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Let’s Play Ball!

“Baseball has become countercultural in America. Its pacing defies our Twitter-addled era. The game denies instant gratification. Thousands of measurable events and matchups provide inarguable facts. The sport demands respect for history and context. Given the current political climate, the republic needs baseball more than ever.

As the country has sped up, baseball has gotten slower. The average nine-inning game takes over three hours — 13% longer than in 2005. There is no ‘running the clock’ as there is in just about every other sport. Batters saunter to the plate and fiddle with batting gloves. Pitchers shake off signs, get set and then step off the mound. Major League Baseball hopes to quicken the pace by limiting the number of coaching visits to the mound and shortening breaks between innings. Players, bless them, have resisted a 20-second pitch clock.

Baseball teaches delayed gratification. It lacks the constant movement of basketball or violent contact of football, and the pleasure of an inning-ending strikeout or run-saving catch comes only after a period of tense waiting. The exact opposite occurs, too. With the crowd on its feet during a go-ahead moment, a batter will foul off five pitches only to meekly ground out to first base. Baseball also fosters a philosophical outlook. There are 162 regular season games; players and teams often recover from slow starts. Fans and players expect ups and downs. This is not the orientation of hyperbolic cable news shows or the incessant outrage traded on social media.”—John R. Bawden for the Los Angeles Times (March 28, 2018)

The rest of this delightful opinion piece is here.

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Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) “learned about haiku from Gary Snyder in 1955 while in the San Francisco Bay area. In The Dharma Bums (1958), Kerouac mentions Snyder had R.H. Blyth’s four-volume Haiku in his shack in Berkeley and tells how they talked about ways to write haiku. Of the Beat writers, Kerouac was the most perfectly attuned to haiku and was soon writing good ones. He wrote the first American baseball haiku (‘Empty baseball field’). It came out in 1959 on Blues and Haikus, a record on which he read his haiku with piano accompaniment. [….]

Though best known as a football player—at Horace Mann prep school and Columbia—Kerouac played in the outfield for the Horace Mann baseball team in 1940. He threw and batted right-handed.”— Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura (tr. and eds.) Baseball Haiku: American and Japanese Haiku and Senryu on Baseball (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007).

Empty baseball field

—A robin,

Hops along the bench

Further Reading:

• Bronson, Eric, ed. Baseball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside the Batter’s Box. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2004.
• Rawls, John. “The Best of All Games,” Boston Review (March/April 2008). This is a letter from John Rawls to Owen Fiss: “In the letter that follows, written in 1981, Rawls puts philosophy to the service of baseball and gives an account of the sport and its special appeal to the American people. The letter recounts a breakfast conversation some twenty years earlier with Harry Kalven (1914 - 1974) who had been a friend and colleague of mine at the University of Chicago. Kalven was a legal scholar of great distinction who specialized in torts, the jury, and free speech. On his death, Kalven left a manuscript, to which Rawls alludes and which was eventually published in 1988 as A Worthy Tradition, on freedom of speech. Like Rawls, Kalven loved baseball. He was proud that his torts casebook contained more baseball cases than any of its competitors, and each year made a point of taking students to a Cubs game.”
• Setiya, Kieran. “Going Deep: Baseball and Philosophy,” Public Books, October 23, 2017.

Some reflections on Freudian psychoanalysis from the philosopher John Wisdom (1904-1993)

We know that the notion of an unconscious mind or mental states predates Freud, and in fact is found, more or less, in both Eastern and Western thought, even if there is little or no systematic reflection and examination of this idea in conceptual terms concerned at once with its philosophical and psychological facets and clarification. Thus, we typically don’t say Freud “discovered” the unconscious but when we think of the unconscious, Freud’s name leaps to mind, if not his provocative and groundbreaking thoughts on “the unconscious.”

More often, it is said that Newton “discovered” gravity, but in one very important sense, he did no such thing, any more than Freud discovered the unconscious part of our minds. So, what was it that both Newton and Freud did in their respective fields of inquiry?

“After all we didn’t need Newton to tell us that apples fall. The well-taught child replies ‘He explained why apples fall. He said they fall because of gravity.’ But wasn’t this explanation like the doctor’s when we tell him how we feel and he tells us that we are run down. For what is gravity but the fall of apples and the like—in short, all these incidents we pretend to explain by gravity. ‘Ah’ the clever child replies, ‘gravity is much more than the fall of apples. It is the fall of apples and the like.’ And this is true. With the word ‘gravity,’ or the word ‘attraction,’ used in a modified way, Newton connected apples in an orchard with stars in heaven, a mammoth in a pitfall with waves high on the beach. Till he spoke we had no word connecting every incident in nature by thin lines of likeness, thin as the lines of force but stronger than steel.

Unlike one who uses a pattern ready made for him Newton had to cut out a pattern in order to show the connections in a whole which no one had ever apprehended as a whole. We now are given the conceptions of gravity and of energy. Newton developed the conception of attraction and presented it with the power of the distant. Freud developed the conception of the unconscious and with it presented the power of the past. Each introduced a word and from it bred a notation which encourages us towards new experience and also enables us to co-ordinate old experience.”

Like poets, both “philosophical scientists” and “metaphysical philosophers” writes John Wisdom, “mould the use of language to their needs,” and the casts produced by these molds can be a bit unsettling or startling, at least upon first sight. Yet poets, philosophers, and scientists are at their best when moving back and forth, to and fro, from the concrete to the general, from the general to the concrete (or from order to chaos or paradox…), from molds to casts, and thus new molds to new casts. Freudian psychoanalysis, insofar as it is a “battle with illusion, disillusion, and despair is something more personal than this,” that is, it is more personal than the movement back and forth between the general and the concrete, between order and chaos:

“ …[I]t is notorious … that it is hard to see oneself as others see one, and this implies that it is hard to see oneself as one can see others, that the advice ‘Know yourself’ is not easy to follow. In psychoanalysis a determined attempt is made to do this with someone else’s help. Concrete detail after concrete detail is assembled and slowly, very slowly, the bewildering chaos comes into order and the shifting shadows begin to have shape. But there are strong forces opposing this.

