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Illustrating one aspect of morality regarding Allied aerial bombing in WW II: The case of Dresden

Responsibility for a direct wrongdoing is not diluted simply because there are more people doing it. — Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin

General Background—

“As in World War I, at the beginning of World War II, both Britain and Germany initially refrained from aerial attacks on civilians. However, in a repeat scenario, both sides deliberately increased their revenge bombing of civilian quarters in major cities following inaccurate bombings of military targets. The German forces conducted Operation Blitz for almost nine months from September 1940, attacking London, Conventry, Birmingham, Manchester, and many other English cities, killing 60,000 civilians and destroying more than 2 million homes. On September 11, 1940, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that this aerial bombing operation would be decisive in forcing the British government to surrender.

In revenge, the RAF [British Royal Air Force] started night raids on industrial cities in the Ruhr region in October 1940. However, aerial attacks on German civilians really expanded in February 1942 when Arthur Harris took over the RAF Bomber Command. Lübeck, a cultural city with no military importance, became the first target of Harris’s new strategy, ‘area bombing.’ Cologne was then attacked with more than 1,000 planes. Other cities, such as Essen, Kiel, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Rostock, and Berlin, were also targeted. In February 1943, Harris pronounced that the morale of the German population in the bombed areas had reached an all-time low and that, if the RAF continued bombing, surrender could be expected in the very near future. Night raids continued on many German cities, including Hamburg, where 7,000 tons of bombs were dropped and about 45,000 people were killed. Yet there was no sign of surrender by the Nazi regime.

The RAF then began to target Berlin, bombing the city sixteen times between November 1943 and March 1944, while continuing to bomb other German cities. Still Harris’s expectation of Nazi surrender was not fulfilled. On the contrary, the Germans started employing new weapons of indiscriminate killing—V-1 and V-2 rockets. More than 9,500 V-1 rockets were launched killing about 6,200 people. About 1,100 V-2 rockets reached various parts of England, killing 2,700 and injuring 6,500 people. Claiming again that the Germans were on the verge of a collapse in morale, Harris stepped up aerial attacks. In February 1945, the Bomber Command flew 17,500 sorties and dropped 47,750 tons on German cities. Between February 13 and 15, Dresden was heavily bombed for the first time by the RAF, this time together with the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF). During the fourteen-hour raid, massive quantities of incendiaries burned large areas of this city, which housed no military facility, and killed an estimated 25,00 to 30,000 people [the figure was probably closer to 35,000 people].

The USAAF, led by Ira Eaker, entered the bombing campaign in Europe in August 1942. Despite repeated requests to join in low-altitude night bombing, the USAAF adhered to its traditional strategy, i.e., so-called precision bombing in daylight from a high altitude, using the Norden bombsight. In reality, ‘precision bombing’ was a euphemism, as the bombs regularly fell at least a quarter mile from the target. It is not surprising, therefore, that the USAAF killed not only German civilians, but also many Allied civilians of German-occupied cities such as Paris, Nantes, Lille, Lorient, and Amsterdam. From November 1943, U.S. bombers started ‘blind bombing,’ by which was meant that advances in radar technology would enable even a blind bombardier to accurately hit the desired target. In fact, due to technical limitations, the bombing became yet more random and indiscriminate. Eaker shared the optimism of Arthur Harris that the British and U.S. cooperative bombing campaign was destroying German morale. Dissatisfied with the results of precision bombing by the 8^th U.S. Bomber command, however, General Henry Arnold reorganized the USAAF in Europe and set up the United States Strategic Air Forces in December 1943. Eaker was demoted, and Carl Spaartz became head of the USSF.

U.S. strategy moved steadily from precision bombing to blind bombing throughout the years 1943 to 1945, i.e., to bombing that was increasingly indiscriminate in practice. In the four months between September 1 and December 31, 1944, the USSF dropped more than 140,000 tons of bombs on ‘major targets,’ 60 percent of them in blind bombing. Only 674 tons were used for precision bombing in the strict sense. Blind bombing increased to 80 percent of the entire U.S. bombing campaign between October 1944 and the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. In February 1945, U.S. forces, together with the RAF, conducted Operation Clarion, in which numerous German towns and villages were bombed from a low altitude in order to demoralize the populace. It was an operation totally devoid of tactical value. In short, U.S. air attacks in Europe had become mostly ‘area bombing,’ with no serious attempt to limit damage to military targets. [….]

… [B]y the end of the war, 131 German towns and cities had been bombed, and approximately 600,000 German civilians had been killed by ‘strategic bombing.’”

Dresden—

“… [In early 1944 the British Air Ministry conceived of a plan code-named Thunderclap], aimed at saturating the core of Berlin with so many bombs that the raid would utterly destroy the administrative center of Germany and at the same time make an indelible impression on millions of people nearby who would witness the attack, which was to be made in daylight. American aircraft, using precision bombsights, were to concentrate 5,000 tons of bombs in two hours in a two-and-a-half-mile area. This would be followed by a British area attack. Bomber Command expected the operation to kill or seriously injure about 275,000 persons and might even precipitate German collapse—or so it was hoped. [….] The Thunderclap proposal elicited considerable controversy among lower-ranking AAF officers in the United States Strategic Air Force (USSTAF), especially among a group of intelligence officers who questioned the morality of what one of them called ‘baby killing schemes.’ [….]

On February 3, 1945, General Spaatz sent 900 B-17s to attack Berlin. In less than an hour, the AAF dropped more than 6,000 high-explosive bombs, 1,000 air mines, and about the same number of incendiary canisters. This raid killed somewhat fewer than 3,000 people, and it did not produce the result that Thunderclap’s planners desired, for it did not push Germany over the brink. It did not become the best-remembered operation of the European war. That distinction went to the fire raid on Dresden, capital of Saxony.

Dresden was a great cultural center with magnificent buildings and artworks, relatively undamaged by previous bombing. Like Coventry, it contained several military targets, including a Zeiss Ikon optical factor and numerous workshops scattered among its streets, many converted from civilian production, that manufactured items used in the German military machine. How aware the Allies were of these shops is uncertain but, whether the Allies knew it or not, Dresden’s economy was woven into the Nazi system of war making and extermination. What chiefly made it a target were its railroad installations, used by tens of thousands of citizens to escape the advance of the Soviet army. [….]

On February 13-14, 1945, two waves of British planes, dropping hundreds of thousands of high-explosive and incendiary bombs, burned out the core of Dresden. They were followed by AAF bombers that sought to attack the marshaling yard, dropping 296 tons of incendiaries and nearly 475 tons of general general-purpose bombs, often bombing blind through the smoke rising from the firestorm that had been created. Fire and explosions, flying debris, suffocation, and toxic gases killed tens of thousands of inhabitants, most of them women, children, and the elderly. While the number of deaths was nowhere near the number killed in Tokyo, a few weeks later, or in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the death toll was nearly as great as in Hamburg, although Hamburg’s population had been much larger.

The bombing of Dresden, known for its beauty and cultural monuments, proved highly embarrassing to people in the British and American governments. For some reason, the censors passed on an Associated Press cable, based on a British press briefing that described the February 13-14 fire raid as a decision ‘to adopt deliberate terror bombing of great German population centers.’ A few weeks afterward, Prime Minister Churchill, who on January 25 had encouraged the RAF to ‘baste’ the Germans fleeing the Russian offensive, tried to insert into the record on March 28 a document questioning area attacks and urging the British military chiefs to concentrate more precisely on military objectives ‘rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction.’ Although he had clearly encouraged the area attacks against east German cities, Churchill argued in this note that ‘the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.’ [….]

The incineration of Dresden was intended as an act of terror. It represented in part an attitude that the German people needed to have the deepest horrors of war ‘brought home’ to them, that they had not been sufficiently touched by the effects of World War I, which ended before ordinary Germans could experience what it was like to be invaded.”

The above material is from a couple of chapters in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History (The New Press, 2009).

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The firebombing of Dresden to illustrate a few moral principles (in other words, what follows is far from dealing with the actual and possible moral principles that arise in this case, let alone the laws of war or international humanitarian law [IHL])—

 “The notion of ‘counterfactual individual difference-making’ can … help in dispelling many mysteries sometimes surrounding ‘causation by many hands’ [and ‘causal over-determination’ generally]. Take the case of the firebombing of Dresden. Hundreds of planes were involved in the bombing, contributing to the deaths of 35,000 people. But because of the huge number of contributory actions, it is tempting to regard each pilot’s contribution to the outcome as vanishingly small—so small that we might be tempted to assume the outcome would have been the same had any one of the pilots been sick on that day and unable to fly.

