ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Gary Wills on The Catholic Church and Its Many Sins

Taryn Mattice has called my attention to Gary Wills powerful critique of the Catholic Church. It is all about the scope of the sex abuse scandal, the craven need to preserve authority, the so-called “natural law” justifications for a wide variety of unpersuasive positions on sex, and the role that the laity ought to be playing in combatting the overreaching and worse of the hierarchy. To be sure, Gary Wills is not a master of understatement. But his criticism is smart, sharp, well written, with breakouts of humor. It is well worth the read. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/23/the-priesthood-of-the-big-crazy/

Genocide: a select bibliography

My latest (ninety-first) bibliography is on genocide (on my Academia page).

Liberal Democratic Socialism

     
Socialism in not a moral theory which offers a particular vision of the good life, instead it is a theory about how the good life is possible. It is, in short, a theory about the conditions necessary for creating a society in which our lives are shaped by moral values—we defer to the authority of the good—rather than a society in which our moral traditions have been erased by forces inimical to the moral life. And part of this theory about the conditions necessary for the good life proved the leading critical aspect of socialism. That part is the claim that it is capitalism which has been largely responsible for the destruction of the conditions necessary for the good life. — Michael Luntley

There exists, within both what is commonly called the classical and later “reconstructed” Liberal tradition (which, as a political philosophy, is related to but not identical with the ‘liberalism’ of contemporary politics used to describe the ideology of the Democratic Party in the U.S.), a preference for socialism beginning with John Stuart Mill. Consider, for example, the reasons Mill the younger viewed “the increasing impact of [capitalist] economic interests on public life and popular morality as a serious threat to liberty” in his normative critique of capitalism. Democratic principles of self-government, in the end, are not consistent with nor do they cohere well with capitalism. Mill “believed that a consumerist ethic and pervasive class interests were responsible for the moral and political weaknesses of capitalist society” [the converse of Bernard Mandeville’s defense of capitalism]. In the concise and exquisite summary provided by Nadia Urbinati, “Mill was a Marxist in reverse [this part is not wholly accurate, but we’ll leave that aside]. He interpreted socialism as an extension of self-government in the social realm to break the chain of fear and poverty that prevented individuals belonging to ‘the subordinate classes’ from enjoying liberty as both security and autonomy.” See Urbinati’s treatment of this topic in her book, Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002).

After Mill, and across the pond, we have the quintessential pragmatist American philosopher, John Dewey, whose democratic sensibilities were impeccable. Dewey’s “reconstructed Liberalism” invokes democratic values, principles, and practices by way of overcoming the constraints and constrictions of “capitalist democracy” (be it the liberal, corporatist or social democratic welfare state) in an argument for socialism. Capitalist democracy, over time, becomes more capitalist than democratic in both structure and ethos, as the imperatives and power of capital (hence capitalists) begin to intrude into every nook and cranny of personal and public life.* Only a consistent and coherent democratic socialism can resurrect the core values of Liberalism, as it gives meaning and expression to a democratic way of life which is essential to enhancing our individual and collective welfare and well-being. It may also prove conductive to personal fulfillment and widespread opportunities for self-realization if not eudaimonia.

Finally, we arrive at John Rawls, whose conception of “justice as fairness” translates, in his later work, into a preference for liberal democratic socialism, trumping both welfare state capitalism and what he terms (after the British economist James Meade) “property-owning” democracy as evidenced in his book, Justice as Fairness: Restatement (Harvard University Press, 2001). For a reconstruction of the basic argument, see William A. Edmundson’s John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

In pointing out this socialist stream within the Liberal tradition, we need not deny the progressive features of capitalism, historically speaking, features which Marx famously appreciated in his critique. What it does say is that should we care to expand the sphere of human freedom in a way that does justice to our potential for and capacities of individuation, self-realization, and general emancipation, as well as enhance our attempts to provide for the general welfare and well-being of everyone (what used to be termed the ‘common good’), perhaps even considerably increase the likelihood of achieving individual self-fulfillment and eudaimonia (in the deepest sense), then we run up against the intolerable, unjustifiable, and inequitable conditions and constraints of capitalism. By way of overcoming these conditions and constraints, we discover the myriad reasons that political philosophers and theorists, activists, utopians, communitarians of yesteryear, anarchists, and untold others have proffered on behalf of a viable alternative, namely (liberal) democratic socialism, a socialism that extends not only the methods and processes of democracy, but also its ethos, principles, and values throughout social realm (thus well beyond the realm of conventional liberal politics).

* With regard to contemporary critiques, there is a large body of works one might cite, but I’ve chosen just a few notable examples below that have strongly influenced my understanding of the inherent weaknesses, limits, and constraints (the latter can be both constricting and enabling) of capitalism when viewed from the vantage points provided by social justice and the paramount principles of freedom, equality, and fraternity (the last in a non-gendered sense: although the term ‘solidarity’ is sometimes used in its place, it lacks, I think, the affective dimension and implications of fraternity). Hence the idiosyncratic character of this list. The authors do not, in toto, make for a strictly consistent critique, as they may disagree on this or that matter about something in Marx’s oeuvre, say, interpretive or methodological issues, normative priorities, what have you. In short, their accounting of what is living and what is dead—or what represents a proper separation of the wheat from the chaff—in the Marxist corpus is not a matter of consensus:

• Anderson, Kevin B. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
• Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (Monthly Review Press, 1994 [1974]).
• Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2013).
• Chimni, B.S. International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2^nd, 2017).
• Cohen, G.A. History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx (Oxford University Press, 1988).
• Cohen, G.A. Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
• Cohen, G.A. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton University Press, 2000, expanded ed. [1978]).
• Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class (Random House, 1981).
• Elster, Jon. “Self-realization in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds. Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
• Harrington, Michael. Socialism: Past and Future (Arcade/Little, Brown & Co., 1989).
• Harvey, David. Limits to Capital (Verso, 2006 ed. [1^st, 1982]).
• Luntley, Michael. The Meaning of Socialism (Open Court, 1990).
• Offe, Claus. Contradictions of the Welfare State (MIT Press, 1984).
• Offe, Claus. Disorganized Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics (MIT Press, 1985).
• Peffer, R.G. Marxism, Morality and Social Justice (Princeton University Press, 1990).
• Przeworski, Adam. Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
• Przeworski, Adam and John Sprague. Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism (University of Chicago Press, 1986).
• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Zed Books, 1983).
• Schweickart, David. Against Capitalism (Westview Press, 1996).
• Shaikh, Anwar. Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010).
• Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, 2008 ed. [1989]).

The Haitian Revolution (August 21, 1791 – January 1, 1804): Jacob Lawrence and the Profound Ethical Purposes of Art

We seek only to bring men to the liberty that God has given them, and that other men have taken from them only by transgressing His immutable will. — François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (20 May 1743 – 7 April 1803)

From [Frederick] Douglass’s time to ours, events in Haiti have continued to inspire African American responses in various genres, including journalism, oratory, music, and poetry. Far from fading, the Haitian Revolution has remained significant and has taken on new meanings during the twentieth century, as contemporary events unfolded. From the response of the NAACP to the American occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934, through the poetry of Langston Hughes and the art of the painter Jacob Lawrence, to the personal connection felt with Touissant L’Ouverture by Ntozake Shange’s protagonist in the 1975 play For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, many African Americans have been inspired by Haiti’s history to create responses that link past and present, providing inspiration as well as spurring continuing activism for contemporary Haitians and for people of color throughout the world. — Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon

I like to think I’ve expanded my interest to include not just the Negro theme but man generally and maybe if this speaks through the Negro I think this is valid also ….  I would like to think of it as dealing with all people, the struggle of man to always better his condition and to move forward….  I think all people aspire, all people strive towards a better human condition, a better mental condition generally. — Jacob Lawrence

“The Haitian Revolution (French: Révolution haïtienne) was a successful anti-slavery and anti-colonial insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign nation of Haiti. It began on 21 August 1791 and ended in 1804 with the former colony’s independence. It involved blacks, mulattoes, French, Spanish, and British participants—with the ex-slave [François-Dominique] Toussaint Louverture [also known as Toussaint L’Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda] emerging as Haiti’s most charismatic hero. It was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery, and ruled by non-whites and former captives. It is now widely seen as a defining moment in the history of racism in the Atlantic World

Its effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The end of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony was followed by a successful defense of the freedoms they won, and, with the collaboration of free persons of color, their independence from white Europeans. It represents the largest slave uprising since Spartacus’s unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years earlier. It challenged long-held European beliefs about alleged black inferiority and about enslaved persons’ capacity to achieve and maintain their own freedom. The rebels’ organizational capacity and tenacity under pressure inspired stories that shocked and frightened slave owners in the hemisphere.”

