Samir Chopra's Blog, page 106

‘Prohibited’ and ‘Acceptable’ Weapons and Targets in War

In my last two posts on Syria on these pages–here and here–I’ve tried to express my discomfort at the threat made by the US to launch cruise missile strikes in response to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. In them, I was trying to make a distinction which I did not clearly articulate, one whose provenance goes back to the debates over nuclear deterrence at the time of the Cold War, or to be more precise, the 1950s, when the threat of mutually assured destruction was first made manifest:

[T]he crucial distinction in the theory and practice of war [is] not between prohibited and acceptable weapons but between prohibited and acceptable targets. [From: Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illuminations, 3rd ed., Basic Books, New York, 2000, pp. 276]

Indeed, insofar as a ‘prohibited’ weapon is to be viewed as such, it is because its effects are likely to be–or have been–disproportionately borne by ‘prohibited’ targets i.e., non-combatants, civilians, innocents, bystanders, call them what you will.  The use of a tactical nuclear weapon, say in the Second World War, on a battlefield, perhaps against massed infantry or armored formations, or out at sea, against a massive fleet of warships, would have provoked considerably less angst than its actual use against the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. (Despite Paul Fussell‘s–sometimes ad-hominem–dismissal of critics of the decision to use the bomb, there are good arguments to suggest it was a criminal act c.f the Walzer reference provided above, and especially the discussion on pages 263-268.)

This distinction, once established, now lets me make more explicit the incoherence in our attitudes toward war and weapons that I had suggested in my earlier posts on this topic. Drawing a so-called ‘red line’ around the use of chemical weapons seems arbitrary and hypocritical when those that have charged themselves with the enforcement of a supposed norm against such use are:

a) confused about the right norm to be observed;

b) guilty of violating the appropriate norm themselves.

A ‘limited’ US cruise missile attack on Syria–one committed to no other objectives other than the preservation of the ‘red line’–then, would have been problematic on both these counts. It would have flirted with the implicit claim that the slaughter of civilians is acceptable, or tolerated, so long as it is carried out by conventional weapons;  it would have established that the US, which is guilty of violating the norm against killing noncombatants in its drone strikes in Yemen and Afghanistan, was taking upon itself the responsibility to enforce its confused reading of it elsewhere.

In response to the cries of ‘What do you want us to do while civilians–prohibited targets–are being gassed?’, I’d suggest that in this case–this Syria, with its warring parties, at this point in time–all options short of armed retaliation be explored first, especially when such an action is likely to cause further loss of life, destabilize the region and perhaps invite retaliation by Assad, using conventional weapons this time, against the same non-combatants. (My post at The Washington Spectator alluded to some of these possibilities.)

Note: I realize that recent diplomatic maneuvers involving Russia have made a US attack less likely, but the threat has not completely receded, which suggests this discussion is still relevant.

The 9/11 Attacks: A Terrifying Spectacle, Viewed from Afar

On September 11th, 2001, I was in Sydney, Australia, working as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales. I spent most of the day in my office, composing a long email to my girlfriend back in New York City, my former home for seven years, suggesting we break up. Our long-distance relationship was not working out; too much misery had been parceled out to the both of us; we hadn’t covered ourselves in glory; time to move on; and so on. I read and re-read and edited my email a few times, and then, as the close of the workday approached, saved a draft, and headed for home. I would read it once more at night before sending it off, hopefully bringing to a close an unnecessarily protracted series of disputations.

Once back in my neighborhood, I picked up some excellent takeaway Thai food from my local takeout joint–on Cleveland Street, Sydney’s home to amazing ethnic food–and a bottle of red wine. Time to eat. The pad thai was excellent, as was the rustic Shiraz, and soon, I was sated and drowsy.  I didn’t feel like editing and reading a long, dramatic email any more. I’d send it on the morrow once I was back at work. I watched a bit of television, and then headed to sleep.

