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Symptoms of precipitous “decline and fall” detected in U.S. foreign policy

Our country’s penchant for self-righteous posturing, its overt “messianic and missionary,” “big stick and bombs” foreign policy, combined with its covert “secret” and not-so-secret wars (e.g., the large laundry list that makes for the CIA’s bag of ‘dirty tricks,’ from regime overthrow to ‘targeted killings’ and torture), have rendered the fine—albeit ambiguous—political art of diplomacy a mere dark shadow of its former self. All of this was embodied with bombast and bluster in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent speech at the aptly named Heritage Foundation that proclaimed in predictably pompous rhetoric a “new Iran strategy,” although in historical terms, there was precious little that was truly new, much like resurrected fashions that attract those devoid of historical knowledge and a dispositional and feckless taste for fads of any kind. For example, Pompeo announced, without a trace of irony or satire:

“No more wealth creation for Iranian kleptocrats. No more acceptance of missiles landing in Riyadh and in the Golan Heights. No more cost-free expansions of Iranian power. No more.”

Never mind the fact that the U.S. government, at the pinnacle of its pyramid of power, and today more than ever, models a kleptocracy, albeit one draped in neoliberal capitalist dress produced in sweatshops furiously affixing labels of democratic legitimacy.

Never mind the fact that the U.S. government, which is the world’s biggest exporter of arms, is fighting a devastating proxy war in Yemen (the poorest state in the region), providing the Saudis with the weaponry essential to its illegal military intervention in the country (causing mass civilian casualties and a humanitarian crisis on several fronts). Indeed, “the U.S. and European states remain the main arms exporters to the region [i.e., the Middle East] [having] supplied over 98% of [the] weapons imported by Saudi Arabia.”

Compare this to Iran (with admittedly geopolitical and religious interests for propping up Bashar al-Assad’s brutal Syrian regime), which “did not even make the list of the 40 largest importers – only accounting for 1% of arms imports to the region.” In fact, “Iran, which is under an international arms embargo, spends a fraction of what its Arab neighbours spend on weapons, instead relying on proxies and soft power to advance its policies.”

Only the U.S. and Israel are free to takes sides (which comes with their inordinate military prowess) in external and internal Middle Eastern conflicts, the Arab regimes or Iran located in this part of the world, forbidden from doing so (they apparently lack our altruistic motives), any actions by them invariably characterized as threats to the national security of the U.S. and Israel, or serving as ready-made explanations for terrorism, and so forth and so on.

Never mind the fact that the immense military aid the U.S. provides to Israel (a country with well over 100 nuclear weapons*), more than it provides any other state, has been used to further Zionist (colonialist settler) territorial ambitions, facilitated by a long-standing occupation of Palestinian territories (70 years!) that has systematically and ruthlessly denied the international legal right of self-determination to the Palestinians (in Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem).

* It’s a well-known fact that Israel possesses quite a number of nuclear weapons (150-200) and believes itself to be entitled, alone in the Middle East, to possess such weapons. Israel—alongside India and Pakistan—has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and alone among nuclear-weapons states, it has never publicly acknowledged its nuclear arsenal nor openly demonstrated its nuclear capability. As Avner Cohen writes in The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb (2010), “In Israel, to this day, the gap between nuclear conduct and basic democratic norms of open debate, the public’s right to know, public accountability, oversight, and transparency remains vast.”

Furthermore, Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons has not led to a viable or successful deterrence strategy and policy. For example, it has “not deter[red] Arabs from attacking it; nor is there evidence that it imposed limitations on Arab operational planning.” (In fact, Arab states in the region have never had anything remotely close to a coordinated strategy and policy with regard to Israel, whatever the historical pan-Arab rhetoric of ‘annihilation.’) Among the adverse side effects of its nuclear weapons arsenal and related policy, Zeev Maoz notes that “it was a major factor in accelerating a conventional arms race and in igniting a nonconventional arms race in the Middle East.” While Israel was developing its nuclear potential (1957-67), “inter-Arab relations were characterized by political and military discord,” its decision to develop nuclear weapons coming at a time “when the actual investment in military manpower and hardware by the key Arab states was marginal, to say the least.” Maoz convincingly argues that ”each time Israel actually invoked its nuclear policy in a context of international crisis or war, its implied or explicit threats failed to achieve their intended aim.” In short, “the logic of last-resort deterrence that served as the strategic foundation of the nuclear project is logically self-defeating, because it renders incredible the threat of nuclear retaliation in any other circumstances.” See Maoz’s very important book, Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and Foreign Policy (University of Michigan Press, 2006).