In ordinary bombings, even if each pilot’s bombs contributed only a little bit, the contribution of each will have been made the outcome that much worse than it would have been otherwise. Usually, some people who died from this pilot’s bomb would not have died from anyone else’s bombs, for example.

But let’s focus on one particular feature of the Dresden case that might seem to bracket that thought. In Dresden it was the firestorm that was responsible for the vast majority of deaths, and a firestorm can only be ignited by the detonation of a great many bombs simultaneously. In that respect, especially, we might be tempted to think that no particular pilot was causally an individual difference-maker. No single pilot could ignite a firestorm with his own bombs alone. A firestorm can only occur, let us imagine, when 1,000 bombs are detonated within 10 metres and within 2 seconds of one another. Still, the counterfactual difference-maker point remains. There is some suitably nearby possible world [thinking in modal terms] in which it is true of any given pilot that is flying in a squadron with others who have only 999 bombs on board, and had he not dropped his own bombs the firestorm would not have occurred. The contribution of each (and indeed, of all) is thus potentially essential to the firestorm occurring.

Notice, however, that there is another way to think about the Dresden case. We could think of it instead in constitutive terms, as an instance of a consolidated wrongdoing. Thinking along those lines, the actions of the pilots all taken together constituted the firebombing …. True, their actions together ‘caused’ the firestorm—the outcome—just as we have been saying. But it could also be said that the pilots’ actions, taken together, ‘constituted’ the firebombing—the act that was wrong.” — Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin, On Complicity & Compromise (Oxford University Press, 2013): 64-65.

Facets of Criminal Procedure in a Constitutional Democracy

Prominent criminal lawyer Edward Bennett Williams once noted that, like other criminal lawyers, he took on difficult case for unpopular clients, ‘not because of my own wishes, but because of the unwritten law that I might not refuse.’ — Abbe Smith and Monroe H. Freedman, in the preface to their edited volume, How Can You Represent Those People? (2013)

Defense attorneys are frequently asked the ‘cocktail party’ question: ‘how can you represent those people?’ Prosecutors are rarely asked, ‘how can you prosecute those people?’ It’s a good question—and maybe harder to answer, in many respects, than the defense attorney question. It is interesting that we do not demand the same moral accountability from prosecutors that we do from defense attorneys they have chosen. — Paul Butler in the Smith and Freedman edited volume (above)

In a free society, it is vital that there be a counter to the overwhelming power of government, because it is a power that can be easily abused by those who wield that power, individuals who may be more interested in advancing their own ambitions, venting their own hatreds, and satisfying their own prejudices, than they are in respecting our rights and even protecting society. In representing ‘those people,’ therefore, even those who have committed the worse crimes against other people and against society, the criminal defense lawyer serves each of us by curbing official abuse and preserving the fundamental values of a free society. Vital though criminal defense is, it can also be grueling. In addition to what is at stake in representing the accused—frequently the client’s inhumane imprisonment, and sometimes even the client’s [possible or imminent] death—criminal lawyers also have to deal with public scorn that can go beyond the familiar ‘cocktail party question.’ As Clarence Darrow noted, ‘You must learn to endure criticism and to be callous to spiteful remarks.’ — Monroe H. Freedman in the Smith and Freedman volume (above)

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§ 94. “The person charged is entitled to have the assistance of a defence counsel of his own choice at every stage of the case. He shall be so informed. The court may allow the person charged to have his defence conducted by more than one counsel.” — From Norway’s Criminal Procedure Act of 1981.

At The Faculty Lounge blog back in 2011, Bridget Crawford posted on the lawyer who agreed to represent Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian suspect who apparently had confessed to the bombing in downtown Oslo and the shooting spree that soon followed at the island summer camp, terrorist acts that claimed the lives of 76 individuals. Breivik was convicted of his crimes in July 2012. Crawford transcribed a portion of the interview with his defense counsel, Geir Lippestad, part of which follows:

“For several hours he hesitated and discussed with friends and family whether to defend a man who only hours early had massacred 68 young people on a summer holiday island. But in the end his civic instincts trumped his initial horror. ‘I believe that the legal system is very important in a democracy and someone has to do this job,’ he told reporters this afternoon.”

Some biographical background on Lippestad, whose own political views were worlds away from those of his client (distinct from but perhaps not unrelated to his violent, reactionary right-wing views, Breivik was several times diagnosed with a variety of mental health disorders, the severity of which raised the possibility of his being confined to a psychiatric hospital, upon which he said: ‘I must admit this is the worst thing that could have happened to me as it is the ultimate humiliation. To send a political activist to a mental hospital is more sadistic and evil than to kill him! It is a fate worse than death.’):

“Geir Lippestad (b. 7 June 1964) is a Norwegian lawyer, politician and social activist. He is most known for his involvement in several high-profile legal cases. As a criminal appellate lawyer, he first became known in 2001 when he acted as defense counsel following the murder of Benjamin Hermansen. [He was accorded international recognition as a result of being] “lead counsel for the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, Anders Behring Breivik. [….] He is also noted for being an outspoken proponent of progressive causes, and is the chairman of the left-wing think tank Agenda. [In 2015 he became and remains] a member of the Oslo City Council, representing Labour.”

What immediately follows is my original comment, now lightly edited, to Professor Crawford’s post:

Indeed, and let’s hope people do not draw any inferences about Lippestad based on the charges against his client (as has happened in the case of lawyers who did pro bono work for accused terrorists detained at Guantanamo). Contrary to what some prominent legal ethicists believe, I don’t think lawyers should be praised or blamed for exercising their professional and personal discretion with regard to whom they decide to represent, given the fact that every defendant is entitled to legal representation, no matter how horrific the charges (consider, for example, the charges against the defendants in the Nuremburg Military Tribunals), or how convinced we may be of the defendant’s guilt (based on well-attested facts in the public domain), despite the putative and muddled notions of (material and probatory) presumption of innocence.

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As Brad Wendel has argued, “the lawyer should be seen as endorsing more general political values embodied in the legal system,” and Geir Lippestad’s rationale for agreeing to represent Breivik is evidence of his more-than-verbal appreciation of the value of that endorsement (Crawford views this decision in term of ‘moral mettle’), although I would add the decision likewise represents core moral values and principles enshrined in the rule of law generally and criminal law in particular, be it municipal or international. All defendants are entitled to due process and unqualifiedly deserve to be treated with dignity. As Joseph Raz explains in Ethics in the Public Domain (1994), “When people are called upon to make substantial sacrifices in the name of one of the fundamental civil, [and here legal] and political rights of an individual, this is not because in some matters the interest of the individual or the respect due to the individual prevails over the interest of the collectivity or the majority. It is because by protecting the right of that individual one protects the common good and is thus serving the interest of the majority.” The “common good” in this instance includes the rules of criminal procedure in the legal system of a constitutional democracy[1] which, by definition, is committed to democratic law-making (be it constitutional, statutory, common, administrative or regulatory) and the “rule of law” generally.

The “legal and moral ecology” of criminal defense lawyering, the norms and duties of which appear to be successfully internalized by most of its practitioners, bring in their wake (as spill-over or by-product effects) enhanced personal and professional esteem, respect, or status among one’s peers as well as among those (as part of an overlapping set) outside the profession likewise concerned with rule of law values and constitutional and democratic principles and practices. There is of course a litany of publicly avowed reasons[2] that will be proffered by way of defense of such representation having to do with rule of law values generally (both substantive and procedural), constitutional protections and rights, and related democratic values and principles in particular. Criminal defense lawyers who defend presumptively or allegedly “guilty clients,” notorious or not, could be said to be clear exemplars of the moral and legal norms and professional responsibilities of criminal defense lawyering, evidencing and modeling the moral, legal, and logical breadth and depth its  members commit to in virtue of their professional role and duties of legal office. The necessary exercise of personal moral discretion and judgment invariably means that some (in this case fairly small class of) individuals may studiously avoid recognizing (at least the full extent of) their professional and moral legal obligations, perhaps finding sufficient rationalization or justification in their ethical lifeworld that ill fits the predominant moral and legal ecology of criminal defense lawyering. On the other hand, personal moral discretion is essential to lawyers making a voluntary decision to represent a client or cause. The late and great Monroe Freedman speaks to the professional commitment made in favor of such representation:

“After having made the choice to serve as the client’s fiduciary, however, the lawyer is bound to zealously represent the client’s interests as determined by the client after appropriate counseling by the lawyer. At that point, for a lawyer to act in a way that betrays the client’s interests would be both a breach of fiduciary duty and a violation of personal moral obligations that many lawyers share.”