It is not only that the incidents one needs to recall are half forgotten. Added to this and bound up with it is the fact that there exists already a way of telling the story which selects, emphasizes and assembles things in certain constellations. For instance, the story is told in terms of loving certain people and hating others. You loved your kind mother and your good father and your little sister, who was weaker than yourself. You hated the people next door who poisoned the cat, and you despised Uncle Jack who disgraced the family name by selling on prodigious scale, bogus shares. You despised him of course although he drove so magnificent a motor car. You loved your sister. Of course there were occasions when you lost your temper with her, but these were temporary aberrations when perhaps she broke your best soldiers or tore your best book. So far so good. It is only later, perhaps, that the adequacy of this picture begins to be suspected. You love your wife. You are of course sometimes angry with her. And here you are sorry to say you are sometimes extraordinarily angry with her, unreasonably angry, much angrier than you would be with someone else who had done what she did. Perhaps of course she has done the same thing before. But sometimes she has not. And anyway why were you so angry with her from the first? You might be tempted to say sometimes that you detest your wife if it were not that you love her and love her very much. And now you come to think of it, though sometimes your sister was very provoking it is also true that you were sometimes angry with her about very little, and no less when grown-ups in a certain tone of voice again said that she was smaller and weaker than you. Did you really detest her for the love she won so easily?

The suggestion is preposterous. But is it pointless? Isn’t it in fact extremely pointed? The suggestion that a hat is a monument, that legal discussion is verbal, that knowledge of other minds isn’t really knowledge [these are examples discussed earlier in the essay] are all preposterous. But they are not pointless. They force us to recognize things familiar but unrecognized. Psychological suggestions also, preposterous as they sometimes are, reveal to our dismay and our relief things we had felt creeping in the shadows and now must see in light. [….]

Psycho-analysts in order to reveal to us things about ourselves modify and sophisticate our conceptions of love, hate, jealously, envy, sympathy, sense of responsibility. They use familiar words not with a disregard to established usage but not in bondage to it. [….] The psychoanalyst also tries [i.e., like the ‘metaphysician’] to bring to light models which dominate our thought, our talk, our feelings, our actions, in short our lives. And of course it is not the professional psychoanalyst only who does this—anyone who reflects upon people and tries to come at the truth does in some degree the same thing. [And this is one reason why Marcia Cavell can write: “I think it is true that Freudian interpretation depends generally on the everyday reason-explanation model—sometimes called ‘folk psychology’—which it then expands in various ways, and that precisely this is one of its strengths.”] [….]

The psycho-analyst seeks to bring into the light those models from the past which for good and evil so powerfully influence our lives in the present, so powerfully distort reality and so powerfully illuminate it. For, of course, these models don’t only distort. By no means. No doubt the lover see what we see isn’t there. But doesn’t he also see what we can’t see? Unquestionably Miss E. Brown is not Aphrodite nor Diana. But then maybe she isn’t the Miss Brown we think we know. Hate may blind, but hate, even neurotic hate, also reveals.”— John Wisdom, from the essay, “Philosophy, Metaphysics and Psycho-Analysis,” in his book, Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1957 [1953]).

Of course the entire essay is best read in toto, thus I hope this extract provides sufficient enticement toward that end.

A bibliography on Freudian and Post-Freudian psychology is here.

Documentary on Dolores Huerta: “Dolores”

Some readers—as viewers!—may be interested (assuming you’ve yet to see it) in the recent documentary on the remarkable and inspirational life of Dolores Huerta on PBS (Independent Lens): “Dolores.”

And should you have missed its earlier posting, here is my bibliography for “César Chávez & the United Farm Workers … and the Struggle of Farm Workers in the U.S.”

Image: “Yreina D. Cervántez’ 1989 mural La Ofrenda, painted under a bridge in downtown Los Angeles.... In it, Cervántez—an artist and Chicana activist—pays homage to Dolores Huerta, co-founder with César Chávez of the United Farm Workers of America.”

Legalized Corruption and Your Retirement Funds

For many years many brokers and insurance agents were permitted to give investment advice to their clients without revealing that they had a conflict of interest with respect to the investments they were recommending. This practice was costing investors $17 billion dollars per year. See here.

President Obama’s Labor Department ruled on April 6, 2016 (see here) that these brokers, insurance agents, and others could no longer engage in these shady practices, but had to put their client’s interests above their own. They could not recommend investments that were not in the client’s best interests and they had to reveal conflicts. See here.

It is a sad commentary on the brazen corruption of big business that this rule has been fought against and delayed. How dare the Obama administration take away the right to hoodwink investors? After a considerable delay in the Obama administration, President Trump has done his best to delay the provisions even further. In March, 2017, Trump’s Department of Labor received 193,000 comment letters during a 15 day comment period. 178,000 opposed a delay. Yet, full implementation has been delayed until July 1, 2019. See here.

Meanwhile the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Chamber of Commerce (perhaps the Chamber might consider changing its name to Enemy of the People) v. Department of Labor has ruled that the Department has exceeded its authority in requiring a broader class of professionals to act like fiduciaries instead of exploiters, and the Department of Labor has stated that it will not enforce the rule pending appeal. See here.