*          *          *

In a future post I will introduce the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or “the Iran Deal,” and speak to the President’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the agreement (which was not ‘legally binding’ inasmuch as this was not a treaty … but more on that anon). For now, and in preparation for our next installment, should anyone want to begin to historically and politically contextualize the recent hawkish, deceptive, and irresponsible rhetoric coming from both Trump and Netanyahu, I’ll recommend two titles: Haggai Ram’s Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession (Stanford University Press, 2009), and Daniel H. Joyner’s, Iran’s Nuclear Program and International Law: From Confrontation to Accord (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Further Reading:

• Abrahamian, Ervand. The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S. - Iranian Relations (The New Press, 2013).
• Alford, Ryan. Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
• Axworthy, Michael. Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Azimi, Fakhreddin. The Quest for Democracy in Iran: A Century of Struggle against Authoritarian Rule (Harvard University Press, 2008).
• Bacevich, Andrew J. The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford University Press, updated ed., 2013).
• Bacevich, Andrew J. America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (Random House, 2016).
• Calabresi, Steven G. and Christopher S. Yoo. The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush (Yale University Press, 2008).
• Cole, David and James X. Dempsey. Terrorism and the Constitution (The New Press, 3^rd ed., 2006).
• Cole, David and Jules Lobel. Less Safe, Less Free: Why America is Losing the War on Terrorism (The New Press, 2008).
• Greenberg, Karen J. Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, 2016).
• Joyner, Daniel H. International Law and the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Joyner, Daniel H. and Marco Roscini, eds. Non-Proliferation Law as a Special Regime: A Contribution to Fragmentation Theory in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• Krent, Harold J. “From a Unitary to a Unilateral Presidency,” Boston University Law Review, Vol. 88, No. 2 (2008): 523-559.
• March, Andrew F. Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Mirsepassi, Ali. Democracy in Modern Iran: Islam, Culture, and Political Change (New York University Press, 2010).
• Patrikarakos, David. Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State (I.B. Tauris, 2012).
• Sanger, David E. Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (Broadway Paperbacks, 2013).
• Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Anchor Books, 2008).
• Wilford, Hugh. America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (Basic Books, 2013).
• Wills, Garry. Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (Penguin Books, 2010).
• Yoo, John. “Unitary, Executive, or Both?” University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 76, 2009: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1541583

Why Seek Psychoanalytic Therapy?

What makes a person seek analysis? I can’t recall a philosopher, as a member of that select group who’ve both sympathetically explored and critically examined Freudian psychoanalysis, treat this question in any more than a perfunctory manner. In Freud, Insight and Change (1988), Ilham Dilman now provides us with an exception to the rule. In the excerpt that follows below, Dilman “briefly review[s] the kinds of ostensible psychological problems for which people seek analytic psychotherapy.”

At a future date I would like to discuss to what extent the “categories of problems” for which people seek psychoanalytic therapy amount to reasons that are the same as, different from, or overlap with, the reasons for which people may become intellectually and emotionally interested in, or spiritually and philosophically attracted, to Buddhism.  Psychoanalysis is a therapy designed for certain forms of mental disturbance, disquiet or illness rooted in Western traditions of philosophy, psychology, and mythology. It has conspicuous scientific, rationalist, and humanist dimensions, while paying due respect to the cultural currents and psychological motivations that animated nineteenth-century Romanticism as an attempt to speak to aspects of human nature and behavior suppressed or ignored by Enlightenment rationalism if not much of Western philosophy. Buddhism’s roots, on the other hand, are planted firmly in Indic religious and philosophical traditions, later absorbing elements from several Chinese worldviews as Buddhism traveled northward and eastward. And yet, as a growing body of literature attests, there is, whatever their profound differences, provocative similarities or overlap between psychoanalytic therapy and Buddhism, at least to the extent that both are what Helen Nussbaum described as “therapies of desire” in her classic study of Hellenistic philosophies, engaged in what might also be termed “philosophy as therapy” (while this may be clear in the case of the Hellenistic schools, as explained by Nussbaum as well as Pierre Hadot, it’s far less obvious, I suspect, with psychoanalysis, so it will have to suffice for now to note that the analyst is in many respects akin to the Socratic midwife, and his or her (clinical) temperament is one we might see exhibited by the best philosophers or, with Jonathan Lear, we may find ample reason to conclude that ‘philosophical inquiry lies at the heart of psychoanalytic technique’).