A short while later, the phone rang. I picked it up, groggy and confused. An Australian friend from Melbourne was on the line.  He asked, ‘Are you watching the news?’ A little testily, I said no. He then continued, speaking quickly, in one breath, ‘I think you should; some hijackers have taken over a bunch of planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.’ This all sounded a bit bizarre, so I put the phone down, walked over to my living room and switched on the television. A close-up shot of one of the towers was being shown, with smoke billowing out of its windows. The scale of the building and the close-up confused me; it looked like a minor conflagration, perhaps caused by a small plane flying into the tower. But what was that about hijackers and the Pentagon? Still confused, I walked back to my bedroom, thanked my Melbourne friend for calling, hung up, and returned to the living room to continue watching.

Over the next few minutes, I slowly became more cognizant of the scale of the disaster unfolding before my eyes; I think I might have viewed some video of the jets’ impact. I’m not sure. And then, suddenly, it happened; the South Tower collapsed. I stared at the screen, incredulous. Perhaps this was a Hollywood movie being shot in New York City, and this building collapse had been rigged up for that? Somehow, strangely, I had managed to have my very own ‘it sounded/looked just like the movies’ moment. I continued watching, now transfixed by the spectacle. Half an hour later, the North Tower collapsed. I continued staring at my tiny television screen, barely paying attention to the newscasters.

I stayed awake for a while, sending some emails to my friends in New York City, inquiring after their well-being; I sent one to my girlfriend, hoping she was ok, and asking her to call me as soon as possible. Finally, the late hour and the wine caught up with me.  Besides, I was getting tired of the endless speculation about motives and the identity of the hijackers. I went to bed.  I wished I was back ‘home’; curiously, I felt excluded, looking on from the outside.  Miraculously, I fell asleep, and as I did so, I dimly sensed the next day would be quite unlike the ones that had preceded it.

That is my 9/11 story. That’s where I was; that’s what I did.

I never sent that break-up email; it wasn’t quite the sort of thing you do after a disaster like that. But we broke up anyway. I would return to New York City soon. First in December 2001, for an interview with Brooklyn College, and then, in August 2002, to begin my new job and life in a changed city.

On First and Second Languages – III

In the first post of this series, I described my relationship with English and Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani; in the second, that with German. The story in today’s post–that of Spanish in my life–is similar to the German tale: partial fluency, a long-standing, constantly procastinated commitment to formal study. The distinctive contrast lies in the nature of the fluency: in German, I possess some grammatical foundation coupled with a poor vocabulary; in Spanish, my vocabulary outstrips my grammatical foundation.

But back to the beginning. After I moved to the US in 1987, I lived in Elizabeth, New Jersey and attended graduate school in Newark. Elizabeth had a sizable Colombian and Cuban population (they were prominent members of its local Hispanic demographic). Newark’s Hispanic population was also considerable. There were, therefore, ample opportunities to pick up some Spanish. So I did; I read a lot of store signs, browsed Spanish-language newspapers, and acquired a small smattering of sentences and words to use in interactions with Spanish speakers (something as trivial as ‘tiene cambio para un dollar?’ was very useful when catching the bus in the mornings).  But I never learned how to conjugate verbs.

My opportunities to learn Spanish only increased after I moved to New York City in 1993, but I continued to make one crucial mistake: I did not take a class in Spanish to bolster the vocabulary, context, immersion and daily practice that was available to me. I prided myself on reading subway advertisements; I received praise for my pronunciation from native Spanish speakers (some consonant sounds in Spanish are similar to those in Hindi/Urdu, as are the rolled ‘r’ and the soft ‘d’); I sometimes helped tourists and immigrants who could not speak English with a Spanish sentence or two after they had sought help from me (assuming that I was Hispanic because of my appearance).   But verb conjugation remained a mystery.

