Samir Chopra's Blog, page 52

Democracy, The ‘Anti-National,’ And The Seditionist

In my essay in The Los Angeles Review of Books on the Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar López Rivera, currently serving a fifty-five year jail term in Federal prison for seditious conspiracy, I had written:

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 remain a blot on American democracy; John Adams deeply regretted — till the day of his death — being their prime mover. The crimes they charge citizens with — and the notion of a political dissident imprisoned for holding political beliefs supposedly dangerous — are an embarrassment for democracies. The very idea of sedition induces puzzlement in a student of politics: how can a liberal democracy punish the entertainment of beliefs?

Recent events in India–the crackdown on student protests at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in particular–suggest that this lesson has not yet been learned by democracies everywhere. (A pair of articles by Ruchir Joshi “A Rash of Fascisms” and Mukul Kesavan “Republic vs. Nation” makes this point in the Indian context quite eloquently.)

What is it that those who seek to crack down on the slogans, claims, and activities of the alleged seditionist fear? Because a nation is an idea, an abstract entity, and not a piece of land or a group of people, this question becomes a little more puzzling.

The nationalist has, of course, conflated himself with the nation; he perceives the attack on the nation as an attack on himself. The arch-nationalist thus reveals himself as a deeply paranoid, insecure type. Rather than seeing the fulminations of the political radical as an opening salvo in a debate, he perceives it as a material attack upon himself and his life’s projects; he has dedicated himself to the unblinking service of something whose provenance, dimensions, and nature he does not fully understand and now finds himself all at sea, unable to coherently defend, without descending into inarticulate rage, this mysterious notion. He is, as I noted in another context, “all unsatisfied Id, no Ego.”

I went on to note:

The accusation of seditious conspiracy is political: nothing enrages the patriot like the seditionist. He is a fifth columnist, a cancer on the body politic. The seditionist assaults the idea of the nation and offends our sensibilities by proclaiming that our idols have feet of clay. Sedition incites rebellions by encouraging citizens to rise up against their state; the existence of the seditionist is a threat to the public and psychic order underwritten by nationalist sentiment. In the old days, those who spoke against dominant paradigms, who placed the earth at the center of the universe and the like, were tortured, torn apart by mobs, burnt at the stake.

Unsurprisingly, we find religious fervor in the prosecution of this variant of political heresy. Nietzsche described the punishment felt suitable for this kind of citizen as:

A declaration of war and a war measure against an enemy of peace, law, order, authority, who is fought as dangerous to the life of the community, in breach of the contract on which the community is founded, as a rebel, a traitor and breaker of the peace, with all the means war can provide.

As might be expected, this rhetoric has shown up in the discourse surrounding the arrest and physical abuse of the students arrested in India.

Democracy is a young thing, a mere fledgling; it places a fairly onerous responsibility upon those charged with its care. Many, it seems, are simply not up to the task.

Tim Parks On Writerly Conformity

At The New York Review of Books blog, Tim Parks writes of the “general and ever increasing anxious desire to receive positive feedback” on writing:

It is a situation that leads to…an intensification of conformity, people falling over themselves to be approved of….Announce an article…on Facebook and you can count, as the hours go by, how many people have looked at it, clicked on it, liked it, etc….Everything conspires to have us obsessively attached to the world’s response to whatever we do.

Franzen [suggests] that, simply by offering us the chance to check constantly whether people are talking about us, the Internet heightens a fear of losing whatever popularity we may have achieved: “the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness….the fear of being flamed or forgotten.”

Is it really possible, then, to be free as a writer? Free from an immediate need for money, free from the need to be praised, free from the concern of how those close to you will respond to what you write….Perhaps the best one can ever achieve is a measure of freedom, in line with your personal circumstances….So long as it’s compatible with regular writing, the day job is never to be disdained. A steady income allows you to take risks.