The real problems of criminal defense, in the U.S. at least, lie elsewhere: recalcitrant issues with access to justice, the unfulfilled promises of Gideon, innocent clients pleading guilty, the ethics of plea bargaining, systemic race and class biases, and prosecutorial misconduct, for example. As Wendel succinctly reminds, “In general … there does not appear to be a pervasive problem of potential clients being turned away on account of their morally disagreeable qualities, as opposed to their inability to pay.”

[1] Strictly speaking, Norway is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system of government, while its constitution is correctly characterized as “democratic.”

[2] Wendel provides one such list in his book, Lawyers and Fidelity to Law (Princeton University Press, 2010): 151.

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Prior blog posts by yours truly with direct or indirect relevance to both criminal procedure and the right to counsel:

• “American Violet: A Criminal Justice Story”
• “Mapping the Dimensions of Prosecutorial Misconduct”
• “The War on the Indigent with the Sword and Shield of Neoliberal Commodification”
• “When Innocent Clients Plead Guilty”
• “Wrongful Convictions”

See too:

• Andrew Cohen, “So You Want to Learn More About the Gideon Case,” The Atlantic, March 13, 2013.
• “Justice Denied: America’s Continuing Neglect of Our Constitutional Right to Counsel,” Report of the National Right to Counsel Committee, April 2009 (The Constitution Project).
• Keith Findley, “The presumption of innocence exists in theory, not reality,” The Washington Post, January 19, 2016.
• Monroe Freedman’s provocative article, “An Ethical Manifesto for Public Defenders,” Valparaiso University Law Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Summer 2005): 911-923.

For a philosophically and legally sophisticated analysis of the criminal law’s notion of “presumption of innocence,” please see chapter 4, “Innocence, the Burden of Proof, and the Puzzle of Affirmative Defenses,” in Larry Laudan, Truth, Error, and Criminal Law: An Essay in Legal Epistemology (Cambridge University Press, 2006): 89-114.

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Beyond Punitive Capitalist and Liberal Society
• Capital Punishment
• Criminal Law: Municipal and International
• International Criminal Law
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
• Punishment and Prison

Image: Jacob Lawrence, “To the Defense” (1989)

Some thoughts on current events in the States of the Union

The end of the government shutdown was not “caused” by what was happening at the airports, that was only, at best, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back or the tipping point, or we can say that the cumulative impact of sundry reasons, some more significant than others, prompted Trump and his administration to finally relent to more powerful forces. The reasons, in a loose causal sense, were set in motion before the airport mess.

One more and perhaps obvious thought: all this commentary and punditry about the putative reality or imminent possibility or inchoate fears and dangers associated with the Democratic Party “moving to the Left,” are sheer nonsense. Let’s not forget how far to the Right the Party I grew up with has moved at least since Clinton (keeping in mind that it has never been a Left political party, even if it has occasionally been inspired by or borrowed ideas from the Left). The masses can be moved in an ennobling and emancipatory fashion to a higher ground: the Party need not appeal to some hallow or shallow “middle ground” or the lowest common denominator in choosing a Presidential candidate. No doubt whoever that candidate ends up being will disappoint or even anger some on the Left, who have long entertained unrealistic expectations about presidential elections in this country, such that the best or ideal becomes, all things considered, or consequentially speaking, an enemy of the (common or public) good (there is no savior or messianic figure). One wonders how many of those who voted for Jill Stein or refused to vote (out of disgust or because they saw themselves as above the fray or even holier than thou) or gave Trump their “protest” vote, would do the same again. We may not like, as we say, having to yet again choose between the lesser of two evils, or even settling for a smaller rather than greater good. Conditions, situations, and circumstances in our world, especially the conventional political world, are mixed with varying portions of good and bad, and we must continually assess what mix we can settle upon while persevering in our struggle for a better mix in the future, one we hope someday will be clearly characterized as a case in which the forces of good predominate.

I would like to share an abstract, stylized model of two forms of “interpersonal” compromise (with implications for ‘intrapersonal compromise,’ although the latter will not be broached here) from Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin’s book, On Complicity and Compromise (Oxford University Press, 2013), a model I think speaks to the kinds of compromise the Democratic party invariably makes when deciding on its presidential candidate, and which aims to satisfy the existing and even “laundered” preferences of members of the Party as well as potential independent voters and perhaps even some Republicans (at least in the 2020 election) as well.

The first type of compromise is called “substitution compromise” by Lepora and Goodin and involves each of the parties setting aside their original principles (for our purposes, ‘values and policy preferences,’ both domestic and foreign, although the emphasis is more on policies than values), substituting their original principles or conflicting respective sets of values and policies (agent 1: A, B, C, D; agent 2: E, F, G, H) for an altogether different principle or set of values and policies (X and Y). While I think this may be what appears to happen from the vantage point of some voters, especially those well to the Left of the Party or of “independent” suasion, and thus occasionally occurs, I don’t think it’s the most common sort of compromise that takes place in arriving (through arguing and bargaining) at an agreement upon the candidate for President. Agents 1 and 2 regard X and Y as good, but X and Y is considered by both parties to be less good than their original principles or sets of values and policies. Agreement to X and Y of course occurs because it is deemed “better than what will occur in the absence of any agreement between them.”

Another type of compromise, the kind that occurs more routinely within the Party, is termed an “intersection compromise.” In this case, agent 3 holds one set of values and policy preferences: I, J, K, L, and the agent 4 subscribes to set K, L, M, N. Here we have both conflict and some overlap, and thus the parties can agree to compromise on the respective parts of their overlapping sets: K and L, although the mere fact that there is overlap does not mean there will be instant agreement on the subset, as its likely that the parties will still indulge in some measure of arguing and bargaining before settling upon K and L. In the word of Lepore and Goodin: “Neither agent thinks that subset is actually better than his or her own full set of original principles [or ‘values and policies’], but each thinks that achieving that subset is better than what may occur in the absence of an agreement between them.” It is this intersection compromise that is (or at least should be) commonplace within Democratic Party politics. Those “holier than thou” or dispositionally self-righteous will wash their hands of such compromises while basking in their moral and political purity, clinging to their respective and conflicting original sets come hell or high water … and we got both with the election of Donald Trump. (The third kind of compromise identified by Lepora and Goodin is not germane to our discussion.)

Don the Con

When Trump starts throwing invented nicknames around in the next campaign, the best moniker for him that I have heard is "Don the Con."

The economization of human relationships under capitalism: from abstract labor and exchange value to commodity fetishism and alienation

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

In arguments in support of capitalism, the following propositions are sometimes advanced or presupposed: (a) The best life for the individual is one of consumption, understood in a broad sense that includes aesthetic pleasures and entertainment as well as consumption of goods in the ordinary sense. (b) Consumption is to be valued because it promotes happiness or welfare, which is the ultimate good. (c) Since there are not enough opportunities of consumption to provide satiation for everybody, some principles of distributive justice must be chose to decide who gets what. (d) The total to be distributed has first to be produced. What is produced depends, among other things, on the motivation and information of producers. The theory of justice must take account of the fact that different principles of distribution have different effects on motivation and information. (e) Economic theory tells us that the motivational and informational consequences of private ownership of the means of production are superior to those of the various forms of collective ownerships. — Jon Elster, “Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds. Alternatives to Capitalism (1989)

We have been looking in the wrong place to found the good life (the normativity of value) and a truly civil society. It is not enough to expect to find a truly socialist civil society by looking simply at what agents actually desire and, adopting the sentimental response, hoping to employ the state to interfere and promote what is desired. That loses the normative edge that makes us socialists in the first place: the normative edge that gives us the notion that there is a way society ought to be, regardless of how people evaluate the way it actually is. … [W]e can only provide a distinctive notion of what socialism is by rejecting the prevailing assumptions of liberal theory. We need to examine the conditions necessary for the good life, for a truly civil society. — Michael Luntley, The Meaning of Socialism (1990)

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“Jeffrey Pfeffer has an ambitious aspiration for his latest book. ‘I want this to be the Silent Spring of workplace health,’ says Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. ‘We are harming both company performance and individual well-being, and this needs to be the clarion call for us to stop. There is too much damage being done.’ Dying for a Paycheck … maps a range of ills in the modern workplace — from the disappearance of good health insurance to the psychological effects of long hours and work-family conflict — and how these are killing people.

Pfeffer recently sat for an interview with Insights. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I was struck by the story of Robert Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, standing in front of 1,000 other CEOs and saying, ‘You are the cause of the health care crisis.’