I traveled to Spanish-speaking countries: Spain, Ecuador, Peru (twice), Puerto Rico. My wife, whose Spanish is more advanced than mine–yes, because of those damned verb conjugations–and who had used it during her work as a community organizer in East Harlem (Spanish Harlem, El Barrio) was our primary interface with the ‘natives.’ My Spanish improved during these trips; I picked up more words, more sentences, and used it more extensively in a variety of interactions.  I even attempted to learn a bit of Spanish formally; I browsed some guidebooks; attempted some drills; and even took a short afternoon class in Quito, Ecuador. But it wasn’t enough, and wait for it, my conjugation of verbs was still non-existent.

The problem with not being able to conjugate verbs is that you cannot form sentences; you can have a great vocabulary at your disposal, but you cannot employ it if you cannot conjugate verbs. It’s really as simple as that.

As in the case of German, I have made many plans to learn Spanish formally, but something or the other has pushed it off. Thanks to a friend’s recommendation, I have taken a closer look at duolingo.com and finished one level of practice; perhaps this time, I’ll stick to my guns and get the damn conjugations right.

Desearme suerte!

More on ‘Male Anxiety’ in Academic Philosophy

Daniel Mullin comments on my post from yesterday about ‘male anxiety’ in the workplace–in particular, in academic philosophy departments–and describes his strategy for dealing with an atmosphere in which there is heightened sensitivity about sexual harassment:

Since that time, I’ve considered ANY interaction with a female student as a potential minefield to be avoided if possible. I certainly kept my office door open during consultation and only met with female students during office hours. I was a little more casual with male students, sometimes meeting them at a campus coffee shop if, for example, they had class during my office hours. Ironically, then, I suspect that ‘male anxiety’ does not foster more equality, but is more likely to result in preferential treatment of male students by male professors. I still consider my policy a prudent one, but it’s unfortunate that female students had less access to my time than did male students. Sadly, however, the practical effect of male anxiety might be that female students don’t get the best out of male professors which may contribute to an already existing problem: the dearth of women in the discipline.

It is not immediately clear to me that the precautionary measures that Mullin (and his adviser) describe should lead to a situation in which male professors accord ‘preferential treatment’ to male students. Meeting students during office hours, or by appointment on school premises, or conducting all discussions–the ones that do not require a private hearing–in an office with open doors, don’t seem to entail zero contact with female students, and neither do they suggest that all avenues for discussion with them have been blocked. And of course, they do not preclude careful and detailed comments on papers and respectful conversations in academic fora and the classroom.

More problematic is Mullin’s assertion that he considers ‘ANY interaction with a female student as a potential minefield to be avoided if possible.’ This is roughly equivalent to saying ‘I consider ANY female student to be potentially an irrational actor who will make false, career-destroying accusations against me.’ This seems like a very prejudicial attitude to maintain toward women students; it makes it seem as if false accusations by them and destroyed careers are the norm in academia. Are they? Are female students–especially those in philosophy–especially prejudiced against their male professors? So much so that they have conducted a vindictive smear campaign against them?

Again, it must reiterated, it is a false dichotomy to suggest that unless and until male professors can interact with their female students in a host of intimate, possibly problematic, situations that there cannot be fruitful academic interaction between the two. To suggest this is to paint a curiously impoverished picture of the numerous modes, possibilities and venues for meetings and discussions between professors and students. If Mullin could not meet on a campus coffee shop with his female students, could he have met them in the department lounge or common room? Or on the quad? Or is the fear that a student will insist on a private meeting and then turn around and make a false accusation of sexual harassment? The picture of the female student that emerges from these anxious responses is not a flattering one.

It is significant that Mullin mentions his adviser giving him the–very sound!–advice to ‘be conscious of what [he] said to female students. ‘ Indeed, all professors should be careful of what they say to their students: we occupy positions of power; we often set examples by our behavior and speech. Professors, like other folks, can also make racist and sexist speech; why shouldn’t we be cognizant of the effects of our words and actions?