Famine: History, Causes, and Consequences — A Select Bibliography

Prompted by the recent post on the Great Irish Famine, I decided to put together a comparatively short bibliography (books, in English) on the history, causes, and consequences of famine. Compilations with significant relevance to our latest list:

• Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice
• Ecological & Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
• Global Distributive Justice
• Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice
• Marxism

Down on the Farm: Nostalgic Ideological Hegemony in the Service of Agribusiness, Big Data, and AI, or, Capitalist Agriculture and Country Music

“Agriculture Wars”

By Nick Murray (March 12, 2018), for Viewpoint Magazine

“The town of Maricopa may be surrounded by Arizona desert, but a small plot of land near its northern border may qualify as the most closely studied piece of farmland our planet has ever produced. Here stands the LemnaTec Scanalyzer. Weighing some 50,000 pounds, the device sits on a steel gantry that moves back and forth along tracks that line the field. It monitors the growth of every plant below it, and by the end of the day it generates five to eight terabytes of data. What it records could help scientists develop the next generation of genetically modified seeds. The University of Arizona, the company LemnaTec and the U.S. Government, which funded the project through the Department of Energy, all agree: this could be the future of agriculture.

‘Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process,’ Raymond Williams says in Keywords. It described ‘the tending of something, basically crops or animals.’ Eventually, by way of metaphor, the word was ‘extended to a process of human development.’ But the roots run deeper still: for much of human history, culture, in the sense of ceremony and arts, has been tied closely with cycles of agriculture, from work songs in fields to celebrations of harvest. In America, this tradition sees some of its most potent representation in country music. The genre has produced countless songs about life on the farm, but few are as straightforward as Alabama’s ‘American Farmer,’ from 2015. ‘They’re out there every morning, planting those seeds in the ground/Riding those big wheels, until the sun goes down,’ sings the group’s frontman, Randy Owen. Owen tells a familiar story, paying tribute to the wholesome grit of the farm tradition. Yet with the nature of farming accelerating rapidly into the future, the labor he describes could soon be obsolete. Not many farmers will ever have access to a 50,000 pound robotic field scanner, but if the corporations that dominate the agriculture industry get their way, farmers will see their work transformed by smaller devices like drones, automated tractors, and mini-robots that crawl the ground.

At the front of this shift is the German company Bayer AG. We usually associate the name Bayer with aspirin – or heroin, which it trademarked in the late 1800s – but the pharmaceutical giant has steadily grown into one of biggest names in agriculture. In 2014, its market capitalization – the value of its outstanding shares – stood around $112 billion. This should soon rise: Bayer is now in the process of acquiring the American seed and pesticide firm Monsanto, itself worth around $66 billion. Now, on Bayer’s ‘Crop Science’ website, the company promotes technological upgrades geared to the future. One article mentions another ‘scanalyzer’ that ‘allows an automated measuring of crop growth.’ But planting those crops can be automated too, and to this end, Bayer promotes a robot called Prospero, an ‘agricrab’ that scuttles across fields, drills holes and deposits seeds.

Prospero’s inventor, David Dorhout, imagines a small army of these on every farm, a ‘swarm of autonomous robots’ doing all the things Alabama’s American Farmer used to do. So what happens to the farmer? Dorhout has already considered this: ‘The farmer acts like a shepherd, giving his swarm instructions,’ he says. ‘Then his robots carry out these orders by communicating with each other through infrared signals.’ In bigger picture, robots like Prospero will ‘change the role of a farmer from being a driver to an instructor, which robots will pick up,’ Dorhut continues. They will ‘alleviate the physical work of farmers, which gives them more time to focus on the economic part of their business.’

If country music gave voice to many American farmers during the 20th century, what does it have to say about the fundamental shift in farm labor that is coming to define the 21st? If farmers become robot herders, spending more time in Quicken than in the field, what will that mean for the culture that grew out of it? Will representations of farm work, like those in country music, keep pace with its realities?

The ongoing process of automation affects jobs in just about every sector of the economy, yet for farming, the shift toward robots creates a unique ideological problem. That’s because in American culture, the farmer usually represents self-sufficiency, both personal and national – the ability to live with two hands, connected to the land, without the need for modern devices like robots and computers. In country music, no song makes such a claim quite as forcefully as Hank Williams, Jr.‘s ‘A Country Boy Can Survive.’

A Number Two hit in 1984, ‘Country Boy’ beings by foretelling an apocalypse: ‘The preacher man says it’s the end of time, and the Mississippi River she’s a goin’ dry.’ The resulting environment of scarcity and conflict divides urban from rural, businessman from farmer. You can guess which side adapts quickest. Though as Hank tells it, the rural country folk barely need to adapt at all. They already know how to plow a field, harvest heirloom tomatoes and ferment wine. ‘I got a shotgun, a rifle and a 4-wheel drive,’ he sings. What more does one need?

Williams’s country folk are drawn from myth as much as fact. Subsistence farming was once common in regions like Appalachia, but by 1984, the practice was nearly extinct. In the coal mines that the singer mentions, subsistence farmers were violently incorporated into the markets of capitalism. Those still in business tend to grow one crop, like wheat or corn, as nodes in a supply chain that extends around the globe. If ‘Country Boy’ is an indignant song, some its fire seems to come from this fact: the singer has missed the first era of American household agriculture, so he eagerly anticipates the divine providence that will bring about a second.

Thus ‘Country Boy’ is at once nostalgic and millenarian. It claims to speak for the working class yet it rejects solidarity with the urban poor. Over 30 years later, it remains one of country music’s major points of reference. We hear its title spoken at the end of tracks like Montgomery Gentry’s ‘Daddy Won’t Sell the Farm’ and looped throughout Blake Shelton’s ‘Boys ‘Round Here.’ Search its title alongside the name of just about any male country star and there’s a good chance you’ll find shaky cell phone footage of a live cover.

So what happens when even farmers lose the skills that Hank Williams, Jr. is counting on? We can begin to trace this shift even in the multiple versions of ‘A Country Boy Can Survive.’ On songs like the anti-gay, anti-disco ‘Dinosaur,’ Hank Williams, Jr. proudly proclaims his obstinacy, his refusal to change with the times. But when it comes to ‘Country Boy,’ even he has twice amended his own tune. In 1999, Williams collaborated with George Jones and Chad Brock on a ‘Y2K Version’ of ‘Country Boy Can Survive.’ The update emphasized the country boy’s distance from Wall Street; a new line proclaimed that ‘if the bank machines crash, we’ll be just fine.’

