Lately, I've been having some thought-provoking conversations about the extent of personal moral responsibility in the context of vast, systemic problems, such as food injustice, global warming, corporate globalization, racism, and poverty, and in terms of more localized phenomena, such as gentrification and various urban environmental and local food movements, that are connected to these larger concerns. The question I'm left with is this: what is the role and extent of personal moral responsibility in these contexts? What is the significance of personal consciousness and action? What does it mean for me to do what I ought to with respect to global warming or gentrification? Does an emphasis on personal responsibility and action evade systemic questions?
My liberal and left-liberal friends tend to place great emphasis on individual action, arguing that it is indeed a moral obligation, and an important one at that, to make responsible consumer choices and lifestyle choices: for example, avoid buying products sold by corporations who use sweatshop labor, or buy less toxic cleaning products, or choose alternatives to the corporate food chain (grow your own food or buy local organic food), or simply reduce consumption altogether.
My Marxist friends tend to place great emphasis on the systemic nature of these problems, and consider the kinds of personal action just described a futile and perhaps naive exercise which wrongly places responsibility on individual shoulders rather than on the capitalist system (and the racist, patriarchal, heterosexist systems that accompany it). It's just not personal, they argue. The answer is revolutionary change (at the level of the whole system), not individual action (or even collective action on single issues).
My own feeling is that both sides have important insights, but the question of individual moral responsibility in the context of systemic problems is very complex. To make things more manageable, I shall concentrate on two clusters of issues: gentrification and racism, and urban environmentalism. In this part, I discuss the former; in four weeks' time, I shall discuss the latter.
I am a white, educationally privileged young woman living in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, Crown Heights (Brooklyn). The section of Crown Heights where I live has long been a black community, with many people of Caribbean origin. The neighborhood has had a history of poverty and associated problems; now it is seeing an influx of young, mostly white, mostly educationally and economically privileged, gentrifiers. The consequences are complex: the neighborhood is more peaceful, and there is a lot of new development and economic activity. Franklin Avenue is, week by week, seeing new businesses: cute cafes and restaurants, hip boutiques, cheek by jowl with neighborhood mainstays such as West Indian bakeries and small places of worship. The food landscape is changing, and in my personal life as a consumer, I enjoy being able to buy organic milk and fresh produce in my immediate neighborhood. On the other hand, these changes have another side: black, working-class residents have increasingly been displaced by skyrocketing rents (and, according to some disturbing reports, by harassment designed to remove them from their rent-stabilized homes so that landlords can charge new tenants far higher rents). Week by week, month by month, Crown Heights is less black and working class, more white and middle class.
Where do I stand in all this? Gentrification-- and especially the heavily 'raced' version we have here-- is at once personal and not personal. It is personal in the sense that it is lived by individuals face to face, as it were, as they do the most personal, everyday things-- moving in to a new home, shopping for groceries, having brunch at a cafe. There is often tension in the air between old and new residents: sometimes unspoken, sometimes not. Of course, most people are civil and even welcoming. I'm fortunate to have friendly, pleasant neighbors, who have been gracious and helpful. But there have been awkward moments in the neighborhood: the message boards are peppered with them. I've been called a "white bitch" on the street myself. It's hard not to take this personally at least to some degree, of course: I'm human. I've been called homophobic names on the street in my time, too (in Park Slope, of all places!), and it's equally unpleasant at a very raw, personal level. It is, however, politically very different. When I'm subjected to homophobic verbal abuse, I'm the oppressed: I'm in a morally clear position, I'm on the 'right' side of the line in that sense. When I'm called "white bitch" in a gentrifying black working class neighborhood, the dynamics change. I'm part of the problem: I'm a walking symbol of a process that has displaced and marginalized people, I'm on the 'wrong' side of the line in race and class terms. I'm describing a one-off incident, but everyone knows-- or at least, everyone who is paying the smallest amount of attention knows-- that as white people move in, the neighborhood "improves"; who can blame people for feeling aggrieved? I would find it hard not to be bitter at the underlying assumption: nice neighborhoods with good, healthy food and pleasant places to go are for white, middle class people. And it is uncomfortable to know that I am part of the process.
On the other hand, of course, gentrification is not personal. I did not harass tenants, I did not create the housing situation we have, I did not create the race and class systems of which gentrification is one symptom. I moved to my current home for the same reasons most people move: it was a neighborhood I could afford, it was an easy commute to work, it was near places I like to go (the park, the museum, etc). What could I do? Where else could I go? I certainly couldn't afford to live in Park Slope or Prospect Heights-- not my economic class. Why should I feel personally responsible? Why feel bad? It's the system, and the landlords and property developers who are the winners in it. And yet, I do further it every day simply by my presence, and of course my purchases (they started carrying organic milk for people like me). It seems vulgarly insensitive not to be at least conscious of the process I am part of, but my being conscious won't actually make a difference. Will it merely make me feel a bit better?