It’s true. He takes three points and puts them together. The first point, which is consistent with data reported by the World Economic Forum and other sources, is that an enormous percentage of the health care cost burden in the developed world, and in particular in the U.S., comes from chronic disease — things like diabetes and cardiovascular and circulatory disease. You begin with that premise: A large fraction — some estimates are 75 percent — of the disease burden in the U.S. is from chronic diseases.

Second, there is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome — and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and under-exercising and drug and alcohol abuse — come from stress.

And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs.

Has this connection always been there, or has there been an evolution in workplace culture that got us to this point?

I think the connection as just described has always been there, because the physiology and etiology of disease have not really changed. But I would say that with all the evidence I’ve encountered — and it’s not perfect evidence — I’ve seen nothing inconsistent with the statement that the workplace has generally gotten worse. Job engagement, according to Gallup, is low. Distrust in management, according to the Edelman trust index, is high. Job satisfaction, according to the Conference Board, is low and has been in continual decline. The gig economy is growing, economic insecurity is growing, and wage growth overall has stagnated. Fewer people are covered by employer-sponsored health insurance than in the past, according to Kaiser Foundation surveys. And a strikingly high percentage of people, even those covered by insurance, say they forgo treatment and medications because of cost issues. I look out at the workplace and I see stress, layoffs, longer hours, work-family conflict, enormous amounts of economic insecurity. I see a workplace that has become shockingly inhumane.”

The full interview is here.

Comment:

For researchers who work in the field of public health and health justice, Pfeffer’s findings, however alarming, are not at all surprising. The same could be said of those psychoanalytic, humanist, and existential psychologists who have long been concerned about how the greater social world (i.e., beyond immediate family relations) clearly affects the mental health and well-being as well as the physical health of their analysands, patients, or clients, concerns that go back to the inter-War period in Europe when psychoanalysts (many of whom were also physicians) were often at the same time Marxists or simply fell out somewhere along the Left spectrum from Communism/communism to social democracy.

Such research clearly reveals, once again, the severe constraints of the conventional and thus still prevailing bio-medical model of disease causation, frequency and distribution that is dominant in epidemiology. As Sridhar Venkantapuram explains in Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach (2011), both the bio-statistical theory of health and the biomedical model in epidemiology (aptly termed ‘health individualism’) should be demoted not only because jointly they “focus[] too narrowly on the causation and distribution of disease,” but more importantly because they are unable to “explain fully the causation and distribution of diseases most prevalent in developed [affluent] economies, namely chronic and degenerative conditions.” The dominant epidemiological model, in other words, is structurally incapable of analyzing “the possible causal impact of social conditions” [and, I would add, appreciating complex body/mind interactions or physical and mental dynamics]. What is urgently needed is an alternative epidemiological model capable of integrating “micro” and “macro” variables of behaviors and conditions, the natural and social sciences (including the humanist, existentialist, or psychoanalytic ‘science of subjectivity’), thereby linking, in short, individual level phenomena with population level phenomena (in many respects this blurs the distinctions between ‘private’ health care and provision and the field of ‘public health’). Venkatapuram himself argues for a “new multi-dimensional theory for epidemiology” that builds on earlier public health efforts and findings in this regard, efforts that presumed physical and mental health were intimately even if sometimes mysteriously related to each other.

These earlier efforts, ironically enough, trace back to the origins of epidemiology in the United Kingdom, when this method of inquiry evidenced clear if not overarching “concern over social class inequalities in mortality and impairments” just after the Second World War. The appreciation because “recognition of differences in mortality and its rate of progress across socio-economic classes over time” was one reason for the creation of the National Health Service (NHS), “which provided free healthcare to all, [and] was meant to ensure that all parts of society would share in the health improvement.” Despite notable achievements on several fronts, the NHS alone of course was not capable of fully addressing “inequalities in health achievements across the socio-economic classes,” especially the “persistence of higher mortality rates and slower progress among the poorest classes.” The studies culminating in the release of the Black Report by the Working Group on Health Inequalities (WGHI) in 1980, concluded “significant public resources would need to be spent to improve the health of the poorest classes” if the government was to begin to sufficiently address obdurate social inequalities in health achievements, particularly longevity. As Venkatapuram notes, “the report has had a profound impact on the scope and nature of public debate on health, health research and poverty alleviation which continues to the present day in the United Kingdom and beyond.”

Findings “from a 1978 study looking at the health of 17,520 British civil servants known as the Whitehall Study,” complemented if not made more complex the precise causal variables implicated in health achievements:

“What started out as a conventional study of the risk factors for cardiovascular and respiratory disease among a large, defined and accessible population of research subjects produced startling findings. The conventional thought at the time was that senior managers at the top of the organization were the most under stress and suffered more heart disease and mortality. Michael Marmot and colleagues reported results which showed the opposite. The individuals at the bottom of the organization had higher rates of mortality and disease. But what is most astounding is that the researchers found a clearly step-wise gradient in disease and mortality paralleling the rank of employment. Starting from the top grade, each rank of civil servants had worse health than the rank above. In comparison, the WGHI did not really focus on the gradient in mortality across the five socio-economic classes; it was focused largely on the mortality of the lower classes.”

The Whitehall Study manifestly prefigures Pfeffer’s findings, for it “showed that even when absolute material deprivation is not a factor, as all civil service employees across all grade level were above the threshold of poverty, there still was a social gradient in health right across all the employment grades. So, something else aside from material deprivation [and individual behavioral risk factors, such as smoking] was influencing health.”

And here is where our conventional and often moralizing approach to physical and mental health at the level of individual behavioral risk factors falls short: “Subsequent studies which controlled for individual behaviours, such as smoking and diet, showed individual behaviours could not explain the distribution [pattern across all diseases]; the social gradient still persists.” Venkatapuram rightly concludes that

“… by establishing a link between social conditions and ill-health and mortality and the social gradient in health outcomes, the studies highlighted the limitations of the classical biomedical model in epidemiology. The classic biomedical model’s causal factor of biological endowment, individual behaviours, and exposure to harmful agents could not fully explain the ill-health of individuals, and the step-wise gradient. The Whitehall research has generated the hypothesis that a social cause can distribute the harmful exposure to different social groups differently, while also being the cause of disease in individuals. [….] The Whitehall research has also expanded the research into psycho-social processes such as those affected by workplace environment. Some of the Whitehall II studies suggest that the social gradient in mortality reflects an individual-level, psychosocial mechanism mediating between external social conditions and the production of disease within the individual. The ‘infection’ travels through psychobiological pathways. An individual’s ‘control,’ ‘agency,’ ‘dignity,’ and how fairly individuals are treated, as well as how interesting they find their work, has been suggested as aspects of the workplace which differ according to employment grade and may be correlated to the gradient in health outcomes. The expectation is that such workplace features can be extrapolated to other environments such as the home and community.”

To complicate matters a bit, consider this snippet from Gopal Sreenivasan’s entry (sans citations) on “Justice, Inequality, and Health” for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“The existence of a social gradient in health certainly suggests that something in addition to health care exercises a powerful influence on an individual’s health—something, moreover, that at least correlates with a social variable. However, it is not clear exactly what this something is. To begin with, similar domestic gradients in individual life expectancy can be found when the social variable is income; when it is education; and when it is social class. By itself, therefore, the surface fact of a social gradient in health is compatible with quite different accounts of the underlying causal influences on individual health. Each distinct social variable might function as a ‘marker’ for a different underlying causal factor, different social variables might function instead as alternative markers for the same underlying causal factor, or there may be some mixture of both. (It is also possible that some social variables — e.g., education — function as a relatively direct causal factor.)

Furthermore, it is not clear how much of the correlation between health and a given social variable is properly causal in the first place. In some cases, there is clearly some ‘reverse causation’ between health and a social variable, notably from poor health to lower income. In addition, there is plainly some causation among social variables, notably from education both to higher income and to higher occupational status.

The choice of the social variable in terms of which to describe some social gradient in health can be made on a number of different grounds. One obvious ground would be to choose the variable(s) that came closest to conveying the operative causal mechanism(s). Another ground would be to choose the variable(s) that have independent moral significance, such as race and gender. These grounds need not exclude each other and there may be a case for choosing the same variable on both grounds. The second ground acquires a special relevance if health inequalities suffered by individuals who also suffer, for example, from racial discrimination are more unjust than health inequalities (of the same magnitude) suffered in the absence of racial discrimination. If one injustice can compound another, then the choice of social variable may affect the kind of inequality in health at issue, and not simply its magnitude.