Yet two years later, after the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, Williams returned to the studio to record a new version called ‘America Will Survive.’ The original had seemed to imagine a world after America, and took its own shots at downtown Manhattan, hardly acceptable in late 2001. But this latest iteration attempted to reconcile the earlier contradictions – urban and rural, farm and finance – in defense of a nation that will now triumph together. As Hank sings:

Our flag is up since our people went down
And we’re together from the country to town
We live back in the woods, you see
Big city problems never bothered me
But now the world has changed and so have I.

A changed world needs changed country stars. Enter Luke Bryan. [....]

[And now, the article’s conclusion.]

Harlan Howard famously described country music as ‘three chords and the truth.’ This connection-turned-cliché is one reason why companies like Bayer work so hard to become associated with country music. There’s reason to doubt the political efficacy of benefit concerts, and one may certainly hesitate to call for more, but in the 1980s and ‘90s Farm Aid somewhat successfully used music – especially rock and country – to link farming with liberal politics suspicious of big business. These politics may be milquetoast, but for corporations like those described above, that link can pose an existential threat – a bigger threat even than the money that Farm Aid raises for charity, the organization’s nominal purpose. The Here’s to the Farmer campaign should be understood in part as an intervention responding to this particular problem. Its purpose is not just to build brand awareness in the United States, but to break this chain: to encourage country listeners to identify less with a political position than with the brands themselves.

This state of affairs is troubling, but there is no reason to assume it should be final. A corresponding intervention might not just attempt to undo the advances of companies like Bayer, but rather to raise the stakes further, beyond even the bourgeois politics of organizations like Farm Aid. Such a move only seems far-fetched if we fix country to descriptors like ‘conservative’ and ‘traditional’ while ignoring the antagonisms that take shape in the music itself.

One such antagonism lies between the desire for autonomy or self-sufficiency and growth of capitalism, which requires people to submit to the market. Country music may be used to reinforce this submission, but intervention in country music might also attempt to change the way this desire is articulated within the genre, linking its fulfillment to a new anti-capitalist politics. Something like this can only happen through engagement with country music and the spaces in which it takes place. If it doesn’t happen, we might expect to hear more songs like Upchurch’s revanchist rap. Lacking anti-capitalist politics, this same desire for self-sufficiency can produce not socialism but nativism and fascism.

Meanwhile, many of the farmers that country music claims to be speaking for continue to engage in their own forms of cultural resistance, in Raymond Williams’s pre-industrial sense. After the ratification of NAFTA in 1994, indigenous farmers in Mexico, often aligned with the Zapatista movement, rejected hybrid corn seeds, arguing that they displaced native plants and destabilized local economies. In 2010, a group of Haitian peasants promised to burn hybrid seeds that Monsanto shipped into the country in the guise of earthquake relief. Now, back in the United States, two new varieties of open-pollinated corn seed have been bred specifically so that farmers can save their seeds without risking cross-pollination from hybrids or GMOs in neighboring fields. Their names? ‘Rebellion’ and ‘Revolt.’”

The full article is here.

(Nick Murray is journalist based in New York City. He is a former editor at Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, and has contributed to the New York Times, Pitchfork, and Vice.)

Image: Prospero – “This micro planter from Iowa cultivates fields in a swarm: Its six legs provide the necessary stability for uneven farmland. Prospero checks whether a certain section of the soil has already been planted. It digs holes, places seeds, marks the spot and if required also sprays fertilizer or herbicides.”

Cross-posted at the Agricultural Law blog.

The Inflated Military Budget

The House and Senate have just given the military its largest raise in 15 years. See here. Paul Ryan touted the raise as much needed. One wonders why. In 2017, the U.S. already spent more on defense than the next eight countries combined. That includes China, Russia, Saudia Arabia, India, France, UK, Japan, and Germany. See here. Are we really safer? Yes, we have increased salaries, but we have also lined the pockets of military contractors. One could be forgiven for believing that this increase is more about graft than security. 

Learning about the Great (Irish) Famine

“The law stands between food availability and food entitlement. Starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance.”—Amartya Sen

“ … [A]s it happens, quite a few famines have taken place without much violation of law and order. Even in the disastrous Irish famines of the 1840s (in which about an eighth of the population died, and which led to the emigration of a comparable number to North America), the law and order situation was, in many respects, apparently ‘excellent.’ In fact, even as the higher purchasing power of the English consumers attracted food away, through the market mechanism, from famine-stricken Ireland to rich England, with ship after ship sailing down the river Shannon laden with various types of food, there were few violent attempts to interfere with that contrary—and grisly—process. In many famines people starve and die in front of food shops, without attempting to seize law and order by the collar. [….]

There have, of course, been well-known cases of protest and rebellion associated with food crises, and ‘the food riot as a form of political conflict’ has considerable historical significance. Despite this important causal link, the exact period of a severe famine is often not one of effective rebellion. Indeed, the debilitation and general helplessness brought about by a famine situation is not typically conducive to immediate revolt and rebellion. This is not to deny that looting, raiding and other forms of unorganized crime can be quite frequent in famine situations. But the millions that die in a famine typically die in an astonishingly ‘legal’ and ‘orderly’ way.”—Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen

For St. Patrick’s Day, which I do not celebrate, some titles on the Great (Irish) Famine:

• Coogan, Tim Pat. The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012.
• Gallagher, Thomas. Paddy’s Lament. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1982.
• Kelly, John. The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2012.
• Kelly, Mary C. Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish-American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
• Kinealy, Christine. A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland. London: Pluto Press, 1997.
• Ó Gráda, Cormac. Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Ó Gráda, Cormac. Ireland’s Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006.
• Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845-1849. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1991 (1962).