One aspect of white privilege, especially as it interlocks with class and educational privilege, is that I can choose whether or not to be conscious of these issues in my life. I can choose to tune in, or choose to take the process of gentrification for granted. Either way, I can be fairly confident that I will be at an advantage as a result of that process. Peggy McIntosh and Marilyn Frye have done interesting work on white and male privilege and what Frye calls "whiteliness" (bearing the same relation to whiteness as masculinity does to maleness), and one important lesson from it is just this optional blindness. Privilege means, among other things, being able to take things for granted, being able to not think about certain things, being able to ignore/ be ignorant of certain things (usually, the ways in which your privilege unfairly advantages you in your everyday life). This aspect of privilege relates closely to the issues I discussed in my last Intervention, "Rev. Wright and the epistemology of ignorance". Ignorance has served us privileged people well. And yet: we can plead, I didn't know, I didn't notice, I never realized, I was ignorant, not culpable! I just moved to this awesome apartment, I never thought about the effect it was having on the existing community! It's a protest that is only partly mere self-serving denial. How can we blame people for simply not knowing, being ignorant? It is difficult. Ignorance is an interesting phenomenon, though: it's part plain old not knowing, part ignoring. It's also in some ways a bad habit, for which individuals are partly responsible (their bad habit of ignoring other people's needs and suffering is also nurtured by families, communities, and the corporate media). Kant reminds us in the Metaphysics of Morals that we ought not to shield ourselves from knowledge of others' suffering: we ought not avoid places where we will meet it, but ought rather to act positively to cultivate our sense of compassion (Doctrine of Virtue 6:457). The growing literature on care ethics reminds us, too, that morality is to a significant degree a matter of being attentive/ paying attention, of being responsive/ taking responsibility. Ignorance in the sense of ignoring, not paying attention, not stopping to think, is, to some degree at least, culpable.
Let's say I start to acknowledge all of this. Again, what moral difference will it make? What can I do? It seems a small moral gain to simply realize one's privilege, although it is a start. It is dauntingly hard to know what any individual can do about race privilege in general and gentrification in particular. Only collective organizing can do anything, but of course, it is only if individuals act that collective action will happen. If all the individuals stay home alone and think "there is nothing I can do", or even act as individual consumers, individual sites of awareness of privilege-- as many of us do-- we make it true that there is nothing we can do. Everything about our system encourages this perspective. (Ever wondered why there aren't mass street protests and general strikes demanding universal health coverage?)
There are organizations and a few journalists and bloggers trying to bring attention to problems of tenant harassment and displacement; perhaps the one concrete thing one can do is to support them. Even this, however, fails to get at the root of the problem: we live under a system which allows the principle that living in a safe, clean, pleasant neighborhood with access to healthy, affordable food, public transport, parks, cultural facilities, and decent schools, is appropriately distributed according to economic status (and since race and class correlate in the US as elsewhere, according to race too). It's a principle I find horrifying. So are we back to the orthodox Marxist position articulated by some of my companions-- that the only real option is to fight the system as a whole, the system as such? The problem is: that's daunting. Most of us don't know where to begin with that. What do you build a revolutionary politics out of? Can it come merely from people who think in terms of the system as a whole? The key is, it seems to me, to realize the following: you can't solve the gentrification problem without paying attention to the system that creates it, but neither can you fight (or even understand) the system unless you pay attention to a specific, street-level experience like gentrification. What's more, people have different ways of "plugging in" to political struggle. Not everyone will be inspired by wholly theoretical, system-level talk; many people will want to get involved at a less abstract level. The trick is to get them together. We need theoretical analysis and broad-based anticapitalist, antiracist, antisexist, antihomophobic struggle, to be sure, but we also need, as part of that, lots of visions of how that overall struggle makes a difference in terms of concrete issues, and we need lots of visions of how to do concrete things differently, from how we plan our neighborhoods to where we get our food. Why else would we want a new system, if not to do all of those things differently and make people's lives better? Part two of the discussion next month.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Personal responsibility and systemic problems by Ornaith O'Dowd, NYC
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Dealing with Mugabe
Robert Mugabe's coronation was, in most quarters, rightfully looked upon with disdain. The question now is whether he will be allowed to remain in power. Several options are available, none of which need involve the US or military intervention. Even a delusional Mugabe can sense the end, and the time is now for Africa's leaders, who will meet for a summit this Monday, to make a decision.
Kristof offers a solution that gives both Mugabe and Zimbabwe a bright future. FYI: the accompanying multimedia feature from 2005 is worth looking at.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
The look of contempt
When asked by Chairmen John Conyer's about the theory of the unitary executive, David Addington asserted that he did not know what that was. Of course, he had heard of the term from reading the newspapers, but as far as a 'theory', well, what theory is that?
Have we been misled all along thinking that the great Addington had devised and articulated such a brilliant conception of a powerful executive. Or, is it rather that he is just contemptuous of Congress and all those meddling fools who want to stop him and Cheney from protecting us--from ourselves?
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Freedom and illegitimacy: the Bush Doctrine by MT Nguyen, NYC
George Bush and his administration are known for advancing foreign policy innovations collected under the authoritative sounding phrase 'the Bush doctrine'. This doctrine is in fact a heterogeneous hodgepodge of directives and 'principles' of post 9/11 foreign policy, anchored by the right to preemptive strikes, a deeply troubling, stunning and reckless departure from conventional thinking on international relations. One wonders though, since this anchor is but a means to an end, what the underlying rationale is. In name, the rationale is not far to seek, for in address after address since 9/11 Bush has announced that the ultimate aim of his administration is this: the world-historical advance of freedom or liberty (he uses the concepts interchangeably). Thus, in his 2005 inaugural address, he asserts that "We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." Throughout this speech and in others (here and here) Bush maintains this theme of bringing liberty to those parts of the world who he deems to not have it but nevertheless have a right to it. I want to avoid altogether the question of sincerity and inquire instead into the stated project on its own terms. So, my two questions are: What does he mean by the spread of freedom? And, Is it a coherent project?
The project's meaning is mostly unclear because of the obscurity of his use of the central terms liberty and freedom. This is so even though the terms are deployed a total of 42 times in the short speech (yes, I counted). Sometimes Bush uses 'freedom' or 'liberty' to mean independence or the general capacity to do as one desires; at other times, he hypostasizes freedom into a world historical force which combats tyranny and the resentment brought on by tyranny. Yet at other times he characterizes it as the political concept of self-government (but then why not use autonomy?). The latter is suggested by his frequent connection (and more often than not, identification) of liberty with democracy and, importantly, it explains why he sometimes formulates his mission in terms of spreading democracy. I return to this last notion at the end. It would be idle and truly mind-numbing to try to locate a family resemblance in his heterogeneous usage of these terms. I will take it however that whatever else he might mean by the concept, he must have in mind at least the following. Freedom as a concept is a property of persons and it basically means the freedom to do and live as one desires. Minimally, since everyone desires to live free from coercion (in all its guises), the basic concept as applied to the political is, crudely, the idea of living a life free from state coercion. This understanding is reinforced by how Bush uses these concepts as the bases for attacks on coercive states.
A quick argument against this is that all states are by their nature coercive, and hence in principle the stated project would run headlong into anarchism. This is too quick for although his rhetoric cannot allow for it, as all Americans know the Bush administration understands and demands that certain restrictions on freedom are necessary for any political life. [We need only remind ourselves of the Patriot Act and the recent debacle on telecom immunity to recognize this.] Given then that political freedom cannot mean living in whatever way anyone desires and given the project to spread it, how are we to understand what Bush aims to spread and what he aims to attack? 
There is a benchmark to use here. This is the concept of the illegitimate state, and if we characterize that concept in a certain way we can see a basic connection between it and an intelligible conception of political freedom. Unfortunately for us all, the illegitimate state is not difficult to locate in the actual world. One case in point is Zimbabwe [update: for an excellent account of Zimbabwe's downfall under Mugabe, see Samantha Power's 2003 piece here]. After an election in which citizens dared to vote for the opposition party, Robert Mugabe clamped down and gerrymandered a run-off. Yesterday, not surprisingly, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrew his candidacy amidst claims that his supporters were being intimidated and murdered. He said that he would not ask his supporters for a vote which would end their lives. The names of supporters whose life are at risk includes Tsvangirai himself, who is now under the protection of the Dutch embassy.
Being a relatively straightforward case of the illegitimate state, Zimbabwe is instructive. What makes it illegitimate? As Bernard Williams once helpfully put it, an illegitimate state is one in which the solution, the state itself, is worse than the problem, viz., life without an authority to settle disputes. In the case of Zimbabwe the state is but another party to the conflict of interested parties and instead of resolving disputes, adds to them. What's worse, and more problematic, as is obvious to everyone, the illegitimate state is typically the most powerful among the disputants. This makes it worse because being more powerful, it possesses the resources to perpetuate itself. Hence its existence serves to undermine the possibility of a legitimate state.
Prescient in the extreme, Plato recognized the nature of the illegitimate state and put its theory in his mouthpiece for political realism, Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus identified justice with power, defining justice in terms of the sole advantage of the ruling, strongest, party. No doubt he is wrong about that, but the theory is nevertheless helpful for it uncovers the preservatory genius of raw power. This manifests itself, basically, through its capacity to remain hidden: although it is at bottom raw power, it never expresses itself as such. (For all his evident thugishness, Mugabe nevertheless bothered to go through the motions of an election and a runoff.) Thrasymachus declares that the illegitimate state is like the clever craftsman who knows what he can do and what he can't do; and, if he should err on occasion, he knows how to recover from it (Vladimir Putin, Russia's de facto strong man, is perhaps the best exemplar of this). Translated to the conditions of the modern state, this means that the illegitimate state controls the media and hence the primary means by which citizens acquire and disseminate information and opinion, controls the military, and controls the judiciary by which the public pronouncements of justice are made and reinforced.
The illegitimate state so understood has a basic connection to liberty, for the former marks the most extreme curtailment of the latter. Restricted to this context, Bush's mission makes sense (I don't say it would be necessarily justified), for if there exists a good case to support and/or intervene on behalf of the freedom of any body of peoples it is the case of those who are terrorized by their government. However, how are we to evaluate Bush's endorsement of the much more ambitious and suspect extension of the mission to states which are not illegitimate in this sense but rather are non-democracies, non-ideal (from our vantage point) and unjust (again, from our vantage point)? His foray into Iraq (and his consideration of one in Iran) is a case in point.
Answering this question requires a standpoint free from utopian thought (or one might call it, political moralism) and its penchant for believing that politics is just the correct application of moral ideals. Most importantly, we don't want to confuse illegitimacy with injustice, for the reasons to confront the former do not necessarily extend to the latter. The relevant distinction is grounded on the idea that all sane (minimally rational) persons desire to live free from terror and it is the fundamental point of political authority to make that the case. This is a basic psychological fact unburdened by moral theory. Beyond that there are varying degrees of moral value, e.g. freedom of speech, right to economic well-being, autonomy, etc., which can emerge as important depending upon the historical, material, and political circumstances. It is up to political judgment to decide when, where and how these values are to be sustained, supported and protected. If so, it cannot be a coherent ambition to spread freedom per se, for beyond freedom from terror there is no univocal thing that is meant by it. Bush's project is incoherent in the way that a project to bring happiness to all of the world is incoherent. Despite the apparent univocality of these concepts, their application is too multivarious to sustain a unified project.
But beyond these rather fine-grained distinctions, we can certainly acknowledge the wide gulf between promoting freedom from an illegitimate state and Bush's mission, as he sometimes puts it, to deliver democracy (through violence if necessary). We know from history that legitimacy does not require democratic processes, and even if we agree with Bush that we should not "pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies," these are all a far cry from the desire for self-governance. Self-governance requires the kind of self-consciousness, self-reflectiveness and responsibility that represent, we might say, a cultural ideal. To be sure, many societies have no such aspiration even when they are free to do as they desire. Even if they did, however, it can be no part of another country's mission, as it is in Bush's vision, to deliver, no, demand democracy, for this demand has the same air of paradox as forcing someone to be free.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Obama's Negative to Public Financing
On the last entry of Anonymous Liberal, there is an attempt to justify Obama’s negative to use public financing in his forthcoming campaign. The argument presented is roughly that Obama’s fundraising style in the primaries has dismantled the reasons that make public financing compulsory. Obama’s campaign for the Democratic nomination raised a record-breaking amount of money from small donors. His internet-based strategy to raise campaign funds averaged $100 contributions. According to the post, this ensures no substantial influence of the donors on a potential Obama presidency, which was precisely what public financing sought to prevent.
But while it is true that Obama’s fundraising style frees him from some undesirable political pressures, it is far from clear that it frees him from all of them. In a possible political scenario where politicians expect to finance their campaigns by relatively small internet donations, they would still have incentives to define their agendas in accordance with the interest of the potential donors, even if they are not an organized political group. For one thing, this doesn’t seem the healthiest way of doing politics. But for another, it seems likely that the donors, small as they are, won’t represent the whole spectrum of economic classes. $100 may not be a lot of money, but there is a huge number of households in the
Friday, June 13, 2008
Another media failure
The New York Times reports 'Media Charged With Sexism in Clinton Coverage'
I love the neutrality of the headline. As if the allegations weren't evident and glaringly obvious to anyone who was paying attention. I couldn't believe my eyes and ears when I read and heard the coverage of Clinton. Anyone disagree?
How did we arrive here and where are we going?
The following, offered by Marty Lederman here, recounts how the Boumediene petitioners came under American authority. [The whole dialog, focused on the Boumediene case, contained in the link above is well worth reading.]
They were not captured fighting U.S. forces in Afghanistan or, like Hamdi, surrendering a weapon there. Instead, they are Algerians who immigrated to Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990’s. Five of them are Bosnian citizens. On 9/11/01, each was living with his family in Bosnia. None is alleged to have waged war or committed belligerent acts against the United States or its allies. According to the Boumediene brief, they were arrested by Bosnian police in October 2001, purportedly on suspicion of plotting to attack the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. But the Bosnian authorities had no evidence for this charge; instead, they acted under pressure from U.S. officials, who threatened to cease diplomatic relations with Bosnia if Petitioners were not arrested. On January 17, 2002, the Supreme Court of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, acting with the concurrence of the Bosnian prosecutor, ordered Petitioners released because a three-month international investigation (with collaboration from the U.S. Embassy and Interpol) had failed to support the charges on which Petitioners had been arrested. On the same day, the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina, established under the U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement and staffed by judges from several European countries, issued an order forbidding the prisoners’ removal from Bosnia. Later that day, however, as the Boumediene Petitioners were being released from a prison in Sarajevo, Bosnian police acting at the behest of U.S. officials (and in defiance of the Human Rights Chamber’s order), re-seized them and delivered them to U.S. military personnel, who transported them to Guantanamo, where they have been held for the past six years, without contact with their families.Yesterday's SCOTUS decision was a great victory for American justice. However, that it took 6 years and Supreme Court intervention to get to this point which point, as the above description makes clear, we should never have arrived at in the first place, demonstrates our legal, moral, and political disorientation these past 7 years. And for these men, it is just another beginning. They might languish at Guantanamo for yet another unknown number of months and years while we figure out the legal and political ramifications of yesterday's decision.
Are the Boudemiene petitioners innocent? Who knows?--that's what we want to determine and that's what the decision makes possible. Back in the day, Rumsfeld assured Americans that Guantanamo harbored only the 'worst of the worst'. That kind of presumptive guilt was subjected to skepticism by certain quarters, but I suspect many Americans felt, or wanted to feel, it to be basically true. I mean unless our government is sadistic or crazy, what else could possibly explain our imprisoning people in this way? I've had more than a few students say this very thing to me; and, I don't doubt that they believe it and that many others do so as well. But the basic fact is, more than a few of the detainees who have now been released, had nothing to do with, and knew nothing about, Al Qaida or terrorism, not even in the preposterously broad sense defined by our government. After 8 months of investigation, the reporters at McClatchy have now confirmed this (see here for print story). What explains our actions then? I don't know, but it is important to keep in mind that evil outcomes do not require evil intent or madness. Incompetence, zeal, hubris, fear, indifference: these will do just fine.
Am I to believe that Americans, even knowing these facts, would persist in their support of our terrorism policies? Am I to believe that even after watching that video containing interviews with the released detainees, Americans would not feel sympathy, perhaps even remorse? I refuse to believe that, even though I know some who feel nothing of the kind. At any rate, we all know of 1 American who knows the facts, but persists in the belief that Guantanamo was, is and will always be right. The NY Times reports that " Mr. Bush on Thursday appeared to hold open the possibility of a new legislative effort to alter the [Boumediene]decision’s result." The reporter offers no evidence for this assertion, but given Bush's known recalcitrance to all things good coupled with his unmatched conviction in the correctness of his own (disoriented) beliefs, can anyone doubt that, absent his political wounds, he would demand from our inept and spineless Congress a revision of that abomination, the Military Commissions Act?
We should be reminded, and I hope this is made an issue come November, that Obama voted against the MCA, while McCain was one of its chief architects. It's good to be right and just as good to be vindicated. I only pray, and I'm not really a praying kind of guy, that Obama lives up to his promise and, as his first priority, closes Guantanamo.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Haebeus Corpus affirmed for alien detainees
Monumental SCOTUS decision today. Go here for decision (by Kennedy) and dissents (by Roberts and Scalia) (a large pdf document). And here and here for discussion.
It's a good day.
Not for Scalia, who asserts (alarmingly) that "the nation will live to regret what the court has done today." What does he mean? As he writes in his dissent, the decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed"(p.2) and generally have "disastrous consequences" (p.2).
Well, couldn't one say the same if the decision had been the opposite? And is Scalia just Cheney in robes?
Impeachment rumblings
I saw Dennis Kucinich on C-SPAN earlier this week recite his 35 articles of impeachment. The diversity of the charges is staggering. He would make a good vice president. I had planned on writing something, but saw this morning that Gore Vidal sums it up much better than I would have.
Incidentally, the vote was 251 to 166 in favor of jettisoning it off to committee. The committee is chaired by John Conyers, so there is hope that there will be at least some coverage, as opposed to the current deafening media silence.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Obama, Mexico, and Americans
The following post comes from our friend, Ligarius, who will be contributing with some frequency in the future.
------------------------------------
Guanajuato, Mexico – Though my family doesn’t descend from Latin America, nor indeed from any country speaking one of the Latin-based ‘Romance’ languages, I’ve been traveling in Mexico for a couple weeks now, since the semester ended at the college where I teach.
In Mexico City, my guidebook (one of the ones for traveling on a budget) directed me to some hotels that looked both cheap and respectable, in a neighborhood west of the Zocaló, whose location I already knew, near a quasi-tourist ‘destination’ that I’d never heard of, “El Monumento a la Revolución.”
What should strike any American about this colossal monument, at least if she is thinking, are its overwhelming indigenous features. Though the structure was originally designed to be a mausoleum (the construction was halted because of the Revolution) the indigenous images now adorn a national memorial to Mexico’s liberation from Spain in 1821. In one sense, of course, it’s entirely natural for Mexico to memorialize its independence from Europe (from so many Conquistadores) with images that predate the arrival of the Spanish.
But for an American it’s striking – because it’s impossible to imagine a comparably important monument anywhere in the United States, let alone in Washington, one that so proudly displays indigenous images.
“But the histories of the two countries are fundamentally different!”–
They are indeed. Mexico’s greatest president, according to pretty much anyone’s account of the history of this country, will always remain Benito Juarez (1806-1872), himself an indÃgena. The thought of a Native American having been, in 2008, the greatest ever President of the United States, certainly strains the boundaries of the imagination, as well as those of actual political possibility.
But such boundaries began to burst this week when Barack Obama acquired the (presumptive) Democratic presidential nomination. As one of Obama’s campaign posters victoriously announces, and as should seem undeniable, his very candidacy represents a much-advanced form of something unthinkable when Bush was re-elected. It says: “Progress.”
In November of this year, Americans will hopefully precipitate an electoral verdict that would rival one of the most admirably progressive events in the history of Mexico. It can do so by electing the candidate who is already a representation of hope for many of America’s traditionally disenfranchised groups. This includes, for instance, not only African Americans, but also Native Americans and, crucially for the election, Mexican Americans.
Since I brought some old magazines with me on my trip – the kind that can pile up over the course of a year or two – this morning I read a “Harper’s Index,” from April 2007, that included the following couplet:
Total value of U.S. government contracts in 2000 that were handed out without competitive bidding: $91,000,000,000
Total last year: $170,000,000,000
Though it defies propriety to refer, in Spanish, to individuals as self-satisfied in their unilateral philistinism as President Bush and Vice President Cheney, still, in addition to their being manifest criminals abroad, they are also, right at home, Conquistadores capitalistas. De la gente.
In any case, later this week I’m heading to the southern state of Oaxaca, home to many of Mexico’s large population of indÃgenas, and the birthplace of Benito Juarez.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Bloggers' Arguments for and against Libertarianism by Matias Bulnes, NYC
Sometimes what you need is right before your eyes but you don’t see it. I confirmed this popular saying just now when I was trying to come up with something interesting to write about. In this case, it wasn’t right before my eyes, for I had to do a few online searches before landing on destination. But it was within the reach of my finger: a philosophical debate between bloggers. The debate was perfect for my purposes because it was going on right now and, more importantly, because I think that most of what they say is wrong. Thus there was a lot of room for criticism. And in passing it gave me the chance to beat up on Libertarians which, I must admit, I find pleasant.
The first argument in the debate is actually the worst. It was posted by Bryan Caplan on his blog EconLog. Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and staunch libertarian. In his post he proudly embraces his hard-line libertarianism implying thereby that some libertarian icons such as Friedman or Hayek erred on the moderate side. The debate is about welfare-abolitionism and how Friedman and Hayek were wrong in negotiating this point with liberals. He presents two arguments for welfare-abolitionism, the first of which is this:
Almost no one thinks you should be legally required to financially assist your relatives - even your indigent parents who raised you. The welfare-state abolitionist can fairly ask all of these people a tough question: If your parents shouldn't have a legal right to your help when they really need it, why should complete strangers?
Unless I’m missing something, the argument has the form of a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that we should have a legal obligation to help other members of society. It proceeds by observing that if we should have such an obligation to help others then we should have the obligation to help our parents, in particular. And then the punch line: but obviously we don’t have a legal obligation to help our parents; therefore we shouldn’t have an obligation to help others. Check mate.
Now this argument is bad, silly bad. For almost no one thinks you should be legally required to help your parents in addition to the help you should give them by paying your taxes. In fact, pretty much nobody but libertarians thinks you shouldn’t be required to help your parents by paying taxes and hence if that were the assumption it would beg the question. Children are indebted to their parents at least qua tax payers, if not qua their children. And having no legal obligation to help our parents qua their children is, of course, compatible with having a legal obligation to help them qua their fellow citizens. Hence, Caplan’s reductio produces no contradiction. And, it goes without saying, a reductio without contradiction is like marriage without consummation: hopelessly fruitless.
Caplan’s second argument is not as bad as the first one, but doesn’t work either. This is how it goes:
Second, and probably even more compellingly, the existence of welfare state is one of the main rationalizations for undercutting the greatest anti-poverty campaign the world has ever known: immigration. (Friedman said it most clearly: "You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state." But Krugman's in full agreement). And unlike the welfare state, immigration has and continues to help absolutely poor people, not relatively poor Americans who are already at the 90th percentile of the world income distribution. There's no reason for libertarians to make apologies to social democrats: Libertarian defenders of immigration are the real humanitarians in the world, and the laissez-faire era of open borders without the welfare state was America's real humanitarian era.
Here Friedman returns to his position of libertarian guru after a couple of paragraphs demised due to excessive moderation. But let’s not be too touchy, let’s set this aside. Still the argument only works under the assumption that we have a paramount obligation to help the poorest people in the world. However, I’m not totally sure where the libertarian is going to find that assumption in her repertoire of arguments. . . Unless the argument is intended to show that the liberal’s position is incoherent by showing that given that the liberal wants to help the poor he would do a better job without welfare-state. But this just gets the liberal wrong. If Caplan is referring to the liberal theorist, he is wrong about his concern for the poorest people in the world. The liberal theorist wants to analyze what a just society is, wherever it is located and whatever its dimensions. And he claims, of course, that within that society there should be redistribution of wealth. No claim is made regarding people outside that society. On the other hand, if Caplan is addressing the liberal politician then he is wrong again, only this time about her obligation to the poorest people in the world. The politician has an obligation to her country primarily. True, usually the liberal politician will express concern for world poverty, but she does (or should do) that not in her role of politician but of private individual.
The third argument I want to consider was presented in response to Caplan by Mark Thoma, professor of Economics at University of Oregon, on his blog, Economist’s View. This is what he says trying to meet Caplan’s challenge:
The source of the insecurity for workers is the system we live under, capitalism. It's better than any other system yet devised at providing for our needs, but within this system changes in preferences, changes in technology, management errors, the weather - all sorts of things out of the worker's control can cause them to become unemployed. Because it's a risk that's due to the system we live under, the cost of insuring against it should be shared by all those living within the system and benefiting from it, i.e. the cost should be shared across the entire population. The burden of paying for capitalism's dynamism and flexibility shouldn't be limited to the individual or the individual's family. So I don't see any contradiction in saying that families should not be required to provide this insurance, but "complete strangers" should.
Now if I understand the argument correctly, the reason why we have a moral obligation to help other members of societies is that they are subject to an evil as the result of participating in capitalism, viz. unemployment. Since all members of society benefit from the workers being in an unstable position, they all should compensate them.
But I don’t think this argument gets the job done. For it’s not clear to me what would stop the argument from working the other way around, i.e. why it doesn’t justify helping the entrepreneur. After all, the workers benefit from the entrepreneur’s risking his capital and hence, under the same logic, they should compensate him for that. In fact, in capitalism everybody benefits from everybody’s risks and so the obligations should cancel out. Or at least Thoma should explain how it is that the obligations vary presumably in virtue of the benefits varying.
But I think the major problem with this argument for welfare is that it doesn’t establish the wrongness of the inequalities by themselves. Actually, in a fictional society with no rotation of jobs (hence no risk of unemployment) but which is identical to our capitalist ones in its inequalities, there would be no need for welfare—according to the line of the argument. I find this result intolerable and certainly far from the liberal conception of the just society.
I still believe in Rawls’ arguments for welfare. At least I know of no other compelling justification for it. I think the one point that Rawls makes that libertarians usually miss is that society is a cooperative endeavor. Everybody benefits from everybody else’s participating in society. So the deal has to guarantee that all come out better off. If the inequalities don’t go to the advantage of the worse off they have no reason to agree to participate and hence there will be no more inequalities (but nothing else either). When this happens, money has to be transferred from the rich to the poor. This is of course a very inaccurate expression of Rawls’ ideas but it will do for the present purposes.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
How is this possible?