As I indirectly noted in my past yesterday, what started as a problem about sexual harassment of women in the workplace can turn very quickly turn instead into one about ‘fearful’ men in the workplace, whose needs now must be attended to. The most substantive effect of this is, if Mullin is to be believed, is that women have suffered even more. They needn’t have, but they might, according to this account. Perhaps the women should have not complained so that business as usual could have proceeded?

Finally, Mullin suggests that ‘the academy is already doing more than enough to make men hyper-conscious of the dire consequences of even seemingly innocent interactions with female students.’ The crucial point is whether this ‘hyper-consciousness’ is leading to better behavior or just the anxious reactions that I have described and discussed. If it’s the latter, then we haven’t made any progress.

Male Anxiety in the Workplace: The Case of Academic Philosophy

In 1990, I began work at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories. My technical employment status was ‘Resident Visitor’; I was a ‘consultant’ sent to work at the Laboratories on a contingent basis. Because of this status, I was not required to attend the training sessions that were often set up for permanent employees. Off they went, while I, and the rest of the consulting crew stayed in our offices, attending to whatever it was we did. When my colleagues and friends returned, they complained bitterly and caustically about these trainings, these onerous impositions on their time and energy: they had been made to attend day-long seminars on ‘diversity,’ ‘affirmative action,’ ‘women in the workplace,’ ‘sexual harassment’ and the like.

Their contempt for these efforts was unvarnished: ‘a fucking waste of time,’ ‘useless,’ ‘just a bunch of moaning and whining,’ ‘the usual politically correct bullshit.’ They wondered, to a man–and I use that term advisedly–what would it all mean? What did ‘management’ want? How should they comport themselves? They were bewildered and anxious and angry: ‘It’s like you can’t crack a joke anymore without someone getting offended’; ‘Try being friendly with someone, and you’ll get cracked down on’. One older gentleman, with whom I had developed a bit of a friendship, complained to me that he when he called younger women ‘honey’ or ‘sweetheart’ , he meant it as a term of affection, not meant to be remotely insulting, patronizing or offensive; it was just how he interacted with that demographic. (I failed to point out to him that he used these terms more often for women of color.)

Listening to them, one would have been hard pressed to not imagine that a gigantic inquisitorial McCarthyite whip had been cracked, shedding skin and sending them scurrying for cover. Those whose protection was seemingly demanded by these trainings now became the focus for more suspicion and contempt: Will this woman complain about my language, linguistic or body? Will this black man accuse me of being patronizing? Oh, the inhumanity! The realm of social interaction, previously unsullied by exhortations to be more sensitive to assorted sensibilities, to problematic presuppositions, to the potential for prejudice-enforcing behavior, had been transformed into one of suspicion and worry; relationships, which would have flowered and bloomed without this malign intervention and chaperoning, were now doomed to wither. Why not just let things be as they are–when they seemed to have worked so well for everyone? Couldn’t the whiners and complainers just learn to live and let live?

I am reminded of that group of anxious men as I read Louise Antony‘s article at the Stone yesterday, noting the male anxiety triggered in academic philosophy by La Affaire Colin McGinn, in which a senior philosopher resigned his tenured post after being accused of inappropriate behavior by his female graduate student. As Antony notes, the MIT linguist  Steven Pinker wrote ’that “such an action would put a chill on communication between faculty and graduate students and on the openness and informality on which scholarship depends.”’ And then, of course, there are the familiar worries from elsewhere:

Pinker’s reflexive and overheated reaction to the events in Florida is simply one precipitate of the fog of male anxiety that floats through the halls of academia. I’m always hearing from stressed-out men, worrying aloud what “all this fuss” about sexual harassment means for them. I’ve heard it at training sessions on university sexual harassment policy: “Does this mean I can’t even tell a woman that she looks nice?” I’ve heard it in coffee lounges: “Make sure you keep your door open when you’re talking to a woman student — you never know what she might say later.” And I’ve had it confided to me, with a sigh of regret, at conference happy hours: “I’m afraid now to form any relationships with female students — they might take it the wrong way.”

Unsurprisingly enough, in academia, just like it was at Bell Labs more than twenty years ago, the actual disciplinary record is the same: very few men have actually been complained about, and an even smaller number have had any action taken against them. Very few careers had been ruined; what had been, or could be, ruined was the atmosphere that had existed before, where all the squirming was done by women, or some other vulnerable minority, and where all the smirking and grinning was done by men. Yes, there was plenty of banter, some of it just the kind that adults engage in to take the edge of what might otherwise be a stilted social engagement. But in these very same engagements, the balance of power was always visible to all; if there were lines to be crossed it would only happen in one direction. How much give and take, the supposed fabric of banter, could really be spun out in these domains of unequal power?

Antony is right to note that the real effect of the heightened visibility of discourse about sexual harassment–or about other variants of discomfort and offense inducing behavior–is not as much legislative or punitive, as it is to induce an uncomfortable spotlight on the perpetrators and to place an expectation on them of real, substantive change in their behavior. That is onerous; it requires some serious introspection, some work on building new habits of speech and action, some effort directed toward sympathetic or empathetic listening; it requires working on the new, as yet not clearly understood or defined, parameters of new relationships; it requires the construction of a new space of discourse, with new guidelines and conversational implicatures. If male academic philosophers insist that ‘openness and informality’ be understood and construed only as specified by them, and that intellectually rewarding academic relationships cannot be formed in any other way, then they are guilty of several false dichotomies.

As Antony notes:

The real worry, I think, for men is that they will have to change their ways. They will have to monitor what they say to female students and colleagues. They will have to think twice before chatting up that attractive graduate student they see at a conference. They’ll have to stop relying on smutty double entendres to get laughs in their seminars.

So, yes, it is a burden. Having to change our ways always is.  So, since those folks who complain about diversity training and sexual harassment sensitivity sessions always set great store by plain speaking, it would not be untoward to direct at them, a simple and plain injunction: Deal with it. Change.

A Norm-Preserving Bombing

War waged to prevent the gratuitous, deliberately caused, cruel, inhuman loss of innocent life; a moral intervention, a just war. War waged to preserve an international norm, a collective sensibility of outrage and revulsion at the use of a weapon of mass destruction: a similarly moral intervention, a similarly just war?

These questions, obviously, are up for the asking because of the arguments put on display in the current wrangling over Syria. It has become clear that there are few to no military reasons for intervening in its civil war: a US bombing will not bring Assad down; it will not help the rebels win; it will not tilt the military advantage in any of the warring parties’ favor; it will not end the killing of innocent citizens; it could still cause the conflict to escalate, provoking Saudi Arabia and Iran to intervene on behalf of their respective proxies; it could, in sum, cause greater human misery than it prevents.

But it will, according to those who argue for it, help preserve a worldwide moral and normative guideline, that the use of certain kinds of weapons, even as part of that moral atrocity, that zone of ethical catastrophe we term ‘war’, is to be placed beyond the pale. Tyrants of the present and future, take heed; this world can be pushed around and many of your deeds will go unpunished. But there are some lines you will not, we will not let you, cross. This is not a world in which anything goes. Unthinking and untrammeled anarchy in the pursuit of your heinous objectives will eventually run into the solid, immovable opposition of some bedrock moral certainties, over which the world can come to some agreement, despite our disagreement about everything else. When the smoke and confusion caused by the endless suggestions of relativism has cleared, we, as a global community, will find ourselves confronted by a zone of ethical and legal agreement.

That is what that upcoming shower of cruise missiles is supposed to achieve.

There are many oddities here, all worthy of wonderful inspection. Why are chemical weapons so cruel, so worthy of condemnation, that a (literally) explosive reaction is called for, one which will in all probability cause some loss of life itself? What is the foundation of a norm that may exact, for its preservation, such a notable price? In my previous post on this subject, I had tentatively made the same inquiry and wondered in much the same fashion: why is a chemical weapon crueller, more heinous than a conventional weapon?

Interestingly enough, a chemical weapon, such as nerve gas, because of problems with delivery systems, might not be as deadly or efficient as might be thought. There is a tactical, not strategic, reason that they have not been used as often; they don’t work as well as their deployers might hope. When they have been used in war, they have not secured any decisive or overwhelming advantage for their principals; much of the smoke fired into ‘enemy’ trenches during the First World War drifted back towards ‘friendly’ lines. They do cause horrible deaths to those afflicted by them, but it is not clear these are any worse than those caused by conventional weapons. (The New York Times article I link to below shows a dead woman and baby after the 1988 Halabja gassings; I assure you, a baby hit by a grenade looks equally gruesome, its death was just as painful.)

But chemical weapons are somehow more insidious: they sneak up on you, they asphyxiate, they bury you alive standing. They are wily, creepy, clammy; the first international agreement against their use–in 1675, ‘when France and the Holy Roman Empire agreed in Strasbourg not to use poisoned bullets’–found, in an era of the bow, axe, sword and cleaver, poison too reprehensible for its sensibilities.  Our global niceties in this regard have not always been observed; as Steven Erlanger notes in the New York Times, their use in the Iran-Iraq war, a case of Muslim-on-Muslim violence, caused no outrage, no condemnation. But, as I said in my last post, we are a ‘fastidious species’; we like to keep our hands clean, we like to remind ourselves of our ‘humanity’ even as we persistently traffic with the inhuman.

So, is this norm worth preserving, even at the cost that might be likely: the escalating conflict, and all of the rest? There has been rare near unanimous consent  to sign and observe treaties that affirm it; this sense of broad agreement over the non-use of a weapon might be felt to be reason enough by some. The very rare of  use chemical weapons in war, remains, for me, a less impressive datum; it is not too implausible to suggest that if chemical weapons were more useful battlefield weapons their use would have been far more common and our norms about them would be rather more flexible. Perhaps an argument could be made that the first reason is sufficient. Perhaps. I don’t see it as yet, largely because of my failure to understand what grounds the norm against chemical weapons in a world populated by a moral community that does not seem similarly concerned with other equally terrible weapons and acts.

Furthermore, actions like the ones proposed by the US do not take place in a vacuum all of their own. The identity of our putative moral instructor–in this case, the US, and some coalition cobbled together to convey the impression of international solidarity–provides some context. The historical background, the location, the identities of the warring parties–the Iraq war, the Middle East, Sunni and Shia forces, each with their own backers respectively–provide more. These dispel some the supposed clarity about the intended norm-preserving objectives of the strike; it cannot but have more effects, more ramifications than that original narrow one.

I do not have a clear conclusion to draw here; but I do know that try as I might, I cannot shake the dissonance caused by the employment of deadly force–by a party that might justly be accused of bad faith and a poor recent record of ill-directed violence–to preserve a moral convention that does not seem to rest on particularly principled foundations.

The NSA’s Bullrun Around Encryption

A few weeks ago, over at The Washington Spectator, I wrote a post on the NSA, which mentioned its historical–and historic–struggles with the pioneers of encryption:

[W]hen the NSA got wind of academic research on cryptography, its agents approached those working on such research and “suggested” that all such research be vetted by the NSA. Roughly, the NSA’s instructions to encryption researchers were: keep us apprised of what you are doing and run it by us for clearance before you release it to other academics.

It might have been the first time that a powerful covert government agency had suggested that academic research be controlled and monitored in this fashion: the NSA wanted nothing less than a monopoly on cryptography research. Given the NSA’s resistance to encryption reaching the masses, it’s a miracle we have it facilitating e-commerce today.

…[T]he NSA [and] the FBI…became more aggressive in attempting to prosecute those who made encryption software public.