When the social variable is income, there is an important further definitional dispute to consider. Income appears to have a significant effect on life expectancy, even controlling for education. However, there is an on-going debate about which definition of ‘income’ is adequate to capture the contribution individual income makes to individual life expectancy. According to the absolute income hypothesis, the contribution income makes to individual life expectancy is entirely a function of the individual’s non-comparative income. By contrast, the relative income hypothesis holds, roughly, that an individual’s life expectancy is also a function of the relative level of her income—that is, its level compared to others’ income in her society—and not simply of its non-comparative level. To make this second hypothesis precise requires one, among other things, to specify the reference group to which the individual’s income is compared and also the nature of the comparison.”

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• The Corporatization, Commodification, and Distortions of Formal Education …
• Democratic Theory
• Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychoanalytic Psychology
• Global Distributive Justice
• Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Toward a Realist Social and Political Psychology
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

Mary Oliver and Judaism

For a wonderful discussion of Mary Oliver's poetry and its relationship to Judaism by Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, see https://religionnews.com/2019/01/17/mary-oliver/

Acts of Cultural Genocide in China?

James Millward’s article, “‘Reeducating’ Xinjiang’s Muslims” in the New York Review of Books (February 7, 2019) is essential, indeed urgent reading. It is bone-chilling ... and a reminder why international criminal law needs to outlaw cultural genocide. See, for example, Lawrence Davidson, Cultural Genocide (Rutgers University Press, 2012), and the brief but compelling argument by Larry May that “acts of cultural genocide should be included as punishable acts in international law” in his invaluable study, Genocide: A Normative Account (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Here is the opening paragraph of the piece:

“In a courtroom in Zharkent, Kazakhstan, in July 2018, a former kindergarten principal named Sayragul Sauytbay calmly described what Chinese officials continue to deny: a vast new gulag of ‘de-extremification training centers’ has been created for Turkic Muslim inhabitants of Xinjiang, the Alaska-sized region in western China. Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh, had fled Xinjiang and was seeking asylum in Kazakhstan, where her husband and son are citizens. She told the court how she had been transferred the previous November from her school to a new job teaching Kazakh detainees in a supposed ‘training center.’ ‘They call it a “political camp”… but in reality it’s a prison in the mountains,’ she said. There were 2,500 inmates in the facility where she had worked for four months, and she knew of others. There may now be as many as 1,200 such camps in Xinjiang, imprisoning up to a million people, including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and especially Uighurs, who make up around 46 percent of Xinjiang’s population.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

The remainder of the article is here.

Hindutva (BJP) inspired mobs are killing Muslims and Dalits in India

(While the snippet from the article below is about acts of violence against Muslims, Dalits in India have also been routinely targeted by these Hindu nationalists.)

“In India, killing cows and the consumption of beef is banned in most states. Since Modi and his party assumed power in 2014, this beef ban has been used by Hindu nationalists to justify their attacks on innocent Muslims in public. [….] [Prime Minister] Modi’s government … routinely disseminates fake news, targeting and demonising Indian Muslims.” The full article from The Guardian by Rana Ayyub is here.

*          *          *

“The Member States of the United Nations have acknowledged that they have the primary responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of these crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means, and is consistent with existing obligations under international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law. The international community has a parallel responsibility to encourage and assist States to fulfil their responsibilities towards their populations. The policy options presented here are aimed specifically at preventing incitement to violence that could lead to atrocity crimes. They should be placed in the broader context of the structural and operational measures that States and the international community can take to protect populations from these crimes, which are set out in the reports of the Secretary-General on the responsibility to protect.” 

*          *          *

It is awfully clear that the government of India is ignoring its “responsibility to protect” obligations under international human rights instruments and international law. At some point we have sufficient evidence for the crime of “incitement to genocide,” keeping in mind that acts of genocide do not have to occur for this to be a crime in international criminal law (‘incitement’ is classed as an ‘inchoate’ crime, meaning that it does not require completion of a harmful act for the assignment of criminal liability). Incitement is defined as “encouraging or persuading another to commit an offence,” and under both the Genocide Convention and the more recent Rwanda Tribunal Statute, “direct and public incitement is expressly defined as a specific crime, punishable as such.” [I hope to write more about this in the near future.]

Elizabeth Anderson’s moral and democratic reformulation of equality

First, please read this article, “The Philosopher Redefining Equality,” by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker, from which the following snippet is taken:

“To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence [one might note the means of equalizing wealth have not of course been limited to progressive taxation schemes]. ‘People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,’ Anderson wrote.”

 

Comment:

The idea of being “equally free” as a democratic principle (which is intrinsic to the tripartite motto, or perhaps better, triune ideal, liberté, égalité, fraternité) need not and should not involve “shifting from the remit of egalitarianism” insofar as that entails a move to toward equalizing wealth, as long as that is not understood in an absolute sense (and I don’t think most political theorists of this persuasion have viewed it that way). The problem today is the societal distribution of wealth around the globe has been moving dramatically in an inegalitarian direction for some time now, such that many of the conditions of being “equally free” in Anderson’s salutary democratic sense are undermined. In other words, a more egalitarian distribution of wealth (which involves, at the same time, an ecological or environmental constraint of the nature or character of such wealth) is a necessary yet not sufficient condition of being “equally free” in truly robust democratic terms.* And those moral and political philosophers with egalitarian sensibilities, however different their precise philosophical views, from John Rawls to Amartya Sen, from G.A. Cohen to Martha Nussbaum, for example, all appear to appreciate this, although one might wish they had devoted more attention to notions of solidarity and, especially fraternity (as realized in motley reference groups and communities); the latter, I suspect, is indispensable to the widespread incarnation and cherishing of the notion of being “equally free” in a would-be democratic society.

 

Here is where Jerry Cohen’s critique of “classical Marxists” is spot-on: “It was partly because they believed that equality was historically inevitable that classical Marxists did not spend so much time thinking about why equality was morally right, about exactly what made it morally binding” [which is what, I think, Anderson is in effect attempting to do]. Hence the demise of “scientific socialism” brings us back to normative political philosophy, ideals, and even the utopian socialists of yesteryear or utopian thought more generally. And this is one reason Cohen later came to believe that there is some truth in the proposition (or ‘nostrum’) that “for inequality to be overcome, there needs to a revolution in feeling or motivation, as opposed to (just) in economic structure” [what Rudolf Bahro meant in part by the need for a ‘cultural revolution’]. Put in simpler if not more stark terms: “how selfish people are affects the prospects for equality and justice” (keeping in mind that whatever selfishness exists, may be conditioned by capitalism, or more broadly, the Rawlsian ‘basic structure,’ as Cohen appreciates, thus the disappearance of capitalism or change in the basic structure may alter the frequency or intensity of selfishness in the general population, but we should hardly expect it to be thereby eliminated). Cohen also came to realize the significance of an ethos of justice “that informs individual choices,” an ethos that is intrinsically related in various ways to the “basic structure” of society, which is close in spirit at least, to Anderson’s point about the democratic nature of equal freedom, this ethos being the requisite democratic sentiment in social or moral psychological terms for motivating the struggle for democratic equality, i.e., being equally free. Cohen came to this conclusion in his critique of Rawls’s “difference principle” (which we can’t go into here):

 

“A society that is just within the terms of the difference principle … requires not simply just coercive rules, but also an ethos of justice that informs individual choices. In the absence of such an ethos, inequalities will obtain that are not necessary to enhance the condition of the worst off: the required ethos promotes a distribution more just than what the rules of the economic game by themselves can secure. And what is required is indeed an ethos, a structure of response lodged in the motivations that inform everyday life ….”

 

We can thus begin here to speak of democratic distributive justice, which is not “economistic,” but which retains, as a necessary but not sufficient condition, economic egalitarianism. Perhaps one lesson from Anderson’s Sen (or Nussbaum)-like focus on functionings (an ugly word insofar as it applies to persons, but now common in the literature) and capabilities is to accord far more consideration to the public rhetoric we choose in making our arguments and policy recommendations in pursuit of more equalized wealth distribution within the overarching value of being equally free. In any case, being equally free is indeed the foremost desideratum of the (reconstructed Liberal) democrat, and thus this democrat is, at the same time, a socialist.

 

* As to what the phrase “robust democratic terms” means or implies please see, for example, Robert E. Goodin’s Reflective Democracy (2003) and Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (2008); the works of Nadia Urbinati; and, finally, for how this might be understood in terms of a eudaimonistic individualism (or, if you will, the democratic ideal of ‘self-rule’) which accords essential formative or developmental roles to tradition(s), worldview(s), and community(ies), see David Norton’s Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (1991).