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6043
I become red in the face and inordinately outraged when I read this kind of thing--the kind of thing I don't want to read come November.
Must read
The final Senate report on executive use of intelligence prior to Iraq war is finally released. The report was held up for many years, although there were repeated assertions (by then Republican chair, Pat Roberts) that investigations were moving forward. For links to official report go here.
The ultimate quote from committee chair John D. Rockefeller, "In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even non-existent."
If accurate what happened was not an exaggeration of known intelligence (as both the Times and WaPost headlines read today), but rather intentional deception. Can't editors recognize the difference?
I have no sense for whether the report's conclusions are already widely believed or not, but it's important to have official government confirmation even if such beliefs are already widely held. No longer can we merely claim that everyone was misled by faulty intelligence; evidently, we were misled by our current government.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Canadian Justice: holding oneself responsible for human rights violations
The outline of Omar Khadr's story is fast becoming familiar. He is an enemy combatant. He was picked up by US authorities in Afghanistan in 2002 and brought to Guantanamo where he has wallowed for nearly 6 years. The US has decided to bring him to the military commissions court on the charge that he threw a grenade which killed a US medic. In that sense, he is one of the luckier inhabitants of Guantanamo: he's set to get his day in court. Well, not quite, since it is an open question whether the military commissions court he'll face is a court of justice in the requisite sense. We know that this court accepts as legitimate evidence attained through coercion (e.g., torture). We know that SCOTUS (in Hamdan)has rejected as unconstitutional the previous iteration of this court, and it is difficult to see what has changed in the interim. We know that the man in charge of the court, William Haynes, asserted to his then chief prosecutor that “there can be no acquittals.” No one, including the prosecutor towards whom it was barked, took this assertion to benignly mean that he should do his best to win the case. Rather it was, repugnantly and malignantly, a prediction grounded in a threat on the order of “I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.” We know that said (now, former) prosecutor has testified on behalf of the defense of the person he was once in charge of bringing to justice.
And, now, right on time and as a means to fulfilling that prediction, we learned last Friday that the judge appointed to Khadr's case was summarily and without explanation (part of the Bush administration's frequent Friday surprises) dismissed from it. The judge in question, Peter Brownback III had, from the Bush administration's point of view, the annoying habit of demanding procedural justice, and that evidently was enough 'judicial activism' to warrant dismissal. In particular, Brownback refused to set a trial date until the prosecution handed over to the defense potentially exculpatory evidence for which it had legitimately and repeatedly demanded.
The Brownback dismissal was evidently hastened by the Canadian Supreme Court's ruling (it can be read here) the previous week. The ruling, which was unanimous, asserted that the Canadian government violated Khadr's human rights by participating and supporting an activity which violated his human rights. In particular, in 2003 Canadian agents interviewed him at Guantanamo and passed on the content of the interview to U.S. authorities (this is the support and participation claim). The claim that the activities violated Khadr's human rights is grounded on SCOTUS's decisions (in Rasul and Hamdan). The court reasoned that Canadian agents and law should not defer to another country's law (as would be customary on foreign soil) when the latter, by its own lights, violates human rights. In such a case, Canada and its agents, since they facilitated a human rights violation, have an obligation to rectify the wrong. Since Canadian authorities possess a transcript of the interviews which they conducted with Khadr (which transcript US authorities claim to have lost!!!), they have an obligation to make them available to the defense per its request. This was the Canadian Supreme Court's order.
Given this order, we can understand one dimension of the U.S.'s urgency in bringing Khadr to court and Brownback's dismissal. They want his defense team to be crippled as much as possible so as to guarantee their prediction of 'no acquittals'.
In the face of such an unaccountable U.S. government, it's reassuring to see Canada actually living up to its promise of justice and holding itself accountable when it deems itself to have done wrong. If we cannot do it ourselves, then it's nice to have a friend and neighbor who will do it for us.
Oh, did I forget to mention that Khadr was but 15 years old when originally picked up? I would say we have reached the nadir of American justice if it weren't for the fact that it keeps getting lower and lower, and baser and baser by the days and months. We'll need to await the upcoming years to get a full measure of our current government's depravity.
Obama is the Democratic Nominee
So finally Obama is the Democratic nominee. Clinton hasn’t yet acknowledged defeat, but she’ll have to unless she wants to appear reprimanded by the delegates of her own party. Here are a few relevant questions regarding the future.
1) Will Clinton vow full support for Obama’s candidacy?
She will or else she’ll probably get isolated within her own party. Praises for Clinton come cheap lately in the presidential race (see last night’s speeches by Obama and McCain), but no matter how sincere these compliments, she seems to be a skillful politician, and skillful politicians play the game with their heads and not with their guts. My hunch is that she is smart enough to choose supporting Obama as her best way out of this weary Primary.
2) Will Obama win the general election?
Who knows? He does seem to run with the lead, but Democrats have made it a party tradition loosing elections under favorable circumstances. Plus, Republicans are very crafty and unprincipled for playing the game. Let’s hope Obama will manage to dodge all the hurdles that will surely arise on his way. At least, he does seem to be smarter than many previous Democratic candidates.
3) If elected president, will Obama bring about the much promised change?
