Corey Robin's Blog, page 97

When Kafka was NOT the rage

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

Common looking-glasses, it is said, are extremely deceitful, and by the glare which they throw over the face, conceal from the partial eyes of the person many deformities which are obvious to every body besides. But there is not in the world such a smoother of wrinkles as is every man’s imagination, with regard to the blemishes of his own character.

In fairness to Smith, this passage appears only in the first edition of TMS; it was excised from the succeeding five editions that appeared in his lifetime. It’s also quite out of keeping with the overall thrust of the text, particularly its lengthy passages on the torment we subject ourselves to when we act in ways we believe are less than praiseworthy, even if everyone else believes the contrary.

University of Oregon to Faculty: You Belong to Me!

I always thought of the University of Oregon (UO) as one of great gems of our public university system. It’s got a terrific political science department (with Hobbes scholar Deborah Baumgold in theory and wonderful APD folks like Joe Lowndes and Gerald Berk in American Politics). It’s in Eugene, a lovely little city of hot tubs and hippies. And since last year, it’s had a faculty union. Who wouldn’t love it?

Apparently, the UO administration, that’s who.

The administration is currently locked into a battle with the faculty, who are trying to negotiate their first contract. Rather than seize the moment to establish good relations with the union and improve the university, the administration is intent on doing the reverse. Not simply with the usual patter of bottom-line administrators—no big raises, say (though even here the administration has gone the extra mile by refusing to guarantee the fulltime faculty a living wage)—but with proposals that would astonish even the most jaded observer of administrative ways and means.

I first caught wind of the UO’s aspirations this past week, when Inside Higher Ed reported that the administration was trying to undermine the speech rights of the faculty by inserting a so-called “civility” clause in the contract.

The university statement mentions civility twice in a section on faculty responsibilities, including that faculty are responsible for treating “students, staff, colleagues and the public fairly and civilly in discharging his or her duties and in accordance with this agreement.” Civility clauses have long been of concern to advocates for professors. While it’s hard to find people who are anti-civility, many academics note that requiring civility can become a tool for punishing those professors who speak out against their bosses or who push unpopular positions.

…

Bill Harbaugh, professor of economics and moderator of the “UO Matters” blog, which is frequently critical of university policy, said decoupling academic freedom from free speech left room for administrators to punish those faculty – like him – who say things administrators don’t like. He also objected to the idea that administrators would be the ones deciding what qualifies as “civil.”

…

Asked about the civility clause, [executive assistant to the UO president] said Oregon has a long history of promoting respectful discourse – one that’s covered by the university’s existing policy on academic freedom and free speech: “It is the responsibility of speakers, listeners and all members of our community to respect others and to promote a culture of mutual inquiry throughout the university community.”

Any determination of what’s civil would likely include faculty input, he said.

The minute I read that, I thought of my blogging. I’ve accused CUNY leaders of lying and cover-ups, of being Stalinists, of peddling nonsense and of being “as crude as the day is long.” I’ve no doubt they consider my posts uncivil and unfair. The notion that these same administrators would be in a position not only to define civility but also to enforce it as a contractual obligation, with all the attending disciplinary powers such obligations entail, well, you can see where this is all going.

Thankfully, so did the UO. They pulled the proposal.

When it comes to the freedom of the faculty, however, never underestimate the ambitions of an administrator scorned. The UO is back at the table, mooting even more draconian assaults on faculty autonomy and privacy.

Take their latest proposal (see section 7) on faculty email:

Bargaining unit faculty members have no expectation of privacy in emails, files, documents, or other information created or stored on university information assets. The university may monitor the use of, and review documents and other information stored on university information assets. Emails sent on a bargaining unit faculty member’s non-university email account and information created or stored on non-university computer systems belong to the bargaining unit member except to the extent that they address work-related subjects.

Read that last sentence carefully. Not only is the administration demanding the right to monitor and review the faculty’s UO email accounts, but it also arrogates to itself the right to monitor any emails on the faculty’s non-UO accounts (and computers) so long as those emails or documents “address work-related subjects.” So if I email my wife on my Gmail account, complaining about the action of a university administrator, or if I keep a diary on my home computer in which I talk about what that administrator did, that very same administrator can demand to read and review that email or document.

I’ve written quite a bit about the lengths to which employers will go to command and control the actions of their employees, and I’m certainly no naïf about the differences between universities and other employers. But this overreach from a university administrator seems like a first.

The administration has apparently tried to reassure the union that they would only monitor the faculty’s non-UO accounts in pursuit of what the university calls a “legitimate” “business need.” When the union asked for some examples of a “legitimate business need,” the UO’s hapless chief negotiator said the administration might want to check up on an individual professor’s work habits: Is she putting in her required 40 hours per week or is she shopping on-line during that time? (Apparently the negotiator really said this.) Or perhaps the administration, the negotiator added, would want to check up on a professor who was publicly critical of her chair. When the union countered with an offer that would guarantee the faculty a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” the administration said no.