For instance, the 1991 release of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), a data encryption tool by developer Phil Zimmerman, was regarded as the “export” of a deadly weapon. It triggered a criminal investigation and ultimately failed prosecution of Zimmermann.

…We should not imagine that because the battle to bring encryption and privacy to the masses was won in the past that all future battles will be.

And today, I awoke to read this:

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

….Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products.

This is perhaps the most stunning revelation to have come from Edward Snowden yet. Privacy advocates have always suggested the use of encryption as a privacy-enhancing tool; these revelations show the NSA is winning the battle against it as well.

The NSA has now marked itself out as a truly distinctive agency: one that will stop at no measure–legal or not–to achieve its goals of complete surveillance. The almost perfectly asymmetrical relationship with secrecy that it has demanded and often, successfully created, has been one of its most astonishing achievements. This latest effort shows just how far it is willing to go.

Thus far, I’ve only read two news reports on , the NSA’s anti-encryption program; I hope to write more on it once I’ve had a chance to read more about its details.

Susan Sontag on Truth’s ‘Value’

Susan Sontag, in reviewing Simone Weil’s Selected Essays, offers some remarks on the nature and function of truth, and its placement in our schema of intellectual and emotional endeavor. In doing so, she strikes a slightly Nietzschean note:

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

So, the ‘sane’ is the true, but it is not always the most desirable. Truth–as the remark for the ‘need for repose’ indicates–may only represent a kind of quiescence, an accepting of the world as is, an illusory freezing of its vitality. Other kinds of ‘ideas’, which may shatter this calm, disturb this peace, distort the placidity and stillness, may do more, may ‘serve’ us better; they may provoke us and move us to further inquiry, to further activity, to a continuation of our physical and spiritual quests. Later, we learn ‘the truth is balance’, an imagery that confirms the impressions we have been led to form of it: an equilibrium of sorts, a compromise, an arbitration of compelling impulses. Truth is moderation; not always desirable.

And then,:

In the respect we pay to such lives [as Simone Weil's], we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.

Here the ‘possession of truth’ entails a denial of ‘mystery’; given truth’s metaphysical standing these may be the most primeval puzzles of all. And taking on board of the truth is ultimately ‘superficial’, the denial of the mystery, the acceptance of the surface baldness of the true statement, the refusal to look further, the happy satisfaction with the bare presentation of the world.

So, truth, in these depictions, becomes a life-denying force. It speaks of the cessation of motion, of resting; the peace it offers is that of the endless repose in the grave. Truth becomes a paralytic dogma; it is literally, the end of inquiry. It thus generates an irony about itself: its pursuit might life-giving but its gaining might not be.

These remarks’ Nietzschean flavor should be clear, for in them Sontag is doing no more and no less than struggling to find a more appropriate–and perhaps less exalted–placement for truth in our ‘table of values.’

(Coded) Messages in Bottles

As part of his continuing series on free speech in Asia, Timothy Garton Ash turns his attention to Burma–the land of military juntas and Aung San Suu Kyi–and points us to some deft work to get around its censors’ pen:

Thirteen years ago, editors of tiny magazines in dim, cramped offices showed me examples of the crudest precensorship by the authorities: individual phrases or whole pages had to be blanked out, or hastily replaced with advertisements. This was the age of the hidden message, of the Aesopian, with even an article on the proliferation of mosquitoes in Rangoon banned by the censors as suspected allegory. Sometimes, editors got away with little triumphs, like the November 2010 First Eleven magazine headline, in this soccer-mad country: “SUNDERLAND FREEZE CHELSEA UNITED STUNNED BY VILLA & ARSENAL ADVANCE TO GRAB THEIR HOPE.” First Eleven submitted this to the censors in black and white, but published it in multiple colors. The letters in bright red spelled out “SU…FREE…UNITE…&…ADVANCE TO GRAB THE HOPE….” Su—that is Aung San Suu Kyi—had just been released from house arrest. The captain was back.