Many of my blog posts here–indeed, a significant percentage–evoke not even a single ‘Like’ on Facebook. They ‘generate’ a few views here–mostly from people who have found them through search engines.  They have, as it were, ‘fallen stillborn from the press.’ This does me little economic or professional damage–but it often does a number on my ego. In that dimension, I sometimes find myself infected with that most damaging of thoughts: Perhaps I should write something people will read?  Like the kind of stuff that people ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ on Facebook or pass around on Twitter? On topics that articles like those were concerned with?

Phew. The temptation is great; the abyss lurks close by, only a step or two away. I’m saved–in the economic and professional sense–by the fact that, as Parks recommends, I have a day job. I do not have to sell myself too much. (I do descend into some groveling when I’m trying to get the word out about pieces that I think, for political reasons, deserve wider circulation.) Moreover, as I have to often remind myself, I always intended this blog as a space in which to ‘stay in touch’ with writing, to tentatively approach some ideas and write them down, to ‘try things out.’ (It also functions as a bit of a diary, a journal, which, when you come to think about it, doesn’t really need any readers.) Perhaps the most positive side-effect of my writing here has been that some of the posts here suggest themselves as starting points for further exploration, and yet others have found themselves–suitably modified–integrated into other works of mine.  Indeed, that fact alone could suggest my blog has been a ‘success.’ Even if this post gets no ‘Likes’ and no RTs.

The February 16th Brooklyn College Student Coalition Protests

On Tuesday, February 16th, in my capacity as departmental delegate for the philosophy department, I attended the monthly Faculty Council Meeting at Brooklyn College. During the meeting, members of the Brooklyn College Student Coalition, who were attending the meeting (as non-voting observers), staged a protest action, which consisted of a reading out of their demands for changes in the City University of New York. As their protest continued, the meeting was adjourned. Some faculty members applauded the students’ action; others simply left. There was no rancor or violence or abuse.

Apparently, that was not the impression others had.

The Jewish Telegraph Agency reported it as follows:

Some 10 Brooklyn College students interrupted a faculty meeting and made anti-Israel demands and statements.

A faculty member who was at the Tuesday afternoon meeting told JTA the students demanded “Zionists off campus.” The educator wished to remain anonymous.

Other demands ranged from calls for better pay for adjunct teachers to ending “racist” class offerings.

Some of the faculty members at the meeting applauded during the students’ vocal protests, but it was not clear which demands the teachers were reacting to.

The faculty member also told JTA that when computer science professor and faculty council head Yedidyah Langsam told the students they were “out of order,” they called him a “Zionist pig.

I certainly did hear a call for “Zionism off-campus” but I did not see or hear any abuse. (This article offers a more qualified report on what happened.) As I described the meeting’s events in an email to Andrew Plessin of The Algemeiner, who wrote to me asking for information about the action:

Yes, there was a student action, which was run in the same fashion as all such actions are: that is, they stood up to speak during the meeting (after one speaker, so they didn’t interrupt any one.) When their intervention was called ‘out of order’, they continued to speak, but they did so very respectfully, with no shouting, no gesticulations etc. They called for many changes in the university e.g., removing CUNY investments in the private prison industry etc. I did not hear or see them abuse or threaten anyone. As they went on speaking, the chair called for an adjournment and the meeting was adjourned. I have contacted one of the students who was involved in the action and asked him for more details; he will soon get back to me, and I will be happy to pass on any information I get to you.

I had not heard back from the student when Plessin went on to write an article titled “Brooklyn College President Calls for Investigation Into Antisemitic Disturbance at Faculty Meeting.” The article included a statement issued by the president of Brooklyn College, Karen Gould, which reads:

A small student protest on February 16, 2016 disrupted a campus meeting of the Brooklyn College Faculty Council, which is the body charged with making decisions on academic policy. The Faculty Council Chair leads the meeting and recognizes who can and cannot speak, including guests, according to Robert’s Rules of Order.  The students, who had not been recognized by the chair, and refused to follow his direction, made a number of demands on a wide range of academic and economic topics.  They also directed hateful anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish comments to members of our community.  We find this disruptive behavior unacceptable and the hateful comments especially abhorrent.  Brooklyn College is committed to fostering a campus environment in which challenging issues and viewpoints can be expressed.  However, such conversations must not impede the Faculty’s right and responsibility to conduct the academic business of the College; nor should these conversations create a climate of exclusion and hostility.   We will be vigilant in our efforts to promote a safe and respectful learning environment.