The medical model and analogy that Nussbaum finds prominent among Hellenistic philosophers is likewise found in Buddhism. To cite just one and perhaps the best known example, the Four Noble Truths (better rendered in English as ‘the four truths [‘known by the spiritually’] noble,’ meaning those who stand apart from the rest of us because of their extremely rare spiritual knowledge and understanding) are often taught by way of a medical analogy, one which provides (1) a symptomatic diagnosis of a “disease” or illness of sorts, (2) an etiology of the causes (there is in fact more than one cause), (3) a prognosis that the “disease is curable,” based on the profound knowledge or wisdom possessed by the “physician” (one of the epithets of the Buddha is ‘the Great Physician’) who belongs to a spiritual tradition which has cultivated and passed down such knowledge; and (4) a prescription or therapeutic regimen that leads to this cure (otherwise known as ‘the eightfold path’ or the Dhamma more broadly).

The aim of philosophical, moral and psycho-spiritual therapy in Buddhism is a spiritual healing that results in “awakening” or spiritual liberation (from ‘suffering,’ which has metaphysical, epistemic, psychological, and physical facets), although its positive therapeutic effects can be evidenced far short of nibbāna/nirvāṇa. The aims of Freudian psychoanalysis are considerably more modest and yet, for the analysand, substantially arduous if not elusive. I hope to speak to these topics at length in the future. For now, let’s return to Dilman’s effort to list the broader motivational reasons one might have for seeking the help of a psychoanalyst:

“The first thing to notice is that it takes some self-awareness to be conscious of such problems as problems so as to be able to seek help for them. Though the categories of problem for which psycho-analytic help is sought merge into one another, one could put these problems, in a rough and ready way, under the following headings:

1. Various forms of self-dissatisfaction—that is, dissatisfaction with the self, with oneself. One may, for instance, feel a sense of inferiority, or worthlessness, or feel oneself to be a poor sort of person morally or otherwise. One may desperately try to compensate for this and be dejected by one’s failure to do so. This sense of one’s own inferiority or worthlessness or unacceptability may mar one’s relationships in the way, for instance, that one seeks other people’s regard and approval. It may mar them, alternatively, in that what one gives others is itself infected with this sense of one’s own worthlessness or unacceptability. It is obvious that such dissatisfactions would make life problematic.
2. Various forms of dissatisfaction with one’s life. It may appear limited or empty; one may feel one is wasting one’s time, have no absorbing interest, find little fulfilment in the things one does. Obviously one would have to feel some responsibility and think of oneself as at fault and the cause of this state of affairs in order to be able to seek help.
3. Various kinds of incapacity that leave one with unsatisfied needs. One be shy or awkward, one may continuously rub people up the wrong way, etc. One may, in consequence, find oneself isolated and yet feel that one is oneself the cause of this. (The needs that one is unable to satisfy may themselves be neurotic needs that may diminish and disappear in the course of the analysis.)
4. More passively, one may suffer from a feeling of helplessness, ineffectuality, impotence. One may feel that one makes no difference to other people, that one is not needed by anyone, that as far as others are concerned one may as well not exist.
5. Various kinds of failure for which one feels responsible and that one believes reflect badly on one, such as a series of broken marriages or relationships.
6. Specific distressing fears and incapacitating anxieties. I am thinking of cases where the emphasis is on the distress itself and where people most of all crave relief from the distress.
7. Specific troubles that one keeps finding oneself in and that one feels unable to avoid, such as associating with the ’wrong’ sort of people, picking up ‘bad’ habits and, as a result, losing out on things that one aspires to.

These are broad categories with vague contours, and there are psychological problems that it would be difficult to know where to fit in this scheme. The classification is not meant to be of practical value. Its main purpose is to highlight how much the problems in question have to do with a ‘breakdown’ of the self—its chronic discontents, incapacities, failures, pains – and some failure in its development. It is this that makes life and relationships problematic—isolation, emptiness, feelings of failure, envy, guilt, dejection and depression—in a way that make people ask for personal help—involving the desire to communicate, to be listened to, to receive attention and care. It is a combination of these desires, together with some recognition of personal failure and the wish to do something about it—though this is in conflict with a wish to maintain palliative strategies—that makes a person seek psycho-analytic therapy.”—Ilham Dilman, Freud, Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988): 165-167.

Further Reading

• Ganeri, Jonardon and Clare Carlisle, “Philosophy as Therapeia,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). All of the essays in this volume are worthwhile, but I want to highlight for our purposes David Burton’s contribution, “Curing Diseases of Belief and Desire: Buddhist Philosophical Therapy,” pp. 187-217.
• Haldane, John. “On the Very Idea of Spiritual Values,” in Anthony O’Hear, ed., Philosophy: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The Royal Institute of Philosophy supplement: 47 (Cambridge University Press, 2000): 53-71.
• “The Therapeutic Model of Philosophy: Philosophy as Applied Philosophy.”