Further Reading:

• Devereux, Stephen, ed. The New Famines: Why Famines Persist in an Era of Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2007.
• Drèze, Jean and Amartya Sen. Hunger and Public Action. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1989.
• Drèze, Jean, Amartya Sen and Athar Hussain, eds. The Political Economy of Hunger. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995.
• Ó Gráda, Cormac. Famine: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
• Sen, Amartya. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
• Watts, Michael J. Silent Violence: Food, Famine, and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013 ed. (1983).
• Yang, Jisheng. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012 (2008).

John Dewey on the United States, Inc. … or, Liberalism’s flaccid response to Capitalism

Apologia

Two philosophers, (the late) Hilary Putnam and his wife, Ruth Anna Putnam, are together largely responsible for re-awakening my interest in the work of John Dewey (Robert Westbrook’s excellent intellectual biography shares some blame as well). The language in much of Dewey’s philosophical writing appears deceptively simple. And some have complained about his prose style, but in both composition and meaning, his writing proves to be rather complex and provocative. As Tom Leddy states in his SEP entry on “Dewey’s Aesthetics,” “although Dewey seems to write in an almost folksy style, his philosophical prose is often difficult and dense” (however, what I share below from Dewey is not, strictly speaking, a sample of his philosophical prose). One should therefore read him rather slowly and carefully (in principle, of course, that is what one should do with all philosophical writing, but I’ve found that, at least with some philosophers, one can at once read carefully and quickly!). Dewey and Wittgenstein strike me as two very different kinds of characters of very different sorts of upbringing and cultural background, and yet there appears, in the end, to be considerable overlap, at least in spirit, in what they are trying to convey to us in their philosophical work (I wouldn’t label Wittgenstein a ‘pragmatist’ however, even if there’s a significant pragmatic quality to his later work). That is only a tentative conclusion, subject to possible qualification or revision at a later date (as I’m also reading Wittgenstein afresh).

I recently initiated a series on one fairly well-known facet of Dewey’s philosophy titled “Philosophy of Education, Education as Philosophy & Education for Democracy,” but this post is not part of that project, even if it has obvious or implicit ties to the principled democratic motivations of the moral psychology and political philosophy incarnate in his philosophy of education. Indeed, as it strikes my fancy, I may end up posting on sundry topics from Dewey’s corpus.

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Close to 90 years ago the wide-ranging (pragmatist) philosopher, political commentator, and activist John Dewey (1859–1952) wrote a series of powerful essays for the New Republic* criticizing this country’s “materialism” and “money culture,” including the wholesale “corporatization” of American life. In short, these contribute to a compelling indictment of capitalism that presciently identified its myriad distortions and deformations of democracy, be they patent or insidious. What follows are a few snippets I think are representative of the righteous anger (in part sublimated by the written word) and incisive critique of these pieces. It is utterly remarkable and equally telling that, with a little updating or tweaking here and there, these essays are no less trenchant and discerning when viewed through the prism of our time and place.

Dewey begins this series with reflections prompted in part by Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd’s pioneering work in sociology (using methods borrowed from cultural anthropology), Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929), which was followed some years later by Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1937). The Lynds’ case studies focused on the white residents of Muncie, Indiana:

“The word ‘middletown’ was meant to suggest the average or typical American small city. While there are many places in the U.S. actually named Middletown (in Connecticut, in New Jersey, in New York, in Ohio and elsewhere), the Lynds were interested in an idealized conceptual American type, and concealed the identity of the city by referring to it by this term. Sometime after publication, however, the residents of Muncie began to guess that their town had been the subject of the book.” [….]

*Written for the New Republic in 1929 and 1930, these articles are available in book form: Individualism Old and New (Prometheus Books, 1999).