 

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Anarchist Thought and Praxis
• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Beyond Punitive Capitalist and Liberal Society
• Democratic Theory
• Global Distributive Justice
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Human Rights
• Liberalism
• Marxism
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
• Toward a Realist Social and Political Psychology
• Social Security and the Welfare State
• Utopian Thought, Imagination, and Praxis

Beyond Punitive Capitalist and Liberal Society: Toward a Syllabus

While still working for the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, Erich Fromm penned two articles on the criminal justice system, “The State as Educator” (1930) and “On the Psychology of the Criminal” (see the volume edited by Kevin Anderson and Richard Quinney, Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the Punitive Society, 2000). In The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (2013), Lawrence J. Freidman summarizes several of the principal arguments:

“On a … basic and psychological level … the state was referring to crime and deterrence in order to present itself on a subconscious level as a father image. The child knew that he was defenseless against the power of the father, particularly the capacity of the father to castrate the child. By drawing upon unconscious fear of paternal punishment, Fromm noted, the state sought to promote obedience to its dictates.

The state also used the criminal justice system to enhance itself, Freud claimed, by treating the criminal as a scapegoat instead of confronting society’s deep social problems. In dwelling on crime and punishment, the state manipulated society into becoming less attentive to the social and economic inadequacies and oppressions in daily life. That is, a punitive criminal justice system was employed to divert the anger of the masses from the oppressive social conditions that required government remedies. In brief, the criminal rather than state policy became the scapegoat for social ills, economic inequality, and governmental corruption and callousness.

Did the criminal justice at least deter crime? Fromm answered in the negative. Reliable evidence consistently demonstrated that imprisonment, harsh sanctions, and even capital punishment had no salutary effect on crime and thus did not protect the public.

Fromm’s final point linked to the others—that the criminal justice system had a decidedly class bias. Whereas the propertied classes had opportunities to sublimate their aggressive propensities into socially acceptable channels, the disadvantaged lacked these channels and were consequently more likely to commit crimes. Therefore, the reform of social inequities through the redistribution of wealth constituted a more effective plan for combating crime than a harsh system of incarceration and punishment that offered little protection to the public. In essence, these papers reflected Fromm’s own rather eclectic fusion of psychoanalytic commentary and Marxian analysis to promote a view of criminal justice that was ahead of his time.”

• Aertsen, Ivo and Brunilda Pali, eds. Critical Restorative Justice. Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2017.
• Anderson, Kevin and Richard Quinney, eds. Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the Punitive Society. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
• Beirne, Piers and Richard Quinney, eds. Marxism and Law. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1982.
• Bissonette, Jamie. When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition. Boston, MA: South End Press, 2008.
• Braithwaite and Philip Pettit. Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Brottman, Mikita. The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison. New York: Harper Collins, 2016.
• Cohen, Stanley. Against Criminology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988.
• Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.
• Gorringe, Timothy. God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Greenberg, David F., ed. Crime and Capitalism: Readings in Marxist Criminology. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1981.                   
• Harring, Sydney L. Policing a Class Society. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2nd ed., 2017.
• Honderich, Ted. Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited. London: Pluto Press, revised 4th ed., 2006.
• Karpowitz, Daniel. College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017.
• Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe. Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison. New York: New Press, 2016.
• Murphy, Jeffrie G. and Jean Hampton. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• O’Mahony, David and Jonathan Doak. Reimagining Restorative Justice: Agency and Accountability in the Criminal Process. Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2017.
• Sarat, Austin and Nasser Hussain, eds. Forgiveness, Mercy, and Clemency. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
• Sweeney, Megan. Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• Tigar, Michael E. Law and the Rise of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2nd ed., 2000.
• Van Ness, Daniel W. and Karen Heetderks Strong. Restoring Justice: An Introduction to Restorative Justice. New York: Routledge, 5th ed., 2015.
• Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018.
• Zimmerman, Michael J. The Immorality of Punishment. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2011.

 

 

 

 

 

Basic Bibliographies:

• Criminal Law: Municipal and International
• International Criminal Law
• Marxism
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
• Punishment & Prison

Bibliographies with family resemblance to this topic:

• Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction
• The Emotions
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Marxism and Freudian Psychoanalytic Psychology

Routine prevarication, extravagant hyperbole, and blatant, shameless lies by pundits and ideologues on the Right (or, let’s play ‘follow the Leader’)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is profoundly unsettling to many on the Right (and perhaps some Democrats as well). Today’s column by Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times is symptomatic of the Right’s fear and loathing of her democratic politics and political policy views in particular:

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked the political establishment by defeating a machine politician in a New York Democratic primary for Congress last June. Ever since then, Republicans and conservatives have been trying to smear her as a know-nothing socialist ditz unfit to sit in the House chamber with all those gray-bearded sages who have made the House such a model of reasoned and informed debate.

The latest such campaign erupted this weekend. I’m not talking about the unearthing of a dance video from her college years, which backfired spectacularly by making Ocasio-Cortez seem youthful and joyous, but an interview with the newly minted member of Congress broadcast Sunday on ‘60 Minutes’ but released by CBS on Friday. In the interview, Ocasio-Cortez argues for raising the top federal income tax rate on the richest Americans to as much as 70% from the current 37% and using the money to convert the country to renewable energy.

Conservative heads exploded. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) accused her on Twitter of wanting to ‘take away 70% of your income and give it to leftist fantasy programs.’ Right-wing anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist implied that the ‘expropriation’ of 70% of ‘your production’ was coming uncomfortably close to ‘slavery.’ Pro-Trump commentator Ryan Fournier declared that he was ‘not going to work my ass off for the rest of my life for 70% of my income to go to the government.’

All three, and anyone else speaking out in this vein, displayed their rank ignorance of how the federal income tax works. That’s the charitable explanation of their reaction. The only other explanation is that they know how it works, and they were lying about her proposal. (Ignoramuses or liars? You make the call.)” The entire article is here.  

Toward Red-Green Socialism: Recommended Reading

“In Marx’s analysis, the growing destruction of nature under capitalism is not simply a function of nature having become an object for humanity; rather, it is primarily a result of the sort of object that nature has become. Raw materials and products, according to Marx, are bearers of value in capitalism, in addition to being constituent elements of material wealth. Capital produces material wealth as a means of creating value. Hence, it consumes material wealth not only as the stuff of material wealth but also as a means of fueling its own self-expansion—that is, as a means of effecting the extraction and absorption of as much surplus labor time from the working population as possible. Ever increasing amounts of raw materials must be consumed even though the result is not a corresponding increase in the social form of surplus wealth (surplus value). The relation of humans and nature mediated by the labor process becomes a one-way process of consumption, rather than a cyclical interaction.” — Moishe Postone

 

“The problem with capital accumulation, then, is not only that it is unbalanced and crisis-ridden, but also that its underlying form of growth [emphasis added] as marked by runaway productivity that neither is controlled by the producers nor functions directly to their benefit. This particular sort of growth is intrinsic to a society based on value; it cannot be explained in terms of misdirected views and false priorities alone. Although the productivist critiques of capitalism have focused only on the possible barriers to economic growth inherent in capital accumulation, it is clear that Marx criticized both the accelerating boundlessness of ‘growth’ under capitalism as well as its crisis-ridden character. Indeed, he demonstrates that these two characteristics should be analyzed as intrinsically related.” — Moishe Postone

 

“… [A]ny attempt to respond fundamentally, within the framework of capitalist society, to growing environmental destruction by restraining this society’s mode of expansion would probably be ineffective on a long-term basis—not only because of the interests of capitalists or state managers, but because failure to expand surplus value would indeed result in severe economic difficulties with great social costs. In Marx’s analysis, the necessary accumulation of capital and the creation of capitalist society’s wealth are intrinsically related. Moreover, …because labor is determined as a necessary means of individual reproduction in capitalist society, wage laborers remain dependent on capital’s ‘growth,’ even when the consequences of their labor, ecological and otherwise, are detrimental to themselves and others. The tension between the exigencies of the commodity form and ecological requirements becomes more severe as productivity increases and, particularly during economic crises and periods of high unemployment, poses a sever dilemma. The dilemma and the tension in which it is rooted are immanent to capitalism; their ultimate resolution will be hindered so long as value remains the determining form of social wealth. [….] The particular relation between increases in productivity and the expansion of surplus value shapes the underlying trajectory of growth in capitalism. This trajectory cannot be explained adequately in terms of the market and private property, which suggests that, even in their absence, economic growth would necessarily assume the form marked by increases in productivity much greater than the increases in social wealth they effect—as long as social wealth ultimately remains a function of labor time expenditure. Planning in such a situation, however successful or unsuccessful, would signify a conscious response to the compulsions exerted by the alienated form of social relations expressed by value and capital; it would not, however, overcome them.” — Moishe Postone