Bibliographies with relevance or strong family resemblance to our subject matter:

• Buddhism
• Buddhism & Psychoanalysis
• Dreams & Dreaming
• The Emotions
• Freudian Psychology
• Human Nature & Personal Identity

Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965): Black Self-Determination & Black Solidarity [from the archives, with updated reading list]

“… [T]oward the end of his life [Malcolm X] argued that blacks should put aside religious and philosophical differences and recognize they had a common oppressor. Antiblack racism, he argued, negatively affects all blacks, regardless of faith or party affiliation, and thus blacks should unify to resist racial oppression on nonsectarian and non-ideological grounds. Although he continued to believe in the necessity of autonomous black institutions, he did come to relax his opposition to alliance with progressive whites.

Malcolm X’s ideas of internal colonization, black communal self-determination, skepticism toward the black elite and the Democratic Party, and racially autonomous political organizations influenced a generation of black activists and have had a significant impact on the contemporary political culture of African Americans. As Manning Marable remarked, ‘Dead at the age of 39, Malcolm quickly became the fountainhead of the modern renaissance of black nationalism in the late 1960s.’ Indeed, shortly after his assassination in 1965, many of Malcolm X’s ideas were developed and promoted by several black leaders under the slogan ‘Black Power,’ a phrase popularized by Stokely Carmichael.”—Tommie Shelby.

With analytical acuity, Shelby proceeds to examine the “philosophical content and social-theoretic underpinnings” of Black Power nationalism so as to ascertain its contributions to, hence its contemporary relevance for, a “pragmatic black solidarity” in which “there must be room…for disagreement over the precise content of political action and policy initiatives.” On this account, neither black self-determination nor black nationalism preclude the extension of “solidarity to other racially stigmatized groups and even to committed nonracist whites.” And the ideal of black self-determination, “at least with respect to blacks in America, requires a sharply delimited trans-institutional and decentralized form of black political solidarity.” Shelby insists that “black political solidarity must be noncorporatist,” meaning “[n]o black party, association, or institution can legitimately claim to speak for black people as a whole. Instead, there should be multiple and independent black organizations and advocacy groups that take up particular issues that affect black interests.”

This political solidarity nonetheless has principled grounding insofar as it entails joint commitment to particular values and goals, “understood as the faithful adherence to certain political principles, including antiracism, equal educational and employment opportunity, and tolerance for group differences and individuality, and to emancipatory goals, such as achieving substantial racial equality—especially in employment, education, and wealth—and ending ghetto poverty.” Finally, pragmatic black nationalism “is a form of black solidarity that aims, ultimately, to transcend itself.” Please see Shelby’s We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (2005).

As Zaheer Ali wrote in his contribution, “Malcolm X in Brooklyn,” to the “Remembering Malcolm” (Feb. 20, 2017) forum at Black Perspectives, Malcolm contributed to the “transcendence” (in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung or ‘sublation’) of black nationalism: “one of Malcolm X’s enduring legacies is his effort to internationalize the Black freedom struggle by linking it to Third World anti-colonial movements.”

Recommended Reading:

• Breitman, George. The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1967.
• Carson, Clayborne. Malcolm X: The FBI File. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1991.
• Cone, James H. Martin & Malcom & America: A Dream or A Nightmare. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991.
• DeCaro Jr., Louis A. On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
• Dyson, Michael Eric. Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Goldman, Peter. The Death and Life of Malcolm X. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
• Johnson, Cedric. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
• Malcolm X (with the assistance of Alex Haley) The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
• Malcom X. (George Breitman, ed.) Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. New York: Merit Publishers, 1965.
• Malcolm X. Malcolm X Talks to Young People. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1965.
• Malcom X. Two Speeches by Malcolm X. New York: Pathfinder Press, 3rd ed., 1990 (1965).
• Malcolm X. Malcolm X on Afro-American History. New York: Merit Publishers, 1967.
• Malcolm X. (Archie Epps, ed.) The Speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard. New York: Morrow, 1968.
• Malcolm X. (George Breitman, ed.) By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter by Malcolm X. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970.
• Malcolm X. (Benjamin Karim, ed.)The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
• Malcolm X (Bruce Perry, ed.) Malcolm X: The Last Speeches. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989.
• Malcolm X (Clark, Steve, ed.) February 1965: The Final Speeches. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1992. 
• Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York: Viking, 2011.
• Sales, William W., Jr. Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994.
• Shelby, Tommie. We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.
• Terrill, Robert E. Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2004.
• Terrill, Robert E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Wolfenstein, Eugene Victor. The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution. London: Free Association Books, 1989.
• Wood, Joe, ed. Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992.

The Gwangju Uprising, May 18, 1980

As my Verso Radical Diary reminds us, on May 18, 1980, “citizens of Kwangju, South Korea, seize control of their city, demanding democratization, an end to martial law, and an increase in the minimum wage.”