*           *           *

• “Anthropologically speaking, we are living in a money culture. Its cult and rites dominate. ‘The money-medium of exchange and the cluster of activities associated with its acquisition drastically condition the other activities of the people.’”
• “We live as if economic forces determined the growth and decay of institutions and settled the fate of individuals. Liberty becomes a well-nigh obsolete term; we start, go, and stop at the signal of a vast industrial machine. [….] The philosophy appropriate to such a situation is that of struggle for existence and survival of the economically fit [elsewhere he describes this in terms of a Social Darwinism, which probably owes more to Herbert Spencer and an argument from Thomas Malthus than it does Darwin].”
• We loath to admit our everyday subscription to a “materialist scheme of value” as it would lay bare the “obvious contradictions between our institutions and practices on one hand, and our creeds and theories on the other.”
• “The glorification of religion as setting the final seal of approval on pecuniary success, and supplying the active motive to more energetic struggle for such success [this is not limited to the influence of what today is known as ‘prosperity gospel’ or ‘prosperity theology,’ as both Max Weber and R.H. Tawney remind us], and the adoption by the churches of the latest devices of the movies and the advertiser approach to close to the obscene.”
• “It is evident enough that the rapid industrialization of our civilization took us unawares. Being mentally and morally unprepared, our older creeds have become ingrowing; the more we depart from them in fact, the more loudly we proclaim them [among other things, this speaks volumes for the sorry state of evangelical Christianity, at least as it is expressed among those conservative white evangelicals that enthusiastically support Donald Trump’s xenophobic and racist populist nationalism]. In effect, we treat them as magic formulae. By repeating them often enough we hope to ward off the evils of the new situation, or at least to prevent ourselves from seeing them—and this latter function is ably performed by our nominal beliefs [in ‘individualism,’ in the ‘free market,’ in ‘liberty,’ and so forth].”
• “With an enormous command of instrumentalities, with possession of a secure technology, we glorify the past, and legalize and idealize the status quo, instead of seriously asking how we are able to employ the means at our disposal so as to form an equitable and stable society. This is our great abdication. It explains how and why we are a house divided against itself. Our tradition, our heritage, is itself double. It contains in itself the ideal of equality of opportunity and of freedom for all, without regard to birth and status, as a condition for the realization of that equality. This ideal and endeavor in its behalf once constituted our essential Americanism; that which was prized as the note of a new world. It is the genuinely spiritual element of our tradition. No one can truthfully say that it has entirely disappeared. But its promise of a new moral and religious outlook has not been attained. It has not become the well-spring of a new intellectual consensus; it is not (even unconsciously) the vital source of any distinctive and shared philosophy. It directs our politics only spasmodically, and while it has generously provided schools, it does not control their aims or their methods.” [emphasis added]
• “Our law and politics and the incidents of human association depend upon a novel combination of machine and money, and the result is the pecuniary culture characteristic of our civilization. The spiritual factor of our tradition, equal opportunity and free association and intercommunication, is obscured and crowded out. Instead of the development of individualities which it prophetically set forth, there is a perversion of the whole ideal of individualism to conform to the practices of a pecuniary culture [cf. conservative claptrap about capitalism as a unique and unassailable fount of our ‘liberty’]. It has become the source and justification of inequalities and oppressions.”
• “ … [T]he growth of legal corporations in manufacturing, transportation, distribution and finance is symbolic of the development of corporateness in all phases of life. The era of trust-busting is an almost forgotten age. Not only are big mergers the order of the day, but popular sentiment now looks upon them with pride rather than with fear [this may be less true today, as such corporate behavior generates at least a modest amount of skepticism or distrust, even if it is rarely prohibited]. Size is our current measure of greatness in this as in other matters [Donald Trump has an uncanny appreciation and inordinate fondness for this fact]. It is not necessary to ask whether the opportunity for speculative manipulation for the sake of private gain, or increased public service at a lower cost, is the dominant motive. Personal motives hardly count as productive causes in comparison with impersonal forces. [….] Aggregated capital and concentrated control are the contemporary responses. Political control is needed, but the movement cannot be arrested by legislation.” [One can well imagine what Dewey would have thought about the prevailing ‘neoliberal’ logic of de-regulation and privatization of public goods.]
• “We live exposed to the greatest flood of mass suggestion that any people has ever experienced. [….] The publicity agent is perhaps the most significant symbol of our present social life.”
• “The significant thing is that the loyalties which once held individuals, which gave them support, direction and unity of outlook on life, have well-nigh disappeared. In consequence, individuals are confused and bewildered. It would be difficult to find in history an epoch as lacking in solid and assured objects of belief and approved ends of action as in the present. Stability of individuality is dependent upon stable objects to which allegiance firmly attaches itself. There are, of course, those who are militantly fundamentalist in religious and social creed. But their very clamor is evidence that the tide is set against them. For others, traditional objects of loyalty have become hollow or are openly repudiated, and they drift without sure anchorage.”
• “The most marked trait of present life, economically speaking, is insecurity. It is tragic that millions of men desirous of working should be recurrently out of employment; aside from cyclical depressions there is a standing army at all times who have no regular work. We have not any adequate information as to the number of these persons. But the ignorance even as to numbers is slight compared with our inability to grasp the psychological and moral consequences of the precarious conditions in which vast multitudes live. Insecurity cuts deeper and extends more widely than bare unemployment. Fear of loss of work, dread of the oncoming of old age, create anxiety and eat into self-respect in a way that impairs personal dignity. Where fears abound, courageous and robust individuality is undermined. The vast development of technological resources that might bring security in its train has actually brought a new mode of insecurity, as mechanization displaces labor. The mergers and consolidations that mark a corporate age are beginning to bring uncertainty into the economic lives of the higher salaried [i.e., managerial and professional] class, and that tendency is only just in its early stage. Realization that honest and industrious pursuit of a calling or business will not guarantee any stable level of life lessens respect for work and stirs large numbers to take a chance of some adventitious way of getting the wealth that will make security possible: witness the orgies of the stock-market in recent days [we might come up with any number of legal and illegal examples to illustrate Dewey’s point there].” [emphasis added]

The Eastside 13 and the East L.A. “Blowouts” (walkouts)

“They faced 66 years in prison. The ‘Eastside 13’ and how they helped plan the East L.A. walkouts,” Los Angeles Times (March 8, 2018)

By Louis Sahagun

“As Los Angeles schools and others this week observe the 50th anniversary of the East L.A. walkouts, when thousands of Mexican American students marched to demand a better education, much attention has focused on those who became known as the Eastside 13. But who were the Eastside 13? They were 13 men secretly indicted by a grand jury June 1, 1968, on conspiracy charges stemming from the East L.A. ‘blowouts.’ The walkouts kicked off March 5, 1968, when students began protesting at Garfield High School, and spread to other campuses to decry the shortcomings of public schools in Los Angeles’ barrios. The walkouts are viewed as a turning point in the political development of the nation’s Mexican American community.

Some local leaders at the time, including Mayor Sam Yorty, denounced the walkouts as a communist plot, and in the months that followed, law enforcement responded with undercover operations, raids and arrests.

In returning the indictments, the grand jurors found there was sufficient evidence to show that the protests staged at Garfield, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Belmont high schools were not spontaneous, but rather the result of careful off-campus planning by non-students. Defense attorneys would later argue, successfully, that the protest organizers were merely exercising their 1st Amendment rights. But when the indictments were handed down, each defendant faced 66 years in prison.

Among the 13 arrested was Carlos Muñoz Jr., who recalled how the police arrived at his apartment at dawn with guns drawn. Muñoz, then a 20-year-old college student, had been writing a paper for a graduate seminar on the ‘international communist movement’ when the officers broke in. One of the officers noticed a stack of books on the kitchen table where Muñoz had been typing. He scanned the names of the authors — Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx — and yelled out, ‘We’ve got the goods on this damn communist agitator!’