Little side note: you’ve got to love this chief negotiator. When she isn’t telling the faculty at the table “you all need to get focused on your students,” she apparently moonlights as a defense attorney for Phillip Morris. Charming. Wonder how she squares that with her proposal to radically restrict the faculty’s freedom to consult with outside organizations. Which brings me to…

Like the faculty at CUNY, faculty at the UO are allowed to work one day a week as consultants for outside groups and organizations. At CUNY, professors consult for human rights groups, civic education groups, and other NGOs and non-profits. In Oregon, this activity is protected by state law. But the administration at the UO wants to eliminate that protection. (Yes, you heard that right: university administrators want to be even more intrusive and restrictive than the state.)

From now on, says the administration (see section 3), faculty wanting to do consulting work for outside groups or organizations “must get the prior written approval of the Provost or designee.” Among the criteria administration intends to apply when considering such proposals is whether the activity lies “within the scope of the bargaining unit member’s professional competence.”

How is that judgment to be determined? And how is a provost trained in, say, microbiology, in a position to judge whether a political scientist’s consulting work lies within her area of competence? And what if it doesn’t? Why is that any of the university’s business?

Oddly, in section 2 of the same proposal, the administration says that “activities unrelated to a bargaining unit faculty member’s…areas of professional competence do not require prior approval.” Given that section 3 requires the provost to determine what is or isn’t within the faculty member’s professional competence, it seems that anything and everything must come before the provost for approval.

Having to get permission from the provost, and under these terms, is creepy enough. You might wonder, though, why the administration would even want to involve itself in such byzantine determinations. After all, even the UO chief negotiator—there she goes again!—could not cite a single instance of the faculty abusing this right in the past.

The penultimate criterion in the administration’s proposal gives you a sense of why they might be interested in the faculty’s consulting work. The consulting, says the proposal, must not be “contrary to the University’s best interests.” The University’s best interests as determined by…the administration.

Now whose interests might the administration be most mindful of? Perhaps its Board of Trustees, which includes CEOs from the state’s timber and construction industries, the wife of the CEO of Microsoft, and a retired executive from Nike? Or big UO donors like Nike’s Phil Knight? It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which a professor is forbidden by the provost from consulting with an organization critical of Nike’s labor polices or Microsoft’s market practices. “Contrary to the University’s best interests” and all that.

There’s a lot more to be said about these negotiations; check out this blog for more info and updates (especially on the administration’s plans regarding intellectual property: they’re a doozy!)

But in the meantime, drop a note to the UO President Michael Gottfredson at pres@uoregon.edu— make sure to cc the union (info@uauoregon.org)—telling him what you think about all this.

Adam Smith: The Real Spirit of Capitalism?

How can “the man of inferior rank…hope to distinguish himself,” muses Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Unlike the man of high rank, the non-noble cannot affect the bearing of nobility; his comportment will go unnoticed. “Why should the man, whom nobody thinks it worth while to look at, be very anxious about the manner in which he holds up his head, or disposes of his arms while he walks through a room?” The man of middling or inferior rank is expected to act modestly and plainly, so he must. He must thus pursue a different path, says Smith.

If ever he hopes to distinguish himself, it must be by more important virtues. He must acquire dependants to balance the dependants of the great, and he has no other fund to pay them from, but the labour of his body, and the activity of his mind.

 

Marshall Berman, 1940-2013

Political theorist Marshall Berman, who was my colleague at the CUNY Graduate Center, died yesterday morning.

When I heard the news last night, my first thought was the date: 9/11. There’s no good day to die, but to die on a day so associated with death—whether the murder of nearly 3000 people on 9/11/2001, most of them in his beloved New York, or the 9/11/1973 coup in Chile that brought down Allende and installed Pinochet—seems, in Marshall’s case, like an especially cruel offense against the universe.

For as anyone who knew or read him knows, Marshall was a man of irrepressible and teeming life. The life of the street, which he immortalized in his classic All That’s Solid Melts Into Air; the life of sex and liberation, which he talked about in The Politics of Authenticity (read the section on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters; you’ll never read that book the same way again); the life of high art and popular culture, whether it was the Sex Pistols or hip-hop.

Marshall took in everything; his portion was the world. The only thing he couldn’t abide, couldn’t take in, was ugliness and cruelty. If he had to die, it should have been on May Day—not just the May Day of internationalist radical politics (though that too is a commemoration of death) but the May Day of pagan spring, of dance and song, of maypoles and fertility rituals.