 

“There has to be a change in our whole system of production, for technology in the present-day world carries the capitalist mode of production within itself.” — Rudolph Bahro

 

“More important than the quality or quantity of consumer goods, in my view, is the need for a new consumption pattern geared to the qualitative development of the individual, so that the length of young people’s education, for example, becomes a higher priority than the addition of one more piece of clothing to my wardrobe. [….] [W]e have not yet succeeded in breaking through the horizon of capitalist civilization to reach the vision of a world-wide alternative. It is true that the peoples of the world are at different levels of development, but one has to make use of the concrete possibilities where the civilization is not so overdetermined. [….] The point of the concept of a cultural revolution is that man has to rise above the level of capitalist reproduction process for the satisfaction of life’s necessities. We cannot wait until we are sated with material goods. A level of basic needs has to be defined, and a standard of living may be achieved in underdeveloped countries that may be more rational than our own.” — Rudolph Bahro

 

 

Recommended Reading:

• Angus, Ian. Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016.
• Bahro, Rudolf. Socialism and Survival. London: Heretic Books, 1982.
• Bahro, Rudolf. From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso, 1984.
• Bahro, Rodolf. Building the Green Movement. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1986.
• Benton, Ted. Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice. London: Verso, 1993.
• Benton, Ted, ed. The Greening of Marxism. New York: Guilford Press, 1996.
• Bernstein, Henry. Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 2010.
• Bernstein, Henry, et al., eds. The Food Question: Profits Versus People. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990.
• Borgnäs, Kajsa, et al., eds. The Politics of Ecosocialism: Transforming Welfare. New York: Routledge, 2017.
• Burkett, Paul. Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009.
• Burkett, Paul. Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2014.
• Carter, Alan. A Radical Green Political Theory. London: Routledge, 1999.
• Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
• Foster, John Bellamy. Ecology against Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.
• Foster, John Bellamy. The Ecological Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.
• Foster, John Bellamy. “Marxism and Ecology: Common Fonts of a Great Transition,” Monthly Review, 2015 (Vol. 67, No. 7).
• Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.
• Ghosh, B.N. Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2012. [I have included this title because I think both Marxists and environmentalists (and by implication, ecologists), can benefit from examining Gandhi’s principles of moral and spiritual political economy.]
• Gorz, André. Ecology as Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1980.
• Gorz, André. Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology. London: Verso, 1994.
• Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
• Kovel, Joel. The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? London: Zed Books, 2nd ed., 2007.
• Löwy, Michael. Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015.
• Magdoff, Fred. “A Rational Agriculture is Incompatible with Capitalism,” Monthly Review, March 15, 2015 (Vol. 66, No. 10).
• Magdoff, Fred and Chris Williams. Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017.
• Magdoff, Fred, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds. Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
• Magdoff, Fred and Brian Tokar, eds. Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.
• Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2015.
• O’Connor, James. Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford, 1998.
• Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2007.
• Pepper, David. Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice. London: Routledge, 1993.
• Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Ross, Eric B. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development. London: Zed Books, 1998.
• Ryle, Martin. Ecology and Socialism. London: Radius/Century Hutchinson, 1988.
• Saito, Kohei. Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017.
• Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 3rd ed., 2008.
• Tokar, Brian. Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change. Porsgrunn, Norway: New Compass Press, 2nd ed., 2014.
• Williams, Chris. Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2010.

See too the many works of the Marxist geographer, David Harvey, especially the earlier stuff. I also think it’s important to carefully and dispassionately examine “conflicts on the ground”* between and among Left and Green movement politics and parties (e.g., consider early conflicts between the ‘Realos’ and ‘Fundis’ in West Germany and the ‘deep ecologists’ and largely Bookchin-led or inspired ‘social ecologists’ in the US). On the Left, André Gorz (1923 – 2007), the pen name of Gérard Horst (born Gerhart Hirsch, also known by his pen name Michel Bosquet), was a New Left theorist who early on developed an “ecological politics. Rudolf Bahro (in)famously moved from Red to Green, eventually developing something like a “deep ecology” or apocalyptic-like (some would say messianic) spiritual environmentalism that largely left Marx behind (at least rhetorically and strategically), but his writings, beginning with The Alternative in Eastern Europe (NLB, 1978), remain worthy of study.

 

* Alas, these conflicts all too often degenerate into stultifying because dogmatic and sectarian infighting that serve to distract us from the purposes and urgency of, thereby canalizing energy away from, our emancipatory struggles, calling to mind—among other things moral psychological—Freud’s poignant and pregnant idea of the “narcissism of small differences.”

 

Should you want to venture beyond the literature above, please see the bibliographies with strong family resemblance on (i) Marxism, (ii) environmental and ecological politics, philosophies, and worldviews, and (iii) beyond capitalist agribusiness: toward agroecology and food justice, at my Academia page.

C.L.R. James, the “cricketing Marxist” and “urbane revolutionary” (4 January 1901 – 31 May 1989)

Today is the birthday of C.L.R. James (4 January 1901 – 19 May 1989), the remarkable Marxist humanist and Afro-Trinidadian socialist, historian, journalist, and essayist. 

Here are two of my posts from the archives on James: From “Cricketing in Compton” to the “Cricketing Marxist,” and The Marxist Spirituality of C.L.R. James. The following works help illuminate the life and writings of C.L.R. James, the “cricketing Marxist” and “urbane revolutionary:”

• Buhle, Paul. C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. London: Verso, 1988.
• Buhle, Paul, ed. C.L.R. James: His Life and Work. London: Allison & Busby, 1986.
• Høgsbjerg, Christian and Charles Forsdick, eds. The Black Jacobins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Renton, Dave. C.L.R. James: Cricket’s Philosopher King. London: Haus, 2007.
• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Books, 1983.
• Rosengarten, Frank. Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
• Worcester, Kent. C.L.R. James: A Political Biography. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996.

One might also read two other books that are not about James or Black Marxism as such: first, Tommie Shelby’s We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005) which makes a compelling argument for aiming to “achieve a robust form of black solidarity without a commitment to black identity,” a view I think has much in common with James’ Marxist humanism. And then Michael C. Dawson’s Blacks In and Out of the Left (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), which is a brief history of black radicalism in the United States toward outlining the elements of a progressive black radicalism for our own time and place. In the words of Shelby, “in the spirit of hope and possibility, it calls for utopian yet pragmatic political thinking that regards independent black political organizing not as a balkanizing force or distraction from the ‘universal’ fight for a democratic society, but as an indispensable element of any viable Left-wing politics.”

Most of the major works (books only) of C.L.R. James (for a comprehensive list, see the bibliography for ‘published primary sources’ in the Høgsbjerg and Forsdick volume above):

• James, C.L.R. Minty Alley [a novel]. London: Secker and Warburg, 1936.
• James, C.L.R. World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International. London: Secker & Warburg, 1937/ New York: Prism Key Press, 2011.
• James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2^nd, 1963/1989 (1938).
• James, C.L.R. A History of the Pan-African Revolt. Oakland, CA: PM Press, in conjunction with Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. (Chicago), 2012 (1938).
• James, C.L.R. (Noel Ignatiev, ed.) A New Notion: Two Works by C.L.R. James (The Invading Socialist Society and ‘Every Cook Can Govern’). Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010 (1947 and 1956, respectively).
• James, C.L.R. Beyond a Boundary. London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1963/Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 50th anniversary edition, 2013.
• James, C.L.R. The Future in the Present. London: Allison & Busby, 1977.
• James, C.L.R. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. London: Allison & Busby, 1977.
• James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. Detroit, MI: Beswick, 2^nd, 1978/London: Allison & Busby, 1985.
• James, C.L.R. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. London: Allison & Busby, 1980.
• James, C.L.R. Spheres of Existence. London: Allison & Busby, 1980.
• James, C.L.R. At the Rendezvous of Victory. London: Allison & Busby, 1984.
• James, C.L.R. (in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee) State Capitalism and World Revolution. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1986.
• James, C.L.R. (Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, eds.) American Civilization. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993.

The pathology of normalcy—or the shared mental pathologies of millions—and the arduous quest for a sane society

Some years ago, after one of the many and more horrific mass shootings in the U.S., a reader responded to a Crooked Timber blogger’s argument about the possible and probable underlying socio-cultural (and I would add ‘psychological’ and spiritual) conditions that appear to be responsible for making such shootings all too commonplace in this country (and, in this respect, atypical of similar affluent welfare state capitalist democracies):

“…I am always a bit suspicious of claims that the modern world or modern America is unusually prone to psychosis, or is somehow generally schizotypal in ways that other places and times are not. It’s entirely possible, but how would one even begin to measure that, with changes in diagnostic criteria and changes in the way people deal with mental illness?”