Also indicted on multiple charges of conspiracy to disturb public schools and conspiracy to disturb the peace were Sal Castro, 34, a teacher at Lincoln High, and Eliezer Risco, 31, a Cuban-born editor of La Raza, a newspaper circulated in the Mexican American community.

Indicted members of the militant Brown Berets, who often took the title of ‘minister,’ were David Sanchez, 19, chairman; Ralph Ramirez, 18, minister of discipline; Fred Lopez, 19, minister of communication; and Carlos Montes, 20, minister of public relations and holy grace.

Others indicted were Gilberto Olmeda, 23; Richard Vigil, 27; Joe Razo, 29; Henry Gomez, 20; Moctesuma Esparza, 19; and Juan Sanchez, 41. [….]

The indictments were struck down in 1970 by an appeals court in a case that became a cause celebre to Chicanos. ‘The No. 1 thing that the walkouts achieved is that it gave our own community a voice — that we didn’t have to rely on what other people thought we should be doing or who we should be,’ said Esparza, who went on to become an award-winning filmmaker, producing movies such as ‘Gettysburg,’ ‘Selena’ and ‘Walkout,’ a dramatization of the 1968 Chicano student protests. ‘I never gave up my identity as a Chicano,’ Esparza said. ‘The struggle never ends.’” The entire article is here.

See too:

• “East L.A., 1968: ‘Walkout!’ The day high school students helped ignite the Chicano power movement” (March 1, 2018)
• “A. Unified commemorates 50th anniversary of Eastside walkouts, but tells students to stay in class March 14” (March 2, 2018)

The Chicano Movement & the 1960s:

• Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle Toward Liberation. San Francisco, CA: Canfield Press, 1972.
• Castro, Tony. Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1974.
• Chávez, Ernesto. “¡Mi Raza Primero!”— Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
• Donato, Rubén. The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans during the Civil Rights Era. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997.
• García, Alma M., ed. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge, 1997.
• García, Ignacio M. United We Win: The Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1989.
• García, Mario T. Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.
• García, Mario T. and Sal Castro. Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
• Marin, Marguerite V. Social Protest in an Urban Barrio: A Study of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1974. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991.
• Mariscal, George. Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965-1975. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
• Mariscal, George, ed. Aztlán and Vietnam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.
• Montejano, David. Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010.
• Muñoz, Carlos, Jr. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. London: Verso, 1989.
• Navarro, Armando. Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995.
• Navarro, Armando. The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998,
• Navarro, Armando. La Raza Unida Party: A Chicano Challenge to the U.S. Two-Party Dictatorship. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000.
• Oropeza, Lorena. ¡Raza Si! ¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
• Rendon, Armando B. Chicano Manifesto: The History and Aspirations of the Second Largest Minority in America. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
• Rosales, Francisco Arturo. CHICANO! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, University of Houston, 2^{nd ed.,} 1997.
• Vigil, Ernesto B. The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

Images (from top to bottom):

• John Ortiz addresses fellow students at Garfield High on March 7. (H.O. McCarthy/Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library)
• Sheriff’s deputies form a line near Garfield High on March 5, the first day of the student “blowouts.” (Joe Kennedy/Los Angeles Times)
• Freddie Resendez rallies students at Lincoln High School. (Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library; Los Angeles Times)
• Members of the Brown Berets, above, listen to a speaker on June 9, 1968. (Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library; Los Angeles Times)

The Malevolent Chipmunk Takes His Racism to Sacramento

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ war on the Constitution was carried to Sacramento as he made clear that his previous commitment to states rights was predominantly a manifestation of racism. If abandoning the rights of states harms people of color and furthers the racist brand of the President, so be it.

In keeping with Sessions declaration of war, the Justice Department filed United States v. California which centers on three California policies. In this post, I will focus on the most important. California Senate Bill 54 took effect in January of this year. It largely prohibits state and local law enforcement agencies from using either personnel or funds to hold, question or share information about people with federal immigration agents unless those individuals have been convicted of one or more offenses from a list of 800 crime outlined in a 2013 state law.

If the federal government can draft state and local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal laws, this is plainly unconstitutional. But those agencies are not puppets of the state. They cannot in the words of the Court be “commandeered” to do the bidding of the federal government. Sessions has previously threatened to cut funding to those with similar policies. But a federal judge in Chicago has previously declared Sessions’ failure to respect federalism as unconstitutional.

Sessions is perhaps hoping that the Constitution means something different in California than in Chicago. Or he is hoping that a reactionary Supreme Court led by Federalist Society members will reject Federalism. Or perhaps, Jerry Brown is right: this is just another political stunt by a craven administration.

Rising Seas, Sinking Cities

The title of the post comes from the subtitle of a recent book by Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilised World (Little, Brown and Co., 2017), which I’ve yet to read but is reviewed by Meehan Crist* in the London Review of Books: “Besides, I’ll be dead” (Vol. 40, No. 4 · 22 February 2018). Goodell’s book concentrates on one of the more disconcerting and eventually devastating effects of the rise of temperatures causally tied to climate change (hence ‘global warming’): the imminent threat of sea level rise which, according to Elizabeth Kolbert, is explained “with characteristic rigor and intelligence. The result is at once deeply persuasive and deeply unsettling.” And, as Crist helpfully and succinctly reminds us in her review,

“Global sea level rise is hard for scientists to predict, but the trend is clear. Massive ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic have begun to collapse, in a phenomenon known as ‘marine ice-sheet instability,’ which previous models of global sea level rise didn’t take into account. When the Paris Agreement was drafted just over two years ago, it was based on reports that ice sheets would remain stable and on the assumption that sea levels could rise by up to three feet two inches by the end of the century. In 2015, NASA estimated a minimum of three feet. In 2017, a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the pre-eminent climate science agency in the United States, revised estimates up dramatically, stating that by 2100 sea levels could rise by more than eight feet. Last year, a study estimated that if carbon emissions continue at present levels, by 2100 sea levels will have risen by as much as 11 feet. Higher sea levels mean higher storm surges, like the nine-foot surge that inundated Lower Manhattan and severely affected neighbourhoods in Long Island and New Jersey, but also that low-lying coastal areas, from Bangladesh to Amsterdam, will be underwater in less than a hundred years. It’s worth remembering that two-thirds of the world’s cities sit on coastlines. In a high-emissions scenario, average high tides in New York could be higher than the levels seen during Sandy. A rise in global sea levels of 11 feet would fully submerge cities like Mumbai and a large part of Bangladesh. The question is no longer if – but how high, and how fast.”