Jacob Lawrence and the Haitian Revolution: The Spiritual, Historical, and Ethical Purposes of Art

“The traditional account of the value of artworks is that they have their value through their beauty, and the experience of a work’s beauty is still a prime determinant of our valuing it. … [T]he notion of beauty is not to be construed merely in terms of pleasure in sensory presentations, but has to allow for the possibility of the beauty of objects and traits, such as moral ones, which cannot be perceived directly. The existence of moral beauty means that a work’s moral character can be a beauty in the work. One of the most influential modern accounts of the value of art is the cognitive one, which holds that works of art have their artistic value in part through their cognitive merits. … [T]hrough linking cognition to imagination, art can teach about ethical values, as well as about other matters; and … this cognitive merit can be an aesthetic merit too. Finally, an important aspect of our valuing works of art is the way that they move us emotionally, and this aspect of our experience [in light of the question of value, occurs once more in assessing] … whether the responses prescribed are merited. And this notion of merit … is sensitive to moral considerations. Thus, if one examines some of the central grounds on which art is valued—its beauty, its cognitive role, its affective dimension—each of them involves an ethical aspect. It is in this sense that the ethical evaluation of art is inescapable, since it is inextricably intertwined with some of the central grounds on which we value art.” – Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)

“[Jacob] Lawrence [September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000] is one of the first American artists trained in and by the black community in Harlem, and it is from the people of Harlem that he initially obtained professional recognition. He was also the first African American artist to receive sustained support from mainstream art museums and patronage outside of the black community during an era of legalized and institutionalized segregation. [….]

… Lawrence developed a philosophy regarding art and the role that it can play addressing social issues, particularly as they pertain to race. Though much of his career coincides with a period in which artists attempted to strip all narrative and literary references from their work, he has always maintained that art, as one of the highest forms of human endeavor, is too significant a communicative medium to be simply reduced to formal experimentation. For over sixty years and with intentionally limited means (water-based paints on boards or paper), he has harnessed the seductive power of semi-abstract forms to address many of the great social and philosophical themes of the twentieth century, especially at they pertain to the lives and histories of African Americans: migration, manual labor, war, family values, education, mental health, and creativity. He made visible a side of American history that includes the contributions of African Americans; has presented scenes of daily life that provide a compassionate counterpoint to stereotypical images of African Americans; and painted poignant social commentary on the effects of racism and bigotry in American culture. His ability to distill the essence of these subjects into elemental shapes is unparalleled and one of the defining aspects of his work.” — Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, eds., Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, in association with Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonné Project, 2000): 11.

“Lawrence painted not just what he saw, but also what he heard from the oral historians of Harlem. Lectures on aspects of American and African-American history and culture given at the 135^th Street library (history previously unknown to Lawrence since the topic was not part of the New York City public education curriculum) sparked his interest in these subjects. He, along with many other artists, heard lectures by Joel C. Rogers, Richard B. Moore, and the carpenter-cum-scholar ‘Professor’ Charles C. Seifert. These lectures were part of a community-wide effort in Harlem to learn and value the history of African Americans and their contribution to American history. Lawrence was so impressed after having heard one of Seifert’s lectures that he was inspired to research the history and political struggles of his people. Motivated by the courageous events he studied, he was compelled to create, in rapid succession, a series of paintings on the important African American heroic narratives: The Life of Toussaint L’Overture (1938), The Life of Frederick Douglass (1939), and The Life of Harriet Tubman (1940). The stories and struggles of these monumental freedom fighters became icons of survival and hope.”—Leslie King-Hammond, “Inside-Outside, Uptown-Downtown:  Jacob Lawrence and the Aesthetic Ethos of the Harlem Working-Class Community,” in Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, eds. Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, in association with Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonné Project. 2000): 77-78.

“It was … [at the New York Public Library that Lawrence] might have read John W. Vandercook’s book Black Majesty: The Life of Christophe, King of Haiti, published in 1928. The book included drawings by Mahlon Blaine of scenes of the [Haitian] revolt and of Christophe and other leaders, which served as inspiration for Lawrence’s later work on Toussaint.

Lawrence was also influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois. Lawrence was an American, but he also was an African American and an African American artist. He knew that he had to define himself, and as a painter he came to be known as a social realist, abstractionist, and visual narrator of the American black experience and the struggle of blacks for freedom from oppression. Lawrence told of seeing a W.E.B. Du Bois play on the life of Toussaint Louverture in the mid-1930s and assumed it had been written by the man he admired, since Du Bois had written about Haiti in his doctoral thesis and other works. According to Du Bois’s biographer David Levering Lewis, however, the play was written not by the African American W.E.B. Du Bois, but by a white playwright named William DuBois. Inspired nonetheless, Lawrence decided to paint on the subject.

In 1938, at the age of twenty-one, Lawrence completed and exhibited a series of paintings on the life of Toussaint. He felt that one painting would not do the job, so he decided to do a series, and it became known as the Toussaint L’Ouverture series of 1937-1938. Lawrence’s works consisted of forty-one paintings, “gouache paintings on paper,” outlining the history of the Haitian Revolution, each telling a unique aspect of the story. It was funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Arts Project (FAP). Lawrence wrote, ‘I’ve always been interested in history, but they never taught Negro history in the public schools…. It was never studied seriously like regular subjects. My first real introduction to Negro history was when I was very young—thirteen, I imagine—when a Mr. Allen spoke at Utopia House. He spoke about Toussaint L’Ouverture.’ At the same time, Lawrence noted, ‘most of my information came from Charles Beard’s book, Toussaint L’Ouverture. I read other books—there were more novels than anything else. One book—I don’t even remember its name—told me of conditions on the island, and its resources. It gave a short sketch of the Haitian Revolution.’ Lawrence concluded, ‘I’m not a politician; I’m an artist just trying to do my part to bring this thing about. I had several reasons for doing this work and these are some of them. Someone had to do it. Another reason is that I have great admiration for the life of such a man as Toussaint L’Ouverture.’ [….]

As the art history Ellen Wheat has written, ‘The Toussaint series focuses on the mistreatment of the Haitian natives by the colonial farmers and military leaders and on Touissant’s heroic struggle to educate himself, fight the military leader’s occupational forces and achieve the independence of Haiti.’” – Maurice Jackson, “No Man Could Hinder Him: Remembering Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in the History and Culture of the African American People,” in Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, eds., African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents (New York: Routledge, 2010): 141-164.

“Influenced by storytelling techniques derived from film, the Toussaint L’Ouverture series unfolds episodically and kaleidoscopically, presenting scenes at various locations, during various times, and from various points of view. Each scene was carefully orchestrated for content; before picking up his brushes, Lawrence spent several weeks poring over biographies of Toussaint’s life, as well as historical and socioeconomic accounts of Haiti. Like a screenwriter, the artist emphasized, condensed, or omitted narrative details in order to underscore his overriding message. For Lawrence, Toussaint’s prominent roles in commandeering the Haitian Revolution and drafting the country’s new constitution epitomized the ability of an authoritative individual to bring about major social change.

Evident throughout the series is Lawrence’s strong acumen in manipulating shapes and colors to communicate with clarity and emotion. Demonstrating his penchant for dynamic yet cohesive patterning, the artist repeated colors and motifs in order to unify the sequence across its individual images. By employing flat shapes bereft of shading and cast shadows, he eliminated extraneous detail and strove for greater legibility. A pronounced sense of graphic design predominates throughout, so when viewed in their totality the 41 images generate a cumulative visual power, an upshot rendered even more forceful by the intimate spaces of our prints and drawings gallery.

Created in 1937–38, when Lawrence was just 20 years old, the Toussaint L’Ouverture series launched the artist’s career on a national stage, and its success provided momentum to further elaborate his aesthetic vision. For the next six decades, Lawrence continued to harness the power of abstracted forms to address significant social issues, and a host of gallery and museum exhibitions amplified his fame. At the time of his death at the age of 82, he was among the most distinguished artists in the nation.” — Mark Cole, curator of American painting and sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art since 2006.