Herewith my reply to the original post and subsequent response to the reader above, more or less, as it is now edited (I have both subtracted and added material):

I think my country, the United States, is a rather militaristic and violent society generally, from its military industrial complex, national security state, and criminal justice system, to its popular films, video games, television shows, and other forms of “entertainment.” Now of course not everyone who votes supports the “pentagon of power” and mass incarceration, nor does everyone ritually or habitually indulge in such forms of (escapist) entertainment. And more notably, not everyone is likely to be affected, in a moral psychological sense, in just the same way by such things, and there’s the rub. The variety of personalities or temperaments and character types, combined with genetic inheritance and socialization processes across a spectrum of socio-economic conditions, leaves some individuals more liable to being affected by such phenomena than others: they’re intrinsically vulnerable we might say (and that vulnerability is likely to be expressed in symptoms of mental illness). Of course it is hard to precisely identify beforehand just who such individuals are or might be by way of lessening any potential harm or violence they may do to themselves or others, although not infrequently, those who have intimately interacted with such individuals have hunches, suspicions or concerns, have seen “warning signs,” and so forth (although when these are verbalized ex post facto, they may not be genuine), which they may or may not act upon owing to any number of reasons: not wanting to get involved, uncertainty, or fear, for example. To make matters worse, the mental health system in this country is a mess, one egregious example of which is the number of people with serious mental illness who are incarcerated, be it in the short-term or serving prison sentences. Some of our mental health problems arose as a direct result of “de-institutionalization” of the mental health care system, which has had some well-known perverse effects not anticipated by those who may have earlier summoned humane and principled reasons on its behalf.

More than a few of the rhetorical characterizations of those guilty of mass shootings exemplify a more generalizable tendency to avoid examining how the larger society and regnant cultural ethos bear some measure of responsibility for the kinds of individuals (and communities) that compose it. Moral responsibility is not simply individual but collective and shared, and many forms of violence have identifiable background conditions and variables that can be changed or eliminated by way of dramatically reducing the risk of the worst kinds of interpersonal violence. Individual lives are not lived in vacuums, and there are myriad effects on these lives, some of them identifiable and even predictable, others hidden or mysterious. If only in the beginning as an heuristic exercise or thought experiment, however painful or inchoate, I think it behooves us to see ourselves as sharing in some degree, however small and indirectly, in the enabling or complicity of such acts, or the creation of mental illness itself, at least insofar as we’ve done nothing to change a society which is incredibly punitive, aggressive, and violent, and in which an astonishingly large number of people display symptoms of mental illness.

Erich Fromm memorably spoke of the “pathology of normalcy” (while the particular locution was his, the idea has ancient pedigree). Setting aside for the moment the conspicuous forms of violence (be it random, drug- or gang-based, the domestic kind, mass shootings, drone strikes, or aerial bombing), Fromm argued that much of our cultural and political life evidences the expression of low-grade, chronic schizoid tendencies. In brief, our society is in many respects “sick.”

As for the question of why and how entire societies or even civilizations might be “sick” in more than a metaphorical sense (although I would think even a descriptive metaphorical reference is damning), I have the audacity—or is it temerity—to recommend (this is not a complete inventory) works from the philosophical traditions of Daoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism; writings penned by Rousseau, Tolstoy and Simone Weil; the young Gandhi’s scathing tract (‘written [in Gujurati] with terse directness and solemn fervor’), Hind Swaraj; lastly, and more succinctly in a contemporary theoretical idiom, Arno Gruen’s The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness (Grove Weidenfeld, 1992), and the chapter, “Consensus, Conformity, and False Consciousness: ‘The Pathology of Normalcy,’” in Daniel Burston, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991).

With regard to the question(s) of “measurement,” I strongly doubt such claims are amenable to decisive or convincing measurement, at least not in a way that would satisfy biomedically derived epidemiological assumptions and standards (which themselves are contestable*), although I do believe we can assemble evidence and construct reasons of various kinds on behalf of such a claim. At least one reason for this epidemiological skepticism is provided by Burston: “When it comes to questions of fundamental sanity, laypeople and clinicians alike are accustomed to gauging the sanity of thought processes in terms of the degree of consensual validation that attaches to their content, and in terms of the adequacy or intelligibility of their underlying process (so far as we can apprehend it). Many of the diagnostic instruments and protocols used by mental health professionals are merely refined and systematic extensions of these commonsense assumptions.” And we are well served by remembering, again with Burston, that the very idea of Erich Fromm’s locution, the “pathology of normalcy,” is found in ancient Greece before, during, and after the time of Plato (e.g., Hellenistic ethical philosophies like Epicureanism and Stoicism), as well as among Hindu and Buddhist philosophers, Daoist sages, and some (Judaic) rabbinical traditions.

Nonetheless, assessed largely within the strictures of and standards provided by the aforementioned biomedical criteria and thus conceding the increasing psychological “medicalization” of certain otherwise normal mental attitudes, moods, dispositions, or emotional states like depression, sadness or shyness (see works, for example, by Allan Horowitz and Jermoe Wakefield, and Christopher Lane), it does appear to be the case that

“… Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.

A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives. The categories were ‘anxiety disorders,’ including, among other subcategories, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); ‘mood disorders,’ including major depression and bipolar disorders; ‘impulse-control disorders,’ including various behavioral problems and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); and ‘substance use disorders,’ including alcohol and drug abuse. Most met criteria for more than one diagnosis. Of a subgroup affected within the previous year, a third were under treatment—up from a fifth in a similar survey ten years earlier.” (Marcia Angell in the New York Review of Books)

Of course this raises all sorts of questions, the most important of which Angell herself asks:

“What is going on here? Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?”

Well short of here answering (or even beginning to answer) the necessary and urgent questions posed by Angell, and relying largely upon mental health and well-being criteria found within the above philosophical traditions, writers (be they political philosophers, activist intellectuals, or karma-yogins defying ready-made classification, like Gandhi), as well as the Freudian (and post-Freudian) psychoanalytic tradition,  I think one can, if only reluctantly or uneasily, correctly conclude that American society (and perhaps more than a few elements essential to modern civilization) is (are), generally speaking, “sick” (this was of course originally written a number of years before Donald Trump’s presidency). I am inclined to believe that there are in fact a lot of people who are, routinely, quite unhappy (to the point of episodic or even chronic depression), miserable, anxious, fearful, insecure, and prone to an unusual degree in their structural susceptibility to living daily with self-deception, (debilitating forms of) wishful thinking, and states of denial, in addition to a welter of illusions and, in the worst cases, delusional thinking. The extent of such symptomatic and often pathological behavior is such that we might safely claim there are an alarming number of people in this society that lack a reliable disposition to truth, have a tenuous grip on reality and a corresponding untenable notion of what constitutes a fact, and a stubbornly elusive moral compass.

Insofar as this is indeed the case, existing capacities for individuation have been thwarted or stunted and the quest for generalized (in a Marxist sense or otherwise) self-realization (or what Rudolf Bahro termed ‘general emancipation’) becomes purely utopian or but a mere dream. Can we assert, with confidence, or make an unambiguous judgment to the effect that this adds up to widespread mental illness as defined by contemporary psychiatrists and psychologists? Perhaps … or sometimes (if only because of the different kinds of psychiatry and psychology: from the ostensibly ‘scientific’ to the humanely psychotherapeutic). To be sure, the boundaries between ordinary unhappiness, everyday depression and generalized anxiety and the exhibition of pathological symptoms are not always hard and fast. But it is all too clear that there is precious little evidence, so to speak, of eudaimonia or flourishing among the masses, and thus a widespread dearth of meaningful or true self-fulfillment, suggesting the absence of basic mental health, if not the presence of mental illness of various kinds and degrees of severity. The main problem with the former is that it is liable to be a breeding ground for the latter. People in this country are in fact, at least in the first instance and as a manner of speaking, self-diagnosing (which becomes self-fulfilling or -confirming in the clinic) and self-treating or self-medicating (again, often or later in collusion with a biomedically disposed health care system and health insurance agencies), and the disturbing results and nefarious consequences are all around us, in both the daily round and public realms.

* See the formidable critique in Sridhar Venkatapuram’s “crucial and impressive work,” Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach (Polity Press, 2011).

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction
• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Buddhism & Psychoanalysis
• The Emotions
• Freudian Psychoanalytic Psychology
• Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Individual and Shared Responsibility
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology