Digressions&Impressions

On the "more insidious" Defenders of Israel.

But there’s another type that’s more insidious. I’m referring to those right-thinking mealy-mouths who are “critical” of Israel’s actions on the Gaza frontier. They may “disagree” with the current leaders of the Jewish state. Perhaps they might “oppose” the occupation and the settlements, and “support” the idea of Palestinian statehood. But the one thing they will not question is the shibboleth that Israel only acts in “self-defense.” From this unquestioned premise, they arrive at the cowardly and trite conclusion:  it’s a complicated situation. At which point, they’re only a Palestinian stone’s throw away from having a politics that’s maybe kinder, but no less lethal, than a hardened Likudnik’s.

Apply the slightest scrutiny to Israel’s vaunted “self-defense” claim, and the whole jig falls apart. Again, consider the image of a military superpower facing down civilian protestors, armed at most with rocks and tires, and ask yourself: who poses an immediate threat to whom? Ask this to an apologist of Israel, and something predictable will happen. Invariably they will say, “But what about Hamas?,” with breathless reference to their “genocidal charter.” This is a thought-terminating and frivolous cliché.

It’s not unreasonable to assume that Hamas—which is a political party, a civil administration and a social-religious movement, in addition to a militia—would be present in a mass demonstration. What is unreasonable is the idea that all, or even most, a majority or a plurality of Palestinian demonstrators are members of Hamas. And even of those who are, that they are active militants engaged in armed hostilities; still less, that they all swear by a charter written in 1988, and are presently enacting its provisions to a tee. More to the point, that they are even capable or credible as threats; and lastly and the least, that any of this is grounds for summary execution.

To draw that odious conclusion, you would have to think of Palestinians as a fanatical horde, stripped of all humanity and independent will, thrilling to the exhortations of religious manifestos and on the cusp of genocidal murder. You would have to believe, consciously or not, that the only thing that keeps the Palestinians from unbridled savagery is their continued subjugation, or anyway segregation. (A complicated situation, after all.) In any other context, we would recognize such thinking as the product of a lurid and extreme and toxic ideology, the sort of desperate slander you expect from bloodthirsty dictators. But this is what now passes for a “nuanced” and “moderate” opinion.

A whole industry of quacks and cranks exists to generate these wisdoms. (Their leading light, the historian Bernard Lewis, passed away this past weekend. Note how his famous coinage, the so-called “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, still resonates in The New York Times’ coverage of the Gaza massacre as an ahistorical “clash.”) And a cottage industry of legal charlatans complements their efforts, inventing legal justifications from whole cloth for each of Israel’s crimes (Israel’s exemption from the Geneva Conventions, for instance, or the legitimacy of territorial acquisition in the Six Day War). Many politically minded people, especially the young, are wising up to these exploded myths and propaganda. They know that voices of raison d’État cannot be taken at face-value. But out of all of these received opinions, by far the most resilient is the plaintive and self-pitying whine that Israel is “defending” its “security.”

“Security” is one of those magical words that lets you do whatever you want to do, and means whatever you want it to mean. In the present case, it has the exact opposite meaning from its common sense. For one, the “defensive” paradigm is wrong from the start. Israel is an Occupying Power, having ruled over an unwilling population for 50 years of military dictatorship. The majority of Gaza’s residents are stateless refugees, ethnically cleansed from what is now the state of Israel; several generations have grown up in subjugation and exile. Israel, in plainer terms, is the aggressor—in a long, protracted state of aggression. The only thing it is defending is its continuing aggression. The irony should not be lost on anyone: if Israel were genuinely concerned with “public safety” in a strict sense, it would know that if you end the subjugation of Palestinians, you remove the whole raison d’être of Palestinian resistance.

...

“Security” has political content, in other words. “Security” means securing Israel’s territorial expansion, its regional dominance, and ultimately its ethnic identity as a country purged of its original inhabitants.

In a televised interview, prime minister Yitzhak Shamir once admitted that Israel went to war with Lebanon in 1982 because there was “a terrible danger…not so much a military one as a political one.” This is as good a statement of Israel’s security concerns as any. Israel knows that its ambitions and its obstacles are political in nature, that its woes stem from the fact that the Gaza protestors’ demands (which are, in fact, their basic human rights) are politically anathema to the Jewish state. And they’re anathema, because the return of Arab refugees to their homeland would undermine the very project of Zionism, of a Jewish ethno-state.

This is a political choice—a choice which, when stated plainly, sounds retrograde and racist and intolerable, which it is—but when you depoliticize and dehumanize a people into a security concern, everything can be permitted. It is a political choice, pretending to be a security issue, and producing a military response. All the moral condemnation in the world against the Israeli military’s “excesses” doesn’t get one off the hook from this political decision; a decision which requires one, if you believe it, to accept that Israel should defend its border, that Palestinians should be seen as a security liability. So you might disagree with the degree of violence used, the type of ammunition, the rules of engagement; but if you accept the politics of Israel’s “defense,” you’ll still have made your bed on the side with guns, as it were. And those who do have made themselves the useful idiots on the wrong side of history.--Jordan von Manalastas "The Wrong Side of History." [HT Marcus Stanley]

Shooting bullets into a demonstration is indefensible. The previous sentence is true even if all the dead and wounded are (as I think not) armed, Hamas militants sworn (let's stipulate) to destroy Israel and whose deaths may be part of a cult of martyrdom. Nobody deserves to die just because they hold a weapon which you think one day will be pointed at you. Basic and minimal humanity requires us to mourn the loss of life. Instead many apologists for Israel end up blaming the victims either directly (because they are bad people) or indirectly because, as Shmuel Rosner grotesquely suggests in the New York Times,* they fail to march against nor have dislodged Hamas from power. It is grotesque because while justifying the ongoing suffering of the Palestinian Gazans, Rosner never confronts the fact that for quite a while now, Israeli policy is in clear collusion with all Palestinian extremists to systematically undermine any non-violent Palestinian  voices or movements from ever emerging. As far back as 2009, non-violent protests -- in the West Bank -- routinely are met with rather harsh responses. Israel's collective punishment of the Gazans only breeds hatred and despair. 

You might think from the previous paragraph I think Zionism is illegitimate. But I have defended the legitimacy of Zionism at the height of a Gaza war.  My defense of Zionism is rooted in the failures of internationalist liberalism, which has proven itself impotent to prevent the revival of racialized nationalism (which is historically antisemitic in lots of places) and closed borders (which trap minorities). Zionism is a second best solution for the world we have inherited. Anybody who looks at the liberal world today with its embrace of deportations, its fondness for walls and farming out of immigration policy to dictatorial regimes, and its callous regard for  the plight of refugees anywhere, recognizes that ongoing relevance of Zionism, which guarantees a home to Jews from everywhere.

Equally my criticisms of Zionism are not moral, but strategic: i) its failure to establish permanent borders for the state of Israel; (ii) to settle what kind of political entity Israel should be so that it can end its near-permanent war-footing and occupation of hostile populations; (iii) (the perception of) Israel's dependence on America's political and military support, which ties Israel to America's strategic interests and electoral politics, while (iv) allowing a split between the interests of Zionism and American Jewry to develop. In addition, (v) Israel, and too many of its purported friends, fail to provide Palestinians with positive incentives to come to peace with Israel. Israel's actions are desperately short of confidence inspiring measures that show it is willing to think of life after war. Because the war has become so asymmetric,+ Israel's political order is dangerously complacent about the status quo.

I am one of those insidious defenders of Israel, who does not merely think that Israel's current policies are a strategic mistake, but recognizes the historical injustice done to Palestinian refugees seventy years ago. I think they deserve genuine compensation for their losses and continued suffering. (I should add that I think the Jews who had to leave North Africa and Persia/Iran also deserve compensation.) The founding of Israel involved war crimes.++ But it does not follow that the refugees must be allowed to return to their historic homelands or that, thereby, Zionism is bankrupt ideology. My reasoning is not ad hoc; for example, the Greeks of Alexandria have no right to return to Egypt nor the Turks of Thessaloniki have a right to return to Greece. (The list is much longer, of course.)  Nor does my family have a right to the property in Berlin we lost to the Nazis.** Von Manalastas is writing his critique of the insidious in Ithaca; I know upstate NY a bit. It's full of native lands, whose true heirs have not been compensated (let alone the slave labor that enriched, say, the endowments of the Ivies). 

It's not that Von Manalastas is wrong that much defense of Israel is nauseating propaganda which blames victims and dehumanizes the  Palestinians; it often merely repeats cliches that cannot withstand much intellectual scrutiny. If you want "peace and quiet" from Gaza, why constantly strengthen the hands of Hamas and rejectionists? You don't create indifference if you starve and impoverish folk. Such defenses turn those with a moral sensibility (recall) away from the Zionist project (this is a tactical mistake) and leaves as its only supporters the (large number, alas) Islamophobes and Christians who see Israel as a necessary step toward bringing about the apocalypse. While my own defense of Zionism (not Israeli policy) is not rooted in morality, Zionism deserves to be evaluated by its fruits, including the moral ones: this is a mixed bag with amazing successes and genuine injustices. 

By contrast, too many critics of Israel fall into Von Manalastas's position which slides from criticism of Israel's policies into de-legitimizing any defense of Israel at all. He is right that appeals to 'security' get abused; this is a fact familiar not just from Israeli policy, but from much of the so-called 'war on terror' in lots of places. The human rights problem engendered by it are familiar enough for those who do not wish to be ignorant. But the underlying strategic problem does not get emphasized sufficiently: by focusing exclusively on security rejectionists on all sides are offered a full-proof veto-power over any attempts to end a conflict.

Let me close with a final observation: Von Manalastas is confident that people like me are on the wrong side of history. His stance is little different from too many Israeli intellectuals, who, drunk with power, are indifferent to criticisms, and think folk like me represent a historical aberration. My modest reminder is that history has a tendency to disappoint.

 

On Those Flags at the Dyke March Chicago with Some Thoughts on the Future of American Jewry

Sadly, our celebration of dyke, queer and trans solidarity was partially overshadowed by our decision to ask three individuals carrying Israeli flags superimposed on rainbow flags to leave the rally. This decision was made after they repeatedly expressed support for Zionism during conversations with Chicago Dyke Mark Collective members. We have since learned that at least one of these individuals is a regional director for A Wider Bridge, an organization with connections to the Israeli state and right-wing pro-Israel interest groups. A Wider Bridge has been protested for provocative actions at other LGBTQ events and has been condemned by numerous organizations (http://tarabnyc.org/cancelpinkwashing) for using Israel’s supposed ‘LGBTQ tolerance’ to Pinkwash the violent occupation of Palestine...The Chicago Dyke March Collective is explicitly not anti-Semitic, we are anti-Zionist. The Chicago Dyke Mark Collective supports the liberation of Palestine and all oppressed people everywhere. From Palestine to Mexico, border walls have got to go!!”--The Chicago Dyke March@Twitter as reported by Pinknews

On Facebook, my blogging buddy,  Mark Norris Lance, shared a statement by People Artists Collective (FTP) defending "the decision of Dyke March Chicago (DMC) to protect Palestinian participants of the march by removing a group of openly Zionist marchers from yesterday’s event in La Villita." My exchange with Mark prompted the reflections that generated this post.

Let me start by noting that, according to most reports I have read, the number of folk that seem to have been removed is three. These were seen to be "carrying rainbow flags with a blue six-pointed star in the center." This was taken to be an expression not of Jewish Gay Pride, but Zionist Gay Pride. This latter inference is not silly: for at least one of the three works for an organization (A Wider Bridge) that is self-consciously (pro-Zionist). [I quote from one of its own press releases, "A Wider Bridge has been building a movement of LGBTQ people and allies, Jews and non-Jews, with strong interest in and commitment to Israel and its LGBTQ community."] It does not follow, however, that a rainbow flag with a Star of David needs to be a statement of support for Zionism.

I have defended the legitimacy of Zionism and often post my reflections on contemporary Zionism and its history as part of a wider, immanent conversation about the future of Zionism today; but, because I take freedom of association very seriously, I also recognize that DMC has every right, even a moral right, (i) to prevent its message from being hijacked by those whose policies it does not approve* of or (ii) "to protect Palestinian participants" from exposure to Zionist imagery. I would prefer an intersectional universe in which Jews, who wish to express their Gay Pride and their favorable view of Zionism, would not be forced to choose between them, but Zionists need not be told that the world we inhabit is imperfect.

As an important aside, the history of the Star of David as a Jewish symbol is an interesting one and is generally dated to late middle ages among Ashkenazi Jews in Central Europe. (The Star was used prior to that by Christians and Jews alike.) Perhaps it had a role earlier in Jewish Kabbalah, but that was always self-consciously an exclusive enterprise even among Jews. Due to the influence of Herzl (recall these two posts) it was also adopted as a Zionist symbol in the late nineteenth century, but that did not prevent Franz Rosenzweig, who was (to put it mildly) decidedly lukewarm about Zionism, to organize his (Jewish) philosophy around the Star in The Star of Redemption. That is to say, while the Star of David as a Jewish Symbol is itself a modern phenomenon, it predates Zionism. The early Zionists chose the Star of David because they wanted a Jewish symbol that did not, I think, emphasize Judaism (as a religion), otherwise they could have chosen a Menorah.

Let's return to DMC's decision and rhetoric (in non-pejorative sense). While allowing that the DMC has the right to prevent its message from being hijacked by those whose policies it does not approve* of or "to protect Palestinian participants" from exposure to Zionist imagery, I cannot help thinking that the DMC also thereby prevented the visible, public expression of Jewish Gay Pride. Now, DMC claims that "QUEER AND TRANS ANTI-ZIONIST JEWISH FOLKS ARE WELCOME HERE...WE LOVE YOU AND NEED YOU.” (Caps in original.) So, it would be interesting to learn -- I don't mean this cynically -- how such Jews can, if they so wish, self-present themselves publicly as Jews in a DMC organized march. (I have no doubt that Jews that keep their identity low profile are surely welcome.)

Before I get to why, given that I allow that the organizers of DMC have the right to prevent its message from being hijacked (etc.), I care about the potential effacement of public expressions of Jewish identity, I should note that I am not writing this in a vacuum: there are plenty of forces, both among many of my Zionist friends as well as by those (among which I include many that are my friends) that support the BDS movement, that will happily encourage a Manichean battle in which no genuine conversation between those that support Zionism and those that criticize it is possible. That's familiar enough.