References & Recommended Reading:

• Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. New York: Verso, 1998.
• Brown, Gordon S. Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
• Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 2010 (1997).
• Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.
• Dubois, Laurent and John D. Garrigus. Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804A Brief History with Documents. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin, 2^nd, 2017.
• Dun, James Alexander. Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
• Forsdick, Charles and Christian Høgsbjerg, eds. The Black Jacobins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Forsdick, Charles and Christian Høgsbjerg. Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions. London: Pluto Press, 2017.
• Geggus, David Patrick, ed. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
• Geggus, David Patrick and Norman Fiering, eds. The World of the Haitian Revolution. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.
• Girard, Philippe R. The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011.
• Girard, Philippe. Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
• Horne, Gerald. Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015.
• Jackson, Maurice and Jacqueline Bacon, eds. African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents. New York: Routledge, 2010.
• James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2nd ed., 1963/1989 (1938).
• Kaisary, Philip. The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2014.
• Kennedy, Roger G. (an illustrated documentary by David Larkin) When Art Worked: The New Deal, Art, and Democracy. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2009.
• L’Ouverture, Toussaint (Nick Nesbitt, ed.) The Haitian Revolution. London: Verso, 2008. [A collection of Louverture’s writings and speeches]
• Meltzer, Milton. Violins and Shovels: The WPA Arts Projects. New York: Delacorte Press, 1976.
• Morgan, Stacy I. Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-1953. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004.
• Munro, Martin and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, eds. Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006.
• Musher, Sharon Ann. Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Nesbitt, Nick. Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2008.
• Oldfield, J.R. Transatlantic Abolitionism: The Age of Revolution, 1787-1820. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Popkin, Jeremy D. You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Ros, Martin. Night of Fire: The Black Napoleon and The Battle for Haiti. New York: Sarpedon Publishers, 1994.
• Stinchcombe, Arthur L. Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Taylor, Nick. American-Made — The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR put the Nation to Work. New York: Bantam Dell, 2008.
• West, Michael O., William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds. From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Circumambulating the Tomb of a Spiritual Teacher or (above) the Head of a Sufi Saint

“Now that the hajj has commenced in Mecca, I thought it might be of some interest to share something I learned when writing biographies of Sufis from various orders (ṭarīqah[s]) for The Biographical Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy, Oliver Leaman, ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015; first published as two volumes by Thoemmes Continuum in 2006). I’ve taken the relevant paragraph from the full biography which follows below. It shows how one Sufi understood this particular Islamic obligation. I invite you to read the entire biography as Abu Sa`id is a rather colorful and eccentric Sufi mystic, at least as gleaned from the evidence we have of his life and spiritual practices. Oliver Leaman, our esteemed editor, explains the reasons for including Sufis in the introduction, which includes the fact that philosophy is translated as both falsafa (with Greek connotations, especially the Peripatetic tradition) and hikma or “wisdom” (there is also a pharmaceutical company in Jordan: Hikma Pharmaceuticals!), and he is using philosophy in the latter sense, “since this will include all kinds of theoretical enquiry which were in their time regarded as philosophy or philosophical. It was not only those who were formally philosophers who discussed philosophy, as scientists, theologians, jurisprudents, and physicians all made important contributions to the topic.”

*           *           *

“In the person of Abu Sa`id there is a complex intertwining, hence reconciliation, of three distinct Khurasanian currents that were not always compatible: the jawanmardi (ethical chivalry; futuwwa), qalandariyya (wherein God-intoxication or mystical states sanction antinomian behavior), and malamatiyya (‘path of blame’) spiritual paths. The preference for sama` (for which the heart must be alive and the passions dead) as definitive of collective dhikr; the wearing of silk garments; instructing students who longed to take the hajj to rather circumambulate the tomb of his beloved teacher, Abu’l-Fadl; his own decision not to undertake the hajj (for which he proffered reasons: Kharaqani (d. 426/1034) told him that he would serve as the Ka`ba around which the devout would circumambulate and, in any case, ‘the true man of God sits where he is and the Bayt al-Ma`mur [heavenly archetype of the Ka`ba] comes several times in a day and night to visit him and perform the circumambulation above his head’) (qtd. in Nicholson 1921: 62); the giving up of (at least conspicuous) asceticism in favor of comparatively luxurious living; his reputed ecstatic utterance that ‘there is nothing inside this coat except Allah;’ the not infrequent use of telepathic powers; and the preaching in poetry rather than Qur’anic verses and litanies; all find ample justification in what has been termed the ‘divine right of the saint,’ or in what for Abu Sa`id was the unadulterated love of God, meaning ‘no anxiety or fear concerning what befalls you … [nor] worry about incurring blame or reproach from others’ (qtd. in Graham 1999: 128).”

 

*          *          *

Abu Sa`id Fadlullah ibn Abi’l-Khayr Ahmad Mayhani (357-440/967-1049)

(Please note: this is missing macrons and diacritics)

Abu Sa`id was born in Mayhana in Khurasan (present day Turkmenistan) on 1 Muharram 357/December 7, 967 and died there 4 Sha`ban 440/12 January, 1049. He made seminal contributions to Sufi institutional and ritual practices, including the pedagogical use of the Persian poetical form, the quatrain (ruba`iyat), while boldly instantiating fidelity to the values and principles of mystical psychology and philosophy (`ilm al-tasawwuf).

Abu Sa`id’s father, a druggist, regularly attended Sufi gatherings, his mother urging Babul Bu’l-Khayr to bring their son along. Consent to this request exposed the young boy to sama`, that is, dancing to music and poetry as part of the devotional ritual of dhikr (what Franklin Lewis calls a kind of ‘motile meditation or deliberative dancing, a mode of worship and contemplation’). Abu Sa`id’s first spiritual teacher was Qasim Bishr Yasin (d. 380/990), who was fond of teaching through verse. Indeed, many of the quatrains attributed to Abu Sa`id may have been those of his first mentor in mysticism, especially if we take at face value his direct disavowal: ‘I have never composed a poem myself. What you hear from my tongue comes from able men (mardan-i saturg), the most part from Abu’l-Qasim Bishr’ (qtd. in Graham 1999: 95). In fact there are no written works that can be reliably attributed to Abu Sa`id. 

An education in Shafi`i jurisprudence (fiqh) was obtained by Abu Sa`id in the city of Merv, under Abu `Abdullah Muhammad ibn Ahmad Khidri (d. after 373/983). Khidri’s death five years later prompted him to seek out another prominent Shafi`ite jurist, Abu Bakr `Abdullah ibn Ahmad Qaffal Mervazi (d. 417/1026). Thus his legal education acquainted him with Ash`arite theology, which was typically paired with the Shafi`i madhhab. Expertise in the citation of hadith (Prophetic traditions) was assured some years later under the tutelage of Abu `Ali Zahir Sarakhsi (d. 389/999) in Sarakhs, closer to his hometown of Mayhana. At some point during his studies in the religious sciences, Abu Sa`id’s interest in Sufism was rekindled—as signified in early biographical accounts—by an encounter with the ‘saintly fool’ (`aqil-i majnun), Luqman Sarakhsi. Luqman formally passed Abu Sa`id on to his new Sufi master, Abu’ l-Fadl Muhammad ibn Hasan Sarakhsi (d. 414/1023).

In Nishapur, Abu Sa`id accredited a number of muhaddithun (scholars of Prophetic traditions), including the renowned Shafi`ite jurist and Ash`arite theologian Abu’l-Ma`ali `Abd al-Malik Juwayni (d. 468/1075). In the words of Terry Graham: ‘as the most important teacher of the famous Abu Hamid Muhammad Ghazali (d. 505/1111) … Juwayni served as a direct conveyor of Abu Sa`id’s teaching to the most celebrated theologian in the history of Islam’ (Graham 1999: 87). Abu Sa`id’s skills in the Islamic sciences were employed at Nizamiyya College, the founder of which, the vizier Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092), was a generous benefactor of the Shafi`ite madhhab and, later, of Abu Sai`id’s khanaqah. Yet scholarly acumen was soon dwarfed by a prolonged if not extravagant immersion in asceticism, tales of which resound throughout Sufi lore. Practiced at the family home in Mayhana, at Abu’l-Fadl’s khanaqah in Sarakhs, and in the surrounding wilderness, his ascetic exercises were interrupted by a visit to Abu `Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (d. 412/1021) in Nishapur to receive the ‘cloak of guidance’ (khirqa-yi irshad). Soon thereafter, Abu’l-Fadl sent him back to Mayhana a Sufi master. He received the ‘cloak of blessing’ (khirqa-yi tabarruk) from Abu’l-`Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad Qassab.

Abu Sa`id established his khanaqah in Nishapur. Famous for his ascetic feats, popular veneration of this energetic Sufi was equally extreme: ‘…one day as I chanced to be riding a mule who deposited its droppings, people rushed over to rub them onto their scalps and faces’ (qtd. in Graham 1999: 91). Yet the sources of his popularity were multifarious, as the eventual abandonment of asceticism proved disconcerting to those who believed it set apart the holiest of lives. And although miracle-mongering is frowned upon by the great Sufi masters as ‘snares along the way to God,’ the presence of pure motivation, however rare, marks the permissible exception. Abu Sa`id is said to have frequently relied upon firasat (‘heart-discernment’) or clairvoyance, specifically telepathy, to win over his detractors or persuade the constitutionally skeptical. With its roots in the poetic forms, themes, and New Persian court language (Dari) that circulated in the ‘streets and marketplace,’ his use of the ruba`iyat and du-bayti (double couplet) was at once didactic and devotional. This preaching in verse and aphorism, and on occasion giving voice to ecstatic states (cf. ishara, hikam, and shath), likewise endeared him to the masses.