And yet there is something about that date—9/11—that seems appropriate. For Marshall’s vision of life bursting was inextricably linked to his awareness of death and destruction. All That’s Solid Melts Into Air, which takes its name from that famous line in The Communist Manifesto, is a paean to the divided experience that is modernity: the loss of the old world paired with the creation of the new, decay as the condition of construction. Whenever I think of Marshall, I think of that line from Osip Mandelstam’s poem Notre Dame: “I too one day shall create/ Beauty from cruel weight.” (Oddly, though Marshall wrote about Mandelstam at length in All That’s Solid, he never mentioned this poem.)

All That’s Solid is one of those rare texts of theory that is really a memoir, a deeply personal revelation of its author’s being. Like Rousseau’s Second Discourse or Said’s Orientalism, it is intensely, almost unbearably, intimate. Formally a discussion of Marx and modernism, it is the biography of a man who saw his world come to an end as a teenager, during the fateful year of 1953, when Robert Moses came blasting through his neighborhood in the East Tremont section of the South Bronx. The cause was the Cross Bronx Expressway, but in that cause and its demonic villain, Berman found his muse, his Faust, his Fleurs du Mal.

Growing up in suburban Westchester in the 1970s, I remember driving above the South Bronx on those long arterial stretches and looking down and out on the devastation. But it was not till I read Marshall that I understood its source or at least one of its sources: the wrecking ball of a mad urban genius, who set out to reconstruct an entire city as if it were nothing more than a system of highways, an expressway to get people and goods from one end to the other.

Robert Moses is the man who made all this possible. When I heard Allen Gisnberg ask [in Howl] at the end of the 1950s, “Who was that sphinx of cement and aluminum,” I felt sure at once that, even if the poet didn’t know it, Moses was his man. Like Ginsberg’s “Moloch, who entered my soul early,” Robert Moses and his public works had come into my life just before my Bar Mitzvah, and helped bring my childhood to an end.

…

For ten years, through the late 1950s and early 1960s, the center of the Bronx was pounded and blasted and smashed. My friends and I would stand on the parapet of the Grand Concourse, where 174th Street had been, and survey the work’s progress—the intense steam shovels and bulldozers and timber and steel beams, the hundreds of workers in their variously colored hats, the giant cranes reaching far above the Bronx’s tallest roofs, the dynamite blasts and tremors, the wild, jagged crags of rock newly torn, the vistas of devastation stretching for miles to the east and west as far as the eye could see—and marvel to see our ordinary nice neighborhood transformed into sublime, spectacular ruins.

In college, when I discovered Piranesi, I felt instantly at home. Or I would return from the Columbia library to the construction site and feel myself in the midst of the last act of Goethe’s Faust. (You had to hand it to Moses: his works gave you ideas.)

Right there, in that last line, is the man. Standing amid ruins, he reaches for the flowers of high culture, then cracks wise. That was Marshall. That was modernity. Marshall’s modernity. “We come from ruins,” he said in Ric Burns’s documentary on New York, “but we’re not ruined.” (h/t Bryan Waterman)

Marshall liked to sign off his emails with “Shalom.” I used to think he meant simply “Peace.” But shalom, of course, also means “hello” and “goodbye.” That too was Marshall: every hello was a goodbye, every arrival a departure.

Though I first met Marshall in 1999 and was his colleague for nearly a decade, I didn’t know him well. We served on committees together, we shared students and an office (the first copy of Treitschke’s Politics that I read was his, though he never knew it), and he treated me to stories about his son, his ambivalence about Israel, and more.

And yet I feel like I knew him: not only from his work but from the legions of students who loved him, who came to the Graduate Center just to work with him, and regaled me with stories of his kibitzing genius. He was one of those rare advisers (Michael Denning at Yale was like this too) who tossed off a sentence from which an entire dissertation grew.

You’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about if you listen to him in these three clips from Burns’s documentary (thanks to Josh Kamensky for uploading the first, and to Bryan Waterman and Cyrus Pattell for uploading the second and third; make sure to read Bryan’s wonderful appreciation).

Here in the first he talks about Corbusier as an inspiration to Robert Moses; both of them, says Marshall, were “metaphysicians” of traffic. Just listen to the pungent beauty of Marshall’s words, and you’ll know the man: “We have to merge with the cars…the flow that would never end…kill the street.”

 

And here he is talking about the arrival of Moses and the Cross Bronx Expressway. Again, listen out for that pairing of cruelty and beauty.

 

And finally here he is talking about graffiti on the subway.

 

Marshall was our Manhattan Socrates: not the arch dialectician but the philosopher in and of the street, not the aggressive asker of questions but the ambler in the boulevard, the man who seeks wisdom in the agora, in the conversation of Times Square, the walker in the city, the man who died among friends.

I feel about Henry Kissinger the way Edmund Burke felt about Warren Hastings

I feel about Henry Kissinger the way Edmund Burke felt about Warren Hastings:

We charge this Offender with…nothing, that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle; that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, died in grain with malice, vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core….We charge him with nothing, that he did not commit upon deliberation;…They were crimes, not against forms, but against those eternal laws of justice….

