Digressions&Impressions

Final Covid Diary Update of the Year: On Partial Cognitive Disability

I am taking my customary end of year blogging break, again. And I hope to return to near-daily blogging in January. 

I have enjoyed and appreciated all the well wishes, my dear readers. (For my "covid diaries," see here;  here; here; here; here; here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; and here). It's a strange feature of my current disability that it is easier and more relaxing for me to write a blog post than to have a minor conversation in a café or restaurant. Social interactions are exhausting, and if there is ambient noise or more than one interlocuter, I am likely to have headaches and bad sleep (and a kind of 'soft'-brain fog--in which my thoughts slow down and my phenomenal experience is not as rich as it ordinarily would be). Unfortunately, the side-effect of such interactions is reduced time and energy for blogging, and other writing. (Basically I have been unable to do research while I taught my small Fall course.) 

My occupational therapist has convinced me to try to limit social interactions to no more than thirty minutes. And to plan plenty of rest between them. Her theory being that longer interactions just drain me of all energy. 'Energy' is the explanatory concept, the goal, and the ground of everything the occupational therapist says to me. (In Dutch, the occupational therapist is an 'ergo-therapist,' and in conversation with her, I have to prevent myself from using random passages from Aristotle's Ethics.) She basically compares my brain to a car battery that due to my current activity pattern is incapable of fully recharging and, so, fails to retrain itself post trauma. (She alternates comparing my brain to one that has suffered considerable trauma and one that is suffering from burn-out.)

As I have noted before (recall), the occupational therapist has induced a number of behavioral changes all of which amount to avoidance of multi-tasking, doing a better job of relaxing when I should be relaxing, and to give myself a chance to 'build up energy.' Luckily, I don't have to teach for about eight weeks, and I will also try to do more exercise along the way.

The most recent meeting with the occupational therapist annoyed me greatly. Basically, all the new exercises (and 'home-work') involve planning exercises. These are chapter 2 of the exercise-book I was given. It took me a while to figure out why I found it annoying. (The occupational therapist is a funny and empathic person.) But after some reflection, I realized it was because I felt I with my particular symptoms wasn't being treated, but rather I was a number being put through a pre-existing training program. Undoubtedly, the training program is useful, but while i have some cognitive impairments, inability to plan my life is not one of them.

As I said it took me a while to figure out my irritation. What triggered it was her considerable surprise that reading and writing is relaxing for me. Her surprise didn't bother, but the lack of adjustment of the training program does. In particular, she sent me a number of videos (which her patients appreciate greatly) even though I had explained to her earlier that zooms and videos are especially draining. Paying attention to another's reasoned argument or explication basically sets me back a day; whereas reading is a piece of cake.  

All of this is in the category, minor troubles relative to the sorrows of humankind. But since I have been sick for a year now, and the pattern has recurred with several other health care providers (go read the covid diaries), I am more attuned to it. Basically nobody knows what my underlying problem really is, and nobody is willing to spend public money to do the kind of invasive testing to figure it out. The testing itself is unlikely to produce conclusive evidence of what's wrong with me, and it is unlikely it will produce a suggestion of how to treat me. And since hospital visits actually set me back days on end, the medical system sensibly hopes my body will cure itself eventually rather than drag me in for lots of tests.

Since this gets repeated with most folk like me -- i.e., long haulers without clear lung and/or heart problems --, we're also disappearing from the system. Nobody is counting how many of us there are, and how much work is being lost. Basically, GPs and and occupational physicians keep track of their own patients, and they know I am not alone; and they share best practices in whatsapp groups. Often we read the same pre-prints when I come to them with experimental treatments. Interestingly enough, the London covid clinic prescribed me heavy dosage of melatonin, and then my UK GP refused to prescribe it except in very small dosage. (This is actually funny because in Holland melatonin is an over the counter drug, but my Dutch GP expressed surprise that this would work at all for long haul.)

My Dutch neurologist told me he rarely sees patients with long haul. (Meanwhile, the waiting list for the neurologist in the London long haul clinic is over a half year now.) Since in the Dutch system, the costs of the first two years of (partial) medical leave are born by the employer and employee (I have have a pay cut alongside my reduction in work hours and responsibilities). And that means that the government will only start noticing us in the Spring of 2022, when the first generation of long haulers will be pushed partially into social security. And since the employer is initially responsible for finding fitting work for the employee, the government will only notice those who are completely disabled or those working for very small companies. So, the numbers, if any, won't start adding up until later in 2022 and 2023. 