“The Gwangju Uprising, alternatively called May 18 Democratic Uprising by UNESCO, and also known as May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement, was a popular uprising in the city of Gwangju, South Korea, from May 18 to 27, 1980. Estimates suggest up to 606 people may have died. During this period, Gwangju citizens took up arms (by robbing local armories and police stations) when local Chonnam University students – who were demonstrating against the Chun Doo-hwan government – were fired upon, killed, and beaten in an unprecedented attack by government troops. The uprising eventually ended in defeat on May 27, 1980. The event is sometimes called 5·18, in reference to the date the movement began. [….]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During Chun Doo-hwan’s presidency, the authorities used to define the incident as a rebellion instigated by Communist sympathizers and rioters. By 1997, a national cemetery and day of commemoration (May 18), along with acts to ‘compensate, and restore honor’ to victims, were established. In 2011, 1980 Archives for the May 18th Democratic Uprising against Military Regime located in Gwangju city hall were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

Further Reading:

• Katsiaficas, Georgy and Nah Kahn-chae, eds. South Korean Democracy: Legacy of the Gwangju Uprising (Routledge, 2006).
• Lewis, Linda Sue. Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising (University of Hawaii Press, 2002).
• Shin, Gi-wook and Kyung Moon Hwang, eds. Contentious Kwangju: The May 18th Uprising in Korea’s Past and Present (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blue Collar Workers, Guaranteed Jobs, and the Politics of Resentment

Democratic candidates for President and many other Democrats are supporting a proposal that would make the government the employer of last resort, at least in the poorest counties. This is not only humane policy; it may be good politics. Guaranteeing a job for blue collar workers that the economy has left behind together with guaranteed health insurance and education combined with an infrastructure program and serious efforts to address climate change gives the Democrats a positive program, that goes well beyond opposition to Donald Trump.

It is no secret that Donald Trump appealed to white male blue collar workers and that appeal was a critical part of his success. The guaranteed jobs proposal is designed to appeal to that group and beyond.  But I worry. Almost thirty years ago, Johns Hopkins’ William Connolly argued in his book Identity/Difference that liberal policies (see, e.g., affirmative action, busing, and gun control) and rhetoric in a variety of ways has triggered substantial resentment in working class males. There is substantial evidence that resentment strongly influences voting behavior. This is certainly true of voting influenced by race. UCLA’s David Sears has shown that white racism does not primarily arise from material deprivation, but is rooted in status resentment. It proceeds from a symbolic predisposition to believe that African-Americans have benefited from government programs and have been given a status they have not earned.

When Democrats advance policies in the fall that should appeal to working class males from a material and rhetorical perspective, I wonder how many votes of working class males will be guided by their resentment of liberals. As Connolly observed, when Democrats suggest that professionals and corporate leaders merit their position and women and minorities have been discriminated against, they have implied that unemployed working-class males deserve to be unemployed. Hubert Humphrey maintained that the federal government should be the employer of last resort. It is long past time that the Democratic Party once again recognize the government’s duty to rectify the weaknesses of a capitalistic economy.

On the “pathology of normalcy” … or psychoanalysis on the fly at a M*A*S*H

What follows is the dialogue between Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, a surgeon, and Major Sidney Theodore Freedman, an Army psychiatrist, in a scene from one of my favorite M*A*S*H episodes (on the ‘pathology of normalcy’). Allan Arbus plays the part of Major Sidney Theodore Freedman, the Army psychiatrist who visited the 4077th many times. Alan Alda plays Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce (the only character to appear in all 251 episodes). “Between long, intense sessions of treating critically wounded patients, he makes the best of his life in an isolated Army camp by making wisecracks, drinking heavily, carousing, womanizing, and pulling pranks on the people around him.”

M*A*S*H Season 5, Episode 109: “Hawk’s Nightmare” … or psychoanalysis on the fly at the 4077^th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Uijeongbu, South Korea, during the Korean War, 1950-1953 (written by Burt Prelutsky; originally aired December 21, 1976):

Sidney [hereafter S.] – How’s it going?

Hawkeye [hereafter H.] – Well, you is the cuckoo expert. I’m just a cuckoo.

H. – Potter call you?  S. – Would you be upset if he had? H. – No, I’d appreciate his concern.

S. – I’m just here to play a little poker, have a couple of drinks and figure out the meaning of life.

H. – Sidney, I’m afraid to go to sleep. S. – So I hear.

H. – And they tell me I’ve been playing a mean game of zombie basketball.

S. – They tell me you’ve been worrying about losing your marbles.

H. – Ah, very good. S. – For my next trick I’ll invent sibling rivalry.

H. – Tell me, what’s happening, Sidney? I’m scared sick. Why do I sleepwalk? Why do I have these terrible nightmares? I see old pals as clearly as I see you, and they’re getting zapped. And then I call the States, and they’re home watching Milton Berle. If this keeps up, people are gonna realize I’m as crazy as I think I am. What do you think? S. – I think I’d like to sit down.