…We have brought before you the Chief of the tribe, the Head of the whole body of Eastern offenders; a Captain-general of iniquity, under whom all the fraud, all the peculation, all the tyranny, in India, are embodied, disciplined, arrayed, and paid. This is the person, my Lords, that we bring before you. We have brought before you such a person, that, if you strike at him with the firm and decided arm of justice, you will not have need of a great many more examples. You strike at the whole corps, if you strike at the head.

There might have been a time in the American empire when that last bit was true of Kissinger. Sadly, no more.

It’s 9/11. Do you know where Henry Kissinger is?

Readers who grew up in the New York area in the 70s will remember the “It’s 10 pm. Do you know where your children are?” tagline.

 

Well, it’s 9/11, the 40th anniversary of the coup that overthrew Allende. Do you know where Henry Kissinger is?

Jews Without Israel

In shul this morning, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi spoke at length about the State of Israel. This is more surprising than you might think. I’ve been going to this shul since I moved to Brooklyn in 1999, and if memory serves, it’s only been in the last two or three years that the rabbi has devoted at least one of her High Holy Days talks to Israel.

Throughout the aughts, Israel didn’t come up much in shul. During flash points of the Second Intifada, you might hear a prayer for Jewish Israelis or nervous temporizing about some action in Jenin or Gaza. But I can’t recall an entire sermon devoted to the State of Israel and its meaning for Jews.

That’s also how I remember much of my synagogue experience as a kid. Don’t get me wrong: Israel was central to my Jewish education. My entire family—my five sisters, my parents, and my grandfather—visited there with our synagogue in 1977. Several of my sisters, as well as my parents, have been back. The safety of Israel was always on my mind; I remember spending many a Friday night service imagining a terrorist attack on our synagogue, so short seemed the distance between suburban New York and Tel Aviv. I wrote about Israel in school essays (I actually defended its role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre). I had a strong feeling for Israel (or what I thought was Israel): a combination of hippie and holy, Godly and groovy, a feeling well captured by Steven Spielberg in Munich.

But for all of Israel’s role in my Jewish upbringing, I don’t remember my rabbi talking about the state all that much. In fact, the only time I remember him bringing it up was in 1982, not long after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. This was the first time that I became aware of international criticism of Israel. I had known, of course, about Arab and Palestinian opposition to the state, but in the world of American Jewry, that was all too easy to dismiss. The 1982 invasion, however, was especially controversial and brought Israel intense criticism from across the globe. Or at least sufficiently intense that I noticed.

Our rabbi—Chaim Stern, who edited the prayer book that’s now used at Reform synagogues across the country—was wry and erudite, not given to hot pronouncements. But something in the air that year stirred him to defend the State of Israel against its many critics. I’ve forgotten most of what he said, but one comment stuck with me: Israel should be allowed to be a normal state. We shouldn’t demand of Israel that it be a nation above others; we should let it be a state among others. Stern didn’t mean what many of us would now take that statement to mean: that Israel should be held to the same standard as other states, particularly states that claim to be liberal democracies. He meant that it should be free to hunt and kill its enemies. Just like any other state.

But aside from this one instance, my memory of my rabbi is that he was relatively silent on the topic. Israel was so much a part of the moral and material fabric of our lives that it didn’t require elaborate sermons and defenses or justifications. It (or an image of it) was something we lived rather than something we were lectured about.

And that’s how it had mostly been at the shul I now attend in Brooklyn. Until about two years ago. I remember the rabbi first taking up the topic in earnest in 2011 (or was it 2010?), almost apologetically, saying that we in the shul had been too quiet about Israel. It was time to talk. And by talk, she meant defend. Israel was under attack, politically and ideologically; its status in the culture could no longer be taken for granted. We had to speak up on its behalf. I remember wondering at the time whether she wasn’t responding to some specific call from other rabbis, a sense that Israel was beginning to lose control of the conversation not just internationally but in the US as well.

But what’s become clear to me since then—and this morning’s sermon confirmed it—is that it’s not the goyim the rabbis are worried about; it’s Jews. And not merely anti-Zionist, middle-aged lefty Jews like me but also younger Jews who are indifferent to Zionism.

In her talk this morning, the rabbi cited a statistic: where 80 percent of Jews over 65 feel that the destruction of the State of Israel would be a personal tragedy, only 50 percent of Jews under 35 feel the same way. I have no idea if this is true or what study it’s based on (this article in Tablet cites the same statistic), and admittedly it’s a high (and kind of weird) bar upon which to hang and measure support for the State of Israel. But my anecdotal sense is that there is something to it. Earlier this year, I had a drink with a 20-something journalist who’s Jewish. He said most Jews his age didn’t think or care all that much about Israel. Where Jews my age had to work toward our opposition to Israel—overcoming heated criticism and feelings of betrayal from friends and family—Jews his age, he suggested, could simply slough off the state as if it were so many old clothes.

