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What Is to Be Done?

   

I should note that this was not intended to be my first post upon returning from a brief blogging hiatus, but “the best laid plans…”

Burning Questions for those defending Ukraine against the Russian invasion of a sovereign country orchestrated by the authoritarian plutocrat and sociopath, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin:

There was a “security analyst” (from Edinburgh) on CNN (I tried to find information about him on their website but was not successful, perhaps owing to the fact that it is well after midnight and I usually get up by 4:00 am so I’m getting a bit tired) who said we will soon see urban warfare as Soviet troops begin entering cities in Ukraine, which appears in fact to have already begun. The downside of course is the number of civilians who will be in harm’s way, some because of the understandable and justifiable attempt to defend their country. The kind of strategies and tactics this analyst mentioned, while not specifically those peculiar to guerrilla warfare, began to cross over into same. And some of the methods and tactics cited have even been used in deliberate and organized nonviolent actions by civilians. Be that as it may, I want to reiterate something I said a couple of days ago on my FB page: should the Ukrainians want to have some reasonable chance of stopping the massive (i.e., superior) military forces on the Russian side they will need to resort to guerrilla warfare. This raises all sorts of questions in international law around “combatant and civilian status in international armed conflicts,” which I do not want to minimize, let alone dismiss. Still, and whatever my principled preferences for negotiations and bargaining—that is, diplomacy (the path of peace)—I cannot but help settle for a realist(ic) assessment of what is occurring and likely will occur. Thus I raise the probable if not urgent importance or necessity of Ukrainians resorting, ceteris paribus, to guerrilla warfare.

    

I wonder if there are any handbooks on guerrilla warfare in Ukrainian (or in Russian). That would appear to be the next stage in this military struggle for the survival of a sovereign nation-state, “the second-largest country by area in Europe after Russia,” a would-be democratic republic that has been classified as a “hybrid regime” (part autocratic, part democratic).

“Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare in which small groups of combatants, such as paramilitary personnel, armed civilians, or irregulars, use military tactics including ambushes, sabotage, raids, petty warfare, hit-and-run tactics, and mobility, to fight a larger and less-mobile traditional military.

Although the term ‘guerrilla warfare’ was coined in the context of the Peninsular War in the 19th century, the tactical methods of guerrilla warfare have long been in use. In the 6th century BC, Sun Tzu proposed the use of guerrilla-style tactics in The Art of War. The 3rd century BC Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus is also credited with inventing many of the tactics of guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare has been used by various factions throughout history and is particularly associated with revolutionary movements and popular resistance against invading or occupying armies.

Guerrilla tactics focus on avoiding head-on confrontations with enemy armies, instead engaging in limited skirmishes with the goal of exhausting adversaries and forcing them to withdraw. Guerrilla groups often depend on the logistical and political support of either the local population or foreign backers who do not engage in an armed struggle but sympathize with the guerrilla group’s efforts.”

A short English language list on guerrilla warfare:

• Asprey, Robert B. War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History, 2 vols. (Doubleday & Co., 1975).
• Barry, Tom. Guerilla Days in Ireland (Mercier Press, 2011 [1949]).
• Beckett, Ian F.W. Encyclopedia of Guerrilla Warfare (Checkmark Books, 2001).
• Boot, Max. Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (Liveright Publishing, 2013).
• Chaliand, Gérard. Guerrilla Strategies: An Historical Anthology from the Long March to Afghanistan (University of California Press, 1982).
• Derradji, Abder-Rahmane. The Algerian Guerrilla Campaign: Strategy and Tactics (Edwin Mellen Press, 1997).
• Derradji, Abder-Rahmane. The Algerian Guerrillas and the FLN’s March from Birth to Crisis (Scholars’ Press, 2017).
• Guevara, Che. Guerrilla Warfare (Monthly Review Press, 1961).
• Kilcullen, David. Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (Oxford University Press, 2013.
• MacDonald, Peter. Giap: The Victor in Vietnam (W.W. Norton & Co., 1993).
• Mao, Tse-Tung [Mao, Zedong] (Samuel B. Griffith, II, trans.) On Guerrilla Warfare (University of Illinois Press, 2000).
• Peers, William R. and Dean Brelis. Behind the Burma Road (Little, Brown & Co., 1963).
• Sun, Bin (trans. with introduction and commentary by D.C. Lau and Roger T. Ames) Sun Bin: The Art of Warfare (State University of New York Press, 2003).
• Sun-tzu [Sunzi] (John Minford, trans. and ed.) The Art of War (Viking Penguin, 2002).
• Sutherland, Daniel E. A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
• Taber, Robert. War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare (Brassey’s Inc., 2002).

Wikipedia:

• Guerrilla warfare
• History of guerrilla warfare

Africana and African American philosophy ... and philosophy and racism

Elizabeth Catlett, Pensive Figure, 1968

This is our seventh and last installment for Black History Month (hence BHM 7). We end the BHM series today largely because, to date, it appears to have generated comparatively little interest (which is both puzzling and, for me at least, depressing).  

Today’s post is for the literature—mostly books—on “Africana” and “African American” philosophy as well as “philosophy and racism.” As there may be no definitive and clear boundaries between philosophers and intellectuals in specific instances apart from the professional guild to which the former belong, one should consult the material earlier posted on “Blacks and the Left” to find a number of formidable black intellectuals, some of whom possess, I would argue, a pronounced philosophical temperament.  

• Africana and African American Philosophy
• Philosophy and Racism

I will be on a blogging hiatus for roughly a week (i.e., until next month).

Blacks and the U.S. criminal justice system (BHM 6)

Charles White, Trenton Six, 1949. Ink over
graphite underdrawing on paperboard.

Our sixth post for Black History Month (BHM) concerns Blacks in the United States and their fraught and unequal treatment in the criminal justice system, which the mass media has only fairly recently considered worthy of closer attention. Some of the conditions and problems that occur here are also linked in various ways (directly and indirectly) to racial disparities in economic opportunity, welfare and well-being (or what the late G.A. Cohen defined as lacking ‘equal access to advantage’*), disparities that of course also involve matters of political power and class more generally.

Jacob Lawrence, To the Defense, 1989.

As with some of our earlier posts, first I will provide the resources available at the Cross Cultural Solidarity History Project on our subject matter. They also link to more material at other online sites:

• Histories of Lynching
• Mass Incarceration: articles
• Mass Incarceration: books
• State Repression of the Black Freedom Struggle

William H. Johnson. Chain Gang. c. 1939–40. Oil on plywood.

The following resources are available from yours truly:

• Attica Prison Uprising (September 9, 1971 – September 13, 1971): Notes, Timeline, and Essential Reading
• Toward a Manifesto for a People's (i.e., democratic) Law School
• The Myriad Dimensions of Prosecutorial Misconduct: A Reading Guide
• Beyond Punitive Liberal Capitalist Society: Toward a Syllabus
• Punishment and Prison bibliography (with addendum on policing in the U.S.)

I hope to have at least a couple of more posts in recognition and honor of Black History Month before the month’s end.

* For a philosophical treatment of this idea in general (thus not focused on racial disparities as such), please see Cohen’s posthumously published book (Michael Otsuka, ed.), On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2011). For an attempt to address this from a social policy perspective (one cognizant of the philosophical literature) based on the premise that it addresses differing views and arguments among egalitarians that “appear to converge on the same general policy prescription in the short to medium term: identify the worst off and take appropriate steps so that their position can be improved,” please see Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit, Disadvantage (Oxford University Press, 2007). Finally, and more historically and broadly, see Thomas Piketty (Arthur Goldhammer, trans.) Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).

A Sunday Sermon in the spirit of Joseph Butler (1692 – 1752)

“Freedom, that most general of negative words, looms over us. It no longer means just the absence of a few specified evils—slavery, oppression, error—or the entrance ticket to certain specified goods—attractive personal and political choices. It no longer means freedom from or to do anything in particular. It has spread itself to cover isolation from most of what gives life meaning: tradition, [community], influence, affection, personal and local ties [except to criminal and pathological groups], natural roots and sympathies, Hume’s ‘sentiment of humanity.’ Yet it presents itself as an absolute demand, a new but unanswerable moral demand.”— Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Routledge, revised ed., 1995) I am not sure if this was part of the first edition of 1978, or placed in the revised edition of 1995.  

The “freedom” in question here is that of radical libertarians and their fellow travelers on the radical right who have eviscerated the notion of “conservativism” through their regressive apocalyptic-like politics of annihilation, wherein political “policies” are by design and default the privatization of public and common goods and deregulation in the name of financial and technocratic turbo-capitalism, albeit contradictorily framed in the ideological rhetoric of nationalist or patriotic exceptionalism. In other words, this snippet from Midgley’s book takes us some distance in accounting for the radical right’s singular, obsessive or maniacal, and habitual if not ritualistic invocation of “liberty,” which thus occurs untethered to any sense of moral or political need or justified wants. Its volatile, manipulative and largely inchoate meaning is acquired in the politics of the moment or event by way of evanescent yet emotionally powerful and perhaps subconscious association. What Midgley describes, paradoxically, as an “unanswerable moral demand” is in reality incoherent with regard to the obligations or imperatives of morality, indeed, it is conspicuous by its severance from morality and Liberal (and by implication, democratic) politics, its rhetorical power perhaps a result of a lingering scent from its hallowed and meaningful history, acquired at least since (and to some extent before) the European Enlightenment in general and the French Revolution in particular.

Darwin and Marx as “ill-served benefactors” of humanity

From my vantage point, Marxism should be construed as making arguments that are, in part (and in vary degrees of significance and strength), social scientific (in the widest sense, wherein political economy is paramount), historical, moral (even if only implicit), philosophical (as in having to do with philosophical anthropology, Liberal political philosophy, including democratic theory and praxis, and utopian thought), and of course political (hence the relevance of the state, reforms, and revolution). These strands are sometimes brilliantly or more often obscurely intertwined, confused, or conflated among Marxists; and they cannot be combined so as to achieve clarity within something christened “materialism” in an ontological or metaphysical sense. Thus I find it deeply misleading because profoundly mistaken to characterize Marx and Marxist thought as merely “scientific,” a reductionist and simple-minded description (if only because it is frequently positivistic in the worse sense) that has done much theoretical and practical harm over time. This is but one reason the self-defined “analytical Marxists” (G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer, Erik Olin Wright, Philippe Van Parijs, and Adam Przeworski; there are others, like Robert Brenner, Michael Luntley, David Schweickart and R.G. Peffer, who might be included under this term even if they did not participate in discussions with group members over the years), and thus analytical Marxism as such is, I adamantly believe, a necessary (hence not sufficient) condition of any intellectually respectable Marxism. This Marxism need not hold to any particular model or theory heretofore popular among these Marxists, be it “rational choice” or game theory, but should avail itself of the best in social science methods and the norms of philosophical (especially conceptual) clarity and argument. Finally, it should be leavened by the global experiences of political praxis which draw upon not only the relevant history, but is framed, with regard to probabilities and possibilities, in the short, medium, and long-term, all the while not forswearing or ignoring what might be viewed as a time-transcendent utopian dimension (at least insofar as that involves our most cherished hopes and dreams as incarnate in our highest ideals and fundamental values; this is distinguishable from blueprint utopias on the one hand, and the ‘real utopias’ of the late Erik Olin Wright on the other).

Personally, I hope this Marxism understands the moral, legal, and political significance (which includes ‘constitutional goods’) of Liberal political philosophy as much or even more than Liberal political philosophers themselves, and is firmly committed to the values, principles, and practices embodied in democratic theory and practice, be it in participatory, deliberative, or representative form. Finally, I trust that a Marxism construed in this manner does not rule out lifeworlds and worldviews working in conjunction or collaboration with other worldviews and lifeworlds, such that one might be, for example, and at the same time, say, a Marxist and a Buddhist, a Marxist and a Catholic, (or forging solidarity or alliances with those who, while not Marxist, are sympathetic to socialist and communist ideas and ideals) what have you, for this Marxism need not crowd out other beliefs, values, and ideals that give meaning and purpose to one’s life. After all, Marxism is but one worldview among others, and unless we are irrationally dogmatic or fatally blinkered, like contemporary fundamentalist evangelical Christians or militant jihadists (e.g. Al-Qaeda or ISIS/Daesh) who fail to appreciate and respect the notion of human dignity or the values of intellectual or worldview pluralism, including the unavoidable degree of relativism intrinsic to our views (as both the pragmatists and Jains, for different reasons, would remind us), we can concede the fact that identification with a Marxist worldview is perfectly compatible with coming to learn whatever truth(s) might be incarnate in other worldviews.

A rough analogy with the propagation of a crude and reductionist Marxism might be taken from what has occurred in the natural sciences insofar as it demonstrates how far astray philosophers and scientists often find themselves from the arguments of those to whom they are theoretically beholden, while more or less claiming intellectual fidelity (and often some measure of emotional identification or devotion) to this or that intellectual forebear. Consider, for instance, what has happened to the Darwinian theory of evolution, which has been variously translated (and ‘updated’) as (i) the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer; (ii) the Malthusian Social Darwinism of the ecologist Garrett Hardin’s “lifeboat ethics;” (iii) the sociobiology and “population genetics” of E.O. Wilson; (iv) the right-wing ideology of what Mary Midgley memorably termed “biological Thatcherism” (which is ‘romantic and egotistic, celebrating evolution as a ceaseless crescendo of competition between essentially “selfish” individual organisms, each making “investments” for its own separate advantage, organisms whose attempts to “manipulate” one another provide[ ] the whole dynamic of development’); (v) the “selfish genes” of Richard Dawkins; (vi) and much of the nonsense that has dominated the field of evolutionary psychology. The collaboration between disciplines or fields of inquiry does not necessarily avoid any of the myriad problems that plague the above theories, indeed, it may just exacerbate them, as I suspect will be—if it is not already— the case with the marriage of convenience between the neurosciences (or ‘evolutionary neuroscience’ in particular) and evolutionary psychology. As Darwin himself wrote about the intellectual and ideological nature of such phenomena, “Great is the power of misrepresentation.” We cannot hold either Darwin or Marx wholly responsible for the folly of those who later developed ideological isms and systems in their name (even if their theories were to some extent unavoidably vulnerable to same). Of course neither intellectual giant is immune from criticism, as the analytical Marxists demonstrate in the case of Marx and Stephen Jay Gould or Evelyn Fox Keller illustrate in the case of Darwin: this is what it means to follow in the footsteps of others while also carefully constructing new trails through methodological and theoretical thickets. Therefore, and to adapt the words of one of my undergraduate teachers—the late Raghavan Iyer—Darwin and Marx remain “ill-served benefactors of humanity.”

Here is a short list of titles germane to the critique of the various Darwinian motivated or inspired theories above (which should not detract from the core integrity and coherence of Darwin’s theory). (I have not included titles, save one, related to the neurosciences, which are prone to similar kinds of untenable reduction, extravagant and hyperbolic theoretical claims, as well as ideological manipulation):

• Buller, David J. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (MIT Press, 2005).
• Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford University Press, 2001).
• Hacker, P.M.S. Human Nature: The Categorial Framework (Blackwell, 2007).
• Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science (Oxford University Press, 2007).
• Lewontin, R.C. Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (HarperCollins, 1991).
• Lewontin, Richard. It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (New York Review Books, 2000).
• Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Routledge, revised ed., 1995).
• Rose, Hilary and Steven Rose. Genes, Cells and Brains: The Promethean Promises of the New Biology (Verso, 2012).
• Ross, Eric B. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development (Zed Books, 1998).
• Tallis, Raymond. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness (St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ed.).
• Tallis, Raymond. I Am: An Inquiry into First-Person Being (Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
• Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Acumen, 2011).

  Relevant Bibliographies

• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Thinking about Comparative Philosophy
• Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity
• Marxism
• Notes on the Science and the Sciences
• Philosophy, Psychology, and Methodology for the Social Sciences
• Sullied Sciences
  

Notes on Proverbs, Aphorisms, Maxims …

(This is perhaps a long introduction to our subject matter, especially if one’s attention span has become habituated to tweets, internet memes, and smartphones.)  

       

• Aphorism: “A ‘definition’ or concise statement of a principle in any science (OED).”
• Adage: “A maxim handed down from antiquity (OED).” Any principle bequeathed from the past is an adage.
• Proverb: A short pithy saying in common and recognized use (OED). A proverb has to be pithy and also common in use.

“We can certainly say that these distinctions in the definition are largely ignored in practical usage. Along with these three words, others like ‘saw,’ ‘maxim’ and ‘apothegm’ could also be used interchangeably. Proverb, adage and appear to be the most common oral and literary form.”

“You could say that an aphorism is a perverse or paradoxical proverb; a corrective for experience. Auden says they’re an aristocratic genre of writing (Viking Book of Aphorisms). Hollingdale … says they’re ‘philosophical,’ while epigrams are not, and they have the impact of the punch line of a joke, For example: ‘There are truths that go around so dressed up you would take them for lies, but which are pure truths none the less.’”

• A proverb is “a short pithy saying in common use, a concise sentence, which is held to express some truth ascertained by experience or observation and familiar to all,” Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Webster’s Second: A proverb is an adage couched usually in homely and vividly concrete phrase; as, accused (in the phrase of a homely proverb) of being “penny-wise and pound-foolish” (The Spectator).
• An adage “is a saying of long-established authority and universal application,” Webster’s Second.
• An apothegm is “a terse, pointed saying embodying an important truth in a few words,” Shorter Oxford; “a terse and sententious aphorism,” Webster’s Second; Liddell & Scott say of the Greek apophthegm, “to speak one’s opinion plainly; metaphorical of vessels when struck.”
• A saying “is a brief current or habitual expression of whatever form,” Webster’s Second

The difference between an aphorism and a proverb seems to be very minimal. They often cover similar subjects, they have the same basic structures, and there seems to be some overlap.

The words ‘aphorism’ and ‘proverb’ come from Greek and Latin, respectively. ‘Aphorism’ comes from the Greek word ‘aphorismos,’ which meant a pithy phrase containing a general truth. That came from the word ‘aphorizo,’ which meant ‘I define’ or ‘I determine’, so ‘aphorismos’ probably meant a phrase that defined some aspect of life. ‘Proverb’ comes from the Latin word ‘proverbium,’ formed from ‘pro’ meaning ‘for,’ ‘verb’ meaning ‘word,’ and the –ium suffix, which was used to mark a noun as nominative, or describing what something was. The overall meaning could be considered ‘a word for,’ as in ‘a word (or phrase) for the situation.’

An aphorism is defined as a short saying that is both original and conveys a deeper meaning about life, often concise and meaningful, otherwise known as ‘pithy.’ This would mean that a quote that conveys some fundamental truth would be an aphorism. A proverb, on the other hand, is defined as a phrase expressing a basic truth. Originality is not specified in the meaning, which is a good thing because many proverbs are said over and over again. However, the definition of a proverb has been subject to some controversy.

The biggest difference between the two, based on many of the examples given seems to be that aphorisms more often quotes from famous people while proverbs are often not given a source.

‘No amount of reasoning is going to help a person see the way that he does not want to see.” — Rolland, French

That quote has been used as an aphorism. The English language has a proverb which expresses the same idea: ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.’

The majority of aphorisms also seem to be literal while proverbs are more often metaphorical. There are a number of literal proverbs, but they seem to be less than half. This might be due to the fact that the aphorisms are more often quotes. While the writers of these aphorisms might use an example to back up their truth, they often have to summarize their meaning to capture the attention of the reader. Proverbs often come with their meaning attached, since many people learn them as children, so they are more recognized.

Some people say that proverbs are types of aphorisms. However, given the definition above and the typical examples, it would seem more likely that aphorisms are a type of proverb. Specifically, they are ones that are given a source, meaning they are original to the person who defined that truth.

Other people say that the difference between aphorisms and proverbs is that aphorisms are more instructive in nature while proverbs are witty observations. This could be true, given that it’s easier to take the instruction of a clear comment than a metaphor. However, of the examples given for each type, that appears to be the other way around. The aphorisms appear to be more observational while the proverbs are more instructive.

Others say that aphorisms tend to be shorter than proverbs. While this can be true, it is not always true: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’—Lord Acton

The proverb form – that is, the one most commonly repeated, which is said to be a proverb – of this aphorism is “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” which is shorter than the aphorism. In any case, the majority of sayings said to be aphorisms are quotes from famous people or from novels. Proverbs, while sometimes taken from novels or famous quotes, are most often unsourced. That appears to be the most prominent difference between the two.

         

*           *           *

Adage: An aphorism that has that has gained credit through long use.

Example: Where there's smoke, there’s fire.

Aphorism: A tersely, memorable phrased statement of a truth or opinion; an adage.

Example: He’s a fool who cannot conceal his wisdom.

Cliché: An overly commonplace, banal or trite saying, expression or idea. Sometimes the terms stereotype or platitude are used as a synonym. Clichés can be defined as preconceived twists, hackneyed and worn out by too frequent use of images, modes of expression, speech and thought patterns. These are often used thoughtlessly and without individual conviction.

Example: All Americans are very open.

Epigram: A concise, clever, often paradoxical statement, thought or observation; sometimes expressed as a short, witty poem.

Example: The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

Epithet: A descriptive term (= word or phrase) used to characterize a person or thing, that has become popular is commonly understood.

Example: The Great Emancipator — as a term for Abraham Lincoln.

Folklore: The term in the narrower sense means oral lore of a group of people. In the broader sense folklore describes the totality of ‘demotic‘ traditions. It often has religious or mythical elements. See also: myth, (urban) legend, tale, oral tradition. [From Old English - folk = ‘people’ and lore = ‘tradition’ or ‘knowledge’] Therefore folklore literally means ‘knowledge of the people’ or ‘tradition of the people.’

Idiom: An expression that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of the words. Quite a few idioms are language specific, and thus difficult to translate.

Example: A cold day in Hell

Hyperbole: A figure of speech (or any rhetorical device) in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect, mostly beyond credibility. [Greek huperbol, exaggeration, from: huper (= beyond) and ballein (= to throw)] It is encountered in casual speech, as in — ‘I could sleep for a year’ — ‘This book weighs a ton.’

Maxim: Compared with its approximate synonyms: saying, adage, saw, motto, epigram, proverb, aphorism, the term maxim stresses the succinct formulation of a fundamental principle, general truth, or rule of conduct. [Latin: maximus, ‘greatest,’ via the expression maxima propositio, ‘greatest premise.’]

Example: Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

Motto: A brief statement used to express a principle, a motivation, a goal, or an ideal.

Examples: Be Prepared; Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity (FBI).

Phrasal verb: An English verb and one or more following particles (e.g. a preposition or adverb); the combination creates a meaning different from the original verb thus acting as a complete syntactic and semantic unit.

Example: The new teacher passes for a linguist.

Proverb: A simple and short saying, widely known, often metaphorical, which expresses a basic truth or practical precept, based on common sense or cultural experience.

Example: Honesty is the best policy.

Pun: This is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of words (or of similar-sounding words) for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect.

Example: A fool with a tool is still a fool.

Quip: A clever or witty observation or remark, with a tendency to descend into sarcasm, or otherwise is short of point. [Latin: quippe = ‘indeed’ - meaning: smart remark]

Example: Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

Saying: A short well-known expression — a pithy remark of wisdom and truth or a general advice.

Example: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Saw: An old familiar saying that is commonplace, longstanding and occasionally trite (sometimes through repetition). [Old English: synonym for ‘saying’ - meaning: uneducated wisdom, often based in superstitions]

Example: When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Slogan: This is a memorable motto or phrase used as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose. Also called tagline or one liner.

Example: Make learning fun.

Winged Word: A popular saying which can be attributed (as a citation) to a specific source. These phrases have found entrance into general usage. Among them are often terse descriptions of complex matters or those of life experiences.

Example: Writing on the wall (Biblical book of Daniel)

Witticism: Witty remarks can be intentionally cruel and are more ingenious than funny.

Lady Astor said to Churchill, ‘If you were my husband, I’d poison your tea,’ Churchill replied ‘Madam, if you were my wife, I’d drink it!’

*           *           *

“Proverbs are unique in several respects. They represent one of the oldest genres in world literature, if not the oldest. They may be transmitted individually, or gathered into collections, or inserted in other contexts. They are often transmitted orally and thus can have an extraordinarily long shelf life. They may be couched in prose or poetry. They may serve as part of a school curriculum or as a repository of folk wisdom widely cited at suitable times. They may impart behavior that is ethical, or reverent, or politically correct. Most often they convey practical knowledge for the daily life humanity. Yet for all these and other divergent and sometimes mutually contradictory characteristics, proverbs have one thing in common: they are short [unlike some maxims by the French moralists], pithy statements expressing eternal verities and couched in piquant language suitable for memorizing.”

Bailey’s 1,350 proverbs “are drawn strictly from the daily life of the Bedouin, to the exclusion of any proverbial wisdom shared with Arabic speakers generally. Like Bedouin poetry, which the author has called the ‘mirror of a culture,’ they thus reflect the Bedouin lifestyle [which is swiftly disappearing; see titles in my Bedouin bibliography for more on this], the “culture of desert survival” in the Sinai peninsula and the Negev, where the author collected his material over thirty-five years of indefatigable fieldwork. But that lifestyle is disappearing before our very eyes as village settlement is [often] being [ruthlessly] promoted by Egypt and Israel respectively, as it is in other countries of the entire ‘Fertile Crescent,’ whose edges have always sustained a population of pastoralists living in a more or less uneasy symbiosis with the agriculturalists [historical narratives surrounding the beginnings of Islam inadvertently narrate this ‘uneasy symbiosis’]. [….] Bailey’s collection represents the precious preservation of a vanishing literary legacy.”— From the Foreword by William W. Hallo to Clinton Bailey’s A Culture of Desert Survival: Bedouin Proverbs from Sinai and the Negev (Yale University Press, 2004)

*           *           *

Proverbial Wisdom: a brief introduction to proverbs

Please note: I am not addressing the Book of Proverbs¹ in the Hebrew Bible (Hebrew: מִשְלֵי, Míshlê [Shlomoh], ‘Proverbs [of Solomon’], which is part of Ketuvim, ‘Writings,’ the third section of Tanakh), what Christians call the Old Testament, nor am I speaking to Erasmus’ annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, Adagia,² compiled during the Renaissance.

“True enough, ordinary people do not produce bodies of written reflection expounding their views of life. [We can readily imagine several likely explanations for this fact: they are comparatively disadvantaged: oppressed or exploited, they are preoccupied with ‘making a living’ and their discretionary time, such as it is, involves entertainment or forms of escape form the drudgery or dreariness of their everyday lives, they are poorly educated, their social and economic circumstances are conducive to neither individuation of self-realization, and so forth and so on.] But other roads lead into their avenues of thought. In particular, a communal group’s proverbial dicta provide us with a window into life as seen by ordinary people—an insight into the philosophical outlook of [the masses] that would otherwise remain mute because philosophy, literature, scholarship, and other modes of written expression remain outside its range.

By common dictionary definition, a proverb is a popular maxim that pithily conveys a useful lesson or instruction. The three salient features of a proverb are thus instructiveness, brevity, and popularity. And its reason for being is to provide useful guidance in the conduct of life. Perhaps we [Rescher is speaking of philosophers and those who read philosophy] can learn but little from this source of ‘popular philosophy,’ but that little is neither uninstructive nor uninteresting. For the proverbs of a people show us how they really think about things.

Proverbs are generally anonymous, passed down from time immemorial. Sometimes, however, the dictum of an identifiable individual becomes proverbial—as, for example, Sir Robert Walpole’s cynical remark now familiarly rendered as ‘Every man has his price.’ [Donald J. Trump believes this, Kant does not, assuming here that ‘price’ can also be metaphorical.] Proverbial wisdom is overwhelmingly concerned with the conduct of life, formulating the ‘commonsense’ lessons put at the disposal of everyone the hard-won wisdom of the sagacious. [….] Hence the bulk of it is devoted to rules and instructions (‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’). To be sure, proverbs are sometimes framed in the form of questions. But then the questions are rhetorical and do duty for an injunction. [….] Here, as elsewhere, the exception tests (not proves, save in an antiquated sense of the term) the rule: Exceptio probat regulam.

Proverbial wisdom’s messages are generally universal. In overwhelming measure, proverbs reflect constancies of the human condition and not cultural peculiarities of particular groups or eras. [Rescher here provides numerous examples in a variety of languages.] The basic message is generally universal, although the particular mode of expression may be culturally shaped in ways that call for backward [i.e., historical!] information about prevailing conditions: the English ridicule taking coal to Newcastle, the Greeks taking owls to Athens, the Indians taking pepper to Hindustan. Sometimes, however, closely kindred proverbs move off in somewhat different directions: ‘When it rains, it pours, means once troubles begin for someone, he or she has lots of them [it seems in this instance there is a ‘tipping point’ leading to ‘slippery slope’]. But ‘Cuando llueve todos se mojan’ [‘when it rains, everyone gets wet’] means once troubles begin for someone, many people are affected.”—From Nicholas Rescher’s chapter, “Proverbial Wisdom,” in his book, Human Interests: Reflections on Philosophical Anthropology (Stanford University Press, 1990): 36-41.

“Quotable” definitions of proverbs inasmuch as I found them clever, incisive, or imaginative, in addition to being more or less true (I also came across some ‘quotable’ definitions that did not strike me as true, while others were needlessly and thus annoyingly elitist and condescending):

• “A short sentence based on long experience.”—Miguel de Cervantes
• “The sanctuary of the intuitions”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Consist usually of a natural fact selected as a picture or parable of a moral truth.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “They are all made for men, for their own advantage.”—Thomas Hardy
• “The proverbs of a nation furnish an index to its spirit, and the results of its civilization.”—Josiah G. Holland
• “The wisdom of the streets.”—William G. Benham
• “The philosophy of the common people.”—James Howell
• “Few words, right sense, fine imagery.”—Moses Ibn Ezra
• “A little gospel.”—Spanish proverb

I found these in Eugene E. Russell, ed. Webster’s New World Dictionary of Quotable Definitions (Prentice Hall, 2^nd ed., 1988)

Notes

1. The Book of Proverbs is “traditionally placed among the ‘Writings’ and considered part of the wisdom literature. It consists in part of short sayings expressing in pithy form insights into human affairs, especially of a social and religious natures. The Hebrew word (māšāl) translated ‘proverb’ can mean comparison, and many of the proverbs contain a metaphor or simile. The dates of the material within the book range over a long period of time; while the final edition was made after the exile [hence ‘postexilic’], probably in the fifth century B.C.E., much of the actual contents are earlier and some of it is even pre-monarchic. The oral origins are often obvious.” For the rest of this helpful introductory entry, please see “Proverbs, The Book of,” in Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford University Press, 1993): 624-626.
2. “Adagia (singular adagium) is the title of an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus’ collection of proverbs is ‘one of the most monumental ... ever assembled’ (Speroni, 1964: 1). The first edition, titled Collectanea Adagiorum, was published in Paris in 1500, in a slim quarto of around eight hundred entries. By 1508, after his stay in Italy, Erasmus had expanded the collection (now called Adagiorum chiliades tres or ‘Three thousands of proverbs’) to over 3,000 items, many accompanied by richly annotated commentaries, some of which were brief essays on political and moral topics. The work continued to expand right up to the author’s death in 1536 (to a final total of 4,151 entries), confirming the fruit of Erasmus’ vast reading in ancient literature.” An English translation of a selection of the proverbs made by William Barker with ample contextual and explanatory material is found in The Adages of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2nd ed., 2001).

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Aphorisms in Indic worldviews and traditions

In Indian literary (including religious and philosophical) traditions a sūtra (सूत्र, ‘string’ or ‘thread’; Pali: sutta) refers to an aphorism (cf. maxims, proverbs, etc.) or more often a collection of aphorisms in the form of a manual or, more broadly, a condensed manual or text. Sūtra(s) are a genre of ancient and medieval Indic texts found, for example, in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, as well as other literary, medical, legal, and loosely scientific traditions. Because of their aphoristic or condensed (or even enigmatic) quality, they typically require and thus are often accompanied by one or more bhāṣya(s) (भाष्य), which are expositions, interpretations, and commentaries of the sūtra(s).

“The Heart Sūtra (Sanskrit: प्रज्ञापारमिताहृदय Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya; Chinese: 心經 Xīnjīng) is a popular sutra in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Its Sanskrit title, Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya, can be translated as ‘The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom.’ The sutra famously states, ‘Form is empty’ (śūnyatā). It is a condensed exposé on the Buddhist Mahayana teaching of the Two Truths doctrine, which says that ultimately all phenomena are śūnyatā, empty of an unchanging essence. This emptiness is a ‘characteristic’ of all phenomena, and not (simply or solely) a transcendent reality, but also ‘empty’ of an essence of its own.”

I have introduced the term sūtra here because I recently came across a work in English which has a sūtra-like quality to it; at the very least, its aphorisms often pack a philosophical punch and, from my vantage point at least, call for, provoke, or demand further elucidation of one kind or another. I stumbled upon this gem of a book while browsing in a local bookstore, having never heard of its author, but the enchanting title quickly captured my attention: On Art and Mindfulness: Notes from the Anderson Ranch (Snowmass, CO: Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Whale & Star Press, 2nd ed., 2015). It is written by one Enrique Martinez Celaya, who has trained as an artist and physicist, having exhibited his works internationally, as we say, with some of his art in permanent collections of well-known museums. The material for the book was drawn from the summer workshops and seminars he taught over nine years at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado. While I have yet to view his art in more than a cursory manner, I have begun reading his book! For now I want to share just one aphorism:

“Freedom is elusive and frequently it is not where we think it ought to be. Much time is devoted to talking about freedom in art,* but art is most about boundaries. About constraints.”

By way of reference to an appropriate but unintentional bhāṣya that speaks to the importance of (intrinsic, imposed, and self-imposed) constraints and conventions (or ‘soft’ constraints), both those which reflect one’s discipline and training as well as those constraints one has deliberately chosen as a form of “self-binding,” I recommend Jon Elster’s incisive discussion in the chapter “Less Is More: Creativity and Constraint in the Arts,” from his book, Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Longstanding friends and acquaintances will be familiar with my predilection for finding excuses or ample reason to cite this particular work by Elster (which, like all good books, I return to again and again).

* There are of course moments of freedom or autonomy throughout the process of producing creative and compelling works of art. In the words of Nick Zangwill, “even when there are external influencing factors which impinge on the artist’s decision-making, there are always some properties of the work which cannot be explained without reference to the artist’s intrinsic desire that the work should be a certain way.” In other words,

“ … [W]hen all the influencing factors constraining art production have been taken into account, there is a residual space in which the artist has freedom. This freedom implies a lack of concern with actual or dispositional effects of the work on others—except in the sense that the artist is concerned that the audience will recognize or have a disposition to recognize the values [aesthetic and otherwise] that the artist believes have been realized in the work.” Please see Zangwill’s important philosophical explanation of fundamental features of art in relation to aesthetic properties in his book, Aesthetic Creation (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Blacks and the Left (BHM 5)

Frederick Douglass (c. Feb. 1817 or 1818 – Feb. 20, 1895; incidentally, Douglass chose Feb. 14th to celebrate his birthday) believed that exercise of our “natural” yet distinctively human “faculties and powers” [examples of the latter include ‘wisdom, virtue, and all great moral qualities’] are the basis of “man’s right to liberty” and our “humaneness,” and this in turn “expresses not only our humanity but also produces self-respect, or what Douglass … calls ‘natural dignity.’ This is why he asserts that our ‘natural powers are the foundations’ of our rights: we have rights because we have a human worth, or dignity,’ that we feel deserves informal acknowledgment and formal protection. Douglass’s second idea [‘braided together’ with that just sketched above] is … that our consciousness of our powers and rights depends, in some measure, on others conveying to us, through acts of respectful acknowledgement, that they, too, are conscious of and recognize our powers and rights. [….] Thus, while our rights derive from our innate powers, and to that degree are inherent in our very humanity, they also rest in the hands of others,* who may or may not allow us to become conscious of our powers, achieve our dignity, and exercise our rights.” — Nick Bromell, The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass (Duke University Press, 2021): 41-45

* In the end, Douglass can be seen as affirming what Michael Rosen has identified as four strands of thought commonly associated with the concept of dignity, namely, (i) rank or status, (ii) intrinsic value, (iii) “measured and self-possessed behavior,” and (iv) respectful treatment. Nos. (i), (ii), and (iv) at least (and perhaps arguably (iii)) have since found philosophical grounding or affirmation in international human rights instruments and constitutional law. Insofar as the notion of dignity pertains to the rule of democratic law, in the words of Allen Buchanan, it “can be understood to include two aspects. First, there is the idea that certain conditions of living are beneath the dignity of the sort of being that humans are. [….] Let us call this first aspect of dignity the well-being threshold aspect. The second aspect of dignity is the interpersonal comparative aspect, the idea that treating people with dignity also requires a public affirmation of the basic equal status of all and, again, that if they are not treated in this way they suffer an injury or wrong. [….] The well-being threshold aspect of dignity concerns whether one is doing well enough for a being of the sort one is; it makes no reference to how one is treated vis-à-vis others. The interpersonal comparative aspect has to do with whether one is being treated as an inferior relative to other people.” Please see Thomas E. Hill, “In Defense of Human Dignity: Comments on Kant and Rosen,” in Christopher McCrudden, ed. Understanding Human Dignity (for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2013): 313-325.

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“Black radical liberalism is not intended to be a particularistic and exclusionary political ideology for blacks, but rather one that fully adheres to the standard of liberal ideals—if more often betrayed than realized—of universalism and egalitarianism. It seeks to correct the (anti-universalist, anti-egalitarian) distortions in mainstream white liberalism, whether de jure or de facto, introduced by the complicity of that iteration of liberalism with white supremacy, both nationally and globally. [….] What I am arguing for is a synthesizing, reconstructed black liberalism that draws upon the most valuable insights of the black nationalist and black Marxist traditions* and incorporates them into a dramatically transformed liberalism.” — Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017): 201-202

* At this point we might remind ourselves that the Left, whatever its critique of Liberalism as a political philosophy and political praxis, cannot afford to ignore, let alone do away with (as Marx appreciated), what is perhaps its fundamental historical project: the “insistence on human dignity.”

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“… [T]he Black Popular Front—the ‘Other Blacklist’ of my title [i.e., Mary Ellen Washington’s The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (2014)]—has almost always been marginalized in black literary and cultural studies. Though nearly every major black writer of the 1940s and 1950s was in some way influenced by the Communist Party or other leftist organizations, and although the Left was by all accounts the most racially integrated movement of that period, the terms ‘U.S. radicalism,’ ‘left wing,’ ‘Old Left,’ ‘New Left,’ and ‘communism’ came to signify white history and black absence.

Blacks came to the Communist Party [CP] through various channels: through labor unions, labor organizations, and grassroots antiracist work; through the WPA [Works Progress Administration] or anticolonial work like the campaign against South African apartheid; through community and cultural groups like the South Side Community Arts Center in Chicago, and through the peace movement. As the witch hunts of the McCarthy Senate investigations and HUAC [The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly dubbed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)] geared up, every kind of legitimate dissent, including teachers who tried to institute Black History Week in schools and unions that did antiracist work, was targeted as ‘subversive.’ [….]

No one could have convinced me as a twelve-year-old Catholic schoolgirl or even as a twenty-something graduate student in the early 1960s that communism meant black people any good. But if I had listened carefully to the adults, I might have overheard them talking of unions, Paul Robeson, and civil rights. [….] ‘The CP was the only major American political party that formally opposed racial discrimination; it devoted considerable resources to an array of anti-discrimination campaigns; and it created a rare space for Black leadership in a multicultural institution’ (Martha Biondi). The CP signaled its commitment to black liberation as early as 1928, at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, when, with the encouragement of black activists, the CP made a statement in support of black rights to full equality. With its slogan of ‘self-determination in the Black Belt’ focused on black equality struggles in the U.S. South, the Party embraced both black nationalism and fought against white supremacy, a dual project rooted in the belief that ‘antiracism should be an explicit component of the anticapitalist struggle.’ [….]

Given the political history of the Communist Party as far back as the 1920s, it is clear why the CP attracted blacks, especially during the Depression. In industrialized cities, where blacks were at the bottom of industry’s discriminatory structures and were trying to organize themselves as workers, the militant efforts of communists to unionize workers, stop evictions, protest police violence, integrate unions, and give positions of authority to blacks in the unions must have seemed like beacons of light. The CP gained black support and black confidence in the rural South because of its work organizing the Sharecroppers Union and in the northern industrialized cities because of its organizing of the local CP Unemployed Councils, which fought for welfare relief and against evictions. Starting in the 1920s, the CP coordinated with, joined, or supported a range of black organizations: the American Negro Labor Congress (1925), the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (which replaced the all-black ANLC in the 1930), the National Negro Congress (1935-1947), the Council on African Affairs, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and the Civil Rights Congress (1940-1955). [….]

The Left played such an important part of the black struggle during the 1940s that scholars refer to that period as the Black or Negro Popular Front to indicate that for blacks the classic period of the Popular Front (1935-1939) extended well into the next decade and beyond. [….] With the impetus of World War II and the black militancy it encouraged, the Left gained a much-needed boost in the fight against racism. The war provided a nice set of ideological slogans—represented best by the Pittsburgh Courier’s ‘Double V’ campaign (victory against fascism abroad and victory against racism at home) and the ‘Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’ campaigns. But it was the CP and the black labor Left that supplied the armor for those slogans. Leftist labor leaders—like Ferdinand Smith of the National Maritime Union; Ewart Guinier of the United Public Workers Union; leaders of the Communist-led United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America; the Left-led National Negro Congress; and the leaders of the National Negro Labor Council, Coleman Young (mayor of Detroit from 1974 to 1993) and Nicholas Hood (who would serve as a Detroit councilman for twenty-eight years)—led the struggle for black jobs in war production and in unions and made fair employment practices central to their political agendas. Beyond the war, African American civil rights activists tried to internationalize black struggle with petitions to the United Nations: the NAACP’s 1947 An Appeal to the World and the Civil Rights Congress’s 1951 petition, We Charge Genocide, both of which offered a powerful critique of America’s institutionalized racism. These were left in the dustbin: the U.S. State Department refused to allow these petitions to be presented to the world body.” — Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (Columbia University Press, 2014): 4-7

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This is our fifth post in recognition and honor of Black History Month. In this installment, Black History Month encompasses organizations, movements, and people both inside and outside the U.S. Our next post will address Blacks and the U.S. criminal justice system.

From the Cross Cultural Solidarity History Project:

• Black Communist Tradition
• Black Internationalism
• Black Panther Party: Resources
• Black Power: Articles
• Black Power: Books
• Black Studies and the Black Campus Movement

Elizabeth Catlett, Homage to Black Women Poets, 1984

See too:

• W.E.B. Du Bois
• Martin Luther King, Jr.: Articles
• Martin Luther King, Jr.: Books
• Martin Luther King, Jr.: Speeches, Sermons, Essays, & Interviews
• Malcolm X
• Pauli Murray

Black Panther Party breakfast program

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From yours truly:

• Ella Baker (not a bibliography)
• Black Anger and Rage in the Struggle against Racism (not a bibliography)
• Blacks on the Left
• The Black Panther Party
• Detroit: Labor & Industrialization, Race & Politics, Rebellion & Resurgence
• Frantz Fanon
• The Haitian Revolution
• L.R. James: Marxist Humanist and Afro-Trinidadian Socialist
• Malcolm X
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Black Cosmopolitanism
• South African Liberation Struggles

Angela Davis

See too (relevant blog posts and related bibliographies):

Blog Posts

• George Padmore (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959): exemplifying laudable communism
• “Black Lives Matter:” the ennobling and social realist art of Charles (Wilbert) White (1)

The above post was followed by a series of nine more posts, beginning with Charles White’s democratic art on behalf of human dignity: the aesthetic imperatives of ethical and spiritual “social realism,” and ending here.

Septima Clark teaching at a Citizenship School on the South Carolina Sea Islands

Related Bibliographies

• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• The Great Depression and the New Deal
• The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
• The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Marxism, Art, and Aesthetics
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy and Law
• Social and Political Conflict Resolution & Nonviolence
• Social Security and the Welfare State
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

Jacob Lawrence, Portrait of Stokely Carmichael, 1967

The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization (BHM 4)

Jacob Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000), Two Builders Playing Chess, 1996

This is our fourth post in recognition and honor of Black History Month, with roughly half a dozen more to come before the end of the month. While the posts are somewhat thematic, this one covers an immense amount of material, in part because of the historical period: after Reconstruction (1865 to 1877), that is, the late nineteenth century up until today, but also because of the nature of the subject matter itself, as captured in the title of this bibliography: “After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization.” At over 120 pages, this is one of my longer compilations, rendering it a tad unwieldy for some purposes, as it is not broken down into sections or topics. I have a separate post forthcoming on “Black Power and the Left.” By way of mitigation or compensation for the lengthy bibliography, I’m also—once more—sharing relevant resources (books, articles, podcasts, audio-visual materials, etc.) from the Cross Cultural Solidarity History Project. The parenthetical stuff (largely bibliographies), however, is from yours truly.

Jacob Lawrence, Soldiers and Students, 1962

• Black/Latino Solidarity in U.S. History (see too this compilation: César Chávez & the United Farm Workers… and the Struggle of Farm Workers in the U.S.)
• Black Lives Matter (see too: Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity)
• Contemporary White Antiracism
• Black Studies & the Black Campus Movement (see too: Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education, and Progressive Philosophy of Education and Pedagogical Practices … )
• Environmental Racism (see too: Ecological and Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews)
• Housing Discrimination
• Race & Economic Inequality (see too: Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing)
• Racial Capitalism (see too: Marxism)
• Resources on Critical Race Theory (see too: Philosophy, Psychology, and Methodology for the Social Sciences)
• Voter Suppression (see too: Democratic Theory & Praxis and Elections and Voting)

Jacob Lawrence, The Schomburg Library, 1986-87 (‘Lawrence researched the historical content for many of his own paintings there.’)

“ … Jacob Lawrence created the print The Schomburg Library in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York City. Formerly known as the 135th Street Public Library, the Schomburg Center’s mission advances knowledge about the global black experience. The library was a cultural fixture during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. [….] The Schomburg Center [one of The New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries] is devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences. It holds a huge collection that covers writings, rare books, manuscripts, newspapers, art, artifacts, photography, film and music, the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, and much more.”

Human animals on display at the zoo

The following comes from the research I have been doing on zoos in conjunction with my attempt (forthcoming) to defend Dale Jamieson’s arguments “against zoos.” Presumably anyone examining the history of zoos will at some point come across the fact that human animals—human beings like you and I—were once exhibited in zoos. To be sure, they may not have been, superficially or by appearance, exactly like you and I (which is impossible in any case, as every human person is unique), but they were no less human for all that. This reminds us of the invaluable significance and democratic importance of Liberalism’s insistence on the notion of human dignity and the corresponding value of human rights, the former central to the latter even if its intrinsic tie or philosophical grounding is not always spelled out in legal terms or human rights instruments. I have added a list of titles on human dignity after the suggested reading on the main topic of our post.