The President of Brooklyn College [Karen Gould] has instructed the Office of Judicial Affairs and the college’s legal counsel to initiate an investigation of student conduct at the Faculty Council meeting, and to take appropriate actions based on their findings.

The student I contacted later wrote back to me with the Student Coalition’s response to Gould’s statement:

In an email sent out to the entire Brooklyn College campus, President Karen Gould admonished a student-led disruption of the February 16, 2016 Faculty Council meeting. Karen’s email incorrectly accuses Brooklyn College students of making anti-Jewish comments directed towards members of the Brooklyn College community. Anti-Jewish sentiments should not be taken lightly. However, no comment of such a nature was made. Members of the Brooklyn College Student Coalition expressed our grievances surrounding many of the atrocities committed against students, our communities, and the world that Brooklyn College and CUNY administration must be held accountable for. These demands ranged across various issues, including the rising tuition, the presence of undercover New York Police Department agents on campus and lack of public administrative response, the lack of Black and Latina/o faculty, the blatant disrespect directed towards the Puerto Rican and Latino Studies department and Africana Studies department, the lack of a just contract for professors and faculty, CUNY’s investment in security companies that are enlisted to brutalize student protesters in South Africa, and Brooklyn College’s commitment to all forms of imperialism and settler-colonialism, including, but not limited to Zionism. This commitment is monetary, in investments in companies complicit in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the prison industrial complex, etc., but also goes deeper: the case of professor Petersen-Overton a few years ago and the hiring of war criminal David Petraeus are two of the many examples of CUNY’s commitment to reinforcing imperialist and settler-colonialist systems.

Karen’s unfortunate conflation of an anti-Zionist demand with anti-Jewish hate speech is not a new one. This tactic is often used to disparage any opposition to Zionism and seriously minimizes the reality and severity of actual anti-Jewish sentiment. The political nature of Karen’s statement must also be addressed in its larger context.

In the spring of 2013, two academics, Omar Barghouti, and Judith Butler, were invited to Brooklyn College to give a lecture on the topic of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. The event stirred up much debate [more here] surrounding questions of free speech and drew heat from political stakeholders and donors. City Council members wrote to the school demanding withdrawal of co-sponsorship of the event, at the threat of decreased funding. Several donors also threatened to pull funding if the event was not cancelled. The lecture went on, to these donors’ and politicians’ disdain. Almost every semester since, politicians have written letters to the school demanding the cancellation of several events critical of the state of Israel, including an event with journalist Ali Abunimah in the spring of 2014 and professor Steven Salaita in the fall of 2014.

Word has gotten out that Karen was pressured to send this e-mail by elected official Dov Hikind. Dov has consistently opposed any critiques of Zionism at Brooklyn College and has run vicious campaigns against departments at Brooklyn College for co-sponsoring events that are critical of Zionism. Karen’s speedy response to Hikind’s pressure starkly contrasts with her (and CUNY Chancellor Milliken’s) lack of response or public condemnation of the NYPD’s illegal and racist surveillance of Muslim students on campus for four years (2011 – 2015) via an undercover cop. The administration seems to be concerned more with the grievances of its donors and government officials than with those of its students and faculty, responding immediately to external pressure but ignoring and sweeping student and faculty demands under the rug.

Aside from the common political rhetoric that has been used to de-legitimize work around Palestinian liberation across the world, Karen’s e-mail also represents a gross exaggeration of the events that occurred at the Faculty Council meeting yesterday. Faculty council is a governing body on campus that serves as a forum for faculty and administration to communicate and set policy for the campus. This forum excludes students from speaking as it does not envision us as being worthy of deciding on campus policy. The student demonstration that occurred at the meeting was about a half an hour long, of which less than a minute was directed at CUNY’s investment in Zionist institutions. We can only assume that the focus on the comment on Zionism in proportion to the many other demands made and repeated by students was intended to detract from the grievances and legitimate concerns of students on campus surrounding the many injustices committed against them. This creates an environment of hostility towards student-led movements on campus and discourages students from expressing their grievances with this very flawed institution.