But what most stood out for me from this morning’s sermon was how nervous the rabbi was about bringing up the topic. After talking a bit about how Israel felt to her as a kid (her memories are much like mine), she said that nowadays it seemed as if one couldn’t have a conversation with another Jew about Israel without fearing that it would explode into an argument. So fraught is the topic, she said, that many of us have opted not to talk about it at all. An uneasy silence had descended upon the Jewish community—an anxious modus vivendi in which we don’t agree to disagree but agree not to discuss—and it was this, more than anything, that worried her.

Now there are many reasons why a Jew would be made nervous by such a silence. Jews like to pride themselves on their tradition of argument and internal dissent. For every two Jews, three opinions, and so on. (That’s often not been my experience of Jews and Judaism, but it’s certainly a part of our sense of ourselves). Judaism, moreover, is not a religion of inner lights, of atomistic individuals who do their own thing. Ours is the religion of a people, a people with a rather insistent sense of collectivity. We do not shuffle into private confessionals; we declare our guilt publicly and communally. On Yom Kippur, we recite all the offenses we have committed against God and to each other (my personal favorite is “stiff-neckedness”). Individually, we may not have committed all of them, but that doesn’t matter. Somewhere, someone in the community did, and we’re all responsible.

But the rabbi wasn’t concerned about the conversation about Israel for these reasons. Something else seemed to be bothering her. If Jews can’t speak to each other about Israel, how can they defend the state to the rest of the country, much less the world? If defenders of Israel can’t make the case to the Jewish people, to whom can they make the case? Instead of issuing a call to arms, the rabbi pleaded for civility: let’s learn to speak to each other with mutual regard and respect, not to demonize each other simply because we take different positions on the State of Israel. Though she framed this as a universal injunction, I suspect she was speaking more personally. It seemed as if she felt like she had been demonized for her support for Israel (which is not, I should hasten to add, uncritical support but probably something closer to Peter Beinart’s liberal Zionism). And not by Arabs or the French, but by other Jews, perhaps even Jews in her own congregation.

I know how she feels. Though I grew up in a Zionist family, my position on Israel began to shift during my last years as an undergraduate in the late 1980s. In my junior year, I studied at Jesus College, Oxford. On the one hand, the experience solidified my identity as a Jew. Growing up in suburban Westchester, I never felt marked as other, as exotic or alien or strange. But at Oxford I did (I remember visiting a friend’s family over the Christmas holiday. Upon my arrival, the first thing they remarked upon was my being Jewish. It was as if they had been talking about it for weeks, wondering what they would do with this Jew once he crossed the threshold.) I came away from my year in England not only more identified as a Jew but also more interested in being Jewish.

On the other hand, that was the year of the Intifada, which set me on a path of questioning the State of Israel. When I returned to the States, I heard Edward Said speak on campus. I was mesmerized (anyone who had the privilege of hearing Said on Israel/Palestine knows what I’m talking about).

Coming out of these experiences, I recommitted myself to Judaism while rejecting Zionism. I learned how to be a Jew without Israel.

My break with Israel didn’t happen all at once. It was a process, but it did have an end point. In the summer of 1993, I was in Tennessee with my then-girlfriend, who was doing dissertation research there. Toward the end of the summer, I bought a copy of Said’s The Question of Palestine and read it in two days. As we drove back to New Haven, all hell broke loose. She was Jewish and at the time a firm if critical believer in Israel as a Jewish state. I began the car ride by voicing some tentative criticisms, but the conversation quickly escalated. It ended with me declaring that no child of mine would ever step foot in the State of Israel (I was kind of melodramatic in those days). We didn’t speak for a week.

That was my last experience of really getting into it with another Jew over Israel. I learned my lesson. I kept quiet. For about a decade and a half. The topic was simply too painful. I would only talk about it with ideologically sympathetic friends (and a couple of my sisters, who had come around to the same position as me) or with non-Jews. I couldn’t bear the feeling that I was being disloyal to the Jewish people; it was as if I had turned my back on my own family. I didn’t change my position; I just didn’t publicize or push it.

But something has changed in the last few years. The BDS movement has made great strides, critics like Ali Abunimah provide thousands of followers on Twitter with a constant stream of vital information we wouldn’t get elsewhere, books like Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby (whatever you think of its thesis) have blown open a topic long considered taboo, and respected voices in the mainstream media like Glenn Greenwald (and before him, Tony Judt) have made it possible for Jews to speak our minds on the topic. Now my little tribe within a tribe is more vocal, and suddenly it is our opponents who feel like they have to be careful around us and not vice versa.

I don’t want to overstate things. The pro-Israel forces still have an iron grip on the conversation in Congress (not to mention the expenditures and actions of the American state as a whole); critics of Israel are still vulnerable on college campuses; and lock-step support for Israel is still a requirement for mainstream respectability in most of the mainstream media.