“Alongside his infamous bar-less zoo design … Carl Hagenbeck¹ also played a pioneering role—albeit a much less famous one—in the modern zoo’s display of human animals alongside animals. This practice can be traced back to one of the earliest known zoos, that of the emperor Montezuma in Mexico, which exhibited not only a vast collection of animals but also unusual humans, for example, dwarfs, albinos, and hunchbacks. In 1874, Hagenback exhibited Samoan and Sami people as ‘purely natural’ populations. Similarly, both the 1878 and the 1889 Parisian World’s Fair displayed four hundred indigenous people as a major attraction.

Human zoos² were not only successful in Europe. In 1906, the Bronx Zoo exhibited Ota Benga, a Mbuti pygmy from central Africa, as an example of an emblematic savage from a primitive race. At first, he was free to move around the zoo and help keepers feed and communicate with the animals. Soon, however, he was confined to a cage, with a parrot and an orangutan to keep him company. While this exhibit was fairly controversial [well, at least in some quarters], it is nonetheless illustrative of the debates of the time. It was not simply who was and who was not human that worried westerners at the turn of the century, but ‘who was more human and, finally, who was the most human, that concerned them.’ In this sense, the human zoo of the nineteenth century did not see itself as exhibiting humans per se, but rather as displaying naturalized humans. Such humans were typically represented as still-living examples of the earliest stage in human development, the point of transition between animal and human history. Human zoos were, in effect, exhibitions of the [popular? social-?] Darwinian rhetoric of progress as well as visible demonstrations of colonial power.” — Irus Braverman, Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford Law Books/Stanford University Press, 2013): 73.

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Let’s look more closely at the example of Ota Benga mentioned above by Professor Braverman, as it is perhaps the best known case, with several books devoted to his life. I have lightly edited the Wikipedia entry on Benga, which is quite reliable, at least from the perspective of what I have learned to date from other sources. The “suggested reading” list appended at the end of our post is from yours truly.

“Ota Benga (c. 1883 – March 20, 1916) was a Mbuti (Congo pygmy) man, known for being featured in an exhibit at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, and as a human zoo exhibit in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo. Benga had been purchased from African slave traders by the explorer Samuel Phillips Verner, a businessman searching for African people for the exhibition, who took him to the United States. While at the Bronx Zoo, Benga was allowed to walk the grounds before and after he was exhibited in the zoo’s Monkey House. Benga was placed in a cage with an orangutan as a lampoon on Darwinism. To enhance the primitive image and presumably protect himself if need be from the ape he was given a functional bow and arrow. He used this instead to shoot at visitors who mocked him and partially as a result of this the exhibition was ended. Except for a brief visit to Africa with Verner after the close of the St. Louis Fair, Benga lived in the United States, mostly in Virginia, for the rest of his life.

African-American newspapers around the nation published editorials strongly opposing Benga’s treatment. Robert Stuart MacArthur, spokesman for a delegation of black churches, petitioned New York City Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. for his release from the Bronx Zoo. In late 1906, the mayor released Benga to the custody of James M. Gordon, who supervised the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn. In 1910 Gordon arranged for Benga to be cared for in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he paid for his clothes and to have his sharpened teeth capped. This would enable Benga to be more readily accepted in local society. Benga was tutored in English and began to work at a Lynchburg tobacco factory. He tried to return to Africa, but the outbreak of World War I in 1914 stopped all ship passenger travel. Benga fell into a depression, and died by suicide in 1916.

As a member of the Mbuti people, Ota Benga lived in equatorial forests near the Kasai River in what was then the Congo Free State. His people were attacked by the Force Publique, established by King Leopold II of Belgium as a militia to control the natives, most of whom were used for labor in order to exploit the large supply of rubber in the Congo. Benga’s wife and two children were murdered; he survived because he was on a hunting expedition when the Force Publique attacked his village. He was later captured by ‘Baschelel’ (Bashilele) slave traders.

In 1904, American businessman and explorer Samuel Phillips Verner traveled to Africa, under contract from the St. Louis World Fair, to capture and bring back an assortment of pygmies to be part of an exhibition. Verner discovered Benga while en route to a Batwa pygmy village visited previously; he purchased Benga from the slave traders for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth. Verner later claimed he had rescued Benga from cannibals. The two spent several weeks together before reaching the Batwa village. The villagers had developed a racial prejudice against the muzungu (‘white man’). Verner was unable to recruit any villagers to join him for travel to the United States until Benga said that the muzungu had saved his life, and spoke of the bond that had grown between them and his own curiosity about the world Verner came from. Four Batwa, all males, ultimately decided to accompany them. Verner also recruited other Africans who were not pygmies: five men from the Bakuba, including the son of King Ndombe, ruler of the Bakuba; and other related peoples.

The group was taken to St. Louis, Missouri, in late June 1904 without Verner, as he had been taken ill with malaria. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition had already begun, and the Africans immediately became the center of attention. Benga was particularly popular, and his name was reported variously by the press as Artiba, Autobank, Ota Bang, and Otabenga. He had an amiable personality, and visitors were eager to see his teeth that had been filed to sharp points in his early youth as ritual decoration. The Africans learned to charge for photographs and performances. One newspaper account promoted Benga as ’the only genuine African cannibal in America,’ and claimed that ‘[his teeth were] worth the five cents he charges for showing them to visitors.’

When Verner arrived a month later, he realized the pygmies were more prisoners than performers. Their attempts to congregate peacefully in the forest on Sundays were thwarted by the crowds’ fascination with them. McGee’s attempts to present a ‘serious’ scientific exhibit were also overturned. On July 28, 1904, the Africans performed to the crowd’s preconceived notion that they were ‘savages,’ resulting in the First Illinois Regiment being called in to control the mob. Benga and the other Africans eventually performed in a warlike fashion, imitating Native Americans they saw at the Exhibition. The Apache chief Geronimo (featured as ‘The Human Tyger’ – with special dispensation from the Department of War) grew to admire Benga, and gave him one of his arrowheads.

Benga accompanied Verner when he returned the other Africans to the Congo. He briefly lived amongst the Batwa while continuing to accompany Verner on his African adventures. He married a Batwa woman who later died of snakebite, and little is known of this second marriage. Not feeling that he belonged with the Batwa, Benga chose to return with Verner to the United States.

Verner eventually arranged for Benga to stay in a spare room at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City while he was tending to other business. Verner negotiated with the curator Henry Bumpus over the presentation of his acquisitions from Africa and potential employment. While Bumpus was put off by Verner’s request of what he thought was the prohibitively high salary of $175 a month and was not impressed by the man’s credentials, he was interested in Benga. Benga initially enjoyed his time at the museum, where he was given a Southern-style linen suit to wear when he entertained. He became homesick for his own culture. The writers Bradford and Blume imagined his feelings:

‘What at first held his attention now made him want to flee. It was maddening to be inside – to be swallowed whole – so long. He had an image of himself, stuffed, behind glass, but somehow still alive, crouching over a fake campfire, feeding meat to a lifeless child. Museum silence became a source of torment, a kind of noise; he needed birdsong, breezes, trees.’

The disaffected Benga attempted to find relief by exploiting his employers’ presentation of him as a ‘savage.’ He tried to slip past the guards as a large crowd was leaving the premises; when asked on one occasion to seat a wealthy donor’s wife, he pretended to misunderstand, instead hurling the chair across the room, just missing the woman’s head. Meanwhile, Verner was struggling financially and had made little progress in his negotiations with the museum. He soon found another home for Benga. At the suggestion of Bumpus, Verner took Benga to the Bronx Zoo in 1906. William Hornaday, director of the zoo, initially enlisted Benga to help maintain the animal habitats. However, Hornaday saw that people took more notice of Benga than the animals at the zoo, and he eventually created an exhibition to feature Benga. At the zoo, the Mbuti man was allowed to roam the grounds, but there is no record that he was ever paid for his work. He became fond of an orangutan named Dohong, ‘the presiding genius of the Monkey House,’ who had been taught to perform tricks and imitate human behavior.

The events leading to his ‘exhibition’ alongside Dohong were gradual: Benga spent some of his time in the Monkey House exhibit, and the zoo encouraged him to hang his hammock there, and to shoot his bow and arrow at a target. On the first day of the exhibit, September 8, 1906, visitors found Benga in the Monkey House. Only five promotional photos exist of Benga’s time here, none of them in the ‘Monkey House;’ cameras were not allowed. Soon, a sign on the exhibit read:

The African Pygmy, ‘Ota Benga.’

Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.

Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the

Kasai River, Congo Free State, South

Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner.

Exhibited each afternoon during September.

Hornaday considered the exhibit a valuable spectacle for visitors; he was supported by Madison Grant, Secretary of the New York Zoological Society, who lobbied to put Ota Benga on display alongside apes at the Bronx Zoo. A decade later, Grant became prominent nationally as a racial anthropologist and eugenicist. African-American clergymen immediately protested to zoo officials about the exhibit. Said James H. Gordon, ‘Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes ... We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.’ Gordon thought the exhibit was hostile to Christianity and was effectively a promotion of Darwinism: ‘The Darwinian theory is absolutely opposed to Christianity, and a public demonstration in its favor should not be permitted.’

A number of clergymen backed Gordon. In defense of the depiction of Benga as a lesser human, an editorial in The New York Times suggested:

‘We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter ... It is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation Benga is suffering. The pygmies ... are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place ... from which he could draw no advantage whatever. The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.’

After the controversy, Benga was allowed to roam the grounds of the zoo. In response to the situation, as well as verbal and physical prods from the crowds, he became more mischievous and somewhat violent. Around this time, an article in The New York Times quoted Robert Stuart MacArthur as saying, ‘It is too bad that there is not some society like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. We send our missionaries to Africa to Christianize the people, and then we bring one here to brutalize him.’ The zoo finally removed Benga from the grounds. Verner was unsuccessful in his continued search for employment, but he occasionally spoke to Benga. The two had agreed that it was in Benga’s best interests to remain in the United States despite the unwelcome spotlight at the zoo. Toward the end of 1906, Benga was released into Reverend Gordon’s custody. Gordon placed Benga in the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, a church-sponsored orphanage in Brooklyn that Gordon supervised. As the unwelcome press attention continued, in January 1910, Gordon arranged for Benga’s relocation to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived with the family of Gregory W. Hayes.

So that he could more easily be part of local society, Gordon arranged for Benga’s teeth to be capped and bought him American-style clothes. He received tutoring from Lynchburg poet Anne Spencer in order to improve his English, and began to attend elementary school at the Baptist Seminary in Lynchburg. Once he felt his English had improved sufficiently, Benga discontinued his formal education. He began working at a Lynchburg tobacco factory, and began to plan a return to Africa.

In 1914, when World War I broke out, a return to the Congo became impossible as passenger ship traffic ended. Benga became depressed as his hopes for a return to his homeland faded. On March 20, 1916, at the age of 32 or 33, he built a ceremonial fire, chipped off the caps on his teeth, and shot himself in the heart with a borrowed pistol.

He was buried in an unmarked grave in the Black section of the Old City Cemetery, near his benefactor, Gregory Hayes. At some point, the remains of both men went missing. Local oral history indicates that Hayes and Benga were eventually moved from the Old Cemetery to White Rock Hill Cemetery, a burial ground that later fell into disrepair. Benga received a historic marker in Lynchburg in 2017.

Phillips Verner Bradford, the grandson of Samuel Phillips Verner, wrote a book on the Mbuti man, entitled Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (1992). During his research for the book, Bradford visited the American Museum of Natural History, which holds a life mask and body cast of Ota Benga. The display is still labeled ‘Pygmy,’ rather than indicating Benga’s name, despite objections beginning a century ago from Verner and repeated by others. Publication of Bradford’s book in 1992 inspired widespread interest in Ota Benga’s story and stimulated creation of many other works, both fictional and non-fiction…. [….]

Similarities have been observed between the treatment of Ota Benga and Ishi. The latter was the sole remaining member of the Yahi Native American tribe, and he was displayed in California around the same period. Ishi died on March 25, 1916, five days after Ota.”

Notes

1. “Human zoos (also called ‘ethnological expositions’ or ‘Negro villages’) were 19th and 20th century public exhibits of human beings usually in their ‘natural’ or ‘primitive’ state. They were most prominent during the 19th and 20th centuries. These displays often emphasized the supposed inferiority of the exhibits’ culture, and implied the superiority of ‘Western society.’ Throughout their existence such exhibitions garnered controversy over their demeaning, derogatory, and dehumanizing nature. They began as a part of circuses and ‘freak shows’ which displayed exotic humans in a manner akin to a caricature which exaggerated their differences. They then developed into independent displays emphasizing the exhibits’ inferiority to western culture and providing further justification for their subjugation. Such displays featured in multiple world fairs and then transitioned into sections of animal zoos.”

2. “Carl Hagenbeck (June 10, 1844 – April 14, 1913) was a German merchant of wild animals who supplied many European zoos, as well as P. T. Barnum. He created the modern zoo with animal enclosures without bars that were closer to their natural habitat. The transformation of the zoo architecture initiated by him is known as the Hagenbeck revolution. Hagenbeck founded Germany’s most successful privately owned zoo, the Tierpark Hagenbeck, which moved to its present location in Hamburg’s Stellingen district in 1907. He was also an ethnography showman and a pioneer in displaying humans next to animals in human zoos.”

*           *           *

Suggested Reading

• Baratay, Eric and Elizabeth Hardouin-Fugier. A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (Reaktion Books, 2002).
• Bradford, Phillips Verner and Harvey Blume. Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (St. Martin’s Press, 1992)
• Braverman, Irus. Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford Law Books/ Stanford University Press, 2013).
• Gray, Jenny. Zoo Ethics: The Challenges of Compassionate Conservation (Comstock Publishing Associates/Cornell University Press, 2017).
• Hancocks, David. A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future (University of California Press, 2001).
• Jamieson, Dale. Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Clarendon Press, 2002).
• Kroeber, Theodora. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (University of California Press, 2002 [1961]).
• Lindfors, Bernth, ed. Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Indiana University Press/David Philip Publishers [South Africa], 1999).
• Minteer, Ben A., Jane Maienschein, and James P. Collins, eds. The Ark and Beyond: The Evolution of Zoo and Aquarium Conservation (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
• Mullan, Robert and Garry Marvin. Zoo Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1998).
• Newkirk, Pamela. Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2015).
• Rothfels, Nigel. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

Human Dignity (and human rights)

• Besson, Samantha and John Tasioulas, eds. The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Buchanan, Allan E. The Heart of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Capps, Patrick. Human Dignity and the Foundations of International Law (Hart Publishing, 2010).
• Carozza, Paolo G. “Human Rights, Human Dignity, and Human Experience,” in Christopher McCrudden, ed. Understanding Human Dignity (2011): 615-629.
• Daly, Erin. Dignity Rights: Courts, Constitutions, and the Worth of the Human Person (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
• Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press, 3^rd ed., 2013).
• Düwell, Marcus, et al., eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
• Hill, Thomas E., Jr. Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (Cornell University Press, 1992).
• Hill, Thomas E., Jr. “In Defense of Human Dignity: Comments on Kant and Rosen,” in Christopher McCrudden, ed. Understanding Human Dignity (2011): 313-325.
• Kateb, George. Human Dignity (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
• Kraynak, Robert and Glenn Tinder, eds., In Defense of Human Dignity: Essays for Our Times (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).
• Luban, David. Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• McCrudden, Christopher, ed. Understanding Human Dignity (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Morsink, Johannes. Inherent Human Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
• Peffer, R.G. Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton University Press, 1990).
• Rachels, James. The Elements of Moral Philosophy (McGraw-Hill, 4th ed., 2003): 130-140.
• Rosen, Michael. Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Harvard University Press, 2012).
• Steiner, Henry J. and Philip Alston. International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Morals (Text and Materials) (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2000).
• Waldron, Jeremy (et al.) Dignity, Rank and Rights (Berkeley Tanner Lectures, 2009) (Oxford University Press, 2015).
• Wood, Allen W. Kantian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Related Bibliographies

• Constitutionalism
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• The European Enlightenment
• Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity
• Human Rights
• International Law

Slavery (BHM 3)

 

As part of our ongoing recognition and honoring of Black History Month, I am sharing my bibliography on slavery, as well as the page, “On the History of Black History Month,” at The Cross Cultural Solidarity History Project. Click on the piece by W.E.B. Du Bois below to enlarge.

Against Zoos (which are for us and not in the main, for the animals confined to them)

Menagerie, artist unknown, Laing Art Gallery

“A menagerie is a collection of captive animals, frequently exotic, kept for display; or the place where such a collection is kept, a precursor to the modern zoological garden. The term was first used in 17th-century France, in reference to the management of household or domestic stock. Later, it came to be used primarily in reference to aristocratic or royal animal collections. The French-language Methodical Encyclopaedia of 1782 defines a menagerie as an ‘establishment of luxury and curiosity.’ Later on, the term referred also to travelling animal collections that exhibited wild animals at fairs across Europe and the Americas.

A menagerie was mostly connected with an aristocratic or royal court and was situated within a garden or park of a palace. These aristocrats wanted to illustrate their power and wealth, because exotic animals, alive and active, were less common, more difficult to acquire, and more expensive to maintain. The aristocratic menageries are distinguished from the later zoological garden (zoos) since they were founded and owned by aristocrats whose intentions were not primarily of scientific and educational interest.” [….]

While the menagerie is indeed “a precursor to the modern zoological garden,” I mention this only because there are a few features of zoos today that are still held in common with royal menageries, but the reader should not infer a genetic fallacy here as there is much in the best zoos, that is, those accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), an independent non-profit that awards accreditation to zoos that meet the highest standards in animal care and welfare, that differ in significant ways from this precursor. For example, those zoos that meet these standards (‘Of the approximately 2,800 animal exhibitors licensed by the USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] across the country, less than 10% are AZA [Association of Zoos & Aquariums]-accredited.’) have agendas and programs that involve scientific research (including preservation of species and biodiversity), public education (e.g., educating the public to care for all animals, not just those in the wild, as well as the natural world, thus not just wilderness), and conservation efforts (which includes ecosystems), among other characteristics that distinguish them from the menageries of yesteryear. In the words of Irus Braverman, “[t]he various states of the zoo’s evolution are more than relics of the past,” even if zoos “contain physical evidence of the cage phase” and other “traces” of their “convoluted history.”

*          *          *            

“… [W]e should not just focus on ending pain and suffering, though that is urgently important. We should also imagine what needs for friendship and community each type of animal has, what needs for free movement, for pleasure, and for using their faculties in a happy way. This would utterly transform the idea of a zoo, if zoos persist at all. And I think fortunately some forward-looking research-oriented zoos, in which group I count the Lincoln Park Zoo, are already asking all the right questions. Law can do much more to regulate conditions in zoos.”— Martha C. Nussbaum

“… [T]here is a moral presumption against keeping wild animals in captivity. What this involves, after all, is taking animals out of their native habitats, transporting them great distances, and keeping them in alien environments in which their liberty is severely restricted. It is surely true that in being taken from the wild and confined in zoos, animals are deprived of a great many goods.” — Dale Jamieson

“What life span is normal for that species in the wild? What is the physical condition of the healthy animal? What human [or nonhuman] acts invade or impair the bodily integrity of that sort of animal? What types of movement from place to place are normal and more pleasurable for that sort of animal? What sensory and imaginative stimulation does this animal seek, and what is it to keep the animal in an unacceptably deficient sensory environment? What is it for this sort of animal to live in a crippling and intolerable fear or depression, or with a lack of bonds of concern? What type of affiliation does this animal seek in the wild, what sorts of groups, both reproductive and social, does it form? What types of communication does the animal engage in, using what sensory modalities? What is it for the animal to be humiliated and disrespected? What is it for the animal to play and enjoy itself? Does the animal have meaningful relationships with other species and the world of nature? What type of objects does the animal use and need to control if it is to live its life?” — Please see: Court of Appeals of the State of New York—In the Matter of a Proceeding under Article 70 of the CPLR for a Writ of Habeas Corpus and Order to Show Cause, THE NONHUMAN RIGHTS PROJECT, INC., on behalf of HAPPY, Petitioner-Appellant, – against – JAMES J. BREHENY, in his official capacity as Executive Vice President and General Director of Zoos and Aquariums of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Director of the Bronx Zoo and WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY, Respondents-Respondents. BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE PROFESSOR MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFFS-APPELLANT

*          *          *

I am, in principle, against the existence of zoos. The reasons for this opposition are owing to arguments made by Dale Jamieson in a quite prescient collection of his writings, Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Clarendon Press, 2002). In particular, they come from two consecutive chapters, “Against Zoos,” and “Zoos Revisited” (the latter consists of replies to critics of the former essay). A fundamental if not axiomatic premise of his overall argument is that the freedom or liberty animals enjoy or experience in the wild is denied them in captivity, thus he believes “there is a moral presumption against keeping animals in captivity.” Presumptions are rebuttable, as Jamieson well appreciates, so there is more to the argument than this. Although I am against the existence of zoos, I would not call for their immediate abolition. I will later post on specific arguments made by Jamieson, but for now I want to share the concluding remarks to each of the aforementioned chapters:

“Zoos teach us a false sense of our place in the natural order. The means of confinement make a difference between humans and animals. They are there for our pleasure, to be used for our purposes [e.g., entertainment or recreation and education; sometimes, in fact rather infrequently, for scientific research, such as studies in anatomy and pathology; and species preservation for endangered species, although numerous and often insuperable problems face these captive breeding programs]. Morality and perhaps our very survival require that we learn to live as one species among many rather than as one species over many [this need not entail us ignoring or downplaying some significant differences between human and nonhuman animals, although we have learned over time that these differences are not as strong nor as numerous as we once believed]. To do this, we must first forget what we learn at zoos. Because what zoos teach us is false and dangerous, both humans and animals will be better off when they are abolished.”

Jamieson does not expect zoos to disappear anytime soon, and concedes that there “is a great difference between good ones [i.e. zoos] and bad ones;” furthermore, he believes the “best zoos in the future will be indistinguishable from small [animal or wildlife conservation] parks” with a “naturalistic environment” [which ‘should not be confused with a natural environment’]. Thus Jamieson states that if we continue to “keep animals in captivity,” bearing in mind that these creatures “are in our custody through no wish or fault of their own,” “then we must conform to the highest standards of treatment and respect,” “for the animals themselves have no voice in human affairs, and as nature recedes their voices become ever more silent.” I should note that in examining the indices of several well-known books on zoo ethics, not one of them has anything by way of responding directly to Jamieson’s arguments (although I cannot claim to have read all the relevant literature).

Recommended Reading (this list will be expanded in one or more later posts):

• Baratay, Eric and Elizabeth Hardouin-Fugier. A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (Reaktion Books, 2002).
• Braverman, Irus. Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford Law Books/Stanford University Press, 2013).
• Jamieson, Dale. Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Clarendon Press, 2002).
• Mullan, Robert and Garry Marvin. Zoo Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1998).
• Rothfels, Nigel. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

Relevant Bibliographies

• Animal Ethics, Rights, and Law
  
• Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology and Food Justice
• Ecological and Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews

The Non-Human Rights Project (NhRP) is here.

The Case for Reparations (BHM 2)

As an extension of our earlier post on the Indemnification of Slaveowners and Black Reparations, and in honor of Black History Month, I want to share one of the educational resources provided by The Cross Cultural Solidarity History Project, this one on Reparations. It includes a number of books, articles, and audio-visual material that appear to have been thoughtfully selected. At least several more times during the month I will share some more of these resources, in particular those related to my bibliographies on identical or similar subjects.

The mental and especially psychological comforts of self-deception, denial, and wishful thinking will, in time, turn bone-chilling cold.

First, a brief comment on the democratically dysfunctional Republican Party: When you’re the Manichaean political party of inchoate grievance, resentment, fear, anger and rage, willful ignorance, collective self-deception, denial, wishful thinking, phantasies, delusions, and an inordinate because insatiable thirst for political power, you lack the basic intellectual and moral capacities, let alone social and political vision and virtues, needed to craft coherent or plausible public policies. You are simply and dangerously a regressive political force on behalf of absolute negation, hence the predominant political strategies center on de-regulation and privatization while rhetorically propagating ideological phantasies the draw upon nostalgic myths and xenophobic nationalism framed in terms of American “exceptionalism” and dreams—nightmares for the rest of us—of omnipotence. There is both a cause and effect relationship with our next observation.

Americans remain goo-goo-ga-ga over all things monarchical and royal, and not in the funny and endearing way of babies, but in the babbling, stupefying, and distracting manner of ill-formed adults. This infatuation with royalty transcends class and education, extending through all sectors of the population and is not unrelated to the support for former President Trump, whose unquenchable narcissistic thirst for political power is autocratic, albeit gilded with the social-psychological remnants of monarchy. It reveals a regressive, phantasy-like clinging to obscene wealth and undemocratic power. Many of these same Americans cannot get enough of salacious and malicious gossip-mongering about people they secretly envy. And perhaps a greater number of Americans are addicted to “Reality TV,” an addiction which, invariably and inevitably, communicates in both subtle and flagrant fashion, messages about human living that have a cumulatively corrosive effect on good manners or social etiquette, fundamental social norms of co-ordination and cooperation, and ethical comportment if not simply basic morality. This is compounded by its crowding-out effect on values inherent in when not derived from an attraction to beauty, truth, and “the Good.” It represents or symbolizes the essence of barbaric entertainment, as we live vicariously through this virtual reality, finding not-so-subtle validation of our darkest desires and dispositional traits. Finally, an appalling number of us go through our daily lives caring only about ourselves and those near and dear to us, which is perfectly fine until we realize that if we cannot progressively extend that circle of care and concern both imaginatively and concretely, the madness and unnecessary suffering that surrounds us will catch up to us and our cherished ones as well, and then, alas, we will only be able to blame ourselves for that predicament, for that frightening state of affairs, for that intolerable condition. (I leave for another occasion my thoughts on the dark side of the Internet, social media, and habitual texting.)

If this is a moralistic rant, so be it. (My spouse will be pleased to learn that she alone is not subject to same.)

The Republican Party has in effect declared itself to be a fascist political party and part of the sociopathic cult led by Donald J. Trump

“It may seem odd to draw inferences about the operation of power from the parables and stories of individuals who suffer from psychotic disintegration. [….] I take these stories to be real experiences described by human beings who suffer, who know something about the structure and reality of power as it affects their lives, perceptions, and values. The feel of power, the reality of power for psychotic selves, suggests a firsthand knowledge of tyranny. In this sense, I believe, the raw, primitive, archaic quality of the schizophrenic experience demonstrates how power works.

What the schizophrenic self suffers is a microcosmic representation of the political form of power as tyranny and domination. Power is exercised on the self; it defines the world of knowledge and meaning in rigid terms of absolute good and evil [as in the populist cult of Trump]. This power derives not from social or consensual bases but from narcissism and solipsism [hence the shared and mutually reinforcing pathologies between the leader(s) and the led]. It seeks omnipotence [hence on the collective plain, the ‘power’ of those powerless is thus vicariously realized in the power of the authoritarian demagogue; the religious analogue of this is found in the notion of vicarious atonement]. It [i.e., that which is psychologically regressive and more sub- or un-conscious than not] is destructive, parasitic, and violent. It pushes the self into masochism and physical mutilation. [….]

The fragility of secondary process restraints perhaps implies that only a thin line separates a so-called democratic or participatory politics from equally powerful and dangerous tendencies within the culture to institute the infantile world of unlimited entitlement in the form of tyrannical power. What is repressed, as Freud discovered a century ago, refuses to disappear; it lingers; it affects action; it transforms life; it reappears.

Regression destroys secondary process structures, pushes the self into a state of boundlessness, releases enormous amounts of aggression and intensifies feelings of anxiety and panic. Living without limits, possessed by a delusional epistemology, the self faces a loss of continuity and being. What emerges in both the self and the group are actions or forms of power that have nothing to do with tolerance, respect for rights [such right are morally and legally limited at that point where they cause harm to others or when they interfere with the exercise of the joint or shared rights of others], or what John Stuart Mill calls liberty [Mill’s conception of liberty does not denote or imply, let alone exemplify, the predominant contemporary ‘libertarian’ ideological portrait of liberty].

Psychosis threatens democratic forms of conflict resolution by attacking a sense of limitation and those boundaries between groups which, while allowing each to pursue its own cultural ends, nonetheless protects the group’s integrity. What psychosis releases—intense vulnerability, rage, and hatred, Kristeva’s ‘unnameable space of need’—finds itself contained within [Liberal] democratic approaches to conflict resolution and negotiation, particularly acknowledgment of and respect for rights. A liberal democratic polity requires renunciation and sublimation and the willingness to endure restraint in the pursuit of self-interest. [….] The willingness to sustain conflict without resort to tyranny requires, to use Peter Gay’s words, ‘a capacity for tolerating delays, disappointments and ambiguities attendant upon any open society, an unimpaired capacity for reality testing, for curbing one’s aggressiveness without turning against oneself, for reliance on defensive stratagems that remain moderates in scope and flexible in application.’ Democracy that respects rights and liberty is indeed fragile. [….]

[Liberal] [d]emocracy is, in its politics as well as in its epistemology, a defense against more extreme (what I call psychotic) modes of being and power. It acts as a protection against regression, the tendency to embrace unyielding and totalizing ideological positions. And its method of conflict resolution functions much the same way as the mother/container does for her infant’s split-off, raging self. A resilient democratic culture (one embracing participatory modes of action) will hold or contain the rage of its constituent groups without allowing it to annihilate either the constitutional structures maintaining the community or the respect for rights which allows conflict to flourish with endangering individuality. Conflict is the lifeblood of democracy, but it consistently circulates around the respect for the capacity of the other to contain and detoxify disruptive aspect of the self or group emotion. Democratic institutions, from this perspective, do not eliminate conflict; rather, they detoxify anarchic or annihilating presence and consequence. Power becomes supportive and creative or, to use Erik Erikson’s concept, ‘generative;’ it fosters growth. Conflict is talked about and legislated rather than imposed and forced. Rage is held by institutional and cultural processes that work to bind the entropic tendency present in all expressions of political interest. [….]

A democratic theory of rights and participation protects against the fragility of human defenses against regression (the psychotic substratum to all human experience, Kristeva’s ‘hole’ that threatens to engulf the ‘subject’), the unbinding of the self, the refuge in solipsism, a kind of political variant on what Otto Kernberg calls ‘pathological narcissism.’ Democracy respects conflict, works to contain its entropy; the dynamic is dialectical, and the relationship between container and contained is reciprocal. Hobbes and Machiavelli fear conflict and its effects and desire to suppress or enchain its consequences; the push is to close off communication, to repress, hold down, crush.

Democracy as a political theory protects the values of liberty and autonomy, which at the level of individual psychology are parallel to the acceptance of boundary, proportion, limitation. Democracy opposes the affect or symptom of nonreciprocal power: unrestrained narcissism, unlimited entitlement, perceptions of omnipotence, delusions or images of grandeur and dominance. As Peter Gay puts it: ‘Cultures … regress just as individuals do …. Jingoism is a triumph of the primary process.’ It is one political equivalent of narcissistic rage.”—James M. Glass, Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995)

*          *          *

From The New York Times today:

“The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it ‘legitimate political discourse,’ formally rebuking two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it. The Republican National Committee’s overwhelming voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.

On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in ‘persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.’ It was an extraordinary statement about the deadliest attack on the Capitol in 200 years, in which a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the complex, brutalizing police officers and sending lawmakers into hiding. Nine people died in connection with the attack and more than 150 officers were injured. The party passed the resolution without discussion and almost without dissent.”

One can no longer be a member of the GOP and claim to believe in the values, principles, and practices of our Liberal, constitutional democratic republic. Remaining in the Party from this point forward embodies an avowed and shameless identification of and active support for the politics of fascism as exemplified in the sociopathic cult of Donald Trump. We can quibble about the precise components that define fascism in general, but the following selected from Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works (Random House, 2020 ed.) will suffice for our purposes:

(i) “… [F]ascist politics distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘them’ [by] appealing to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions, and using this division to shape ideology … and policy.” In the case of the GOP, this involves white supremacist beliefs and (‘so-called’) xenophobic “Christian” nationalism [Christianity reduced here to right-wing evangelicalism], as well as a libertarian, hyper-technocratic capitalism granting a de facto and de jure imprimatur to an emergent fascist plutocracy.

(ii) “Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present.” With the cult of Trump, this involves a denial of the historical consequences and systematic effects of slavery and racism, as well as the belief that this country can return to an economic world defined by historically unprecedented economic growth that occurred, roughly, between 1870 and 1970 in this country. Deregulation and privatization are the core “policies” of an economically regressive strategy, one that has already let to democratically destructive levels of income (and other forms of) inequality. Globally, this involves unregulated capital movement (fueled by ‘finance capitalism’) which guarantees the manias, crashes, and panics endemic to capitalist cycles will continue to haunt the affluent nation-states, especially those lacking social democratic welfare policies and programs. The myriad predictable and unpredictable effects of these cycles will be exacerbated by the uncoordinated and weak response among the more affluent nations to climate change and global warming. The picture sketched by Meghnad Desai is stark, providing a peak into both the present and future. As he explains, we are in the midst of another revolutionary phase of capitalism (i.e., ‘a profit-driven system of accumulation and incessant search for new technologies to increase productivity’).  This time round, however, it is truly global:

“The influence of capital—either as portfolio finance or as direct investment—the hegemony of financial markets, the increasing penetration of trade, have become experience by all the worlds: First, Second and Third. Indeed, this numerical categorization is now otiose. The benefits and costs of capitalism fall symmetrically—though not equally—on all parts of the world. For the first time in two hundred years, the cradle of capitalism—the metropolis, the core—has as much to fear from the rapidity of change as does the periphery.”

(iii) “[Fascists] rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas.” We witnessed this in the reckless and immoral Republican response to the pandemic and in their relentless assault on Liberal public education at all levels, which includes, of late, book banning (and book burning) and purely partisan control of the curriculum and local school boards.

(iv) “Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.” I have previously explained why we should not call these “theories,” for that accords them a type of coherence and plausibility they conspicuously lack, indeed, these are ideological phantasies, propagated by people steeped in illusions and delusions, and motivated by wishful thinking and willful ignorance. This state of unreality or madness is further fueled by denial and individual and collective self-deception, among other deleterious cognitive and psychological mechanisms and processes, often in conjunction with deadly dispositional vices. This state of “unreality” is reminiscent of what Erich Fromm earlier termed the “pathology of normalcy,” while political groups on the Right have come to resemble a world characterized by psychotic agency, that is, and after Bion (as summarized by James M. Glass), a time “where the world appears in the ominous gray of panic, anxiety, fear, compulsion, and fragmentation,” “nothing remains but impulse and power,” an “assertion,” therefore, “of unconscious phantasy as both will and desire.”

Essential Reading

• Alford, C. Fred. What Evil Means to Us (Cornell University Press, 1997).
• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, revised ed., 1991).
• Auestad, Lene, ed. Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac Books, 2014).
• Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1994).
• Brudner, Alan. Constitutional Goods (Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991).
• Cassam, Quassim. Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Coady, C.A.J. Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
• Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded ed., 1970).
• Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (Yale University Press, 1993).
• Collins, Adela Yarbro. “The Book of Revelation,” in John J. Collins, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity (Continuum, 2000): 384-414.
• Desai, Meghnad. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, 2002).
• Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction (Verso, new ed., 2007).
• Elster, Jon. Ch. 8, “Ideologies,” in Elster’s Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1985): 459-510.
• Glass, James M. Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995).
• Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2016).
• Gruen, Arno. The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward an Understanding of Human Destructiveness (Grove Press, 1992).
• Harcourt, Edward, ed. Morality, Reflection and Ideology (Oxford University Press, 2000).
• Hasen, Richard L. Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (Yale University Press, 2020).
• Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
• Hirschman, Albert O. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).
• Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Jamieson, Dale. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Keane, John. Violence and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
• Larrain, Jorge. Marxism and Ideology (Macmillan Press, 1983).
• Lee, Bandy, ed. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, expanded ed., 2017).
• Lefebvre, Henri (John Moore, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 (Verso, 1991).
• Lefebvre, Henri (John Moore, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (Verso, 2002).
• Lefebvre, Henri (Gregory Elliott, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 3: From Modernity to Modernism (Verso, 2005).
• Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Marlin, Randall. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (Broadview Press, 2002).
• McGinn, Bernard, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Vol. 2: Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture (Continuum, 2000).
• Piketty, Thomas (Arthur Goldhammer, trans.) Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
• Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Seidel, Andrew L. The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American (Sterling, 2019).
• Stanley, Jason. How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press, 2015).
• Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works (Random House, 2018).
• Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
• Straub, Michael S. Madness is Civilization: When the Diagnosis was Social, 1948-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
• Taylor, Gabrielle. Deadly Vices (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Therborn, Göran. The Killing Fields of Inequality (Polity Press, 2013).
• Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton University Press, 1998).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Relevant Bibliographies

• After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization

• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Constitutionalism
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• The Deformation and Perversion of Education in a Capitalist Democracy
• Elections and Voting
• The Emotions
• Toward an Understanding of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
• Utopian Imagination, Thought and Praxis

Epistemic Authority: rejecting self-reliance in favor of autonomy and self-reflective consciousness (... including the epistemic justification of religious authority)

Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), Phillis Wheatley, 1973, bronze and wood

“… [O]ur autonomy, our rationality, inescapably require us to do something more with our lives, to grow, to learn, not just physically but intellectually and aesthetically and morally, to orient ourselves progressively and ever more closely towards the true, the beautiful, and the good. None of this is to sacrifice our autonomy properly understood: rather it is its culmination.

The suggestion that the religious ideal of submission to God’s will is compatible with the ideal of autonomy [notice that this is not how this issue would be formulated in non-theistic religious worldviews] is obviously a controversial one. The term ‘autonomy’ has a long and complex history which there is no space to explore here, other than to draw attention to one particular ambiguity in use of the term: the autonomous person may be construed as either (a) the entirely ‘self-legislating’ being [the paradigmatic model that begins with Libertarian philosophy], who makes up his own rules by a completely independent act of will, subject to no constraints whatsoever—this may be thought of as the extreme existentialist interpretation; or (b) the being who makes decisions independently of the arbitrary will of another, acting in the light of full reason, free from internal or external interference with her rational processes. [….] On this account, to act autonomously is to act rationally and freely; and this seems quite compatible with the religious thought that in making my decisions I have to acknowledge that I live in a world I did not create, which contains other free and rational creatures who are entitled to equal respect with me, and that, whether I like it or not, these facts impose constraints on how I may or may not properly exercise my choice.

Iris Murdoch writes: ‘How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundlegung [i.e., Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)] who, confronted even with Christ, turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason … this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy’ [from Murdoch’s classic, The Sovereignty of the Good (Routledge, 1991 (1970)]. But this noble Kantian vision, properly understood, is not in conflict with the religious vision of our human destiny, but rather is integral to it. The whole history of humankind’s religious journey is not, as some critics of theism like to portray it, one of submissive deference to alien authority; rather it is the story of progressive moral growth. The ancient story of Abraham and Isaac (despite Kierkegaard’s famous interpretation of Abraham’s faith as involving a ‘suspension of the ethical’), is perhaps best interpreted not so much as an abject subordination of the will as a progression beyond the dark atavistic imperative of human sacrifice to something more morally enlightened—or at least a lesser evil (the substitution of a ram); later there will be an even more enlightened shift, away from blood sacrifice entirely to the moral conduct that alone is acceptable to God: ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice.’”¹ — John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press,

*     *     *

I have, intermittently, been doing research on the notion of judgment: epistemic, moral, and political, especially but not only in the works of Hobbes, Kant, and Godwin. My interest in the topic extends to the role of psychology in accounting for what facilitates or interferes with good judgment. Invariably one bumps up against companion notions of “authority,” once more, epistemic, moral, and political. This research first arose some years ago in the context of democratic theory and practice and the role of formal and informal education in preparing individuals and deliberative groups to make sensible, plausible, or reasonable judgments, that is, judgments not clouded or overwhelmed by epistemic vices, cognitive biases and distortions, and sundry debilitating psychological phenomena, be they conscious or unconscious (or somewhere in between), all of which I have increasingly come to appreciate given the precipitous erosion of our country’s already tenuous and now thoroughly fragile Liberal welfare state democracy (a democracy which, at least since the 19^th and throughout the 20^th century and beyond, has existed in an inverse relationship to capitalism in the sense that the stronger the latter, the weaker the former).

My interest in judgment has since grown to include the comparatively little examined notion of “epistemic authority” as such, which extends well beyond democratic structures and processes into the pursuit of knowledge (or overcoming ignorance) more generally insofar as that occurs within various kinds of human community in which many of us are reared, socialized, educated, ethically formed, and so forth. These communities are the products of traditions and worldviews, often but not exclusively religious in orientation and can make or break a democratic polity if it has forgotten or disavowed the legacy of the European (and especially ‘radical’) Enlightenment. Let me be clear, I do not think, in principle, that there need be any fundamental or intractable conflict between a Liberal and thus secular society and the existence if not flourishing of religious and non-religious worldviews, in part because (thus for other reasons as well) I subscribe to (at least something like) Rawls’s notion of the possibility of an “overlapping consensus” in a plural society. I will leave aside for now the fact that in an affluent world (as well as those countries aspiring to same) suffused with the norms, culture, and imperatives of a hyper- or turbo-capitalist and technocratic ethos, such communities have been weakened and often destroyed, leaving the nuclear or elementary family on its own as it were, as the piecemeal assemblage or accumulation of values, norms, and beliefs take on an inconsistent, haphazard, and often chaotic or contradictory—irrational—character (at times even predominantly ‘mad’ or sociopathic when not simply displaying symptoms of mental illness of one kind or another, symptoms that may be shared by millions of ones fellow citizens). This is not conducive—to put it mildly—to moral psychological and thus rational autonomy. Individuals thus reach the age of reason bereft of the moral, psychological, and social benefits once provided by communities (of a certain kind which we cannot here elaborate), their lifeworlds (that is, the individual or idiosyncratic version of a worldview) often shaped by accident or the necessities and desires of the moment, pervasively determined by a suffocating and hallucinatory capitalist society and culture of conspicuous consumption, one that today has an apocalyptic-like pall hanging over it given the deteriorating ecological and environmental conditions we face, not all of which are simply the product of global warming and climate change. These benefits should include a period of questioning, reacting to, rebelling against, facets or components of the worldview in which one is nurtured and socialized. The outcome of such queries might result in abandoning that worldview (or lifeworld) or in choosing a different one, or perhaps even in constructing a novel lifeworld made up of ideals, ideas, values, beliefs and practices one can rationally or reasonably justify to oneself, assuming one has reached the age of reason or maturity, and a state of (more or less) of autonomy.

There are various dangers in constructing such a lifeworld afresh or from scratch (assuming that is possible), especially if one’s moral psychological autonomy, capacities for reasoning, self-reflection and self-examination are fragile or evanescent (over time, their exercise becomes self-reinforcing, although just when that occurs can vary widely among persons). One such danger comes from choosing that which makes one secure and comfortable with the way things are, with both oneself and the surrounding world; that explains away or ignores one’s faults and shortcomings and/or denies or crudely rationalizes the suffering of others or manifest injustices both near and afar. This occurs when one has resigned oneself to a reality in which there is no longer any gap between what is and what can or ought to be. Another albeit perhaps lesser danger is that this bricolage, if you will, may lack a substantively meaningful coherence and a structural disposition to truth, its inconsistencies and contradictions indicative of persistent cognitive dissonance one can now “live with.” In a world plagued by troubling if not illusory or delusional conceptions of personal and collective identity, addicted to novelty and social status, spellbound by fads and fashions, and unperturbed by the social, cultural and economic dominance of the “pleasure principle,” the personal and piecemeal “construction” of worldviews and lifeworlds, or the subscription by default to the prevailing social ethos, has profound political reverberations and deleterious effects on the democratic polity.

Which brings me back to the subject of “epistemic authority,” and the author of a particular book on same by one of our better contemporary philosophers (the blurbs on the back cover are not at all hyperbolic), Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief (Oxford University Press, 2012). It’s worth noting that Professor Zagzebski is a Roman Catholic and I was raised a Catholic, but am no longer a member of the Church. I do not have any particular fondness for philosophers who happen to be Catholic, although I might mention several others whose works stands apart for me: John Cottingham (who is mentioned in the Acknowledgements to Epistemic Authority), Nicholas Rescher, and Anna Wierzbicka. In the twentieth century, there are a few more formidable philosophers one should read if you have or hope to cultivate a philosophical temperament (I’ve winnowed these from a much larger and indiscriminate list): Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, G.E.M. (or Elizabeth) Anscombe, Michael Dummett, Charles Taylor, Bas van Fraassen, and John Haldane. Among the most well-known giants in Catholic theology and philosophy, I happen to prefer Pascal over both St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. My Catholic upbringing and primary through secondary education in Catholic schools (much of which I appreciate and am quite grateful for), alongside the fact that I am no longer a member of the Church leaves me at point where, I believe, the actual or possible biases for and against the Catholic worldview are roughly equal in effect and thus at a stalemate. At the same time, and for those adamantly opposed to religious worldviews or strongly motivated by, say, atheism or agnosticism, I would hope we can at the very least depend on the principle of charity² (assuming belief in the values of impartiality and objectivity) in interpreting and evaluating Zagzebski’s arguments. Be that as it may, what follows is a brief introduction in her words with a comment or two from yours truly.

“Everyone recognizes that some forms of authority are inescapable, but authority in the epistemic domain gets virtually no attention. Moral and political philosophers understandably focus on authority over actions, presumably assuming the authority over beliefs is a topic for epistemology. But epistemologists do not discuss it either. If they occasionally use the term ‘epistemic authority,’ that is only by courtesy. What they mean by an epistemic authority is an expert. Rarely do we get an explanation of what makes an expert authoritative, or any attempt to connect authority with the literature on authority in moral and political philosophy. [Sometimes the notion of an ‘epistemic community’ functions as a de facto if not normative form of epistemic authority. While he was not an epistemologist, the late Douglas Walton dealt with some of the ‘arguments from authority’ in his book, Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).] [….]

No doubt some philosophers neglect epistemic authority unconsciously, but I think that many find the idea suspicious. Historic experience [in the West] provides one kind of reason for that suspicion. The Protestant Reformation, the political turmoil of the early modern period, and the rise of modern science all contributed to shattering the idea of authority, and epistemologists are not immune to the effects of those events. Distrust of authority is now as pervasive and as invisible as trust in authority once was. I think that when we do philosophy it is important to be aware of what we trust and what we distrust because that affects the lines of inquiry we resist and the kinds of conclusions we applaud. Suspicion of epistemic authority is a natural consequence of the general suspicion of authority we have inherited.

[….] In my opinion, one of the most significant philosophical turns of the modern period for epistemology, as well as for ethics and political philosophy was the development of the idea of autonomy. [I unreservedly and wholeheartedly agree with Zagzebski’s judgment on the emergence of the value of autonomy (a more apt term here than ‘opinion’).] The general distrust of authority might be the cause of the rejection of epistemic authority, but its philosophical defense is its apparent incompatibility with autonomy.