If I could handle social interactions, this would be the moment I would try to mobilize a Dutch patient group for long haulers. But the very idea of trying to fight the system, and to coordinate many despairing and angry patients, is not 'energy enhancing.' And so I hope that by planning well and conserving energy, I recover sufficiently so that I can keep a version of my job by the end of next year. The system, of course, finds my defeatist response very welcome.

I have come to describe myself as cognitively 'disabled' and 'impaired' (or 'handicapped'). I know that sounds final, and I don't believe it's final. But I have also noticed that 'sickness' doesn't convey my situation and what I need. I need others to accommodate themselves to my limits, and it means that I have to police these limits in a way that I am not used to at all. (It reminds me a bit of when I had to keep visitors away from my partner and son when he was new-born.) And I am also discerning that I have to police my own activities most. Obviously, this risks a spiral of social isolation; I am no fun to be around because I can't do much or engage in much. Yesterday, when I was in the office, I literally had to keep well-wishing and well-meaning colleagues from entering my office because I needed time to recover. And it is very difficult to be a partner and dad, when you have to do it in twenty-five minute installments.

The reason I use 'disability' is because when people encounter me they can't see anything wrong with me. And while I don't fit some of the stereotypes of cognitive disability either, at least with cognitive impairments, we're used to them not being wholly visible in one's countenance. (Sometimes people notice I am tired or green/gray.)

As I noted recently, I have also been diagnosed with partial hearing loss. This has nothing do with covid, it seems, and is potentially reversible. But it occurred to me that one reason why social interactions are so exhausting is that because of the hearing problems I have to work harder at hearing and processing what people say. (This is a good place for your favorite joke about ignoring what others say!) One day, I'll write a paper about intersectional disability.:)

In January, I'll do a post on how all of this has changed my approach to teaching. But I have gone on long enough, and I need some time away from the screen. It is the way.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 3.: Utopia without Satire (on Le Guin and Borges)

Bedap’s eyes had got very small, like steel beads. “Brother,” he said, “you are self-righteous. You always were. Look outside your own damned pure conscience for once! I come to you and whisper because I know I can trust you, damn you! Who else can I talk to? Do I want to end up like Tirin?”

“Like Tirin?” Shevek was startled into raising his voice. Bedap hushed him with a gesture towards the wall. “What’s wrong with Tirin? Where is he?”

“In the Asylum on Segvina Island.”

“In the Asylum?”

Bedap hunched his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them, as he sat sideways on the chair. He spoke quietly now, with reluctance.

“Tirin wrote a play and put it on, the year after you left. It was funny—crazy—you know his kind of thing.” Bedap ran a hand through his rough, sandy hair, loosening it from its queue. “It could seem anti-Odonian, if you were stupid. A lot of people are stupid. There was a fuss. He got reprimanded. Public reprimand. I never saw one before. Everybody comes to your syndicate meeting and tells you off. It used to be how they cut a bossy gang foreman or manager down to size. Now they only use it to tell an individual to stop thinking for himself. It was bad. Tirin couldn’t take it. I think it really drove him a bit out of his mind. He felt everybody was against him, after that. He started talking too much—bitter talk. Not irrational, but always critical, always bitter. And he’d talk to anybody that way. Well, he finished at the Institute, qualified as a math instructor, and asked for a posting. He got one. To a road repair crew in Southsetting. He protested it as an error, but the Divlab computers repeated it. So he went.”

“Tir never worked outdoors the whole time I knew him,” Shevek interrupted. “Since he was ten. He always wangled desk jobs. Divlab was being fair.”

Bedap paid no attention. “I don’t really know what happened down there. He wrote to me several times, and each time he’d been reposted. Always to physical labor, in little outpost communities. He wrote that he was quitting his posting and coming back to Northsetting to see me. He didn’t come. He stopped writing. I traced him through the Abbenay Labor Files, finally. They sent me a copy of his card, and the last entry was just, ‘Therapy. Segvina Island.’ Therapy! Did Tirin murder somebody? Did he rape somebody? What do you get sent to the Asylum for, beside that?”

“You don’t get sent to the Asylum at all. You request posting to it.”

“Don’t feed me that crap,” Bedap said with sudden rage. “He never asked to be sent there! They drove him crazy and then sent him there. It’s Tirin I’m talking about, Tirin, do you remember him?”

“I knew him before you did. What do you think the Asylum is—a prison? It’s a refuge. If there are murderers and chronic work-quitters there, it’s because they asked to go there, where they’re not under pressure, and safe from retribution. But who are these people you keep talking about—‘they’? ‘They’ drove him crazy, and so on. Are you trying to say that the whole social system is evil, that in fact ‘they,’ Tirin’s persecutors, your enemies, ‘they,’ are us—the social organism?”

“If you can dismiss Tirin from your conscience as a work-quitter, I don’t think I have anything else to say to you,” Bedap replied, sitting hunched up on the chair. There was such plain and simple grief in his voice that Shevek’s righteous wrath was stopped short.--Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed, Chapter 6, pp. 141-143 (in the British edition). 

This post is the third in an open-ended series on Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see here for pt 1; here for pt 2.). Annares is an anarchist society without public laws, property, nor guilt. Relatively minor violations of local norms and practices are generally sanctioned by social criticism and ostracism. The exchange between Bedap and Shevek, the initially foolish hero of the story, reveals that some major violations of norms are medicalized; one is viewed as psychologically diseased if one murders, rapes, or systematically refuses to contribute work to society (a society -- it should be noted, in fairness -- that teeters on the edge of subsistence and otherwise is quite generous). Presumably the Asylum aims at rehabilitation. (In chapter 10, we hear the Asylum understands itself as a "refuge.") Bedap's suggestion is that those who show too much independence of  thought are also nudged to the Asylum.

What makes Tirin's situation so interesting is that his free-thinking is expressed in terms of a satire. And it becomes clear through the narrative that Annares is unfamiliar with such comedy. In this respect Annares, a community devoted to sympathetic mutual aid, is not unalike to how Socrates legislates Kallipolis and, perhaps more pertinent, how J.L. Borges imagines (recall) Ibn Rushd's Muslim Spain (which also lacks satirical comedy). That Le Guin was very familiar with Borges' thought, and took it rather seriously, is suggested by her (1988) introduction to Borges' co-edited volume The Book of Fantasy, which focuses exclusively on Borges (without paying much attention to the two other editors) and the "honours" she thinks he is due, and scattered remarks in her non-fiction writing. Among the noteworthy claims of that introduction is that she treats fantasy and science fiction as a joint genre, each (to convey her thought rather reductively) devoted to making visible the moral questions of our age.

The arts are key to social life to the relatively isolated communities of Annares. And, in particular, the theatre is very important, "the Art." (Chapter 6; p. 131) But the syndics who put up art-works also have rather restrictive interpretations of what art should be shown. So, comedies do exist on Annares, but are not as central: ‘They performed tragedies, semi-improvised comedies, mimes. … Rising out of and embodying the isolation and communality of the Anarresti spirit, the drama had attained extraordinary power and brilliance.’ (p. 131) So, satire is unknown.

My students and I had some initial difficulty in understanding why Tirin's play created such trouble for him in Annares. It looks rather innocent. Here is a brief, post-facto summary by an eye-witness (in chapter 10):

“Did you see the play he put on, the one that made trouble for him?”

“At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I don’t remember it, that’s so long ago now. It was silly. Witty—Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti, that’s right. This Urrasti hides himself in a hydroponics tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw, and eats the plant roots. I told you it was silly! And so he gets himself smuggled onto Anarres. And then he runs around trying to buy things at depots, and trying to sell things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he’s holding so many he can’t move. So he has to sit where he is, and he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anarres. And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she’s just wide open and ready, but he can’t do it until he’s given her his gold nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn’t want them. That was funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he’d leap up like he’d been bitten, saying, ‘I must not! It is not moral! It is not good business!’ Poor Tirin! He was so funny, and so alive.”

“He played the Urrasti?”

“Yes. He was marvelous.--chapter 10, p. 269

At first sight, Tirin is merely making fun of the money-obsessed Urrasti, drawing on the shared prejudices or ideology of the anarchists of Annares. These views are taught on Annares from a young age. In addition, Urrasti are not allowed to visit Annares. (Annares and Urras are each other's moons.) This is, in fact, part of the founding "Settlement" that governs the isolationist anarchist society (which is developed out of the refugees of the members of a failed revolution on Urrasti). They keep outside influences and people, which are seen as dangerously corrupting, out of Annares. This is achieved by limiting planetary entry to a few commodities that are exchanges with mining commodities that are useful to the much wealthier Urrasti societies. 

So, Tirin's play is a fantasy about the troubles an Urrasti might find in adjusting to life on or trying to subvert life on Annares. And since the Urrasti is not presented in attractive fashion and is, in fact, held up to ridicule, it is at first odd that Tirin is sanctioned so badly for staging the play (and his life haunted by it), and that Shevek eventually decides he has to publish it independently despite social disapproval. 

Now, eventually, we are informed that Shevek learns to understand Tirin as an "inventor-destroyer, the kind who's got turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man who praises through rage." (Chapter 10, p. 270.) This goes very much against the purpose of drama on Annares, which really frowns on (i) individuality in all the arts and tends to praise works that (ii) promote (without being shallow) uplifting harmony. (This is also seen in the treatment of choral music on Annares.) 

So, let's take stock: in virtue of (i) and (ii) and (iii) representing immorality in satirical fashion Tirin's play is called "immoral" by some (270). Even in the narrative of The Dispossessed, it is recognized that calling an author immoral in virtue of (i-iii) is not an especially sophisticated response to the play.  But despite the Urrasti being the but of the joke, there is an important feature of the play that is highly critical of Annares. While the satire seems to be primarily directed against the traditional capitalist or properterian enemy it also expresses a criticism of the isolation of Annares. As Shevek puts it, this satire also teaches, "what prisons are, and who builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners." Annaeres is simultaneously a great social project, and a prison.

Now, for us as readers with only partial and second hand access to the play, it's not entirely clear how this interpretation follows from what we have been shown. But it is not entirely unclear either: the local Annares women does not get satisfaction, and the interaction between the man and women is governed by mutual misunderstanding. And all of this is due to the fact that the Settlement has built a theoretical and empirical wall around Annares. To keep capitalism out, the locals also deliberately keep themselves uninformed and to avoid nearly all mutual exchange.* The outside world is a source of contamination--and needs to be quarantined out. (This point is actually made on the very first page of the book.) 

And taken like this, Tirin's satire is not misunderstood at all by those who criticized and socially ostracized him. And while they may seem initially outlandishly vindictive and dangerously totalitarian to us, Tirin's audience accurately perceives that his ridiculous satire is taking aim at the foundational commitments of their society of mutual aid.+ (Notice that in the play, the Annares basically leave the Urrasti to his own devices.)

To close: one of the main questions that The Dispossessed makes us ask -- this is played out in a number of set-piece debates in chapter 12  -- is whether a society founded on the noble ideals of mutual aid and solidarity, can tolerate individual, intellectual commerce with the rest of the world (especially if that commerce is not governed by social utility) without risking its own survival by it. The question is, of course, not limited to such admirable societies. Le Guin's book offers no platitudes of reassurance or an answer to the question; each of us have to think it for ourselves with our communities.**

 

The Long Haul Glass is half full (knock on timber)

It's time for a long haul covid update again. (For my "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here). It's a nicer one to write because, despite a gloomy ending, I do have a lot more positive news to report.

1. So a few weeks ago, I had my first meeting with an occupational therapist. I may have mentioned that I find her theories silly, but there is nothing wrong with her practical insights. She made me do five day of diaries (by thirty minute intervals), and I was shown that I multitask a lot. And that a lot of things count as multi-tasking which were not intuitively multitasking to me: like walking and talking, like walking and listening to music, cooking and listening to music, writing and listening to music, etc.

2. So, I have made a lot of relatively minor behavioral adjustments all in the spirit of reducing what I call soft multi-tasking. Including some adjustments designed to relax before going to sleep (e.g., turning off my phone 30 minutes before lights out; no watching of netflix/football (etc.) before I go to sleep, etc.). I sleep much better, especially if I manage to go to bed relatively early. (I still need melatonin, alas.)

3. To my amazement, my headaches, nausea, and most of my sudden bouts of fatigue have largely disappeared. (I'll get to the *MAJOR* exception below.) So, my quality of life has improved dramatically again because I am not really suffering much day to day. And in many ways I feel like I did near the end of July, when I was confident I would recover before long.

4. Some of my symptoms (dizziness, tinnitus, and ear problems) have been tackled by my (fantastic!) new ENT physician. These problems were all eliminated by her aggressive treatment. However, a hearing test on Thursday revealed that, in fact, I do have reduced hearing loss (something I had suspected all year), but in my right ear only. Extra testing revealed the problems are due to my eardrum and not any of the nerves or structures behind the eardrum. This is very good news because it suggests it's reversible and (presumably) unrelated to Covid. My ENT thinks it's due to my chronic sinusitis. (Something diagnosed about five or six years ago.) She has started me on a whole battery of tests to get to the bottom of the chronic sinusitis  and to try treat it (so hopefully I have better hearing and better quality of life to hope for). These tests will be completed by the end of January, so this will be a major subtext going forward.

5. My Dutch GP (the junior partner of my longstanding GP) has become pro-active in helping me navigate the health options in Dutch context. She has invested time and energy to research different options and has coached me in dealing with recalcitrant specialists, and answering my questions. It really helps to have her in my corner. It also helps that the practice has a very good patient dossier system that allows for low key interaction with the GPs.

6. With some holiday and a month of no teaching coming up, I am optimistic about recovering more. This optimism is also due to the fact that with my ears recovered I can return to my swimming exercise, which is physically and psychologically a major boost.

Okay so much for the good news.

 

There is still bad news:

1. Social interactions still destroy me; I quickly get fatigued, headaches, and irritability after even minor conversations.

2. Since I mostly avoid social interactions, teaching and hospital/physician visits are the major trigger of these problems. Often adrenaline takes me through the actual class or the visit but the aftermath is brutal (fatigue, headaches, etc.). My occupational therapist claims she can help me with this, and our next meeting is all about strategies for improving my social endurance. (I will just ignore her theories.) So, hopefully she is as successful with this as she is with my multi-tasking issues. 

3. All of this (1-2) has led my occupational physician to cut my teaching load (and my salary) for next semester again. (I agreed.) I am very sad not to teach my inaugural feminist philosophy class, but my large lecture course is shorter and easier for me (despite the gigantic enrollments--we're expecting over 600 students.) This will leave me more time to recover from teaching, and also to spend more time with my family.

4. Having said that, while the aftermath of social interaction is still brutal, it's also clear that I am recovering quicker than before. And that's clearly because now when I think I am relaxing, I am really doing a better job of actually relaxing.

5. I had to miss my son's 12th birthday. Because I am in no position to do quick return trips between London and Amsterdam. I shared in some of the fun through social media (which I also find taxing), and it's not the same thing.

7. I know a lot of you want to cheer me on (thank you), and kind of try to spin things positively on my behalf. Well, this week the glass is half full.

Happy Holidays!

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 2.: Inductive risk in State Capitalist plutocratic-oligarchic society

"I did it in ten decads. Well enough to read To’s Introduction. Oh, hell, you need a text to work on. Might as well be that. Here. Wait.” He hunted through an overflowing drawer and finally achieved a book, a queer-looking book, bound in blue, without the Circle of Life on the cover. The title was stamped in gold letters and seemed to say Poilea Afio-ite, which didn’t make any sense, and the shapes of some of the letters were unfamiliar. Shevek stared at it, took it from Sabul, but did not open it. He was holding it, the thing he had wanted to see, the alien artifact, the message from another world.

He remembered the book Palat had shown him, the book of numbers.

“Come back when you can read that,” Sabul growled.

Shevek turned to go. Sabul raised his growl: “Keep those books with you! They’re not for general consumption.”

The young man paused, turned back, and said after a moment in his calm, rather diffident voice, “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t let anybody else read them!”

Shevek made no response.

Sabul got up again and came close to him. “Listen. You’re now a member of the Central Institute of Sciences, a Physics syndic, working with me, Sabul. You follow that? Privilege is responsibility. Correct?”

“I’m to acquire knowledge which I’m not to share,” Shevek said after a brief pause, stating the sentence as if it were a proposition in logic.

“If you found a pack of explosive caps in the street would you ‘share’ them with every kid that went by? Those books are explosives. Now do you follow me?”

“Yes.”

“All right” Sabul turned away, scowling with what appeared to be an endemic, not a specific rage. Shevek left, carrying the dynamite carefully, with revulsion and devouring curiosity.--Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed (chapter 4; p. 89 in the (1999) Millennium edition).

As regular readers know, ever since Joshua Miller introduced me to The Dispossessed, I have become an Ursula Le Guin fan-boi. I wrote about the book enthusiastically six years ago almost to the day (recall here--that counts as pt 1 of the present series). And I intended to return to it regularly. However, when I taught it the next time around, a class discussion about the sexual assault scene in chapter 7 made me realize I didn't understand the book. Normally, I use these digressions to think my way through to some clarity or higher order confusion, but, despite writing joyously about many of Le Guin's other works since, I was blocked on The Dispossessed, which I think of not just as a work of science fiction, but a major contribution to Socratic political theory (recall also here; this one on Thomas More; and here on Kant and Spinoza) in utopian and anarchist thought. (This post will illustrate that.) So now, I'd like to try again with a series of posts, including, eventually, a revisit the significance of that scene.

Okay, in the quoted passage above, our main protagonist, Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is introduced to a feature of what philosophers call 'inductive risk' (a now flourishing topic again thanks to Heather Douglas' revival of it). As I noted back in 2015 Shevek is politically very naïve, "a fool," this includes the politics of the science. And part of the action of the book is us viewing his education in politics (as well as the politics of science). And while I would never claim you should primarily read the book in virtue of its many insights into the nature of the socially embedded intellectual mind, but it is a good reason to read the book. (Yes, I am a fan.)

As an aside, I am usually not one for insisting biography matters, but while Le Guin never completed her doctorate, she was the daughter of the influential anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber, the sister of the literature professor Karl Kroeber, and the spouse of the historian Charles Le Guin. And she used her keen powers of observation and analysis in  her (gentle) satire and advocacy of the intellectual life (including the labor of spouses to make it possible).

What makes the passage notable is that Sabul, the director of the Sciences Institute, uses the inductive risk argument in the service of secrecy. That's not surprising; inductive risk does not entail secrecy, but it's always a live option in light of it. Yet, we realize rather quickly that in many ways it's a bogus argument because the interests that are being served are primarily his own careerist ones. For despite the absence of profit as a motive -- Annares is anarchist society without (private) property and commerce -- the Sciences Institute itself has become hierarchical in structure and a source of social benefits not the least prestige. And through his office and political maneuvering, Sabul controls gate-keeping rather severely (e.g., publication locally and access to information from and with international networks). 

And the reason why the inductive risk argument works so well with Shevek is that the social responsibilities of science (and other practices) are very important in Annares, which teeters constantly on the edge of famine, and where all the social mores are organized around mutual aid and local control by local syndics. Part of Le Guin's wizardry in the book is that she simultaneously makes the potential oppressiveness of such little platoons local syndics highly visible and felt, while not destroying the ideal behind it. Like all important ideas that can be communicated to others, inductive risk can be abused. Of course, in this case it is a reflexive problem (it's the inductive risk of inductive risk). And it is striking that it can be abused so badly in a society where social consequences are taken so seriously. In lots of other contexts, the scientists themselves might well resist the idea that their work should be evaluated in light of social consequences--that's other people's responsibility and problem.

Interestingly enough, despite rejecting property, and embracing mutual aid, the scientists of Annares, the idealistic Shevek not excepted, crave credit/recognition for their scientific work. When Shevek is arm-twisted into sharing credit with his boss (Sabul), we see him experiencing misery. And he looks for ways to receive the credit he thinks he deserves. Sabul and Shevek end up bargaining (through barter and withholding labor/benefits) over credit. And it is one of his motives to challenge (and eventually leave) the Physics syndic. On first principles, one would have expected anonymous or collective publication -- so, either put all the names of the syndic on it or just the name of the syndic -- to be the norm in Annares. But Le Guin discerns, not implausible, that even when profit motive is eliminated by society, status and recognition are important pulls.

To be clear, when Le Guin turns to science's functioning in A-Io (on the planet Urras),--an excessively patriarchal-state-capitalist society [a critic calls it "plutocratic-oligarchic" at one point], which appears as a kind of a mirror-hybrid between the UK and US of the 1970s, but still highly familiar--profit and bureaucratic advancement are also not the only motive in science. When Atro, the doyen of science in Urras, and a champion of Shevek's theories, explains his motives he says:

“I hope you feel the same, my dear. I earnestly hope it. There’s a great deal that’s admirable, I’m sure, in your society, but it doesn’t teach you to discriminate—which is after all the best thing civilization teaches. I don’t want those damned aliens getting at you through your notions about brotherhood and mutualism and all that. They’ll spout you whole rivers of ‘common humanity’ and ‘leagues of all the worlds’ and so on, and I’d hate to see you swallow it. The law of existence is struggle—competition—elimination of the weak—a ruthless war for survival. And I want to see the best survive. The kind of humanity I know. The Cetians. You and I: Urras and Anarres. We’re ahead of them now, all those Hainish and Terrans and whatever else they call themselves, and we’ve got to stay ahead of them. They brought us the interstellar drive, but we’re making better interstellar ships now than they are. When you come to release your Theory, I earnestly hope you’ll think of your duty to your own people, your own kind. Of what loyalty means, and to whom it’s due.” The easy tears of old age had sprung into Atro’s half-blind eyes. Shevek put his hand on the old man’s arm, reassuring, but he said nothing.

“They’ll get it, of course. Eventually. And they ought to. Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone. But before they get it, I want them to pay for it! I want us to take our rightful place. I want respect; and that’s what you can win us. Transilience—if we’ve mastered transilience, their interstellar drive won’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s not money I want, you know. I want the superiority of Cetian science recognized, the superiority of the Cetian mind. If there has to be an interstellar civilization, then by God I don’t want my people to be low-caste members of it! We should come in like noblemen, with a great gift in our hands—that’s how it should be. Well, well, I get hot about it sometimes. By the way, how’s it going, your book?” (119-120)

It's important that in the self-conception of Atro, science is in its social aspect fundamentally about prestige and recognition. In this respect he is not so different from the attitudes of Shevek.

But for Atro, it is a means to winning in a competition. In an important (1987) paper, Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception, the feminist philsopher, María Lugones, noticed, correctly, that modern advocates of play (she names Johan Huizinga and Hans-Georg Gadamer) tend to think of play in terms of agonistic competition, that is winning, and in which competence (under uncertainty over the come) reigns supreme. And she, quite rightly, connects these ideas to imperialist outlook. Atro fits this agonistic schema very nicely.* (I actually think the alternative, loving play, also has a platonic origin in Plato's Laws, but about that some other time.)

In fact, Atro (a scion of an old noble family) rejects the profit motive (which is otherwise very important in his society). But prestige can also be used for ends that are quite political: international standing, and international competitive advantage. And while there are plenty of hints that others in Atro's society intend to make great profits from technological advantage, even derive military advantage, Atro is keen on gifting ideas to others recognizing, a norm once ubiquitous in the academy, that in gift-economy bearing great gifts is a source of great prestige (and power).

There is one more scene that bears on this. It occurs just after the assault scene (and Shevek's response to it) that is so troubling. And after it, Shevek's character changes course in significant. It's an introspective meditation by Shevek:

To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State.

On his first night in this room he had asked them, challenging and curious, “What are you going to do with me?” He knew now what they had done with him. Chifoilisk had told him the simple fact. They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. (Chapter 9, p. 225)

It's important to recognize (and this is explicit in the book), that in this respect, there is little difference between a communist state [which Chifoilisk serves], where "one [centralized] power structure controls all, the government, administration, police, army, education, laws, trades, manufactures [and with a] money economy.” (p. 114) And wages are determined by this power structure. And a society (A-Io, akin to ours today) in which profit is pursued, but in which the state and interlocking companies and foundations fund research. The modern state is mercantile in character, and even in the absence of actual violence, it is always lurking in the background to those who refuse or resist its coinage. (This is, in fact, the point of chapter 9.)

Here foreseeable, inductive risk really means either that science is corrupted by letting the state's coinage rule it (that is, that science's intrinsic reward scheme is displaced by extrinsic ones), or that it serves to entrench state power (by becoming "an investment or a weapon" (p. 288)) at the expense of those in the margins of society or other societies. That is, the book very clearly (and rightly!) rejects the idea that the state's and its functionaries' interests coincide with the wider proper interests. And the hard-hitting message of The Dispossessed is that all of us in the academy are, in this respect, state functionaries with more or less greater self-awareness about this.

At the end of the book, Shevek decides that the best solution is free, universal open access; a true communism of knowledge (familiar, say, from the Stoics). But it's not wholly clear whether Le Guin endorses it; because she shows that for Shevek this for all his idealism, too, is partially transactional. He receives credit and a chance at return home (or freedom). And a moment's reflection suggests that international open access may strengthen the states and oligarchs, if they can control, and they have the means to do so, their state functionaries. 

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on Rawls and Liberalism

As a serious and committed liberal, Rawls did not position his theory as a response to the many radical tendencies of his day, because he was convinced that his position, like liberalism itself, already represented an adequate response. These challenges were, in the main, the same radical challenges that liberalism has faced since its inception. That inception did not take place in a hypothetical “state of nature” but rather in a real era of slave states and imperial conquest on a planetary scale, and it was these forces that spread its putatively universalist tenets around the world as it developed ever more incisive criticisms of injustice and inequality. That liberal vision had long been wedded to theories of property and popular sovereignty formed in response far more to imagined histories of political and economic inheritance than to the actual history that explained the distributions of income, rights, and privileges that liberalism and liberals promised to equitably manage. By every indication, Rawls really meant what he said about equality, fairness, and justice in his personal and intellectual life, though he came to a partial and selective understanding of what those things required of him and the structures around him.--Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò "Selective Conscience: John Rawls’s doctrine of fairness." The Nation, December 13, 2021 issue.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's elegant and provocative review of Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (a book I have procrastinated on reading carefully) closes with the remark quoted above. A key point of the review is that "by redirecting us from both history and sociology and premising justice on abstract game theory, Rawls’s book and its liberal vision of justice ended up promoting a political philosophy that was ill-equipped for the era of sustained academic and popular attention to historical injustice." I am generally not a friend of the Rawlsian vision of liberalism, but I am curious about the claim because there are a series of papers that have tried to develop Rawls to fill the gap on the academic side (Janna Thompson here; and Erin Kelly here, both published in Ethics). That made me wonder whether Táíwò thinks such attempts fail intellectually or whether, and more interesting to me, he thinks such attempts are unsuited to informing and shaping the "popular attention" to the topic. I have long been struck by the fact that Rawls' Theory of Justice appeared at the turning point of the New Deal settlement, and when the culture's and political (ahh) zeitgeist moved against it, Since Táíwò has a book (which I also aspire to read) out/forthcoming on the topic consider this advertisement for it. 

As an aside, when Táíwò describes Rawls' rise in biographical terms through the academy he does not mention one of the more remarkable features of it, that is, that Rawls had a quite noticeable speech impediment (something I encountered first hand in 1991 or 92). (I think this may be missing from Forrester's book.) In her remembrance of Rawls at the memorial servive, Christine Korsgaard leads with a touching story about this. The Guardian's obituary claims that "as a child, he was traumatised by the deaths of two brothers from infections they had contracted from him; Rawls later admitted that this tragedy had contributed to the development of a severe stutter, which afflicted him for the rest of his life." I mention this because the academy is not an especially easy place to function in with such a limitation. And it also would have undermined the effectiveness, alas, of a lot of more public facing political activities.

Be that as it may, the quoted passage uses Rawls as a stand-in for liberalism. In a certain sense this makes sense because from a theoretical point of view, in the Anglophone academy, Rawls is the only liberal game in town. But liberalism as a living political practice, institutionalized in constitutions and institutions, draws on sources that generally predate Rawls and have been capable of sustained creativity and re-invention. It is worth noting that when in the late 1970s Foucault turned to the question of the liberal art of government, Rawls has no place in his narrative: instead he focuses on eighteenth century sources, and (from the twentieth century) ordoliberalism, Walter Lippmann, Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and Chicago economics. (Foucault largely skips Keynes, who thought of himself as saving liberalism, and, more oddly -- given the list -- Popper.)*

The list of names in the previous paragraph hints at many polemics against the 'radical tendencies' of their day. For many those polemics were existential because they thought it possible that liberalism could collapse, and had collapsed in many places. Because Rawls is writing in the shadow of pax americana there is a complacency to his thought absent from others. For all his flaws (and there are many) Popper's Open Society and its Enemies, for example never bores (despite the lengthy and sometimes bizarre footnotes) because he takes these tendencies extremely seriously. And none of the  characters I have just mentioned are interested in state of nature theorizing or even popular sovereignty, which many of these liberals  associate with the dangers of totalitarianism and the dangerous afterlife of Rousseau's Social Contract. All of them try to imagine democracy in ways that would screen of such a doctrines.

I mention ordoliberalism, especially, in this context because in its foundational moment (recall here), as a politically potent force, on the ruins of Nazi Germany, it relatively quickly recognizes the principle of reparations for historical injustice. The Federal Republic of Germany has paid out to Israel and Jews (and some other victims) everywhere since. So, the idea that liberalism (sharing) in power is incapable of addressing historical injustice rests, I fear, on the Anglo-experience. (Of course, I don't deny that liberalism in power does a lot of evil, too.)

And if we go back a bit, to the nineteenth century, the most vital age of liberal politics, there is quite a bit of liberal complicity with racialized empire. But the most interesting liberal political characters of the age, Richard Cobden and John Bright, are implacable enemies of slavery (Bright especially), of militarism (including Britain's), and imperialism. (Interestingly enough, their names are generally only associated with free trade; but for them that was a moral and political crusade against militarism and poverty.) And it is interesting to me that philosophers happily teach and discuss Mill, warts and all, in the undergraduate curriculum, but ignore (recall) Cobden and Bright.+ And I don't think Cobden and Bright are somehow odd exceptions. They are drawing on what one may call the Adam Smith-Condorcet-Wilberforce heritage.

Noam Chomsky (not a liberal apologist), writing in 1970, in "Government in the Future," recognizes this heritage and articulates it through Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “Limits of State Action,” which he even treats as a kind of founder of libertarian and a certain species of anarchist thought or at least its most profound exemplar. And, crucially for present purposes Chomsky (correctly) opposes Von Humboldt to the state of nature tradition (especially Rousseau) and ideas of popular sovereignty. (In 1995 he links Smith and Von Humboldt.) Smith and Von Humboldt take state political violence (of Mercantilism) as their target.

I mention all of this in superficial form because there is liberal social theory and a liberal political philosophy that takes its own complicity with social evils seriously, and also has articulated responses to it. Nearly everyone mentioned here believed in relatively open borders in order to welcome refugees and immigrants, and instinctively rejected Rawls' "closed society." Many of my past digressions are invitations to the material mentioned above. (My friend Jacob T. Levy has been very inspirational on these issues, and his work is, perhaps, a better place to start.) I do not suggest that these responses would be compelling to the present radical tendencies and radical critics, but Rawls' shadow also blots out a lot of liberalism worth rediscovering if only to understand our recurring predicaments. Perhaps, some of you may wish to join me in rebuilding a theoretical liberalism worth having from the building blocks scattered throughout history.