In the person of Abu Sa`id there is a complex intertwining, hence reconciliation, of three distinct Khurasanian currents that were not always compatible: the jawanmardi (ethical chivalry; futuwwa), qalandariyya (wherein God-intoxication or mystical states sanction antinomian behavior), and malamatiyya (‘path of blame’) spiritual paths. The preference for sama` (for which the heart must be alive and the passions dead) as definitive of collective dhikr; the wearing of silk garments; instructing students who longed to take the hajj to rather circumambulate the tomb of his beloved teacher, Abu’l-Fadl; his own decision not to undertake the hajj (for which he proffered reasons: Kharaqani (d. 426/1034) told him that he would serve as the Ka`ba around which the devout would circumambulate and, in any case, ‘the true man of God sits where he is and the Bayt al-Ma`mur [heavenly archetype of the Ka`ba] comes several times in a day and night to visit him and perform the circumambulation above his head’) (qtd. in Nicholson 1921: 62); the giving up of (at least conspicuous) asceticism in favor of comparatively luxurious living; his reputed ecstatic utterance that ‘there is nothing inside this coat except Allah;’ the not infrequent use of telepathic powers; and the preaching in poetry rather than Qur’anic verses and litanies; all find ample justification in what has been termed the ‘divine right of the saint,’ or in what for Abu Sa`id was the unadulterated love of God, meaning ‘no anxiety or fear concerning what befalls you … [nor] worry about incurring blame or reproach from others’ (qtd. in Graham 1999: 128).

From Abu Sa`id come the first formalized rules for the Sufi convent (khanaqah) he helped shape by grafting the hospice onto the existing Sufi monastic institution. One function of such rules is the tempering of those elitist tendencies intrinsic to an ascetic or monastic regimen. For example, rule eight instructs the residents to ‘welcome the poor and needy, and all who join their company, and let them bear patiently the trouble of (waiting upon) them.’ In keeping with his belief that the ‘shortest, best, and easiest way to God is to bring comfort to someone else,’ Abu Sa`id saw to it that ‘service to others’ or ‘selflessness in intention and conduct’ was the central ethic of the khanaqah. This might also be construed as a logical continuation of his earlier ascetic engagement with ‘service of the poor’ (khidmati-i darwishan). In short, the conduct countenanced by Abu Sa`id is not, strictly speaking, antinomian, but instead indicates the infusion of an egalitarian or democratic ethos into otherwise rarefied spiritual practices and beliefs. Further evidence for this proposition comes from his comment that the ‘true saint goes in and out amongst the people and eats and sleeps with them and buys and sells in the market and marries and takes part in social intercourse, and never forgets God for a single moment’ (qtd. in Nicholson: 1921, 55). The monastic functions of the ribat and zawiyya found in the khanaqah are henceforth bound up with the fulfillment of concrete ethical objectives and social obligations, as their unique values are liable to more thorough ‘interiorization.’

A Sufi master with a rather large family, an uncommon mystic who exemplified selfless generosity (ithar), a charismatic preacher who subdued sectarian strife and, in time, silenced the legal and clerical cries of heresy and apostasy, Abu Sa`id put flesh and bones on his definition of the true saint (wali) while embodying the truth of Junayd’s maxim that ‘the water takes on the color of its cup.’ Although Khwaja `Abdullah Ansari (d. 481/1089) disapproved of Abu Sa`id’s qalandariyya character or malamati temperament, and although Abu’l-Qasim Qushayri (d. 465/1074) failed to include him among the famous Sufis subject to hagiographical sketches in his influential Risala ila’s-Sufiya (Treatise on Sufism), such treatment would not have disturbed him. Nor should it prevent us from fully appreciating his creative and enduring contributions to Sufi institutions and devotional practices.

Further Reading:

• Graham, Terry (1999) ‘Abu Sa`id ibn Abi’l-Khayr and the School of Khurasan,’ in Leonard Lewisohn, ed. The Heritage of Sufism, I: Classical Persian Sufism from its Origins to Rumi (700-1300). Oxford, UK: Oneworld.
• Muhammad Ibn Munawwar (1992) The Secrets of God’s Mystical Oneness (Asrar al-Tawhid) (trans. John O’Kane). Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publ.
• Nicholson, Reynold A. (1994 rprt., orig. publ. 1921) Studies in Islamic Mysticism. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press.

My study guide for Islam is here. My bibliography for Sufism is here.

Bombing French Indochina during the U.S. War in Vietnam: a précis

“‘Once we’ve broken the war in Vietnam,’ Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, told the President, ‘no one will give a damn about war crimes.’”

Here is a little known—at least from my vantage point—but ugly fact: “In the ten months after [Robert S.] McNamara left the Pentagon, Clark Clifford under the president [Lyndon B. Johnson] dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on Indochina than had been expended in the previous three years: 1.7 million tons compared with 1.5.” – Daniel Ellsberg

What follows is a summary of the bombing figures for Indochina* (technically, French Indochina: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) during the U.S. war in Vietnam:

“Throughout World War II, in all sectors, the United States dropped 2 million tons of bombs; for Indochina, the total figure is 8 million tons, with an explosive power equivalent to 640 Hiroshima-size bombs. Three million tons were dropped on Laos, exceeding the total for Germany and Japan by both the U.S. and Great Britain. For nine years, an average on one planeload of bombs fell on Laos every eight minutes [from 1965 to 1973 — about one ton for every Laotian man, woman and child]. In addition, 150,000 acres of forest were destroyed through the chemical warfare known as defoliation. For South Vietnam, the figure is 19 million gallons of defoliant dropped on an area comprising 20 percent of South Vietnam—some 6 million acres. In an even briefer period, between 1969 and 1973, 513,129 tons of bombs were dropped in Cambodia, largely by B-52s, of which 257,465 tons fell in the last six months of the war (as compared to 160, 771 tons on Japan from 1942-1945) [In Cambodia, between October 4, 1965 and August 15, 1973, the U.S. dropped 2,756,941 tons in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites]. The estimated toll of the dead, the majority civilian, is equally difficult to absorb: … 2 to 4 million in Vietnam.” — Marilyn B. Young, “Bombing Civilians from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Centuries,” in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young, eds. Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: The New Press, 2009).

“In Vietnam the majority of U.S. bombing was in the South of the country in the rural areas. (In the North the bombing was largely targeted on urban areas and the population had to decentralize). Much of the U.S. bombing of Indochina was integrated into the Pacification Program, primarily as part of what were called ‘search and destroy missions.’ These missions have been graphically described as ‘typically [beginning] with B-52 saturation bombing of an “objective” area ... [followed by] long range artillery fire ... aerial bombing by smaller, lower flying attack bombers which are armed with half-ton bombs, ... and huge canisters of gelatinous napalm .... Last to arrive and devastate the “objective” from the air are helicopter gunships firing rockets and M-60 machine guns….’ (Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, 1970: 104). After these bombing attacks, any people left alive were either forced to move to the cities or were herded into ‘strategic hamlets,’ set up and financed by the United States, surrounded by high barbed wire fences to separate the ‘ocean’ from the ‘fish.’ Between 1965 and 1970, 5,000 hamlets, with an estimated population of four million people, were destroyed.

The use of chemicals (such as CS gas and napalm) and herbicides (such as Agents Orange and Blue) against the people, forests, and crops was also part of this overall Pacification Program of destroying the capacity for people to support the guerilla fighters, rather than primarily, as the Army generally claimed, to destroy the opposing military forces or to destroy their forest cover. According to the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (1970: 112), ‘The army denies that herbicides were used in populated areas. But there is ample documentary evidence to the contrary, even from government sources.’

This was the policy throughout Indochina. In Laos, from 1965 to 1973, the U.S. Air Force dropped over 2,000,000 tons of bombs. Most of the victims were civilians. In Cambodia in March 1969, the U.S. military increased to ‘intensive’ the secret bombing program: 3,630 B-52 bombing raids annihilated the country (Kiernan, 1989; Shawcross, 1987: 28).

The U.S. bombing in Indochina was the ‘heaviest aerial bombardment in history’ (Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, 1970: 97).”—From Truda Gray and Brian Martin, “The American War in Indochina: Injustice and Outrage,” Revista de Paz y Conflictos, No. 1, 2008.

References & Further Reading:

• Branfman, Fred, ed. (with essays and drawings by Laotian Villagers). Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2^nd ed., 2013 (1^st ed., 1972).
• Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. The Indochina Story: A Fully Documented Account. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.
• Duffett, John, ed. Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal. New York: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation/Flanders, NJ: O’Hare Books, 1968.
• Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking Penguin, 2002.
• Hitchens, Christopher. The Trial of Henry Kissinger. New York: Twelve, 2012 (Verso, 2002).
• Kiernan, Ben “The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969-1973,” Vietnam Generation, 1, 1989 (Winter): 4-41.
• O’Donnell, Patrick S. The Vietnam War (or, ‘the American War in Vietnam): a select bibliography.
• Russell, Bertrand. War Crimes in Vietnam. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009 (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1967).
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. On Genocide (and a summary of the evidence and the judgments of the International War Crimes Tribunal by El Kaïm Sartre). Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968.
• Shawcross, William. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. New York: Simon & Schuster, revised ed., 1987.
• Tanaka, Yuki and Marilyn B. Young, eds. Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History. New York: The New Press, 2009.
• “Indochina … is a geographical term originating in the early nineteenth century and referring to the continental portion of the region now known as Southeast Asia. The name refers to the lands historically within the cultural influence of India and China, and physically bound by the Indian Subcontinent in the west and China in the north. It corresponds to the present-day areas of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and (variably) peninsular Malaysia and Singapore. The term was later adopted as the name of the colony of French Indochina (today’s Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), and the entire area of Indochina is now usually referred to as the Indochinese Peninsula or Mainland Southeast Asia.”