The idea of autonomy is another idea that has a large literature in moral philosophy but is ignored in epistemology. If intellectual autonomy exists, we will want to see how it connects with autonomy in the moral realm and authority in any realm. If we should reject authority in the epistemic domain, there is much work to be done to explain why this is the case. If we should not reject it, then again, we need to find out what it is, why we should care about it, and what we will lose if we ignore it.

One thing we lose is a way to understand the justification of a great number of religious beliefs. [The issue of justification from ‘within’ a religious sensibility has been addressed in a manner that does not directly treat questions of ‘epistemic authority’ as such, but companion questions (and for our purposes, to the extent that autonomy has something to do with the cognitivity and rational dimensions of religion in James Kellenberger’s The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives (University of California Press, 1995). Unfortunately, this book has not received the attention it deserves.] There have been claims to religious authority for thousands of years, and if there is a religious authority, it is [or should be] both moral and epistemic. More precisely, religious authority includes epistemic authority in the realm of the teaching authority of a given faith tradition, which usually includes both metaphysical and moral teachings. Some religions have an authoritative teaching structure, as does the church to which I belong, the Roman Catholic Church. But given the modern suspicion of authority, it often appears from an outside perspective that a person is unjustified in accepting epistemic authority in her community. From a perspective inside the community, authority is usually justified by reference to other beliefs [it has a web-like structure] that arise from the community (e.g., ‘Christ founded the Church,’ ‘Sharī‘ah law’ [that expression is redundant] was revealed by God,’ etc.), so the justification is circular [from inside the tradition, this is ‘virtuous’ rather than ‘vicious’ circularity, exemplifying, if your will, divinely inspired geometry]. That is not necessarily problematic for the members of the community, but it means that their beliefs are insulated from criticism from the outside. It also makes it easy for those on the outside to disregard [or dismiss] a community’s justification for its authoritative beliefs. I assume that this situation is undesirable.

… I will defend the existence of epistemic authority on grounds that almost all modern philosophers would accept. My argument will proceed wholly from the point of view of the [ideal] subject—a self-reflective person who asks herself how she should get beliefs she accepts on reflection. Is it ever reasonable for her to take someone as an authoritative source of her beliefs? Can she reasonably accept an authority in her community only if she already accepts what the authority proclaims? I will argue that if we make some minimal assumptions about the self, we are all committed to accepting epistemic authority, and authority in religious communities can be defended in the same way. My argument permits both external recognition of the justification of authority in community and external critique of that authority.” — From the Introduction to Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski’s Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Notes

1. Alas, that is why I have a dispositional aversion to Anselm’s (c.1033-1109) famous (or infamous) theological formulation of “substitutionary” atonement in which Anselm states that humanity owes God a ransom of “satisfaction” for sin, a debt, however, that is unpayable owing to our lowly status. This appears to me to represent moral or even spiritual regression, not the kind of progressively enlightened moral awareness that Cottingham describes here. Consider, for example, the unquestionable significance of the Crucifixion: the Incarnation of God through Jesus Christ—innocent of sin and equal to God, so to speak—allows the Son to offer himself (a sacrifice, through suffering) to the Father on humanity’s behalf. In other words, Christ’s Passion, his sacrifice on the cross, was to make amends for our sins. Anselm’s formulation meshes well with the Gospel understanding of sin as a kind of debt that is relieved or forgiven with the expiatory sacrifice of Christ’s death, meaning we need no longer be enslaved by the power of sin. The Catholic Church adopted this doctrine in the 16th century, and the Reformation, ironically, only reinforced its spiritual and moral psychology for those who broke from the Church: “O perfect redemption, the purchase of blood/ to every believer the promise of God/ The vilest offender who truly believes/ That moment from Jesus a pardon receives.” Anselm’s interpretation is sometimes called the penal (or juridical) theory, as Christ has borne the penalty for sin instead of us. Because our sin is an infinite offence against God, it requires a correspondingly infinite satisfaction that only God can make (and did, through Christ).

Anselm’s substitutionary atonement theory was theologically contested by a notion of exemplary atonement, the essence of which goes back to the French theologian Peter Abelard (1079-1142): “The purpose and cause of the incarnation was that God might illuminate the world by his wisdom and stir it to the love of himself.” This theory has been deemed “subjective” in comparison with the aforementioned “objective” theories. What is central to the exemplary theory is the extent to which God’s love is revealed through Christ, most poignantly in Christ’s acceptance of a brutal and unjust death. It is this—God’s unconditional love for us as embodied in the life and death of Jesus—which should move us to repentance. A corporate rather than individualist interpretation of atonement appears in the late 20th century with Liberation Theology that took hold in Central and South America. In this case, atonement is effected as reconciliation which, in turn, must be demonstrated as a living fact, at both the individual and collective levels. Alas, the exemplary theory has never been anything near as popular as Anselm’s formulation in Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant.

2. I think it important that we make a sincere endeavor to abide by an analytical and interpretive trinity in philosophical discussion, debate, and argument that involves three overlapping and mutually reinforcing principles: (i) the principle of charity, (ii) the principle of humanity, and (iii) the principle of “intellectual non-violence.” The first is fairly well known (at least among philosophers and students of rhetoric) even if unevenly practiced. The “principle of charity” in general means (some philosophers have formulated slightly different versions of this principle) “interpreting a speaker’s statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation.” The second—and not unrelated—“principle of humanity,” which is perhaps logically prior to the first principle, states, “when interpreting another speaker we must assume that his or her beliefs and desires are connected to each other and to reality in some way (which sounds, if I am not mistaken, like something both Quine and Davidson said), and attribute to him or her ‘the propositional attitudes one supposes one would have oneself in those circumstances’” (Richard Grandy). It is perhaps arguable (if only because we may be mistaken as to the precise propositional attitude, given that a person can have different propositional attitudes toward the same proposition) as to whether or not the goal expressed in the final clause is always (realistically speaking) attainable, but it’s no less worthy an aim. The third principle of our trinity is unquestionably the most arduous, described by the late B.K. Matilal as a “Jain principle,” and one that Jaina philosophers have “surprisingly and conspicuously” evidenced in their own work, namely, “intellectual non-violence,” by which is meant that “any criticism must be preceded by a proper and total understanding of the doctrine one tries to criticize.” This principle of intellectual non-violence in the Jain tradition presupposes and is one consequence of the preeminent doctrinal position of anekāntavāda, which is, in the first instance, both a metaphysical and ontological doctrine, one with intriguing epistemological implications. Matilal characterizes it generally as a philosophy of “non-radicalism” insofar as the doctrine emerged as indicative of the Jaina attempt to synthesize if not reconcile the various philosophical schools in India at the time (it could be said to have been forged in the fire of arguments between the various schools, which were fairly well-developed by this time). This reconciliation, however, and in the end if you will, is probably impossible, if only because other schools will read (or have read) this attempt as a not-so-subtle way to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Jain worldview, or because its doctrine of kevalajñāna, which is the Jaina claim for the omniscience of a kevalin, or an enlightened being, such as Vardhamāna Mahāvīra (there is no creator deity in Jainism), is not accepted by the other schools. Nevertheless, a similar claim for “omniscience” of a kind is made for the Buddha (Sara McClintock notes that the Jainism is ‘among the earliest systematic defenders of the notion, probably inspiring some later Buddhist arguments’), as well as, it turns out, deities in several schools (e.g., the Naiyāyikas hold that the creator God, Īśvara, is omniscient by nature, and the Sāmkhyas accorded omniscient status to Lord Īśvara, although he is not a creator deity in this system). In Jain epistemology, there are two kinds of valid methods for gaining knowledge: pratyakṣa or “direct knowledge” and parokṣa or “indirect knowledge,” and only kevalajñāna is considered pratyakṣa, hence it is the prerogative, to date, of only a very small class of human beings, although it “is believed to be an intrinsic quality of all souls,” and thus in principle at least, something attainable by any of us.

Black History Month (BHM 1)

Today marks the inauguration of Black History Month. It is also, fortuitously, the birthday of the African American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist, Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967).

As I Grew Older

It was a long time ago.

I have almost forgotten my dream.

But it was there then,

In front of me,

Bright like a sun—

My dream.

And then the wall rose,

Rose slowly,

Slowly,

Between me and my dream.

Rose until it touched the sky—

The wall.

Shadow.

I am black.

I lie down in the shadow.

No longer the light of my dream before me,

Above me.

Only the thick wall.

Only the shadow.

My hands!

My dark hands!

Break through the wall!

Find my dream!

Help me to shatter this darkness,

To smash this night,

To break this shadow

Into a thousand lights of sun,

Into a thousand whirling dreams

Of sun!

— Langston Hughes

This is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, so ...

 I have decided to use the occasion, with the philosopher Larry May, to think about genocide more widely.

“ [….] Thinking of the Holocaust is useful as a vivid reminder of the way that genocide produces strikingly horrendous suffering of humans, most of whom are innocent and many of whom are children. It is difficult to think of genocide without thinking of the paradigm cases of genocide, and especially the Holocaust. There is ample evidence that those responsible for drafting the Genocide Convention, which occurred only a few years after the end of the Second World War, were similarly and strongly influenced by the Holocaust. If one were Jewish and living in Central Europe in the early 1940s there would surely be very few if any losses that one could experience that are worse than what would have been lost had the anticipated annihilation of the entire Jewish people by the Nazi government been successful. And even without the completion of the ‘Final Solution,’ the sheer number of deaths and untold misery caused by the Nazis in their attempt to destroy the Jewish people is nearly unparalleled in human history and stands as a stark example of all that is horrible about genocide.

Many subsequent instances of genocide have involved large-scale complicity within the larger population, where even the relatives of the victims are often complicit. Many will object that the Holocaust is different, and I will be the first to agree. As Hannah Arendt and others have argued, there was some complicity among some Jewish leaders in the Holocaust, but this was undoubtedly not on the scale that has occurred in other genocides. And the ‘evil’ that was manifest in the Holocaust did not have the same kind of ambiguity than many other genocides have had. Indeed, when people visit Auschwitz or the other death camps, many are literally sickened by what they see. The conclusion seems obvious: international law must deal directly with the perpetrators of genocides such as the Holocaust, if there are any others, in the clearest terms, for this type of wrong is certainly among the worst. Yet … it is not always clear who is responsible for what has occurred in many recent genocides.

If we … think of genocide and the Holocaust as inextricably intertwined then it will be easier to understand why many have seen genocide as the worst of all possible international crimes. In general I do not disagree … about keeping paradigm cases in mind when we examine a moral concept. Yet it is also true that the concept of genocide has been, and is currently being, used for many cases other than the Holocaust. I do not dispute that we should see the Holocaust as one of the most horrible moral atrocities of all time. But insofar as genocide covers more than one case, indeed more than even its main exemplar, we cannot rest with the easy task of explaining the moral wrong of the Holocaust alone to understand the much larger concept of genocide. The alternative … is to look first at the exemplar but then also at the whole range of phenomena that fall under the concept of genocide.

Paying too much attention to the exemplar of the Holocaust may make it difficult to understand the rest of the phenomena, especially insofar as the rest of the phenomena may not elicit the visceral condemnation that is elicited in considering the Holocaust. As I said, I am not opposed to the idea that exemplars and paradigm cases can often elucidate a concept. But if these cases are too closely associated with the concept, it becomes very difficult to know how to deal with other cases that also seemingly fall under the concept. Concepts are larger than the individual instances that fall under them. And, it should go without saying, the category of genocide is larger than the Holocaust.

There is also a problem with the way the definition of genocide was so closely tied to the Holocaust. … I [earlier] argued that the definition of genocide, with a list of only four groups than can be the object of genocide, is conceptually unsupportable. One needs to remember that, at least according to one authority [William Schabas], the four groups—racial, ethnic, national, and religious—were chosen because they best represented the constellation of groups that all intersected with the Jewish people who were the subject of the Holocaust. As various scholars and practitioners have tried to defend the definition of genocide first announced in the Genocide Convention, they have generally failed to account for why just these four groups can be the subject of genocide. Disconnecting the exemplary case from the concept of genocide again seems called for. For this and other reasons advanced earlier … the harm of genocide should not be drawn with reference to [or completely constrained by] the Holocaust.” — Larry May, Genocide: A Normative Account (Cambridge University Press, 2010): 79-81

My compilation on genocide is here. And the compilation on international criminal law is here.

Some embryonic thoughts on two facets of terrorism

In the moral and philosophical, as well as legal and political analyses and discussions of terrorism, there remain two topics or issues that still do not receive the attention due them:

First, in mass media reporting and commentary, as well as in public political rhetoric (especially among politicians of all stripes) more generally, there remains comparatively little discussion of “state terrorism.” In the U.S., there is ignorance, motivated or willful and otherwise (e.g., as a result of poor education, lack of sufficient exposure to the requisite information, etc.), of the times and places in which this country has resorted to what is in fact state terrorism (e.g., the bombing of Dresden; the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of numerous Japanese cities in WW II; as well the napalm carpet bombing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during its war in Indochina). And of course the U.S. is not alone in this regard, we need only look at ample historical examples dating back to the early twentieth century. And the resort to same has not been confined to the world’s most powerful nation-states: of late, Saudi Arabia (in Yemen), Syria, and Israel come quickly to mind in the Middle East. Most of us are no doubt familiar with so-called “lone-wolf” (a horrific term, as this is the sort of violent behavior that is peculiar to human beings, not non-human animals) terrorist acts, dedicated terrorist groups (like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and to some extent the Taliban), or groups like the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Hamas that have used acts of terrorism as part of larger and legitimate political and military campaigns and struggles. I am not attempting an exhaustive list or categorization here but want merely to highlight the comparative breadth and depth of attention accorded non-state terrorism. There are a number of possible and plausible reasons which might help us account for if not explain this difference, but we can leave that to a later date.

Second, and with some notable exceptions (e.g., Scott Atran and his research collaborators), there has been little work devoted to the socio-psychological motivations, contexts, and variables that help us make some sense or provide some kind of social scientific understanding and perhaps even explanation of the political and psychological motivations and socialization of those who commit terrorist acts. We prefer to vociferously and self-righteously moralize, judge, or condemn before engaging in sincere or well-intentioned attempts at understanding. At the very least, we could be more modest or circumspect in our moralizing and judgments until we have undertaken the arduous task of understanding.¹ Atran exemplified the seeds of such an attempt in a piece he wrote some years ago in Foreign Policy:

“… terrorist plotters against Western civilian populations tend not to be parts of sophisticated, foreign-based command-and-control organizations. Rather, they belong to loose, homegrown networks of family and friends who die not just for a cause, but for each other. Jihadists pretty much span the population’s normal distribution: There are very few psychopaths and sociopaths, few brilliant thinkers and strategists. Jihadi wannabes today are mostly emerging adults in transitional stages of their lives—students, immigrants, in search of jobs or companions—who are especially prone to movements that promise a meaningful cause, camaraderie, adventure, and glory. Most have a secular education, becoming ‘born again’ into the jihadi cause in their late teens or 20s. The path to radicalization can take years, months, or just days, depending on personal vulnerabilities and the influence of others. Occasionally there is a hook-up with a relative, or a friend of a friend, who has some overseas connection to someone who can get them a bit of training and motivation to pack a bag of explosives or pull a trigger, but the Internet and social media are usually sufficient for radicalization and even operational preparation.”

Related but distinguishable from this concern is the paucity of evidence and knowledge we have about the actual and possible “de-radicalization” of terrorists, one exception to the rule being in the case of “jihadist” Islamists: please see Omar Ashour, The De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming armed Islamist movements (Routledge, 2009).²  In addition to Irish Republicans, I suspect there are instances of this among former Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) members and Naxalite-Maoist insurgents in India as well as among Communists who have resorted to terrorist acts in Nepal.

One should keep in mind that the endeavor to understand and in some measure explain this kind of political violence at the individual level is not at all equivalent to proffering a moral justification, ideological rationalization, or legal excuse for putative or real terrorist acts.

Notes

1. For a brilliant attempt to address some of the facets of this problem, please see: G.A. Cohen’s essay, “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?” in Cohen’s posthumously published volume edited by Michael Otsuka, Finding Oneself in the Other (Princeton University Press, 2013): 115-142.

2. Further reading along these lines:

• Atran, Scott. Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (Ecco/Harper/Collins, 2010).
• Bjørgo, Tore and John Horgan, eds. Leaving Terrorism Behind: Individual and Collective Disengagement (Routledge, 2009).
• Boulden, Jane and Thomas G. Weiss, eds. Terrorism and the UN: Before and After September 11 (Indiana University Press, 2004).
• Gambetta, Diego, ed. Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Horgan, John. Walking Away from Terrorism: Accounts of Disengagement from Radical and Extremist Movements (Routledge, 2009).
• Sageman, Marc. Understanding Terror Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Relevant Bibliographies

• The American War in Indochina (see too Bombing French Indochina during the U.S. War in Vietnam: a précis)
• International Criminal Law
• Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• Terrorism
• Violent Conflict and the Laws of War

Preamble to the Constitution: “constitutional goods” and the pursuit of justice ... in light of “the Good”

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution was signed in convention September 17, 1787 and ratified June 21, 1788.

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It is commonly acknowledged that the Preamble “is a brief introductory statement of the Constitution’s fundamental purposes and guiding principles. Courts have referred to it as reliable evidence of the Framers’ intentions regarding the Constitution’s meaning and what they hoped the Constitution would achieve.”

And yet, constitutional theorists, lawyers and law professors, much of Congress, the Executive branch, and the Supreme Court have, by and large, not accorded sufficient recognition, legal deference and democratic realization to forming “a more perfect union,” “establish[ing] justice,” and “promot[ing] the general welfare,” at least in comparison with the deference paid to and preoccupation with “provid[ing] for the common defense” and “secur[ing] the blessings of liberty,” the last (especially of late) in a largely libertarian Liberal sense which grants social and economic supremacy to capitalist markets (hence the hypnotic and ideological focus on what are termed ‘negative liberties’). As for “insuring domestic tranquility” (this is related to the Rawlsian concern for social stability) the next few decades, if not years, should inform us to what extent that can be achieved within the boundaries of Liberal egalitarian rights and duties as well as democratic participation, deliberation and representation more broadly (that is, if the U.S. can salvage what is left of its constitutional commitments and democracy).

In brief, several of the “fundamental purposes and guiding principles” of the Constitution are deserving of far more attention, elaboration, and fulfillment by all three branches of government, as well as more citizens on the Right side of Mirabeau’s “geography of the Assembly,” many if not most of whom tend not to possess even a decent understanding of their own “self- interests,” let alone evidence a basic appreciation of common and public goods, equal liberties and rights, and the pursuit of justice in light of “the Good.” The term “the Good” is here open-ended and not beholden to any one particular metaphysical doctrine or moral theory, although it has aspirational or perfectibilist (distinguishable from ‘perfectionist’) and cosmopolitan connotations that assume if not cohere with something closely akin to or perhaps even identical with the Rawlsian ideas of “reasonable pluralism” and an “overlapping consensus” under the Liberal constitutional conditions of “democratic law.” Thus one might call it a “thin” theory or model of “the Good,” the “thick” conceptions being peculiar to individual worldviews. Accordingly and ideally, it should be able to capture the particular “truths” or vantage points, or the conceptions of “public reason” peculiar to three distinct Liberal constitutional models or frameworks: libertarian, egalitarian, and communitarian. After Alan Brudner, the “model” or best theory of the Liberal-democratic constitution is one that, by way of critique, subsumes and transcends each model or framework while incorporating aspects of their fundamental principles and values as constituent components of a whole that is sensitive to the pursuit of justice through the means and ends, principles and purposes, provided by Liberalism and democratic law. Being on the Left, I cannot help but point out that this Liberalism in the widest and deepest sense is perfectly consistent with (although not necessarily circumscribed by) ideas of democratic or Liberal socialism as found in the writings of J.S. Mill, John Dewey, and John Rawls, and to some extent, B.R. Ambedkar. And it is, I would argue, consistent with Marx’s vision of a post-capitalist democratic and socialist society.*

* I wholeheartedly agree with the arguments of R.G. Peffer that, in spite of his well-known “anti-moralism” and tendency on occasion to conflate morality and ideology, Marx nevertheless held firmly to (an often implicit) normative moral theory that was part and parcel of his social scientific theory. Please see Peffer’s Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton University Press, 1990).

Indemnification of Slaveowners and Black Reparations

I would like to draw your attention to the updated entry on “Black Reparations” in the Stanford Encyclopedia (SEP) by Bernard Boxill and J. Angelo Corlett.* Here is the introduction (and of course I urge you to read the entire piece):

“States have long demanded reparations from other states at the end of wars. More recently non-state actors such as the Aborigines of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, and many American Indian nations of North America are demanding the return of their tribal lands from Europeans as reparations; Eastern Europeans dispossessed by socialist governments are demanding the return of their property as reparations; and U.S. blacks (black people whose genealogy traces back to slavery within the U.S.) are demanding reparations from the United States of America for the harmful wrongdoings to them caused by U.S. slavery and its aftermath. The last of these demands is our subject.”

*          *          *

In thinking about reparations to blacks we should recall, with our authors, indemnification for slaveowners with the abolition of slavery (‘abolition’ is not equivalent to ‘emancipation, the former being a necessary but not sufficient condition of the latter):

“Demands for compensation related to slavery frequently arose during the U.S. Civil War, but [did] not do so in the way present day U.S. citizens would expect. The demands were not to compensate the black slaves for the injuries of slavery, but to compensate the white slaveholders for the anticipated loss of their slaves. These demands were voiced in the South when they faced the prospect of having to free their slaves, but they were also voiced in the North, and from the highest sources. President Abraham Lincoln, for example, repeatedly urged compensated emancipation, which meant paying the slaveholders for the loss of their slaves who would then be deported from the U.S. Indeed, at one time he appeared to be ready to propose paying the South $400,000,000, for the loss of their slaves. As W.E.B. Du Bois observed dryly: ‘Lincoln was impressed by the loss of capital invested in slaves, but curiously never seemed seriously to consider the correlative loss of wage and opportunity of slave workers, the tangible results of whose exploitation had gone into the planters’ pockets for two centuries.’ (Du Bois 1992 [1935]: 150) And Lincoln did not even sugar coat his deportation proposal with the suggestion that the freedmen were a nation and therefore needed a separate territory on which to govern themselves.”

Here are two more vivid examples of indemnification of slaveowners outside the U.S., from England and France respectively, courtesy of Thomas Piketty:

The British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1832, but the actual elimination was gradual, not taking full effect until some 10 years later. Moreover, it involved the “complete indemnification of slaveowners,” while “[n]o funds were appropriated to compensate slaves for the damages they or their ancestors had suffered, whether serious physical harm or mere loss of wages for centuries of unpaid labor.” While no amount of tort damages could amount to full justice for the harms suffered, for the denial of human dignity and loss or diminution of fundamental liberties and corresponding loss of human welfare and well-being, significant reparations would have been a step in the right direction. In fact, racist discrimination and unequal treatment continued, as “former slaves, once emancipated, were obliged to sign relatively rigid and undercompensated long-term labor contracts, which left most of them in semi-forced labor for long periods after their official liberation. By contrast, in the British case slaveowners were entitled to full compensation for their loss of property.”** The quoted material is from Thomas Piketty in Part Two, “Slave and Colonial Societies,” of his book Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).

And now France, with even more deleterious consequences:

 “The Haitian case is emblematic, not only because it was the first abolition of the modern era following a victorious slave revolt and the first independence secured by a black population from a European power but also because the episode ended with a gigantic debt that did much to undermine the development of Haiti over the next two centuries. If France finally agreed to recognize Haitian independence in 1825 and to end its threat to invade the island with French troops, it was only because Charles X extracted from the Haitian government a promise to pay 150 million gold francs to compensate slaveowners for loss of their property [‘the figure was based on the profitability of the plantations and the value of slaves prior to the Haitian revolution’]. The government in Port-au-Prince really had no choice given France’s obvious military superiority, the embargo imposed by the French fleet pending a settlement, and the real risk of an occupation of the island. [....]

Recent research has shown that the sum of 150 million gold francs represented more than 300 percent of Haiti’s national income in 1825—in other words, three years of production. The treaty also provided that the entire amount should be paid within five years to the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignation (a public banking institution created during the French Revolution and still in existence today), where it would be paid out to the despoiled slaveowners (which was done), while the Haitian government was required to refinance the loan from the Caisse with new loans from private French banks so as to spread the payments over time (which was also done). It is crucial to recognize the magnitude of the sums involved. With refinancing at an annual interest of 5 percent, typical for the time—not even counting the juicy commissions that the bankers did not fail to add on in the course of numerous partial defaults and renegotiations over the subsequent decades—this meant Haiti was obliged to repay the equivalent of 15 percent of its national product every year, indefinitely, simply to pay the interest of the debt without even beginning to pay down the principal. [….]

The 1825 debt was not definitively repaid and officially wiped from the books until the early 1950s. For more than a century, from 1825 to 1950 [!], the price that France insisted Haiti pay for its freedom had one main consequence: namely, that the island’s economic and political development was subordinated to the question of the indemnity....” — Thomas Piketty, “Slave and Colonial Societies,” in Part II of his book Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).

* I was surprised to learn that Alfred L. Brophy’s book, Reparations: Pro & Con (Oxford University Press, 2006), was not included in the bibliography for this entry.

** The indemnity was roughly equal to the “market value” of the slaves.

Relevant Bibliographies

• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• The Haitian Revolution
• Human Rights
• Slavery
• After Slavery and Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization

Democracy & Liberty, Part 3

The previous parts of our series: 1(a), 1(b), 2(a), and 2(b). The first two focus on democracy, the next two concern liberty.

This is our fifth and final installment on “democracy and liberty” from Raghavan Iyer’s book, Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979), specifically, from the beginning of the chapter on “Democracy and Liberty in Emerging Polities.” Iyer’s aim was to “show the complexity of the concepts of democracy and liberty, the variety of concrete conditions, and the specificity of theoretical assumptions upon which they are usually based.” This is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an appreciation of “some of the telling features and immediate problems of the emerging polities [often called ‘developing countries’ and usually and not helpfully grouped together as the ‘third world’], many of which have colonial histories and most of which are “victims of imperialistic domination,” although Iyer notes that these are “not all new countries or new democracies or even newly independent entities,” the salient point remaining that “the world-wide demand for national self-determination and sovereignty has now become essentially irresistible.” Geographically, most of these new States belong to the continents of Asia and Africa, which have given to humanity its chief religions, and now comprise the great majority of the world’s people ….” (Bracketed comments here and below are from yours truly.)

This last snippet from the aforementioned chapter treats “the assumptions underlying the traditional models and modern systems of democracy and liberty [emphasis added]:”

“Both these concepts were conditioned by the intellectual climate of early scientific metaphysics, the ethical flavor of secularized religious values, and the social and economic context of expanding industrial capitalism, as well as the noble but somewhat naïve optimism and enthusiasm of the [European Enlightenment] philosophes and revolutionaries. We cannot trace the details here of the lineage and background of these concepts, but merely indicate a few of the more fundamental assumptions. Political power is assumed to be a finite quantity of storable and distributable force which resides in individuals or in the social system. When it is evenly divided among the crucial agencies of decision-making or when its concentration at a single point is prevented by a complicated machinery of checks and balances, the stable equilibrium of the system is achieved [this ‘equilibrium’ later becomes, for John Rawls, transformed into a more explicitly Liberal and democratic concern for the ‘stability of a well-ordered society of justice as fairness’]. Individuals are motivated by the attractions and repulsions of self-interest [this term has a complicated and a fairly wide range of meanings within the history of political and economic thought in the West; see, for example, the discussion in Stephen Holmes’ Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995)]. Given an atomistic view of actions, interests, and individuals, the pulls and pressures in different directions throughout the system can be seen as reconcilable only in terms of a central harmony carried over from the ancient world into a mechanistic picture of nature and the finite universe. The stress in politics as in science is on regularity, predictability, and manufacturability. This simple model was modified and generalized into a doctrine of political pluralism and the interplay of autonomous centers in our own century.

The pace of change should be slow, measured, and self-regulating, except for inevitable explosions in the system at infrequent intervals [these ‘explosions’ would soon include the ‘manias, crashes, and panics’ endemic to capitalism]. The needs of social life and of State action are generally not so compelling or immediate as to require rapid legislation or even a very strong and expanding government and administration [an essential premise of conservatism and libertarianism]. There should be opportunities for revision and readjustment at all levels of activity, so that the number of irrevocable changes in the system is reduced to a minimum [this is what I have elsewhere described, after Jon Elster and Robert E. Goodin, as the obdurate ideological doctrine of ‘piecemeal (trial-and-error) social engineering and incrementalism,’ which has strong family resemblance to the inordinate fondness for and fealty to tradition, custom or convention and, in common law, a rather strict rendering of stare decisis (precedent)]. A purely utilitarian but cautious conception of government may be combined with a contractual and relatively static picture of society. There is presumed to be a majestic movement in history toward better democracy and greater freedom, toward spontaneous [if not inevitable] social progress. The struggles of the past—between Church and State, Society and State, Government and State, the King and his Barons, Kind and Parliament and the Courts, Government and the Courts, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—have all been regarded as essential and ordered phases in a grand sequence, aspects of the folklore of the political odyssey of liberal democracy. The notion of sovereignty, theories of the State, and many other preoccupations of the political theorists of democracy and liberty were doubtless stimulated by such factors as the bitter struggle between Church and State, which has no parallel in the history of many of the emerging polities of today. The acceptance of the System by all classes and groups through a series of struggles resulted in considerable cultural [and especially in the U.S., racist] homogeneity and a common political consciousness. The dissolution of traditional loyalties and local bonds led to a general concern for common rights and wider loyalties. The growth of a civic spirit and of social solidarity thus came to be taken for granted.

A crucial assumption is the unique efficiency of a competitive mechanism of politics, open to all and regulated by its own code [hence ‘self-regulating’], marked by considerable mobility between rival groups and the equalization of risks if not rewards, destined to maximize general satisfaction. [….] The method of arriving at decisions is assumed to be more important than whether the right decision is taken in any situation [‘proceduralism’]. It could be contended that the subordination of democratic theory to rationalist ends and utilitarian procedures is not so much the corruption as the culmination of democratic ideas. However, many critics of democracy complain that there is no real competition, that there are non-competing groups and a collusion between different sections of the ruling class, that the élite in power becomes the Establishment by absorbing potential rivals and by alienating the incurably discontented until they are regarded as the common enemies of the entire System. At the worst the System is a social or economic monopoly, and at its best it is a form of monopolistic competition in which there are clandestine coteries pulling strings behind the scenes and reaching compromises in the hope of deferred if not immediate profits. Apologists and critics of democratic competition share many common assumptions and play into each other’s hand by their respective exaggerations. Mill and Montesquieu as well as Mosca and Marx spoke some truth[s] about democracy and liberty.

An even less pleasant assumption is the uniqueness of particular democratic systems [as in, say, the U.S. or Great Britain, perhaps even in France], which fosters a mystical faith in the inevitability and invulnerability of democracy and liberty in a given country and an obstinate belief in the dubiousness of democracy and liberty elsewhere. The greater the prevailing cynicism, the more the assumption has been cherished. The tragedy of democracy and liberty in the older States, like that of religion and culture, has been their prostitution and desecration in the service of individual and national egotism. A less harmful assumption is the magical potency of political ritual, with its ideal as well as symbolic elements, its capacity to bolster up failing morale and to allay persisting anxieties. Like all ritual, it is impersonal, dramatized, and solemn, an equalizer and a tranquilizer, a medium of expression as well of communication, a substitute for the sense of mystery of the supernatural. When ritual is outmoded and decaying we have democracy at a low temperature. There is, finally, the admirable assumption that political freedom and responsibility could be developed through exercise; that all social problems are soluble by the good sense of every citizen; that every individual is endowed with integrity, conscience, and reason; that the potentialities of individuals are more important than their present capacities; that it is better to reform society than to accept or reject it; that people have the power of grading loyalties as well as being moved by them; that the citizen knows when to resist and how to compromise; that the leader knows how to listen and when to lead; that, in short, it is better to trust than to fear others and ourselves” [emphasis added].  

Relevant bibliographies for this series of posts:

• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education
• Constitutionalism
• Criminal Law: Municipal and International
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Elections and Voting
• The European Enlightenment
• Global Distributive Justice
• Human Rights
• Immigration & Refugees: Ethics, Law, and Politics
• International Law
• The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy, and Law
• Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law
• Punishment and Prison
• Social Security and the Welfare State
• Transitional Justice
• Utopian Imagination, Thought, and Praxis
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

Democracy & Liberty, Part 2(b)

This is our fourth installment in this this series, with the fifth and final post, Part 3, to follow anon. Here are Parts 1(a), 1(b), and 2(a).  

Before we proceed with Professor Iyer’s conceptual and political introduction to liberty and liberties in a democracy, I need to get something off my chest: in the U.S. today, millions of Americans demonstrate an impoverished and often implausible knowledge (be it philosophical, political or constitutional) of liberty and liberties (as well as freedom more fundamentally and generally), an ignorance that encompasses democratic constitutionalism, political philosophy and theory, as well as basic morality and ethics. This is evidenced most conspicuously with regard to their beliefs and behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, when those primarily on the Right believe they have a constitutionally grounded thus a legally protected “right” not to wear a mask to protect themselves and others from getting sick and/or dying (the liberty in question thought to arise from this right). In a future post, we will speak to the topic of “police powers” that are indispensable to explaining why no such liberty exists (as Steve Shiffrin earlier stated, the ‘government has a compelling state interest in requiring its citizens to wear masks in appropriate circumstances’). In Liberal democratic constitutional law, liberties are not absolute, even if they sometimes come close, as with the liberty of conscience or freedom of religion (or, as I would prefer, ‘worldviews’ and ‘lifeworlds’). And Professor Shiffrin also recently reminded us that constitutionally enumerated liberties are invariably “qualified,” and thus not absolute. In the history of political philosophy and politics, even with the most ardent or extreme libertarians, with few exceptions, understood that one’s liberties must be consistent with the liberties of others, and that liberties are limited or end when they interfere with the equal liberty or others or effectively if not predictably deny liberty or liberties to others, most vividly and importantly, when the exercise of one’s liberty directly causes some sort of unreasonable or unacceptable harm or enhances the risk of such harm such as, in our case, severe illness (including the ill effects of ‘post-COVID’) or death. This is but one reason why we rightly speak of the necessity for “equal liberties.”

Raghavan Iyer continues:

“The immediate implications of liberty must be seen in the context of a constellation of factors favorable to the maintenance of a system of liberties. These pertain to a free country, a free society, and a free people in contrast with and enslaved country, and authoritarian society, and a powerless people. Some favorable factors are readily seen and could be easily listed—the existence of a non-political civil service and a non-military police, the former mainly and the latter entirely an instrument of law rather than of policy; checks on delegated legislation and delegated jurisdiction; a considerable area of autonomy for individuals and organizations, with evident exemption from central control or pressure; a tolerance of novelty and a willingness to experiment; intellectual objectivity and a critical spirit; safeguards against conformity, dogmatism, and persecution; adequate avenues for the development of individual talents and capacities; the fearless performance of civic and personal duties; the criticism and correction of existing social institutions, traditions, and conventions; widespread concern for the promotion of tolerance and moderation, plurality, and flexibility in communal life; the general acceptance of rules to regulate competition between individuals and groups, within and between parties and other power-centers; the role of the State in hindering hindrances to the enjoyment of liberties by the weaker sections of society. [….]

Historically, liberties become the foundation of liberty, although liberty is not merely the fortuitous occurrence of liberties. Liberty can only thrive in an atmosphere of creative activity in which there are reasonable restraints on individual judgment so that all moral failures do not become legal crimes, and in which the power of self-determination and freedom of choice are sufficiently cherished for the individual to function as a person and a citizen, not as a mere subject or as a slave except in name. It is not always noticed by libertarians, all too conscious of the bitter struggles that led to formal liberties and their social sanctions, that real liberty, like true democracy, is inimical to any form of intimidation, manipulation, or coercion even to secure the most exalted ends. [….]

In totalitarian countries the Leviathan has almost swallowed up the right of the individual to his own soul, habeas animum, while in democratic countries there has been a growing tendency for the small man, habeas homunculum, to be sacrificed to raison d’état. There is no doubt that democracy is more conducive to liberty than any other system of government yet devised. It provides the necessary link between liberty and equality, though a democratic government is sometimes required by the people at large to promote equality even at the expense of liberty. Bergson assigned to democracy the role of the reconciler between égalité and liberté under the banner of fraternité. Historically, the struggle for liberty, the quest for equality, and the movement toward fraternity have been stressed almost as successive phases in the development of democracy. [….] Ideally, a proper democratic system can be effectively established only in a society of equals in which every citizen has the full liberty to realize his own ends and the moral responsibility to serve the purposes of the community. This being unattainable at present, we must consider the extent of freedom from executive restraint as the test of democratic efficiency and rely on various forms of voluntary association to safeguard liberty in a democracy. We can secure neither democratic ends through undemocratic means nor liberal aims through illiberal methods. If this is understood, it will be easier to see why democratic ends cannot be secured through illiberal means and why liberal aims cannot be achieved by undemocratic methods. Those who postpone or destroy present liberties in the name of future freedom are the friends of neither liberty nor democracy.”

Our fifth and final installment—Part 3—in this series will speak to some of the questionable when not troubling or dated assumptions “underlying the traditional models and modern systems of democracy and liberty.”

Democracy & Liberty, Part 2(a)

We continue our conceptual and political if not philosophical introduction to democratic theory and praxis provided by the late Professor Raghavan Iyer from a chapter in his book, Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979), with the material on “liberty” and liberties within democratic societies. Part 1(a) is here. Part 1(b) is here, and Part 2(b) is forthcoming.

“While the concept of freedom is both broader and deeper than that of democracy [cf., for example, its metaphysical and ontological meanings in Kant’s philosophy, Sartrian existentialism, or Indian philosophies and, most recently, a book on the subject by the inimitable Raymond Tallis] the concept of liberty is narrower but no less significant. Although it has positive as well as negative aspects, it means, strictly and etymologically, exemption from tutelage and tyranny, from external restraint and arbitrary power. Every notable instance of such an exemption is called from medieval times a liberty, or, in more modern jargon, the establishment of a claim or right. Some of these are often see as natural or fundamental and implicit in the definition of man [here is where liberty merges with freedom]. While these and other rights may be sanctified by notions of natural law, they are safeguarded by sanctions of man-made law. Liberty is the product rather than the sum of particular liberties; it stands for a system rather than a set of rights, as the interrelations of all affect the implications of each. These liberties may be seen as pertaining to different spheres of activity—religious, civil, political, and personal; or to various human functions—thought, conscience, speech, movement, association; or the other things most men value—life, education, happiness, property, power, reputation, conviction, intellectual and social intercourse; or to institutions and organizations—schools, trade unions, parties, the courts, local bodies, reform societies, vocational groups, business firms, the media. Individual liberty seems always to have to run faster to keep in the same place, despite the nostalgia for a simpler and purer world of the past.

The essential elements in the concept of liberty remain unaffected by its ever-expanding application to an expanding social universe. There has always been a commitment to fewer restraints, wider choices, and greater self-determination, although these have been viewed in the varied historical struggles for liberties by master and slave, feudal lord and serf, the rural aristocracy and the urban bourgeoisie, worker and peasant, producer and consumer, landlord and tenant, the intelligentsia and the proletariat, the imperialist and the revolutionary, the haves and the have-nots in every sphere. In Athens, the idea of liberty was incarnated into particular forms such as isegoria or equality of speech, isonomia or equality before the law, isocratia, or political equality, and parrhesia or equality and freedom of speech. It is no doubt a far cry from the claims and concessions of the Magna Carta to William Blackstone’s statement in the eighteenth century concerning the absolute rights that belong to every citizen under a system of law which reduced the natural liberty but increased ‘civil liberty of mankind.’ Today we can see more clearly and state more explicitly the essential elements in the idea of liberty:

1. All men are equally entitled to liberty, for liberty without equality of rights is meaningless in the social context.
2. Liberty for all means equal restrictions and reciprocal obligations for all. There is a contractual as well as an egalitarian element in the idea of public liberty.
3. The restrictions imposed on citizens by the laws of the State must be laid down specifically so that may never be increased without adequate justification in the eyes of those subjected to them.
4. Certain liberties are regarded as inviolable but they need to be supplemented by new liberties.
5. These liberties must be guaranteed by constitutional or statutory law and safeguarded by impartial courts of justice.
6. It must be possible to effect changes in the social and political system to increase the amount of liberty available to all classes of people as well as to secure a better implementation of existing liberties.
7. There must be adequate means to prevent the overthrow or exploitation of the system by the internal and external enemies of liberty.

Implementation of these essential elements  in the concept of liberty through suitable institutional and constitutional devices is not enough for a liberal society. There must also emerge an awareness of their rights among all the members of a community, together with a deep-seated respect for the dignity and worth of the individual. There must be free legal aid and equal access to the law. Every citizen must be competent to claim his own rights and have adequate opportunities to claim and maintain his liberties. This implies a commitment to a minimum standard of social and economic security as well as basic and civic education [emphasis added].

Part 2(b) on liberty and liberties should be our final installment. Part 3 will be our fifth and final installment.

Democracy & Liberty, Part 1(b)

This is the second in a series of posts on this subject by the late Professor Raghavan Iyer that was introduced here.

“The essential elements in the everyday concept of political democracy must be appreciated if we are to lay down the minimally necessary institutional conditions [emphasis added].

1. Even if all cannot govern, all citizens must be allowed to choose who can govern. [Of course here what is important is that we have a definition of citizenship that includes all who have reached, as we say, “the age of reason” or are deemed adults, regardless of their ethnicity, worldviews, gender, and so forth. Given the nature of human judgment and political judgment in particular, we will endeavor to provide sufficient forms of formal and informal education and socialization or enculturation such that it is less likely that these citizens will not have malformed judgments or judgments distorted or trumped by those forms of well-known debilitating psychological and emotional phenomena that tend to make mincemeat of rationality and the voice of reason.]
2. Those who are chosen as eligible to govern must represent those who cannot govern. [This may seem obvious, but history has shown us how elusive this often can be.]
3. Those who are eligible must in turn choose those who will govern. [In a footnote Iyer writes: ‘If the word “choose” here is taken literally, the entire model would be applicable in parliamentary democracy. If taken in a looser sense to apply widely to all those who fulfill important political roles, the model can cover many types of democracy.’]
4. Those who do govern must be responsive and responsible to the people through representative and also behave as if they were themselves the foremost trustees and representatives of the people, including those who are opposed to their policies and positions [emphasis added].
5. All citizens must be allowed to replace or re-elect those who may and those who do govern.
6. Those who are chosen as eligible to govern must be able to remove or replace those who do govern when they no longer enjoy their confidence or the support of the people.
7. There must be adequate opportunities for all these choices to be made and to be realized, as also for the enlargements of the area of choice and the capacity to choose, thus tending to equalize the chances of all to secure their choices and to be chose as representatives or as rulers.

These essential requirements of the concept of democracy can only be realized through appropriate institutions and arrangements. Power must be diffused as widely as possible and not concentrated in a few centers if democracy is to secure unity without loss of freedom, equality without mediocrity, variety without sacrificing unity, progress without endangering either unity or liberty [emphasis added].  

If democracy is viewed mainly as a social theory, there is a natural tendency to think of it in terms of a metaphysical, sociological, or psychological archetype, abstracted from a historical and cultural context. In fact, democracy is a system of government which is determined not only by minimal institutional conditions but also by varying constellations of supporting and sufficient conditions. A democratic society, like a developed economy, has its own infrastructure conducive to political democracy as to economic development. It is not feasible to describe exhaustively the elements in this infrastructure, or even to decide definitively which are necessary and which are sufficient conditions. [J.S.] Mill mentioned two necessary conditions—the popular willingness to receive, defend, and preserve democracy, and to discharge the functions it imposes on its supporters. Tocqueville pointed to a variety of factors that supported and reinforced democracy: the application of the federal principle; the vitality of local institutions; the strength and scope of judicial power; the role of a healthy religious spirit in a secular polity; social equality; expanding opportunities; a restless and enterprising, and independent temper; the capacity for and the quality of self-legislation; the existence of numerous non-governmental associations [today we might term these ‘reference groups’ and ‘communities’ of one kind or another]; and a variety of avenues of social cooperation. Three others are stressed by James Bryce: the reforming zeal of citizens and their readiness to assume responsibility for public institutions; the role of intellectual and cultural élites in the formation of opinion and the stimulation of thinking on public questions; and the prevailing sentiment of national unity. [….]

There are many more stabilizing factors and dynamic forces favorable to democracy, some so obvious that they are mistakenly believed to be universally necessary, others so subtle and intangible that they are often overlooked. The latter include the following factors, which can only be listed here: the existence of independent institutions respected for their integrity and fearlessness in the face of the State; the ability of people in general to distinguish between the men in power and the System; a nationwide structure of democratic education; the adoption of democratic methods within nonpolitical bodies wherever possible [emphasis added; the last two italicized items call to mind such different individuals as John Dewey, Paolo Freire, Septima Clark, and Myles Horton, as well as models of education found in anarchist thought and experiments]; sufficient diversity of desires and expectation to reduce the stress and strain of competition [the most troubling forms of which are intrinsic to capitalist societies]; intellectual resilience, cultural flexibility, and social mobility; the continual narrowing of the gap between privileged and weaker groups so as to reduce the intensity of conflicts of interest in society; the ability of leaders to influence and be influenced by the widest possible range of public opinion; the sense of responsibility and the self-denying role of élites; a steady rise in the ethical and cultural level of the community; a spirit of trusteeship and a capacity for admitting and correcting errors among those who constitute the administration; a climate of thought and conduct that fosters intellectual honesty and individual initiative. It is only the essentials—conceptual and institutional—of democracy that can help us to identify a democratic regime, although its evolution cannot be understood except in terms of the infrastructure of the society in which it functions. Much intellectual and practical harm has been caused by ignoring these caveats.”

Part 2(a) will cover Iyer’s succinct introductory and incisive discussion of liberty as it is (like equality and fraternity or solidarity) an integral part of democratic theory and praxis.

Democracy & Liberty, Part 1(a)

I want to share some material from a book by one of my late professors at UC Santa Barbara, Raghavan Iyer, from whom I took several undergraduate classes in political philosophy (including one on anarchist thought) back in the 1980s. I am copying some of Iyer’s passages on “democracy and liberty” from the chapter, “Democracy and Liberty in Emerging Polities,” in his book, Parapoltics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979), in particular his conceptual and political introduction to democratic theory and praxis, leaving out the incisive material on its relevance to actual, necessary and possible roles in emerging democratic states (at least at the time this was written) outside of Western Europe and North America, however germane his perceptions, analysis, and suggestions remain, even today.