I want to focus on the section of Crist’s review which raises a number of psychological questions and topics surrounding the well-attested and apparently recalcitrant phenomenon of “climate change denial:”

“Sea level rise is a problem humans are particularly ill-equipped to handle. We’re not good at thinking on geological timescales and ‘we are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time.’ [I happen not to like the metaphor here, and don’t believe constitutional myopia is simply an ineliminable part of human nature.] To help explain inaction in the face of rising seas, Goodell invokes, as others have, the five stages of grief outlined by the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, [and] acceptance. He suggests that in Miami at least, denial is giving way to anger and bargaining, with overtones of fear. But classical grief paradigms, in which the object of attachment has gone and must be mourned, don’t map neatly onto the experience of living in a city that may soon be submerged. Reading this, it seemed to me that there is another psychological paradigm, less often invoked in discussions of climate grief that might be more apt. In the 1970s Pauline Boss, studying families of soldiers who had gone missing in action, coined the term ‘ambiguous loss’ to describe the arrested mourning that follows a loss without closure or understanding.

Boss describes two types of ambiguous loss: when the object is physically absent but psychologically present (as with soldiers missing in action), and when the object is physically present but psychologically absent (as with Alzheimer’s disease). The first helps illuminate the arrested mourning often experienced by climate refugees. How do you mourn a home that is sinking into a faraway sea, but remains psychologically present? The second type of ambiguous loss is appropriate to the experience of living in an area threatened by a rise in sea levels. The object of attachment is there but not there – still present, but slowly disappearing. How do you mourn the loss of someone whose hand you can still hold? How do you mourn a home increasingly prone to flooding, but not submerged, yet? The parallels aren’t perfect, but even the disjunctures reveal how wickedly hard the problem of climate grief can be. When a beloved person is slowly disappearing into the fog of senescence, the endpoint is known. With rising seas, the endpoint remains unknown. Three feet? Eight feet? Grief is stalled by uncertainty. For what eventuality should you and your community prepare? Of what do you need to let go in order to move forward? The incentive to wait and see is powerful. But hoping for a rise in sea levels of just one or two feet by 2100 is starting to look a lot like self-delusion, and for those who have the luxury of choice, clinging to life at the waterline is increasingly an exercise in self-defeat. For politicians and the rich, who prosper from maintenance of the status quo, it is increasingly unconscionable.”

There’s much food for thought here, and you can select from the menu for yourself, but I just want to note that there appears to be, in addition, a number of (related) cognitive and so-called social biases, as well as sundry irrational cognitive mechanisms and informal fallacies of reasoning and argumentation that might account for the persistence of climate change denial and the corresponding failure to acknowledge the motley possible and probable harms identified with climate change as direct and by-product effects of modern (hyper-) industrialized societies that have proven unable to properly comport themselves with the ecological systems and processes that sustain all forms of life on our planet (some of the effects may turn out to be beneficent, but these are considerably outweighed by the growing list of environmental harms): cognitive dissonance, the confirmation bias, conservatism with regard to belief revision, hyperbolic time-discounting, neglect of probability, normalcy bias, wishful thinking, denial, status quo bias and system justification, in-group bias, undue reliance on the availability heuristic, argumentum ad ignorantiam, fallacy of composition, and fallacy of prejudice come quickest to mind.

I urge you to read both Goodell’s book and Crist’s review, well aware that the diet of news on the home front as well as news from abroad (e.g., the ongoing war in Syria, the bombing of Yemen, the worldwide refugee crisis, acts of genocide against the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar, terrorist bombings, reactionary and often fascist political parties and movements, and so forth and so on) can be rather depressing. But our religious traditions and philosophical worldviews have cultivated an abundant supply of spiritual exercises or therapeutic regimens and time-tested means for cultivating mindfulness and a proper sense of perspective that should keep us from sliding into despair and depression, prevent us from feeling overwhelmed or paralyzed, and steel us for the ongoing struggles for a saner and more just world, one which further contributes to the historical progress made thus far in the quest for general human emancipation, progress that has been at times episodic and uneven (and is not of course assured) yet the general direction remains constant and encouraging.

We’ll bring things to a close with the conclusion from our review:

“What will happen in the next eighty years remains far from certain. There is a tipping point after which ice sheets will fully collapse – Greenland holds enough water to raise sea levels by roughly 22 feet – but researchers don’t know where that point lies. In January, NOAA released a major report on sea level rise that factors in current ice-sheet collapse and more than doubles the median rise in global sea levels predicted at the time of the Paris Agreement, from 2.3 feet to 4.9 feet. Goodell’s conclusion is crystal clear: ‘If we want to minimise the impact of sea level rise in the next century, here’s how we do it: stop burning fossil fuels and move to higher ground.’ If humans stopped using fossil fuels entirely by 2050, we might face two to three feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. Instead of 4.9 feet. Or 11 feet. But the water will come. The future depends on how humans rise to meet it.”

*Meehan Crist is a writer in residence in biological sciences at Columbia University. She hosts a podcast called “Convergence.”