This little bit of crypto-messaging reminded me of yet another cloaked message, in another context and country and age, pointed out by Christopher Hitchens:

In the year 1798, seeking to choke the influence of French and other revolutionary opinions in their own “backyard”, the British authorities jailed the radical Irish nationalist Arthur O’Connell. As he was being led away, O’Connell handed out a poem of his own composition that seemed to its readers like a meek act of contrition, and a repudiation of that fount of heresy, Thomas Paine:

I

The pomp of courts and pride of kings

I prize above all earthly things;

I love my country; the king

Above all men his praise I sing:

The royal banners are displayed,

And may success the standard aid.

II

I fain would banish far from hence,

The Rights of Man and Common Sense;

Confusion to his odious reign,

That foe to princes, Thomas Paine!

Defeat and ruin seize the cause

Of France, its liberties and laws!

If the reader has the patience to take the first line of the first stanza, then the first line of the second stanza, and then repeat the alternating process with the second, third and fourth lines of each, and so on, he or she will have no difficulty in writing out quite a different poem. (How much the British have suffered from their fatuous belief that the Irish are stupid!)

Such a construction yields, of course:

The pomp of courts and pride of kings

I fain would banish far from hence,

I prize above all earthly things;

The Rights of Man and Common Sense;

I love my country; the king

Confusion to his odious reign,

Above all men his praise I sing:

That foe to princes, Thomas Paine!

The royal banners are displayed,

Defeat and ruin seize the cause

And may success the standard aid.

Of France, its liberties and laws!

On First and Second Languages – II

In my first post in this series, I wrote of my relationship with English and Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani – my first and second languages. I claimed partial fluency in three other languages: German, Spanish and Punjabi.  I aspire to mastery of all three and have varying levels of optimism about the plausibility of my success in this endeavor.

Of those three languages listed above, I’ve only been educated formally in German: a semester’s worth of instruction through the Indian version of the Goethe Institute – the Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi. I was then in my final year of undergraduate studies and had dimly entertained thoughts of studying in a German university for a post-graduate program. A quick look at the admission requirements made it clear three semesters of German language proficiency was required. The grundstufe eins was the first installment of the program; I enrolled for a class that met three times a week for two hours at a time.

My education in German was excellent; the teachers for the course–both postgraduate Indian students of German literature–were dedicated, enthusiastic, hard-working, thorough and personable; my fellow students were mostly highly motivated; we faithfully followed our teachers’ demands that we use German exclusively as the language of conversation with each other. I enjoyed my classes, scored well in the tests and was encouraged to continue with the program.

But I didn’t.  I had applied to the US for graduate school as well; an alternative destination now presented itself; a student visa had been procured; and I was off. My progress in German came to a halt.

Over the years, I would practice my German on the odd tourist, a German friend or two, or at the movies, all the while checking subtitles to gauge my facility in the spoken version of German. I planned endlessly to register for a formal course and resume my language studies, but never did.  I remembered most of my verb conjugations and my articles; the drills had been extensive and I retained their details easily.

When I began graduate work in philosophy, I intended to take the German language proficiency exam–a simple translation task of a passage in Nietzsche or Schopenhauer into English–but that  requirement was waived for my cohort. A friend of mine read Wittgenstein in a facing-page translation; I envied his talent but still made no effort study German formally. A German friend taught Nietzsche in the original German (at Regensburg) and talked glowingly of the thrill of reading his literary, flowing prose. My envy knew no bounds.

On trips to Germany and Switzerland, I practiced my German, sometimes receiving compliments for it. Each appreciative remark inspired further resolve to seek out the nearest Goethe Institute but I never, ever acted on it. My endless procastination, thus, has been a source of some bafflement to me;  I have always managed to find some excuse or the other to not bite the bullet and take on the grundstufe zwei. Mostly, I don’t seem to have the time; a rather lame evasion at best.

Hopefully, sometime next year, I’ll end this twenty-seven year long procastination and finally sign up at the nearest Goethe Institute/