (Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams, tr.). Colonialism and Neocolonialism. New York: Routledge, 2001 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1964).
• Schalk, David L. War and the Ivory Tower. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005 ed.
• Sorum, Paul Clay. Intellectuals and Decolonization in France. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977.

Ethnic Cleansing & Crimes against Humanity in Myanmar

The following is from an online petition being circulated by Avaaz.org:

“Aung San Suu Kyi is an apologist for genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass rape. For the past year, Aung San Suu Kyi has been State Counselor, or de facto head of government, in Myanmar, where members of the Rohingya Muslim minority in the northern Rakhine state have been shot, stabbed, starved, robbed, raped and driven from their homes in the hundreds of thousands. In December, while the world focused on the fall of Aleppo, more than a dozen Nobel Laureates published an open letter warning of a tragedy in Rakhine ‘amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.’

In February, a report by the United Nations documented how the Burmese army’s attacks on the Rohingya were ‘widespread as well as systematic’ thus ‘indicating the very likely commission of crimes against humanity.’ More than half of the 101 Rohingya women interviewed by UN investigators across the border in Bangladesh said they had suffered rape or other forms of sexual violence at the hands of security forces. ‘They beat and killed my husband with a knife,’ one survivor recalled. ‘Five of them took off my clothes and raped me. My eight‐month old son was crying of hunger when they were in my house because he wanted to breastfeed, so to silence him they killed him too with a knife.’

And the response of Aung San Suu Kyi? This once‐proud campaigner against wartime rape and human rights abuses by the Burmese military has opted to borrow from the Donald Trump playbook of denial and deflection. Her office accused Rohingya women of fabricating stories of sexual violence and put the words ‘fake rape’ — in the form of a banner headline, no less — on its official website. A spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry — also controlled directly by Aung San Suu Kyi — dismissed ‘made‐up stories, blown out of proportion.’ In February, the State Counselor herself reportedly told the Archbishop of Yangon, Charles Bo, that the international community is exaggerating the Rohingya issue.”

The latest article from The Guardian [sans hyperlinks] about what is happening to the Rohingya Muslim community notes that Myanmar has blocked all UN aid to civilians at the heart of Rohingya crisis:

“Myanmar has blocked all United Nations aid agencies from delivering vital supplies of food, water and medicine to thousands of desperate civilians at the centre of a bloody military campaign in Myanmar, the Guardian has learned. The world body halted distributions in northern Rakhine state after militants attacked government forces on 25 August [only recently, after years of State-led violence and Buddhist-led pogroms against the Rohingya did some of their members resort to violence in organized self-defense against the government], and the army responded with a counteroffensive that has killed hundreds.

The Office of the UN Resident Coordinator in Myanmar told the Guardian that deliveries were suspended ‘because the security situation and government field-visit restrictions rendered us unable to distribute assistance,’ suggesting authorities were not providing permission to operate. ‘The UN is in close contact with authorities to ensure that humanitarian operations can resume as soon as possible,’ it said. Aid was being delivered to other parts of Rakhine state, it added.

In the deadliest violence for decades in the area, the military is accused of atrocities against the persecuted Muslim Rohingya minority, tens of thousands of whom have fled burning villages to neighbouring Bangladesh, many with bullet wounds.

Staff from the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), have not conducted any field work in northern Rakhine for more than a week, a dangerous halt in life-saving relief that will affect poor Buddhist residents as well as Rohingya. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said it also had to suspend distributions to other parts of the state, leaving a quarter of a million people without regular food access. Sixteen major non-government aid organisations – including Oxfam and Save the Children – have also complained that the government has restricted access to the conflict area. [….]

Refugees who have made it to Bangladesh during the past week have told horrific stories of ‘massacres’ in villages that they say were raided and burned by soldiers. Along miles of the border, thick black smoke can be seen rising from small settlements surrounded by green fields. The government blames rebels for burning their own homes and accuses them of killing Buddhists and Hindus, a claim repeated by some residents.