H. – Tell me, Sidney, has my little red choo-choo gone chugging around the bend? S. – You amateurs just can’t resist tossing around that psychoanalytical jargon.

H. – Okay. Have it your way. Has my, uh, trolley been derailed? Am I playing with half a deck? Am I driving without my headlights?

S. – That’s better. So you’ve been walking in your sleep. What do you think it means?

H. – I’m walking. I’m, uh, uh I’m walking towards something. I’m walking away from something. S. – Mm-hmm.

H. – I’m trying to escape.

S. – In other words, you go to sleep, your subconscious takes a little walk and brings your body along for company. H. – Yeah, well, I don’t seem to be getting very far.

S. – You’re making it all the way back to Crabapple Cove. All the way back to a time when playing ball and shooting marbles and going on picnics were all there was to worry about. No more responsibility. No more life and death decisions. And pain was a skinned knee.

H. – What about my nightmares? What about them? I keep having these dreams about these kids I grew up with. The dreams start out okay. The kids are fine. And then they end in disaster.

S. – Like those kids who roll past you on that bloody assembly line. You dream to escape, but the war invades your dream, and you wake up screaming. The dream is peaceful. Reality is the nightmare.

H. – Am I crazy, Sidney? S. – [Scoffs] No. A bit confused, a little ‘fershimmeled’ [a Yiddish word] is all. Actually, Hawkeye, you’re probably the sanest person I’ve ever known. The fact is, if you were crazy, you’d sleep like a baby.

H. – So when do my nightmares end? – When this big one ends, most of the others should go away. But there’s a lot of suffering going on here, Hawkeye, and you can’t avoid it. You can’t even dream it away.

H. – You’re very reassuring, Sidney. You’ve got a heck of a ‘warside’ manner.

Assessing Arguments

A recent post at The Faculty Lounge about citations in law review articles not being a “good proxy for article quality” (the conclusion being that the ‘only way to judge the quality of an article is to actually read it!’), together with the observation that President Trump’s speeches, insofar as they involve claims, arguments, or simply conclusions (with the premises assumed or implied) of one kind or another, abundantly exemplify formal and informal fallacies in reasoning and thus amount to awful arguments,* prompted me—by way of free association—to think about works I often rely on to refresh my memory regarding the relevant methods and criteria one should keep in mind when assessing and judging the qualities or simply merits of an argument.

In addition to knowing some basic rules of formal logic, the nature of practical reasoning, and being acquainted with the many informal fallacies (which are not, strictly speaking, always ‘fallacious,’ hence their ‘informal’ characterization), I have found a handful of books particularly helpful for evaluating the merits of arguments in both everyday conversational contexts and more formal fields of knowledge, inquiry, and praxis (e.g., history, law, medicine, science, the arts, social sciences…). I’ve also included several philosophy-related texts: a dictionary, a compendium, and a work in epistemology, all of which I think are useful for those of us outside philosophy proper but perhaps in possession of (or at least desiring) a philosopher’s temperament or an ardent amateur’s taste for philosophy.

• Angeles, Peter A. The HarperCollins Dictionary of Philosophy (HarperCollins, 2^nd, 1992).
• Baggini, Julian and Peter S. Fosl. The Philosopher’s Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods (Blackwell, 2003).
• Fisher, Alec. The Logic of Real Arguments (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
• Haack, Susan. Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
• Rescher, Nicholas. Cognitive Pragmatism: The Theory of Knowledge in Pragmatic Perspective (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001).
• Toulmin, Stephen. The Uses of Argument (Cambridge University Press, updated ed., 2003).
• Toulmin, Stephen, Richard Rieke, and Allan Janik. An Introduction to Reasoning (Macmillan Publishing, 2^nd, 1984).
• Walton, Douglas N. Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
• Walton, Douglas N. Plausible Argument in Everyday Conversation (State University of New York Press, 1992).
• Warburton, Nigel. Thinking from A to Z (Routledge, 2^nd, 2000).

* Incidentally, it seems Trump has an inordinate fondness and proclivity for both “abusive” and “circumstantial” ad hominem arguments, which makes sense, given his narcissistic megalomania (his mission to dismantle ‘Obama’s legacy’ has relevance here as well, but that speaks to motives, beliefs, and racism which we can set aside in most instances when examining the plausibility or soundness of his ‘arguments’).

See too this bibliography, which is more or less about arguments in the social sciences.

Toward New Models for the Scale and Practice of Agriculture, No. 4

Our first, second, and third posts in this series are, respectively, here, here, and here.