But I am also writing this at a historical moment when American Jewry is confronting some uncomfortable truths. The revival of American White nationalism,** encouraged by President Trump [whose administration is, let's stipulate, pro-Zionist]],+ is also re-opening and undermining the public role of Jewish life in American politics and civil life. This revival occurs precisely when the State of Israel is increasingly understanding its own interest as independent and distinct from the survival of American Jewry in America (recall this post and this one). This last point is illustrated by the Israeli government's refusal to embrace the Western Wall compromise (one promoted by Natan Sharansky with backing of American Jewish organizations);*** the Israeli government's rejection generated the extraordinary statement by the new head of the Jewish Agency that 'Support for Israel doesn't necessarily mean support for the Israeli government.' The Jewish Agency is the largest Jewish non-profit organization (and traditionally funded primarily by American Jewry) and, also, an umbrella organization for worldwide Zionists (it played a central role in the founding of Israel and it is connected to the Corporatist elements of Herzl's vision).

So, American Jewry finds itself at a a complex cross-roads. A generation long drift away from unquestioned support for Zionism coincides now with a renewed urgency about safe-guarding civil rights for Jews Stateside and thereby a renewed receptivity for developing coalitions with others looking to secure civil rights for all. For American Jews this means both an international struggle within international Jewry to secure a Zionism that reflects its humane values -- including a desire to come to a historic, even if elusive, compromise with Palestinian self-determination -- as well as a national struggle to prevent the further erosion of civil rights Stateside. Such a two-fold struggle is unlikely to succeed because of lack of focus and thus its energy is likely to be diluted. It is surely doomed to fail if the most energetic and politically savvy would-be-interlocutors among existing American civil rights movements show themselves unwilling to be receptive to Jews, who publicly express themselves as Jews, as fellow-travelers in the march for civil rights and dignity.

This leads me to a final observation. I have already noted above that among certain Zionists and supporters of the BDS movement there is a long-term Manichean battle, which is designed, in part, to force a choice among American Jews for or against Zionism. Many college campuses and, as the debates over DMC indicate, other areas of civil engagement are now the sites of contestation. But in Trump's America, it is an urgent task to end this Manichean battle for the only ones that gain from this battle are those that support a resurgent White nationalism.

 

 

 

On Paying Attention to Murray but not Cugoano

"Try to find Cugoano in a philosophical syllabus," Coleman notes. You will fail. Similarly, if you search for "philosophers" in Google Images, you will find only ""white men," usually with beards."

According to Coleman, the philosophical canon is socially constructed and unjustly excludes Africans like Cugoano or Anton Wilhelm Amo, an African philosopher who lived in (what is now) Germany, in the 17th century. They were virtually written out of the history of philosophy. It has been recounted that enslaved Africans did not write anything worth reading, and much less anything of philosophical value. And if they did write anything, it was only "stories." But this is false.

These authors were philosophers, insists Coleman: Alongside Cugoano and Amo and the "Sons of Africa," Frederick Douglass, as well as African women such as the African British Mary Prince or the African American women Sojourner Truth, Harriet Ann Jacobs, and Sarah Parker Remond are also to be included or, better, intruded into the canon .

With the British campaign "Why is my curriculum white," the related South African campaign "Rhodes must fall" and the British solidarity campaign "Rhodes must fall Oxford," efforts are currently being undertaken to recover those voices that have been stifled and to challenge institutionalised whiteness, especially in Eurocentric curricula.

How deeply rooted racist views still are can be seen in the fact that there are still "orangutan" philosophers around. Take, for example Michael Levin, an emeritus professor of New York University, who, among other things, defended the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which attempts to establish a relationship between intelligence and "race."--(August 24, 2015)  Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman

I have taught courses related to early modern and enlightenment thought on and off for twenty years. But I never included Cugoano or Amo. I have only known about them during the last few years (in part because of the work by Justin Smith on Amo). By contrast, I have taught and blogged about Charles Murray -- because you know, a great occasion to teach the tools of socially relevant philosophy of science -- and I have listened to and reflected on folk who think it's important we respectfully listen and engage civilly with Murray. I have, of course, noticed that there is quite a bit of financial and PR effort to make sure that Murray's writings are noticed and by now this notice has created a predictable ritual in response which creates more notice, etc. So, in order to break the cycle, I decided to read Cugoano.

Much of Cuguano's book is an effort with coming to terms how people who call themselves Christians can act so barbaric to others. (There is also a hint of theodicy, but about that some other time more.) And some of the best passages are actually an analysis of the institution(s) of slavery in the Bible and the abuse of it in justifying then contemporary slavery. The normative argument is Lockean in spirit and should appeal to contemporary libertarians in lots of ways.

But I picked out an extended aside (which echoes of Smith's critique of the political effects of Mercantilism and the role of debt in imperial projects, but is in some ways more specific) that I quote below. I call attention to three still relevant, inter-connected arguments about the political economy of slavery (and any imperial project) and its pernicious political effects. First, it creates the kind of riches that generate the means to influence and control government, which then will serve the interest of the well-connected abroad. So, Cugoano has clear sense of the ways in which immorality and theft leads to rent-seeking, which makes the state follow policies that enrich the immoral more.

Second, these policies lead to an endless cycle of wars initially to protect the newfound property abroad. These wars are both a source of riches to some in society, and actually impoverish the rest of society because they create debts that need to be paid through unproductive taxes (etc.). These debts are financed by the slave-owners and warmongers who benefit twice over from their immorality. Moreover, the immoral practices undermine the practice of virtue at home, too, and make the whole society more war-loving.

Third, these debts create opportunity costs in two ways: (i) the debts could have been used to finance more productive enterprise at home; (ii) the renter class is itself not productive. This argument strikes me as highly relevant for our present, political situation (if you think there is no slavery anymore, just insert 'oil', extracted 'commodities' or 'arms' into the argument). Anyway, here is Cugoano (maybe you can find more in his argument):

But should it be asked, what advantages Great-Britain has gained by all its extensive territories abroad, the devastations committed, and the abominable slavery and oppression carried on in its colonies? It may be answered ac|cording to the old proverb,

It seldom is the grand-child's lot,

To share of wealth unjustly got.

This seems to be verified too much in their present situation: for however wide they have extended their territories abroad, they have sunk into a world of debt at home, which must ever remain an impending burden upon the inhabitants. And it is not likely, by any plan as yet adopted, to be ever paid, or any part of it, without a long continued heavy annual load of taxes. Perhaps, great as it is some other plan, more equitable for the good of the whole community, if it was wanted to be done, and without any additional taxes, might be so made use of to pay it all off in twenty or thirty years time, and in such manner as whatever emergencies might happen, as never to need to borrow any money at interest. The national debt casts a sluggish deadness over the whole realm, greatly stops ingenuity and improvements, promotes idleness and wickedness, clogs all the wheels of commerce, and drains the money out of the nation. If a foreigner buys stock, in the course of years that the interest amounts to the principal, he gets it all back; and in an equitable time the same sum ever after, and in course must take that money to foreign parts. And those who hold stock at home, are a kind of idle drones, as a Page  88 burden to the rest of the community: whereas if there were no funds, those who have money would be obliged to occupy it in some improvements themselves, or lend it to other manufacturers or merchants, and by that means useful employments, ingenuity and commerce would flourish. But all stock-jobbing, lotteries, and useless business, has a tendency to slavery and oppression; for as the greater any idle part of the community is, there must be the greater labour and hardships resting upon the industrious part who support the rest; as all men are allotted in some degree to eat their bread with the sweat of their brow; but it is evil with any people when the rich grind the face of the poor. Lotteries must be nearly as bad a way of getting mo|ney for the good of a nation, as it is for an individual when he is poor, and obliged to pawn his goods to increase his poverty, already poor. On the reverse, if a nation was to keep a bank to lend money to merchants and others, that nation might flourish, and its support to those in need might be attended with advantage to the whole; but that nation which is obliged to borrow money from others, must be in a poor and wretched situation, and the inhabitants, who have to bear the load of its taxes, must be greatly burdened, and perhaps many of those employed in its service (as soldiers and others) poorly paid....

But when a nation or people do wickedly, and commit cruelties and devastations upon others, and enslave them, it cannot be expected that they Page  89 should be attended with the blessings of God, neither to eschew evil. They often become infatuated to do evil unawares; and those employed under their service sometimes lead them into debt, error and wickedness, in order to enrich themselves by their plunder, in committing the most barbarous cruelties, under pretences of war, wherein they were the first aggressors, and which is generally the case in all unnatural and destructive disputes of war. In this business money is wanted, the national debt becomes increased, and new loans and other sums must be added to the funds. The plunderers abroad send home their cash as fast as they can, and by one means and another the sums wanted to borrow, are soon made up. At last when the wars subside, or other business calls them home, laden with the spoils of the East or elsewhere, they have then the grand part of their business to negociate, in buying up bank stock, and lodging their plunder and ill-got wealth in the British or other funds. Thus the nation is loaded with more debt, and with an annual addition of more interest to pay, to the further advantage of those who often occasioned it by their villainy; who, if they had their deserts, like the Popish inquisitors, are almost the only people in the world who deserve to be hung on the rack.

But so it happens in general, that men of activity and affluence, by whatever way they are possessed of riches, or have acquired a greatness of such property, they are always preferred to take the lead in matters of government, so that the greatest depredators, warriors, contracting companies of merchants, and rich slave-holders, always endeavour to push themselves on to get Page  90 power and interest in their favour; that whatever crimes any of them commit they are seldom brought to a just punishment. Unless that something of this kind had been the case, 'tis impossible to conceive how such an enormous evil as the slave-trade could have been established and carried on under any Christian government: and from hence that motly system of government, which hath so sprung up and established itself, may be accounted for, and as being an evident and universal depravity of one of the finest constitutions in the world; and it may be feared if these unconstitutional laws▪ reaching from Great-Britain to her colonies, be long continued in and supported, to the carrying on that horrible and wicked traffic of slavery, must at last mark out the whole of the British constitution with ruin and destruction; and that the most generous and tenacious people in the world for liberty, may also at last be reduced to slaves. And an Ethiopian may venture to assert, that so long as slavery is continued in any part of the British dominions, that more than one-half of the legislature are the virtual supporters and encouragers of a traffic which ought to be abolished, as it cannot be carried on but by some of the most abandoned and profligate men upon earth.

However, the partizans of such a class of men are generally too many and numerous, whose viciated principles from time to time have led the whole nation into debt, error and disgrace; and by their magnetic influence there is a general support given to despotism, oppression and cruelty. For many have acquired great riches by some insidious traffic or illegal gain; and as these become often leading men in governments, vast Page  91 multitudes by sea and land pursue the same course, and support the same measures; like adventurers in the lottery, each grasping for the highest prize; or as much enamoured with any infamous way of getting riches...And when ambitious and wicked men are bent upon avarice and covetousness, it leads them on to commit terrible cruelties, and their hearts become hardened in wickedness; so that even their enormous crimes sink in their own estimation, and soften into trivial matters. The house-breakers and highwaymen, petty depredators, think nothing of any mischief or cruelty that they can do, so as they can gain their end and come off safe; but their villainy and crimes appear to other men as they ought to do, and if they can be detected, and taken hold of, they will meet with such punishment as they justly deserve for their crimes. But it is otherwise with the Colonians, the great depredators, pirates, kidnappers, robbers, oppressors and enslavers of men. The laws as reaching from Great-Britain to the West-Indies, do not detect them, but protect the opulent slave-holders; though their opulence and protection by any law, or any government whatsoever, cannot make them less criminal than vio|lators of the common rights and liberties of men. They do not take away a man's property, like other robbers; but they take a man himself, and subject him to their service and bondage, which is a greater robbery, and a greater crime, than taking away any property from men whatsoever. And, therefore, with respect to them, there is very much wanted for regulating the natural rights of mankind, and very much wrong in the Page  92 present forms of government, as well as much abuse of that which is right.-- Ottobah Cugoano (1787) Thoughts and sentiments on the evil and wicked traffic of the slavery: and commerce of the human species, humbly submitted to the inhabitants of Great-Britain,

 

 

 

Adaptive Preference(s) and Status Quo Bias

A diagnosis of adaptive preferences is licensed only when preferences are directed toward something suboptimal. We don't, however, make decisions about what is subotimal from Plato's heaven (or from our armchair). We observe, we evaluate, and -- crucially -- we listen to testimony. The problem with the adaptive preference model is that it allows us to dismiss certain kinds of testimony as irrational or misleading. And so the adaptive preference model can quickly become a way of defending the moral status quo. (135)

Insofar as it justifies in discounting first-person testimony, the adaptive preference model can be a way of preventing this kind of progress. Misapplied, the adaptive preference model can simply entrench pre-existing biases. Elizabeth Barnes (2016) The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (137)

Yesterday's Impression (recall) was inspired by passages in which Barnes criticizes certain applications of an adaptive preference model to discount testimony. But that post otherwise ignored her account of adaptive preferences which is the subject of today's Digression. As the quoted passages reveal, Barnes appeals to a notion of moral progress. This appeal to moral progress (and an accompanying presupposed moral community between Barnes and her sympathetic reader) is quite important in her overall argument, and in a future post I will be critical of the role it plays in her treatment.

But I don't think the idea of moral progress is central to her critique of certain uses of adaptive preferences model. Nothing substantial (as opposed to rhetorical) is lost if we rewrite the last quoted sentence from p. 135 as follows, And so the adaptive preference model can quickly become a way of defending the status quo as understood by expert. And the first sentence from p. 137 can be rewritten as follows, Insofar as it justifies in discounting first-person testimony, the adaptive preference model can be a way of preventing moral understanding of victims of testimonial injustice. This is not to deny that moral progress plays an important role in Barnes's presentation--to motivate some of her arguments, she appeals to her readers willingness to grant that prior discounting of the testimony and preferences of women and gays as adaptive was obviously wrong (134-6).+

For, in fact, Barnes cleverly applies the growing insights of the literature on (Fricker's) testimonial injustice and (Dotson's) testimonial smothering to undermine over-reliance of adaptive preference model (especially in the capability literature inspired by Nussbaum and Sen) to ignore first person testimony of disabled people.* (I am assuming here some familiarity with these concepts.) As she writes, "whether being disabled is somehow bad or suboptimal is precisely what's up for debate." (133)+  To be sure, Barnes allows that there are occasions one can still diagnose adaptive preferences in others, especially when there are fundamental conflicts between what a person says about herself and other factors of her well-being (but the discussion is a bit brief, see 140-1).

To understand the historical significance of Barnes's critical treatment of the misapplication of the adaptive preferences model it is worth briefly reminding ourselves of the rule it played in Elster's (1983) Sour Grapes, which formulated the modern conceptual apparatus of adaptive preferences (recall). (Barnes also mentions Sour Grapes.) He did so, in part, to combat certain perverse implications of utilitarianism (see chapters III.3-4 especially). What interests me here is that in Elster's account, one role for the invocation of adaptive preferences is to combat a certain form of status quo bias when one takes (historically conditioned) given wants or subjective preferences for granted (say in one's utility calculations in evaluating some policy or another). By giving a principled justification for discounting (some) existing preferences, the theorist who relies on the adaptive preferences model can propose normative improvements.

As an aside, this is not to deny that there is not some status quo bias built in Elster's approach. Elster takes political orders and regimes largely for granted and, while he allows changing of wants by “rational and public discussions,” (140 referring back to I.5 and its discussion of the political “transformation of preferences rather than aggregation” of preferences, (35)) his notion of “collective rationality” (42) has no space for the radical, even violent, transformation of institutions. Moreover, he embraces a further status quo bias by insisting that, while acknowledging that intuitions may be “culturally relative,” we “must require of a theory of justice that it does not strongly violate our ethical intuitions in particular cases” (137—emphasis added; to be sure, Elster is less optimistic than Rawls about possibility of consensus). As Michael Della Rocca taught me, this reliance on the method of reflective equilibrium has considerable status quo bias built into it.

By contrast, Barnes shows that there are two predictable risk of (moral and economic) experts relying on an adaptive preference models. First, and this is the one she emphasizes, is that (a) they put themselves in a situation of defending an imperfect status quo (that they themselves understand as moral) while, simultaneously, (b) discounting evidence that could correct the status quo. That is to say, the adaptive preference model does not generate methodological and conceptual incentives to self-correct. Second, and this is strongly implied by her treatment, the down-side risks of (let's stipulate, well-intentioned) application of the adaptive preference model is primarily born by often vulnerable member of society.

Given that the research ethics that I propose in light of methodological analytical egalitarianism is especially critical of approaches where the down-side risk of use/application by non-expert vulnerable, one might expect me to be very critical of the adaptive preferences model (as another danger of expert over-confidence in their own model [justness, etc.]). Strikingly, the adaptive preference model was, in part, designed to address the needs of the most vulnerable in the context of the history of oppression.

Not unlike Barnes, I don't think experts should never rely on an adaptive preference model. But experts and policymakers that rely on it should also be alert for the two foreseeable risks in the approach. As noted above, Barnes supplies us with a further test in application: do the preferences expressed by particular subjects cohere with other features of  the subjects' lives. (For example, if a victim of abuse says they're flourishing, but otherwise has lots of symptoms of depression.) This is an empirical question and requires considerable and careful contextual judgment(s). I would add, in addition, corrections to the very theory of adaptive preferences to account for the foreseeable and known cognitive and status quo biases of experts and policymakers alike. But that's for another time.

 

 

The irrational and Ignorance in Natural Life Sentences

Notice that nothing in the epistemic argument here suggests that no prisoners should, in fact, spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars. Instead, the point is that rationality requires that we leave the epistemic door open to acquiring new information. Put bluntly, the argument says that it is irrational for the possibility of parole to be taken off the table at the outset of any sentence....

Nearly all of my students at Stateville are serving natural life sentences. At least a handful of them have been incarcerated since they were teenagers, one since he was 14. While I didn’t know any of their decades-earlier selves, their current selves are some of the most extraordinary students I’ve had in my 15 years of teaching. They are painters and poets, mentors and authors, researchers and advocates. They breathe new life into philosophical questions I’ve been asking for the entirety of my career. And yet we tell these men that who they are now and what they have accomplished matters so little to how they ought to be treated that we won’t even bother to consider it. Rationality demands that we do better.--Jennifer Lackey "The Irrationality of Natural Life Sentences," New York Times.

I  warmly recommend Lackey's Opinionater piece (although I was surprised she did not explore the possible role of the existence of the death penalty in motivating natural life sentence);* she raises important questions about the status quo in the penal code while giving a sense of the significance of philosophy to individuals, including prison populations, and the public. By combining her experiences with analysis, she makes philosophy come alive.

I agree with Lackey's conclusion. Even so, I would argue that it's not always irrational to limit (even severely limit), in the present, the scope of decision-making of future temporal selves or polities: promises, contracts, debts, laws, and treaties all do this; as Elster reminds us, Ulysses did it to listen to the Sirens. 

We may engage in such limitation, or self-binding, for all kinds of reasons, but because Lackey is primarily interested in exploring an "epistemic argument," I note that there is an important epistemic reason to limit the availability of new information, or evidence: doing so can (other things being equal--and of course they may not be equal and in the penal system they are definitely not equal) reduce uncertainty. Enforceable contracts and promises are paradigmatic instruments to reduce (epistemic) uncertainty; they allow, for example, for better and less costly planning and also for more reliable causal inferences.  This is true in low and in so-called high stakes environments. In fact, reducing uncertainty may be more valuable in high stakes environments than allowing new evidence to influence operations. This can sometimes involve eliminating any (or severely restricting) any possible role for new information or evidence. (This is basically a variant of Hume's argument for the extremely strict enforcement of the rule of law.) It's only when a practice is overwhelmingly oriented toward truth, rather than some other end, where epistemic doors have to be kept open (and even, then, there will be constraints -- of time, money, etc. -- that may keep doors closed).

Having said that, nothing in the previous paragraph undermines Lackey's idea that there is something really wrong about ruling "out the possibility of ever considering additional evidence" (that may motivate parole) about the cases she is describing. But I worry that couching it in the terms of contemporary epistemology actually misplaces the problem. Lackey's main argument is described in this passage:

But one argument that is surprisingly absent from these conversations is an epistemic one that has to do with us. For natural life sentences say to all involved that there is no possible piece of information that could be learned between sentencing and death that could bear in any way on the punishment the convicted is said to deserve, short of what might ground an appeal. Nothing. So no matter how much a juvenile is transformed behind bars, and no matter how unrecognizable an elderly prisoner is from his earlier self, this is utterly irrelevant to whether they should be incarcerated. Our absence of knowledge about the future, our ignorance of what is to come, our lack of a crystal ball, is in no way a barrier to determining now what someone’s life ought to be like decades from now.

What Lackey is pointing to here are three, non-trivial moral-political & moral-psychological (if not metaphysical) phenomena (that combine for an argument): (i) persons can change dramatically over time -- let's call this the transformation thesis --, and (ii) imprisonment is imprisonment of whole persons and so the whole characters of these persons matters to the justification of imprisonment. In addition, (iii) imprisonment is justified (at any given time) if the incarcerated person deserves it (at that time). I am going to ignore here the fact that Lackey also sometimes seems to presuppose the unity of the virtues (such that in virtue of her students being wonderful in a variety of ways now implies they are not capable of the kind of crimes now -- let's stipulate that they were rightly convinced [something that may well be worth challenging] -- that landed them in trouble).

Lackey's epistemic argument is, of course, not irrelevant to these three non-trivial moral phenomena, but I submit that if natural life sentences are irrational in the epistemic sense it will be so because we come to believe (not just because the brain-science evidence Lackey provides, but also, say, inspired by the work of Laurie Paul) the truth of the transformation thesis and some version of (ii-iii). But (i-iii) are substantial theses that deserve independent scrutiny. In particular, if one is moved by epistemic arguments in favor of uncertainty reduction and accepts the limitation of the scope of future action, then it is not obvious one will be moved by considerations like (iii). For, one thing natural life sentences do is to remove, fairly or not, questions about future desert from consideration altogether at the time of sentencing. Of course, if one thinks this question is removed unfairly  (as it seems Lackey does), then one can argue this. But at this point we have left epistemology and slid into ethics or political theory (or something in that ballpark).

And, in fact, Lackey herself notes that "public attitudes can evolve, moving away from a zealous “war on crime” approach to one that sees much criminal activity as the result of broader social problems that call for reform." This suggests to me that beneath the epistemological argument she is really appealing to a Dewey-Anderson style argument about the nature of a proper democratic culture in political life (recall): no political decision is final, and democratic life is itself an ongoing, experimental learning (or epistemic) process in which policies, including legal policies, are tried out and evaluated in light of experience. This argument has deep roots in American culture (e.g.,Thoreau). Of course, this kind of theoretical argument also appeals to epistemic virtues and epistemic standards, but, again, the force of the stance that Lackey exhibits is not primarily epistemic, but rather political and moral. And it strikes me as a mistake to consider those that reject this political and moral stance as "irrational."

So, to sum up, this post is not intended to challenge Lackey's core insight. There is something deeply problematic about natural life sentences and the unwillingness to be receptive to new evidence that may allow one to reconsider a decision is part of the problem. Lackey is right to call attention to it. But the reasons for it being problematic are not really epistemic, but moral and political.

Why care about labeling the argument? Lackey explicitly notes that she treats her argument as an addition to the existing moral (legal, etc.) arguments; so I do not want to suggest she is pretending to be offering a unique argument against natural life sentences. (And, as it happens, I defend the role of epistemology in political theory in my inaugural lecture tomorrow.) But, even so, there is in analytical philosophy a recurring temptation to treat moral and political issues as problems of meaning, language, or epistemology and, 'when we go public,' thereby, fail to do justice to the public's moral concerns (even if these concerns are flawed); by treating these as "irrational" we use reason to end conversation, rather than opening it up--and this would be an odd result, especially because Lackey exhibits so much courage to generate the right sorts of conversations.

The Failure of Human Rights and Democratic Faith

To understand the political background of the refugee crisis, we must turn our gaze elsewhere; in fact, in the opposite direction. The crisis at hand confronts us with a predicament of modern political thought — modern liberalism even. It is a problem that we have successfully repressed but that now returns with a vengeance, namely the inadequacy of the lingo of human rights.

A more promising alternative has been to follow Kant in appealing to reason instead of nature or God; that is to claim that the rights of humanity are grounded in our capacity for rational deliberation. However, in order to uphold this position one must defend a metaphysical conception of reason — an account of rationality that transcends its reduction back to blind naturalistic explanations — and while Kant himself indeed defended such a metaphysics, current political thinking prides itself for being “post-metaphysical.” John Rawls’s dominant formulation of justice is famously “political, not metaphysical,” and the eminent German philosopher Jürgen Habermas recently reaffirmed his early slogan, according to which “we have no alternative to post-metaphysical thinking.” While it may well be true that we do not have such an alternative, it is also true, to speak with Kant, that “every theory of justice must … contain a metaphysics, and without the theory of justice there is no theory of the state.”...While it is true that German history generates special commitments to human rights, the problem is precisely that we do not know how to think of these rights in political terms.--Omri Boehm,New York Times.

Human rights are political conversation stoppers. Once they are invoked matters of principle are settled, and put aside, and all that remains is the technocratic discussion of solving the means by which to implement them. That is, while we often claim that rights generate duties, politically they are designed to generate obedience.

The problem is that rights-talk is increasingly hollow.* I mean this in four senses: first, as Boehm notes, their ultimate metaphysical justification is ungrounded and they require such ground. Second, rights talk is (increasingly) politically ineffective. States and considerable parts of their electorates act as if rights talk is not meaningful or, worse, that rights, especially those of others (non-citizens, foreigners, refugees, un-represented, etc.) are optional thereby undermining their very existence. Third, as Boehm notes, in order to re-activate adherence to rights, historical memory (of Nazi genocide) is prompted in order to create a psychological disposition favorable to respect for rights (of others). But this is a doomed strategy because at best it will be just one of many competing psychological dispositions. Fourth, rights are hollow to those that are supposed to benefit from their protection and are left in dangerous, if not fatal, oft-literal no-man's land.

Now, Boehm thinks that the solution to the hollow-ness of human rights is a return to metaphysics in order to solve the justificatory problem. It would be easy to satirize the wish that metaphysics has this kind of political power (and that, therefore, we need to teach the Barcan formula in civic education classes). But the underlying idea seems to be that once that metaphysical problem has been solved rights can return to being authoritative conversation stoppers. But the significance of metaphysics in this sense (as authoritative background) is a by-product, I think, of that period of the Christian era in which (parts of) Christianity was wedded to enforcing metaphysical dogmas that were secured by reason. And while Christianity will undoubtedly continue to exist, that era is unlikely to return (not just for political, but also for metaphysical reasons). The point here is not a historical or sociological.

I do not mean to suggest in the previous paragraph that metaphysics and philosophy are not important politically in the sense embraced by Boehm. I have noted, too, that, for example, Europe's political malaise is more than just a failure by the technocrats to deliver open-ended economic growth and income. Rather, Boehm seems to think that a politics ruled by reason -- indirectly via rights that enforce agreement -- is genuinely possible. Here he is no different from those philosophers and other citizens of humane, good will that believe access to moral and metaphysical truth ought to be privileged in the political arena.

But to think that truth or reason will rule is a misguided (and also dangerous) conception of politics. For that is precisely the domain of life where one acts under conditions of great uncertainty in order to maintain minimal unity. Polities recognize, of course, that there are areas where such truth is available and then the experts and technicians are given free reign. Undoubtedly human rights lawyers and activists had hoped to obtain or, perhaps thought they had already achieved, such autonomy from politics with its own specialized discourse and intricate legal realm. But at bottom the authority of the law requires political will. It is unlikely that political will is restored by a better metaphysics alone. That is, rights are intended to secure noble human ends within an often indifferent and hostile political life.

The problem, then, is how to secure these (moral) ends within politics in the absence of rights. I have no answer to that, but it strikes me that if rights are failed conversation stoppers, perhaps we should re-consider the whole strategy of conversation-stopping. That is, within political life we need to address the fears and aspirations of those that would deny political strangers minimal shelter and protection from the cruelties of fate and other men (recall). If we do not trust our capacity to do so, we really have no faith in our democratic way of life.

 

Recognition as Terrorism Prevention

[I]f you recognize another person with regard to a certain feature, as an autonomous agent, for example, you do not only admit that she has this feature but you embrace a positive attitude towards her for having this feature. Such recognition implies that you bear obligations to treat her in a certain way, that is, you recognize a specific normative status of the other person, e.g., as a free and equal person. But recognition does not only matter normatively. It is also of psychological importance. Most theories of recognition assume that in order to develop a practical identity, persons fundamentally depend on the feedback of other subjects (and of society as a whole).--Mattias Iser in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

According to the EU at least 6,000 European young men are said to be involved with Jihadi groups in Syria (the real number is thought to be much higher). Given that a number of these have returned to Europe to commit local terrorist attacks, returning jihadists are now seen as a security threat by the EU (see here). In response, there is now quite a bit of effort to prevent such men from leaving Europe in the first place. My colleague, Marieke de Goede, has detailed some of these pre-emptive policies in her book (2012) Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies. One striking finding of De Goede is how much surveillance and reporting of possible suspect terrorist money governments is now legally required from non-state actors (like banks and financial institutions). Last week, at a conference she hosted ("European Security Practices After 9/11"), I learned that in many European countries, there is now legislation in the works (or passed) that either demands such surveillance from physicians, school teachers, lawyers, university professors, and even parents (etc.) or tries to draw these elements of civil society into voluntary mentoring and, if necessary, reporting of 'potential' Jihadis. Leaving aside the effectiveness of such tactics (it may, after all, create disincentives for trust and frankness in whole parts of civil society), it is worth wondering to what degree there is any genuine civic society left if it has been fully co-opted by security apparatus and policing practices of government.*

Here I will not list the other kinds of preventive policies that European countries are pursuing and could be pursuing. But I will note two non-trivial lacunae in discussions on these matters. First, most mainland European governments, politicians, media, and other public figurers do not bother with even trying to offer genuine recognition (in the sense quoted at the top of this post) of all their citizens in public life.

For, it is very striking that few major European parties really openly compete for votes of second and third generation immigrant populations as fellow national and European citizens; politicians and media rarely treat members of such populations as part of a shared enterprise or community. Rather, if not silenced they tend to be treated not as individuals worthy of respect, but as the culturally alien 'other' except, of course, when demands are made for public denunciations of some recent terror attack. It is, thus, no surprise that Jihadists are recruited from alienated members of society (see here). That is to say, European polities are not unities in the minimal sense required for long-term political survival (or peace). While there are a lot of further ways to prevent alienation, only recognition tackles the problem head-on. Ideally such recognition would be available from within European nation-states and regions, but that's not happening right now (or foreseeable future).+

Second, and related to the first, European governments and populations refuse to treat the existence of Jihadists and would be Jihadists as a (metaphorical) vote of no-confidence; that is to say, we refuse to acknowledge that as Liberal societies we are failing on an ideological level with some of our own citizens. Rather than treating European violent Islam as the cause of our problems, we should start seeing it as one of the effects. (By this I do not mean to refer to European neo-colonial policies in North Africa and the Middle east, or our roles in arming various groups/countries in these places, or our attitude toward Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc., although undoubtedly some of these are significant factors, too.) Rather, we should treat every European Jihadi also as a rejection of a Liberal vision of the future.

A cynical reader may say, What Liberal vision of the future?

But that's my point. The European Jihadis are an expression of a European malaise. Some of this malaise is institutional (recall), some of that moral (recall) -- as the refugee crisis is exhibiting on daily news --, some of it is economic (with sluggish growth, Eurozone crises, etc.), and some of it is the systematic breakdown of rules-based governance (the hard-core norm of the Weberian state) [recall]. But the underlying problem is that there is no common good that could be the articulated vision from which an emotionally rewarding recognition of each and everyone citizen of the Union is possible.

PS. Of course, the point of such recognition would not be terrorism-prevention (despite the title of this post), but it might be a useful and foreseeable side-effect.**

 

 

On the Whitewashing of Philosophy

But "Africans are philosophers. From the moment they were abducted they argued philosophically that it was unjust," Coleman says.  But they weren't listened to, and even today they are missing from the canon of Eurocentric curricula and are not valued as philosophers.

Enlightenment philosophers such as Hobbes or Rousseau philosophised and spoke about slavery, but not really about the European colonial enslavement of African people. If they did, it was in a supposedly universal political sense as the opposite of freedom, or metaphorically, as in Wollstonecraft, who meant "enslaved" wealthy, "white middle-class women." "She didn't really want to get her hands dirty with the actual enslavement right before her eyes."

...

A leading member of the "Sons of Africa" was Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, who had been abducted on the West African coast. Later, he was the first African who penned and published arguments against enslavement in English.

The most notable thing about this was that his writings weren't narratives or biographies, like those of his colleague Olaudah Equiano, but rather philosophical arguments that were rooted in the European ideas of the Enlightenment, beginning with John Locke, one hundred years earlier, in the 17th century.

Cugoano committed himself to Locke's idea that each person owns himself. Accordingly, his philosophical argument was that this also applied to Africans and, therefore, African persons couldn't be owned by other persons. Through enslavement, African people had been dispossessed of themselves, argued Cugoano. With this, he came to a conclusion implicit in Locke's thought - one that Locke himself had not drawn. For Locke once wrote: "Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves."--From An interview with Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman by Aaron Salzer, of science.ORF.at Translation from German by Dr Jeff Bowersox and Daniel James. [HT DailyNous]

Coleman is right that philosophy has been whitewashed. I learned this not during my BA & PhD, but while entering the profession, as I became a student -- guided by the economists David Levy and Sandra Peart -- of the shared history of economics, statistics (recall), and philosophy, which is not just at the intersection of Utilitarianism's history (e.g. recall this post on W.E.B. Du Bois). Questions of breeding/eugenics, slavery, and racialized (inferior) others haunt the enterprise from the start (recall this post). In the English-language context the racialized (to be enslaved/bred, etc.) other is not just African (or, recall, Indian), but also Irish (recall my post on Berkeley).

So, it is a painful fact -- for those of us who reflect on the fact that we continue and renew a practice, even a continuous tradition --, that philosophy has systematically effaced African voices from our history and self-conception. It is painful because I take pride to belong to a community that in its self-conception is receptive to argument and evidence.  Coleman is right to be unrelenting about this "whitewashing" and to bring to our attention African authors and arguments that contested the institution of slavery and the nature of philosophy (by say, giving living evidence that philosophy is not just an occupation of white university professors or leisured gentlemen [see also Haslanger's comments]). My view, perhaps too optimistic, is that thereby Coleman puts us in the position to renew, even revive, philosophy if we are willing to live up to his challenge.

But Coleman has a tendency to essentially our philosophical past through the implication that the institution of slavery was uncontested by Enlightenment thinkers (or before). But this ignores not just the opposition to the institution by Radical philosophers that Jonathan Israel has been describing at length in his works, but even the non-trivial opposition of Adam Smith and, especially, his student, James Millar (see here for scholarship), to really existing slavery in their own day. They did so in lectures and publications. They were not alone in Scotland: James Beattie (who is loathed by Hume and Kant), also was a fierce opponent of slavery in part on strongly held religious grounds (reminding us of the positive role of Christian thought).* This is is not to deny that each one of these Scottish men requires critical and serious criticism of their views of race, empire, slavery (etc), but Coleman has a tendency to present the past in Manichean terms. He thereby obscures that the the nature of philosophy was contested in the Enlightenment age of slavery and that slavery was, in fact, one of the key issues of contestation--my suspicion is that part of Ancient philosophy's opposition to Sophism turns on the Sophists attack of slavery (see here for hints). (And when we look closely at the debates during the eighteenth century we find plenty of complexity; even Hume, who was too comfortable with racism and no abolitionist, liked to taunt his Republican opponents that their beloved liberty was founded on slavery.)

These days it's still a hard sell to convince professional philosophers that Mandeville (a complex proto-Feminist) and Millar were philosophers worth taking seriously. (Poor Beattie: if Kant and Hume agree about something it must be true!) It's not so long ago, and now I speak from personal experience, that Adam Smith was put in the same non-philosophical category by many professional philosophers. (Amusingly enough, Smith gets re-discovered in every generation for over a century now.)

Now, this is not a plea for using Millar to displace Cugoano in any future canon or curriculum. Rather, it's to point out that Coleman is right that there has been institutionalized forgetting and effacement, including (judged by a depressingly low bar) philosophy's rare, more noble past.

 

A Further note On the Trigger Warnings Controversy

[T]hey bewitch our souls...so that I myself, Menexenus, when thus praised by them feel mightily ennobled, and every time I listen fascinated I am exalted and imagine myself to have become all at once taller and nobler and more handsome. And as I am generally accompanied by some strangers, who listen along with me, I become in their eyes also all at once more majestic; for they also manifestly share in my feelings with regard both to me and to the rest of our City, believing it to be more marvellous than before, owing to the persuasive eloquence of the speaker. And this majestic feeling remains with me for over three days: so persistently does the speech and voice of the orator ring in my ears that it is scarcely on the fourth or fifth day that I recover myself and remember that I really am here on earth, whereas till then I almost imagined myself to be living in the Islands of the Blessed,—so expert are our orators.--Plato, Menexenus, 235a-c*

It is odd to read about the scorn ('new infantilism') heaped by self-described friends of a humanistic or classical education -- professors and commentators alike -- on the request for trigger warnings by college students encountering poetic and graphic scenes of rape in their required courses (recall this post to which the current one is a footnote). For in their ridicule, these cosmopolitan, mature types suggest that they do not really believe the once common rhetoric of the transformative potential of literature and the other arts. From their public utterances we may  infer that these false shepherds of culture appear to practice a detached, ironic stance toward the texts and material they teach and study; they seem literally unable to imagine to be swept away by poetry and rhetoric, to be un-moored from one's own identity by film,  and to be captivated by another's train of thought in a work of fiction. They understand themselves as stewards of traditional learning, but they reveal that they read with detached minds and closed hearts who are unable, it seems, to learn from their students' searching questioning.   

That works of art, including many thought canonical, can be dangerous to their readers and the society that permits them is an un-cool thought--one that gets suppressed by the banality that pases for a literary education. For, too many of our teachers assume that by branding a work 'fiction' we have created a convention by which it is treated as harmless speech a mere diversion without anything at stake (recall my exchange with the Dutch novelist Grunberg). But dictators and censorious religions (not to mention Plato) know better--imaginative works can inflame the soul and worse--some of them known to incite killing (cf. Charlie Hebdo).

One belittles our civic religion, which embraces a hard-won freedom of speech protected by law and people's hearts, by failing to recognize what is at stake in it: it is not just intended to protect "the language and imagery" of beautiful and harm-free speech. We do not get the (for lack of a more lovely term) freedom-enhancing effects of texts without risking incurring some of the dangerous effects; this is both why free speech is nowhere absolute and the limits of it are constantly contested as well as why the nature of responsible speech is of recurring significance in philosophy and the arts. A true educator recognizes the fragility of the experiment in living that occurs when student and teacher are receptive to (well) the demonic.

The above is not meant to deny the legitimate concern over the spread of trigger warnings if, as is likely, these become yet another instrument of the rent-seeking technocrats that run the modern university by which they curtail and intimidate professors and instructors (see here).** But if one treats the Liberal Arts as merely about lovely language and escapist fantasy, one should not be surprised if the rest of society decides one is dispensable.

 

On Casual Cruelty in Philosophy

I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk.

Now, of course, no one has said these things to me specifically. They haven’t said “Hey, Elizabeth Barnes, this is what we think about you!” But they’ve said them about disabled people in general, and I’m a disabled person. Even just thinking about statements like these, as I write this, I feel so much – sadness, rage, and more than a little shame. It’s an odd thing, a hard thing, to try to take these emotions and turn them into interesting philosophy and careful arguments.—Elizabeth Barnes, writing at Philosoph-her [HT Meena Krishnamurthy]

I sometimes fall into despair and think that my professional community, analytical philosophy, -- in which I have invested so much of my life and identity -- cannot be redeemed. It’s one thing to note, echoing Ruth Chang (recall and here), that our intellectual reflexes and moral sentiments are deformed by our disciplinary education; it’s another thing to note that as professionals in a zero-sum institutional environment we often lionize bullies (recall and here & here) and exhibit a party-line attitude toward those that approach philosophy from alternative viewpoints and with different sensibilities. But Barnes, who is one of my favorite metaphysicians, reports something far worse: our “casual assertions” exhibit much cruelty, even inhumanity, qua philosophers.

For, in analytical philosophy, “talks” are carefully prepared because we know that audiences are unforgiving—and that our intended discussion can easily be derailed by zealous scrutiny of details, even our throw-away remarks. (This explains how common it still is to encounter fully read papers.) We pride ourselves on our clarity, rigor, and care, after all, and we prepare focused talks. So, according to the self-image we embrace, we don’t let anything into these talks without some reflection and scrutiny. Barnes’s report reminds us that in the intellectual air we breathe, in the uncontroversial-background-assumptions that we collectively take for granted, there are noxious, even poisonous humors that are fully compatible with civility, politeness, and embracing S5 as the true modal logic.

I saw Barnes’s post widely shared with approval and admiration at blogs and facebook; even so, I puzzle over the lack of sympathetic shame, even embarrassment over our practices. For, Barnes’s experience(s) qua disabled person are not isolated. The history of philosophy is one long record of casually expressed norms of superiority (e.g., recall and here), and there is little reason to think that we do better than earlier generations (because our training is not geared toward preventing it).

As a sociological aside, Barnes notes that she had deferred her work on "social and feminist philosophy – especially philosophical issues related to disability" until after "having established a certain amount of professional security." That Barnes has achieved such security is a great achievement. But her frank admission suggests how deplorable the state of the profession is given that her calculation about deferring such work is -- given existing norms and incentive/reward structures -- eminently rational. We have, as a discipline, undoubtedly missed out on more voices that have never achieved the kind of security Barnes has and, thereby, have missed out on lots of arguments. This suggests that the intellectual status quo is probably more fragile than folk realize because its commitments have not been stress-tested against the best possible arguments. 

Some other time I hope to return to a key theme in Barnes's post, which is about the bind she found herself in because she can't express her justified anger ("you are angry and sad about what is being said about your disability or how you are being treated because of your disability") without further professional cost or more engagements that generate anger and sadness (etc.). But here I want to focus on a feature of the passage quoted at the top of this post. 

Barnes allows, perhaps for rhetorical purposes, that some cruel thoughts are less reprehensible if they would be “conclusions of careful, extended argument.” I am less sure. Arguments are tools at the service of practical reasoning, theoretical rationality, and perhaps, even the path toward truth; they are not, even the "careful, analytically rigorous" ones, self-vindicating in virtue of being “careful arguments.”[1] (Barnes does not suggest this, so we may agree here.) There may be nothing more comical within professional philosophy than witnessing purported hyper-caution about one’s premises and inferential steps that are conjoined with an utter lack of judgment about, say, the nature of the issue at hand. Odds are that if cruelty is the consequence of a careful, extended argument then something has gone wrong somewhere; the lack of reserve in sharing the argument is a further sign that something is amiss.*

Now, most folk don't knowingly exhibit cruelty (one assumes, although sometimes I wonder). But it is not uncommon that when somebody is confronted with the impact of his/her casual cruelty (or carefully argued for cruelty) one often does not encounter a dispassionate attempt at exploring previously accepted norms of superiority, but one receives eloquent statements on the evils of 'political correctness,' the importance of 'freedom of speech,' or the deplorable state of 'call out culture' (or unwillingness to tolerate satire, hypersensitivity, etc.). To be called to account for the unintended, perhaps, consequence of one's (casual) remarks (or careful argument) is no fun, especially if it happens somewhat publicly, and so some defensiveness is to be expected. But it is noteworthy that such a response entails a further lack of recognition of the victim, of the harm(s) done, and even of one's own role as an agent within a variety of moral communities. There is an additional source of shame lurking here; for while Plato and Aristotle restricted the origin of philosophy to wonder, as Barnes more correctly notes, other painful emotions, including "sadness, rage, and more than a little shame," as well as, perhaps, despair, can also be the starting place for true philosophy.