This will serve as a necessary backdrop to a forthcoming post on recent articles alerting us to the immanent fact that democracy in the U.S. is but a simulacrum of what it can or should be, and what is more, what is left of “democracy” in this country is under imminent threat for a number of reasons and in several ways which have combined to mutually reinforce their destructive potential through the precipitous rise of populist and authoritarian forces that have, in turn, come to a head with the Presidency and cult of Donald Trump. Of course these forces have a generative history on multiple fronts that cannot be recounted here so suffice to say that they did not arise spontaneously or unexpectedly, as cultural, economic, and political trends and factors (both national and global) have recently coalesced (as if on a slippery slope) so as to be amenable to ideological expression and political action and mobilization on the Right, a Right that is no longer aptly circumscribed and defined by principles of a largely Liberal “conservativism,” even if it represents the logical and immoral extension or deformation of some of those principles. The principal vehicle and (de facto and de jure) leadership of this mobilization is provided by congressional Republicans in both the House and Senate and by party members and supporters in mass and social media that have largely given themselves over to blatantly regressive and fascist methods and politics, having reached the tipping point of authoritarianism. But more on that anon.

In what follows, and in part for reasons of length, I will pay more attention to democracy than liberty, so please do not infer anything about their comparative worth or importance from that fact. In Part 2 we will examine what Professor Iyer wrote about liberty (and liberties) in conjunction with democracy.

As a prelude to the principal passages copied here, Iyer reminds us that “[e]very political idea casts its ideological shadow,” and that even among the most sincere and ardent democrats and libertarians there are three “illusions that die hard and have culminated in corresponding myths, these illusions falling under the headings of “political arithmetic,” “political algebra” and “political geometry” (which we will not here address), all of which contribute, among other things, to a failure to appreciate that, “[d]emocracy and liberty, like all political concepts, have a high degree of open-endedness and inevitable imprecision,” while being “conspicuous for their enormous emotive flavor and hortatory [and thus rhetorical] functions.” That said,

“Democracy may be viewed as an ideal, a method, and a process. From all three standpoints, it has a fundamental purpose which gives it a value of its own that makes it seem—like liberty—an end in itself. This purpose is political education in the widest and best sense, a strong commitment to training the populace in the arts of individual citizenship and collective coexistence. As an ideal, it is a system of self-rule that makes no distinction between the government and the governed on the personal, local, or national planes of decision making. This ideal being unattainable on a large scale or at the existing level of individual development, pure democracy remains [in several respects, like utopian thought], a notional norm, a conceptual model. The reconciliation of this remote yet powerful frame of reference with existing realities has necessitated popular myths and political fictions as well as a host of pragmatic devices and social conventions. The myth of popular sovereignty, the fiction of the general will, the device of representative government, and the convention that distinguishes the State from the government, are obvious examples.

As a method, democracy is a peaceful mode of securing agreement through free discussion, of settling disputes through various types of arbitration, and of civilizing the procedures of expressing and maintaining disagreement in an atmosphere of amiable tolerance, self-restraint, and mutual respect between person, parties, and groups. As this method is elusive and subtle, there has been in practice a fetishistic tendency toward formalism, toward the exaltation of conventional procedures and known precedents. As a process of political activity, democracy is a system of popular consent as well as responsible government, of dialogue and dialectic. To use the language of Lenin, it is a talking-shop as well as a working-shop. The dialogue is open to all, ceaseless in operation, and assumes a variety of forms and channels as well as periodic opportunities for the articulations of the wishes and will of the populace [reduced by rational choice oriented economists and political scientists to ‘preferences’]. The dialectic provides for the periodical replacement as well as the perpetual replaceability of the existing rulers, while at the same time enabling them during their tenure to exercise power effectively on behalf of their electors. This process contains within itself its own contradiction consequent tensions, as it is not easy for any government to remain both responsive and responsible to those who brought it into existence as well as those who desire its downfall. How to secure intelligent popular participation and to safeguard against indifference and inertia, how to preserve freedom and to prevent anarchy, how to obtain strong and popular leadership and to avoid demagogic or despotic tendencies—these problems face every democracy in the context of its own internal contradictions and inner tensions. It is helpful to remember that democracy, in its present form, is of relatively recent origin [the late 18^th century] and is frequently in a state of internal crisis, or of emergency caused by external forces. Democracy in wartime or under the stress of an economic crisis or national emergency, in the face of bankruptcy or breakdown, demands so many restraints on itself as a process or as a method that it remains chiefly an ideal that lives by the faith of votaries in itself, its past, and its future. Thus democracy may be seen as a faith as much as anything else [although that particular description may have rubbed them the wrong way, it was no less true of the radical republican democrats of the European Enlightenment and French Revolution]. It presupposes faith in the possibility of securing responsible government through representative institutions, of reducing arbitrary action and achieving equity and equality through legislative and judicial means, and of inducing voluntary cooperation and popular support in a free society. Democracy has its own distinctive approach to the three crucial problems of politics, centered on social power and human wisdom—the problem of authority, the problem of law, and the problem of obligation. The democratic approach must be governed by genuinely democratic conceptions of welfare, justice, and freedom.”

I hope to post Part 1(b) in a day or two, after which Part 2 on Liberty (with two or three installments) will follow. Then, as noted above, we will address recent analyses of what forces are responsible for degrading—and may eventually destroy—what counts for democracy these days in the U.S. After that, I want to share the main arguments from Seana Valentine Shiffrin’s profound and timely book, Democratic Law [The Berkeley Tanner Lectures, ‘reworked,’ 2017] (Oxford University Press, 2021). Standing on the shoulders of others, I may add some comments as well so as to locate her argument within the body of literature on democratic theory and praxis and jurisprudence as it relates (or might or should relate) to same.  

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

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:”

• Bennett, Gaverne and Christian Hogsbjerg, eds. Celebrating C.L.R. James in Hackney, London. London: Redwords, 2015.
• Bogues, B. Anthony. Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James. London: Pluto, 1997.
• 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.
• Douglas, Rachel. Making The Black Jacobins: C.L.R. James and the Drama of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
• Featherstone, David, et al., eds. Marxism, Colonialism, and Cricket: C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
• Gair, Christopher, ed. Beyond Boundaries: C.L.R. James and Postnational Studies. London: Pluto Press, 2006.
• Glaberman, Martin, ed. Marxism for Our Times: C.L.R. James on Revolutionary Organization. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
• Grimshaw, Anna, ed. The C.L.R. James Reader. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992.
• Henry, Paget. Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2000.
• 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.
• Smith, Andrew. C.L.R. James and the Study of Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Webb, Constance. Not Without Love: Memoirs. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2003.
• 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.

Religious worldviews/lifeworlds and the spiritual dimension

(A lifeworld is the individual or idiosyncratic appropriation and understanding of a worldview that typically departs in this or that manner from the orthodox or officially prescribed or expert/authoritative doctrines of institutionalized religions. Lifeworlds may also include ideas, ideals, values, beliefs and so forth that are not in any way intrinsically connected to the worldview, such as a penchant for astrology, or the belief that life exists on other planets, or an inordinate fondness for baseball!)

When I taught a course on “world religions” at our community college I tried to get my students to appreciate the fact that it is quite difficult if not completely misleading to make (or foolish to even attempt) plausible “grandiose” empirical or sociological or historical generalizations about religious worldviews as such (especially, but not only, if they were but dimly aware of Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Instead, we need to examine, for better and worse, religious doctrines in all their plurality, the different forms of religious institutions, the different kinds of religious communities and groups, the different sorts of religious persons, the creation of “sacred” art and so forth (I have elsewhere attempted to identify the ten main characteristics or dimensions of religious worldviews).

This came to mind again when I was reading … and thinking about the Catholic Church in France during the Enlightenment and French Revolution. How different this sort of Catholicism was and is from the Catholic faith later evidenced in the Catholic Worker movement or the liberation theology that for a time flourished in the “base communities” of Central and South America, for example. Religions, I insisted in the classroom (not effectively, I suspect), are what people make of them, thus they are, from the outside looking in, constructed by all-too-human beings who are afflicted with the vices and virtues, the ignorance and illusions, the cognitive biases and vehement passions, that afflict everyone else. This is true irrespective of their various (divine or sacred) “beginnings:” in revelation, dreams, prophecy, meditation, mystical experience, what have you. Consider, for example, the differences between two well-known Christians no longer with us: the American Southern Baptist pastor, televangelist, and conservative activist, Jerry Falwell Sr. on the one hand, and the South African Anglican bishop and theologian Desmond Tutu, on the other. When the more strident atheists polemicize against religions, they frequently ignore the genuine “messiness” or complexity of religions on the ground, as we say, let alone their theological or philosophical diversity and sophistication. And very few of these folks, if any of them, are well-acquainted with (i.e., have studied in some depth) religious worldviews of both Western and Eastern provenance.

For myself, I have long been intrigued by the question of whether or not what the philosopher John Cottingham identifies as the “spiritual dimension” of religious worldviews (which partially overlaps with a secular or humanistic version of same found in non-religious worldviews, philosophies, and lifeworlds), that is, the focus on “spiritual exercises” or a spiritually (and thus psychologically) therapeutic regimen conducive to individuation, self-transformation, and self-realization (all of which assume ‘moral autonomy’) is unavoidably dependent (as a necessary condition) on religious traditions. In other words, can such spirituality ever be wholly divorced from religions as we know them? The “communitarian” response to this question has been an emphatic “no,” while a genuinely Liberal answer is more ambivalent, or at least it admits that individuals, having reached the age of reason, are free to do what they want with the worldviews or ideologies or cluster of beliefs and values in which they have been reared (such socialization and enculturation ranges from weak to strong, deliberate to inadvertent). This implies that one can, or perhaps should, fashion one’s own lifeworld, the danger here being that one will be tempted to select beliefs and values and practices that suit one’s existing temperament and biases, one’s dispositional vices and cognitive blind spots, one’s indulgence in self-deception and wishful thinking, in short, construct a lifeworld that is “comfortable,” one that provides no challenges by way of ego-transcendence, a worldview and lifeworld that becomes merely a poorly disguised form of personal identity and debilitating ego-orientation inclining us toward the pleasure principle. I imagine there might be ways out of this conundrum, but that will be material for another day.

Moral Exemplars and Narrative Goodness: basic philosophical literature

       

“It is not implausible to think we are elevated by others who are more developed than ourselves in their striving for harmonious hierarchical development and for a valuable life. We are aided and encouraged along our own path of development by their striving for self-development and purer feeling; contrast the effects on us of encountering those with a sour mixture of one-upmanship, self-aggrandizement, desire to dominate or destroy, and other festering emotions, the effects of wending our way and bending our attention, to their motivations and trajectories. Just as a cacophony of urban noise is an intrusion if you’re are trying to listen to a string quartet or compose your own, so a person in the course of his own self-improvement or development will want, if merely as a means, to help raise the developmental level of those around him (or else to move into an isolated community of like-spirited persons). He will want to help them along. Even if a person were able to maintain his level and rate of (spiritual) advance and development unperturbed by others around him [like Plotinus!], not dragged down by them no matter what their state, he would still lack the benefits of associating with others who are equally or more developed. First, there is the benefit of being helped along by good examples and good companions. We all know people, I hope, who bring out the best in us, people in whose presence we would be embarrassed to speak or act from unworthy motives, people who glow. In their presence we feel elevated. We are pushed or lured or nudged further along a path of development and perfection; rather, we are inspired to move ourselves along, in the direction shown. Second, there is the joy in encountering a like person, in the experience of the other and in the mutual recognition of the mutual joy. The most intense delights, surely, are these experiences, at least as they combine with, enrich, and transfigure other delights more frequently listed. One awful psychological deformity is the resentment of excellence, not merely the inability to delight or take pleasure in it—bad enough—but the envious desire for its absence. To avoid being the object of such envy, people will hide their own excellence and camouflage their delight in it. Not only does this deprive others of the encouragement of an example, and of the opportunity for happy mutual recognition, it also alters the person’s own experience. She does not simply feel the same delight only without expressing it; an unexpressed delight is not as delightful. Resentment and envy of moral and spiritual excellence is most awful. [….] At any rate, persons developing in value will not feel or dwell in such envy; they will seek out opportunities to share the joy of being on and moving along their path. They will aid others in their own (spiritual or developmental) advance, for the pleasure of their company. (In thus aiding, they will not focus their attention upon their own pleasure but rather upon what brings that pleasure—the developed state of the others.) There is a third reason for wanting other equally or more developed persons around: their appreciation is especially worth having. In a loving relationship with another adult, the worth of what they give, including themselves, depends partially upon their estimation of themselves—whether they give something they hold precious and valuable. [….] The developed or developing person will wish for like companions, for inspiring examples to aid him along his path, for joyous company, and for meaningful affirmation of his own worth. This is the opposite of the desire to be surrounded by submissive people less developed than oneself, the desire that they be less developed.’ [….] The developed person will want to help perfect others; this is the most important aid he can give them. We want to find a way of living whereby our best energies and talents are poured out so as to speak to and improve the best energies and talents of others. We want to utilize our highest parts and energies in a way that helps others flourish.” — Robert Nozick

What the late Robert Nozick is speaking to here, as an illustration of what David L. Norton termed eudaimonistic ethics in Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (University of California Press, 1991), is in the realm of everyday living, while our notion of narrative goodness involves that and more: fictional stories or idealized portraits of one kind or another which may be viewed as attempts to depict what might, can, or should occur in our attempts to be moral, to have and cultivate vigilant ethical awareness and sensibilities, to live the good life.

*          *          *

Reading an article online by Junaid Quadri, “Ethical Perfectionism in Fiqh: The Example of Moral Exemplars,” called to mind some earlier thoughts I’ve entertained on “narrative goodness.” The first three paragraphs from his piece should suffice to get a sense of what Quadri is proposing and what motivated my return to the topic of “exemplarist moral theory” and “narrative goodness:”

“How precisely to understand the ethical material found within works of fiqh has been a recurrent question of Western scholarship on Islamic law since its earliest period. If, in the first phase of this interest, scholars tended to find in fiqh a curious (and perhaps, objectionable) amalgam of law, religion and ethics, recent decades have witnessed a robust response. A bulk of this literature has been focused on disentangling the fiqh’s religious or ethical norms from its legal ones, often with a view to locating a place for secular reason within what has been viewed as a sacred law, or a place for liberal rights in what has often been cast as a divinely-willed deontology. This has been a productive turn that continues to generate deep insights into the inner workings of Islamic law. It has been especially successful in identifying the rational and pragmatic elements of fiqh as opposed to the purely revelatory and textual, and in positioning the sharīʿa as a viable legal system suitable for comparison with counterparts.

It is the conceit of this post, however, that there are also alternative ethical visions animating the fiqh literature that merit exploration. What if we regard the apparent commingling of law, religion, and ethics not so much as a problem to be solved, but rather a feature of a distinct normative tradition that invites investigation in its own right? I submit that this opens us up to imagining moral habits and psychological horizons that live beyond our own most immediate normative concerns. Such a reorientation would clear conceptual space for an examination of the intersections of fiqh with a different conception of ethics, a perfectionist ethics directed at cultivating certain qualities, or virtues, in the Muslim subject. This is an ethics that is much more often identified – because more readily apparent – in Sufism or falsafa, fields that are regularly placed in opposition to juristic discourse. Locating evidence of perfectionism in fiqh, then, would offer the further prospect of an overlap in ideas between otherwise distinct normative Islamic traditions, a possibility that is too often overlooked when these bodies of thought are read in isolation.

One avenue of inquiry that presents itself as a result of a shift in focus from rights to perfection is the place of moral exemplars [later Quadri explains why and how Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory serves his argument]. The exemplar is that figure in a normative system who exhibits a superior sense for what constitutes the good life and how to live it, and serves as a model for other moral agents aspiring to develop (or approximate) that same awareness and mode of cultivation. To be sure, the idea of a moral exemplar is not strictly speaking a requirement for a perfectionist ethics, and yet such examples as Aristotle’s phronimos and the Confucian sage [or even, and more practically speaking, the junzi] point to the vital importance of a moral model to the process of self-cultivation.”

       

Like Professor Quadri, I too have referenced some of Linda Zagzebski’s arguments from her book, Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2004)—albeit for different reasons and purposes (e.g., I set aside the ‘divine motivation’ part of her argument)—as critical or essential for how we might or should socialize people into fundamental moral notions and behavior, thus using stories of “moral exemplars” to provide concrete models that are compelling examples of what it means to be moral, to be good, to do, as we say, the right thing. Heretofore, notes Zagzebski, moral philosophers have tended to ground their basic evaluative moral or ethical concepts in presuppositions, assumptions, or beliefs that are non-evaluative, such as human nature, reason, or “the Good” (or, for those who are theological, the ‘will of God;’ our examples of course do not exhaust the possible sources of such grounding, as we see in the metaphysical or ontological possibilities found in classical Indic and Chinese philosophies). Her ideas can be used to appreciate the formative and fundamental role of moral exemplars (parents, caregivers, teachers …) in coming to know and appreciate what precisely is proper moral behavior (as a ‘direct reference’ theory of the good or moral virtues: ‘good person are like that’), in other words, one important part of an assessment of a moral or ethical theory involves “judgments about the identity of paradigmatically good persons.” She terms this “exemplarist ethical (or ‘virtue’) theory.” Importantly, there is a wide variation among both “perfect” and (considerably) less-than-perfect moral (and spiritual) exemplars.

“The alternative that I am suggesting is to anchor moral concepts in an exemplar. Good persons are persons like that, just as gold is stuff like that. The function of an exemplar is to fix the reference of the term ‘good person’ or ‘practically wise person’ without the use of any [other] concepts, whether descriptive or non-descriptive. An exemplar therefore allows the series of conceptual definitions to get started. The circle of conceptual definitions of the most important concepts in a moral theory—virtue, right act, duty, good outcome, and so on—is broken by an indexical reference to a paradigmatically good person.”

And thus we arrive at one of the consequences of this exemplarist ethical theory: we can fill out a notion of “narrative goodness,” one which transcends the divide between religious and non-religious worldviews, while respecting some of their differences, such as the sorts of persons who are identified as moral exemplars (and spiritual exemplars; after John Cottingham, Sudhir Kakar, and Grant Gillett our conception of spirituality extends beyond strictly religious traditions and worldviews):

“Making the exemplar a person has an even more important advantage than its aid to theory. If all the concepts in a formal ethical theory are rooted in a person, then narratives and descriptions of that person are morally significant. It is an open question [at least for some purposes] what it is about the person that makes him or her good. When we say that a good person is like that, and we directly refer to Socrates, Saint Francis of Assisi, or to Mahatma Gandhi [or the pre-school teacher, or grandma, or the character in a novel, and so forth], we are implicitly leaving open the question of what properties of Socrates, Francis, or Gandhi are essential to their goodness [here, the descriptive value of ‘thick’ ethical concepts is germane]. [….] We need to observe the exemplar carefully in order to find out what the relevant properties are. Since narratives can be considered detailed and temporally extended observations of persons, exemplarism gives narrative an important place within the theory.” [emphasis added]

In communities formed and sustained by religious worldviews, we have many instances of this: in Buddhism with the Jātaka tales (largely for children), in Christianity with the Gospel stories of Jesus’s parables, sayings and behavior, and in the Analects of Confucius, for example. In the words of the late philosopher, Robert Nozick,

“There are some individuals whose lives are infused by values, who pursue values with single-minded purity and intensity, who embody value to the greatest extent. These individuals glow with a special radiance. Epochal religious figures often have this quality. To be in their presence (or even to hear about them) is to be uplifted and drawn (at least temporarily) to pursue the best in oneself. There are less epochal figures as well, glowing with a special moral and value loveliness, whose presence uplifts us, whose example lures and inspires us.”

From an “emic” vantage point these are seen as means whereby one learns the terms and conditions of one’s religious (and to some extent philosophical) tradition, but from an “etic” perspective, we can focus on the fundamental features of what it means, generally speaking, to be ethical, to aspire to be good and so forth that, in one very significant sense, transcends the contingencies and unique articulations more or less intrinsic to specific religious worldviews. Thus, in effect, from the outside looking in were are concentrating on their common moral and ethical foci or, if you prefer, their shared stress on spiritual praxis, on therapeutic spiritual “exercises,” moral values, and ethical principles that are part and parcel to what are, in effect, instructions or lessons in the “art of living.”

For vivid examples of moral exemplars who lives are a bit messier or more realistic in comparison to those found in religious worldviews (prophets, saints, bodhisattvas, etc.), and in keeping with a more explicitly secular or widely humanistic outlook, we can look not only to individuals we regularly encounter or interact with in the intimate realm of everyday life, but also modern literature (especially shorts stories, novels, and children’s literature), the works of some playwrights as well as films (a mass media art). The moral psychology here being rather complex if not elusive, works by the French Moralists as well as adages, aphorisms, and proverbs more generally, and even poetry, may further fill out the nature of these forms of narrative goodness, which themselves, in turn, contribute to the larger end of explaining and encouraging spiritual praxis or a profound appreciation of the role of therapeutic spiritual “exercises,” moral values, and ethical principles as lessons in the “art of living.” Of course not all such modern and secular media perform this function, thus parents, critics, philosophers, psychologists and others with some measure of moral knowledge and authority, as well as a corresponding capability of exercising reliable moral judgments, can proffer their guidance in these areas by way of discriminating (thereby helping the rest of us learn how to discriminate) between the ethically availing or ethical troubling or disturbing forms of such material. Whether religious or not, such stories fall under the heading of “narrative goodness.” As Colin McGinn has argued:

“[O]rdinary people—which means all of us—find [the] story mode of moral discourse [i.e., the form which includes parable, the play, short story, the narrative poem, the novel and the film] uniquely palatable and nutritious; it seems perfectly designed to engage our moral faculties. Our moral understanding and the story form seem fitted for one another. No rote learning is necessary: it all seems to flow quite naturally. This is the way our moral faculty likes to operate. It is almost effortless to take in a story, pleasant even, though the story may be replete with moral discourse. The novel, in particular, is a text of a very different kind from the scientific treatise. It is also very different from the philosophical text, which is what philosophers, naturally, are most comfortable with. Thus the novel form has tended to be ignored by moral philosophers: it is not, for them, the place to look for canonical expressions of ethical truth. Yet, quite obviously, it is for most educated people one of the prime vehicles of ethical expression. (Film plays a similar role for the less word-minded.) In reading a novel we have ethical experiences, sometimes quite profound ones, and we reach ethical conclusions, condemning some characters and admiring others. We live a particular set of moral challenges (sitting there in our armchair) by entering into the lives of the characters introduced. [....] Stories can sharpen and clarify moral questions, encouraging a dialectical phenomenology between the reader’s own experiences and the trials of the characters he or she is reading about. A tremendous amount of moral thinking and feeling is done when reading novels (Or watching plays and films, or reading poetry and short stories). In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that for most people this is the primary way in which they acquire ethical attitudes, especially in contemporary culture. Our ethical knowledge is aesthetically mediated.”

I think McGinn’s conclusion is largely right: our ethical knowledge is, indeed, “aesthetically mediated,” insofar as we learn about the virtues (whatever particular cluster of same our worldviews place emphasis upon), or how to be moral through narrative aesthetic forms, or at the very least, we are moved to think about “the ethical” and its converse. To the extent that such aesthetic mediation is not “spiritual” or religious, it may be less reliable or dependable as a form or medium of moral knowledge or ethical instruction, especially but not only when we are young or if we have not had the seeds of moral sensibility planted in us at a very young age. Put differently, spiritual and religious literature is ideally suited for the aesthetic mediation of moral knowledge, for learning what it means to be virtuous, for it is here we find “exemplars of goodness.” It is not the only or even primary way in which we learn to be moral, for we obviously and ideally learn to live a virtuous life, as both Confucius and Plato would remind us, from those who are responsible for our upbringing: our parents, caregivers, teachers, and others who are, it is hoped, suitable “role models,” those entrusted to take care of us until we reach the “age of reason.” Intriguingly, both Plato and Confucius appear to agree that learning to be ethical for children entails training or discipline in the arts, particular arts to be sure, but there is something about the arts that these two philosophers find integral to the habituation to virtue, as a necessary yet not sufficient condition to being moral. And even as adults, we might learn something about virtuous living from those with whom we come into meaningful personal contact in daily life.

The titles we have listed below are philosophical in orientation but their aim is to help us—more or less, directly or by implication—understand what is meant or should be meant by “narrative goodness,” in this case, distinguished from (which does not rule out the fact that it can overlap with) the use of “moral exemplars” in religious worldviews.

• Alfano, Mark. Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (University of California Press, 1988).
• Boruah, Bijoy H. Fiction and Emotion: A Study in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford University Press, 1988)
• Bruner, Jerome. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
• Dilman, Ilham. Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil (Open Court, 2000)
• Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Duke University Press, 1999).
• Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons (MIT Press, 2008).
• Hutto, Daniel D., ed. Narrative and Understanding Persons (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• Hutto, Daniel D., ed. Narrative and Folk Psychology (Imprint Academic/Philosophy Documentation Center, 2009).
• Landy, Joshua. Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Martinich, A.P. and Avrum Stroll. Much Ado About Nonexistence: Fiction and Reference (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007).
• McGinn, Colin. Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1997).
• Murdoch, Iris (Peter Conradi, ed.) Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Penguin Books, 1999).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1990).
• Velleman, J. David. How We Get Along (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus. Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Ella Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986)

Ella ‘Jo’ (Josephine) Baker was born on this date in 1903 (and died on this date in 1986). She was one of the most influential women in the civil rights movement and one of the leading African American activists and organizers on the Left in the twentieth century. In a remarkable biography of Baker, Barbara Ransby characterizes her as “a Freirian teacher, a Gramscian intellectual, and a radical humanist.” It is of course notoriously difficult for biographies to do justice a person’s life, but I suspect Ransby has come damn close in Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003):

“In much of her adult political life, Ella Baker was a socialist without a party or a party line. As a friend of hers, the author and filmmaker Joanne Grant, observed, Baker was not often explicit about her socialist beliefs, but there were times when she was as straightforward as one could be. ‘The only society that can serve the needs of the large masses of poor people is a Socialist society,’ she declared in a 1977 interview. She was a harsh critic of capitalism, but resisted any hints of sectarianism or ideological orthodoxy. She loathed dogma of any kind and was openly critical when she observed this kind of rigid thinking on the part of friends and colleagues. Her own worldview was constructed from an amalgam of different ideologies and traditions, combining the black Baptist missionary values of charity, humility, and service with the economic theories of Marxists and socialists of various stripes who advocated a redistribution of wealth. She also embraced the militant self-defense tradition of the black South. Here affiliation with the openly Mass Party Organizing Committee (MPOC) and her defense of Communist Party member Angela Davis are further indicators of her unequivocal identification with the left by the 1970s. She had become her own unique kind of revolutionary.”

By way of illuminating some features of her political activism in the in the civil rights struggle, we need first to introduce the Highlander Folk School. The Highlander Folk School (HFS) is an exemplum of what Aldon Morris memorably termed a “movement halfway house” in his classic study, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (Free Press, 1984). Morris defines a movement halfway house as

“an established group or organization that is only partially integrated into the larger society because its participants are actively involved in efforts to bring about a desired change in society. The American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, and the Highlander Folk School are examples of modern movement halfway houses.”[1]

Importantly, Morris proceeds to add the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) to this list. As Clayborne Carson points out in his definitive examination of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; pronounced as if an acronym, with an added vowel sound: ‘snick’): “SNCC’s relations with SCEF illustrated a growing willingness of SNCC workers to associate with leftist groups,”[2] in this instance, a comparatively small—in the sense of lacking a mass base—and predominantly white organization with goals close to, when not identical with, the civil rights movement. Although communists helped found this formally interracial organization in the 1930s, its ranks and supporters included non-communists as well. SCEF, for better and worse, attracted disproportionate attention given its fairly small size, while the steadfast and courageous efforts of its most active members speak to its equally disproportionate impact on other individuals and groups in the civil rights movement:

“During the late 1950s SCEF became a target of the southern press when one of its representatives, Carl Braden, refused to answer questions before HUAC [House Committee on Un-American Activities] and was later sentenced to a year in prison. Despite the controversy, SNCC leaders as early as the fall of 1960 developed close ties with Braden and his wife Anne. SCEF’s newspaper, The Southern Patriot, devoted considerable coverage to SNCC activists at a time when the organization received little attention elsewhere, and during 1960 and 1961 the paper contained essays written by Ella Baker and James Lawson.

The Bradens had gained the trust of SNCC workers because they understood better than most white leftists the militant mood of black activists, and they respected the desire of those in SNCC to remain independent of all outside control.”[3]

Both Anne Braden and Ella Baker attended Highlander Folk School workshops (in particular for our purposes, its ‘college workshops’). In fact, it was shortly after the HFS’s seventh annual college workshop on April 1, 1960 that sit-in leaders from the college ranks met to form SNCC under the initiative of Ella Baker, then serving as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The formal structure for SNCC was created in October 1960.

HFS, like other movement halfway houses, provided an array of “social change resources such as skilled activists, tactical knowledge, media contacts, workshops, knowledge of past movements, and a vision of a future society”[4] for existing and future SNCC activists. The pedagogical, epistemic, and political functions performed so ably by HFS for SNCC and the civil rights movement generally, were strategically significant in (1) the coalescing and coordination of young black leaders, men and women; (2) in the provision of a mass education program that “was revolutionary from an educational, political, and social standpoint,” this being directly linked to mobilization outcomes; and (3) through its partial but no less exemplary instantiation of a “visible and successful model of a future integrated society.”[5] The second and third strategic functions illustrate dimensions of what Wini Breines describes as “prefigurative politics,”[6] at least insofar as we detect belief in and reliance on the theory and methods of participatory and deliberative democracy, as part of the greater attempt to embody here-and-now the future—socially integrated—society.

This society is not so much evidenced in direct action tactics and protests (although these are largely parasitic on the virtues of prefigurative community), but in the blurring and transcending of public and private boundaries that serve to privatize moral life on the one hand, and leave the work of politics to elites (politicians, bureaucrats, corporate lobbyists, professional experts…) on the other. This makes for the propitious emergence of moral if not “spiritual” communities whose members have devoted much of their lives to discerning—through thought and deed—the lineaments of the “good society,” of psychologically meaningful yet elusive notions of “happiness,” of the terms and conditions of human fulfillment. The interpersonal nature of these intimate communities is grounded in intrapersonal values, commitments, hopes and the like of self-defining and self-actualizing individuals who practice a revolutionary and eudaimonistic “politics of virtue.”[7] Such communities are not “communitarian” if by that one means individuals are constitutionally deferent to existing traditions and social norms but rather emblematic of a eudaimonistic individualism in which communities serve as fora for interdependent values realization of persons who have come to feel a compelling and urgent obligation (from the outside looking in, this may appear as supererogatory) to realize objective values in the world, each individual serving as a unique locus for such values realization. In the words of the late David L. Norton,

“For eudaimonism the common good is no more and no less than the particular good of individuals in complementary interrelationship. The requirement for complementary interrelationship is implicit in the fact that the good to be actualized, conserved, and defended—the good that represents the individual’s achieved identity—is an objective good, that is, it is of value to others no less than to the individual who realizes it. [….] [E]very well-lived life must utilize values produced by (some) other well-lived lives. And that is to say that within a society, every person has a legitimate interest in the personhood of every other. [….] In this form of community individual self-determination, self-direction and self-fulfillment are not sacrificed to the ‘common good’ but nurtured as the foundation of the common good.”[8]

The prefigurative politics of virtue in the moral and spiritual communities nurtured by HFS and SNCC was revolutionary or radical to the degree that it went beyond the goals of the mainstream civil rights organizations and the conventional politics of constitutional Liberalism in seeking societal wide systemic change involving socio-cultural and economic spheres and institutions heretofore structurally resistant to the imperatives of egalitarian distributive justice and the extension of the principles and practices of participatory and deliberative democracy. This revolutionary politics involves the struggle to generalize the welfare and individual well-being of all members of society so as to collectively supply as a moral and political entitlement grounded in human dignity, the conditions and opportunities of moral and psychological individuation and self-determination insofar as these cannot be self-supplied by individuals (alone or in community). SNCC’s Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 was a vivid and inspiring demonstration of the germination of seeds sown by earlier traditions of radical black activism (especially communists, and both here and abroad), civil rights organizations (e.g., NAACP, CORE, and SCLC), and movement halfway houses like HFS. It is no exaggeration to characterize HFS’s pivotal halfway house role here as “the educational center of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and early 1960s” (emphasis added) and, “until 1961…in the forefront of the drive to end racial segregation in the South.”[9]

Among the remarkable men and women in the civil rights movement who spent time at the Highlander Folk School, we find Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, and Ella Baker. Parks believed that the

“only black female leader … compar[able] to Clark was Ella Baker, who was emerging as one of civil rights movement’s boldest and most versatile leaders. She had taken charge of all the NAACP branches in the 1940s, would coordinate Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC] in the late 1950s, and later gained renown as the founding mother and guiding spirit of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] in the early 1960s. Baker inspired groups to recognize that leadership works best when shared widely and cooperatively.

[Rosa] Parks had met Baker when she delivered keynote addresses at two different NAACP leadership conferences in the mid-1940s. Calling Baker ‘beautiful in every way,’ Parks opened up her home to Baker whenever she visited Montgomery. Baker’s approach to community leadership, which closely paralleled Highlander’s method, called to Parks. People didn’t really need to be led, Parks recalled Baker insisting. They needed to be given the skills, information, and opportunity to lead themselves.

Now, thanks to [a] Highlander workshop on civil rights, Septima Clark joined Baker in Parks’s exclusive club of outstanding leaders. The fact that they both led fearlessly and powerfully mattered a great deal to Parks. But just as important, they exemplified the caring, dignified, unshakeable person Parks aspired to become. [….]

Late on the afternoon of December 1, 1955, less than four months after attending the Highlander workshop, Rosa Parks absentmindedly boarded a Montgomery bus …. [I’m assuming our readers know the rest of this fateful event, one in which her act of civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws … ‘helped inspire the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year,’ and soon led to a successful federal lawsuit, Browder v. Gayle, 142 F. Supp. 707 (1956), challenging the City of Montgomery and Alabama bus segregation laws.] [….]

On Easter weekend 1960, just two weeks after the sit-in protesters met at Highlander, Ella Baker convened a meeting that she called the Southwest Student Leadership Conference on Nonviolent Resistance to Segregation. Many of the same students, joined by scores of others, converged on Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, the historically black university where Baker herself had been valedictorian. The avowed purpose was to conceptualize a new, independent, student-focused civil rights organization. Widely regarded as one of the African American community’s most effective organizers, Baker, like [Myles] Horton, recognized the untapped potential of young people. She lamented the lack of racial progress made since the Montgomery bus boycott and saw in student leadership an opportunity to electrify the civil rights movement by bringing youth and adults together into a stronger, more unified movement. At the same time, she rejected efforts by Dr. King and other members of the SCLC ‘to capture the youth movement.’ She believed that students’ strength would come from their independence, which would also empower them to become more constructive partners of groups like the SCLC and the NAACP. Inspired by her confidence and vision, students emerged from the Raleigh conference as members of a new organization—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), with Ella Baker serving as the group’s primary adult adviser.

Baker was not only a great organizer but also renowned for her first-rate skills as an educator and developer of grassroots leaders. She often argued, as least as insistently as Horton, that strong, that strong charismatic leadership in a movement for participatory democracy was self-defeating. A different kind of leadership worked better, she contended—more humble, caring, and behind the scenes. For Baker, leadership had little to do with filling a position and almost everything to do with collaborating with others to support a group’s collective development. Her response in 1970 to historian Gerda Lerner’s question about community leadership directly aligned he with Horton when she said, ‘I have always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership in others.’

Like Horton, Baker believed that one principal way activists exerted leadership was through carefully crafted questions. Prathia Hall, a SNCC member and Baker admirer, praised her for her nondirective and question-centered teach style: ‘Raising a question and then raising another question and then helping us to see what was being revealed through the answer was her mode of leadership.’ Another activist, Lenora Taitt-Magubane, commented that Baker’s inclination to rely on ‘key questions’ frequently wasn’t recognized or appreciated as leadership. She delayed intervening, Taitt-Magubane pointed out, ‘because she wanted the decision to come out of the group and not be hers.’ Still another SNCC activist, Mary King, observed that Baker maintained a ‘Socratic presence’ by asking questions that brought the focus of discussions back to purpose and intent. ‘Now let me ask this again, what is our purpose here? What are we trying to accomplish? Again and again she would force us to articulate our assumptions.’ As biographer Barbara Ransby notes, Baker acted on the belief that ‘people had many of the answers within themselves; teachers and leaders simply had to facilitate the process of tapping and framing that knowledge, of drawing it out.’ As at Highlander, ‘debate and the open exchange of ideas became critically important.’ [….]

Ella Baker’s most important contribution as a teacher and a leader was probably her notion of group-centered leadership. One of the educational assumptions that united Baker and Horton, as well as the world-renowned educator Paulo Freire, was this notion that learning is ‘a collective and creative enterprise requiring collaboration and exchange at every stage.’ For Baker, this especially meant creating a space for everyone to speak and contribute. Learning to be silent had real value, as did learning to interrupt ‘to make sure that others were allowed to speak and that the more confident speakers were made to listen.’ In order for group-centered leadership to work, no single person could be designated as the leader or the official spokesperson all the time. Rather, as many participants as possible had to assume multiple leadership roles so that the contribution of individuals more accurately reflected the broad range of viewpoints and feelings represented in the group.

Ella Baker, like Septima Clark, ‘functioned as an organic intellectual for groups’ because ‘she validated and relied on the collective wisdom that resided in poor and oppressed communities. She had enormous respect for the everyday experience of marginalized populations and believed they possessed the thoughtfulness and social intelligence to generate discerning critiques and take informed actions. Although she personally received a rigorous forma education, she reserved her greatest admiration for people with street smarts, for the learning that took place ‘in the meeting places and unions hall of New York City, as well at rural and urban churches, barber shops and kitchen tables throughout the South.’ She recognized that retreat centers like Highlander proved a central location where the everyday wisdom of ordinary people could be brought to bear on the most difficult problems, while also diminishing the barriers of race, class, sexism, and elitism that so often derailed productive dialogue.”[10]

Notes:

1. Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984): 39.
2. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 ed.): 51.
3. Ibid., 51-52.
4. Morris, 139-140.
5. Ibid., 141.
6. “Prefigurative politics” is discussed in the chapters 1 and (especially) 4 in Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal (New Brunswick, NJ” Rutgers University Press, 1989).
7. See David L. Norton, Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). On “community” in SNCC, consider what James Forman wrote at the time of SNCC’s fourth general conference in April 1963. After first noting the group’s achievement of organizational security, in the sense that it was no longer insecure about its survival, he says, “The meeting was permeated by an intense comradeship, born out of sacrifice and suffering and a commitment to the future, and out of knowledge that we were indeed challenging the political structure of the country, and out of a feeling that our basic strength rested in the energy, love, and warmth of the group. The band of sisters and brothers, in a circle of trust, felt complete at last.” Quoted in Carson, 82.
8. Ibid., 124.
9. John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2nd ed., 1996): 3 and 154 respectively.
10. Stephen Preskill, Education in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center’s Vision for Social Justice (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2012): 161-164 and 211-214 respectively.
    

References and Recommended Reading

• Adams, Frank (with Myles Horton). Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, Publisher, 1975.
• Asch, Chris Myers. The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer. New York: The New Press, 2008.
• Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
• Blain, Keisha N. Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2021.
• Bledsoe, Thomas. Or We’ll All Hang Separately: The Highlander Idea. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969.
• Braden, Anne. The Wall Between. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2^nd ed., 1999.
• Brooks, Maegan Parker. Fannie Lou Hamer: America’s Freedom Fighting Woman. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.
• Brooks, Maegan Parker and Davis W. Houck, eds. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
• Carawan, Guy and Candie Carawan. Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life: The People of Johns Island, South Carolina. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989.
• Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 ed. (1981).
• Charron, Katherine Mellen. Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
• Clark, Septima (Cynthia Stokes Brown, ed.) Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement: A First Person Narrative. Navarro, CA: Wild Trees Press, 1986.
• Cotton, Dorothy. If Your Back’s Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Atria, 2012.
• Fosl, Catherine. Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
• Glen, John M. Highlander: Nor Ordinary School. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996.
• Holsaert, Faith S., et al., eds. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
• Horton, Myles and Paulo Freire (Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters, eds.) We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990.
• Jacobs, Dale, ed. The Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.
• Lee, Chana Kai. For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
• Morris, Aldon D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984.
• Moye, J. Todd. Ella Baker: Organizer for the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013.
• Parks, Rosa. Rosa Parks: My Story. New York: Puffin, 1999.
• Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.
• Preskill, Stephen. Education in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center’s Vision for Social Justice. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.
• Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
• Reed, David (Preface by Anne Braden). Education for Building a People’s Movement. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981.
• Stefani, Anne. Unlikely Dissenters: White Southern Women and the Fight for Racial Justice, 1920-1970. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015.
• Theoharis, Jeanne. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2013.

Miscellaneous

• The Wikipedia entry on Baker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Baker
• Baker’s page from the Zinn Education Project: https://zinnedproject.org/materials/baker-ella/
• My alma mater, the University of California, Santa Barbara, established in 2014 a visiting professorship in her honor: https://www.jbhe.com/2014/10/shana-redmonds-named-to-professorship-honoring-civil-rights-activist-ella-baker/
• The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights is in Oakland, California: https://ellabakercenter.org/contact-us/
• Ella Baker at the SNCC Digital Gateway: https://snccdigital.org/people/ella-baker/

Relevant Bibliographies at my Academia page:

• After Slavery and Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization
• The Black Panther Party
• Blacks on the (radical) Left
• Conflict Resolution and Nonviolence
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Elections and Voting
• The History, Theory and Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
• Malcolm X

Enlarging the circle of care, concern, rights, and obligations: gratitude to the “web of life”

         

Prayer for the Great Family

Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day—
and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing, light-changing leaf
and fine root-hairs; standing still through wind
and rain; their dance is in the flowering spiral grain
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and silent
Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
clear spirit breeze
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;
self-complete, brave and aware
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep— he who wakes us—
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Great Sky
who holds billions of stars— and goes yet beyond that—
beyond all powers, and thoughts
and yet is within us—

Grandfather Space.
The Mind is his Wife.

so be it.

            (after a Mohawk prayer) — Gary Snyder

       

“Nature Is Becoming a Person”

By Justin E. H. Smith for Foreign Policy, November 24, 2021

How to make sense of the new global trend that grants legal rights to animals, plants, and rivers.

“Inbred, feral, and hungry, the ‘cocaine hippos’ of Colombia took to the rainforests after liberation from Pablo Escobar’s menagerie at the time of the drug kingpin’s death in 1993. From an initial population of four, the hippos are now a fast-growing nuisance numbering over 100. Yet they are also the stuff of legend and an obvious favorite in a popular culture ever in search of quirky, new animal mascots.

In part because of their singular fame, a symbolic impediment to treating them as a common invasive pest was introduced in October, when a U.S. judge recognized their status as ‘interested persons,’ which at least (in principle) enables them to exercise their legal right to obtain information in a U.S. legal trial. This ruling is not enforceable in Colombia, but it is a milestone in U.S. law and pushes the idea that the Earth is a political community composed of all sorts of ‘persons’—only some of whom are human.

Escobar’s hippos are far from unique (at least with respect to their claim to personhood). Building upon his own 2010 article, ‘Legal Personhood and the Nonhuman Rights Project’ (Animal Law 17/1), the philosopher and animal-rights activist Steven Wise has spearheaded a movement for animal freedom that has successfully used the writ of habeas corpus to secure it—a writ that generally presupposes of the entity whose freedom is being sought that it is a ‘person.’ Following Wise’s strategy, in 2018 a group of philosophers wrote a brief in support of two captive chimpanzees, Tommy and Kiko, arguing that they ‘satisfy the criteria [for personhood] and are entitled to habeas corpus relief.’ As early as 2004, before the Nonhuman Rights Project had begun, a landmark case known as The Cetacean Community vs. George W. Bush asked an American court to decide whether marine mammals have the legal standing necessary to bring a suit in their own name. Again, the presumption is that such legal standing flows from personhood, even if until recent years this did not have to be made explicit, since the kind of persons brought before the court were consistently those we take to be paradigmatic: human beings.

The expansion of the legal category of ‘person’ in this way may look like an opportunistic bit of wordplay, redefining a term in a way that satisfies certain immediate goals but without any real requirement that the new definition wins broad assent—or even that it seems intuitively plausible to anyone. In fact, however, the broadening of personhood to include some nonhuman entities is not so much a recent adaptation of an old legal concept as it is a return to an even older one. The expansion of the concept of ‘person’ was perhaps always inevitable. Like the creative definitions of gambling in at least some U.S. states—designed to carve out a legal niche for riverboat casinos while prohibiting the same activity on terra firma—legal personhood for nonhumans was an available loophole that someone was always bound to try to jump through. If you are looking to secure protections for certain beings or environmental features that are otherwise at risk of exploitation, winning the status of person for them is a good way to get what you want.

For a long time, the only way under the law to protect an animal from wanton abuse was to characterize the abuse as harm to property, essentially no different from the sort of law that prevents you from smashing your neighbor’s wheelbarrow. As for morality, if it was to enter into question at all, it was indirect incitement to moral depravity brought on by abuse of animals that justified any prohibition on harming them. Thus, philosopher Immanuel Kant insisted it is indeed wrong to harm domestic animals, but this still does not require us to suppose these animals are, as he would say, ‘ends in themselves.’ They can only ever be means to distinctly human ends while a child who grows up torturing these ‘means’ is, at worst, going to be more prone to abusing human beings later in life—animal torture as a gateway to human torture—or, at best, is going to be stunted in his or her overall moral development.

In any case, such indirect protection generally only extends to domestic animals while the vast majority of animals belonging to the category we call ‘wildlife’ cannot be protected as property because, by definition, they do not belong to anyone. Over the course of the 20th century, significant subcategories of wildlife would come to be legally protected as part of large-scale conservationist efforts. But the concern here was at the population level rather than the individual and typically implied no commitment to the irreducible worth, however that may be conceived, of any individual member of a given protected species.

For example, gorillas, it appears to many, are sufficiently like human beings in deserving not to be harmed for the same reasons we deserve not to be harmed: not because we belong to someone else and not because our species is at risk of disappearing (though this is, in fact, also the case for gorillas) but because we are—however one might wish to flesh this out in theoretical, metaphysical, or even religious terms—intrinsically worthy beings. The best way to recognize this apparent truth in law has been to reclassify gorillas—perhaps to ‘promote’ them to the status of person as has been done with varying degrees of success in several European countries, New Zealand, and Argentina.

So far, this is the easy part. Again, the case for gorilla personhood has typically been made on the basis of an evident similitude of internal capacities they share with us. Even hippos have what appear to be big smiling faces and plainly love to eat, so they come across as (in certain salient respects) relatable. But no one, at least no one directly involved in modern states’ law-making institutions, will make a similar argument for rivers and mountains. Rivers, it is generally believed, have no internal capacities at all. They are not subjects. To adapt an expression from philosopher Thomas Nagel, there is nothing that it’s like to be a river. Yet today, at least some rivers have been reclassified as persons too. To bring such a river harm is to harm a person, a being that ought to be considered an end in itself with inalienable rights and intrinsic worth. In other words, some legal systems are now treating rivers as subject entities nearly universally recognized as lacking any subjective existence at all.