“Agribusiness lab breeds its few poultry lineages at the level of grandparent stock before shipping out the product to clientele around the world. The practice in effect removes natural selection as a self-correcting (and free) ecological service. Any culling upon an outbreak or by farmers in reaction to an outbreak has no bearing on the development of immune resistance to the pathogens identified, as these birds, broilers and layers alike, are unable to evolve in response.

In other words, the failure to accumulate natural resistance to circulating pathogens is built into the industrial model before a single outbreak occurs. There exists no room for real-time, ecologically responsive, and self-organized immune resistance.

From a world away, human breeders and vaccines must somehow track microscopic molecular trajectories across dynamic mixes of myriad local pathogen variants, a Sisyphean task. It’s a system that appears able to repel pathogens only under the kind of biosecurity and biocontainment that often can’t be implemented in developing countries and even in some developed countries. No ecologically selected resistance, surrounded by a fence. The image of a broken arm, pale and mushy in a cast, comes to mind. Or perhaps more appropriately, a pale mushy wing.

Setting aside barn architecture, reifying capitalism’s angry fight against nature, and the resulting effect on flavor and nutritional fitness of the food produced, Fortress Filière should be subjected to an additional query. Does it even work?

In increasing the rate of livestock turnover, blocking entry by low-pathogenic strains, and restricting selection to grandparent stock, intensive farming is forced to increase the precision of its biosecurity efforts if only in order to keep deadlier pathogen variants from emerging in a context of no or little new natural host resistance.

We can ask of there are combinations of harvesting rate and finishing time selecting for virulence and/or transmissibility that supersede the precision of which the industry is capable or is willing to pay for. At what point does the nature of the problem supersede the margins dedicated to its solution?

The last is perhaps a silly question, as how could we possible assume companies are responsible for the dangers that originate on their property? Sarcasm aside, it offers an explanation for the lengths to which agribusiness goes to externalize the integral environmental, social, and health costs of their operations to any and every passerby—governments, consumers, workers, livestock, and the environment. Agribusiness, some of the largest companies in the world, can’t afford them otherwise.” — Rob Wallace, 21 June 2011, in Big Farms Make Big Flu (2016): 222-223.

Making Sense of Science Under the Conditions of Neoliberal Capitalism: A Syllabus of Twenty-Five Titles

Well-ordered science is an ideal. It may seem a utopian fancy, the sort of thing that may figure in philosophical discussions but that has little place in a realistic account of the sciences. There is an important distinction between specifying an ideal, something at which our practices should aim, and identifying procedures for attaining or approximating the ideal. To proceed to the latter task requires a large amount of empirical information, information no one yet has. Nonetheless, meaningful ideals are those for which we can envisage a path that might lead toward them, and a philosopher who proposes an ideal should be able to point to the initial steps we might take (as Dewey insisted, it is also important to appreciate that, as we move toward an ideal, our conception of it may be refined). — Philip Kitcher

Apologia

In constructing a list of this sort, the number of titles is unavoidably arbitrary and its composition indelibly idiosyncratic. By way of mitigating these properties, I wanted a list that could be reasonably considered “manageable” by anyone with a well-motivated interest in the topic, even if it is, strictly speaking, outside one’s professional field of expertise, or contains material about which one might have some strong intuitions or inchoate thoughts and thus prone to being persuaded to search in earnest for confirming or disconfirming evidence. If the length of this compilation does not satisfy your hunger but merely whets your appetite, you’re invited to browse through the list of bibliographies appended below from which this list was culled.

Introduction

The conservative and right-wing assault on science as seen, for example, in (religiously charged) skepticism or outright denial of evolutionary theory, the dismissal of climate science about global warming, and the refusal to face the social, economic, and political imperatives implied by acquaintance with the ecological and environmental sciences, should not lead us to be naïve or uncritical about the nature and function of science in societies around the globe. Nor should it cause us to ignore the literature penned by philosophers (of science) as well as those examining the epistemics and praxis of science “in society” that has sketched the contours of scientism and “science as ideology.” In other words, within the considerably less than ideal conditions of science often sullied by all-too-human intentions and motives contrary to our normative if not idealized conceptions of its role in a would-be democratic society sensitive to our deepest and broadest ethical sensibilities and concerns, science can and often does fall far short of what it should be, that is, what the late John Ziman called “real science” or what Philip Kitcher terms “well-ordered science.” In short, we should not hesitate to study where, when, how, and (especially) why the practice of science has gone (or is in danger of going) awry, egregiously failing to modestly conform to or at least sufficiently approach our ideal or best conceptions or models of what constitutes science as a form of knowledge inquiry and praxis. I share Ziman’s belief that “[i]n less than a generation we have witnessed a radical, irreversible, worldwide transformation in the way that science is organized, managed and performed:”

“Post-academic science is organized on market principles. One of the consequences of this is that the post-academic research project is subordinate to the sphere of influence of bodies with the corresponding material interests. Thus, for example, basic research findings in molecular genetics have potential applications in plant breeding. Agrochemical firms and farmers are therefore deemed to have a legitimate right to influence the course of this research, from the formulation of projects to the interpretation of outcomes.