This is also available on my Academia page.

Manafort's Silence

Jennifer Rubin reports in today's Washington Post that "Paul Manafort's lawyers rested their case without allowing their client to take the stand . . ."   In an important respect, that is not true. Lawyers cannot prevent their client from testifying, and surely they did not do so here. Lawyers can advise the client not to testify, but the decision whether to testify or not is squarely within the client's authority.

Paul Manafort decided not to testify. I am not suggesting this was a mistake. His chances of being convicted would surely have increased if he had. Opening himself to cross examination by a prosecutor would have been a form of legal madness. 

Prosecutors are not permitted to comment on a defendant's failure to take the stand, and juries are legally foreclosed from drawing an inference from that failure.  Juries are ordinarily quite good about trying to follow instructions, but it is hard for a jury to ignore a defendant's silence. 

U.S. “Space Force” Proposal and The Weaponization of Outer Space

Mike Dorf at his blog today:

“Last week, Vice President Pence announced the creation of a ‘Space Command,’ a first step towards what President Trump hopes to obtain from Congress: a ‘Space Force’ as a full-fledged new branch of the military to take its place alongside the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard. Despite the appeal of a Space Force to pre-adolescent boys whose mommies and/or daddies tuck them into Star Wars-themed blankets (and to a president whose emotional age matches the youngest of these boys), a Space Force is a terrible idea.”

I agree. Mike’s post, however, is not about international law and the weaponization of space (distinguishable to some extent from the ‘militarization’ of space, which has already taken place) but rather asks the question, “Would a Space Force be constitutional?” I’ll leave the possible answers to that question to Mike and his colleagues who are experts on constitutional law. Here I simply want to introduce some material relevant to the international law questions:

“The fact that a large number of States have been calling for the adoption of a treaty on the prevention of an arms race in space for decades now, and more recently with renewed vigour, demonstrates the international community’s belief that the existing legal regime is inadequate for halting the encroaching militarization of space. This should serve as a reason to re-examine what existing space law actually has to say on this issue. [….]

The peculiar circumstances which gave birth to the entire branch of international space law imply that the international community saw a chance for a new beginning in the ascendance of mankind to the stars. It was this perception that brought about the prohibition of claims of sovereignty on celestial objects, or the obligation to help astronauts regardless of their national origin. The same is true when it comes to mandating the ‘peaceful uses of outer space.’ Militarization should be seen as antithetical to the inspired goals and ideals set by space law treaties.

While many scholars would conclude that ‘the final frontier’ is increasingly militarized, the law clearly places a number of limits on the military activities of States in outer space. The ‘pacifist’ approach to the law is therefore more than just idealism. But simply interpreting the law is not enough. International law provides a framework for any scientific, commercial or even military activities in space. As such, it can restrict specific activities, but it may not direct them. The latter remains primarily the domain of policy. If the exploration of space is truly to provide humanity with a chance to start over, it needs to be guided by the principles of true equality, solidarity and cooperation between all States — and they exclude all forms of militarism.”—Pavle Kilibarda

(Pavle Kilibarda holds a LL.M. from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. He previously worked at the ICRC’s legal training sector, the UNHCR office in Belgrade and the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, engaging principally with the legal position of refugees and asylum-seekers in Serbia.)

Please see the material at the Union of Concerned Scientists website.

See too the introductory analysis by Kilibarda (above) on the IRC’s blog on Humanitarian Law & Policy (in chronological order):

• “Space law revisited (1/3): The notion of ‘peaceful uses’ and the Outer Space Treaty”
• “Space law revisited (2/3): Are weapons of mass destruction prohibited in space?”
• “Space law revisited (3/3): The regime of international liability in space”

Nondisclosure Agreements (NDAs) & Public Officials (updated)

“President Trump appeared to acknowledge on Monday something his aides have declined to confirm for months: that his White House had aides sign nondisclosure agreements. The president made the statement in a post on Twitter about Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former contestant on ‘The Apprentice’ who became an assistant to the president, and whose new book makes unflattering claims about Mr. Trump and his family.

‘Wacky Omarosa already has a fully signed Non-Disclosure Agreement!’ Mr. Trump tweeted, using the type of moniker he often deploys against people who say disparaging things about him. For months, officials in the West Wing have refused to confirm reports by The New York Times and other news outlets that aides were ordered to sign nondisclosure agreements, which legal experts say are essentially unenforceable for government employees.” — Maggie Haberman in The New York Times, August 13, 2018

*           *           *

“A non-disclosure agreement (NDA), also known as a confidentiality agreement (CA), confidential disclosure agreement (CDA), proprietary information agreement (PIA) or secrecy agreement (SA), is a legal contract between at least two [private] parties that outlines confidential material, knowledge, or information that the parties wish to share with one another for certain purposes, but wish to restrict access to or by third parties. It is a contract through which the parties agree not to disclose information covered by the agreement. An NDA creates a confidential relationship between the parties to protect any type of confidential and proprietary information or trade secrets. As such, an NDA protects non-public business information.”

Apart from those in the corporate world, the most common forms of these NDAs involve “doctor–patient confidentiality (physician–patient privilege), attorney–client privilege, priest–penitent privilege, and bank–client confidentiality agreements.”

Government officials and political office holders are bound by oaths, moral obligations and legal and constitutional duties,* not private contracts; they are not and should not be parties to NDAs, for the public realm is distinguished in fundamental and thus significant ways from the “private” realm and corporate sector, even if these two realms necessarily overlap and affect each other (as in the relations between civil society and the State). Justice in the case of officials and office holders involves justice as a personal and professional obligation as well as a constitutional imperative. Legal officials and political office holders at local, state, and national levels routinely make decisions, policies and act in their official capacity on matters that are basic to our individual and collective security, welfare, and well-being as these come to be historically understood and constitutionally defined in a democratic polity. The power they hold and wield is in the nature of a (revocable) trust, hence it is a question of trusteeship. The moral obligations to which they are subject and the political power with which they are entrusted, cannot be legally or morally confined within, nor should it be confuse with, the constraints of private party contract formation.

By definition, public officials are not private employees, and Trump’s attempt to bring nondisclosure agreements into the White House effectively effaces this distinction, although it is consistent with the patently absurd belief captured in the Right’s mind-numbing ideological slogan—and Trump’s promise—to “run the government like a business.” I suppose this should not be surprising insofar as we live in a “capitalist democracy” whose governing ethos and motivational mindset is increasingly more capitalist than it is liberal or democratic, its “constitutional goods” overwhelmed by the literal and figurative “goods” of consumption. Even one of our country’s foremost (or at least better known) legal theorists, Cass Sunstein, has succumbed to the “production” side of this positivist and capitalist calculus, arguing that the “bottom line” of public policy should in fact be the bottom line: cost-benefit calculations (‘quantitative cost-benefit analysis’).  

Writing for the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus speaks to the nondisclosure agreements senior staff have signed in the Trump White House:

“In the early months of the administration, at the behest of now-President Trump, who was furious over leaks from within the White House, senior White House staff members were asked to, and did, sign nondisclosure agreements vowing not to reveal confidential information and exposing them to damages for any violation. Some balked at first but, pressed by then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and the White House Counsel’s Office, ultimately complied, concluding that the agreements would likely not be enforceable in any event.

The nondisclosure agreements, said a person who signed the document, ‘were meant to be very similar to the ones that some of us signed during the campaign and during the transition.’ [….] At that time, in February or March of 2017, the source said, ‘There was lots of leaking, things that just weren’t true, and a lot of things that were true and should have remained confidential. The president’s point was that they [staff] would think twice about that if they were on the hook for some serious damages.’

Moreover, said the source, this confidentiality pledge would extend not only after an aide’s White House service but also beyond the Trump presidency. ‘It’s not meant to be constrained by the four years or eight years he’s president — or the four months or eight months somebody works there. It is meant to survive that.’”

Marcus’s reaction, and the attorney she quotes in support of her argument, is one I share and will serve as our conclusion:

“This is extraordinary. Every president inveighs against leakers and bemoans the kiss-and-tell books; no president, to my knowledge, has attempted to impose such a pledge. And while White House staffers have various confidentiality obligations — maintaining the secrecy of classified information or attorney-client privilege, for instance — the notion of imposing a side agreement, supposedly enforceable even after the president leaves office, is not only oppressive but constitutionally repugnant.

Unlike employees of private enterprises such as the Trump Organization or Trump campaign, White House aides have First Amendment rights when it comes to their employer, the federal government. If you have a leaker on your staff, the cure is firing, not suing. ‘This is crazy,’ said attorney Debra Katz, who has represented numerous government whistleblowers and negotiated nondisclosure agreements. ‘The idea of having some kind of economic penalty is an outrageous effort to limit and chill speech. Once again, this president believes employees owe him a personal duty of loyalty, when their duty of loyalty is to the institution [and the constitution!].’”