I also wouldn’t want to make too much of a few sermons at my shul in Brooklyn, which despite being Conservative is politically progressive. I suspect the conversation in other shuls is rather different.

Still, if what my rabbi says is any indication, something may be happening in the Jewish community. If we look beneath the world of AIPAC and high politics, if we pay attention to the everyday conversation and its unspoken rules of discretion, we may be seeing a subtle shift in manners and mores that portends something larger and more fundamental.

I don’t know what that something larger is, or will be, and despite what Montesquieu and Tocqueville taught us, the politics of politesse is just that. Even so, for the first time in 20 years, I’m hopeful.

Shanah Tovah.

When it comes to Edward Snowden, the London Times of 1851 was ahead of the New York Times of 2013

After a summer of media denunciations of Edward Snowden, I thought this comment from Robert Lowe, a 19th century Liberal who opposed the extension of the franchise and other progressive measures, was especially apt. Lowe was a frequent editorialist in the London Times; this is from a piece he wrote in 1851.*

The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation. The statesman collects his information secretly and by secret means; he keeps back even the current intelligence of the day with ludicrous precautions, until diplomacy is beaten in the race with publicity. The Press lives by disclosures; whatever passes into its keeping becomes a part of the knowledge and the history of our times….For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences—to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.

It’s hard to believe in progress when a Times editorialist in 1851 is out in front of Times editorialists in 2013…

*Cited in Alexander Cockburn, A Colossal Wreck, a posthumously published memoir of the 1990s and 2000s by the wonderful radical journalist, which just came out this year.

Jesus Christ, I’m at Yale

In 1978, Vivian Gornick wrote an article in The Nation, “A Woman Among the Ivy Fellows,” on her semester-long experience as visiting professor at Yale. It’s a forgotten little classic of campus manners and mores, which is sadly inaccessible on the internet (though you can dig it out of the Nation digital archive if you’re a subscriber).

After detailing a litany of sexist and boorish behavior from the male faculty—and a general atmosphere of anti-intellectualism and antediluvian anxiety—Gornick concludes with a wonderful vignette about a conversation with a non-tenured historian whose husband is a tenured professor in sociology.

Ruth Richards drove me to the station. As we sat in her car waiting for my train to come in she leaned back in her seat, lit a cigarette, then turned to me and said: “You know what keeps this whole thing going? What allows them to take themselves so seriously, and still go on behaving like this? It’s guys like my husband. My husband is a good man, a kind and gentle man, comes from a poor home, fought his way to the top. And he’s smart. Very, very smart. But you know? In spite of all that, and in spite of everything he knows, every morning of his life he wakes up, goes to the bathroom, starts to shave, and as he’s looking at himself in the mirror, somewhere inside of him a voice is saying: ‘Jesus Christ. I’m at Yale.’”

Same as it ever was.

Jean Bethke Elshtain Was No Realist

The political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain has died. Many people were fans of her work; I was not.

In her early scholarship, Elshtain established herself as a distinctive voice: feminist, Laschian, Arendtian. By the mid to late 1990s, however, she had descended into cliche.  As she dipped deeper into the well of communitarian anxiety, she would come up with stuff like “the center simply will not hold.” When she worried about the loss of historical memory, she would say “we are always boats moving against the current, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”

Every sentence felt like a windup to an inevitable, unsurprising conclusion. Any author or topic she mentioned, you knew the exact quote she was going to pull.

But it was her posture as a realist that irritated me most. Elshtain styled herself a sober, unflinching witness to the horrors of our world. This write-up at The Atlantic partakes of the same frame.

As befits a political theorist, Elshtain’s ideas eclipsed her accolades. ”She wanted to be absolutely realistic about structures of power and political power that operate in our world that we should not be naïve about,” said William Schweiker, a University of Chicago professor and colleague of Elshtain’s. “In the terms of political philosophy, she was called a political realist.”

But, importantly, she was a political realist of a very specific sort: Christian. An admirer of Augustine, her sense of the fallen world was an early and foundational belief, she wrote in Augustine and the Limits of Politics in 1995. “Having had polio and given birth to my first child at age nineteen, bodies loomed rather large in my scheme of things. … I was too much a democrat and too aware of the human propensity to sin to believe that humans could create a perfect world of any sort on this fragile globe.”

This led her to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a robust theoretical argument about just war.

Yet what was most striking about Elshtain’s realism was how removed from reality it actually was.  Channeling decades of communitarian complaint about the triumph of the rights revolutions of the 1960s, the rise of individualism and the like, she took aim in 1995 at the “new attitude toward rights that has taken hold in the United States during the past several decades.” This at a time when  Democrats and Republicans had begun to strip suspected criminals of many procedural protections, when a presidential candidate’s membership in the ACLU was equated with membership in the Communist Party, when there were fewer counties in the United States with abortion providers than they were in the 1970s—developments, as we have seen, that have mostly gotten worse in the succeeding years.