In general … post-academic natural scientists can usually be trusted to tell ‘nothing but the truth,’ on matters about which they are knowledgeable. But unlike academic scientists, they are not bound to tell ‘the whole truth.’ They are often prevented, in the interests of their employers, clients or patrons, from revealing discoveries or expressing doubts that would put a very different complexion on their testimony. The meaning of what is said is secretly undermined by what is not said. This proprietorial attitude to the results of research has become so familiar that we have forgotten how damaging it is to the credibility of scientists and their institutions. This is one result of the fact that ‘the context of application’ is largely defined by the material interests of bodies outside science.”

In short, writes Ziman, we have “increasing subordination to corporate and political interests that do not put a high value on the production of knowledge for the benefit of society at large.”

Finally, I should note that I do not believe there should be strict boundaries (hence there is some overlap) between what we understand as “science” and what is characterized or defined as “folk knowledge” and “Indigenous Knowledge Systems” (e.g., ‘ethnobotany’ or ‘traditional medicine’). Much of what is found in the latter resembles some forms of science, even if more “collective” or communal, or largely oral, or on the order of “amateur” science.

1. Aoki, Keith. Seed Wars: Controversies and Cases on Plant Genetic Resources and Intellectual Property. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2008.
2. Bennett, M.R. and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
3. Buller, David J. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
4. Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
5. Elster, Jon. Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
6. Greenberg, Gary. The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. New York: Blue Rider Press/Penguin, 2013.
7. Healy, David. The Creation of Psychopharmacology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
8. Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.
9. Keller, Evelyn Fox. Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
10. Kenny, Martin. Bio-technology: The University-Industrial Complex. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.
11. Kitcher, Philip. Science, Truth, and Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001.
12. Kitcher, Philip. Science in a Democratic Society. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011.
13. Kloppenburg, Jack Ralph. First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2^nd, 2004.
14. Lakoff, Andrew. Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
15. Lewontin, Richard and Richard Levins. Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007.
16. McCloskey, Donald N. Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
17. McCloskey, Deirdre. The Secret Sins of Economics. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002.
18. Mgbeoji, Ikechi. Global Biopiracy: Patents, Plants, and Indigenous Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
19. Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. New York: Routledge, 2001.
20. Mirowski, Philip. Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
21. Patterson, Dennis and Michael S. Pardo, eds. Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
22. Rose, Hilary and Steven Rose. Genes, Cells and Brains: Bioscience’s Promethean Promises. London: Verso, 2012.
23. Shrader-Frechette, K.S. Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
24. Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham, UK: Acumen, 2011.
25. Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

The following bibliographies, available at my Academia page, contain quite a number of titles germane to the endeavor to understand the nature and function of contemporary science (i.e., under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism) in formal and informal fields of systematic knowledge inquiry in which theory and praxis is distinguishable but inseparable.

• Animal Ethics, Rights, and Law
• Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice
• Bioethics
• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Ecological & Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
• Ethical Perspectives on Science & Technology
• Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice
• Nuclear Weapons
• Philosophy, Psychology, & Methodology for the Social Sciences
• Science and Religion
• Science and Technology
• Sullied (Natural & Social) Sciences

Karl Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883)

Karl Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) “was a German philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist.”

My bibliography for Marxism is here.

Please see Andrew Hartman’s piece for Jacobin, “Marx’s America.” See too Mary Gabriel’s “A letter to Karl Marx on his 200th birthday” in the Los Angeles Times.

Happy May Day!

Today we celebrate the dignity, personhood (including personal agency), and capabilities (existing and potential) of working people everywhere; today we honor their struggles to be identified not just as people who labor, often under compulsion and thus in a manner of which they exercise little meaningful (i.e., democratic) and fulfilling self-control, but in recognition of their full humanity in its most elevated expressions and incarnations as partially captured in the history of arts and crafts; in the triune moto of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité; and in the sundry values and virtues articulated and exemplified in religious and non-religious worldviews and philosophies in the history of mankind. One day, the opportunity for individual and collective or joint self-realization, for what Condorcet and Godwin understood as the never-ending quest for “perfectibility,” will be the prerogative of every human being.

Here are some posts from the archives in honor of this date:

• 2010
• 2013
• 2015
• 2017