* Please see, by way of a basic introduction and overview that is nonetheless incomplete, Steve Sheppard’s I Do Solemnly Swear: The Moral Obligations of Legal Officials (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Update: Many thanks to Marcia McCormick who let me know of this interview at NPR’s 1A with Neal Katyal.

Update no. 2: From a Huffington Post article (Aug. 15) by Kurt Bardella:

[....] “In 2012, Congress unanimously passed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA), introduced by the Oversight Committee leadership, to prohibit agencies from implementing or enforcing ‘any non-disclosure policy, form or agreement’ that did not specifically include the following language: ‘These provisions are consistent with and do not supersede, conflict with, or otherwise alter the employee obligations, rights or liabilities created by existing statute or Executive order relating to (1) classified information, (2) communications to Congress, (3) the presorting to an Inspector General of a violation of any law, rule or regulation, or mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety, or (4) any other whistleblower protection….’

Simply put, it is illegal for anyone in the Trump administration to impose a nondisclosure agreement on a member of the federal government that in any way limits that person’s ability to communicate with Congress and expose waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement. Once this bill was signed into law, the federal Office of Special Counsel issued a direct guidance that ‘this statement should be incorporated into every nondisclosure policy, form or agreement used by any agency.’

If the Trump administration failed to incorporate this language in nondisclosure agreements, they are in clear violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act. And it’s not the first time the Trump administration has broken the law on this front.” [....]

Samir Amin (3 September 1931 - 12 August 2018)

”
Samir Amin (Arabic: سمير أمين‎) was an Egyptian-French Marxian economist.

Please see Amin’s article, “Revolution or Decadence? Thoughts on the Transition between Modes of Production on the Occasion of the Marx Bicentennial,” Monthly Review, May 2018 (Vol. 70, No. 1).

*          *          *

“Samir Amin: a vital challenge to dispossession”

By Nick Dearden for Red Pepper, August 13, 2018 [lightly edited]

“Samir Amin (1931-2018) was one of the world’s greatest radical thinkers – a ‘creative Marxist’ who went from Communist activism in Nasser’s Egypt, to advising African socialist leaders like Julius Nyerere to being a leading figure in the World Social Forum. Samir Amin’s ideas were formed in the heady ferment of 1950s and ’60s, when pan-Africanists like Kwamah Nkrumah ran Ghana and Juliuys Nyrere Tanzania, when General Nasser was transforming the Middle East from Amin’s native Egypt and liberation movements thrived from South Africa to Algeria.

Africa looked very different before the International Monetary Fund destroyed what progress had been made towards emancipation and LiveAid created a popular conception of a continent of famine and fecklessness. Yet through these times, Amin’s ideas have continued to shine out, denouncing the inhumanity of contemporary capitalism and empire, but also harshly critiquing movements from political Islam to Eurocentric Marxism and its marginalisation of the truly dispossessed.

Global power

Amin believed that the world capitalism – a rule of oligopolies based in the rich world – maintains its rule through five monopolies – control of technology, access to natural resources, finance, global media, and the means of mass destruction. Only by overturning these monopolies can real progress be made.  This raises particular challenges for those of us who are activists in the North because any change we promote must challenge the privileges of the North vis-à-vis the South. Our internationalism cannot be expressed through a type of humanitarian approach to the global South – that countries in the South need our ‘help to develop.’ For Amin, any form of international work must be based on an explicitly anti-imperialist perspective. Anything else will fail to challenge structure of power – those monopolies which really keep the powerful powerful.

Along with colleagues like Andre Gunder Frank, Amin see the world divided into the ‘centre’ and the ‘peripheries.’ The role of peripheries, those countries we call the global South, is to supply the centres – specifically the ‘Triad’ of North America, Western Europe and Japan – with the means of developing without being able to develop themselves. Most obviously, the exploitation of Africa’s minerals on terms of trade starkly favourable to the centre will never allow African liberation, only continual exploitation.  This flies in the face of so much ‘development thinking,’ which would have you believe that Africa’s problems come from not being properly integrated into the global economy which has grown up over the last 40 years. Amin believes in fact Africa’s problem stem from it being too integrated but in ‘the wrong way.’

In fact, as long as the monopolies of control are intact, countries of the centre have had few problems globalising production since the 1970s. Sweatshop labour now takes place across the periphery but it hasn’t challenged the power of those in the North because of their control of finance, natural resources, the military and so on. In fact, it has enhanced their power by reducing wages and destroying a manufacturing sector that had become a power base for unionised workers.

So there is no point whatever in asking countries of the centre to concede better trading relationships to the peripheries. Amin is also concerned at environmental activism which too often becomes a debate about how countries of the centre manage their control of the world’s resources, rather than challenging that control. It is vital that Northern activists challenge the means through which the ruling class in their own society exerts control over the rest of the world.

De-linking

Of course, this is not just a project for activists in the North – far from it. The theory for which Amin is most famous that of ‘de-linking.’ De-linking means countries of the periphery withdrawing from their exploitative integration in the global economy. In a sense it is de-globalisation, but it is not a form of economic isolation – something which African socialist leaders too readily fell into. Rather it means not engaging in economic relationships from a point of weakness.

Amin argues that Southern countries should develop their economy through various forms of state intervention, control of money flowing in an out of their financial sectors and promoting trading with other Southern countries. Countries must nationalise financial sectors, strongly regulate natural resources, ‘de-link’ internal prices from the world market, and free themselves from control by international institutions like the World Trade Organisation. Whatever problems come with nationalised industries, it is the only possible basis for a genuinely socially controlled economy going forward.

After 30 years of being told that their problems would be solved by exporting more, privatising their natural resources and liberalising their financial sectors, many developing countries would today do well to heed Amin’s advice. Instead, too many countries have bought into a de-politicised narrative which posits ideologically loaded terms like ‘good governance,’ ‘poverty’ and ‘civil society’ carefully disguising questions as to how poverty happened, what interests governance serves, or the legitimacy of organisations claiming to speak on behalf of the dispossessed.

Amin did not believe that the ‘rise’ of China, India and other emerging economies has in any way broken the power of the oligopolies, in fact that power has only become more concentrated. But there have been important changes. Imperialist powers have realised competition between themselves is not helpful and have created a sort of collective imperialism which is expressed through institutions like the WTO and IMF.

Capitalism, ‘a parenthesis in history’

Capitalism is experiencing a profound long-term crisis to which Amin believes it has no solution short of political barbarism. He describes this form of capitalism as ‘senile.’

This crisis is characterised by an increased dependence on finance, which means less and less money is being made from productive activities, and more from simple ‘rent.’ It is a far more direct means of stealing wealth from the majority of the world. The accompanying form of politics means that democracy has been reduced to a farce in which people are spectators in an elite drama – that is when they’re not fulfilling their proper role of consuming.

Capitalism necessarily requires an ongoing process of dispossession so that it can accumulate and continue to expand. Capitalism could not have developed without the European conquest of the world – the availability so many ‘spare’ resources was vital. The safety value for many of those dispossessed from European land was the ‘new world’ which allowed mass emigration – though of course others died in droves, witness the Irish potato famine.

So as much as many of the dispossessed might aspire to the lives of those in advanced capitalist countries, it is simply not possible. Nor can traditional Marxists be correct when they say capitalism is a necessary stage on the path to socialism – a view which Amin describes as ‘Eurocentric.’

Industry cannot incorporate more than a small fraction of humanity, but it does require the resources that that humanity depends upon. So the only way that capitalism can move forward is through the creation of a ‘slum planet’ – a sort of ‘apartheid at the world level.’ Amin sees the dispossession of the peasantry across the peripheral countries will become the central issue of the twenty-first century.

This is one reason why Amin see the role of the peasantry in the South – almost half of humanity after all – as key to determining the future. The strength of movements around food sovereignty, against land grabbing and supporting the rights of indigenous peoples, give support to this theory. But for Amin, agriculture is not merely a big opportunity; the existence of the peasantry presents capitalism with an insurmountable challenge.

Amin believes the road to socialism depends on reversing this trend of dispossession meaning, at national and regional levels, protecting local agricultural production, ensuring countries’ have food sovereignty and de-linking internal prices from world commodity markets. This would stop the dispossession of peasants and their exodus into the towns. Only this revolution in the way the land is seen, treated and access can lay the basis for a new society. This also means ditching the idea of ‘growth’ as it is spoken about today and by which all world economies are judged, which really benefits only a minority of the world population. The rest of humanity is ‘abandoned to stagnation, if not pauperization.’

The long road to socialism

Perhaps this makes Samir Amin sounds rather idealistic in his approach, but this is far from true. Amin explicitly rejects the idea of a ‘24 hour revolution’ – a single insurrectionary act which ushers in a period of socialism. Indeed he accepts there may well be a need to use private, even international capital, in order to diversify Southern economies. The important thing is control. For this reason Amin also refuses to use the phrase ‘socialism of the 21st century’ focusing on the need for ‘the long route of the transition to socialism.’