We, the Brooklyn College Student Coalition, remain committed to fighting for a liberated CUNY for the people. [links added]

The student statement says it all. The reactions of Dov Hikind, a long-standing political embarrassment for Brooklyn, is entirely unsurprising, given his repeated attacks on Brooklyn College in the past. (This disgraceful man, who does not realize what damage he does to Jewish and Israeli interests by his actions and pronouncements, would like nothing more than to shut Brooklyn College down.) More bothersome is the Brooklyn College administrative response, which seeks to lower a legal boom on its own students, an intimidatory move seemingly designed to quell further student activism on campus. And of course, as usual, we see a familiar pattern play out: all kinds of protests are allowed on American university campuses, except for one kind. Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism; such a conflation is intellectually dishonest and specious.

Turgenev’s Hamlet And Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man

This semester, I’m running an independent study on existentialism with a pair of students from the English department here at Brooklyn College. Our reading list includes seven novels, four plays, and extracts from several philosophical texts. We kicked off our readings two weeks ago with Dostoyevsky‘s Notes from Underground. Because my students had purchased the Norton Critical Edition (second edition) of Notes from Underground, I did so as well. This Critical Edition–like others on Norton’s list–includes some background and sources, examples of work that are inspired by, or are imitations of the novel under study, and finally some critical notes. While reading it, I found a fascinating foreshadowing of Dostoyevsky’s themes in Turgenev.

Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches includes the story ‘Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District,’ in which “the narrator spends the evening at a party of a landowner.” His roommate for the night considers himself cursed by his lack of “originality” even as he is considered an “original” by his contemporaries:

“My dear sir,” he exclaimed. “I’m off the opinion that life on earth’s worth living only for originals: only they have the right to live. Mon verre n’est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre [My glass isn’t large but still I drink from it], someone said. You see” he added in a whisper, how good my French pronunciation is. What does it matter to me if your head’s large and capacious, and if a person understands everything, knows a great deal, keeps up with things–but knows nothing of his own particular individual self! There’s one more storeroom for leftover luggage in the world–what good’s that to anybody? No, it’s better to be stupid, at least in one’s own way! Have your smell, your own smell, that’s what! And don’t think my demands are too great…God forbid! There’s no end to such originals: wherever you look–there’s an original; every living person’s an original, but I have yet to be counted in that number!

Underground man, of course, considers himself just such an ‘original,’ a fact he sets out to establish in excruciating and agonizing detail, much to the discomfiture of not just his fictional companions, but also his readers. Turgenev’s character, like him, has made introspective self-knowledge central to his life’s projects, acknowledging in his case that all the worldly knowledge of libraries and the commerce of men will be of little use if this self-knowledge is lacking. (A classic Stoic, Buddhist, and existentialist dictum.) If the ‘facts’ uncovered in this inwardly directed journey of exploration turn out to be unpleasant, well then, so be it. Better the ‘originality’ of the odious than the inauthenticity of the ostensibly socially desirable.

Crucially, Turgenev’s character points out that the fact of this ‘originality’ is already manifest “wherever [we] look”: we cannot help but be ourselves, even as we struggle, under the misapprehended weight of social expectation, to be someone else. This conflict, this discordance, cannot but be destructive.  The price for this discordance, as the underground man’s companions find out, is shared with others.

Antonin Scalia And His Incoherent, Hierarchy-Loving, Theory Of Constitutional Interpretation

I taught Antonin Scalia‘s writings–as found in his court opinions–on three occasions in my philosophy of law class. His theory of constitutional interpretation–originalism–was incoherent. His aggressive rhetoric, directed at those who would dare petition the highest court of the land for redress, was tasteless. He was a bully, and a blowhard. Like Christopher Hitchens, he will be revered by many whose taste runs to the skillful deployment of language for the belittling of others. Among the most frequent targets of scorn were his colleagues on the Supreme Court, who were always unfailingly polite to him, and were rewarded with ample sarcasm and invective. His judgments frequently crushed the weak, denied hope to the condemned (I suspect nothing made Scalia quite as tumescent as denying a stay of execution for someone on death row), and scorned the cries for justice issuing from those who had found themselves on the wrong side of the power equations Scalia found written into the US Constitution.

Because that, in a nutshell, mostly, was Scalia’s theory of constitutional interpretation. Originalism, “the theory of constitutional interpretation that seeks to apply the understanding of those who drafted and ratified the Constitution,” relies on a wholly imaginary “original understanding”–the attempt to determine and ascertain it convinces, all too soon, those who would so try, that the effort is futile. The best analysis of the futility of such a determination may be found in Paul Brest‘s analysis in  The Misconceived Quest for the Original Understanding. Hint: Whose understanding? Do ratification votes capture ‘understanding’ or do they point to clumsy off-stage power negotiations? And so on.

Originalism, as a political theory of legal interpretation, is generally chosen by those who would like to preserve very particular power relations, those present at the time of the drafting of the US constitution. An ‘originalist’ is a fancy term used to describe those who would prefer the world of 1787, and all the limited political and moral understandings that underwrote its legal arrangements. Those original relations, which did not acknowledge or recognize slavery or the political rights of women, eminently suit the continued maintenance and perpetuation of very particular hierarchies of power.

Those are the ones Antonin Scalia wanted to preserve. He was a true-blue conservative, a hierarchy-loving reactionary who shivered when he contemplated the masses rising up –in any shape, form, or fashion. He was no champion of the people; his writings reeked with contempt for them. (I can remember him caring about the voice of the people when pro-life protesters tried to infringe on the constitutional rights of those who wanted to have an abortion.) When all the fancy dressing of the elaborate rhetoric that Scalia deployed was stripped away–in cases that most starkly brought the legally dispossessed into conflict with those well entrenched in power, corporate or state-what always stood revealed was a veneration of power and fury at those who had dared challenge it.

It’s perfectly alright to speak ill of the dead when they were public figures. Scalia sent many to their deaths, he scorned the struggles of those claiming their legal and political rights; I am not upset his tenure on this earth is over.

Madeleine Albright, Simone De Beauvoir, And Hillary Clinton’s Responsibility To Women

There is a truth, however uncomfortable, to be found in Madeleine Albright‘s recent remarks–at a Hillary Clinton campaign rally–that women who don’t support other women (in politics) have a special place in a very hot place reserved just for them.  (Albright, justly notorious for her infamous remark suggesting the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions against their nation following the First Gulf War was ‘worth it‘, obviously attracted some particularly pointed flak.)

But Albright was right about one thing. Women must support other women politically; when they vote, assume political power, draft legislation, organize politically, support candidate campaigns. Women will come to attain power and retain it when women see themselves as a political bloc, and vote accordingly. As Simone de Beauvoir noted in the famous Introduction to her opus The Second Sex:

If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say ‘We’; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others’. But women do not say ‘We’, except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say ‘women’, and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have accomplished the revolution…but the women’s effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received.

The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organising themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews….They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women….The bond that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other.

Beauvoir is supporting a particular form of identity politics, and asking for women to organize themselves into a political unit. She wants that unit to demonstrate a solidarity of work and interest, one that is not forthcoming so long as women remain as separated as they are, by class (social and economic) and race.  Women, all to often, are called upon to display solidarity with their class or their race, and they comply; for true political power to be attained, by women, for women, it will have to be sought from other women, and not just those whom they have persuaded to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. They will have to break the bond that unites them to their oppressors, and to do that they will have to disdain older ties, from older forms of political solidarity and build new ones–with other women.

These considerations are especially important for the Hillary Clinton campaign but not exactly in the way Albright and Clinton might have intended–at that  moment, standing together on stage. For they apply equally to those women seeking power, as they do to those who would support them. If those women are to expect the support and solidarity of other women, they must support those women themselves, through action and deed. That is, we can reframe Beauvoir’s remarks as rendering the burden of extending solidarity, a shared, mutual one: if Hillary Clinton expects and demands women’s vote because she is a woman candidate, then she must have shown she is a woman who takes care of other women, whether white, black, rich or poor. She must have supported them because they were women, and she, as a woman, understands the life experiences and stations which women undergo and occupy; her politics must show such a concern for other women.

As I noted in a recent post, it is not clear to me Hillary Clinton has done this, or will. (That case has been made much stronger by Michelle Alexander‘s essay in The Nation, and will be made even more so when Liza Featherstone‘s anthology of feminist writings on Hillary Clinton is published later this year.) There might be, for all I know, a special place in that very hot place for women who don’t support other women; we can only wonder who will sit in that particular hot seat.

Pigliucci And Shaw On The Allegedly Useful Reduction

Massimo Pigliucci critiques the uncritical reductionism that the conflation of philosophy and science brings in its wake, using as a jumping-off point, Tamsin Shaw’s essay in the New York Review of Books, which addresses psychologists’ claims “that human beings are not rational, but rather rationalizing, and that one of the things we rationalize most about is ethics.” Pigliucci notes that Shaw‘s targets “Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Paul Bloom, Joshua Greene and a number of others….make the same kind of fundamental mistake [a category mistake], regardless of the quality of their empirical research.”

Pigliucci highlights Shaw’s critique of Joshua Greene’s claims that “neuroscientific data can test ethical theories, concluding that there is empirical evidence for utilitarianism.” Shaw had noted that:

Greene interpreted these results in the light of an unverifiable and unfalsifiable story about evolutionary psychology … Greene inferred … that the slower mechanisms we see in the brain are a later development and are superior because morality is properly concerned with impersonal values … [But] the claim here is that personal factors are morally irrelevant, so the neural and psychological processes that track such factors in each person cannot be relied on to support moral propositions or guide moral decisions. Greene’s controversial philosophical claim is simply presupposed; it is in no way motivated by the findings of science. An understanding of the neural correlates of reasoning can tell us nothing about whether the outcome of this reasoning is justified.

At this point Pigliucci intervenes:

Let me interject here with my favorite analogy to explain why exactly Greene’s reasoning doesn’t hold up: mathematics. Imagine we subjected a number of individuals to fMRI scanning of their brain activity while they are in the process of tackling mathematical problems. I am positive that we would conclude the following…

There are certain areas, and not others, of the brain that lit up when a person is engaged with a mathematical problem.

There is probably variation in the human population for the level of activity, and possibly even the size or micro-anatomy, of these areas.

There is some sort of evolutionary psychological story that can be told for why the ability to carry out simple mathematical or abstract reasoning may have been adaptive in the Pleistocene (though it would be much harder to come up with a similar story that justifies the ability of some people to understand advanced math, or to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem).

But none of the above will tell us anything at all about whether the subjects in the experiment got the math right. Only a mathematician — not a neuroscientist, not an evolutionary psychologist — can tell us that.

Correct. Now imagine an ambitious neuroscientist who claims his science has really, really advanced, and indeed, imaging technology has improved so much that Pigliucci’s first premise above should be changed to:

There are certain areas, and not others, of the brain that lit up when a person is working out the correct solution to a particular mathematical problem.

So, contra Pigliucci’s claim above, neuroscience will tell us a great deal about whether the subjects in the experiment got the math right. Our funky imaging science and technology makes that possible now. At this stage, the triumphant reductionist says, “We’ve reduced the doing of mathematics to doing neuroscience; when you think you are doing mathematics, all that is happening is that a bunch of neurons are firing in the following patterns and particular parts of your brain are lighting up. We can now tell a evolutionary psychology story about why the ability to reason correctly may have been adaptive.”