When it came to matters of war and peace, especially after 9/11, Elshtain was even more removed from reality. No more so than when she claimed to be confronting it. I wrote about Elshtain’s views on torture in the London Review of Books in 2005. Some of the specifics may be out of date, but the overall argument, I think, remains sound. (The essay, sadly, is behind a firewall, but you can read the first half of it here and the second half, where I discuss Elshtain, here.)

If Torture, Sanford Levinson’s edited collection of essays, is any indication of contemporary sensibilities, neocons in the Bush White House are not the only ones in thrall to romantic notions of danger and catastrophe. Academics are too. Every scholarly discussion of torture, and the essays collected in Torture are no exception, begins with the ticking-time-bomb scenario. The story goes something like this: a bomb is set to go off in a densely populated area in the immediate future; the government doesn’t know exactly where or when, but it knows that many people will be killed; it has in captivity the person who planted the bomb, or someone who knows where it is planted; torture will yield the needed information; indeed, it is the only way to get the information in time to avert the catastrophe. What to do?

It’s an interesting question. But given that it is so often posed in the name of realism, we might consider a few facts before we rush to answer it. First, as far as we know, no one at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or any of the other prisons in America’s international archipelago has been tortured in order to defuse a ticking time bomb. Second, at the height of the war in Iraq, anywhere between 60 and 90 percent of American-held prisoners there either were in jail by mistake or posed no threat at all to society. Third, many U.S. intelligence officials opted out of torture sessions precisely because they believed torture did not produce accurate information.

These are the facts, and yet they seldom, if ever, make an appearance in these academic exercises in moral realism. The essays in Torture pose one other difficulty for those interested in reality: none of the writers who endorse the use of torture by the United States ever discusses the specific kinds of torture actually used by the United States. The closest we get is an essay by Jean Bethke Elshtain, in which she writes:

Is a shouted insult a form of torture? A slap in the face? Sleep deprivation? A beating to within an inch of one’s life? Electric prods on the male genitals, inside a woman’s vagina, or in a person’s anus? Pulling out fingernails? Cutting off an ear or a breast? All of us, surely, would place every violation on this list beginning with the beating and ending with severing a body part as forms of torture and thus forbidden. No argument there. But let’s turn to sleep deprivation and a slap in the face. Do these belong in the same torture category as bodily amputations and sexual assaults? There are even those who would add the shouted insult to the category of torture. But, surely, this makes mincemeat of the category.

Distinguishing the awful from the acceptable, Elshtain never mentions the details of Abu Ghraib or the Taguba Report, making her list of do’s and don’ts as unreal as the ticking time bomb itself. Even her list of taboos is stylized, omitting actually committed crimes for the sake of repudiating hypothetical ones. Elshtain rejects stuffing electric cattle prods up someone’s ass. What about a banana [pdf]? She rejects cutting off ears and breasts. What about “breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees”? She condemns sexual assault. What about forcing men to masturbate or wear women’s underwear on their heads? She endorses “solitary confinement and sensory deprivation.” What about the “bitch in the box,” where prisoners are stuffed in a car trunk and driven around Baghdad in 120° heat? She supports “psychological pressure,” quoting from an article that “the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself.” What about threatening prisoners with rape? When it comes to the Islamists, Elshtain cites the beheading of Daniel Pearl. When it comes to the Americans, she muses on Laurence Olivier’s dentistry in Marathon Man. Small wonder there’s “no argument there”: there is no there there.

…

If the unreality of these discussions sounds familiar, it is because they are watered by the same streams of conservative romanticism that coursed in and out of the White House during the Bush years. Notwithstanding Dershowitz’s warrants and Levinson’s addenda, the essays endorsing torture are filled with hostility to what Elshtain variously calls “moralistic code fetishism” and “rule-mania” and what we might simply call “the rule of law.” But where the Bush White House sought to be entirely free of rules and laws—and here the theoreticians depart from the practitioners—the contemplators of torture seek to make the torturers true believers in the rules.

There are two reasons. One reason, which Michael Walzer presents at great length in a famous essay from 1973, reprinted in Torture, is that the absolute ban on torture makes possible—or forces us to acknowledge the problem of “dirty hands.” Like the supreme emergency, the ticking time bomb forces a leader to choose between two evils, to wrestle with the devil of torture and the devil of innocents dying. Where other moralists would affirm the ban on torture and allow innocents to die, or adopt a utilitarian calculus and order torture to proceed, Walzer believes the absolutist and the utilitarian wash their hands too quickly; their consciences come too clean. He wishes instead “to refuse ‘absolutism’ without denying the reality of the moral dilemma,” to admit the simultaneous necessity for—and evil of torture.