But that’s not to say there have not been significant victories. Interestingly, Amin is less interested in developments in Latin America, which he believes contain risks of repeating the mistakes of many national liberation movements on the 1950s and 60s in becoming a form of ‘popular statism.’ Amin is more interested in Nepal as a possible future model to look towards. He also sees the Chinese revolution as an incredibly significant event in directly challenging the basis of capitalism and in the struggle for democratic socialism, most especially in its ‘abolition of the private property of land’ and the formation of powerful communes and collectives.

Amin’s somewhat romantic view of the Chinese revolution is certainly challenging to Western sensibilities, but his underlying view that the formation of democracy must go beyond a narrow political project, and that peasants – and especially women – through collective organisations, might be better placed than Western individualists to define a really progressive vision of democracy needs to be properly taken on board by activists.” [….] (A version of this article was first published in December 2011.)

The remainder of this piece is found here.                

Important New Book on Impeaching Donald Trump

As a member of the Legal Advisory Board of Impeach Donald Trump Now, I am pleased to announce the release of a new book The Constitution Demands It: The Case For The Impeachment of Donald Trump.  Written by a trio of veteran constitutional attorneys from Free Speech For People, Ron Fein, our Legal Director; John Bonifaz, our President; and Ben Clements, our Board Chair; with a foreword by John Nichols, the national affairs correspondent for The Nation, The Constitution Demands It presents the legal and constitutional case against Trump, and provides a guide for Congress to launch impeachment proceedings.

This book will be in Barnes & Noble stores and independent bookstores across the country on Tuesday, August 14.  You could go to your local bookstore or go on Amazon and buy a copy (or 10!). The more books we sell in the first week, the more likely we’ll attract national attention and maximize pressure on Congress to act in the defense of our Constitution and our democracy. 

You can learn more about the book or find a retailer here. For Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Demands-Impeachment-Donald-Trump/dp/1612197639/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1534082393&sr=8-1&keywords=the+constitution+demands+it

Toward a “Realist” Political Psychology: Suggested Reading

Introduction & Apology

By “realist” I mean something roughly similar to the way Hilary Putnam used this term in his later work (hence its ‘pragmatist’ quality), and the sort of psychology I have in mind can be psychoanalytic, humanistic, or existential, that is, psychology that is particularly sensitive to what is called philosophical anthropology. By “philosophical anthropology” is intended in large part an appreciation of the psychological dimensions of human nature that, after P.M.S. Hacker, is broader in coverage than what is typically treated in philosophy of mind or philosophical psychology. What is more, this psychology is in no way confined or beholden to so-called scientific (or ‘academic’) psychology, be it behaviorist, experimentalist, empiricist (in a post-positivist sense), or cognitive, which does not mean it need be utterly dismissive of such psychology. The late Ilham Dilman termed our realist psychology, “thoughtful” psychology, in the sense that it accords “[pride of] place to reflection on human life—a life which offers the possibility of autonomy to human beings, a life in which human beings find their individuality.” With Dilman, I believe there is much in Freud’s corpus that transcends both his scientism and focus on “psychopathology” (although the former is more troubling for me than the latter), thus Freudian (and post-Freudian) psychology, in the right hands, might be seen as both realist and thoughtful. Revealing the principal concerning assumption of experimental psychology, Dilman reminds us that “it is in his mode of being that a person is moral; it is that which gives his behaviour its moral character. Experimental psychology seems to have no recognition of this.”

Insofar as scientific psychology seeks knowledge that is impersonal, general, inductive, and theoretical (i.e., reductionist) it is neither realistic in Putnam’s sense nor truly human in the manner in which this makes reference to philosophical anthropology. Insofar as scientific psychology strives to place psychology on par with other natural sciences, we begin to understand its recent infatuation with the neurosciences and the extravagant claims made on behalf of evolutionary psychology. Its distance from realism is further evidenced in its skeptical disenchantment with or outright disavowal of so-called folk psychology (or folk-psychological ‘theory of mind’!), a stance it shares with more than a few influential philosophers in the philosophy of mind.

While Jon Elster is highly critical of psychoanalytic psychology, the following comment from his Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999), likewise alerts us to a characteristic, symptomatic, and conspicuous shortcoming of scientific psychology:

“… [W]ith respect to an important subset of the emotions we can learn more from moralists, novelists, and playwrights than from the cumulative findings of scientific psychology. These emotions include regret, relief, hope, disappointment, shame, guilt, pridefulness, pride, hybris, envy, jealousy, malice, pity, indignation, wrath, hatred, contempt, joy, grief, and romantic love. By contrast, the scientific study of the emotions can teach us a great deal about anger, fear, disgust, parental love, and sexual desire (if we count the last two as emotions). [….] I believe … that prescientific insights into the emotion are not simply superseded by modern psychology in the way that natural philosophy has been superseded by physics. Some men and women in the past have been superb students of human nature, with more wide-ranging personal experience, better powers of observation, and deeper intuitions than almost any psychologist I can think of. This is only what we should expect: There is no reason why one century out of twenty-five should have a privilege in wisdom and understanding. In the case of physics, this argument does not apply.”

Well before Adorno, et al. published The Authoritarian Personality (W.W. Norton & Co., 1950), Erich Fromm and his colleagues conducted pioneering research in the late 1920s at the Frankfurt Institute on the “character structure” of the Weimar working class, which was not published in English until 1984 (see the full reference below). Daniel Burston is apropos:

… [T]he fact that Fromm’s study was not published until after his death had notable scientific consequences. For notwithstanding the horrors of Stalinism, the ‘F-scale’ designed by Nevitt Sanford and Daniel Levenson to measure pro-fascist tendencies seemed to involve a tacit equation between right-leaning sympathies and authoritarianism, on the one hand, and left-leaning views and ‘democratic’ trends on the other, ignoring the ‘authoritarianism of the left.’ Although it is possible to understand both the motives that obstructed the initial publication of Fromm’s study and Americans’ ignorance of it, the apparent inability or refusal of Horkheimer and Adorno to take cognizance of Fromm’s findings about the authoritarianism of the left [that is to say, workers who voted left or identified with leftist social programs, nonetheless displayed character traits and beliefs that were rather authoritarian, helping to account for the subsequent fact that more than a few members of the working-class Left soon identified with the fascist National Socialists (Nazism)], and to alert their colleagues [at the Frankfurt Institute] to design their study and instruments accordingly, is both odd and reprehensible.”

I am not an expert on this subject matter (although I’ve had a longstanding ardent avocational interest), so the following merely reflects what I’ve found helpful (or at least suggestive, in other words, some of the titles have indirect implications for political psychology). I’ve left out most of the titles that treat Marxist ideology with some psychological sophistication and nuance, as those are found in my bibliography on Marxism.

• Alford, C. Fred. Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory (Yale University Press, 1989).
• Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005).
• Balbus, Isaac D. Mourning and Modernity: Essays in the Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society (Other Press, 2005).
• Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (Pantheon Books, 1988).
• Bion, Wilfred R. Experience in Groups (Tavistock, 1961).
• Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991). See, especially, the respective chapters, “Studies in Social Character,” and “Consensus, Conformity, and False Consciousness: ‘The Pathology of Normalcy,’” pp. 98-158.
• Coady, C.A.J. Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Cohen, Stanely. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
• Danto, Elizabeth Ann. Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918-1938 (Columbia University Press, 2005).
• Dilman, Ilham. Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil (Open Court, 2000).
• Elster, Jon. Political Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
• Fontana, Benedetto, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, eds. Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
• Fromm, Erich (Barbara Weinberger, tr. and Wolfgang Bonss, ed.) The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study (Harvard University Press, 1984).
• Garsten, Bryan. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Gorringe, Timothy. God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018).
• Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Hinshelwood, R.D. What Happens in Groups: Psychoanalysis, the Individual, and the Community (Free Association Books, 1987).
• Iyer, Raghavan. Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979).
• Kakar, Sudhir. The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2^nd, 1981.
• Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
• Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Lichtman, Richard. The Production of Desire: The Integration of Psychoanalysis into Marxist Theory (Free Press, 1982).
• Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Beacon Press, 1966 [1955].
• Miller, William Ian. Faking It (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Reich, Wilhelm (Vincent R. Carfagno, tr.) The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 3rd ed., 1970).
• Robinson, Paul. The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse (Cornell University Press, 1990 ed.)
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988), in particular, the four chapters in the section, “Community as the Context of Character,” pp. 269-345.
• Rustin, Michael. The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture (Verso, 1991).
• Tomŝiĉ, Samo. The Capitalist Unconscious (Verso, 2015).
• Whitebook, Joel. Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (MIT Press, 1995).
• Wolfenstein, Eugene Victor. The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (Free Association Books, 1989).
• Wolfenstein, Eugene Victor. Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork (Free Association Books/Guilford Press, 1993).
• Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, 1989).

(This compilation is also available on my Academia page.)