But we may ask: Should the presence of such technology mean we should stop doing mathematics? Have we learned, as a result of such imaging studies, how to do mathematics correctly? We know that when our brains are in particular states, they can be interpreted as doing mathematical problems–‘this activity means you are doing a math problem in this fashion.’ A mathematician looks at proofs; a neuroscientist would look at the corresponding brain scans. We know when one corresponds to another. This is perhaps useful for comparing math-brain-states with poetry-brain-states but it won’t tell us how to write poetry or proofs for theorems. It does not tell us how humans would produce those proofs (or those brain states in their brains.) If a perverse neuroscientist were to suggest that the right way to do maths now would be to aim to put your brain into the states suggested by the imaging machines, we would note we already have a perfectly good of learning how to do good mathematics: learning from masters’ techniques, as found in books, journals, and notebooks.

In short, the reduction of a human activity–math–to its corresponding brain activity achieves precisely nothing when it comes to the doing of the activity. It aids our understanding of that activity in some regards–as in, how does its corresponding brain activity compare to other corresponding brain activities for other actions–and not in others. Some aspects of this reduction will strike us as perfectly pointless, given the antecedent accomplishments of mathematics and mathematicians.

Not all possible reduction is desirable or meaningful.

Martin Shkreli Will Have The Last Laugh

‘We’ hate Martin Shkreli. What’s not to hate? He is rich; he gets rich off the misfortunes of others; he buys pop culture icons, treating them like trophies for decorating his den; he postures on video streams as he talks back to those we think can’t be out-talked; he talks smack on his Twitter feed and slathers smarm all over his grinning mug when he goes to Capitol Hill, pompously invoking the Fifth Amendment. Shkreli looks like those familiar assholes at bars, clubs, sports stadiums the world over. You know them well: an extravagant hybrid of the frat boy, the corporate weasel, the jock. He snorts coke off glass tables; he hires hookers; he rides in limos and drinks champagne. Yes, we know the type.

Shkreli isn’t an individual. He is an instance of a type. And he’s acting true to type. It’s all too easy in our social media bubbles to imagine that Shkreli is universally despised or reviled; but he isn’t. Folks like Shkreli aren’t despised that much. They have the wealth, the power,  and the fancy attorney plus accountant crew that every successful person requires. Far more importantly, they  have approval and support. They don’t just have the approval of those who benefit from their monies and who pick up the few scraps tossed their way if they wait attentively and fawningly around the felt-lined tables that Shkreli and his mates dine at. Shkreli works in a world in which the strategies of business lie beyond moral evaluation, where a system exists in order to be worked over, and compromised with. Shkreli’s Twitter account shows much admiration being sent his way; he is after all, an outsider–the son of Albanian immigrants!–who rose to the top, by making the system work for him. The zone he operates in is a morality-free one; it knows little of the table of values that dictates Shkreli assuage our moral sensibilities.

Shkreli wins every time not because he has the money and can buy his way out of any jam he might find himself in; he wins because he faces very little social disapproval of his actions; because he undergoes no systemic pressure to change his actions; because those who would castigate him–like Congress–do little to reign in the culture he represents. Shkreli’s smirk is not just one of bemused condescension,  it is also one of puzzlement; he was told greed is good; that unlimited acquisition was the only foundational principle required to begin acting; that praise would flow his way when he acted so. He has done so, and he is puzzled that a tiny bunch of party poopers want to rain on his parade now.

Shkreli keeps on smirking because he knows no matter how much flak he catches on a few Facebook pages, Twitter timelines, and clickbait websites, he’ll have a lot of friends and admirers left over. And isn’t that all that matters, that more like us than don’t? That he who dies with the most toys, wins?

A Fond Remembrance Of A Canine Friend

My brother’s family lost their pet dog yesterday. ‘G’ was a dachshund, brought home a little over twelve years ago. I have never owned a pet and probably never will; I simply do not have the emotional wherewithal for the caretaking required. I have thus never developed a particularly close relationship with domestic animals; my interactions with most pets is always a fairly tentative, bounded one. Not so with ‘G’. This was because on those occasions when I was visiting my brother and his family, I spent extended time in his company. In the course of that period, I was able to experience at least one moment that gave me some insight into the kinds of relationships pets are able to develop with the families who take care of them.