If it sounds as if the law is stretching concepts beyond their natural usefulness, it is worth recalling that nonhuman persons have been around for a long time, and it is only in the most recent era that we have begun to assimilate ‘person’ and ‘human being’ as synonyms. The term ‘persona’ in Latin originally signified ‘mask’ and, by extension, a ‘role’ one might take on in a theatrical performance. Thus, the dramatis personae, literally the ‘masks of the drama,’ are simply the roles in a play. Nor was it traditionally believed that only human beings could don such masks. Outside of the context of drama, in the Roman Republic, personhood was commonly extended to municipalities and voluntary associations. This entailed, among other things, that such collective bodies had rights and responsibilities independent of their individual members. They were not themselves individual human beings, but they donned a mask, so to speak, by which they presented themselves to the world as singular characters.

In the early modern period, with the rise of powerful joint stock companies for the funding and orchestration of global trade, the idea of corporate personhood became common. And soon enough, the conceptual peculiarity of this idea found echoes in the work of some of the greatest philosophical minds. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for example, is sensitive to the origins of personhood in drama and claims everything that counts as a person is in some sense an actor. ‘A person,’ the philosopher wrote in his 1651 book, Leviathan, ‘is he whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed.’ From here, Hobbes makes a crucial distinction: ‘When [these words] are considered as his own, then is he called a natural person: and when they are considered as representing the words and actions of another, then is he a feigned or artificial person.’ Among such artificial persons are corporations, such as the East India Company, but also, in Hobbes’s view, the state itself.

Even when we come to appreciate the long history of nonhuman personhood, however, we are still hardly in a position to understand how it might be extended to rivers. For although rivers are not moral subjects and lack innate capacities in virtue that we attribute to intrinsic (rather than instrumental) moral worth, unlike corporations or states, rivers are evidently not ‘representing’ anyone or anything. They are simply flowing.

Legislation in Bolivia, and indeed Ecuador’s new 2008 constitution, enshrine within law the ‘rights of nature.’ While being a rights-bearer is not precisely the same thing as being a person, the two have typically overlapped to the point of near co-extensivity throughout modern history. But this overlap does not do much to help determine what a person is, because a clear understanding of what rights are is no less difficult to pin down. When we make claims that ‘every human being has a right to clean water’ or ‘every human being has a right to internet access,’ the propositions take the form of declarative sentences. But they might be better understood as imperatives. Saying a given good, such as clean water, is a ‘human right’ lends gravity to arguments for government funding of sanitation plants or deeper wells.

When the Ecuadorian Constitution’s Article 71 specifies that nature ‘has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes,’ we might similarly suspect this declaration translates faithfully into a conservationist imperative. The apparent inescapability of an anthropocentric motivation for conservation, moreover, seems to appear in the constitution’s Article 27, where a prior right is identified for human beings ‘to live in a healthy environment that is ecologically balanced, pollution-free and in harmony with nature.’ Could it be that Article 71 simply restates, from an attempted nature-centric angle, what has already been claimed in Article 27 but in the more familiar terms of human rights?

Such a suggestion fails to take into account the effort at the heart of the revised constitution and similar legislation elsewhere to do justice to Indigenous conceptualizations of nature and humanity’s place within it. This effort has resulted in what Belgian legal scholar François Ost calls ‘legal animism,’ which not only carves out a space for the preservation of traditional belief systems within modern Western (or Western-derived) legal frameworks but also permits these belief systems to determine the laws’ content and scope. Although it is impossible to succinctly summarize the great diversity of Indigenous beliefs around the world, it is certainly true these beliefs often represent human society and the natural environment as constituting a single ‘socio-natural’ unity—thus conceiving nature or the ‘wilderness’ as populated by sundry nonhuman agents whose actions and interests are no less ‘political’ than those of a neighboring clan. Legal systems that seek to reflect this worldview are thus, in Ost’s words, compelled to use language that ‘personalizes nature.’

A particularly revealing example comes from New Zealand, where, in 2017, in deference to Maori representations of nature, parliament recognized the personhood of the Whanganui River on the North Island, finally bringing an end to long disputes about its territorial status from the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. The British Empire had at least formally recognized certain rights and responsibilities of stewardship or guardianship flowing from Maori traditional beliefs and practices. How well ‘guardianship’ translated the Maori concept of kaitiakitanga was not a point of long consideration, and in any case, the formal recognition of Maori rights to the river by no means translated, in practice, into smooth coexistence in the region.

Conflicts over practical questions continued, leading eventually to the 1975 Waitangi Tribunal, which sought to redress generations of colonial misuse of resources. The solutions were practical—for example, New Zealand’s government agreed to discontinue used water’s circulation back into the river even after having run it through purification plants—but the differences were cosmological. The kinds of things European settlers supposed one might do to, with, or in a river flowed from a different understanding of what sort of thing or being a river is. As Ost notes, in Maori cosmology, human beings, natural resources, ancestors, and spirits ‘form a single community of life when they all descend from Mother Earth, which is like the body of the tribe.’ Significantly, a single term, whenua, designates both the Earth and the placenta. [….] The rest of this article is here.

       

Comment:
This is a somewhat odd place for this article, but perhaps it will reach those otherwise well-educated and well-placed elites who are not familiar with such material. Our regular readers will perhaps not be surprised that I agree with Justin E.H. Smith’s argument and am delighted to see his concise and sympathetic historical, legal and philosophical analysis and discussion of important topics in (nonhuman) animal and environmental ethics.

One of the things that occurs in granting legal personhood to nonhuman animals and to sundry ecosystems is that metaphysical, ontological, and ethical concepts and practices found in the worldviews of indigenous peoples like the Māori and American Indian tribes are acquiring greater recognition and respect, in other words, what is happening here is that “Western” philosophy and jurisprudence is becoming less provincial and imperialistic (and more cosmopolitan in the best sense), at least at the margins or on occasion, and this cannot but be a good thing. There is precedent within Western philosophy and law for extending the concept of “personhood” which is a term not equivalent to what we mean by being a nonhuman animal or human person, distinctions that have been and can be made and further clarified until they one day become commonplace. Ecological devastation, quickened by global climate change, has solidified and strengthened trends that began in environmental (e.g., should trees have ‘legal standing’) and animal ethics (animals are in many respects, ‘like us,’ even if we grant there remains distinct features or properties that distinguish human animals from their nonhuman cousins or extended family), and led to philosophical and ethical “soul searching” as to how human beings relate to the natural world, awakening deeper interest in Asian worldviews like Jainism, Buddhism and Daoism, and those indigenous traditions and worldviews that extend the circle of care and concern, of rights and corresponding obligations (the former to animals and ecosystems, the latter to us), as well as gratitude, to much of the natural world or the “web of life,” a phrase which entails notions of survival, sustenance, and sustainability if not human flourishing. Another way to put this, after Wittgenstein, would be to say that there is strong “family resemblance” which is more than analogical and metaphorical, between human beings and the rest of the natural world.

I would like to note, however, that in addition to being at least ambivalent about corporations being thought of as legal (‘artificial’) “persons,” I am ardently and adamantly opposed, for a host of reasons (some of which rely on features of the ‘for’ argument above), to according (extending) legal personhood to AI machines of any kind, a topic I have addressed before and hope to speak to again in the near future. There are and continue to be philosophical and legal arguments in favor of this extension which I find disturbing if not frightening.

Although I do not think it a plausible argument or well-considered concern, it needs to be said that nothing here directly or implicitly entails “crowding out” the attention we give to those of us near and afar who are absolutely or relatively poor, more disadvantaged, needlessly suffering or having their most fundamental needs unmet or lacking recognition of their dignity-based human rights. And eco-socialist worldviews, movements and parties in part, help one appreciate how welfare, well-being, and flourishing provide us with normative criteria applicable to both the human and natural worlds, worlds that are in many respects perfectly coextensive with each other.

         

Relevant Bibliographies:

• North American Indians: History, Culture, Politics, and Law
• Animals; Ethics, Rights, and Law
• Ecological and Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
• Indigenous Peoples: Culture, Law and Politics
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory

“artisanal miner (or mining): a term that is, facilitates, or contributes to, a “mystifying illusion”

Definition: “An artisanal miner or small-scale miner (ASM) is a subsistence miner who is not officially employed by a mining company, but works independently, mining minerals using their own resources, usually by hand. Small-scale mining includes enterprises or individuals that employ workers for mining, but generally still using manually-intensive methods, working with hand tools.”

I thought to speak to this a result of the reading and research I did for the latest compilation about diamond mining (and other kinds of mining) in Africa.

Comment: The adjective “artisanal” here is misleading, to put it mildly, insofar as it might understandably be taken to refer to a practice or activity “relating to, or characteristic of an artisan.” Another related but distinguishable adjectival definition means that which is “produced in limited quantities by an artisan through the use of traditional methods.” In this case, again, reference to an “artisan” is significant, although the “use of traditional methods” and “production in limited quantities” can be said to apply to small-scale or subsistence mining. The literature on contemporary mining in the poorer countries or regions around the world continues to employ the term “artisanal mining” by way of contrast to modern industrialized mining by state-run companies or capitalist firms (some of the corporations are ‘partially’ state-owned). This is a nice example of what Marx and Marxists have meant by something being or facilitating or contributing to a socio-economic or political illusion, or an illusion (embodied in a concept, description, explanation, or theory, for example) as it is found in the social sciences (distinct from what was thought of more properly as a religious or ‘philosophical’ illusion, what I would prefer to call a ‘worldview’ illusion or the illusory component or components of a worldview). These socially mystifying illusions (e.g., the mystification of social relations exemplified by bourgeois economic and sociological theory and the fetishism of capital) fall within the Marxist concept (or conception) of ideology and “the ideological” used in reference to what has the characteristic of being “socially mystifying.” In our example, “artisanal miner” also represents an instance of “false consciousness” (a wildly misunderstood term in the Marxist literature) in as much as that means simply that which is wrong or false (usually applied to a theory or viewpoint).

Related Bibliographies (with some measure of family resemblance to this subject):

• The Congo and Coltan: Political Economy, Precious Commodity, and Politics
• Diamonds in Africa: Conflict Commodity & Capitalist Political Economy
• Diseases, Epidemics, and Pandemics
• Famine: History, Causes, and Consequences
• Global Distributive Justice
• Frantz Fanon
• Human Rights
• Immigration and Refugees: Ethics, Law, and Politics
• International Law
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Black Cosmopolitanism
• South African Liberation Struggles
• Transitional Justice
• Violent Conflict and the Laws of War
• Water as a Natural Resource, Common Good, and Commodity
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

Toward a democratic “binational” state in Palestine

       

First, a triune propaedeutic by way of historical, moral, and political presuppositions, assumptions, and presumptions as part and parcel of “facts on the ground (i.e., exemplifying ‘fact-value entanglement’).” That is followed by several important points that serve as prelude to introducing Jeff Halper’s latest book, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2021). Americans often stand apart in being woefully misinformed and ill-informed (or in denial, etc.) about the history and politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the vast majority of its representatives in Congress and the major mass media outlets both in print and on television, have been far too long willing if not enthusiastic partners in propagating this ignorance, sometimes willfully so.

(i) “There are only two ways. The one currently pursued by the Israeli government, in all its agencies, is the path of violent, stubborn coercion. The extreme nationalists of the Israeli right have a vision that is easy enough to comprehend; it is embodied daily in a thousand acts and signs. They want to crush Palestinian nationalism as a historical force, and the Palestinian people as a collective; to hem the Palestinians within isolated enclaves and to cut off any hope of their sustaining a national existence with a basis on the ground; and, in the course of achieving this, to annex as much land (with as few living Palestinians attached to it) as possible. In short, this is an uncompromising vision of domination and control. The right, clinging to all the violent memories of the past, fears the Palestinians and inhabits a mental universe in which the only safe option is to attack, punish, destroy, incarcerate, and contain. Such people perceive any alternative approach or action, based on compromise and negotiation and on acknowledging one’s own responsibility for what has happened, as an existential threat. Thus they are prepared to live indefinitely with ongoing occupation, in one form or another; they are also willing to make occasional, relatively minor sacrifices, like the withdrawal from Gaza, in order to ensure the continuation of the main colonial enterprise. A regime of total control, constant application of brute force, the rape of the land—all these are acceptable, indeed necessary, if the Jews are to survive.” — David Shulman, Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine (University of Chicago Press, 2007)

*          *          *

The following from G.A. Cohen [see the reference under ‘Recommended Reading’] hardly does justice to the complete substance of Cohen’s argument, as I had to leave much out owing to its length and complexity. Nevertheless, I trust it provides at least a sufficient taste of the questions and topics raised by Cohen, most of which are not, typically (indeed, hardly ever), addressed in the Palestinians’ pursuit of self-determination both within and outside the Israeli state. At least once Cohen refers to the Palestinians, or Arabs in Israel more generally, lacking “citizenship” status which, strictly speaking, is not true, the problem here being rather that, for a variety of reasons, “Arabs are very much second-class citizens in Israel,” for example, they have “passport citizenship” rights, but are excluded from several aspects of the Jewish welfare state and are therefore denied equal “democratic citizenship.” “While enjoying the fruits of Jewish civil rights (such as access to courts of law and private property) and political rights (access to the ballot and to government) they are denied social rights and economic rights in the form of social security, education and welfare, or access to land and water resources of the State.” Furthermore, while Israel “grants automatic citizenship to every Jew in the world, wherever he or she was born,” the state of Israel completely rejects “the Palestinian right of return—recognized internationally by the UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948. This rejection refuses to allow the Palestinian citizens of Israel to unite with their immediate families or with those who were expelled in 1948. Denying people the right of return to their homeland, and at the same time offering this right to others who have no connection to the land, is a model of undemocratic practice.” (See Pappé, 2011, 2017; and Peleg and Waxman, 2011, for these and other reasons Arabs in Israel are denied equal democratic citizenship within the state of Israel.)

(ii) … [W]e may be disposed to affirm what certain conditions of extreme injustice need not be tolerated, that people may do everything within their power to remove them, or, at any rate, that the sufferers of that extreme injustice may themselves do anything they can do to remove them. But we are also inclined to affirm that certain means of fighting injustice should never under any circumstances be used. Yet what can we say when our two inclinations come together because we are asked to consider circumstances that display the contemplated conditions of extreme injustice, in which forbidden means are the only means available? When we acknowledge that such circumstances are possible, we are forced to revise some of our convictions about what morality says. [….]

… [T]he force, the effect, of a moral admonition varies according to who’s speaking and who’s listening [this falls with the range of topics addressed in rhetoric]. Admonition may be sound, and in place, but some people may be poorly placed to offer it. When a person replies to a critic by saying: ‘Where do you get off criticizing me for that?’ she is not denying (or, of course, affirming) the inherent soundness of the critic’s criticism. She is denying here critics right to make that criticism, in a posture of judgment. Her rejoinder achieves its effect without confronting the context of her critic’s judgment. She challenges, instead, her critic’s right to sit in judgment, and to pass judgment. She couldn’t similarly challenge a critic whom she had overheard saying, to a third party: ‘I of course agree that what she did was morally wrong, but I’m not myself in a position to criticize her (It’s not for me to cast the first stone).‘ [….]

We can distinguish three ways in which a person may seek to silence, or to blunt, the edge of a critic’s condemnation. First, she may seek to show that she did not, in fact, perform the action under criticism. Second, and without denying that she performed that action, she may claim that the action does not warrant moral condemnation, because there was an adequate justification for it, or at least a legitimate excuse for performing it. Third, while not denying that the action was performed, and that it is to be condemned (which is not to say: while agreeing that it is to be condemned), she can seek to discredit her critic’s assertion of her standing as a good faith condemner of the relevant action. [….] What I mean is that there are facts about the critic that compromise her utterance considered as, what it purports to be, a condemnation: the focus is on the intended role, or illocutionary force of the utterance. [….]

This third way of deflecting criticism, that is, by impugning the right of the critic to condemn, is of great importance in the political world, where it matters enormously who can say what to whom, credibly and sincerely: that consideration helps to determine the fate of would-be critical interventions. The world of politics is not populated by saints with spotless track records, but by non-saints who have a better hope of deflecting criticism not by trying to justify what they themselves did, but by implicating their criticizing fellow non-saints in the same or similar charges [e.g., ‘Tu quoque,’ which is an informal fallacy, meaning there are occasions, as here, when it is not fallacious; nor is it, therefore, reducible to a fallacious ad hominem]. [….]

The Israelis have a tu quoque case to answer, because they kill and maim many more people, and deprive many more still of their homes and livelihoods, than Palestinian terrorists do. To be sure, there are Israelis who are oppressed by that fact and who are highly critical of their own government, but who believe that that government may nevertheless credibly condemn Palestinian terrorism because terrorism is morally much worse than any violence that the Israeli government itself commits. In response to the claim that Israeli condemnation of Palestinian terror is silenced by the fact that Israelis kill many more Palestinians, and a lot more children, these Israelis argue that Israeli killing is not as bad as Palestinian killing.

Some of these Israelis invoke the principle of double effect, which distinguishes between killing innocent people as an unintended but foreseeable side effect of otherwise targeted action, and killing innocent people who are your target, people, that is, whom you hope and intend to kill. ‘Our government can condemn them,’ these Israelis might say, ‘because although our government kills more innocent people than they do, our government does not aim to kill innocent people. [….]

I … believe that the only sane form of the principle of double effect is comparative, rather than absolute. I believe, for example, that, holding everything else equal, such as, for instance, the amount of justice that there is in the motivating cause, killing two hundred innocents through foreseeable side effect is actually worse than killing one innocent who is your target. It seems to me ludicrous for us to sat that you committed an outrage when you set your sights on, and killed, a civilian with your petrol bomb, but that we did not commit an outrage when our bombing destroyed not only the Hamas leader [presumably one believed ‘guilty’ of directing or implicated in terrorist acts] that we were aiming at but also fifteen people that lived near him, because we merely foresaw that effect, without intending it [forswearing intention may in any case be disingenuous, as we might conclude after the various wars and ‘operations’ in Gaza]. And we also have to take into account how careful combatants are to avoid killing civilians. It is possible not to aim at killing them yet to be utterly reckless of their safety, and it seems pretty clear that Israeli soldiers have become more reckless, in some cases willfully reckless, as the conflict has deepened. And worse still than (merely) reckless side-effect killing is the side-effect killing that is still not aimed at, that remains ‘mere’ side effect, but that is expected and welcomed, because it deters potential terrorists who care about their families and their neighbors. [….]

For you are yourself more or less implicated in the act you seek to condemn if you caused a legitimate grievance to which the act is a response. And how, therefore, can you reasonably expect your condemnation of the act to be received as made in good faith, unless you address the grievance of those you condemn? How can you suppose yourself to be free to set aside the size and character of that grievance, and your putative role in causing it, and proceed to condemn the responsive terrorist act, as a third party freely might? [….] For whoever caused a particular grievance, and whatever the weight of that grievance may be [in this instance, it happens to be ‘spectacular’], an agent who unjustifiably constrains the practical options that are available to the putatively aggrieved [the Israeli government has often treated predominantly or even exclusively nonviolent protest in much the same manner it responds to violent protest] is not well placed to condemn the choice of option (in our case, terrorism) that he, the constrainer, makes particularly eligible, from the point of the view of the constrained. [….]

… [I]f the Palestinians have a legitimate grievance, then it is against an Israel that both created their grievance and restricts their practical options of response. Accordingly, the question of the justice of the Palestinian grievance cannot be set aside by those who deprive them of conventional means of redress in a discussion of the particular unconventional means that they use to pursue their grievance, especially (but not only) if those who deprive them of conventional means are also the unjust causers of that grievance. [….] If the Palestinians had normal democratic sovereignty and normal civil liberty they would have a normal army which is not equipped merely to police its own people. It is central to their grievance that they lack a state, and therefore, among other things, the approved means of violence that a state possesses. … [This lack] contributes strongly to the explanation of their mode of pursuing their grievance which includes the grievance that you lack conventional means of pursuing grievances. [Please note that Cohen is here assuming the Palestinians want their own state, separate from the Israeli state, commonly termed the ‘two-state’ solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (a phrase that belies the grossly asymmetrical and fundamentally or genetically unjust nature of the colonial settler Zionist project in Palestine). But, as Jeff Helper explains, ‘[h]ad it been implemented, the two-state solution might have worked, even if it wasn’t fair. Palestinians would have had a viable sovereign (if small) state on 22 percent of historic Palestine.’ But Israel has steadfastly and intransigently rejected what the international community supported as far back as 1967. And both the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) (in 1988) and the Arab League (in 2002) officially accepted the two-state solution. (‘They even reject the very fact of occupation.’) ‘So, true, while the two-state solution may have worked, it was never accepted by Israel. Regardless, it is now dead and gone, buried under massive settlement blocs.’]

Cohen proceeds to clarify the truth of two conceptual claims:

… [Y]our having left me with no reasonable alternative does not itself entail that I was forced to do whatever it was you left me with not reasonable alternative to, if only because I might nevertheless not have done that thing. […. ] Therefore having no acceptable alternative do doing something does not entail being forced to do that thing. The second truth is that having no reasonable alternative to using terror may be a necessary condition of being justified in using terror, but it does not follow that it is a sufficient condition of being justified in using terror. For it might be true, I might be in the parlous position that, while I have no acceptable alternative to terrorism, terrorism is nevertheless more unacceptable than one or more of my other unacceptable courses. I might have to choose between disaster for me and a course so morally horrible that the only decent thing to do is to choose disaster for me [a real ‘Sophie’s choice?’]. But how can you in particular condemn me if I refuse to choose disaster for me, when it was you who deprived me of all acceptable alternatives, unless you can justify your having done so? If someone has no acceptable alternative, then there is a case to answer against whoever made that true. If the sad moral truth is that, although all of my alternatives to terrorism are unacceptable, my terrorism is nevertheless unjustified, then how, even so, can the person who deprived me of the acceptable alternatives, and so drove me to admittedly unjustifiable terrorism, condemn that resort, without justifying the action that thus disabled me? [….]

I have assumed, in order to expose some lines of moral principle, that Palestinian terrorism is an effective strategy. But certain non-terrorist strategies might in fact be more effective. Suicide protests [as seen, for example, during the American war in Vietnam, among both Tibetan monks and laypersons protesting Chinese cultural genocide, among peace protestors in the U.S., and in the Middle East] which kill only the protestors might be far more effective, because of the reaction of world opinion. [….] Or suppose that the Palestinians retire their anti-Israeli armed struggle and demonstrate wholly peacefully on a mass on a mass scale against the semi-apartheid/semi-colonial status that they are coming to have under Israeli rule [things have worsened on this score since Cohen wrote this]. Might this not, in time, produce a potent international, and Israeli, outcry against Israeli rule?

It has been a central claim [of Cohen’s argument] that one consequence of the difference between an expression of moral opinion and a condemnation is that it might be true both that terrorism is to be condemned (moral opinion) and that some particular person is not in a position to condemn it, But equally, so it follows, the fact that someone is not in a position to condemn something does not imply that the thing is not to be condemned.” — G.A. Cohen

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(iii) “Future historians may single out 2021 as the year the tide turned for the Palestinian struggle—though it was hard to see coming. The final months of 2020 were among the bleakest in decades, as a US administration bent on furthering Israel’s right-wing expansionist vision sought to dismantle, bit by bit, the central concerns that make up the Palestinian cause: the right of refugees to return to homes from which they were expelled in 1948, the status of Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and the right to self-determination on lands currently occupied by Israel. At the year’s end, the coup de grâce came when several Arab states turned their backs on Palestine, normalizing diplomatic and economic relations with Israel despite its continuing subjugation of Palestinians. The Palestinian people seemed to have been vanquished, while Israel pursued its annexation of occupied territory.

But breakthroughs came unexpectedly. In January 2021, B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, released a report unambiguously titled A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid. In it, the authors argued that their organization’s mandate from its founding in 1989—to bring to light Israeli human rights violations in the Occupied Territories—was no longer adequate. ‘The situation has changed,’ the report explained. ‘What happens in the Occupied Territories can no longer be treated as separate from the reality in the entire area under Israel’s control.’

The power of this report was not in the accusation, delivered by an Israeli organization, that Israel was practicing apartheid; Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization committed to protecting Palestinians living under Israel’s military regime in the West Bank, had leveled that charge six months earlier, as had several leading Israeli public figures. Indeed, numerous Israeli and international voices have warned for years that Israeli practices, left unchecked, would amount to a system of apartheid. What was different about B’Tselem’s analysis was its challenge to a pervasive myth, one to which much of the international community subscribes, that Israel’s military rule in the occupied Palestinian territory can be treated as somehow separate from the state of Israel. Instead, the organization characterized Israel as a single ‘regime that governs the entire area.’

Three months later, Human Rights Watch, the world’s leading international human rights organization, echoed this finding when it issued an exhaustive report, including extensive legal analysis, which concluded damningly that a historic threshold had been crossed: Israeli authorities were committing crimes against humanity, in the form of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people. Beyond the South African origin of the term, apartheid is universally prohibited under the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which also prohibits the crime of persecution.

To justify their claim of a watershed, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch cited a number of developments: Israel’s continuing de facto annexation of Palestinian territory; the laws with constitutional status within Israel enshrining Jewish supremacy; the entrenchment of Israel’s system of control over Palestinians; the demise of the peace process; and the efforts of the US to ratify and formalize this reality under the guise of a nominal commitment to a two-state solution. For both organizations, as for many other analysts, activists, and policymakers, the convention of treating Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip as temporary—and therefore a matter that could potentially be resolved outside the confines and control of the state of Israel—was no longer an accurate description of reality. There was no indication of anything other than the permanence of Israel’s hold over ‘the entire area,’ as B’Tselem had put it.

Then, in May, the uprising that Palestinian have come to dub the ‘Unity Intifada’ erupted, set off by Israel’s planned expulsion of several Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem. Within days, Israel was facing popular protests by Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, a mass mobilization against state-sanctioned violence in Israeli cities, and protests among the Palestinian refugee and diaspora communities. As the crackdown by Israeli police in Jerusalem intensified in violence and scale, militants in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip offered armed resistance, sending barrages of rockets farther into Israel than they had in previous conflicts; this escalation inevitably drew a disproportionate military response from Israel. By the time a truce was called, at least 248 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed, including sixty-six children; a dozen Israelis had died, including two children.

The ground zero of the uprising, the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, had emerged as both a symptom and a symbol of the regime that B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch had identified: a sprawling nexus of legal, military, and economic institutions, both directly of the state and by proxy, whose primary purpose was to consolidate land for Jewish settlement by dispossessing Palestinians. Overnight, Sheikh Jarrah became emblematic of what Zionism has wrought in Palestine over more than a century, and the uprising across the land heralded a rejection of the regime’s decades-long efforts to divide and fragment Palestinian unity.” — Tareq Baconi, in The New York Review of Books, Nov. 5, 2021

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The Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination & the Right of Resistance to Occupation

Perhaps it goes without saying, but I’ll say it: no nation-state or group of such states has legal and political—let alone moral—authority, to ask or demand (as part of one or more conditions for negotiations, or ending a belligerent occupation, aggression or repressive forms policing or ‘security’) political groups or organizations struggling to realize their international legal right to collective self-determination to renounce all use of violence to achieve their ends—all the more so if the denial of self-determination is, as is often the case, part and parcel of collaboration with outside and more powerful parties systematically failing to enforce or recognize human rights: civil, political, social, cultural, and economic. Adding insult to injury, we note the states “demanding” such relinquishment have themselves more often than not achieved their own collective self-determination through violent means (war, rebellion, revolution, terrorism, what have you), while now resorting to means of violence when conventional and nonviolent political methods (diplomacy, negotiation, sanctions, etc.) appear to fail, ruthlessly exploiting a gross asymmetry in various forms of power while employing violence to assert its political will on others (for whatever reason: ideological domination, regime change, resource exploitation, a more congenial economic environment …). Conceding this does not amount to an implicit or roundabout justification or warrant for the particular means of violence such groups or organizations may choose in their struggle (although it’s not difficult to understand why those who are frequently subject to state terror often defend themselves with terrorist means readily available to them) for which they are morally responsible, hence accountable (consider the Sorelian-like celebration of violence or the romantic militarism that finds easy justification for acts of terrorism). Indeed, it may be the case that the humanitarian-inspired constraints of just war theory (especially jus in bello) should apply to groups like the Palestinians in their struggle for collective self-determination.

Speaking of the Palestinians, it’s useful to remind ourselves that, under international law, in the words of Richard Falk, “Palestinian resistance to occupation is a legally protected right,” one that arises in the first instance from two documents: the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and the Fourth Geneva Convention and its subsequent protocols. As argued in a couple of articles Falk co-authored with Burns Weston,

“Israel’s failures as a belligerent occupant to abide by international law amount[s] to a fundamental denial of the Palestinian right of self-determination, and more generally of respect for the framework of belligerent occupation—therefore giving rise to a Palestinian right of resistance.”

In short, Palestinians have an inalienable moral and legal right to resist an illegal and violent military occupation.

For its part, Israel has reacted to all manner of Palestinian resistance, be it violent or non-violent, with routine reliance on “excessive and disproportionate use of lethal force, including the apparent targeting of civilians and children [including the demolition of housing, torture and various other forms of indiscriminate ‘collective punishment’].” Both the creation of “facts on the ground” (e.g., ever-expanding settlements) “and the use of such force … constitute repeated and fundamental violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, violations that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

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Argument (part of an argument made by more than a few of our authors below): There is no longer a plausible or viable “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Assumptions (which case serve as premises): If one is still speaking of a “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it shows you have not been paying attention to the history and politics in the Palestinian territories, that you lack a basic understanding of the nature of Zionist settler colonialism and the role of Zionist nationalism in Israel politics, that you are indulging in ideological myths and fantasies that lack a meaningful orientation to social, economic, and political facts (on the ground, as we say), that you do not fully grasp the legal right and political principle of Palestinian self-determination, that you do not sufficiently appreciate the logic, values and principled practices of democratic theory and practice and the corresponding significance of human dignity and human rights … and so forth and so on.

A bit of relevant history

In 1939, Great Britain proposed a “one-state” solution in Palestine after concluding that the partition proposal was not acceptable to either the Jews or the Arabs. In its White Paper of the same year, the Government noted that the Mandate, which included the notorious Balfour Declaration, was not intended to convert Palestine into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population:

“His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would indeed regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been given to the Arab people in the past…. [….]

It is proper that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-Government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries. His Majesty’s Government are [sic] unable at present to foresee the exact constitutional forms which Government in Palestine will eventually take, but their objective is self-government, and they desire to see established ultimately an independent Palestinian State. It should be a State in which the two in Palestine, Arabs and Jews, share authority in Government in such a way that the essential interests of each are secured.” — Malcolm MacDonald, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in a statement presented to the Parliament (1939).

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In the Los Angeles Times last year (May 23, 2019) George Bisharat argued the case for a democratic, one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

[….] “The two-state solution is dead, laid low by a thousand cuts – or, more precisely, by the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, whose immovable presence ensures that no genuinely sovereign Palestinian state will ever emerge there. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both played a role in delivering the final blows: Trump with his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and Netanyahu by promising voters prior to his recent reelection to begin annexation of the West Bank. [….]

It is time to face some undeniable facts: First, despite Israel’s every effort to establish and maintain a Jewish majority, the two peoples living under Israeli rule hover at near parity, at approximately 6.5 million Jews and 6.5 million Palestinians. Second, Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs are destined to live together in Israel/Palestine in perpetuity. Neither people can or should be forced to leave the land in which they reside and to which they are passionately committed. Third, segregation, of which the two-state solution was a form, is not the answer. As Americans know from our own historical experience, separate is never equal. Finally, it is only equal rights and justice that can provide the foundation for a durable peace for Israelis and Palestinians.” [….]

*          *          *

I am reading, intermittently, Jeff Halper’s informative, perceptive, and persuasive book, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2021). Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a founding member of the One Democratic State, reminds us that the phrase “Arab – Israeli Conflict” [and since the first Intifada, ‘Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’] conceals a “deeper struggle,” that is,

“… the colonization of Palestine by the Zionist movement, culminating in a state of Israel ruling over the entirety of the country [that is, Palestine]. To be sure, colonization generates conflict. But ‘conflict’ did not simply erupt for one reason or another. Jews, in fact, lived in peace with the local Arab population for centuries, if not millennia. They were known in Arabic as yahud awlad ῾arab (Native Arab Jews), al-yahud al-῾arab (Arab Jews), al-yahud al-῾alin (Native Jews), abna al-balad (Sons of the Land) or, in Hebrew, Bnei Ha’aaretz (Children of the Land). Zionism shattered this historic relationship.

Driven by persecution and the rise of nationalism in Europe, it was European Jews with little knowledge of Palestine and its peoples who launched a movement of Jewish ‘return’ to its ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel, after a national absence of 2000 years. In their newly minted nationalist ideology, they were the returning natives. In their eyes, the Arabs of Palestine were mere background. They had no national claims or even cultural identity of their own. Palestine was, as the famous Zionist phrase put it, ‘a land without a people.’ The European Zionists knew the land was peopled, of course. But to them the Arabs did not amount to ‘a people’ in the national sense of the term. They were just a collection of natives—though not the Natives, a status the Jewish claimants reserved for themselves. They played no role in the Zionist story. Having no national existence or claims of their own, the Arabs were to removed, confined or eliminated so as to make way for the country’s ‘real’ owners.

This form of conquest—for that is what it was—took the form of settler colonialism. Zionism felt a deep sense of historical, religious and national connection to the Land of Israel. But in claiming Palestine for themselves alone and rejecting the society they found there, they chose to come as settlers—or more precisely, their choice of settler colonialism rested on formative elements in both Jewish and European societies, such as the notion of biblical ‘chosenness’ and a Divinely sanctioned ownership of the land; a self- and externally enforced ethno-national existence in the European ‘Diaspora:’ embeddedness in the rise of European nationalism, primarily the ‘tribal’ nationalism of Eastern Europe and European experiences of settler colonialism (particularly of Germans in Slavic lands); immediate pressures of economic and religious persecution; and more, …. The upshot is that Zionists intended to displace the local population, not integrate into it as immigrants would. And displacement is by definition a violent process. Zionist ideology justifying the displacement of the indigenous population. The ‘logic’ of settler colonialism worked itself through nationalist ideology. Early Zionist leaders presented the ‘conflict’ as one ethno-religious nationalism against another [which functioned on the order of a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’] so as to deflect attention from settler colonialism, garner the support of the Jewish people and stifle diasporic Jewish opposition. They also used arguments of self-defense to win support of non-Zionist Jews, especially allies in Britain and the U.S. As the only legitimate national group, the Zionists reduced ‘the Arabs’ into a faceless, dismissible enemy Other. Zionist ideologues like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir knowingly altered the framework from one of settler colonialism to that of conflict between and aggressive (and foreign) Arab ‘Goliath’ and the peace-loving (native) Jewish ‘David.’”

Near the end of the book, Halper has a helpful chapter “addressing the fears and concerns of a single democratic state,” one home to both Palestinians and Jews, one in which a Liberal democratic constitution “protects both the individual civil rights of all the country’s citizens as well as the collective rights of all its ethnic, religious, and national communities.”

       

Recommended Reading (there is much worth reading left off this list, so one might browse through my Israeli-Palestinian Conflict bibliography):

• Abunimah, Ali. One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2006.
• Aly, Abdel Monem Said. “The Case for the One-State Solution,” The Cairo Review of Global Affairs (Winter 2019).
• Avnery, Uri and Ilan Pappé. “Two States or One State,” A debate sponsored by Gush Shalom (June 11, 2007): http://ilanpappe.com/?p=58
• Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir (Tal Haran, trans.) The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
• Baconi, Tareq. Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.
• Baconi, Tareq. “What Apartheid Means for Israel,” The New York Review of Books, November 5, 2021.
• Barghouti, Omar. BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011.
  
• Cobban, Helena. “Breakout: Hamas and the End of the Two-State Solution,” Boston Review (May/June 2008): http://bostonreview.net/BR33.3/cobban.php
• Cohen, G.A. “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?” in Cohen’s posthumously published volume edited by Michael Otsuka, Finding Oneself in the Other. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013: 115-142.
• Cypel, Sylvain. Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse. New York: Other Press, 2006.
• Davis, Uri. Israel: An Apartheid State. London: Zed Press, 1987.
• Fari, Hani, ed. The Failure of the Two-State Solution: The Prospects of One State in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
• Hajjar, Lisa. Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
• Halper, Jeff. Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State. London: Pluto Press, 2021.
• Harding, Jeremy. “Subversive Activity,” London Review of Books (LRB) blog, 27 October, 2021.
• Hilal, Jamil, ed. Where Now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution. London: Zed Books, 2007.
• Hiltermann, Joost. “Israel’s Latest Effort to Fragment and Disempower the Palestinians,” Middle East Report Online, November 10, 2021.
• Hussein, Cherine. The Re-emergence of the Single State Solution in Palestine-Israel: Countering an Illusion. New York: Routledge, 2015.
• Judt, Tony. “Israel: The Alternative,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 50, No, 16 (Oct. 23, 2003): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671
• Kattan, Victor. From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949. London: Pluto Press, 2009.
• Kovel, Joel. Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel-Palestine. London: Pluto Press, 2007.
• Kretzmer, David. The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.
• Lazare, Daniel. “The One-State Solution,” The Nation (Oct. 16, 2003): http://www.thenation.com/doc/20031103/lazare/single
• Lieblich, Eliav and Adam Shinar. “Counterterrorism Off the Rails: Israel’s Declaration of Palestinian Human Rights Groups as ‘Terrorist’ Organizations,” Just Security, October 24, 2021.
• Lim, Audrea, ed. The Case for Sanctions Against Israel. London: Verso, 2012.
• Lustik, Ian S. Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
• Makdisi, Saree. Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008: 281-298.
• Maoz, Zeev. Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security & Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009 (2006).
• Middle East Monitor. “Israel outlaws six Palestinian human rights groups,” October 22, 2021.
• O’Malley, Padraig. The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine—A Tale of Two Narratives. New York: Penguins Books, 2015.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, England: One World Publications, 2006.
• Pappé, Ilan. “Blueprint for a One-State Movement: A Troubled History,” in Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2010: 125-144.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
• Pappé, Ilan, ed. Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid. London: Zed Books, 2015.
• Pappé, Ilan. Ten Myths about Israel. London: Verso, 2017.
• Peleg, Ilan and Dov Waxman. Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Rena and Milena. “Israel just declared our human rights work ‘terrorism.’ But it won’t silence us,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2021.
• Rodinson, Maxime. Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? New York: Anchor Foundation/Pathfinder, 1973.
• Salhab, Akram and Dahoud al-Ghoul. “Jerusalem Youth at the Forefront of 2021’s Unity Intifada,” Middle East Report Online, November 10, 2021.
• Shamas, Diala. “The Downstream Effects of Israel’s ‘Terrorist’ Designation on Human Rights Defenders in the US,” Just Security, November 4, 2021.
• Shehadeh, Raja. “What Does Israel Fear from This ‘Terrorist’?” The New York Review of Books, December 2, 2021 issue.
• Shenhav, Yehouda. Beyond the Two State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.
• Tilley, Virginia. “The One-State Solution,” London Review of Books, Vol. 25, No. 21 (6 November 2003): http://www.lrb.co.uk/.../virginia.../the-one-state-solution
• Tilley, Virginia. The One State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israel-Palestinian Conflict. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
• Tilley, Virginia, ed. Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism, and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
• White, Ben. Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
• Zertal, Idith and Akiva Eldar. Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007. New York: Nation Books, 2007.

Relevant Bibliographies (embedded links; freely available on my Academia page for viewing or download)

• The Modern Arab World
• The Bedouin
• Human Rights
• International Criminal Law
• International Law
• The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• Modern Iran
• Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East
• Nuclear Weapons
• Terrorism
• Torture
• Violent Conflict and the Laws of War
• Zionist Ideologies

Quigley on the need for radical or revolutionary social change lawyers

       

“Ten Ways of Looking at Movement Lawyering,” by William P. Quigley, Clinic Professor Emeritus

5 Howard Human & Civil Rights Law Review 23 (2020): 23-43.

I have highlighted some material by way of an introduction to this excellent and inspiring article. We might compare this piece to similar or analogous normative arguments and accounts of the need for “intellectuals” (of a certain kind) in working class struggles and radical social change movements, drawing, for example, on the works of Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Rudolf Bahro, Noam Chomsky, among others.

“Nadia Ben-Youssef, a radical, social-change, lawyer-friend told me that ‘lawyers are either servants of the people or predators.’ There are more than a million lawyers in the United States, but most of them are not servants of the people. Lawyers and legal workers, who are true servants of the people, are often engaged in the struggles for justice alongside communities of directly impacted people. They are engaged in movement lawyering.

Movement lawyering involves several simultaneous journeys that this article will briefly highlight: (1) education of how social change comes about; (2) learning a critical understanding of the differences between law and justice; (3) understanding how to work in respectful partnership with communities and how to actually begin the work; (4) a willingness to be uncomfortable; (5) developing relationships built on solidarity, liberation, and community; and (6) finding, as I have, that the foundation of our relationships and work as movement lawyers is based on hope, joy, and love. [….]

Lawyers doing legal work can be useful to movements. And yes, much of what the movement lawyer does is legal work. The keys to determining whether legal work is considered movement lawyering are included in the answers to following questions:

• Does the lawyer understand how change comes about and how important social movements led by directly impacted people are?
• Is the lawyer in a respectful, ongoing, and team relationship with the community?
• Is the legal work about building and confronting power alongside directly impacted communities?
• Is the directly impacted community making decisions about what the lawyer should be doing in terms of the direction, purpose, strategies, and tactics?
• Is the lawyer listening and learning?
• Is the lawyer listening to the community as much as they are listening to her?
• Is the community getting credit, support, attention, and resources as a result of the lawyer’s work?
• Is the lawyer accountable to the community? [….]

Law schools are full of courses about law. The courts are full of lawyers. Legal work is work done by lawyers for whoever pays the bills. It is often another type of commercial work for businesses. Oftentimes, legal work is actually anti-justice work. What is justice? Words related to justice are often plastered on the outside of courthouses. Justice is mentioned regularly at the swearing-in ceremonies of judges and new lawyers, and at law school orientations and graduations. But is justice furthered in the actual practice of law? Hardly. In fact, justice is often a counter-cultural value in the legal profession. Charles Hamilton Houston, a leading civil rights lawyer, said years ago that a lawyer was ‘either a social engineer or a parasite on society.’

No one can dispute that the legal system is based on, reflects, and supports structurally unequal distribution of economic, social, and political power. That is because the laws are made by those with power, and traditional power resides in corporations, governments, courts, and legislatures. People and communities with less power are usually shut out. If you carefully examine how laws are created, you will usually discover stated and unstated race, class, and gender issues are part of the debate and crafting of laws. The law protects power through reinforcement of institutional racism and systematic injustices based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and class.

One way of critiquing law is to change perspective. Landlord-tenant laws might benefit landlords, but what do renters think? Current civil rights laws might look really progressive to white people given the way the laws used to be, but what about to people of color? Should corporations have more legal protection than their employees or the people in the communities where they operate? If private property is so important, why shouldn’t everyone have proportional rights to property?

Though social progress has been made, the gulf between the ideals of justice and the practice of law remains wide. People defend our current laws saying that they are much better than before, or that they are better in comparison to other countries. There is no doubt that many of our laws today and many of our institutions represent an advancement over what was in place in the past. However, that does not mean all of our laws and institutions are better than what preceded them, nor does it mean that they are as just as they can be, and that the critique on justice should stop.

Without lawyers, courts are effectively walled off from people. Few lawyers provide direct services for individual poor and working-class people. Visit any family law court, landlord-tenant court, or immigration proceeding, and you will find that the majority of people impacted do not participate at all because they lack access to lawyers or try to represent themselves. The overwhelming majority of people have no access to justice or law. Access to law, much less justice, is determined by money. Those with money can go to court, go to the legislature, and change the laws. That is why most lawyering is performed for corporations and the few with real resources. Justice advocates for communities of marginalized people are few because community injustice issues are essentially not on any legal agenda. Big injustice issues are well-insulated from real people. They are wrapped in layers of laws and special interests protecting them from influence by communities.

The idea of radical change scares some people because it is not possible to bring about radical change without reducing the power, influence, and comfort of those who have more than their fair share of the world’s resources. Some will say this is revolutionary. That is fine. Lawyers can be revolutionaries. Martin Luther King Jr. called each of us to join together to undergo a radical revolution of values and to conquer racism, materialism, and militarism. Martin Luther King Jr. did not say the call to be revolutionary extended to everyone except lawyers. He also did not call us to merely reform racism, materialism, and militarism. Revolutionaries are called not just to test the limits of the current legal system or to reform the current law, but also to join in the destruction of unjust structures and systems—to tear them up by their roots. We are called to join the struggles and replace them with new systems based on fairness and justice.

Radical justice work is what movement lawyering is about. The Latin source for the word ‘radical’ means root. Radical justice does not mean merely trimming the edges of injustices or reforming the unjust systems but ripping the unjust systems out by their roots and starting over. Thus, the root causes that support and underpin current unjust systems must be identified and dismantled. [….]

Our world desperately needs more movement lawyers and legal workers who will engage in radical solidarity and partnership with the communities of directly impacted people fighting for justice. [….] Our world needs lawyers willing to work with movements toward a radical revolution of our world. We do not need any more lawyers defending the status quo. We need revolutionary radical social change lawyers; we need movement lawyers.”

       

I will be adding the article to this compilation: Toward a Manifesto for a People’s Law School

The Congo and Coltan: Political Economy, Precious Commodity, and Politics—an introduction and brief bibliography

Environmental Justice Atlas

“Coltan is an abbreviation of columbite-tantalite, a mixture of two mineral ores, and is the common name for these ores in eastern Congo. Tantalum is the name of the metal extracted from tantalite-bearing ores, including coltan, after processing. Scholars, journalists and activists who have sought to understand and publicize the relationship between the  tantalum supply chain and violence in the Congo, popularized the term coltan because this is the name used in the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo]. ‘Coltan’ has subsequently become widely used outside industry and scientific circles.” Michael Nest uses the term ‘coltan’ only in reference “to unprocessed tantalite-bearing ores from the DRC.” Accordingly, ‘tantalite’ refers to “tantalum-bearing ores in general or from countries other than the Congo. ‘Tantalum’ is used when referring to the processed metal.” From Michael Nest’s invaluable volume that motivated this compilation, Coltan (Polity Press, 2011). Coltan falls within the category of what today are termed “conflict minerals (or ’resources’ more ‘widely).” Indeed, “the most prominent contemporary example has been the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where various armies, rebel groups, and outside actors have profited from mining while contributing to violence and exploitation during wars in the region. An unfortunate irony is that many countries rich in minerals are impoverished in terms of their capacity for governance. Conflict, corruption and bribery may be seen as the typical costs of doing business.”

“When refined, coltan becomes metallic tantalum, a heat-resistant powder that can hold a high electrical charge. These properties make it a vital element in creating capacitors, the electronic elements that control current flow inside miniature circuit boards. Tantalum capacitors are used in almost all cell phones, laptops, pagers and many other electronics. The recent technology boom caused the price of coltan to skyrocket to as much as $400 a kilogram at one point, as companies such as Nokia and Sony struggled to meet demand.” (From ABC News in 2006)

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Heavily edited material from the Wikipedia entry on “coltan mining and ethics:”

“Coltan is the colloquial name for the mineral columbite-tantalum (‘col-tan’); it is sometimes incorrectly used as shorthand for tantalite, a metallic ore from which the very similar elements niobium, also known as columbium, and tantalum are extracted. In the early 21st century coltan mining was associated with human rights violations such as child labour, systematic exploitation of the population by governments or militant groups, exposure to toxic chemicals and other hazards as a result of lax environmental protection, and general safety laws and regulations.  

The coltan industry is worth tens of millions of dollars a year. The price for coltan ranged between $50 and $200 per pound in 2012 and has spiked much higher in the past when supplies were scarce. In 2006, Australia, Brazil, and Canada produced 80% of the world’s coltan. As of 2018, coltan’s main producers are Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Brazil and China. Australia, Canada and Mozambique are also important players. Thus, the task of supplying world coltan needs has fallen largely on conflict regions and underdeveloped countries. The coltan market is characterized by opacity, as supply and trade is based on contracts that do not publish public price references. The products are sold in private, unregulated markets, unlike commodity metals like gold, copper, zinc, and tin. No standards are set or enforced for mining operations and devising safety procedures is the responsibility of mine operators which [can hardly be said to] prioritize worker well-being. [….]

A report by the Commission of the European Union in 2011 raised issues of child labour in coltan mining in DRC, and in the recycling industry in Ghana and China. [….]  In 2016, Amnesty International, in a joint investigation with African NGO African Resources Watch, published a report that found that children even as young as seven years old were working in cobalt mines in the DRC. [….] Many of the burgeoning coltan producers are resource-rich developing countries with economies that are currently largely dependent on mining non-renewable resources. This indicates a danger attached to even clean coltan operations in developing countries. Groups that study developing nations such as Oxfam caution against a developing country putting much of its capital into mining operations, especially single mineral developments. While countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia were able to turn their mining operations into profitable industries, these experiences are not practical models that would support today’s developing countries’ reliance on mining operations for further economic development. These countries’ dependence on mining creates tension due to the relatively small size of the developing countries and their exploitation of nonrenewable resources at the expense of their other natural resources. [….]

In addition to the human rights issues attached to the coltan industry, the mining process itself can be environmentally hazardous. Since it is usually pan-mined, the mining process and slurry from this process can contaminate water and thus cause harm to ecosystems, although since no chemicals are added to process the mineral itself is relatively benign. However, while the exact effects of prolonged coltan exposure through dust around particularly artisanal mines have not yet been studied in detail, more DNA damage was found in children living in mining areas than in those from control groups. Preliminary results of an ongoing study also hint that babies born to miners suffer ‘an increased risk of birth defects.’ Other risks include acidic drainage and the presence of toxic metals such as nickel and substances like arsenic and cyanide. Air pollution is also a concern.

Some people question the sustainability of artisanal mining [an ‘artisanal miner or small-scale miner (ASM) is a subsistence miner who is not officially employed by a mining company, but works independently, mining minerals using their own resources, usually by hand’] but miners often are very poor and have few other options to earn a living. Illegal mining in national parks and land reserves can be especially damaging, such as the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park in the DRC and the Puinawai National Reserve in Colombia, due to the deep forest cover these places provide. Coltan is mined using techniques developed for gold mining in the 1800s. The work is difficult and dangerous, with workers panning for coltan in large craters in stream beds, with the average worker producing less than one kilogram of coltan a day.

Coltan mines operate under boom-bust economics and not only strip the mineral from the land, but also cause environmental degradation. In mining towns that depend on coltan for their wealth, fewer people cultivate the land. Numerous instances of famine related to the mining operations contribute to increasingly unsustainable types for land use. Besides the harm it does to food security in the eastern Congo, coltan mining is inimical to other land uses such as ecotourism, game ranches, and medical research which could possibly provide better incomes and profit from the wildlife and forest land. Mining threatens the national parks across the Congo.

Developing nations often go through with mining operations because they need the capital these operations bring without thinking of the environmental impacts. Given that mining is an expensive venture to undertake, the returns are sometimes low. Global NGOs who study developing nations, such as Oxfam, have stated that the cost of mining on the environment can cause extensive and perhaps permanent environmental damage. [….]

Many countries export their raw coltan to China for further processing. The UN reports that coltan from the DRC that is processed in China is often mixed with samples from conflict-free regions and thus is difficult to source.

In Colombia, the coltan mining industry is involved in numerous internal conflicts and is currently illegal. This has not stopped guerilla forces and militia groups from mining the ore and selling it on the black market or shipping it to China. The Colombian government has made little attempt to regulate the industry. In 2010, plans were announced to auction off the rights to mine coltan in certain areas, but those plans were never completed and were dropped by the current administration. Most of the coltan activity takes place in the deep jungle areas along the Southeastern borders of Venezuela or Brazil, causing severe environmental repercussions. Colombia’s coltan mines are often located in national parks and on indigenous territory, which forces the native population into the mining industry. Colombian coltan is tied to violence at every step of the process. The mines are typically owned by paramilitary groups or drug cartels such as the Sinaloa cartel and the Cifuentes Villa family, who use the same smugglers to move both drugs and coltan. Colombian authorities have little control over the coltan mining region due to its size and density, and coltan is easily moved along the same routes as cocaine and emeralds, two of Colombia’s most heavily trafficked illegal goods.

In Venezuela, the government has sent military patrols into the jungle to root out illegal mining activities and the Colombian cartel leaders who fund these operations. As in Colombia, indigenous Venezuelans in the Parguaza region have suffered from the mining industry, and people have suffered violence from the coltan mine’s military supervisors.

It is difficult for manufacturers to ensure that the coltan they use in their products is not from a conflict zone or otherwise unethically produced. Currently there is one process for verifying the origin of a coltan sample. This process, developed in Germany, involves creating an elemental ‘fingerprint’ via WD X-ray fluorescence analysis and X-ray diffraction analysis to determine the composition and amounts of trace elements present in the sample. These results are then compared to the results of samples of known provenance, much like the Kimberly process for diamonds. This technique works for samples of mixed sources as well as pure coltan; however, it requires having sample fingerprints for all original coltan sources on file. Using this technique, it is possible to identify the source of most coltan samples. As of 2010, almost 75% of the world’s coltan mines have samples on file. However, the process is expensive and lengthy and while it has worked in Rwanda, adapting these fingerprinting techniques to the DRC mining industry and convincing countries such as China to adopt these methods has been difficult. Both the United States and Canada have passed legislation that provides incentives for using certified coltan and making conflict materials extralegal, but because most coltan is processed in China and China does not use the certification processes, avoiding conflict coltan has been very difficult. Roughly 60% of the coltan mines in Africa, including in the DRC, have some percentage of Canadian backing but are not subject to Canada’s laws about environmental hazards and human rights violations. Both Canada and the United States have passed acts that attempt to curtail the purchase of conflict-sourced materials.

Most of this change has been consumer-driven. Back in 2004, the TIC (Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center) had little interest in regulating conflict materials, but since then has become one of the leading voices promoting conflict-free minerals. Awareness campaigns in Western countries have been pushed manufacturers such as Apple and Intel to rely on more than just the word of their suppliers that the coltan used in their products is conflict-free. This consumer interest pushed the TIC to create a working group in 2009 to promote better standards for coltan mining and over the next decade it successfully removed conflict minerals from the coltan supply chain. The group works with the OECD, European Commission, civil society, the International Tin Association, UN and with other NGOs to monitor risks associated with conflict affected and high risk (CAHRA) areas and to promote transparency in the supply chain. [….]

• Ansoms, An and Stefaan Marysse, eds. Natural Resources and Local Livelihoods in the Great Lakes Region of Africa: A Political Economy Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
• Autesserre, Séverine. The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
• Berdal, Mats R. and David M. Malone, eds. Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000).
• Calì, Massimiliano. Trading Away from Conflict: Using Trade to Increase Resilience in Fragile States (World Bank Publications, 2014).
• Chabal, Patrick, ed. Political Domination in Africa: Reflection on the Limits of Power (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
• Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2013).
• Chimni, B.S. International Commodity Agreements: A Legal Study (Croom Helm, 1987).
• Chimni, B.S. International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2017).
• Clapham, Christopher, ed. African Guerrillas (Indiana University Press, 1998).
• Clark, John F., ed. The African Stakes of the Congo War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
• Close, William T. Beyond the Storm: Treating the Powerless and the Powerful in Mobutu’s Congo/Zaire (Meadowlark Springs Productions, 2006).
• Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (University of California Press, 2005).
• Cooper, Frederick. Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2^nd ed., 2019).
• Cotula, Lorenzo. The Great African Land Grab? Agricultural Investments and the global food system (Zed Books, in association with International African Institute/Royal African Society/World Peace Foundation, 2013).
• Cramer, Christopher. Civil War Is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries (C. Hurst & Co., 2006).
• Csete, Joanne and Juliane Kippenberg. The War Within the War: sexual violence against women and girls in Eastern Congo (Human Rights Watch, 2002).
• Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums (2006).
• Deibert, Michael. The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books, in association with International African Institute/Royal African Society/World Peace Foundation, 2013).
• Devlin, Lawrence. Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone (Public Affairs, 2007).
• De Witte, Ludo (Renee Fenby and Ann Wright, trans.) The Assassination of Lumumba (Verso, 2001).
• Frankema, Ewout and Frans Buelens, eds. Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development: The Belgian Congo and the Netherlands Indies Compared (Routledge, 2013).
• French, Howard W. A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
• Griffiths, Ieuan LL. The Atlas of African Affairs (Routledge, 2nd ed., 1994).
• Harms, Robert W. River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891 (Yale University Press, 1981).
• Herbst, Jeffrey. States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton University Press, new ed., 2014).
• Hicks, Celeste. Africa’s New Oil: Power, Pipelines and Future Fortunes (Zed Books, in association with International African Institute/Royal African Society/World Peace Foundation, 2015).
• Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998).
• Jerven, Morten. Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong (Zed Books, in association with International African Institute/Royal African Society/World Peace Foundation, 2015).
• Kalyvas, Stathis N. The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
• Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists Beyond Borders (Cornell University Press, 1998).
• Kisangani, Emizet François. Historical Dictionary of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Rowman & Littlefield, 4^th ed., 2016).
• Lemarchand, René. The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
• Longman, Timothy. Zaire: Forced to Flee—Violence Against the Tutsis in Zaire (Human Rights Watch, 1996).
• MacGaffey, Janet. Entrepreneurs and Parasites: The Struggle for Indigenous Capitalism in Zaire (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
• MacGaffey, Janet. The Real Economy of Zaire: The Contribution of Smuggling and Other Unofficial Activities to National Wealth (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
• MacGaffey, Janet and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga. Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law (Indiana University Press, 2000).
• Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism (Princeton University Press, 2008 ed. [1996]).
• Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, 2001).
• Marriage, Zoë. Formal Peace and Informal War: Security and Development in Congo (Routledge, 2013).
• Mazuri, Ali A. Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa (Heinemann, 1978).
• Nest, Michael. Coltan (Polity Press, 2011).
• Nest, Michael, with François Grignon, and Emizet F. Kisangani. The Democratic Republic of Congo: Economic Dimensions of War and Peace (Lynne Rienner, 2006).
• Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges. The Congo: From Leopold to Kabil—A People’s History (Zed Books, 2002).
• Ohambe, Marie Claire Omanyondo, et al. Women’s Bodies as a Battleground: Sexual violence against women and girls during the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Kivu (1996-2003) (International Alert, 2005).
• Prunier, Gérard. Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Radley, Ben and Sara Geenen (2021) “Struggles over value: corporate–state suppression of locally led mining mechanisation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Review of African Political Economy, (2021) 48:161-177. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2020.1865902
• Raeymaekers, Timothy. Supporting the War Economy in the DRC: European companies and the coltan trade—five case studies (International Peace Information Service, 2002).
• Redmond, Ian. Coltan Boom, Gorilla Bust: The impact of coltan mining on gorillas and other wildlife in Eastern DR Congo (Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund and Born Free Foundation, 2001).
• Reno, William. Warlord Politics and African States (Lynne Rienner, 1998).
• Reno, William. Warfare in Independent Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Reyntjens, Filip. The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996–2006 (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Schatzberg, Michael G. Politics and Class in Zaire: Bureaucracy, Business, and Beer in Lisala (Africana Publishing Co., 1980).
• Schatzberg, Michael G. The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire (Indiana University Press, 1988).
• Stearns, Jason. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (PublicAffairs, 2011).
• Stearns, Jason K. The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo (Princeton University Press, 2021).
• Tall, Kadya, Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle, and Michel Cahen, eds. Collective Mobilisations in Africa/Mobilisations collectives en Afrique: Enough is Enough!/Ça suffit! (Brill, 2015).
• Tarrow, Sidney. The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Tegera, Aloys, Sofia Mikolo, and Dominic Johnson. The Coltan Phenomenon: How a rare mineral has changed the life of the population of war-torn North Kivu Province in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Pole Institute, 2002).
• Tordogg, William. Government and Politics in Africa (Indiana University Press, 1984).
• Trapido, Joe. “Africa’s Leaky Giant,” New Left Review, 92 • Mar/Apr 2015: 5-40.
• Trapido, Joe. “Kinshasa’s Theater of Power,” New Left Review, 98 • Mar/Apr 2016: 57-80.
• Trefon, Theodore, ed. Reinventing Order in the Congo: How People Respond to State Failure in Kinshasa (Zed Books, 2004).
• Turner, Thomas. The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality (Zed Books, 2007).
• Turner, Thomas. Congo (Polity Press, 2013).
• Van Reybrouk, David (Sam Garrett, trans.) Congo: The Epic History of a People (Ecco, 2014).
• Van Woudenberg, Anneke. “We Will Crush You:” The Restriction of Political Space in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Human Rights Watch, 2008).
• Warren, Rosie, ed. The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2017).
• Wengraf, Lee. Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism and the New Scramble for Africa (Haymarket Books, 2018).
• Willame, Jean-Claude, ed. Zaire: Predicament and Prospects (United States Institute of Peace/Minority Rights Group, 1997).
• Wrong, Michela. In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo (Harper Collins, 2001).
• Young, Crawford. Ideology and Development in Africa (Yale University Press, 1982).
• Young, Crawford and Thomas Turner. The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

Related Bibliographies (embedded links)

• Samir Amin
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Frantz Fanon
• Global Distributive Justice
• Human Rights
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Black Cosmopolitanism
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

The bibliography is also available for free viewing or download on my Academia page.

One person’s discretionary labor in the surreal and foreboding age of hyper-capitalist technology in general and artificial intelligence and social media in particular

       

“In 1789 and for long afterward, in France and elsewhere, a single word often sufficed to explain the origins of the French Revolution: books. Just days after the fall of the Bastille, the radical journalist and politician Bertrand Barère wrote, ‘Books did it all. Books created opinion, books brought enlightenment down into all classes of society, books destroyed fanaticism and overthrew the prejudices that had subjugated us.’ Even counterrevolutionaries who saw the Revolution as a catastrophe agreed with Barère as to its cause: it was books or, sometimes, ‘philosophy’—by which they meant the great movement of ideas we now call the Enlightenment.

No serious historian today would attribute this kind of power to books alone. We recognize that the French Revolution occurred for many reasons. But no serious historian today would discount the importance of books either. This revolution, one of the greatest in history, did not just replace one king with another. It attempted to establish an entirely new regime, grounded in principles that authors had widely discussed before 1789: equality before the law, the sovereignty of the nation, religious toleration, the ‘rights of man.’ Books mattered.”—David A. Bell, “From Readers to Revolutionaries,” The New York Review of Books, June 27, 2019

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Several times a year I post an updated list of the bibliographies freely available (for viewing or download) on my Academia page, the start of the school year being one of those times (I’m rather late this year!). It is easier to see the list in toto this way because it takes a bit of time to scroll down at the Academia page site to view everything (and the bibliographies are mixed in with my some of my published and unpublished writing). After the bibliographies I have listed  the other the material available at the Academia site as well (encyclopedia entries, essays, and study guides for six worldviews).

1. Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction
2. Africana & African American Philosophy
3. After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle for Civil Rights, Freedom, and Equality in the U.S.
4. Salvador Allende and the Quest for Socialism
5. Alternative and Complementary Medicine
6. B.R. Ambedkar
7. American Indian Law (this list goes considerably beyond ‘law’)
8. Samir Amin (3 September 1931 - 12 August 2018)
9. Analogy & Metaphor
10. Anarchism: Philosophy & Praxis
11. Animal Ethics, Rights, and Law
12. The Arab World: Modern & Post-Modern
13. Attica Prison Uprising (September 9, 1971 – September 13, 1971): Notes, Timeline, and Essential Reading
14. The Bedouin
15. Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice
16. Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
17. Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
18. Beyond Punitive Capitalist and Liberal Society
19. Bioethics
20. Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
21. Biosecurity
22. The Black Athlete and Sports
23. Blacks and Food Justice: A Guide to Resources
24. Blacks on the (Radical) Left
25. The Black Panther Party
26. On Boxing — Sweet Science & Brutal Agon
27. British Imperialism in India: Economics, Politics, and Ideology
28. Buddhism
29. Buddhism & Psychoanalysis
30. Buddhist Art
31. Capital Punishment
32. Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education — From Etiological Diagnosis to Therapeutic Regimen
33. César Chávez & the United Farm Workers
34. Chinese Law and Legal History
35. Christianity
36. Classical Chinese Worldviews
37. Coffee: cultivation, commodity, culture
38. Communism in India
39. Comparative Law
40. Thinking about Comparative Philosophy
41. Conflict Resolution and Nonviolence
42. The Congo and Coltan: Political Economy, Precious Commodity, and Politics
43. Constitutionalism
44. Constitutionalism in India
45. Contract Theory & Promises
46. Criminal Law: Municipal (Domestic) and International
47. The Cuban Revolution
48. Death & Dying
49. Democratic Theory and Praxis
50. Detroit: Labor & Industrialization, Race & Politics, Rebellion & Resurgence
51. Diseases, Epidemics, and Pandemics
52. Dreams and Dreaming
53. Ecological & Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
54. Elections and Voting
55. Emotions
56. Ethical Perspectives on Science & Technology
57. European Enlightenment
58. Famine: History, Causes, and Consequences
59. Frantz Fanon
60. Paulo Freire
61. The Life, Work, & Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi
62. Genocide
63. Global Distributive Justice
64. The Great Depression & The New Deal
65. Toward Green Socialist Democracy (Ecosocialism)
66. The Haitian Revolution
67. Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice
68. Hinduism
69. Human Nature and Personal Identity
70. Human Rights
71. Immigration & Refugees: Ethics, Law and Politics
72. Indic (or Indian) Philosophy
73. Indigenous Peoples: Culture, Law and Politics
74. Individual & Shared Responsibility
75. International Criminal Law
76. International Law
77. Modern Iran
78. Islam, the Arts, and Aesthetic Experience
79. Islam and Jurisprudence
80. Islam & Muslims in the United States
81. Islamic Studies
82. Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
83. The Jain Tradition
84. C.L.R. James: Marxist Humanist & Afro-Trinidadian Socialist
85. Judaism and Jewish Philosophy
86. Law and Literature
87. The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
88. The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
89. Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965)
90. Marxism
91. Marxism (or ‘the Left’), Art & Aesthetics
92. Marxism and Freudian Psychology
93. Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
94. Mass Media
95. Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity
96. Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East (with an emphasis on the Palestinian struggle)
97. Nuclear Weapons
98. Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism
99. Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
100. Philosophy, Psychology, & Methodology for the Social Sciences
101. Philosophy & Racism
102. Progressive Philosophy of Education and Pedagogical Practices: liberté, egalité, fraternité in light of participatory and deliberative democracy
103. The Prophet Muhammad
104. Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line: Human Liberation through Welfare, Well-Being, and Individual Flourishing (or Eudaimonia)
105. Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
106. Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law
107. The Puerto Rican Struggle for Independence & Self-Determination
108. Punishment and Prison
109. The Qur’ān (Translations, Commentaries, Studies)
110. Radical Catholicism (The Catholic Worker Movement, Liberation Theology…)
111. Toward a “Realist” Social and Political Psychology
112. Science and Religion
113. Science and Technology
114. Slavery
115. Social Security & the Welfare State
116. South African Liberation Struggles
117. Sufism
118. Sugar
119. Sullied (Natural & Social) Sciences
120. Terrorism
121. Theology and Philosophy in Islamic Traditions
122. Tort Law
123. Torture: moral, legal, and political dimensions
124. Transitional Justice
125. Utopian Imagination, Thought and Praxis
126. The Varna & Caste System in India
127. Vietnam War
128. Violent Conflict & the Laws of War
129. Water as a Natural Resource, Common Good, and Commodity
130. Women as Intellectuals in the European Enlightenment
131. Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law
132. Zionist Ideologies

In addition to these bibliographies, what follows is some of the published (not everything I’ve published is available online) and unpublished work (encyclopedia entries, essays, and papers, some as first drafts, others a bit more polished), as well as a handful of “Study Guides” for religious worldviews, also freely available (for viewing or download) on my Academia page.

• Abstention from alcohol in Buddhist ethics … and intemperance in Thomas Hobbes's Natural Law morality (or why I remain an aspiring Buddhist)
• “Act Naturally!” “Say What?”
• Advaita Vedānta Philosophy: a short introduction
• Analogy and Metaphor: An Idiosyncratic Introduction
• Unpacking an Aphorism
• On the distinction and differences between AI (‘artificial intelligence’) and human intelligence, judgment and the emotions
• Black Anger and Rage in the Struggle against Racism
• Bombing French Indochina during the U.S. War in Vietnam: a précis
• Book Review: Oliver Leaman’s Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction (2004) Philosophy East and West, Vol. 57, No. 2, (2007), 271-275.
• Book Review: Martin D. Yaffe, ed., Judaism and Environmental Ethics (2001), Philosophy East and West, Vol. 57, No. 3 (2007), 400-405.
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis: Two rather different “therapies of desire” fashioned for the relief of suffering
• Democracy and Islam
• Free Association in Psychoanalysis and “Willing What Cannot Be Willed”
• Friedrich Engels, the English working class, and incipient social epidemiology
• Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory and therapy: An introduction to its therapeutic model and “science of subjectivity”
• The Golden Rule
• Iran’s Nuclear Power Program and the Question of Nuclear Weapons: Articles and Blog Posts (this material is not written by yours truly)
• Marxist existentialism and humanism or spirituality: a preliminary apologia
• On moral philosophy-or ethics-and moral psychology (and the general irrelevance of scientific or academic psychology)
• Natural Law “externalism” v. Natural Law as “moral aspiration”
• New Age nonsense and the “spiritual dimension”
• Notes on Presumption(s): Epistemic (or Inferential), Argumentative, and Legal
• Notes on Science and the Sciences
• The pathology of normalcy ... and the quest for a sane society
• Toward a Manifesto for a People’s (i.e., democratic) Law School
• Poetry and Islam: An Introduction
• The Myriad Dimensions of Prosecutorial Misconduct: A Reading Guide (strictly speaking, not a bibliography)
• Prosoche in the Daily Life of a Salonnière in the French Enlightenment
• Toward a Philosophically Sensitive Definition of Public Health Law
• Social Norms and Legal Theory
• Toward Socialism
• The Legal Doctrine of Stare Decisis and Rationality
• Therapies of Desire: Introspection in Buddhist and Psychoanalytic Psychologies
• Donald Trump and Narcissistic Personality Disorder
• The “kindly illusions” of Yoga and utopian thought and imagination

Study Guides

• Christianity
• Confucianism
• Daoism
• Hinduism
• Islam
• Judaism

Facts and Fiction: The lingering (and occasionally suffocating) ambivalent and equivocal legacy of the “founders”

Contemporary conventional liberals (the ‘l’ here need not imply a sufficient appreciation of ‘L’- Liberal political philosophy) and conservatives (many on both sides being ‘neoliberal’), as well as right-wing members of the cult of Trump, have one thing in common: together, albeit in differing degrees (and that is significant in its effect), they cannot speak or write about the “founders” without indulging in the cloudy comforts and crass confines of ideology and mythologizing. They selectively quote and repeat ad nauseam shopworn and tired phrases and nostrums so as to bask in their authoritative glow and legitimize whatever it is they want to promote, be it in economics or politics. This implies, correctly, another shared dispositional shortcoming: a tenuous grasp of historical data or information and knowledge. Thus, and by way of illustration, consider the following from Adam Przeworski:

“Representative government meant, for the founders, government of those endowed with reason and virtue, but reason and virtue were reserved to those distinguished by wealth, gender, and race. While governments were to be selected by elections, elections merely ratified the superiority of those qualified to govern by their social and economic position. The poor were instructed by that their interests are represented by the wealthy, women that their interests are guarded by men, the ‘uncivilized’ that they need to be guided by their colonizers. Self-government [construed in either a ‘Republican’ (as in ‘republic’) or ‘democratic’ sense], equality, and liberty were dressed up in elaborate intellectual [or ideological] constructions to make them compatible with rule by a few. Created under a shadow of religious and economics conflicts, representative institutions were designed to bar or at least minimize the voice of the people between elections, treating all ‘intermediate organizations’—clubs, associations, trade unions, as well as political parties—as a danger to civil peace [it was soon to be the case that corporations would be permitted to dominate the space of civil society, just when, roughly speaking, such ‘intermediate’ organizations, groups, and ‘societies’ were beginning to flourish in that space]. Intended as a bulwark against despotism, representative institutions were designed to disable governments from doing much of anything, bad or good, by checking and balancing powers, by protecting the status quo from the will of the majority.”

The original motivations and designs of the founders was more or less successful until the Great Depression and the welfare state inaugurated with the New Deal (which grew intermittently according to several imperatives and standards of justice, however awkwardly or insufficiently, until the 1970s, when global capitalist economic forces and trends began to affect the domestic economy), a fact that sticks in the craw of powerful economic and political elites on the Right to this day. The regressive orientation of Republicans that gained dangerous and deadly momentum under Trump is therefore—at least in some respects—in keeping with the beliefs, values, and pretensions (or ‘interests’) of these founders (in addition to being considerably more well-read than their would-be descendants, they possessed and exhibited a cultivated appreciation of the powers of reason and rational argument, and lacked the widespread penchant for pathological phantasies proliferating in the Republican cult of Trump), its leaders fashioning their own nauseous when not toxic “populist’ ideological recipes for the masses, for disgruntled workers, for whites of all economic strata or classes who are anxious and fearful about losing the power and privileges (hence their aversion to truly equal liberties), thereby inheriting some of the dreams (including nightmares) and designs (intentional or by default and by-product) of the founders.

The “benevolent guise of [Republican] paternalism” constitutionally enshrined by the founders has, under the rule of Republicans, morphed into an authoritarianism that is, politically, neither benevolent nor paternalistic, while economically these Republicans are, more often than not, avowedly and shamelessly laissez-faire or libertarian capitalists, entailing the domination and exploitation intrinsic to hyper-capitalism, which heretofore has been modulated and meliorated in differing measure by its democratic welfare state forms—predominantly liberal, corporatist and social democratic (although, of late, these have become permanently weakened by the entrenchment of a capitalist global political economy). This amounts to a vituperatively quarrelous and ideologically suffused fallacious appeal to authority, one evidencing an implicit when not demonstrable distrust and dislike of the values, methods, and processes of participatory, deliberative, and representative democracy, as well as a colossal failure to understand and thus appreciate the related conceptual richness and corresponding political, economic, and social values ensconced in the triune motto of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Ruminations on elections and democracy, with considerable help from Adam Przeworski

       

“Democracy is a system of positive rights but it does not automatically generate the conditions necessary for exercising these rights. As J.S. Mill observed, ‘without decent wages and universal reading [by the latter Mill meant something wider and deeper than reading tweets and text messages], no government of public opinion is possible.’ Nevertheless, there is nothing about democracy per se that guarantees that wages would be decent and reading universal. The nineteenth-century solution to this problem is to restrict citizenship to those who were in condition to use it. Today citizenship is nominally universal, but many people do not enjoy the conditions necessary to exercises it. Hence, we may be seeing a new monster: democracy without effective citizenship.” — Adam Przeworski

I would add the democracy in the U.S. is itself is increasingly “nominal” or, at any rate, illiberal, in effect a faux democracy in many respects, which is but one reason (and not necessarily the principal one) many Republicans and a majority of “independents” could so easily arrive at the belief that Trump, not Biden, won the last presidential election. Elections are supposed to be a means whereby a society can manage to process conflicts in peace and freedom, but if people believe authoritarian phantasies about “rigged” elections, including claims that their votes “didn’t count,” they become avenues for increased conflict and violence. Of course, as Przeworski has said, “conflicts are ubiquitous and passions at times intense,” yet that is one reason we look to democratic governments for comparatively peaceful change through regular elections, a sign of democracy’s capacity to provide for peaceful regulation of conflicts and a modest or temporary constraint on the intensity of perfervid political passions. Consider this in the dim light of the behavior of Trump and his political cult:

“… [I]f the winner of an election fears that an electoral defeat would be disastrous for him or her personally or for his supporters, he will try everything possible not to lose by manipulating the rules [the sort of thing Trump acolytes in state legislatures are doing throughout the county], repressing the opposition [in this case, in addition to voter suppression, acts of intimidation, coercion and violence against those with opposing views: think of the January 6 insurrection, what is occurring at local school boards, the behavior of anti-vaxxers, including members of police unions and fire departments …], or even reverting to fraud. In turn, if the defeated opposition observes that the winner pursues policies highly damaging to its interests and values, it will be willing to wait patiently for the next election only if it expects to have a reasonable chance to win in the future and reverse the course.”

That Trump and his Right-wing cult did not yield presidential office peacefully stands apart as a disturbing outlier, especially for an “affluent democracy “ (albeit one with extreme economic inequality; as Przeworski notes, ‘while about 70 democracies collapsed in poorer countries, affluent democracies have survived wars, riots, scandals, economic and governmental crises, hell or high water,’ a fact which may be reason for hope in our case, although recent events may displace that reason or at least give us pause):

“[W]hile the habit of changing governments through elections is not easy to acquire, it becomes entrenched with repeated experiences. The habit of changing rulers through elections is self-institutionalizing across institutional and economic environments. Elections peacefully process conflicts when not too much is at stake in them and when the conflicting political forces learn through experience that not too much is at stake.”

The obdurate economic power of elites is liable to cause an inordinate, corrosive and thus debilitating effect on democratic government insofar as it depends on mechanisms, processes, and institutions of participation, deliberation, and representation. These elites exist alongside and sometimes in (either intentional or coincidental) conjunction with the forces of white privilege and “supremacy.” The latter are more dispositionally prone to imbibing regressive phantasies that happen to work to the benefit of the former, beset as they are by fear, anxiety, and ignorance (sometimes willful) about our rapidly changing world (accelerated in poorly understood ways by the pandemic and global climate change), hence their preference for wishful thinking, denial and (individual and collective) self-deception, and the corresponding ideological security of illusions and delusions. In brief, “too much is at stake” from the vantage point of the rabid Right, while economic elites, from corporate interests to the higher classes, have at least a dim sense or awareness that their role in maintaining when not increasing economic inequality will be invariably if not increasingly challenged from the Left, perhaps to the point it acquires populist momentum. Again, it may be case that “too much is at stake” for elections to “peacefully process conflicts.”

The ambivalence or despair many of us understandably entertain about elections (including the threats thereto) today has, to some extent, always been an effect or by-product of the nation’s democratic “spectacle,” to paraphrase Przeworski, one that hardly inspires when its

“everyday life … [is] an endless squabble among petty ambitions, [ideological] rhetoric designed to hide and mislead, shady connections between power and money, laws that make no pretense of justice, policies that reinforce privilege. For better and worse, some people are dissatisfied by the incapacity of elections to make people feel that their participation is effective, some by their incapacity to assure that governments do what they are supposed to do and not do what they are not mandated to do, and many by the failure of elected governments to improve their lives.”

But even if we grant these inherent shortcomings or flaws or disappointments, Przeworski argues that “some of this dissatisfaction” with elections in a would-be democratic society “is misplaced.” And here is where a Marxist with democratic if not Liberal values and sensibilities can readily nod in assent (or exclaim, ‘I told you so’):

“Political mechanisms are embedded in societies, with their property structures, their markets, their relations of physical force, their social, ethnic, and religious divisions, their values and traditions. What any political mechanism can achieve is limited by the social conditions in which it operates [in this instance, within the overarching miserly capitalist welfare and obscenely militarist state]. We should not expect elections to generate results that no system of choosing rules could generate in a given society. Governments are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. [….]

Governments appear particularly ineffective when facing economic inequality. This impotence is partly due to the property structures of societies in which we live, societies in which decisions concerning investment and employment made by owners of productive resources affect the lives of everyone else. Capitalism imposes limits on decisions that can be reached by elections, limits that bind all governments. Yet some of the ineffectiveness of governments in reducing economic inequality is due to the [direct and indirect and not infrequently masked] political power of those who control greater economic resources. Even when all citizens enjoy equal right to affect government policies, their actual influence over these policies is not equal when people are economically unequal. Economic inequality generates political inequality [a seemingly obvious fact yet one dismissed or ignored by those who dream that they too, one day, will be rich], political inequality reproduces economic inequality: getting out of this vicious circle is difficult.”

I leave you with these words from Przeworski by way of a tentative and dispiriting conclusion:

“A ‘crisis of democracy’ may assume more or less drastic forms: it may mean that democracy simply collapses—a democratically elected incumbent does not hold an election, or represses the opposition to the point of preventing it from winning, or the military takes power by force—or it can mean that democratic institutions are formally preserved but the political leader rules by appealing directly to ‘the people’ [the hoi polloi or the masses], ignoring institutional norms, in a form of ‘populism,’ ‘illiberal democracy,’ or whatever else one wants to call such situations. Outright collapses of democracy are relatively easy to identify, but how much and what kind of deterioration of democracy constitutes a ‘crisis’ is an inevitably subjective assessment, so we should expect views to differ. [….]

The danger in the United States [this was published in 2018, although it was probably written about a year or two earlier] is the possibility that the incumbent would intimidate hostile media and create a propaganda machine of its own [which the Trump administration effectively did with FOX News and other mass and social media outlets and platforms], that it would politicize the security agencies [it did this to some extent], that it would harass political opponents [militant groups on the Right did this on behalf of the cult of Trump], that it would use state power to reward sympathetic private firms [it did this too], that it would selectively enforce laws [again, and to a disturbing degree], that it would provoke foreign conflicts to monger fear [a mixed record here, but one might cite China and Iran as conspicuous cases], and that it would rig elections [instead, it was claimed that the Presidential election was rigged by Democrats and other conspiratorial forces]. Such a scenario would not be unprecedented. The United States has a long history of waves of political repression [in addition to the structural oppression of, and group acts of violence toward, Blacks and to some extent other people of color]: the ‘red scare’ of 1917-20, the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, the McCarthy period, and the Nixon presidency. In all these cases, the Supreme Court was slow in reacting against violations of civil and political rights. Yet the Democrats lost the 1920 presidential election, Senator McCarthy was censured by the Senate, and Richard Nixon forced to resign. [….]

In the end it looks, it looks like the current crisis will simmer for the foreseeable future [Przeworski is here speaking in global terms about the radical right in office and other threatened democracies]. Nothing much will change except for increased political polarization and increasing intensity of conflicts, at the extreme erupting from time to time in spirals of state and anti-state violence.”   

*          *          *

Please see Przeworki’s Why Bother with Elections? (Polity Press, 2018), and also his book, Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government (Cambridge University Press, 2020), the volume he co-edited with Susan G. Stokes and Bernard Manin, Democracy, Accountability, and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Nadia Urbinati’s Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Relevant Bibliographies (embedded links)

Democratic Theory and Praxis

Elections and Voting (recently updated)

Marxism (recently updated)

Black anger and rage in the struggle against racism

       

I will introduce the concepts of anger and rage as prelude to an introduction to the particular fictional expression of anger and “Black rage” in the character of Bigger Thomas from Richard Wright’s powerful, disturbing and compelling novel (better: ‘incendiary tale’), Native Son (1940). Bigger Thomas, for better and worse, exemplifies “inarticulate and explosive rage,” and in his case it leads to the killing of two women. This introduction is then filled out with some relevant sections from Adam Shatz’s (characteristically) incisive and erudite essay, “Outcasts and Desperados,” in the London Review of Books on Wright’s posthumously published novel, The Man Who Lived Underground (HarperPerennial, 2021), which speaks to the subject of “Black rage” in Wright’s work. Wright’s portrait of Bigger proved unsettling to both James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison (among others). Frantz Fanon on the other hand, “drew on Native Son to examine the violent impulses that racism creates in its victims,” perhaps not surprising given that Fanon was a psychiatrist. Wright himself “desire[d] to fuse the insights of Marx and Freud – he said they were two of his favourite ‘poets’ – and apply them to the lives of oppressed people, especially victims of racism” (Shatz).

The subject of “Black rage” is a prominent theme of late in both works of fiction and non-fiction, having arisen in the wake of slavery and obdurate structural and interpersonal racism, largely evidenced through equally enduring forms of political and economic inequality in this country. Most recently, an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Riverside, Myisha Cherry, who co-edited a volume, The Moral Psychology of Anger (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) with her older colleague in the profession, Owen Flanagan, has penned a book weaving together moral psychology, political philosophy, and anti-racist activism, The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (Oxford University Press, 2021). I’ve yet to read it, but the book’s title appears to elide distinctions one finds in moral psychology and psychoanalytic theory between anger (a ‘vehement passion’ often associated with resentment, contempt and hate, as well as ‘regret, frustration, and disappointment;’ frustration and annoyance often evolving into anger) and rage, the latter being more inchoate and dangerous than anger proper, best viewed as anger’s most extreme mode of expression (Jerome Neu reminds us that Freud’s ‘Rat Man’ ‘suffered from a host of neurotic symptoms because of his repressed rage’).

Anger is often a vice, and many if not most of us lack self-control when we are angry (e.g., when ‘consumed’ by anger). Spinoza’s conception of anger was a bit different from that of Seneca and the Stoics generally, yet he shared their view that anger is invariably and entirely a negative emotion inherently fraught with danger. And the Buddhist view on anger is virtually identical to that of the Stoics, although they do not have “our” concept of emotion(s) as such, classifying anger as one of the kleśas (‘mental states that cloud the mind and manifest in unwholesome actions’).

But there is another philosophical perspective that deserves consideration, one that goes back to both Plato and Aristotle and to some extent is found in the Hebrew Bible, in particular with regard to what we might term “righteous anger,” for example, God’s anger at a person’s sinfulness or the Israelites’ lapses from fidelity to God or the pursuit of justice, these being the more reasonable examples (other instances strike us as irrational and wholly vindictive). In brief, “some form of anger [is] sometimes warranted and often useful.” Plato believed anger (‘as an intrinsic aspect of the spirited part of the tripartite soul’) was capable of being governed by reason. Aristotle’s take was a bit different, for anger can have its reasons: it can be either reasonable or rational to be in a state of anger, hence a “good-tempered” man “is angry at the right things and with the right people, as he ought, when he ought, for as long as he ought.” In this case, anger is dictated by reasons, or at least it is in harmony with same. Thus, Aristotle “thought that a man who is angry for the right reason, with the right person, to the right degree, on the right occasion, and in the right manner, is praiseworthy.”

Aaron Ben- Ze’ev accordingly characterizes rage as a “less specific type of anger,” the “feeling dimension” being “more intense” and thus the “intentional dimension … less complex.” As we saw above, it was Aristotle who first taught us that one species of anger finds moral psychological and ethical warrant as a dispositional virtue: “The man is angry at the right things and with the right people ….” This acceptable or legitimate form of anger, in the words of Philip Fisher, “has its source in the feeling and in the perception of injustice.” And Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, provides an account in the Laws in which the angry or spirited part of the psyche “is fundamental to the indignation necessary for our insistence on justice; that is, not only must we favor or approve of justice, we must [summon the sufficient motivation to] also seek justice and impose it wherever that is required.” (This is but one example of how emotions are often associated with cognitive antecedents and supported by corresponding judgments.) The expression of anger does not always relieve or mitigate it (as in ‘hydraulic’ model or metaphor of the emotions), indeed, it sometimes intensifies anger, and such may be the case with rage, especially if one finds those offenses that led to anger in the first instance enduring or even accumulating.

I largely agree with Aristotle, but what he defines as the “good-tempered” man (or woman) seems, in our time and place at least, increasingly rare, in other words, this dispositional character trait is far from common. A person who does not get angry at Trump’s racist speech and empty public policies, at his demeaning and degrading rhetoric, at his kleptocratic and plutocratic politics, at his narcissistic megalomania and so forth, would appear to be cold-hearted, unethical and self-deceiving (perhaps in a state of denial and prone to self-deception and wishful thinking). A person that cannot summon anger in response to the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar is not acting virtuously or ethically. But such anger need not get the better of one, as we say. I think the Aristotelian view is, for most of us, intuitive, and thus at least plausible, although there is much to be learned from both the Buddhists and Stoics about how to deal with our anger—and of course rage—when it is likely to trump or eviscerate reason. So I am in wholehearted agreement with P.M.S. Hacker’s remarkable analysis of anger in The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018):

“Reason is … needed to apprehend what is offensive, to oneself or others. Indignation or resentment may indeed be appropriate emotional responses to slight and insult, to false accusations or to various forms of offence. That is a proper mark of concern and care. Annoyance and irritation are natural reactions to various forms of disturbance, and natural expressions of frayed nerves. But these natural responses need to be dampened and kept under control lest they feed the flames of fury [or hatred and rage]. Even if anger is warranted, it does not follow that any form or manifestation of anger is warranted. We often have an obligation to control, moderate, or suppress the manifestation of our anger.

Anger is a warranted response to wrong-doing in its manifold forms. It may fuel one’s courage to oppose what is wrong. Nevertheless, to act in anger is never well advised [on this, the Stoics, Buddhists, Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza can all agree]. One may castigate without rage, censure and deplore without fury. The greater one’s wrath, the more likely it is that one’s judgment be led astray, one’s utterances be inappropriate or worse, and one’s action be unjust and harmful. One may rightly seek redress. It is good to endeavor to destroy evil. But reason needs no support from rage or anger in heightened forms in its quest for the right and the good.”

One of the more concise and telling definitions of rage is provided by Robert C. Roberts in his superb study, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2003): “Rage is intense anger marked by proneness to violent action.” Roberts proceeds to fill out this definition:

“Actions characteristic of rage are typically performed in an intense and violent behavioral style—for example, with loud voice, reddened visage, tightly tensed muscles, perspiration, wild swinging of the arms, and so on. Like any adult human emotion, rage is a construal of the situation in terms, some of which are propositional (I do not notice any difference from anger in the defining proposition); but rage, bordering as it typically does on the irrational, is likely to be a blurry kind of construal in which one’s consciousness seems to be overlaid with nonpropositional forces [a rather anodyne phenomenological description!]. For example, the desire to destroy may get detached from its anchor in the concern for justice [as we witnessed in the urban riots of the 1960s], and the question of the culpability of the recipient of the punitive behavior may become irrelevant to the action. It is typical for rage (as it is not for plain anger) that, for the duration of the emotion, the subject is blind to ‘reason;’ that is, the rage is not penetrable by considerations contrary to its propositional content. The enraged person may need to cool off before he can listen to reason. ‘Rage’ suggests a state in which the desire for retribution is so intense that is at best only barely within behavioral control and may be out of control.”

*          *          *

From Adam Shatz’s essay, “Outcasts and Desperados,” in the London Review of Books, Vol. 43 No. 19 · 7 October 2021

When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile,’ as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies. [….]

The novels he wrote in Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life, failed to deliver on the promise of Native Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger Thomas, who achieves a grisly sense of selfhood after killing two women: his black girlfriend and the daughter of his wealthy white employer. But even that novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James Baldwin described Native Son as a modern-day Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy,’ arguing that Bigger Thomas ‘admits the possibility of his being subhuman’ and that Wright was no less guilty than Harriet Beecher Stowe of insisting that a person’s ‘categorisation ... cannot be transcended.’ Baldwin, whose success Wright had done much to promote, wasn’t the only protégé to turn against him. In 1963 Ralph Ellison wrote that, in Bigger Thomas, Wright had created not a black character other black people would recognise, but ‘a near subhuman indictment of white oppression’ crudely ‘designed to shock whites out of their apathy.’ Ellison’s hyper-cerebral protagonist in Invisible Man, who is able to see far beyond his own condition, was a pointed rejoinder to Bigger’s inarticulate and explosive rage.

That rage had once been important to Ellison too. During their days in the CPUSA, he had sent a letter to Wright commending Bigger’s ‘revolutionary significance.’ Readers horrified by Bigger’s violence, Ellison insisted, ‘fail to see that what’s bad in Bigger from the point of view of bourgeois society is good from our point of view ... Would that all Negroes were as psychologically free as Bigger and as capable of positive action!’ [….]

The Black Power movement’s patriarchal and homophobic embrace of Wright did little to salvage his reputation, especially after the rise of black feminism in the 1970s. In Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978), Michele Wallace traced the movement’s ‘love affair with Black Macho’ back to Native Son. Black women writers never forgave Wright for having once accused Zora Neale Hurston of writing ‘in the safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live.’  It didn’t matter that he had denounced the absence of female speakers at the 1956 Conference of Black Writers and Artists in Paris, insisting that black men could only be free if black women were too. Or that in a 1957 book of reportage he had catalogued the forms of oppression suffered by women in contemporary Spain, comparing the Catholic cult of ‘female purity’ to the Ku Klux Klan’s defence of white womanhood. Thanks to Native Son, he continued to be associated with the idea that, in Darryl Pinckney’s words, ‘the black man can only come to life as the white man’s nightmare, the defiler of white women.’

Black feminists weren’t the only ones to take offence. In 1986 the novelist David Bradley confessed that the first time he read Native Son,

‘I shed no tears for Bigger. I wanted him dead; by legal means if possible, by lynching if necessary ... I did not see Bigger Thomas as a symbol of any kind of black man. To me he was a sociopath, pure and simple ... If the price of becoming a black writer was following the model of Native Son, I would just have to write like a honky.’

Novelists never completely shake off an association with the murderers they invent: Dostoevsky is still remembered for Raskolnikov, Camus for Meursault. The difference in Wright’s case is that Bigger Thomas is practically all he is remembered for. Wright is not just blamed for Bigger but almost mistaken for him.

On the surface, Wright’s life bore little resemblance to Bigger’s: he was a child of the rural South not the northern ghetto, a self-made intellectual and writer. But as a young man in Chicago he had had a series of menial jobs in hospitals and the postal service and could identify all too easily with Bigger’s anger at the white world. He had known Bigger’s fear of white people’s arbitrary power – in his view, this was the ‘fundamental emotion guiding black personality and behaviour,’ even if it sometimes appeared in the ‘disguise that is called Negro laughter.’ It wasn’t only whites he wanted to provoke with Native Son, but members of the decorous black middle class, who felt that a figure like Bigger Thomas was a threat to their precarious status on the margins of white America.

Native Son was a work of shocking intransigence in its portrayal of black rage, in its treatment of liberal whites and, above all, in its violence. After suffocating his employer’s daughter, Mary Dalton, with a pillow – he’s terrified that she might alert her blind mother to his presence in her bedroom, and that he might be accused of rape – Bigger slices up her corpse and burns it in a furnace. His violence is recounted as if it were the concentrated payback for hundreds of years of anti-black violence and humiliation, and described with graphic relish. When he murders his girlfriend, Bess, to prevent her from revealing his crime, he feels a rush of exhilaration: at last he has accomplished ‘something that was all his own,’ an act no one would have imagined him daring enough to execute. ‘Elation filled him.’ No longer emasculated by fear, no longer ‘a black timid Negro boy’ in a white man’s world, he has ‘a sense of wholeness,’ of power over his oppressors. He is a man who has ‘evened the score.’

Frantz Fanon drew on Native Son to examine the violent impulses that racism creates in its victims. ‘Bigger Thomas ... is afraid, terribly afraid. But afraid of what?’ Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. ‘Of himself. We don’t yet know who he is, but he knows that fear will haunt the world once the world finds out.’ For Fanon, Wright had shown that violence is a way to ‘put an end to the tension,’ to a ‘feeling of not existing’ in white-dominated society. ‘The black man is a toy in the hands of the white man. So in order to break the vicious circle, he explodes.’ For Bigger, murder provides an irresistible glimpse of freedom. It is ‘disintoxicating,’ as Fanon would write of anti-colonial violence in The Wretched of the Earth. ‘I didn’t want to kill,’ Bigger tells his lawyer, ‘but what I killed for, I am.’

It was hardly surprising that middle-class black readers had little desire to be associated with Bigger. But for Wright, Bigger Thomas was not – or not merely – a symbol of persecuted black masculinity. He was a symbol of the psychic injuries of oppression, rootlessness and dispossession under capitalism. Wright said that he had met defiant men like Bigger while growing up in segregated Mississippi, men who rebelled ‘at least for a sweet brief spell’ before they were ‘shot, hanged, maimed, lynched.’ But in Chicago and New York he had ‘made the discovery that Bigger Thomas was not black all the time ... and there were literally millions of him, everywhere. The extension of my sense of the personality of Bigger was the pivot of my life; it altered the complexion of my existence.’ As he became aware of ‘a vast, muddied pool of human life in America,’ he began to see that segregation was ‘an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and impersonal commodity-profit machine.’

Wright presented Bigger Thomas as the humiliated, alienated and dangerous ‘product of a dislocated society,’ seething with fear and envy, susceptible to fantasies of power, domination and revenge. ‘He liked to hear of how Japan was conquering China; of how Hitler was running the Jews to the ground; of how Mussolini was invading Spain.’ Wright obliquely alluded to Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement, with its fusion of black nationalism and militarist discipline. ‘Someday,’ Bigger muses, ‘there would be a black man who would whip the black people into a tight band and together they would act and end fear and shame.’ In linking social atomisation and fear, racism and authoritarianism, Native Son anticipated Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, and Wright suggested that Bigger ‘carried within himself the potentialities of either communism or fascism.’

Baldwin criticised Wright for overlooking the traditions, rituals and family relationships that protect and fortify black communities in even the most appalling conditions. But Wright wasn’t interested in the structures of support or mutual aid that enabled black people to survive as a collective. He was drawn to outcasts and desperados who had fallen through the cracks to find themselves adrift, naked, in mass society. He himself was a loner, never at ease in his own family, and hostile to the Church thanks to a grandmother who frowned on reading anything other than the Bible. His fiercest quarrels inside the Communist Party were with black militants who shared his working-class roots but didn’t trust him as one of them: he was too intellectual, too independent. He was unmoved by the promise of ‘another country’ where black Americans would at last be free. Unlike the young Baldwin, Wright doubted that such a country would ever exist in his homeland.

Why did Baldwin and others mistake Wright for a crude proletarian realist? His engagement with the Communist Party – he had been a leader of the Chicago John Reed Club, the CPUSA writers’ group, and published journalism in The New Masses – contributed, but Wright’s relationship with the party had always been stormy, particularly when it came to aesthetics. His 1937 manifesto, ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing,’ laid out the case for a radical, politically engaged modernism, and he had no time for sentimental depictions of the lives of the poor and oppressed. The direct, sometimes coarse prose of Native Son represented a deliberate rupture with comforting modes of realism. [….]

Wright’s publishers rejected the novel he at the time considered his most important, written between Native Son and Black Boy. An abridged version of The Man Who Lived Underground appeared in the posthumous collection Eight Men (1961) and attracted some influential admirers, including Irving Howe, who declared its ‘sense of narrative rhythm’ to be ‘superior to anything in his full-length novels.’ Despite this, the complete novel hasn’t appeared in print until now. It’s a short, riveting, exploratory work, begun in June 1941, after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Two weeks before the invasion, at the opening session of the fourth American Writers’ Congress, he had given a passionate speech against the war. To his fury, the CPUSA had suspended its campaign against racism in the war industries, and with the American military still segregated, he refused to support a white man’s army. (He was later drafted but declared psychologically unfit, apparently because of his views about racism.) Although he wasn’t yet ready to leave the party, he withdrew from its activities and poured all his energy into The Man Who Lived Underground.

The novel was inspired by a story Wright read in a detective magazine about a white man in California who lived for several months in a hideout. Wright’s protagonist, Fred Daniels, is black, but unlike Bigger Thomas he is also innocent. The novel begins on a Saturday evening when Daniels, a working-class, churchgoing man with a pregnant wife, is stopped by the police and accused of killing a white man in order to rape his wife. They beat him with a blackjack, and promise he can go home if he signs a confession. Although he’s innocent, he feels ‘condemned, inescapably guilty of some nameless deed,’ and agrees to confess, if only to end the agony and see his wife. When the police take him to his apartment she goes into labour. They rush her to hospital, where he manages to escape. He opens a sewer and climbs inside, sensing in ‘the whispering rush of the water’ the ‘illusion of another world with other values and other laws.’ As many critics have said, The Man Who Lived Underground seems startlingly contemporary in its treatment of police violence against an innocent black man. The story of the interrogation has particular resonances with the 1989 Central Park Five case, in which a group of black and Latino teenagers were manipulated into confessing to the rape of a white female jogger. Not surprisingly, The Man Who Lived Underground has been held up as a prescient indictment of the racist carceral state – a parable for the era of Black Lives Matter.

But this is another misrepresentation. In fact, the book is much less of a protest novel than Native Son, and takes even greater liberties with naturalism. Its setting and atmosphere – chases through sewers, frenzied manhunts – recall noirish films like Fritz Lang’s M and Carol Reed’s The Third Man. The writing combines the blunt rhythms of hard-boiled detective fiction with kinetic, almost phantasmagorical strokes, intensities of emotion and colour. As Howe observed of Native Son, ‘naturalism pushed to an extreme turns here into something other than itself, a kind of expressionist outburst, no longer a replica of the familiar social world but a self-contained realm of grotesque emblems.’ However much the novel may reveal about police brutality and racism, Wright thought of it as a novel of ideas rather than a book about racial injustice: as he told his agent, it was ‘the first time I’ve really tried to step beyond the straight black-white stuff.’

Daniels is a victim of police violence, but Wright’s narrative doesn’t hinge on his victimisation so much as on the mutations of his consciousness as he builds a new home for himself underground, illuminated by a single lightbulb. (Ellison, who knew all about Wright’s novella, equipped his own underground man with 1369 lightbulbs.) He steals money from a real-estate and insurance company that has ‘collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor coloured folks’ – ‘not to spend, but just to keep around and look at.’ He ‘rubbed the money with his fingers, as though expecting it suddenly to reveal secret qualities:’ this is money as Marx describes it in his essay on ‘the mysterious character of the commodity form.’ As Daniels observes ‘with a musing smile,’ it is ‘just like any other kind of paper,’ and he uses it to wallpaper his underground home, a ‘mocking symbol’ of his exile from the world that rejected him. When another man is accused of the theft he has committed he can only conclude that ‘everybody’s guilty.’ The contingency and artifice of the world outside, the ‘dead world of sunshine and rain he had left,’ leads him to the realisation that somehow ‘he was all people. In some utterable fashion he was all people and they were he.’ Rather than hardening his sense of individual identity, racist persecution leads him to an almost cosmic awareness of what he shares with others. One of the novel’s first readers was the German-Jewish psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who sent a poem in response:

‘The Freudians talk about the id
And bury it below.
But Richard Wright took off the lid
And let us see the woe.’

Wertham, a professor at Johns Hopkins who moved in left-wing circles, shared Wright’s conviction that there was ‘no other act … that so gathers together the threads of personal, social, political life of the nation as crime.’ Wright had written to Wertham after reading his book Dark Legend: A Study in Murder, about a young Italian immigrant who killed his sexually adventurous mother to defend the honour of his dead father. Wertham, in turn, published a remarkable essay on Native Son, linking the bedroom scene to a repressed episode from Wright’s childhood. They later joined forces to set up the Lafargue Clinic, which provided cheap psychiatric counselling for people in Harlem. Wright’s friendship with Wertham reflected his desire to fuse the insights of Marx and Freud – he said they were two of his favourite ‘poets’ – and apply them to the lives of oppressed people, especially victims of racism. ‘I’m convinced that the next great arena of discovery in the Negro will be the dark landscape of his own mind, what living in America has done to him,’ he wrote in his diary. [….]

The full essay is here, and it is well worth reading in its entirety, for I’ve left out all the material not directly relevant to our perhaps cursory introduction to anger and rage as it might pertain to facets of Black history and the struggle against racism up into our own time.

       

Anger: A Brief Reading Guide

• Averill, James. Anger and Aggression: An Essay on Emotion (Springer-Verlag, 1982).
• Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron. The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000).
• Briggs, Jean L. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Harvard University Press, 1970).
• (The) Dalai Lama (Geshe Thupten Jinpa, trans.) Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a Buddhist Perspective (Snow Lion Publications, 1997).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology (Rowman & Littlefield, 3rd ed., 2000).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. Buddhist and Freudian Psychology (Shogam Publications, 4th ed., 2010).
• Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Fisher, Philip. The Vehement Passions (Princeton University Press, 2002).
• Frijda, Nico H. The Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018)
• Harris, William V. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 2001).
• Heald, Suzette. Controlling Anger: The Anthropology of Gisu Violence (Ohio University Press, 1998).
• Kassinove, Howard, ed. Anger Disorders: Definition, Diagnosis, and Treatment (Routledge, 2013 [1995]).
• Murphy, Jeffrie G. and Jean Hampton. Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
• Nhât Hanh, Thich. Anger (Riverhead Books, 2001).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Roberts, Robert C. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Roberts, Robert C. Emotions in the Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Sarat, Austin and Nasser Hussain, eds. Forgiveness, Mercy, and Clemency (Stanford University Press, 2007).
• Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum, trans.) Anger, Mercy, Revenge (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
• Thurman, Robert A.F. Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Relevant Bibliographies (embedded links)

• After Slavery and Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization
• Blacks on the Left
• The Black Panther Party
• The Emotions
• Frantz Fanon
• Malcolm X
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Black Cosmopolitanism
• Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line: Human Liberation through Welfare, Well-Being, and Individual Flourishing
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy

For bibliophiles, readers, researchers … and perhaps the curious, or those with significant discretionary time

I recently completed three comparatively short bibliographies that may be of interest to some of our readers:

• Chinese Law and Legal History
• Coffee: cultivation, commodity, and culture
• Sugar

And among several bibliographies I recently updated, I’ve chosen three to highlight:

• Classical Chinese Worldviews
• The Emotions
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law

The Republic’s Liberal Democratic Constitutional Crisis — a flailing and failing capitalist democratic polity

First, please read (and share!), if you have not already, this article by Adolph Reed, Jr.: “The Whole Country is the Reichstag.” Then, please read, again, if you’ve not already done so (and share!), Neil H. Buchanan’s equally alarming analysis for Verdict, “Dead Democracy Walking.” Finally, what follows is a substantial portion from a recent opinion piece last month by Robert Kagan for The Washington Post (also share worthy). Alas, the people that absolutely should read this material will likely not do so. Together, they rightly strike an apocalyptic tone in a time and place in which denial, self-deception, and wishful thinking are tied to illusions and delusions that shape the minds of millions of our fellow Americans.

“Our constitutional crisis is already here”

By Robert Kagan, contributing columnist, The Washington Post

September 23, 2021

“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.” — James Madison

“The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

Meanwhile, the amateurish ‘stop the steal’ efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to ‘find’ more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may ‘revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election’ by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed ‘technical infractions,’ including obstructing the view of poll watchers.

The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.

Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.

Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.

These were not the checks and balances the Framers had in mind when they designed the Constitution, of course, but Trump has exposed the inadequacy of those protections. The Founders did not foresee the Trump phenomenon, in part because they did not foresee national parties. They anticipated the threat of a demagogue, but not of a national cult of personality. They assumed that the new republic’s vast expanse and the historic divisions among the 13 fiercely independent states would pose insuperable barriers to national movements based on party or personality. ‘Petty’ demagogues might sway their own states, where they were known and had influence, but not the whole nation with its diverse populations and divergent interests.

Such checks and balances as the Framers put in place, therefore, depended on the separation of the three branches of government, each of which, they believed, would zealously guard its own power and prerogatives. The Framers did not establish safeguards against the possibility that national-party solidarity would transcend state boundaries because they did not imagine such a thing was possible. Nor did they foresee that members of Congress, and perhaps members of the judicial branch, too, would refuse to check the power of a president from their own party

In recent decades, however, party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era. As the two Trump impeachments showed, if members of Congress are willing to defend or ignore the president’s actions simply because he is their party leader, then conviction and removal become all but impossible. In such circumstances, the Framers left no other check against usurpation by the executive — except (small-r) republican virtue.

Critics and supporters alike have consistently failed to recognize what a unique figure Trump is in American history. Because his followers share fundamentally conservative views, many see Trump as merely the continuation, and perhaps the logical culmination, of the Reagan Revolution. This is a mistake: Although most Trump supporters are or have become Republicans, they hold a set of beliefs that were not necessarily shared by all Republicans. Some Trump supporters are former Democrats and independents. In fact, the passions that animate the Trump movement are as old as the republic and have found a home in both parties at one time or another.

Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom — such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson. The Democratic Party was the home of white supremacists until they jumped to George Wallace in 1968 and later to the Republicans. Liberals and Democrats in particular need to distinguish between their ongoing battle with Republican policies and the challenge posed by Trump and his followers. One can be fought through the processes of the constitutional system; the other is an assault on the Constitution itself.

What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments. This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements. Although the Founders feared the rise of a king or a Caesar, for two centuries Americans proved relatively immune to unwavering hero-worship of politicians. Their men on horseback — Theodore Roosevelt, Grant, even Washington — were not regarded as infallible. This was true of great populist leaders as well. William Jennings Bryan a century ago was venerated because he advanced certain ideas and policies, but he did not enjoy unquestioning loyalty from his followers. Even Reagan was criticized by conservatives for selling out conservative principles, for deficit spending, for his equivocal stance on abortion, for being ‘soft’ on the Soviet Union.

Trump is different, which is one reason the political system has struggled to understand, much less contain, him. The American liberal worldview tends to search for material and economic explanations for everything, and no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — ‘losers,’ to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony. They view Trump as strong and defiant, willing to take on the establishment, Democrats, RINOs, liberal media, antifa, the Squad, Big Tech and the ‘Mitch McConnell Republicans.’ His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity. While Trump’s critics see him as too narcissistic to be any kind of leader, his supporters admire his unapologetic, militant selfishness. Unlike establishment Republicans, Trump speaks without embarrassment on behalf of an aggrieved segment of Americans, not exclusively White, who feel they have been taking it on the chin for too long. And that is all he needs to do.

There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to “deliver” for his constituents. But the most important thing Trump delivers is himself. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the “elites,” his followers see their own victimization. That is why attacks on Trump by the elites only strengthen his bond with his followers. That is why millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity: When Trump’s enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. One Trump supporter didn’t go to the hospital after developing covid-19 symptoms because he didn’t want to contribute to the liberal case against Trump. ‘I’m not going to add to the numbers,’ he told a reporter.

Because the Trump movement is less about policies than about Trump himself, it has undermined the normal role of American political parties, which is to absorb new political and ideological movements into the mainstream. Bryan never became president, but some of his populist policies were adopted by both political parties. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters might not have wanted Biden for president, but having lost the nomination battle they could work on getting Biden to pursue their agenda. Liberal democracy requires acceptance of adverse electoral results, a willingness to countenance the temporary rule of those with whom we disagree. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed, it requires that people ‘endure error in the interest of social peace.’ Part of that willingness stems from the belief that the democratic system makes it possible to work, even in opposition, to correct the ruling party’s errors and overreach. Movements based on ideas and policies can also quickly shift their allegiances. Today, the progressives’ flag-bearer might be Sanders, but tomorrow it could be Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or someone else.

For a movement built around a cult of personality, these adjustments are not possible. For Trump supporters, the ‘error’ is that Trump was cheated out of reelection by what he has told them is an oppressive, communist, Democrat regime. While the defeat of a sitting president normally leads to a struggle to claim the party’s mantle, so far no Republican has been able to challenge Trump’s grip on Republican voters: not Sen. Josh Hawley, not Sen. Tom Cotton, not Tucker Carlson, not Gov. Ron DeSantis. It is still all about Trump. The fact that he is not in office means that the United States is ‘a territory controlled by enemy tribes,’ writes one conservative intellectual. The government, as one Trump supporter put it, ‘is monopolized by a Regime that believes [Trump voters] are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them [from] getting it.’ If so, the intellectual posits, what choice do they have but to view the government as the enemy and to become “united and armed to take care of themselves as they think best”?

The Trump movement might not have begun as an insurrection, but it became one after its leader claimed he had been cheated out of reelection. For Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 were not an embarrassing debacle but a patriotic effort to save the nation, by violent action if necessary. As one 56-year-old Michigan woman explained: ‘We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.’

The banal normalcy of the great majority of Trump’s supporters, including those who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, has befuddled many observers. Although private militia groups and white supremacists played a part in the attack, 90 percent of those arrested or charged had no ties to such groups. The majority were middle-class and middle-aged; 40 percent were business owners or white-collar workers. They came mostly from purple, not red, counties.

Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities. Their bigotry, for the most part, is typical white American bigotry, perhaps with an added measure of resentment and a less filtered mode of expression since Trump arrived on the scene. But these are normal people in the sense that they think and act as people have for centuries. They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although zealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own.

As it happens, however, that is what the American experiment in republican democracy requires. It is what the Framers meant by ‘republican virtue,’ a love of freedom not only for oneself but also as an abstract, universal good; a love of self-government as an ideal; a commitment to abide by the laws passed by legitimate democratic processes; and a healthy fear of and vigilance against tyranny of any kind. Even James Madison, who framed the Constitution on the assumption that people would always pursue their selfish interests, nevertheless argued that it was ‘chimerical’ to believe that any form of government could ‘secure liberty and happiness without any virtue in the people.’ Al Gore and his supporters displayed republican virtue when they abided by the Supreme Court’s judgment in 2000 despite the partisan nature of the justices’ decision. (Whether the court itself displayed republican virtue is another question.)

The events of Jan. 6, on the other hand, proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past. While it might be shocking to learn that normal, decent Americans can support a violent assault on the Capitol, it shows that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. People do things as part of a mass movement that they would not do as individuals, especially if they are convinced that others are out to destroy their way of life.

It would be foolish to imagine that the violence of Jan. 6 was an aberration that will not be repeated. Because Trump supporters see those events as a patriotic defense of the nation, there is every reason to expect more such episodes. Trump has returned to the explosive rhetoric of that day, insisting that he won in a ‘landslide,’ that the “radical left Democrat communist party” stole the presidency in the ‘most corrupt, dishonest, and unfair election in the history of our country’ and that they have to give it back. He has targeted for defeat those Republicans who voted for his impeachment — or criticized him for his role in the riot. Already, there have been threats to bomb polling sites, kidnap officials and attack state capitols. “You and your family will be killed very slowly,” the wife of Georgia’s top election official was texted earlier this year. Nor can one assume that the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers would again play a subordinate role when the next riot unfolds. Veterans who assaulted the Capitol told police officers that they had fought for their country before and were fighting for it again. Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, Trump insists “there is no way they win elections without cheating. There’s no way.” So, if the results come in showing another Democratic victory, Trump’s supporters will know what to do. Just as “generations of patriots” gave “their sweat, their blood and even their very lives” to build America, Trump tells them, so today “we have no choice. We have to fight” to restore “our American birthright.”

Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which Trump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride Trump’s coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business. Yet Trump’s triumph also had elements of a hostile takeover. The movement’s passion was for Trump, not the party. GOP primary voters chose Trump over the various flavors of establishment Republicanism (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio), and after Trump’s election they continued to regard establishment Republicans as enemies. Longtime party heroes like Paul Ryan were cast into oblivion for disparaging Trump. Even staunch supporters such as Jeff Sessions eventually became villains when they would not do as Trump demanded. Those who survived had a difficult balancing act: to use Trump’s appeal to pass the Republican agenda while also controlling Trump’s excesses, which they worried could ultimately threaten the party’s interests.

That plan seemed plausible in 2017. Unlike other insurgent leaders, Trump had not spent time in the political wilderness building a party and surrounding himself with loyalists. He had to choose from an existing pool of Republican officials, who varied in their willingness to do his bidding. The GOP establishment hoped that the presence of “adults” would restrain him, protecting their traditional agenda and, in their view, the country’s interests, from his worst instincts.

This was a miscalculation. Trump’s grip on his supporters left no room for an alternative power center in the party. One by one, the “adults” resigned or were run off. The dissent and contrary opinions that exist in every party — the Northeast moderate Republicans in Reagan’s day; the progressives in today’s Democratic Party — disappeared from Trump’s Republican Party. The only real issue was Trump himself, and on that there could be no dissent. Those who disapproved of Trump could either keep silent or leave.

The takeover extended beyond the level of political leadership. Modern political parties are an ecosystem of interest groups, lobby organizations, job seekers, campaign donors and intellectuals. All have a stake in the party’s viability; all ultimately depend on being roughly aligned with wherever the party is at a given moment; and so all had to make their peace with Trump, too. Conservative publications that once opposed him as unfit for the presidency had to reverse course or lose readership and funding. Pundits had to adjust to the demands of their pro-Trump audiences — and were rewarded handsomely when they did. Donors who had opposed Trump during the primaries fell into line, if only to preserve some influence on the issues that mattered to them. Advocacy organizations that had previously seen their role as holding the Republican Party to certain principles, and thus often dissented from the party leadership, either became advocates for Trump or lost clout.

It was no surprise that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. As for conservative intellectuals, even those who had spent years arguing that Woodrow Wilson was a tyrant because he created the Federal Reserve and supported child labor laws seemed to have no concerns about whether Trump was a would-be despot. They not only came to Trump’s defense but fashioned political doctrines to justify his rule, filling in the wide gaps of his nonexistent ideology with an appeal to “conservative nationalism” and conservative populism. Perhaps American conservatism was never comfortable with the American experiment in liberal democracy, but certainly since Trump took over their party, many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.

All this has left few dissenting voices within the Republican ecosystem. The Republican Party today is a zombie party. Its leaders go through the motions of governing in pursuit of traditional Republican goals, wrestling over infrastructure spending and foreign policy, even as real power in the party has leached away to Trump. From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.

With the party firmly under his thumb, Trump is now fighting the Biden administration on separate fronts. One is normal, legitimate political competition, where Republicans criticize Biden’s policies, feed and fight the culture wars, and in general behave like a typical hostile opposition.

The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and into the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield Trump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Thus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, in their roles as party leaders, run interference for the Trump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, while Republicans in lesser positions cheer on the Jan. 6 perpetrators, turning them into martyrs and heroes, and encouraging illegal acts in the future.

This pincer assault has several advantages. Republican politicians and would-be policymakers can play the role of the legitimate opposition. They can rediscover their hawkish internationalist foreign policy (suspended during the Trump years) and their deficit-minded economics (also suspended during the Trump years). They can go on the mainstream Sunday shows and critique the Biden administration on issues such as Afghanistan. They can pretend that Trump is no longer part of the equation. Biden is the president, after all, and his administration is not exactly without faults.

Yet whatever the legitimacy of Republican critiques of Biden, there is a fundamental disingenuousness to it all. It is a dodge. Republicans focus on China and critical race theory and avoid any mention of Trump, even as the party works to fix the next election in his favor. The left hand professes to know nothing of what the right hand is doing.

Even Trump opponents play along. Republicans such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse have condemned the events of Jan. 6, criticized Trump and even voted for his impeachment, but in other respects they continue to act as good Republicans and conservatives. On issues such as the filibuster, Romney and others insist on preserving “regular order” and conducting political and legislative business as usual, even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.

The result is that even these anti-Trump Republicans are enabling the insurrection. Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties. All that is reason enough to expect another challenge, for what movement would fail to take advantage of such favorable circumstances to make a play for power?

Today, we are in a time of hope and illusion. The same people who said that Trump wouldn’t try to overturn the last election now say we have nothing to worry about with the next one. Republicans have been playing this game for five years, first pooh-poohing concerns about Trump’s intentions, or about the likelihood of their being realized, and then going silent, or worse, when what they insisted was improbable came to pass. These days, even the anti-Trump media constantly looks for signs that Trump’s influence might be fading and that drastic measures might not be necessary.

The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.

But this time, Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then?” [….] The rest of this urgent opinion piece is here.

“Why are you carrying a gun?”

The reply to this question: “I carry a gun because it is my constitutional right to do so,” is not to proffer a compelling or persuasive or even honest answer as to precisely why one in fact believes it is necessary to carry a gun. One may of course supply any number of reasons (reasons ranging from the incoherent or false to the sensible and true, or the plausible to sound and so forth) to explain why one is carrying a gun, the putative constitutional right only accounting for the fact that one is carrying a gun is not a presumptive reason for a criminal offense (or that one is abiding by the law) as well as the fact that the sundry reasons one might proffer by way of an explanation are backed by an (alleged) constitutional liberty (one I happen to think does not does or should not exist, but that is beside the point for now). The knowledge of this alleged right often works in subsidiary conjunction with the actual reason(s) one has for carrying a gun. Thus, one is legally permitted, according to the prevailing interpretation of the first and second clauses of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (the axiomatic logic of which begins by stating the necessity of a ‘well-regulated Militia’ for ‘the security of a free State’), to carry a gun, but to invoke that as a necessary and sufficient reason for why one is carrying a gun is to avoid providing even a plausible or truthful reason for doing so, thus one is in fact not answering the question, “Why are you carrying a gun?” To properly answer the question one has to provide a minimal practical reason for one’s decision to exercise this particular (putative) constitutional liberty.

Water as a Natural Resource, Common Good, and Commodity: A Basic Bibliography

My latest bibliography: Water as a Natural Resource, Common Good, and Commodity, is available on my Academia page for viewing or download (in pdf format).

A brief introduction to the history and political economy of sugar

       

“Sugar has always been central to industry and empire, and has transformed global economic history. Slave driven sugar mills of the seventeenth century were one of the earliest factories. But the history of sugar predates these modern developments. It is a history that witnesses the transformation of an unassuming plant into a global commodity. For most of its existence, sugar in the human diet was a luxury that came in the form of sucrose extracted from sugar cane. Only in the nineteenth century did sugar beet become a competitor to sugar cane. And only starting in the 1970s did sucrose start losing out to high-fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners that dominate the contemporary industrialized [agricultural] diet.

What began as a grass native to Southeast Asia was picked up in Persia by Arab traders. They were the first to introduce sugar to the European palate, as the Umayyad Empire expanded into Europe through Spain and Sicily during the seventh and eighth centuries CE. Later, crusaders established sugar plantations in the Levan and Mesopotamia, and brought new of what was considered and exotic spice from the Orient. European nobility then started to incorporate sugar as a luxurious additive, elevating the flavor of food and forming part of the stock for apothecaries. By 1440, sugar began replacing honey in the diet of European nobility. [Fernand] Braudel notes [in Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th-18^th Century, Vol, II: The Wheels of Commerce (1982)] that in 1544 there was a German saying, Zucker verderbt keine Speis (‘sugar spoils no dish’).

Sugar first came to the so-called New World on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493. This set the foundation for centuries of African slave labor sustaining sugar cane plantations in the Americas. By the seventeenth century, the French and British had acquired a voracious appetite for coffee, tea, and cocoa; because of this hot beverage revolution, sugar was no longer a luxury item and became an everyday good. The British were one of the first nations to move away from a starch-rich diet towards a sugar-rich diet. By the end of the eighteenth century, sugar was a staple in Britain, as many cups of sweet tea were incorporated into the diets of workers, providing a ‘calorie-laden stimulant that warms the body and blunts the pangs of hunger.’ [Sidney] Mintz notes that this change in diet coincided with the Industrial Revolution, exemplifying one sort of modernization. [….]

       

Sugar is central to the colonial history of the formation of many states and territories, such as Hawaii, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Indonesia, India, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Some suggest that sugar was the driving force of imperial expansion. Others propose that imperial expansion reduced the price of sugar, enabling popular consumption. Regardless, sugar (along with coffee, tea, and cocoa) played an important part in the expansion of the British and other European empires.

Sugar may very well have been central to the history of modern trade law because the nature of sugar production lends itself to competing transnational interests. Sugar cane harvested from the fields must be processed into raw sugar. The mill that processes cane into raw sugar must be close to the fields to ensure that the cane does not spoil. One mill would be a center of power fed by multiple peripheral sugar cane fields. As such, mill owners often constituted a sugar elite within their own country, with ties to international capital, or were owned by foreign investors. People could eat moist, raw sugar, but the demand was highest for white, refined sugar. Refining was also where much of sugar’s economic value was added. Most refineries were located in industrialized countries. One refinery might source its raw sugar from different points around the world. Thus, there was also a global pattern of an industrialized center drawing sugar from mills in the periphery. All of this created a relationship of dependence and disparity of power between sugar growers and sugar refineries.” — Michael Fakhri, Sugar and the Making of International Trade Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

A mere taste of the relevant literature:

• Abbott, Elizabeth. Sugar: A Bittersweet History (Penguin Canada, 2008).
• Ayala, César J. American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
• Beachey, R.W. The British West Indies Sugar Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Basil Blackwell, 1957).
• Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (Verso, 1997).
• Dye, Alan. Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929 (Stanford University Press, 1998).
• Fakhri, Michael. Sugar and the Making of International Trade Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
• Galloway, Jock H. The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
• McGillivray, Gillian. Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959 (Duke University Press, 2009).
• Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Viking Penguin, 1985).
• Richardson, Ben. Sugar: Refined Power in a Global Regime (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
• Richardson, Ben. Sugar (Polity Press, 2015).
• Schwartz, Stuart B. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
• Sheridan, Richard. Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies (Caribbean Universities Press, 1974).
• Sitterson, J. Carlyle. Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950 (University of Kentucky Press, 1953).
• Williams, Eric. Capitalism & Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944]).

The three images above are found on the website Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora.

My bibliography on slavery is here.

British Imperialism in India: Economics, Politics, and Ideology

          
My brief reading guide on British imperialism in India is now available for viewing (or download in pdf format) here.

It joins a number of other compilations related in one way or another to India, both its past and present:

• B.R. Ambedkar
• Communism in India
• Constitutionalism in India
• The Life, Work, and Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi
• Hinduism
• Indian/Indic Philosophies
• Jainism
• The Varna & Caste System in India

Please note: I also have a fair number of bibliographies on my Academia page (listed in alphabetical order) about various dimensions of Islam and the lives of Muslims with material on this or that aspect of Islam and Muslim life in India.

       

Finally, here is a perhaps idiosyncratic list I put together on “many-things-Indian,” from history and economics, to politics and culture, which should serve by way of a sophisticated introduction for those fairly new to the “wonder that was” and wonder that is, India.

• Alam, Fakrul and Radha Chakravarty, eds. The Essential Tagore. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Anderson, Perry. The Indian Ideology. London: Verso, 2013.
• Arora, Namit. Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization. Gurgaon, Haryana, India: Penguin Viking, 2021.
• Bardhan, Pranab. Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Bass, Gary J. The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan. New York: Vintage Books, 2013.
• Berenschot, Ward. Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• Bilgrami, Akeel. Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal, eds. Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013.
• Choudhry, Sujit, Madhav Khosla, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Dalrymple, William. The Last Mughal—The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
• Desai, Meghnad. The Rediscovery of India. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011 (Allen Lane, 2009).
• Desai, Radhika. Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics. New Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2004.
• Dhar, P.N. Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Drèze Jean and Amartya Sen. An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
• Frankel, Francine, et al., eds. Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Ganguly, Sumit and Rahul Mukherji. India since 1980. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Gidla, Sujatha. Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
• Guha, Ramchandra. India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. New York: Ecco, 2007.
• Guha, Ramchandra, ed. Makers of Modern India. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Habib, Irfan, ed. Akbar and His India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Hansen, Thomas Blom. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe. Religion, Caste and Politics in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe, ed.  Hindu Nationalism: A Reader. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
• Jayal, Niraja Gopal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds. The Oxford Companion to Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Jenkins, Rob. Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Kihlnani, Sunil. The Idea of India. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
• Kohli, Atul, ed. The Success of India’s Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Larson, Gerald James. India’s Agony Over Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995.
• McLeod, Hew. Sikkhism. London: Penguin Books, 1997.
• Metcalf, Barbara D. and Thomas R. Metcalf. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2^nd ed., 2006.
• Moosvi, Shireen. Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994.
• Nikam, N.A. and Richard P. McKeon, ed. and trans. The Edicts of Aśoka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Robins, Nick. The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational. London: Pluto Press, 2^nd ed., 2012.
• Robinson, Francis. The Mughal Emperors and the Islamic Dynasties of India, Iran, and Central Asia. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
• Ruparelia, Sanjay, Sanjay Reddy, John Harris, and Stuart Corbridge, eds. Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation? London: Routledge, 2011.
• Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India. Penguin, 2007.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. A Restatement of Religion: Swami Vivekananda and the Making of Hindu Nationalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
• Strong, John S. The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
• Thapar, Romila. Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. New York: Oxford University Press, revised ed., 1998.
• Vanaik, Achin. The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India. London: Verso, 1996.
• Varshney, Ashutosh. Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Warder, A.K. Indian Buddhism. Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass, 3^rd ed., 2000.          
• Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. New York: Oxford University Press, 6^th ed., 2000.

The USS Kitty Hawk “mutiny” as part of greater antiwar resistance among sailors from 1970-1972

During the American war in Vietnam on the night of October 12/13, 1972,* a racial conflict between white and black sailors aboard the United States Navy aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk escalated into a “mutiny” or “riot” or “rebellion,” presumably led by African American sailors (‘The ship’s complement consisted of 4,483 sailors, aircrew, and Marines, 302 of whom were black.’). Accounts vary as to what precisely precipitated the mutiny (and various conditions contributed to the proximate causes), one stating it began when Marines attempted to disrupt a protest meeting of black sailors. The meeting had been called in response to what occurred when the warship was in Subic Bay, the night before its scheduled departure:

“…[S]erious fighting erupted at the Subic Bay men’s club, the San Paquito. On the evening of the twelfth, after the first full day of combat in the Tonkin Gulf, the ship’s intelligence investigator exacerbated still smoldering tensions by calling in only black sailors for questioning and possible criminal action related to the brawl at Subic. Outraged at what they considered blatant discrimination, over one hundred blacks gathered for an angry meeting on the mess deck at approximately 8 P.M. The ship’s Marine detachment was summoned to suppress the meeting, and an explosive situation soon developed. Commander Benjamin Cloud, the executive officer and a black man himself, entered the area and attempted to restore calm by ordering the blacks and the Marines to separate ends of the ship. Moments later, however, Captain Marland Townsend, the commanding officer, arrived and issued conflicting orders. As confusion spread, the blacks and the armed Marines encountered each other unexpectedly on the hangar deck, and a bitter clash quickly broke out. The fighting spread rapidly, with bands of blacks and whites marauding throughout the ship’s decks and attacking each other with fists, chains, wrenches, and pipes. [….] Finally, after a 2:30 A.M. meeting in the ship’s forecastle, the fighting subsided. The uprising left forty whites and six blacks injured. Of the twenty-five sailors arrested for the incident, all were black.” (David Cortright)

Twenty-nine sailors–all but three of them black–eventually were charged with crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and 19 were found guilty of at least one charge.

The “mutiny” should be viewed as part of widespread antiwar protests within the US armed forces, in this case, as part of the movement called SOS (Stop Our Ships/Support Our Sailors). H. Bruce Franklin provides the requisite historical context which should preclude us from reducing this incident to solely racial tensions and provocations:

“In 1970 and 1971, ships had been sporadically forced out of action by outbreaks and even sabotage by crew members. Occasional inconspicuous newspaper articles allowed perceptive members of the general public to get inklings of what was happening to the fleet. An early example was the destroyer Richard B. Anderson, which was kept from sailing to Vietnam for eight weeks when crew members deliberately wrecked an engine. Toward the end of 1971, the sailors’ antiwar activities coalesced into a coherent movement called SOS (Stop Our Ships/Support Our Sailors) that emerged on three of the gigantic aircraft carriers crucial to the Tonkin Gulf Strategy [and later, Operation Linebacker]: the USS Constellation, the USS Coral Sea, and the USS Kitty Hawk. (One early act was a petition by 1,500 crew members of the Constellation demanding that Jane Fonda’s antiwar show be allowed to perform on board.) On these three ships alone that fall, thousands of crew members signed antiwar petitions, published onboard antiwar newspapers, and supported the dozens of crew members who refuse to board for Vietnam duty.

In March 1972 the aircraft carrier USS Midway received orders to leave San Francisco Bay for Vietnam. A wave of protests and sabotage swept the ship, hitting the press when dissident crewmen deliberately spilled three thousand gallons of oil into the bay. In June the attack carrier USS Ranger was ordered to sail from San Diego to Vietnam. The Naval Investigative Service reported large-scale clandestine movement among the crew and at least twenty acts of physical sabotage, culminating in the destruction of the main reduction gear of an engine; repairs forced a four-and-a-half month delay in the ship’s sailing. In July the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal was prevented from sailing by a major fire deliberately set by crewmen, which caused millions of dollars of damage to the captain’s and admiral’s quarters of the ship. In September and October the crew of the Corral Sea, which had been publishing the antiwar newspaper We Are Everywhere for a year, staged renewed protests against the war, with over a thousand crewmen signing a petition to “Stop Our Ship.” It was forced to return to San Francisco Bay, where crew members held a national press conference and helped organize rallies and other demonstrations. Almost a hundred crew members, including several officers, refused Vietnam service and jumped ship in California and Hawaii. In September crew members of the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga organized their own “Stop It Now” movement, and navy intelligence tried unsuccessfully to break up the SOS movement on the showpiece carrier USS Enterprise, home of the antiwar paper SOS Enterprise Ledger. A bloody September battle between groups of marines on the amphibious landing ship USS Sumter in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam was not made public until the following January.”

Franklin proceeds to note the outbreak that took place on the Kitty Hawk—“where organized antiwar activities (including publication of the antiwar paper Kitty Litter) had continued during its eight-month tour off Vietnam”—only to be followed several days later by fighting on the Kitty Hawk’s oiler, the USS Hassayampa. “The Kitty Hawk was forced to retire to San Diego, whence it sailed to San Francisco in early January, where it underwent a ‘six-month refitting job.’ The sailors’ movement had thus removed this major aircraft carrier from the war.”

That “Black Power” ideology and political praxis was making inroads among African American soldiers in the antiwar movement is evidenced in what is described as the “largest and most significant” of these antiwar protests and rebellions, namely, one that took place aboard the USS Constellation in early November 1972, and “has been aptly described as ‘the first mass mutiny in the history of the U.S. Navy.’”

Friends and family of Kitty Hawk SOS sailors wait at Fleet Landing in San Diego to distribute copies of the ‘Kitty Litter,’ the sailors’ anti-war underground newspaper. Photo by Norman L. Bleier

“In October, during training operations off the Southern California coast, black crew members formed an organization called the ‘Black Fraction,’ with the aim of protecting minority interests in promotion policies and in the administration of military justice. Throughout October the group held several meetings, including one attended by the ship’s executive officer, where programs were developed to defend blacks subjected to court-martial proceedings and to examine the ship’s records for evidence of discrimination in non-judicial punishment. As the organization grew in strength, the command, on November 1, singled out fifteen leading members of Black Fraction as agitators and ordered that six of them be given immediate less-than-honorable discharges. At approximately the same time, a notice appeared in the ship’s plan of the day announcing that 250 additional men were to be administratively discharged. Fearing that most of these punitive releases would be directed at them and angry at the command’s apparent efforts to suppress their activities, over one hundred sailors, including a number of whites, staged a sit-in at the after mess deck on November 3 and demanded that the ship’s commander, Captain J.D. Ward, personally hear their grievances. The captain refused to acknowledge them, however, and the dissidents continued their strike throughout the day and into the early morning hours on November 4, refusing a direct order to report for muster on the flight deck. As tensions aboard the ship mounted, a series of high-level consultations were held among Captain Ward, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Zumwalt in Washington, and other senior naval commanders. To avert another Kitty Hawk, the officials reluctantly decided to cut sea operations short and return the rebels to San Diego as a ‘beach detachment.’ Captain Ward pulled the ship into the harbor on the fourth and allowed more hand one hundred thirty men to go ashore. The Constellation returned a few days later to pick up the dissidents, but the men refused to board ship, and on the morning of November 9 staged a defiant dockside strike—perhaps the largest act of mass defiance in naval history. Despite the seriousness of their action, not one of the one hundred thirty sailors was arrested. Several of the men received early discharges, but most were simply reassigned to shore duty.” (David Cortright)

* The date is sometimes given as Oct. 8, as that is when the USS Kitty Hawk was docked at Subic Bay, in the City of Olongapo, the Philippines, wherein racial segregation was enforced. On that evening, a black sailor went on stage at the enlisted men’s club [the EM Club] and shouted “Black power! This war is the white man’s war!” A glass was thrown that hit him in the head, and a fight between blacks and whites broke out. “Around 12:30 am on October 9, another incident occurred when a black airman, Dwight Horton, was en route to the ship. He was arrested for fighting with two white petty officers, though he contested that they beat him, arguing he could not fight back because his arm was in a cast. When he returned to the Kitty Hawk, the airman told the other black sailors about what happened, which further agitated them.”

References:

• Cortright, David. Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2005 (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975).
• Fanklin, H. Bruce. Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.
• Freeman, Gregory A. Troubled Water: Race, Mutiny, and Bravery on the USS Kitty Hawk. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
• Sherwood, John Darrell. Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet during the Vietnam War Era. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

Relevant Bibliography: The Vietnam War (or, the ‘American War’ in Indochina)

Reading Books in Prison

“A Canon for the American Prisoner”

John J. Lennon in conversation with Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Review of Books, Oct. 5, 2021

Everyone needs to escape sometimes—in their minds. But to read involves examining the deeper way people live their lives. That is happening in fiction in a way that it’s not on television (except in the best kind of TV drama). There’s something that books do for us that we just can’t get anywhere else. This is critically important for people in prison because so much of prison is trying to master the art of becoming: Who do you want to become?

*          *          *

I went to prison a kid, and books literally saved my life.

*          *          *

This is what Freedom Reads is about. It’s creating opportunities for the conversation that goes: ‘Yo, you should check this book out: Paradise Lost.’ ‘Nah, I ain’t trying to read that.’ ‘Yo, John wrote the intro. Check that joint out, man! He actually mapped it out. This is about what we dealing with.’ When we read a book in community, your reaction may be: ‘I think the book means this.’ To which, I’m saying: ‘I don’t know, man; maybe it doesn’t mean that. Maybe it means this.’ And voicing your opinion about that gives the book room to become something else, and gives us room to become something else.

In 2001, Reginald Dwayne Betts was about five years into a nine-year sentence in a Virginia prison for a carjacking he’d committed at age sixteen. That was the year that I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street, when I was twenty-four years old. I am now twenty years into a sentence of twenty-eight years-to-life. In that time, I’ve become a journalist writing from prison. Since his release, Betts has become an acclaimed poet and attorney. His 2018 article for The New York Times Magazine about his journey from teenage carjacker to working lawyer won the National Magazine Award. His most recent collection of poetry, Felon, explores the post-incarceration experience; just last month, he was appointed one of the 2021 MacArthur fellows (an award commonly known as the “genius grant”).

I currently live in Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison set in New York’s Catskill Mountains. It was a creative writing workshop in Attica, of all places, that led me toward my vocation. In 2019, I wrote a review of Felon and Betts saw it, responding in a tweet: “I’m certain no one has written anything about my writing and life that has hit me so hard in the gut.” With this connection, Dwayne and I subsequently became friends. (Currently, in his capacity as a lawyer, he is pursuing a clemency petition for me, among others.)

Through Betts, I have become involved in the initiative he created in 2019, Freedom Reads, to curate microlibraries and install them in prisons and juvenile detention centers across the United States and Puerto Rico. It’s a project close to his heart.

“I did time where knowledge was always obtained a book at a time,” Betts told me, when I called him recently, “and a lot of the knowledge was bootleg, things I’d later discard as absurd, things that sowed hate or envy or just misinformation.”

Dudley Randall’s anthology The Black Poets and John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers were two books that came around on the cart when he was in solitary confinement. Those two will likely be among the titles in the five-hundred-book collections that Freedom Reads is putting together, the first to be installed in Massachusetts’s Norfolk (where Malcolm X once served time) and Concord, with five by the end of 2021, and Louisiana’s Angola soon to follow.

When Betts got out of prison, in 2005, he enrolled at Prince George’s Community College and took a job at Karibu Books, a bookstore in Bowie, Maryland. He started a book club there, aiming to encourage boys to read, which soon brought in groups of kids aged between six and sixteen on Sunday afternoons to talk about writers from August Wilson to Walter Dean Myers.

Betts went on to the University of Maryland at College Park and earned his bachelor’s degree, then got an MFA from Warren Wilson College and began his writing career. Before long, he was a published author: his books include A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (2009) and the poetry collections Shahid Reads His Own Palm (2010) and Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015). Now he’s pursuing a PhD at Yale Law School.

Today, I can be sure that whenever I call from the prison yard, Dwayne will always pick up. We talk about the magazine pieces we’re writing, the solo theater piece he’s working on. We’ve become writing partners, keeping each other honest with identical due dates for our book manuscripts. And, of course, we talk about the Freedom Reads library. His latest inspiration for the project has been to enlist an array of journalists, novelists, and poets to write new forewords, in the form of letters, for sixteen classics that Freedom Reads will publish under its own imprint as new editions for the collection.