Probably not. He is an exciting politician and has a sort of aura, so it’s easy to develop a political crush on him (as some bloggers have). But to be realistic, you don’t need a whole lot of political experience to realize that almost always political change comes piecemeal. I too am sick of empty political forecasts, but one more on the pile can’t harm: many will be disappointed. The higher you fly, the harder you hit the floor when you fall. And there’s only so much a president can do. Not because a Progressive Democrat gets elected, the country is any more Progressive than it was before. There is also a Parliament, and the Supreme Court, and State governments and legislatures, etc. But, as I have said in other posts, I do think that Obama’s presidency would have a tremendous historical impact in the long run. I believe this could potentially ensue a redistribution of political power across the racial spectrum. No doubt that would be huge.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
The Reverend Wright controversy and the epistemology of ignoranceby Ornaith O'dowd, NYC
As the Reverend Wright controversy broke, I was teaching a philosophy course about race. In one of those great moments when curriculum and current events perfectly coincide, we had just been reading Charles Mills's book, The Racial Contract. In it, he argues that, alongside the 'social contract' of early modernity, there was a "Racial Contract" in which white men essentially decided to establish themselves as "human" and exclude all others as "subhuman" and therefore not of equal moral worth. (White men made the contract, but all whites benefited, and continue to benefit, in varying degrees, from the race privilege it set out to construct. It is worth mentioning at this point that Mills does not deny that there are significant forms of oppression other than racism). While the Social Contract is often read as hypothetical, Mills argues that the Racial Contract can be seen as the underlying structure linking a range of historical phenomena, from legal decisions in support of slavery and colonization to the rise of 'race science' and the project of Enlightenment humanism (which, he argues, assumed that the only humans that counted were whites, and some of those more than others, clearly). If the inhabitants of the colonies, or the slaves that were brought in chains to Europe and America, weren't really human, then their appalling treatment did not disturb the celebrations of humanism and human rights that flowed from the pens and mouths of the perpetrators. White men agreed to organize society, culture, and morality on the basis of the lie that they were morally superior and therefore deserved the spoils of their conquests: in the end, Mills observes, whites themselves have come to believe it, at least at some level. The Racial Contract is, he says, epistemological as well as moral and political: it creates an "epistemology of ignorance" (9) that systematically encourages whites to refuse knowledge of the race system that has created and now maintains their position of privilege. Why else are whites-- even "liberals" (such a muddy term)-- so reluctant to consider the question of reparations, to see that the unjust system of global trade is a continuation of racist imperialism, or to acknowledge that they (we; I am white) directly and materially benefit from racism and race privilege as it operates in the global market and on New York City streets? (Discomfitingly, this is true whether or not one is personally racist, which gives rise to interesting questions of agency and responsibility that I will be addressing in a forthcoming Intervention).
Could it be that the extraordinary response of most white commentators to Reverend Wright's remarks about US foreign policy and the racism of US society is an example of the epistemology of ignorance in action? How quickly they all agreed that OF COURSE his comments were outrageous, appalling, and offensive. When the "scandal" broke in the corporate media-- or rather was manufactured by it, I looked up his sermons online, and having watched the now-famous clips, I honestly wondered whether I had failed to find the correct clip, the one where he said outrageous, appalling, and offensive things. I said this to my students at our next meeting and many of them, especially students of color, were far more shocked that anyone was shocked by the remarks than they were by the remarks themselves, which seemed to some at least a statement of the blatantly obvious. Although I don't have time to pursue this further here, it is worth recalling that Wright's post-9/11 sermon was, in fact, an extended critique of "the cycle of violence" that, he says, includes the 9/11 attacks. It was hardly, as corporate media distortion has suggested, a justification of those attacks. Would that everyone in the US had watched the entire sermon. I'm not religious, but I found it interesting and impressive.
It was as though, at a family gathering, an errant cousin had blurted out the scandalous secret about which everyone had for years quietly gossiped, and the powerful members of the family had rushed to silence her and restore order. Why the panic? Why the closing of the ranks behind the accepted consensus that dismissed Wright as a crazy radical? (Note how "radical" has become a pejorative term in corporate news-media speak). Quite simply, there is a lot to lose if whites in the United States and elsewhere acknowledge that their superior wealth, income, social status, and political power is directly related to the past and present oppression of people of color, and that their unspoken but real conviction that they are perfectly entitled to (and maybe even deserve) these goods is based on the racist claim of white superiority upon which the Racial Contract was built. Every day I reap the benefits of the Racial Contract, and, dear reader, if you are white, you do, too. It is an ugly thing to think about, certainly.
What to do? One might protest: "But I don't WANT to reap those benefits; I think it is utterly wrong that I should reap such benefits based on my race". First, as I mentioned earlier, this does not make it any less true that, if one is white, one unavoidably does. Second, the utterer of the protest should think clearly about what giving up those benefits really means. Can I confidently say that I would definitely have got this university education, traveled so freely, avoided ever having been subject to police harassment, and experienced a world in which I could safely assume that my race would rarely, if ever, disadvantage me, if I were not designated "white"? Would I have the material wealth that I do-- modest as it seems to me as a CUNY adjunct-- were it not for a global capitalist system that protects rich economies against poor ones in a continuation of racist imperialism?
No wonder that the commentators want to exile Wright to officially-stamped loony land post haste: what he is saying, if taken seriously, calls more or less all of their basic political assumptions into question.
The important claim here is that it is not that white America has accidentally failed to really see how race and racism works in the world; rather, white America, from its beginnings, has depended for its very survival on an agreement to ignore it.