During the winter of 2006/7, while on vacation, I came down with a mysterious stomach bug–a fever, the chills, the shakes, a spectacularly upset stomach, the works. The bug advanced during an evening as a fever took hold of my body, and then it struck hard at night. On waking up in the morning, I informed everyone–my brother and his family, and my wife–I would not be joining them for the New Year’s Eve partying later that night. Then, I staggered back to bed and collapsed. I sought warmth and comfort in my blanket and my supine pose. A short while later, ‘G’ pushed open the door to my room–with his nose, I think–walked over to my bed, found himself a spot next to my feet, burrowed in, partially covering himself with my blanket, and settled down.

And there he stayed. For the entire day, well into the evening, in that darkened room. I drifted in and out of sleep, my body exhausted after the frequent interruptions–the trips to the toilet bowl–during the previous night. My head spun, my stomach churned, shivers ran up and down the length of my frame. And down by my feet, ‘G”s presence provided unexpected comfort and reassurance. His body was warm, solid, furry; I could feel him pressing against my legs through the blanket. It was a desperately needed anchoring in a bodily and mental state that felt desperately adrift.

I did not lack for human company that day. My family stopped in at intervals to bring me water and the little food I could keep down. As evening approached and as the night came on, I slowly regained some strength, enough to try to consume a bowl of watery soup. On seeing me sit up in bed, ‘G’, sensing the worst was over, roused himself, shook himself once or twice, and then left the room. He had done his bit.

From that time on, whenever I hear a pet owner speak about their pets in a language rich with intentionality and affect, I know exactly what they are talking about. I too, sensed an animal draw near and take care.

Thanks ‘G’, rest in peace; we all loved you.

Hillary Clinton And The Supposed Political Windfall For Feminism

The ‘feminist legacy’ of Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi is an ambiguous one. These women, in varying fashion, rose to great political power, and exerted it with varying degrees of aplomb. (They both earned nicknames that assimilated their visible displays of ‘steel’ into a stereotypical vision of male toughness.) Gandhi came to power in a nation whose imagined and real social role for women was sharply limited; it is unclear to what Gandhi’s being in power had to do with the greatly increased visibility of women in Indian public life (the latter presence might well be linked with the changes in the political economy that have been introduced in India since the 1990s.) Thatcher’s ascendancy was seen as a victory for women in British politics while her policy support for women’s causes was widely debated. Again, in her case, it is not clear whether her tenure broke glass ceilings and rolled back the tide of sexism in British public life.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that it is unclear to me that the election of Hillary Clinton as president will represent a windfall for feminism and women’s rights. The US of 2016 is not the England of  1979 or the India of 1966, but patriarchy–engaged in mutually supportive roles with corporate structures–still rules the roost here. The American corporate stronghold over politics, whose most visible symbol is the rampant economic inequality that so permeates the lives of American citizens, is better than most in co-opting potential foes as allies.  In its embrace, traditional identity politics matter for little (even as Barack Obama found that his being black was as potent a political force to be ranged against him as any other.)

Materialist feminists know that dismantling patriarchy will not be done without dismantling the economic system it works with; elect an economically privileged person to power and they will simply perpetuate class privilege. Their identity lies with their class, with their economic group, with the allegiances that ensure their economic and political power. Nothing in Hillary Clinton’s record–stretching back to her days in Arkansas–indicates that on taking power she will enact policies that will act to dismantle the very system that is her, and her family’s, best friend. To be sure, the symbolic value of her victory will be immense; it would send a powerful signal to many women, old and young, that their voices have been heard, that they have political representation of a kind, and that oft-repeated-claim that more young women will find it possible to dream about political power will sound ever more plausible.

But those same women, I fear, will find their paths to the ‘top’ blocked if the routes remain the same. And they will resolutely remain the same unless power–in this political and economic system–is exercised differently, for different ends, by those who attain it, by those who show their priorities lie with matters more weighty than the mere retention of that power. Hillary Clinton does little to indicate she will make the kinds of possibilities dreamed about by women more tangible, more substantial. Worse, her election could weaken those arguments which claim that women are economically and politically under-represented. Remember, the refrain will go, if she can make it, so can you.