Although the Rohingya have suffered oppression for decades, the recent bout of violence is seen as a dangerous escalation because it was sparked by a new Rohingya militant group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. The military says 400 people have been killed, the vast majority of them ‘terrorists,’ although a government block on access to Rakhine makes it impossible to verify official figures.

An estimated 1.1 million Rohingya live in Myanmar, which refuses to grant them citizenship and has been internationally condemned for its treatment of the ethnic minority. Hardline religious leaders in majority Buddhist Myanmar have fuelled anti-Muslim sentiment and accuse relief workers of a pro-Rohingya bias. Aid offices were ransacked during 2014 riots in Rakhine’s state capital, Sittwe.

Leader Aung San Suu Kyi has also forged an increasingly antagonistic relationship with humanitarian organisations in Myanmar. Her office accused aid workers last week of helping ‘terrorists,’ a claim that prompted fears for their safety.

More than 100,000 Rohingya who have lived in displacement camps in Rakhine since 2012 when violence between Muslims and Buddhists forced them out of their homes, also stopped receiving assistance last week.” [….]

Aung San Suu Kyi has had many opportunities to speak out, truthfully, about what is happening to the Rohingya Muslims yet has failed to do so. It is simply inexcusable. In particular, she should have spoken to the two principal forms of nationalism responsible as the primary ideologies rationalizing and sanctioning this ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide: Buddhist and militarist. It appears at this juncture as if members of both groups are acting as co-principals of one kind or another (e.g., full joint wrongdoing, conspiracy, co-operation, or collusion) in the acts of coercion and violence. By rescinding the Peace Prize the Nobel Committee could bring absolutely necessary and urgent attention to what is happening in Myanmar/Burma and remove the stain of utter hypocrisy and contradiction now attached to her award.

Update: On Facebook, Chris Bertram writes, “Well, Kissinger, Obama could also be stripped I suppose. And posthumously Wilson and Begin (and that’s just off the top of my head). Agree that she should lose it, but maybe the whole thing should be abandoned.” And I agree with Chris, although in this case the loss is designed to have some immediate impact on the events in question. But, yes, there are more than a few Nobel Peace Prize winners who were not deserving of the prize in the first place (and a few that perhaps we would rescind now given what we later learned). More importantly, perhaps, I think we should indeed scrap the prize altogether. I can live with (pun intended) the Right Livelihood Award garnering the displaced acclaim and attention.

• Please see the full article here.
• For an earlier post by yours truly on this conflict in particular and on Buddhists and violence generally, please see “When Buddhists Resort to Violence.”
• Please take a moment to sign the petition here.
• For an independent legal analysis of the question of whether or not the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar amounts to genocide, please see the paper produced by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School, in October of 2015, the introduction to which is here, and the publication itself, here.

The Jain Tradition: a basic bibliography

The bibliography for the Jain tradition is now available at my Academia page. Here is the introduction to this compilation:

As with most of my bibliographies, this list has two constraints: books only, in English (please note: missing subscript and supra-script diacritic dots). Readers may be interested in several companion compilations: on Hinduism, on Indian (or Indic) Philosophy, and on Buddhism. I would like to dedicate this bibliography* to Padmanabh S. Jaini, Professor emeritus of Buddhist Studies. I first read his book, The Jaina Path of Purification (University of California Press, 1979) in the early 1980s while a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My intermittent but no less abiding interest in the Jain worldview had been awakened upon learning of the profound influence of Jain philosophical doctrines (e.g., anekāntavāda), spiritual exercises and ethics (e.g., vows and fasts) on Mahatma Gandhi. Indeed, as Margaret Chatterjee notes, “Raicandbhāī [Mahetā], the saintly Jain jeweler, was the nearest thing to a guru that Gandhi ever had.”

* I did not dedicate any of the eighty prior bibliographies.