Why? To make space for a moral leader, as Walzer puts it in Arguing about War, “who knows that he can’t do what he has to do—and finally does” it. It is the familiar tragedy of two evils, or two competing goods, that is at stake here, a reminder that we must “get our hands dirty by doing what we ought to do,” that “the dilemma of dirty hands is a central feature of political life.” The dilemma, rather than the solution, is what Walzer wishes to draw attention to. Should torturers be free of all rules save utility, or constrained by rights-based absolutism, there would be no dilemma, no dirty hands, no moral agon. Torturers must be denied their Kant and Bentham—and leave us to contend with the brooding spirit of the counter-Enlightenment, which insists that there could never be one moral code, one set of “eternal principles,” as Isaiah Berlin put it, “by following which alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous and free.”

But there is another reason some writers insist on a ban on torture they believe must also be violated. How else to maintain the frisson of transgression, the thrill of Promethean criminality? As Elshtain writes in her critique of Dershowitz’s proposal for torture warrants, leaders “should not seek to legalize” torture. “They should not aim to normalize it. And they should not write elaborate justifications of it . . . . The tabooed and forbidden, the extreme nature of this mode of physical coercion must be preserved so that it never becomes routinized as just the way we do things around here.” What Elshtain objects to in Dershowitz’s proposal is not the routinizing of torture; it is the routinizing of torture, the possibility of reverting to the “same moralistic-legalism” she hoped violations of the torture taboo would shatter. This argument too is redolent of the conservative counter-Enlightenment, which always suspected, again quoting Berlin, that “freedom involves breaking rules, perhaps even committing crimes.”

I’ve seen many encomiums and generous words for Elshtain on Facebook and elsewhere. That is understandable: she was clearly a voice who inspired many, and she seems to have been a warm and generous person. I hope, however, that in the coming days people will wrestle with her words more fully and more carefully.

Update (August 16, 9:30 am)

Over at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell has a terrific post on historical forgetting and the Vietnam War. He’s been reading Nick Turse’s latest book on Vietnam, which uncovers extensive evidence of far greater war crimes committed by the US than was previously known, and writes: “My Lai was closer to being the rule than the exception. Casual murder by US troops of women, children and old people as well as young men, torture, rape and collective reprisals were endemic, even before one gets into the more impersonal forms of slaughter.” Henry wonders why this book hasn’t occasioned more discussion and reflects on the forgetting of that war in the US.

This is all by a way of an introduction to why I found Elshtain’s prose so grating, her posturing so empty. I know some people thought I was being unduly harsh in my post about her. But when I talked about the vacuousness of her prose, the unreality of her realism, this is what I had in mind. Elshtain could write passages like this—

One of my persistent worries about our own time is that we may be squandering a good bit of rich heritage through processes of organized ‘forgetting,’ a climate of opinion that encourages presentism rather than a historical perspective that reminds us that we are always boats moving against the current, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past,’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s memorable words from The Great Gatsby.

—without ever meditating on, even mentioning, the kinds of historical facts that Henry discusses in his post. She would talk about historical forgetting, and chastise others for their forgetting, at the very moment she was enacting it on the page.

Also at Crooked Timber, commenter Geo writes:

Glad you began by pointing out what a tedious, thoroughly pedestrian stylist she was — colorless, rhythmless, and self-important. Beyond that, a vintage example of the professional contrarian, exalted to eminence for renouncing radicalism and continually scolding her former leftist and feminist comrades.

This is an important point. The relation between style and substance is tricky. Not every great thinker is a great stylist: Rawls immediately comes to mind. But one of the reasons Rawls was such a terrible stylist (not the only reason, of course, there were plenty others) was that he was such a painstaking thinker. Reading Rawls, you can see the sweat, the labor, almost excruciatingly so, that’s going into the sentences. Too much sweat, if you ask me. But that’s because he refused to avoid so many conceptual obstacles (not all, to be sure, but many) that his theory threw up in front of him. With Rawls, every paragraph feels like mountain climbing; there’s just so damn much that gets in the way of his theories that he refuses to overlook. Again, not always (he could ignore quite a bit, as decades of commentary have shown), but often.

With Elshtain it’s the opposite. Some people thought she was an accomplished stylist but she wasn’t. Not by a long shot. The style was flat, not smooth; she went for sheen rather than sheer. The style concealed the problems with her formulations: not by artful labor, but by blandness and banality.

Elshtain didn’t simply avoid topics. Every thinker does that, to some extent, and with the best ones, you see very clearly where and how they’re doing it. (Doesn’t Arendt have a line somewhere about how what makes a great thinker great is not what he gets right but what he gets wrong?)

With Elshtain, it was worse: it was as if the topics had simply been removed in advance of her arrival on the scene. If Rawls was climbing mountains, Elshtain was driving on highways, humming along a nicely paved road, cleared of all traffic by the state police, in an air conditioned car. Never once encountering the sand or the soil, the gritty materials, not even a pebble, upon which that road was paved.