David Brooks and Justice Kennedy

Much of the discussion about the possible elevation of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has centered on whether Roe v. Wade would be overturned. In fact, as Justice Blackmun emphasized in Planed Parenthood v. Casey, Roe has already been partially overturned. But the Court in Casey affirmed what it characterized as the central holding of Roe. Specifically, it recognized that states could not criminalize a women’s decision to have a pre-viability abortion, and it declared that a state could criminalize post-viability abortions except those that endangered the life or health of the mother.

David Brooks has previously been sharply criticized for his views on abortion (see here.)(Brooks’s views) and https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/06/opinions/who-david-brooks-leaves-out-of-his-abortion-argument-drexler/index.html and https://medium.com/planned-parenthood-action-fund/a-memo-in-response-to-the-abortion-memo-e344609f2b57

The criticisms, particularly the Planned Parenthood response, strongly suggest that Brooks's published views are disturbingly ignorant. Recently, Brooks launched an attack on Justice Kennedy for remarks made in Casey. Ironically, the remarks that drew the fire of Brooks were authored by Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter and joined by Justices Stevens and Blackmun. From his column you would think that Justice Kennedy had engaged in a flight of his own (as opposed to likely have written the first draft of the portion of the opinion Brooks attempts to savage).

The Court in Casey argued, that the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment (no state shall deny life, liberty, or property without due process of law) despite its wording did not simply assure process in a narrow sense, but directed that legislatures did not have the power to violate fundamental human rights. If a legislature does so, it employs a power it does not have (thus an unfair process) or alternatively, as the Court said in Casey, the due process clause has a substantive dimension. So, a prohibition on interracial marriage violates due process and so does a law prohibiting the possession or use of contraceptives.  The Court said that carrying a child to term involves anxieties, physical constraints, and pain that the state could not require without strong justification.

In discussing the liberty right in general, the majority opinion said, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Whatever the strength of the state’s justification for regulating abortion and whatever the relation of the Court’s conception of the heart of liberty to abortion, one might think the right is obvious. Determining the meaning of existence, of the universe, and of human life is central to freedom of religion and central to the freedom of atheists and agnostics.

But David Brooks uses this passage to attack Justice Kennedy. What’s wrong with this right? According to Brooks, it is too individualistic. According to Brooks, to believe in this right is to believe that we are monads, that we come to our most fundamental views independent of family, social roles, oppression, and culture. To believe in this right is to deny the existence of truth; instead there are only concepts. It leaves human beings with the impossible task of determining the meaning of existence without contact with the resources of our history and culture. And, if culture disappears, government must intrusively intervene to restrain the anarchistic desires generated by an entirely individualistic society.

These criticisms might be apt if Justice Kennedy had supposed that those who exercised the right to determine the meaning of the universe would do so wholly independent of friends, family, history, and culture. But neither Justice Kennedy, nor the Court in Casey made no such supposition. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Justice Kennedy ever believed anything quite so stupid. Indeed, in Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Kennedy stressed that the right to gay marriage was in significant part justified by the right of association, by the right of families and children. Justice Kennedy obviously does not conceive of society as composed of unrelated monads.

Having previously paraded his ignorance on abortion, David Brooks now has sloppily launched a foolish attack on a statement not made in Casey.  Brooks can be expected to publish disagreeable views. But Justice Kennedy recently served his last day after a long career. One would have hoped that Brooks would have published a more responsible column on Justice Kennedy. Columnists do well when they provoke. When their provocation is rooted in sloppy analysis, they are falling down on the job.

John Dewey at his Marxian and democratic best

Hilary Putnam shares a passage from John Dewey at his Marxian and democratic best:

“Dewey’s social philosophy is not simply a restatement of classical liberalism; for, as Dewey says, the real fallacy of classical liberalism [a fallacy which persists with vengeance in neoliberalism]

‘lies in the notion that individuals have such a native or original endowment of rights, powers, and wants that all that is required on the side of institutions and laws is to eliminate the obstructions they offer to the ‘free’ play of the natural equipment of individuals [if you will, the ‘libertarian fallacy’]. The removal of obstructions did have a liberating effect upon such individuals [e.g., the bourgeoisie and the nobility, including declassed aristocrats, with some trickle down and spillover effects on some members of the lower classes] as were antecedently possessed of the means, intellectual and economic, to take advantage of the changed social conditions, but left all others at the mercy of the new social conditions brought about by the free powers of those advantageously situated. The notion that men are equally free to act if only the same legal arrangements apply equally to all—irrespective of differences in education, and command of capital, and that control of the social environment which is furnished by the institution of property—is a pure absurdity, as facts have demonstrated. Since actual, that is, effective, rights and demands are products of interactions and are not found in the original and isolated constitution of human nature, whether moral or psychological, mere elimination of obstructions is not enough. The latter merely liberates force and ability as it happens to be distributed by past accidents of history. The ‘free’ action operates disastrously as far as the many are concerned. The only possible conclusion, both intellectually and practically, is that the attainment of freedom conceived as a power to act in accord with choice turns upon positive and constructive changes in social arrangements.’

We too often forget that Dewey was a radical democrat, not a radical scoffer at ‘bourgeois democracy.’ For Dewey the democracy that we have is not something to be spurned, but also not something to be satisfied with. The democracy that we have is an emblem of what could be. What could be is a society which develops the capacities of all its men and women to think for themselves, to participate in the design and testing of social policies, and to judge results.” — From Putnam’s Renewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1992): 199.

Hilary (Whitehall) Putnam on Ludwig (Josef Johann) Wittgenstein

 

“ … I think [Wittgenstein] gives us an example of how philosophical reflection can be something other than creating new tempests in old teapots, or of finding new teapots to create tempests in. At its best, philosophical reflection can give us an unexpectedly honest and clear look at our own situation, not a ‘view from nowhere’ but a view through the eyes of one or another wise, flawed, deeply individual human being. If Wittgenstein wants to make a bonfire of our philosophical vanities [e.g., the desire for metaphysical certainty or the quest for metaphysical foundations, or the alienated ‘attitudes’ incarnate in relativistic ‘escape’ or hard (or constitutional) skepticism], this is not a matter of sheer intellectual sadism; if I am reading Wittgenstein correctly, those vanities, in his view, are what keep us from trust, and, perhaps even more important, keep us from compassion.” From the concluding paragraph of Putnam’s chapter, “Wittgenstein on Reference and Relativism,” in his book (which ‘grew out of the Gifford Lectures’ delivered in 1990 at the University of St. Andrews), Renewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1992): 178-79.

Dewey on non-paternalistic, democratic self-liberation (individual and collective)

I just read, in Hilary Putnam’s Renewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1992), this wonderfully incisive passage on non-paternalistic (i.e., democratic) liberation (my description)* by John Dewey, penned in his deceptively simple yet refreshing prose:

“The conception of community good may be clarified by reference to attempts of those in fixed positions of superiority to confer good upon others. History shows us that there have been benevolent despots who wish to bestow blessings on others. They have not succeeded, except when their actions have taken the indirect form of changing the conditions under which those live who are disadvantageously placed. The same principle holds of reformers and philanthropists when they try to do good to others in way which leave passive those to be benefited. There is a moral tragedy inherent in efforts to further the common good which prevent the result from being either good or common—not good, because it is at the expense of the active growth of those to be helped, and not common because these have no share in bringing the result about. The social welfare can be advanced only by means which elicit the positive interest and active energy of those to be benefited or ‘improved.’ The traditional notion of the great man, of the hero, works harm. It encourages the idea that some ‘leader’ is to show the way; others are to follow in imitation. It takes time to arouse minds from apathy and lethargy, to get them to thinking for themselves, to share in making plans, to take part in their execution. But without active cooperation both in forming aims and in carrying them out there is no possibility of a common good.”

* Think, in their respectively unique ways and with their variegated yet often overlapping strategies and methods, of: M.K. Gandhi; B.R. Ambedkar; Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and the Catholic Worker Movement; the Black Panther Party; many principled anarchists and some communist individuals and groups; the Comunidades Eclesiales de Base (CEBs) in South and Central America; the Highlander Folk School; SNCC; Anne Braden; the SDS’s Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP); the Dodge Revolutionary Movement; the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; Paulo Freire; George Padmore; Ella Baker; Steve Biko; the South African Congress of Trade Unions; those groups and organizations participation in the United Democratic Front (South Africa); La Raza Unida; the Brown Berets (numerous other individuals and groups might have been cited, the list being for illustrative purposes and limited to what quickly came to mind)….

Islam, the Arts, and Aesthetic Experience: A Basic Bibliography

My latest bibliography is on “Islam, the Arts, and Aesthetic Experience.”

This compilation began as a section in my Islamic Studies bibliography. I am updating sections of that rather large list and posting them as discrete bibliographies (Sufism was the first of such). The adjective “basic” is warranted for several reasons, one of which is intended to indicate that this list is far from comprehensive, let alone exhaustive. Two constraints remain conspicuous: books, in English.