Nicholas Dawidoff is writing a letter for Great Expectations, Jamaica Kincaid is contributing one for Jane Eyre, as is George Saunders for Dubliners. The list of contributors also includes Nikole Hannah-Jones, Marlon James, Laila Lalami, and Kiese Laymon. (I am writing a letter for Paradise Lost, so resonant with themes of envy, pride, disobedience, and redemption.) Betts’s hope is that these new editions, along with access to many other well-chosen books, will lead people in prison to read these classic works of literature and find a way to the imaginative freedom great writing offers. What follows is an edited transcript of our recent conversation about what reading in prison can mean. [….] The transcript of the conversation (the remainder of the essay) is here.

See too this piece from Mother Jones, “Books Have the Power to Rehabilitate. But Prisons Are Blocking Access to Them,” by Samantha Michaels (with photos by Carlos Chavarría), January/February 2020.  

Recommended:

• Bernstein, Lee (2010) America is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Brottman, Mikita (2016) The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s New York: HarperCollins.
• Chevigeny, Bell Gale, ed. (1999) Doing Time: Twenty-Five Years of Prison Writing. New York: Aracade.
• Coyle, William J. (1987) Libraries in Prisons: A Blending of Institutions. New York: Greenwood Press.
• Davies, Ioan (1990) Writers in Prison. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
• Desai, Ashwin (2014/Unisa Press, 2012) Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
• Franklin, H. Bruce (1978) The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Franklin, H. Bruce (1998) Prison Writing in Twentieth Century America. New York: Penguin Books.
• Fyfe, Janet (1992) Books Behind Bars: The Role of Books, Reading, and Libraries in British Reform, 1701-1911. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
• Harlow, Barbara (1992) Barred: Women, Writing and Political Detention. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
• James, Joy, ed. (2003) Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• James, Joy, ed. (2005) The New Abolitionists: (neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Johnson, Paula C. (2003) Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison. New York: New York University Press.
• Karpowitz, Daniel (2017) College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Kornfeld, Phyllis (1997) Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe (2016) Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison. New York: New Press.
• Melville, Samuel (1972) Letters from Attica. New York: William Morrow and Co.
• Miller, D. Quentin, ed. (2005) Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
• Monroe, Gary (2009) The Highway Men Murals: Al Black’s Concrete Dreams. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
• Peltier, Leonard (Harvey Arden, ed.) (1999) Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
• Sachs, Albie (1990) The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. London: Paladin/Grafton Books.
• Salinas, Raúl (Louis G. Mendoza, ed.) (2006) raúlsalinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon is My Pen. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
• Scheffler, Judith A., ed. (2002) Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women’s Prison Writings, 200 [CE] to the Present. New York: Feminist Press.
• Schorb, Jodi. (2014) Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700-1845. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Barbara, ed. (1992) A Snake with Ice Water: Prison Writings by South African Women. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers.
• Suttner, Raymond (2001) Inside Apartheid’s Prisons: Notes and Letters of Struggle. Melbourne: Ocean Press/Pietermaritzburg, SA: University of Natal Press.
• Sweeney, Megan (2010) Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Waldman, Ayelet and Robin Levi, eds. (2011) Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons. San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s Books and Voice of Witness.

Related Bibliography: Punishment and Prison

What does it mean to be “pro-life”?

Political slogans are not meant to enlighten but to motivate (and perhaps polarize, intentionally or not), whatever part of the political spectrum from which they originate. In fact, they are often more obfuscatory than revelatory with regard to meaning and reference, serving largely as political signals and markers of political identity that drawn hard and fast lines between “us” and “them.” Arguably, political slogans on the Right exemplify these few salient facts better than those originating from the Left. To take one example, consider the “pro-life” rhetoric of right-wing evangelical opponents of abortion (and sometimes euthanasia) and their fellow travelers (many Catholics and putative conservatives). How is it that people who are, generally speaking (hence we can find exceptions to the rule), fanatic activists for “gun-rights,” perfervid militaristic patriots (they can be counted on to support all manner of militaristic adventurism and war), religious (and often ethnic) nationalists (ethno- and religious nationalism being the most dangerous and violent species of contemporary nationalism), against the Welfare State (whatever form it takes, the liberal version in the U.S. the weakest and stingiest of the available forms), against COVID vaccinations and preventative public health measures (the wearing of masks the most conspicuous and effective example of same), for the death penalty, and so forth and so on (when it comes to foreign policy, they prefer ‘dirty hands’ to clean ones). In brief, the slogan “pro-life” encompasses very little of what we might naturally or intuitively (and often should) think constitutes pro-life and thus not its converse, which it conceals and which in fact better symbolizes or represents a political worldview orientation that is relentlessly regressive and anti-democratic.

Thus pro-life rhetoric might be considered to incarnate and exemplify ideology ridden with contradictions and debilitating psychological phenomena for individuals and groups along a spectrum exhibiting episodic denial and self-deception, to chronic illusions and delusions (or simply pathological phantasies), some of these emblematic of psychosis. Without going into Freud’s controversial argument for a “death drive,” which is more suggestive and provocative than it is precise and explanatory (be it for mental repetition or human aggression), it does seem to be the case that what is ostensibly “pro-life” is, all things considered, “pro-death,” or exemplifying something akin to a death-drive (Trieb), be it analogically or metaphorically rendered. Loosely, the following mental states, emotions, and activities are said in one way or another to be suggestive of the death drive: a fear of falling apart or fragmentation or disintegration; destructiveness, including self-destructiveness (e.g., self-harming and suicide), intransigent hostility to the outside world or “reality;” envy; sadism; and strong, especially or peculiarly aggressive libidinal desires. Thus this death drive can be directed inward and/or outward, separately or simultaneously. This may amount, in the end, to a universal (unconscious or subconscious) wish or desire for the “the solace of dissolution” (Stephen Frosh). The death drive cannot be reduced, however, to a “lust for destruction and hate” if only because it enables if not moves us to think more about “those things cannot easily be wished away, but keep returning to plague us until we find ways of [satisfactorily] dealing with them—sadness and loss, failure and trauma, war and unbearable suffering,” as well as less dramatic cognitive and psychological phenomena from cognitive dissonance to dispositional vices (or ‘deadly sins’) and “the passions.” In Freudian terms, “pro-life” should mean what Freud conceptualized as the life drive or Eros,* having to do with the force of love, that is, the “libidinal energy that elaborates life and fuels the capacity of humans to come together to create and procreate,” and which “can be harnessed in opposition to destructiveness.”

I should add that one should not attempt to infer my views about abortion from this post, as these are shaped by Buddhism and do not line up with either of the typical expressions of “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” while acknowledging the law is not always appropriate for the enforcement of morality or ethics, despite conceding that abortion involves the taking of a life (and thus often but not invariably is an immoral or ‘evil’ act, one that includes mitigating factors) and thus has karmic consequences. I hope to post more on this later but should one be curious, please see Peter Harvey’s discussion in the chapter on “abortion and contraception” in his book, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000): 311-352.

* See, for example, Jonathan Lear’s Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990) as well as a slightly different take on “love” in Freudian psychoanalysis proffered by Ernest Wallwork’s Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991).

Image: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Rightful Original Acquisition of Private Property?

If you’ve not seen it, please see the earlier post, “(private) property is theft,” before reading this one.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. The human race would have been spared endless crimes, wars, murders, and horrors if someone had pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men, ‘Do not listen to this impostor! You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone, and the earth to no one!’ — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1755)

“In ‘our’ [scare quotes added] philosophical tradition, arguments about the justification of property have often been presented as genealogies: as stories about the way in which private property might have emerged in a world that was hitherto unacquainted with the institution.” — Jeremy Waldron

Waldron’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry, “Property and Ownership,” from which this quote was taken, does not deal with these or comparable ideas outside of the Western philosophical tradition. Furthermore, he has a rather strange conclusion to the section on “Genealogies of Property:”

“Finally, we should not forget that not all genealogies set out to flatter the practices or institutions they purport to explain. Karl Marx’s account of primitive accumulation (1976 [1867]) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s non-normative description of the invention of property in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Rousseau 1994 [1755]) are genealogies written more in a Nietzschean spirit of pathology than as part of any quest for justification [‘pathology’ is here bettered rendered ‘ideology’ in a Marxist sense]. Such negative genealogies remind us of the importance of Mill’s observation that in approaching the justification of private property we must remember that, ‘we must leave out of consideration its actual origin in any of the existing nations of Europe’ (Mill 1994 [1848]: 7).” [But see Cohen below]

Cf.: “Libertarians, or, to name them more accurately, entitlement theorists, maintain that the market legitimates the distribution of goods it generates. But every market-generated distribution is only a redistribution of titles that buying and selling are themselves powerless to create, and the upshot of market activity is therefore no more legitimate than the titles with which it operates. How, then, to the titles that necessarily precede market activity acquire legitimacy in the first place?

On any characterization of private property, the question of what constitutes a rightful original acquisition of it enjoys a certain priority over the question of what constitutes a rightful subsequent transfer of it, since, unless private property can be formed, it cannot, a fortiori, be transferred. But, in virtues of the way entitlement theorists characterize private property, the priority of the question of how it may be appropriated is, for private property as they understand it, even more marked. For private property in entitlement discourse is property in what is sometimes called ‘the full liberal sense.’ It is decked out with all the rights that could conceivably attach to private property; and, once an original acquisition of such plenary private property is achieved, then no separate question about its transfer can arise, since the full complement of private property rights includes unfettered rights of transfer and bequest. [….]

Note that even now not everything around us is privately owned, and most people would agree that what remains privately unowned, such as the atmosphere we breathe and the pavements we tread [as well as public parks, sewer and water lines, libraries, etc.], should not be available for privatization [the privatization of public utilities and Right’s rhetoric against public education are but two examples where privatization is gaining ground in areas heretofore thought out of bounds]. But the better part of what we need to live is, by now, private property Why was its original privatization not a theft of what rightly should (have continued to) be held in common?

The question would not arise if a certain false thing that [Robert] Nozick [in Anarchy, State and Utopia, 1974] says were true, namely, that ‘things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them.’ That is relevantly false, since people create nothing ex nihilo, and all external private property, either in fact or morally (or is made of something that was made of something that was once not private property, or is made of something that was made of something that was made of something that was once not private property, and so on). If the history of anything that is now privately owned there was at least one moment at which something privately unowned was taken into private ownership. If, then, some claims a Nozick-like right to something he legally owns, we may ask, apart from how he in particular came to own it, with what right it came to be anyone’s private property at all.” — G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge University Press, 1995): 72-73. 

*          *          *                
It is of considerable interest, I think, that Mohandas (‘Mahatma’) K. Gandhi criticized capitalism on two grounds similar in spirit to those of Marx, to wit: “First, the concept of private property lying at its base was logically incoherent and subversive of the social order. Second, it had profoundly inhuman consequences.

The concept of private property was logically incoherent for two reasons. First, there was no logical basis on which a man could claim exclusive ownership of the products of his labour. Born a debtor, he remained one all his life. His powers, capacities, character and energies were all socially derived, and hence not his private property, but a social trust to be responsibly used for the well-being of his fellow-men. Second, the efforts of countless men and women flowed into one another to produce even a simple object, rendering it impossible to demarcate the distinctive contribution of each. Their efforts further occurred within the context of the established social order whose silent and unnoticed but vital contribution could not be ignored either. Even as an event was caused by a number of factors operating against the background of a given set of conditions such that none of them could arbitrarily abstracted and called its cause, so no direct relationship could ever be established between the specific activity of an individual and a specific result [well, consider what occurs in criminal law!]. [….]

For Gandhi, private property was subversive of the social order because it conflicted with the fundamental principles underlying and sustaining it. The customs, values, traditions, ways of life and thought, habits, language, and educational, political and other institutions constituting a social order were created by the quiet co-operation and the anonymous sacrifices of countless men and women over several generations, none of whom asked for or could ever receive rewards for all their efforts. [….] The institution of private property rested on the opposite principles and breathed a very different spirit. It stressed selfishness, aggression, exclusive ownership, narrow individualism, a reward for every effort made, possessiveness and a right to do what one liked with one’s property.” — Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989): 134-135. 

Incidentally, Gandhi also thought that modern civilization “involved an egregious amount of violence against nature, which was largely seen as man’s property to do with it what he liked. Its resources were ruthlessly exploited and its rhythm and balance [its ecological principles] disturbed, and the animals were freely killed or tortured for food, sport, fancy clothes and medical experiments.” This was but one aspect of his view that modern civilization itself “rested on and was sustained by massive violence,” such that it “’oozed from every pore’ of modern society and had so much become a way of life that modern man could not cope with his relations with himself or other men without translating them into the military language of conflict, struggle, mastery, subjugation, domination, victory and defeat.” Parekh: 25-26.

Further Reading

• Aoki, Keith. Seed Wars: Controversies and Cases on Plant Genetic Resources (Carolina Academic Press, 2008).
• Balick, Michael J. and Paul Alan Cox. Plants, People and Culture: The Science of Ethnobotany (CRC Press, 2021).
• Barlow, Maude and Tony Clarke. Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (The New Press, 2004).
• Bhattacharya, Neeladri. The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World (Permanent Black, 2018).
• Brockway, Lucille H. Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Garden (Yale University Press, 2002).
• Charles, Daniel. Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food (Basic Books, 2002).
• Christman, John. The Myth of Property: Toward and Egalitarian Theory of Ownership (Oxford University Press, 1994).
• Cohen, G.A. History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx (Oxford University Press, 1988).
• Coombe, Rosemary J. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Duke University Press, 1998).
• Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
• Desai, Meghnad. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, 2002).
• Drèze, Jean, Amartya Sen, and Athar Hussein, eds. The Political Economy of Hunger: Selected Essays (Oxford University Press, 1995).
• Frankel, Francine R. India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs (Princeton University Press, 1971).
• Ghosh, B.N. Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction (Sage Publications, 2012).
• Glaeser, Bernhard, ed. The Green Revolution Revisited: critique and alternatives (Routledge, 2011 [1987]).
• Gliessman, Stephen R. Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems (CRC Press, 3rd ed., 2015).
• Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass. Of Medicines and Markets: Intellectual Property and Human Rights in the Free Trade Era (Stanford University Press, 2013).
• Gosseries, Axel, Alain Marciano and Alain Strowel. Intellectual Property and Theories of Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
• Griffin, Keith. The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1974).
• Hsu, Elisabeth and Stephen Harris, eds. Plants, Health and Healing: On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology (Berghahn Books, 2012).
• Iyer, Raghavan. The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Oxford University Press, 1st ed., 1973/Concord Grove Press, 2nd ed., 1983).
• Iyer, Raghavan. Gandhian Trusteeship in Theory and Practice (Concord Grove Press, 1985).
• Kenny, Martin. Bio-technology: The University-Industrial Complex (Yale University Press, 1986).
• Kleinman, Daniel Lee. Impure Cultures: University Biology and the World of Commerce (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
• Kloppenburg, Jack Ralph. First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology (University of Wisconsin Press, 2nd ed., 2004).
• Kohli, Atul. Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the United States Shaped the Global Periphery (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Magdoff, Fred, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds. Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (Monthly Review Press, 2000).
• Magdoff, Fred and Brian Tokar, eds. Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal (Monthly Review Press, 2010).
• Mgbeoji, Ikechi. Global Biopiracy: Patents, Plants, and Indigenous Knowledge (Cornell University Press, 2006).
• Mirowski, Philip. Science Mart: Privatizing American Science (Harvard University Press, 2011).
• Mooney, Pat R. Seeds of the Earth: A Private or Public Resource? (Inter Pares, 1979).
• Nazarea, Virginia D., Robert E. Rhoades, and Jenna Andrews-Swann, eds. Seeds of Resistance, Seeds of Hope: Place and Agency in the Conservation of Biodiversity (University of Arizona Press, 2013).
• Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Melville House Publishing, 2007).
• Pearse, Andrew. Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Want (Oxford University Press, 1980).
• Penner, J.E. The Idea of Property in Law (Oxford University Press, 1997).
• Perelman, Michael. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Duke University Press, 2000).
• Posey, Darrell A. and Graham Dutfield. Beyond Intellectual Property: Toward Traditional Resource Rights for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (International Development Research Centre, 1996).
• Purdy, Jedediah. The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination (Yale University Press, 2010).
• Ross, Eric B. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics, and Population in Capitalist Development (Zed Books, 1998).
• Ryan, Órla. Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa (Zed Books, 2011).
• Sen, Amartya. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford University Press, 1981).
• Shaikh, Anwar. Globalization and the Myths of Free Trade: History, Theory and Empirical Evidence (Routledge, 2013).
• Shiva, Vandana. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (Zed Books, 1991).
• Simpson, Christopher, ed. Universities and Empires: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (The New Press, 1998).
• Slaughter, Sheila and Larry L. Leslie. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
• Solovey, Mark. The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (Rutgers University Press, 2013).
• Solovey, Mark and Hamilton Craven, eds. Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
• Teitelman, Robert. Gene Dreams: Wall Street, Academia, and the Rise of Biotechnology (Basic Books, 1989).
• Thackray, Arnold, ed. Private Science: Biotechnology and the Rise of the Molecular Sciences (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
• Waldron, Jeremy. The Right to Private Property (Oxford University Press, 1988).
• Waldron, Jeremy, “Property and Ownership,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition) Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/property
• Warren, D. Michael, L. Jan Slikkerveer, and David Brokensha, eds. The Cultural Dimension of Development: Indigenous Knowledge Systems (Intermediate Technology Publications, 1999).
• Wong, Tzen and Graham Dutfield, eds. Intellectual Property and Human Development: Current Trends and Future Scenarios (Public Intellectual Property Advisors/Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso, 2017).
• Zimmer, Karl S. Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Peruvian Andes (University of California Press, 1996).

Related Bibliographies (embedded links)

(i) Salvador Allende and the Quest for Socialism; (ii) Samir Amin; (iii) Anarchism; (iv) Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice; (v) Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization; (vi) Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing; (vii) Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education; (viii) Democratic Theory and Praxis; (ix) Global Distributive Justice; (x) Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice; (xi) C.L.R. James: Marxist Humanist & Afro-Trinidadian Socialist; (xii) The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s; (xiii) Marxism; (xiv) Marxism and Freudian Psychology; (xv) Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law; (xvi) Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity; (xvii) Sullied (Natural & Social) Sciences; (xviii) Toward Green Socialist Democracy; (xix) Utopian Thought, Imagination, and Praxis; and (xx) Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law.

The inordinate desire for many and varied experiences in a crucible of mental conflict that stymies our normative capacity for moral psychological and spiritual attention

“To be known well, things must be known in detail, but as detail is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.” — La Rochefoucauld (Leonard Tancock, trans.) Maxims (Penguin Books, 1959)

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour” — William Blake, from Auguries of Innocence, under “Songs and Ballads” in David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Doubleday & Co., with revisions, 1979)

“Diderot’s distinctive strength, a paradoxical strength as it depended on a disposition often criticized as detrimental to any kind of success, may have consisted in an openness to the world so radical that it constantly implied the risk of getting lost in details that fascinated him, together with a truly unusual intensity in his reactions to all kinds of experiences and perceptions (‘enthusiasm’ was the word for such intensity in the language of the eighteenth century).” It seems Diderot had an uncommon and perhaps endearing ability “to concentrate on the presence of persons, objects, perceptions, and feelings in their concreteness and singularity, without much direction or purpose.” — Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Prose of the World: Denis Diderot and the Periphery of the Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2012).

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While avarice, greed (or cupidity), and lust are associated with the inordinate if not insatiable desire for power, wealth or material things and sex, I wonder if we might imagine them with regard to our experiences generally in the sense that quantity (past some tipping point) may trump or crowd out the quality of our experiences, that is, our capacity or ability to have attentive and possibly “rich” experiences. (Of course one might have comparatively few experiences, as it were, which are qualitatively poor or dull or zombie-like.) I am not claiming there need be conflict between the quantity and quality of our experiences, only that an unquenchable “thirst” for novel experiences at some point becomes pointless, in which case it is better to have fewer but qualitatively richer experiences which fully engage our attention, a concept that, philosophically speaking, “is of fundamental importance in the philosophy of mind, in epistemology, in action, and in ethics [I would add moral psychology, a subject that overlaps with philosophy of mind and ethics.].” In other words, is it true that fewer and presumably richer experiences are more conducive to a person cultivating the requisite forms of attention (found, for example, in religious and philosophical ‘therapies of desire’) than can be attained among those exhibiting a greedy or “lustful” hankering after many and apparently varied experiences? I suspect that it is the case, although I’m not sure this is an argument that is philosophically dispositive or amenable to resolution by the sciences.  

Attention can be directed both outward and inward, the former concerning the world of our experience, our perceptions, thoughts and feelings of and about the material world, the latter, when disciplined and well-directed, entailing self-knowledge, self-examination, or introspection, perhaps even forms of mind-training and meditation found in worldviews from Stoicism to Buddhism and the spiritual exercises cultivated in monastic and mystical traditions. Jonardon Ganeri speaks to the inward dimension (which is intimately and indissolubly tied to the outward dimension):

“Attention … has an explanatory role in understanding the nature of mental action in general and of specific mental actions such as intending, remembering, introspecting, and empathizing. It has a central role in explaining the structure of the phenomenal and of cognitive access, the concept of the intentionality or directedness of the mental, the unity of consciousness, and the epistemology of perception. And attention is also key to an account of the nature of persons and their identity, to the distinction between oneself and others, and to the moral psychology that rests upon it.”

The Stoic concept of prosochē —the attitude and practice of attention—well captures the inextricable connection between the outward and inward dimensions (and psychoanalysis could be said to widen and deepen the inward dimension). It is “a state of continuous, vigilant, and unrelenting attentiveness to oneself—the present impressions, present desires, and present actions which shape one’s moral character (prohairesis).” The late philosopher and writer Iris Murdoch had an abiding appreciation of this sense of attention as an aptitude, attitude and practice as it relates to the ethical and spiritual life, for she believed that our states of consciousness and action presuppose cognitive and affective discrimination, and that any such discrimination is subject to moral appraisal, as evidenced this exquisite passage from her book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992):

“The moral life is not intermittent or specialised, it is not a peculiar separate area of our existence. [….] Life is made up of details. We compartmentalise it for reasons of convenience, dividing the aesthetic from the moral, the public from the private, work from pleasure. [….] Yet we are all always deploying and directing our energy, refining or  blunting it, purifying or corrupting it, and it is always easier to do a thing a second time. ‘Sensibility’ is a word which may be in place here. [….] Happenings in the consciousness so vague as to be almost non-existent can have moral ‘colour.’ All sorts of momentary sensibilities to other people, too shadowy to come under the heading of manners of communication, are still parts of moral activity. [….] [M]uch of our self-awareness is other-awareness, and in this area we exercise ourselves as moral beings in our use of many various skills as we direct our modes of attention.”

One encounters the attitude and practice of “attention” once again in a moral-psychological and perhaps pedagogical sense in the Republic of Letters and the modes of sociability and conversational manners and etiquette that governed the salons of the (French) Enlightenment. Suzanne Necker (b. Suzanne Curchod, 1737 – 6 May 1794) was one of the remarkable salonnières of the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters who deliberately practiced this art of attention. According to Dena Goodman, Madame Necker’s

“seriousness, and that of the salon whose discourse she shaped is revealed most clearly in the concern she displayed in all things for paying attention. The word attention dominates the five-volumes of her journals published after her death by her husband. One must pay attention, she reminded herself repeatedly, not get distracted. Her purpose in life was not to distract men from their serious business but rather to discipline herself and her guests so that that business might be carried out. Her concern was to concentrate her own attention and to focus that of the philosophes (her guests); her intent was to be a serious contributor to the social and intellectual project of Enlightenment through the shaping of its discourse in her salon.”

Goodman selects a handful of examples “drawn from the many instances in which attention occurs in Necker’s journals: (i) Attention allows one to find new ideas in the most common things: one cannot read aloud well without fixing one’s attention; in a word, distraction kills, negates all the intellectual faculties. (ii) One gets used to inattention in letting one’s mind wander when one is alone. (iii) As soon as the attention of men gathered together is distracted for a single moment, one cannot fix it again. (iv) The great secret of conversation is continual attention. (v) Virtue, health, talent, happiness, are the fruits of patience and attention.” All of these propositions about attention deserve further discussion and analysis which we will not here provide.

As Goodman points out, the notion of “attention” was not foreign to Enlightenment thought, being central to Condillac’s epistemology (which, apart from his conception of the mind, was radically empiricist and based on a ‘sensationalist’ psychology) and, as intimated in the passage from Prose of the Word, it served, at the very least, as an epistemic virtue for Diderot. The economist and philosophe, André Morellet, “identified attention as the first principle of conversation.” For Necker, “attention” was the centerpiece of what we might christen a secular spiritual praxis or askesis that decisively shaped the “art of living” in general and her governance of the salon in particular. In this instance, a secular spiritual praxis needs to be viewed in the light of an upbringing by her father, a Calvinist minister, for Necker was simultaneously devoted both to Catholic France and Enlightenment Paris.

According to Goodman, the “ideal woman” of this time and place “was characterized by a lack of [narcissistic?] ego which enabled her to direct her attention to coordinating the egos of the men around her.” The fact that these men required this kind of vigorous group coordination and conversational governance, in other words, enforcement of the rules of polite conversation, speaks volumes about their egos (and the aristocracy) and the corresponding lack of requisite self-discipline needed to properly engage in the type of sophisticated intellectual conversation that salons brought to prominence in the Republic of Letters during the French Enlightenment. It also speaks, at least indirectly, to the “agonistic” character of French pedagogical theory and practice. In the words of Goodman (drawing on the work of Walter Ong): “Since the days of Peter Abelard in the twelfth century, French schools had been steeped in the language of battle.” And this was not peculiar to France: “The primary form the agon took in education of boys and young men from the Middle Ages on was disputation, a form of ceremonial combat.” The salons, in effect, and under the gentle yet firm guidance of Necker and other salonnières, had to counter the deleterious effects of French education on male elites with their steadfast yet subtle enforcement of the informal social norms, manners, and etiquette of polite conversation.

Our capacity for attentiveness to our daily experiences, our ability to pay attention to not only “what matters,” but also little, everyday things that, at least on the surface, “don’t matter” (or don’t matter as much), is of course threatened by far more than a lust for novel experiences. More fundamentally, and perhaps relatedly (by way of causation, exacerbation or intensification), we are, by degree and on occasion or habitually, disposed to experiencing mental conflict, that is, “a mind divided against itself”* a psychological fact well appreciated by some classical Greek philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, and those associated with Hellenistic Stoicism, for example. These philosophers viewed us as more or less subject to three symptoms of such internal conflict which, after A.W. Price, we will term (i) oscillation, (ii) vacillation, and (iii), and lack of self-control (including akrasia). In Western philosophy and literature, we have filled out this portrait of the divided mind in a manner that speaks to our uncanny ability for mental compartmentalization while lending some support to the thesis, or at least something like it, of mental modularity. Thus the French moralists, novelists and playwrights, psychoanalytic psychology, cognitive psychology, and recent philosophical explorations of the emotions have enabled us to see, for example, how self-love or what La Rochefoucauld called amour-propre (which, as Jon Elster has explained, includes a desire for both esteem and self-esteem), cognitive biases (systematic deviation from norms of rationality and/or rational judgment and deliberative decision-making), denial, self-deception, wishful and magical thinking, phantasies, illusions, and delusions represent dispositional tendencies that at one time or another afflict all of us. This belies whatever facile optimism or flattering pictures of the reasoning mind and rationality we’ve inherited from the European Enlightenment and soon became ensconced within Liberal political philosophy. What is perhaps worse, this model of our psychological conflicts and mental complexity gravely interferes with our conceptions and pursuit of happiness and well-being. The result may be, as Daniel M. Haybron has argued, that not only are many of us on a “hedonic treadmill” (‘we adapt to many changes in our lives, so that we tend eventually to wind up no more or less happy than we were to begin with’), we may be, as foreshadowed above, “substantially on an attentional treadmill” as well. The latter, in this instance, largely in reference to discernment of our own affects or emotions (our capacity for emotional introspection), thus “insofar as one is relatively inattentive about one’s affective state, or an undiscerning observer of what one does attend to, one is liable to be comparatively ignorant about the quality of one’s affect.” Hebron has well-explained the nature of “affective ignorance” and several of its most pressing implications for our pursuit of happiness and we cannot here summarize this analysis but can share part of its conclusion: “the possibility of widespread affective ignorance [Haybron abbreviates this as ‘AI,’ but as that abbreviation is now commonly used for ‘artificial intelligence,’ I am avoiding it here] should be regarded as a live [and lively!] hypothesis. We cannot assume that people are reliable judges of their own affective states,” something we earlier learned from the theory and clinical praxis of Freudian psychoanalysis. Thus, while self-development or self-direction, self-realization, self-fulfillment, and human flourishing or eudaimonia or happiness are all worthy ends, recalcitrant mental conflict and myriad cognitive and psychological mechanisms and processes (from the unconscious to conscious kind) interfere with our ability—and speaking within a normative model of moral psychology—to move in the right direction, let alone to realize or attain these ends.

* “In mental conflict,” writes Price, “a mind is divided against itself, and becomes a battleground of opposing beliefs or desires. The conflicted mind is characterized by relations not just of difference and divergence, but of contention and confrontation. It feels itself not so much attracted from outside by incompatible alternatives between which it has to make a choice, as torn within itself by hostile forces between which it cannot make peace. It is aware not just of contrasting considerations that need to be brought together in an exercise of judgment, but of colliding tendencies that refuse to co-exist within a single perspective [cf. cognitive dissonance]. One may perceive an external figure ambivalently as a friend and as an enemy, with something like a gestalt switch between the two aspects a one’s attitude alternates between love and hate. Even if both responses are perceptive and not projective, one may fail to form or maintain a unified grasp of a complex reality, vacillating instead between simple views that resist reconciliation with a conspectus. What hinders the achievement of single viewpoint is not the complexity of the object but the ambivalence of the subject [Jain metaphysics and epistemology address the ‘complexity of the object’ with its notion of anekāntavāda and correlative doctrines of nayavāda (the ‘doctrine of perspectives’) and syādvāda (the ‘doctrine of predication,’ also aptly termed the ‘maybe’ or ‘perhaps’ doctrine)]: his attitudes are mutually antithetical, and hold out against one another instead of cooperating in a durable synthesis. At heart his enmity is self-directed, so that he feels partly alien to himself. The external object may be the occasions of his internal conflict, but he himself is its cause. [….]

It is inevitable that we should speak of mental conflict in social language. There is no easy demarcation between the metaphor and the reality: the mind constitutes itself according to a model in our language that is also its own, so that our ways of speaking are its ways of being. Its modes of differentiating itself from the world become modes of differentiation within itself. Interpersonal relations are reflected internally by intrapersonal ones, so that the mind becomes the scene of a quasi-social drama. It is no accident that already in antiquity the classic source for what I have been describing should have been a dramatic monologue [Euripides’ Medea] in which a single character engages in an argument with herself as strenuous as any that she conducts with others.”

References and Further Reading

• Brakel, Linda A.W. Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Craveri, Benedetta (trans. Teresa Waugh) The Age of Conversation (The New York Review of Books, 2005).
• Goldgar, Anne. Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (Yale University Press, 1995).
• Elster, Jon. Sour Grapes: Studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
• Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Elster, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Cornell University Press, 1994).
• Gordon, Daniel. Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociality in French Thought, 1670-1789 (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Dilman, Ilham. Freud, Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988).
• Fiordalis, David V., ed. Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path (Mangalam Press, 2018).
• Ganeri, Jonardon. Attention, Not Self (Oxford University Press, 2017).
• Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell, 1995).
• Hadot, Pierre. What is Ancient Philosophy? (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002).
• Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Mulhall, Stephen. “Misplacing freedom, displacing the imagination: Cavell and Murdoch on the fact/value distinction,” in Anthony O’Hear, ed., Philosophy: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Murdoch, Iris. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Chatto and Windus, 1992).
• Olberding, Amy. The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Price, A.W. Mental Conflict (Routledge, 1995).
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988).
• Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Books, 2016).

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

George Padmore (né Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, 28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959): author, journalist, Left organizer and activist against colonialism, imperialism and Empire, one-time Communist Party member, socialist, and Pan-Africanist intellectual

This post is in memory and honor of the all-too-short life and groundbreaking works of George Padmore. In an earlier post I attempted to introduce the “Marxist spirituality” of C.L.R. James (a good friend of Padmore’s going back to the days of their youth in Trinidad) and in this case I want again to suggest we appreciate, in the broadest and deepest sense, a kindred “humanist spirituality” that suffused Padmore’s worldview while firmly grounded in the communism and Pan-Africanism he viewed as integral to the ends of Black self-determination and emancipation (Padmore’s ‘communist’ and socialist beliefs and commitments appear to have more or less survived his former formal identity as a Communist Party member). The following material, a kind of bricolage, is an attempt to give one a taste of the remarkable qualities Padmore possessed as an “organic intellectual” and political organizer on the (Black) Left. George Padmore is yet another exemplar of laudable communism.

[The Soviet Union] has done more to liquidate illiteracy and raise the cultural level of the former subject races of Central Asia within twenty-five years, than the British Government has accomplished in India or Africa in two centuries. — George Padmore, writing in The Crisis (November 1942): [One can appreciate this fact, cited by Padmore in spite of his formal withdrawal/expulsion from the Communist Party, without ignoring Soviet behavior at the time in—among other places—Poland and Finland.]

… I don’t know anybody else, except perhaps Dr. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, who is worth more careful consideration…. Anyone who wants to know where the movement [i.e., Pan-Africanism] came from, what was its foundation, the people you have to look at are Marcus Garvey, who made it a mass movement, Du Bois, who gave it the historical and social background it needed, and George Padmore, who organized it…. Marcus Garvey was the great agitator who made black people and Black politics something in the world. Before Garvey there was none. After Garvey … the great theorist and historian was Dr. Du Bois, but the organizer, the man who took Du Bois’ theory and linked it in such a way to political movement, to the mass movement that Garvey created—that man was George Padmore. — C.L.R. James, At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: Allison and Busby, 1984): 253

Padmore’s writing and his organizing were never distinct spheres: his writing was a form of action. This writing was intended, quite literally, as ‘praxis;’ that is, the application of ideas into practice. The praxis was primarily pedagogical. He executed his primary aim of teaching and enabling through his writing but also, crucially, in his own home. His correspondence with [Richard] Wright and the testimony of many, including C.L.R. James and Ras Makonnen, described Padmore’s practice of taking in and advising anyone interested in imperialism and its relevance to contemporary politics. His home became a center for visitors from the colonies seeking advice and/or access to British sympathizers such that upon arrival in London, the first question on people’s lips was often ‘How can I get in touch with George Padmore?’ C.L.R. James admitted that his own political methodology in the 1960s, when he lived in Washington, D.C. was modelled on Padmore. [Padmore was a ‘political organizer’ and social movement builder who] … encourag[ed] others to take action …, provid[ing] them with the skills and knowledge to do so. [….] Padmore expressed a strong contempt for ‘café intellectuals’ who were unwilling to ‘get out and fight for freedom.’ [….] The vast majority of his work, which required a literate audience able to absorb sometimes vast amounts of information, was still distinct from many in his network like Richard Wright, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and W.E.B. Du Bois because it was much more forensic and report-based, rather than theoretical. Padmore labored to imprint the evidence that could serves as the basis for a sustained attack on the hypocrisy of benevolent empire. [….] Yet Padmore was also deeply engaged in political thought of his own, even if he derided the status of intellectualism. His books have been described as ‘empirically dense’ accounts that applied [history] to present problems, referencing authors who often stood on opposite side of the political spectrum from him. — Leslie James, in George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 10-11

A George Padmore biography courtesy of the Marxist Internet Archive:

“George Padmore was the pseudonym of Malcolm Nurse, who was born in 1902 in Trinidad, then part of the British Empire. After leaving school, Nurse went into journalism before leaving Trinidad to study law at university in the United States. Yet instead of returning home to become a respected professional among the small black middle class of Trinidad, Nurse became a student radical and in 1927 joined the Communist Party of the USA, becoming ‘George Padmore’ in the process. Padmore’s talents as an organiser and writer meant he was soon appointed head of the Communist International’s ‘Negro Bureau,’ and from 1929 to 1933 he was a leading agitator for colonial revolution, travelling widely and residing for periods in Moscow, Hamburg, Vienna, London and Paris. As well as editing the Negro Worker, Padmore wrote prolifically, and his The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931) was particularly influential.

However, when the rise of Hitler’s Nazis in Germany led the Soviet Union to join the League of Nations and seek new diplomatic and military ties with Britain and France, anti-colonialism was no longer the central issue it once was for the Communist International. Resigning from his positions in disgust, the anti-imperialist Padmore survived a vicious Stalinist witch-hunt, and in 1935 returned to Britain. Meeting up again with his boyhood friend from Trinidad, the then Trotskyist C.L.R. James, Padmore from his base in London now steadily evolved into arguably one of the twentieth century’s most important Pan-African figures. Though close to the Independent Labour Party in Britain, and writing prolifically for its publications, Padmore never formally joined, but continued to devote his energies to the struggle to liberate Africa from colonial rule.

In 1937, Padmore formed the International African Service Bureau, later the Pan-African Federation and in 1945 was central to organising the legendary Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Besides writing several books from his London home, from How Britain Rules Africa (1936) to Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), Padmore’s greatest triumph undoubtedly came when one African disciple of his, Kwame Nkrumah, led the Gold Coast from British colonial rule to independence in 1957. Though Padmore’s experience working in Ghana as advisor to Nkrumah in the last years of his life was to be a rather disappointing one, that he lived to witness the birth of a black nation in Africa remains a vindication of, and a testament to, his life’s work.”

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“A forgotten fighter”

International Socialism, Issue: 124 (1st October 2009)

Christian Høgsbjerg (book review)

Fitzroy Baptiste and Rupert Lewis (eds.) George Padmore: Pan–African Revolutionary (Ian Randle Publishers, 2009).

This collection of essays on the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore (1902-59), appearing on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, is a timely tribute to the life and work of a fascinating but forgotten anti-colonial activist and intellectual. The appearance of such a volume is to be welcomed, not simply because Padmore stands as a towering figure of the 20th century ‘black Atlantic’ who fully deserves more critical appreciation in his own right, but also because the question of why he has remained so overlooked for so long, despite the rise of postcolonial studies, is in itself illuminating.

George Padmore was the pseudonym of Malcolm Nurse, who was born in 1902 in Trinidad, then a British crown colony. After leaving school Nurse went into journalism before leaving the Caribbean to study law at university in the United States in 1924. Yet instead of returning home to become a respected professional among the small black middle class of Trinidad (indeed he never returned to the Caribbean), he became a student radical and soon joined the Communist Party of the USA, becoming George Padmore in the process.

Padmore’s talents as an organiser and writer meant he was soon appointed head of the Communist International’s ‘Negro Bureau,’ and from 1929 to 1933 he threw himself into agitating for black liberation and colonial revolution, residing for periods in Moscow, Hamburg, Vienna, London and Paris, and undertaking daring underground work in colonial Africa. As well as editing the Negro Worker, Padmore wrote prolifically, and his pamphlet The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931) became something of a classic.¹

However, when Russia’s Stalinist rulers, threatened by the rise of Nazi Germany, sought new diplomatic and military ties with the ‘democratic’ empires of Britain and France, anti-colonialism ceased to be the critical issue it once was for the Communist International. Padmore, a principled anti-imperialist, resigned from his position in disgust in 1933 and was vilified by the Stalinist bureaucracy. In 1935 he moved to London, the ‘dark heart’ of the British Empire, and joined forces with his boyhood friend from Trinidad, the Trotskyist CLR James.

For the next 20 years or so Padmore devoted all his energies to the struggle to liberate Africa and the Caribbean from colonial rule. In 1937 he formed the International African Service Bureau, later the Pan-African Federation, and in 1945 was central to organising the historic Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Matthew Quest offers a useful discussion of the ‘class struggle Pan-Africanism’ of the bureau’s journal International African Opinion, while Hakim Adi and the late Fitzroy Baptiste examine respectively how the fifth congress was built and how its potential impact was somewhat blunted by the realpolitik of British colonial officials.

Besides writing several books from his London home, from How Britain Rules Africa (1936) to Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), Padmore’s greatest triumph undoubtedly came when one of his African disciples, Kwame Nkrumah, led the Gold Coast to independence in 1957. Nkrumah had met CLR James in America during the Second World War and when Nkrumah moved to Britain in 1945 James referred him to Padmore as a matter of course.

Marika Sherwood discusses Padmore’s relationship as mentor to Nkrumah, quoting one of Padmore’s letters, from 1955, in which he notes that James ‘introduced [Nkrumah] to Trotskyism and I knocked that nonsense out of him before his return [to the Gold Coast]. And put in its place Pan-Africanism (black nationalism and socialism).’

The extent to which Padmore, who ended his life working as adviser to Nkrumah in Ghana, bears responsibility for the manifest failings of Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism generally is perhaps a moot question, but it is certainly one avoided in this volume due to the Pan-Africanist perspective and hagiographic tone of some of the contributors.

Fitzroy Baptiste’s fine contribution does, however, note important continuities between the Stalinist ‘two-stage theory’ of colonial liberation (first political independence then socialism) that formed part of Padmore’s training while in Moscow and his later strategic vision for achieving ‘Pan-African Socialism.’ Baptiste also quotes from a British Foreign Office document from December 1959 entitled ‘Africa: The Next Ten Years,’ which, with what Baptiste notes was the ‘typical smugness’ of those wielding imperial power, concluded that ‘Pan-Africanism, in itself, is not necessarily a force that we need regard with suspicion and fear.’ This statement stands as an epitaph to the limitations of the ‘Pan-African Socialism’ envisioned by Nkrumah and Padmore (and for that matter by James).

That said, George Padmore’s extraordinary lived experience as an ‘organic intellectual’ of anti-colonial movements in Africa and the Caribbean is well brought out in this volume and remains in many ways inspiring for anti-imperialists today. Moreover, his relentless work exposing and denouncing what Karl Marx called ‘the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation’ is of course relevant today.

Indeed, as a new ‘Scramble for Africa’ centred around oil unfolds, the memory of anti-colonialists such as Padmore becomes particularly poignant. His fate was to be largely ignored by postcolonial studies, never forgiven by Stalinists, regarded as a ‘problem’ by the British Labour Party and, after his death, turned into a ‘harmless icon’ by the new Pan-Africanist rulers of post-colonial Africa. Anyone interested in the past, present and future of revolutionary socialist politics in Africa and the Caribbean can learn much from a critical engagement with his life, work and legacy.

Note

1. For this pamphlet and more of Padmore’s writing, go to marxists.org/archive/padmore

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George Padmore interviews Ho Chi Minh in Paris (1946)

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

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

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George Padmore: Pan-African “communist”

 “An anecdote suggests [George Padmore’s] power of persuasion. [Cyril C.] Ollivierre [a fellow West Indian student at Howard University and president of the campus Garvey Club] and Padmore met as dishwashers at Camp Kinderland, a resort for leftwing working-class Jewish New Yorkers which had opened in 1923 in Hopewell Junction. When washing up for a large party, the two fell behind. As the stacks of dirty dishes mounted in the steaming kitchen and the waiters’ voices became more and more abusive, Nurse [i.e., Padmore] grew indignant. Ollivierre, a more pliant man, commenced to scant his efforts, merely dipping plates for a cursory swish, a course of action which brought about his downfall, but in the meantime earned him a respite. Nurse refused to do so. Instead, he stopped, rolled down his sleeves (always one for proper dress) and marched to the dining room where he excoriated the startled diners for abetting the exploitation going on beneath their noses. Some of the men marched back through the swinging doors and helped catch up under Nurse’s supervision.”

According to James Hooker, “[George] Padmore’s strength was his indefatigable nature, remarkable memory and sense of organization. He was able to state his aims concisely, collected statistics avidly, read the capitalist press in detail and quoted from the generally accepted academic sources when he touched upon sensitive issues.” Several of these virtues are exemplified in Padmore’s Life and Struggle of Negro Toilers (London: Red International of Labour Unions, 1931), “the back cover of which showed a gigantic Negro hovering over the United States, West Indies and Africa, snapping the links in the slave chain which connected these distant places,” while its contents displayed “an amazing amount of information on the condition of black men in three continents, described their various organisations, showed statistical tables of the black man’s role in the various militaries of the great powers (including the United States), and explained the role of the new section of the RILU [Red International of Labour Unions]. The book, though on occasion lapsing into jargon, is in the main straightforward journalism which conveys a feeling that the black men of the world are at last awake, with the appropriate weapon of their deliverance at hand. Of his ten books or extended pamphlets, this and his last, Pan-Africanism or Communism? [London: Dennis Dobson, 1956], are probably the best known.” — from James R. Hooker’s Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (Praeger Publishers, 1967).

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George Padmore Archive (at the Marxists Internet Archive Encyclopedia):

• The Negro Liberation Movement and the International Conference, 1930
• The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, 1931
• “Left” Imperialism and the Negro Toilers, May 1932
• Fascism in the Colonies, February 1938
• Hands off the Colonies!, February 1938
• An Outrageous Report, March 1938
• Why Moors help Franco, May 1938
• White Workers and Black, May 1938
• The Government’s Betrayal of the Protectorates, June 1938
• Labour Unrest in Jamaica, July 1938
• West Africans, Watch Your Land, September 1938
• Manifesto Against War, 25 September 1938
• Police Swoop On Workers’ Leaders In Colonies, 20 October 1939
• The British Empire Is Worst Racket Yet Invented By Man, 15 December 1939
• Hands Off the Soviet Union, February 1940
• Poverty, Disease Is Native’s Lot in West Indies, 17 June 1940
• West Indies Need Independence – Not Big Reports, 24 June 1940
• A Typical British Colony, December 1940
• British Imperialists Treat the Negro Masses Like Nazis Treat the Jews, 1941
• Empire “Gauleiters” Greet Each Other, January 1941
• West Indians Answer Anglo-U.S. Imperialism, 4 January 1941
• Whither the West Indies?, 21 July 1941
• Britain’s Black Record, September 1941
• The Socialist Attitude to the Invasion of the U.S.S.R., September 1941
• Answers to a Questionnaire on the War, November 1941
• Atlantic Charter Not Intended for Colonies, 24 January 1942
• Blue-Print of Post-War Anglo-American Imperialism, October 1943
• Imperialism: The Basis of Labour Party Crisis, June 1944
• Chris Jones: Fighter for the Oppressed, September 1944
• A Political Review of the Colonies, February 1945
• The Voice of Coloured Labour, World Trade Union Conference, 1945
• Colonial and Coloured Unity, History of the Pan-African Congress, 1947
• Madagascar Fights for Freedom, October 1947

Books by George Padmore

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

Further Reading:

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

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Blacks on the (Radical) Left
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism