Samir Chopra's Blog, page 82

Lucid Dreaming: A Pleasant Side-Effect of Sleep Disruption

A disrupted night’s sleep is one of the unfortunate concomitants of parenthood; rumor has it that so terrible is the toll that it extracts that some are scared off procreation altogether. Rare is the parent of the infant or toddler who has not tendered a complaint about sleep deprivation to his bored, unsympathetic, childless friends and family. (The wise ones tell it to the ‘been there, done that’ crowd.)

But like most of life’s dispensations, this one is not unmixed in the blessings and curses it tenders. As but a trivial example, a disturbed morning’s sleep means that I can rise early to catch the opening session of the live telecast of a cricket game being played six time-zones away. But by far the most pleasurable side-effect of disrupted sleep are the lucid dreams that result when you do manage to fall asleep again. An amateur chemist scheming to produce a new best-selling psychotropic drug might do well in aiming to produce some of these effects in his  intended product.

I first noticed the intense imagery and quasi-hallucinatory sensations present in the dreaming during a sleep session following disruption in the most unfortunate of ways: during painful, hungover mornings. On those occasions, I would awake early in the morning, my head pounding, my mouth cotton-dry, and stumble out to the kitchen to partake of painkillers and water, and then stumble back into bed to sleep it off. Then, I noticed that as I would fall asleep, I would be entertained by all manners of colorful, vivid dreams; their most startling feature was, almost invariably, the sensation of flight.

Somehow, magically, I would have acquired the powers of airborne locomotion; I could swoop, plummet, hover, soar, dive; I would acquire aerial perspectives on familiar landscapes; so realistic were some of these episodes that I would also experience the sickening vertigo that I unfortunately suffer from when confronted with heights. But the lucidity of these dreams quickly conquered the vertigo, for I was able to reassure myself that no harm could come to me during the dream.

The lucidity of these dreams very quickly enhanced their pleasures; as the dream begins, I feel a rush of pleasurable anticipation; I know a familiar, and yet endlessly varied, pleasure lies ahead. The pleasure at the dream-borne flights that soon follow is considerably enhanced by my knowledge that it is only in these dreams that I will be able to enjoy the pleasures that the considerably more intrepid than me enjoy during activities like hang-gliding or para-sailing.  Because the dreams are lucid, I enjoy greater control over my flight, and often, even over the visual effects I seem able to produce in my dreamscapes.

So pleasurable are these dreams that I am able to comfort myself, as I cast about, hoping to fall asleep after I have been awakened by a few wails that even if I will have been denied my rightful allotment of hours of sleep, the few that will come my way will be pleasurably entertaining and continuously edificatory about the mysteries of human phenomenal experience.

 

Political Schooling Via The Usenet Newsgroup

As my post yesterday should have indicated, we are educated by a variety of modalities. A powerfully formative one for me was my exposure to Usenet newsgroups.

I discovered newsgroups in 1988, shortly after I began work as a research assistant with the Computerized Conferencing and Communications Center at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. I ‘worked’ long hours in our laboratory; email and newsgroups occupied much of that time (in between writing code, debugging code, and stepping out for coffee and cigarette breaks). I had arrived in the US from India in 1987,  a bachelor’s degree in hand; I considered myself well-read, but this inflated estimation of my edification was soon to be revised.

In the late eighties and the early nineties, Usenet newsgroups were largely populated by those with some form of university affiliation: faculty, students, staff, post-doctoral fellows. (Commercial affiliations were not unknown, but these were outnumbered by academic ones; the .edu address was most commonly visible.)  That demographic, unsurprisingly, voluble and prolific in its writing. (It is to the credit of the hacker community that so many of its members wrote often, and well, on newsgroups.)

The following hierarchy of newsgroups captures their eclectic and comprehensive nature:

comp.* — Discussion of computer-related topics
news.* — Discussion of Usenet itself
sci.* — Discussion of scientific subjects
rec.* — Discussion of recreational activities (e.g. games and hobbies)
soc.* — Socialising and discussion of social issues.
talk. * — Discussion of contentious issues such as religion and politics.
misc.* — Miscellaneous discussion—anything which does not fit in the other hierarchies.

I read a few of the .sci, .soc, .talk, and .rec groups on a daily basis. These were the time-sucks of their day; you could spend hours and hours, reading, responding, and engaging in flame wars. They were how you filled lunch and coffee breaks; they could make you stay up late at night, and log in frequently to see if new articles had shown up, to see if anyone had responded to your post.

It was here, in Usenet newsgroups, that I read many, many well-written, articulate, clearly argued and defended, points of view that I had never read before: free speech absolutism, the legalization of drugs, Palestinian self-determination, women’s reproductive rights, privacy rights, gay and lesbian rights, free software versus proprietary software, feminism, interpretations of the American constitution.  And many more. (I also spent a great deal of time reading and discussing cricket in the cricket newsgroup and the Grateful Dead in rec.music.gdead; ) When world-shaking events like the fall of Berlin Wall or Tiananmen  Square occurred on the world stage, they provoked corresponding discussions in the relevant groups. I read furious debates; refutations and counter-refutations; angry tirades; racist and xenophobic rants; calm, reasoned, erudite quasi-dissertations.

I had often entertained conventional views on or all some of these topics before I encountered newsgroups; very few of them survived their encounter with newsgroup discussions.  I read a great deal of revisionist history; I was offered many perspectives on world historical events that I had glibly thought I had understood  well. I had been complacent; I was no longer so. The sense of instability in my beliefs was alarming, but it was also exhilarating. I learned that seemingly air-tight arguments and refutations often contained fatal fallacies and weaknesses that could be exposed by close reading and careful attention to their logical and rhetorical form.

Some discussions were tedious, and many were repetitive, and later in the mid-nineties as the Internet bloomed and blossomed, I found the newsgroups less useful. I stopped reading them soon thereafter. But I never forgot those early readings–which produced in me a kind of ‘shock of the new.’

Many, many thanks are due to all those unnamed teachers of mine.

Costas Gavras’ Missing: Harbinger of Disillusionment

A little while ago, on this blog, while writing of my reading of Alex Haley’s Roots as a schoolboy I made note of it as “a member of that group of cultural productions that changed my view of the US forever.” Another distinguished member of that group would be Costas Gavras‘ Missing, a chilling movie that,

[I]s based on the true story of American journalist Charles Horman, who disappeared in the bloody aftermath of the US-backed Chilean coup of 1973 that deposed the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

Set largely during the days and weeks following Horman’s disappearance, the movie depicts his father and wife searching to determine his fate.

 I saw Missing as a teenager, alone, at a New Delhi cinema; like most movies that I went to see in those days, I knew little about what I was in for. Indeed, my level of ignorance ran embarrassingly high: I did not know who Allende or Pinochet were; I did not know there had been a coup in Chile in 1973. And I knew nothing, certainly, of the US role in it. But I had been assured the movie’s director was ‘famous’, that the movie had garnered critical acclaim. So I bought my tickets, and settled down to watch.

I realized very quickly, that something terrible was afoot; a nation was in turmoil, and innocents were being swept up in a maelstrom of violent political change.  Soldiers ruled the streets; gunfire rang out; and blunt, uncaring, force was applied to all too many who ran afoul of those seizing and retaining power. An atmosphere of menace hung over the urban landscapes the movies’ characters traversed, and a grimly inevitable fate seemed in store for all too many of them. One of them, of course, was Charles Horman, a young journalist–living and working with his wife in Santiago–and who, for whatever reason, falls afoul of the military authorities and is arrested and whisked away. He goes missing.

The nightmare begins at this point. Horman’s father, Ed, flies down from the US to look for his son, and expects, quite reasonably, that the US consular staff will assist him–and Horman’s wife, Joyce–as they seek to determine Horman’s whereabouts. Instead, they encounter a grim, baffling world of evasion, hostility and thinly concealed threat. The adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ is used too often; but it is never more appropriately used than here to describe the dead-ends, misdirections, indifference and obtuseness the Hormans encounter.

And that’s just the American response. It is clear, all too soon, that something terrible has, in all probability, happened to Charles Horman. And it is also all too clear that the American administration in Chile might have had something to do with it.  Or perhaps they know what happened to Charles, but they aren’t telling. As father and wife stumble from pillar to post, from embassy to jail to killing field to morgue, their grief, rage, frustration and anxiety mounts, as does the anger and the fear of the viewer.

At one stage, an American consular officer, utters the following chilling lines to Hormans’ desperate, anguished father:

I don’t know what happened to your kid, Ed. But I understand he was a bit of a snoop. Poked his nose around in a lot of dangerous places where he didn’t really belong. Now, suppose I went up to your town, New York, and I started messing around with the Mafia. I wind up dead in the East River. And my wife or my father complains to the police because they didn’t protect me. They really wouldn’t have much of a case, would they? You play with fire, you get burned.

And that is that.

We never find out what happened to Charles Horman. But we suspect, as Horman’s father and wife do, that he might have met a fate similar to those whose bodies they have seen, victims of torture and execution.

As the movie ends, the following epilogue appears, in white lettering, on a black background:

Ed Horman filed suit charging eleven government officials, including Henry A. Kissinger, with complicity and negligence in the death of his son. The body was not returned home until seven months later, making an accurate autopsy impossible. After years of litigation, the information necessary to prove or disprove complicity remained classified as secrets of state. The suit was dismissed.

I walked home, a little heartsick. I had witnessed the most frightening of encounters: between mere citizens, powerless and alone, and all-powerful, opaque and violent bureaucracies. I was shaken, and for days afterwards, was haunted by the sorrow and anger and fear I had seen writ large on those who searched, futilely and desperately for their missing loved one. I had begun to dream of a life in the US; and suddenly, uncomfortably, I realized my future home had dimensions and depths to it that I had yet to discover.

Sanctimony, Hypocrisy, Nuclear Weapons, and Drones

A couple of days ago, on this blog, I wrote a post attempting to refute the charge of ‘selective outrage’ that is often leveled against critics of Israeli policies in the current conflict in Gaza. In it, I pointed out how the accusation of hypocrisy made against the proponent of a claim does not affect its logical force, but must still be reckoned with for its rhetorical impact. Today, I want to note how accusations of hypocrisy often derail American attempts to provide moral instruction and leadership to the rest of the world.

Consider, for instance, Barack Obama’s statements during a White House briefing session yesterday:

President Barack Obama somberly warned on Friday that a forthcoming Senate Intelligence Committee report will show that the United States “tortured some folks” before he took office. But he dismissed “sanctimonious” calls to punish any individuals responsible and rejected calls for CIA Director John Brennan’s resignation.

In response, on a Facebook comment space, I wrote:

Why, oh why, is the world so strangely reluctant to accept our leadership in all things moral?

Many US presidents–and their administrations–before Barack Obama–and his staff–have used the bully pulpit provided by their office and delivered countless, sonorous, lectures to the rest of the world on the ethical and moral values that should underwrite their political policies.  They, and many Americans, have often wondered why these instructions are not taken more seriously, and are instead responded to with a febrile mix of resentment, rage, and sometimes outright violence. These reactions then provoke the plaintive suggestions that these behavioral patterns are merely the ressentiment of the weak, or perhaps more ambitiously, an expression of an underlying hatred of the American way of life and its unique freedoms.

The answer is considerably less complicated.  As I noted in a post on the problem of nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation:

Perhaps the biggest stumbling-block to nonproliferation has been the failure of the ‘non-proliferation complex’ to internalize a simple truth:

[I]f smaller states are to be discouraged from acquiring a bomb, nuclear states will need to take real steps towards disarmament. Otherwise, non-nuclear states will regard their demands as self-serving and hypocritical – reason enough to think about creating an arsenal of their own. [from: Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka, ‘Who’s In, Who’s Out‘, (London Review of Books, 23 February 2012, Vol 34, No.4, pp 37-38),]

The self-serving hypocrisy of nuclear weapon states, and its implicit acceptance by the ‘complex’ is a long-running farce, depressingly well-known to most.  This hypocrisy is the single most important factor in ensuring that non-proliferation is a non-starter; it ensures the non-proliferation manifesto is foundationally malformed.

Nuclear nonproliferation is a very good idea, as is nuclear disarmament; they can be backed up very good economic, political, and moral arguments, and many of these have been made by very eloquent spokespersons. Their efforts, however, have always been handicapped because, all too often, they were deployed by the self-serving, sanctimonious, hypocritical members of the Nuclear Weapons Club, which merely seemed to be serving double-helpings of ‘pull up the ladder, I’m aboard.’ (I can personally testify that during my university years, as a young hot-head, despite having internalized quite well the arguments against India’s going nuclear for its domestic energy needs–on grounds of inappropriate technological fit especially–I was left almost speechless with rage on reading American lectures on the same topic; these also, for good measure, very often suggested Indians were simply incapable of managing technology of such sophistication.)

Barack Obama warns us against sanctimony, blithely unaware of his own. His listeners however, are not. They are similarly aware that when he ponders the question of which country would tolerate missiles being rained down on it from on high, he is conveniently forgetting about things that fly in the sky and rhyme with ‘phone.’

A Day in Gaol, Part Deux: Notes on Police, Precincts, and Penality

Spending a day in jail has some social scientific value for the temporarily detained; it enables a closer, albeit short-lived, look at the systems of policing and criminal justice. And because I often expend much time on this blog railing against the excesses of the New York City Police Department, it makes especial sense for me to offer a few observations on my interactions with them on Tuesday last.

First, the arrest itself. The NYPD was scrupulous about providing warnings to those that lay down on Second Avenue; we were told that we were obstructing traffic and had to clear the intersection, failing which we would be arrested. We were not immediately bum-rushed. After the warning was repeated, and those who did not want to court arrest had moved out, the police moved in. I was hauled to my feet but I was not treated roughly. The handcuffs placed on my wrists–the plastic variety–were painful, and a couple of tightening tugs made them more so. The arresting officer then placed his fingers through their central loop, making them even more painful. I told him I had no intention of absconding, as I had deliberately courted arrest; he replied he had to follow arresting procedures. Fair enough. We were then bundled into the wagon, un-seatbelted, and  thus susceptible to being thrown around, forward and backwards, when the wagon braked or took corners. The driver of the wagon thankfully opened the doors when we arrived at the precinct, and assured us he had turned on the A/C, but it hadn’t worked, thus leaving us sweltering. I believe him; he sounded sincerely apologetic for any discomfort caused to us.

I had been a little nervous about the arrest because I did not want to get shoved around or slammed to the sidewalk, but none of that occurred. There was no animosity directed at the police by the protesters and the police seemed more bemused than anything else by our doings.

Second, my booking at the precinct. The central irony of the precinct–as Corey Robin and I both noted in our conversation after we had been released–is that while it is a zone of legal enforcement, it feels, and very often is, a lawless zone. You come face to face to unblinking, resolute bureaucracy, beholden to its procedures, and their utter rigidity, all the while knowing that the police can stretch and violate them with impunity. The incarcerated are always aware that they are powerless, that the police can exert all manner of power over them. You might seek redress later, but that will not, in any way, diminish the terrifying powerlessness when a policeman got in your face, or pushed you, or otherwise abused you in any other way. There is also the depressing empirical fact that the long arm of the law rarely reaches out to accost a policeman. You are at the policeman’s mercy. Questions may be treated with a blank stare or a noncommittal reply, and very little helpful clarification about procedure is offered. It is here that you most sense a figurative forcing of you to your knees. The swagger, the cockiness, the brusqueness of the cop; these are all external manifestations of the confidence they posses in their imperviousness to any forms of pleading or redressal.

Third, my time in the holding cell. This is a continuation of the previous state; you are imprisoned; it can be a terrifying feeling.. The police are taciturn and reticent; they do not offer helpful responses to questions put to them, and requests for the lessening of personal discomfort are responded to with visible reluctance; you do not get straight answers on when you may expect to be booked and released. (One Bangladeshi cop was kind enough to tell us we would be released soon; in an effort to reach out to him, I told him my father had fought in the war of liberation for his erstwhile home; he offered me a tight smile and walked away, telling me his wife was from Mumbai.) You sense the police bound by procedures of due process but you also sense that they may at any time, at their own whim, decide not to follow them.  (The refusal–and then later, grudging agreement–to provide water despite our constant requests seemed one instance of this.) The irony of the co-existence of the arbitrary with the rules of law is reinforced. You draw companionship from your fellow prisoners if you can. I was lucky to be with my partners in civil disobedience; their companionship sustains you; it is far more uncomfortable to be with those who are strangers. (Note: at one point late in the afternoon, a middle-aged Cuban gentleman was brought into our cell; he had been arrested for panhandling. He claimed he had merely been asking a friend for some money. His English was not as good as his Spanish, and he seemed a little discombobulated. The police had a field day with him, cracking several jokes at his expense as he was led out and in and otherwise subjected to other procedures. I presume the police code of conduct includes no strictures on gratuitous mocking of the incarcerated.)

My imprisonment was exceedingly brief; I only suffered minimal discomfort (one of my fingers is still slightly numb). I am privileged and lucky. Many others who deal with the police and the penal system are not.

 

Bernard-Henri Lévy And The Problem of ‘Selective Outrage’

You, sir, are a knave and a hypocrite. You protest and fulminate when X assaults–or otherwise inflicts harms on–Y, but not when A assaults–or otherwise inflicts harm on–B. Yet the crime is the same in each case. Your outrage is selective. I do not, therefore, trust your motives, and will ignore your crocodile tears, your faux expressions of concern. They must not be sincere, for if they were, you would visibly and vocally demonstrate the same deep moral concern for the assault in both cases. I suspect you have some animus against X, some deep-rooted hostility that you are covering up with your morally inflected bluster.

I presume this litany of accusations, this suggestion of intellectual dishonesty, sounds familiar. In most cases, the accuser is sympathetic to X‘s stated reasons for harming Y; his accusations of selective outrage–made against those who do not find X‘s stated reasons convincing or persuasive–are intended to constitute a rhetorical disarming of their critique of X.

Here is the latest instance of such an accusation of selective outrage. Bernard-Henri Lévy writes in the Wall Street Journal:

About the crowds on Friday in Paris chanting “Palestine will overcome” and “Israel, assassin”: Where were they a few days earlier when news broke that over the previous weekend Syria’s civil war had produced 720 more dead, adding to the 150,000 others who have not had the honor of demonstrations in France?

Why did the protesters not pour into the streets when, a few days before that, the well-informed Syrian Network for Human Rights revealed that so far this year Damascus’s army, which was supposed to have destroyed its supply of chemical weapons, carried out at least 17 gas attacks around Kafrzyta, Talmanas, Atshan and elsewhere?

Prima facie, accusations of this kind have no force whatsoever. A smoker who tells me to quit smoking because it would cause me lung cancer is presumably a hypocrite, but that does not affect the content of his argument in the least. Does smoking cause lung cancer? Are the reasons provided by the smoker for not smoking good reasons? If they are, you should consider quitting. If they aren’t, don’t. The smoker’s continuation of his smoking habit, his continued patronage of the modern-day merchants of death, should be irrelevant to your evaluation of his argument. The argument above should proceed along similar lines: Are X‘s reasons for assaulting Y good ones? Are they morally justified? If they are, X is justified in continuing with the assault; if not, then X should cease and desist. The person accused of selective outrage might be accused of inconsistency, and perhaps of hypocrisy, but that has no bearing on our evaluation of X‘s conduct.

But we do not always evaluate arguments in such purely logical fashion. We often accept them because we find them persuasive or convincing on non-logical, rhetorical grounds. And in such cases, the context surrounding the argument can make a crucial difference to the argument’s persuasive force. An accusation of selective outrage can thus be quite damaging, and deserves a response that does justice to its non-logical, rhetorical, force as well.

Here is one response, especially relevant to the American context, and perhaps also in those cases where protests are taking places in the cities of other Western allies of Israel. To wit, I am expending my limited political energies in protesting Israel’s policies, because my government, which actively funds and supports Israel, does not appear to share my concern; it does not seem to think Israel’s behavior needs emendation; its inactivity results in aiding and abetting Israel’s actions. In the other cases you mention, I know that my government joins me in my critique, in my condemnation: it is engaged, on perhaps the diplomatic front, or perhaps via sanctions or other punitive actions, to condemn and punish the perpetrators of the outrages taking place elsewhere.

Bernard-Henri Lévy has a response to this defense, which I’m afraid I do not quite understand:

Will the protesters claim that they were rallying against French President François Hollande and a policy of unilateral support for Israel that they do not wish to see conducted “in their name”? Perhaps. But conducting outward politics for inner reasons—converting a large cause into a small instrument designed to salve one’s conscience at little cost—reflects little genuine concern for the fate of the victims.

Henri-Lévy mysteriously concedes the point with a grudging ‘Perhaps’ but then goes on to suggest that ‘outward politics for inner reasons’ does not reflect ‘genuine concern.’  This is incoherent. I do not know what ‘inner reasons’ are when the only reasons being stated are ‘outer’ ones, manifest in speech and action. The suggestion that this political action is being taken merely to provide some healing balm to a guilt-stricken conscience–for having elected our leaders, I presume, or perhaps for not protesting elsewhere too in the shape or fashion Lévy desires–is an ad-hominem claim, one grounded in some mysterious mind-reading ability.

He then goes on to say:

Even more pointedly, should not the same reasoning have filled the same streets 10 or 100 times to protest the same president’s decision, likewise taken in their name, not to intervene in Syria?

As for intervening in Syria, Henri-Lévy conveniently ignores an entire Middle Eastern context, the history of Western military intervention in that domain, and its unpredictable side-effects. But that is another topic altogether. (But see this post on Syria, written in response to the call for bombing in response to chemical weapon use.)

Bernard-Henri Lévy then concludes, a little predictably, by leveling charges of anti-semitism against those who protest Israel’s policies in Gaza. The presence of anti-semitism in anti-Israel protests is reprehensible and outrageous, and has rightly been called out by many; it has no place there. But Lévy’s brush tars a little too broadly and carelessly. I suspect that were he around in the 1960s, Lévy might have accused American civil rights activists of being hypocritical, white-hating fanatics. After all, they weren’t agitating on behalf of India’s untouchables, the Dalits; they weren’t conducting sit-ins, and marching in giant rallies in support of their cause. That must be it. Martin Luther King Jr. was a hypocrite too. He only put his body on the line for American blacks and not for colored people everywhere else.

Why Get Arrested? Why Perform Civil Disobedience?

A Facebook friend of mine asked in response to my posts and photos about yesterday’s protest at the Israeli mission to the UN:

It seems as though you all knew you were going to get arrested and almost seem proud of that? Isn’t there a way to protest without being arrested?

This is a very good question. Let me attempt to answer it, building upon a response I initially wrote in the comments space of my Facebook page.

My friend is right. There are ways to protest without being arrested. I have taken many political actions, participated in many rallies and protests, all without being arrested. I have written blog posts, held up banners, shouted slogans, and marched through city streets in sub-zero temperatures. These forms of protest suffer from one disadvantage: they are often not as politically effective, or as rhetorically and substantively powerful as civil disobedience actions, which culminate in protesters getting arrested.

Consider yesterday’s action for instance. If some hundred or so protesters had shown up, shouted some slogans, all the while confined to the pen the NYPD had put up for us, and then finally dispersed, their energies dissipated, the associated political message would have all too quickly been lost. Yet, precisely because twenty-six folks were arrested and put into jail, we have had a day and perhaps more of social media buzz. Some folks already know what is happening in Gaza, yet others will learn about it for the first time. More conversations will be sparked, and perhaps some might be inspired to take action as well–of whatever form they choose.

Civil disobedience actions are thus more effective in raising political consciousness. Moreover, they are more disruptive of the social order; they send the message–to those watching, to those on their way to work–that business cannot proceed as usual. They impose costs, and thus send a message that political stances, strategies and tactics, such as the US’s support of Israel with a seemingly blank check, lead to domestic costs. Getting arrested shows you are willing to incur a cost yourself – like spending time in jail. It shows your commitment to the cause, which is an expression of solidarity for those who are far more viscerally involved in the political struggle. Getting arrested, and undergoing all the discomforts it entails, sends a message that the cause at hand is not a trivial one, that it has somehow evoked people to step forth and expend time and energy in this fashion. It is not a pleasant experience, and thus provokes the question: Why would people be willing to undergo handcuffing, being pushed around by cops, and being confined in a holding cell?

Imagine millions of American citizens doing the same thing, shutting down traffic, clogging up the jails, bringing all work to a halt. Could the US government really continue with its policies if that was the case? They could, if all they had to deal with was large, vocal rallies. (As they perhaps did at the time  of the Iraq War.)

Politics, political action, and rhetoric go together. Getting arrested is a form of speech; it speaks loudly to the cause it represents. It is another arrow in the quiver of the political activist, one which if used well, can be singularly effective.

Protesting For Gaza: A Day in Gaol

Earlier today, during the course of a peaceful civil disobedience action–at the Israeli mission to the UN, on Manhattan’s East Side–protesting the humanitarian catastrophe currently underway in the Gaza Strip, twenty-six protesters, including moi, were arrested and taken in custody. The protesters included Norman Finkelstein, my Brooklyn College colleague Corey Robin, and my cellmate for the day, the writer Benjamin Kunkel.

Finkelstein had sent out a call last night–via social media–for the protest to take place this afternoon. I was not sure whether I would be able to take part as I had spent most of Monday feeling distinctly unwell thanks to a cold, cough and slight fever. But I awoke this morning feeling rested, went for a run, and decided on my return that I would join Norman Finkelstein (and others) at the protest. I called my wife and told her of my plans, asked her to pick up our daughter from daycare, and headed out. (My wife, bless her heart, was fully supportive, perhaps entirely unsurprising for someone who had spent many of her university days working with a student group called Committee for Justice in Palestine.)

I arrived at the Israeli mission to find our small group clustered across the street. We waited for about forty-five minutes, during which time our numbers grew, all the while chanting slogans. At noon, after a small discussion, Norman announced that the civil disobedience action would involve blocking traffic on Second Avenue.  Which is what we did. At half-past noon, approximately hundred protesters marched out into the middle of Second Avenue, linked hands, and lay down. The police asked us to move; some protesters did, others did not. I continued to lie down.

A few minutes later, I was hauled to my feet and handcuffed. I did not resist arrest by going ‘boneless.’ The plastic handcuffs used by the New York City Police Department are never pleasant on the wrists, and this occasion was no exception. After standing around for a little while, continuing to chant, I was put into a police paddy wagon and taken to Manhattan’s 7th precinct.  Eight others accompanied me.

Getting arrested and booked is a tedious business. The paddy wagon was hot and stuffy, and we had to wait outside the precinct–mercifully, with the door opened for us by the driver–to be called in. Once we were let in, our handcuffs were cut off–again, mercifully, because my fingers were starting to go numb by this time. We were then searched, some forms were filled out, and we were ushered into a filthy holding cell. There were nine of us in it. The remaining protesters were put into two other cells (the arrested women had one to themselves.)  We were not allowed to make any phone calls; we were asked to take off our shoelaces; we could not take food or water into the cell.

The waiting now began. My companions included two grizzled Vietnam veterans and two very young students. We chatted among ourselves, engaged in some friendly verbal jousting with the police, and engaged in a great deal of passionate political discussion. (Kunkel and I also chatted about many other topics on the side.) One of the Vietnam vets told us harrowing tales of his time in that war, and about the experiences that convinced him  it was unjust and immoral. Our partners in the cell adjoining were also engaged in similar discussions and at one point, as they burst into song, we joined them for Solidarity Forever. There was no water to drink and we were given none. (Apparently, there were vending machines in the precinct lobby, but we could not use them.)  At  four pm, we were told our wait was almost over, but it dragged on a for a little while longer.

Finally at around seven or so, we were released one by one. My call came at a quarter after. I was given a desk appearance ticket and told to appear in court on September 9th. I had been charged with disorderly conduct. I collected my belongings, called my wife to let her know I had been released, and walked outside to be greeted by members of the National Lawyers Guild and other folks come to show support. I waited for my cell companions to join me outside. We briefly chatted, took a few photos, and then I left with Kunkel and Robin for a much-needed dinner. (Dumplings and soup in Chinatown.) Two hours later, I was back home in Brooklyn. My daughter was fast asleep so I missed kissing her goodnight. My wife was still awake, and we chatted for a bit about the day’s happenings.

My actions today are insignificant in the extreme. They will not stop the Israeli government from attacking Gaza; they will not bring the carnage ensuing there to a halt. But I’m still glad I went, got arrested, and inconvenienced myself for a day. It was a small price to pay. I often write politically tinged posts here, I express political opinions in person to my friends and family. I have felt strongly about the terrible carnage taking place in Gaza, but have not managed to do anything concrete about it. I wanted to indicate American support for Israel is not unanimous, to let those know who protest for Palestine and Gaza that they are not alone. I wanted, somehow, to do something about a feeling that surges within me, from time to time, that no policy which entails–as an almost inevitable side-effect–eighty percent civilian casualties, can ever be morally or politically justified.

I’ve never been arrested before at a protest, and I have certainly never deliberately courted arrest. Today, when the moment came, it felt like an easy decision. My friend Corey Robin lay down next to me, ready to be hauled away in handcuffs, and lying there, preparing to do the same felt, for many reasons, the right thing to do. In the course of an eternally indecisive life, marked by all too much cognitive dissonance, that is a rare feeling, one to be treasured.

Note: Here is a follow-up post defending the use of civil disobedience actions as a form of political protest and action.

On The Alleged Undesirability of Inconsistency

Inconsistency in our beliefs–and thus actions–is often held to be not just a cognitive failure, a breakdown of rationality, but also a moral failure of sorts. Sometimes the inconsistent are accused of hypocrisy, of disingenuousness. We are urged to forensically examine their utterances and actions, sifting through the traces they leave, all the better to indict them of a catalog of epistemic and ethical sins. The expression of an inconsistency is also often taken to be a cover-up for a truly held belief, a masking of a sordid reality; there are the things we ‘really believe’ and then there are the things we only pretend to believe.

Perhaps we should be more tolerant of the inconsistent–especially as most of us, if not all, are guilty of it.

There is a simple apologia we can offer for this widespread inconsistency; we are creatures of limited reasoning power; we may find it too cognitively expensive to check our enterprise for consistency. We often satisfice, rather than optimize, the sanitation and hygiene we impose on our beliefs.

But there might be something even more fundamental at play. The accusations leveled against the inconsistent often presume there is a genuine, authentic self, one covered up and disguised by incompetency, for nefarious purposes. They suggest we are whole and are fractured by this tolerance of rupture within our corpus of belief. But perhaps–as many have suggested before me–we are a shifting conglomerate of sorts. We play host to many selves, many drives, many desires, all at once; if these drives and desires and instincts may conflict with each other, then why not our beliefs? Beliefs are revealed by actions, by visible exertion and the spoken word; these issue from our inner being, each bearing the impress of the turbulence that gave rise to it. Unsurprisingly, the agent who has been assigned their ownership appears singed by incoherence at the edges. But this incoherence may instead be a pleasurable medley of a kind.

I do not think there is much, if any, novelty in what I have noted above. But consistency continues to hold sway as an epistemic and moral ideal. It is still put down as a signpost, as a marker, for our aspirations. We are urged–when we have the time and the energy–to look closely and carefully under and around ourselves, and to conduct search-and-destroy missions for all and any inconsistencies.

We are too harsh on the inconsistent. In a fit of self-righteous rectitude, we indict them of too much. To be sure, some inconsistencies are harmful; for ourselves, for those impacted by our actions. The inconsistency of the powerful hypocrite is a particularly damaging one. But all too many variants of this supposedly deadly sin are not. At worst, they may only puzzle and perplex us, impatient as we are to categorize, all too neatly, our friends and family and acquaintances. But we should be more tolerant, and treat these visible faults in action and belief as spurs to a more sympathetic investigation of the human condition and the complexity of the inner life.

V. S. Naipaul on Diversion and Inspiration

In “The Author’s Note”, a preface of sorts to The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1980), V. S. Naipaul writes,

These pieces…were written between 1972 and 1975. They bridged a creative gap: from the end of 1970 to the end of 1973 no novel offered itself to me. That perhaps explains the intensity of some of the pieces and their obsessional nature….I can claim no further unity for the pieces; though it should be said that, out of these journeys and writings, novels did in the end come to me.

This little passage contains, within it, several interesting observations on the writing process.

First, Naipaul notes that for a period of three years no ideas for a novel ‘came’ to him (or if they did, they were not fecund enough to be sustained for too long.) By phrasing his description of this state as one in which “no novel offered itself to me” Naipaul reiterates the quasi-mystical notion of a written work as presenting itself to its writer as an offering, one now to be taken on and brought forth. Here I am; make of me what you will. The writer appears as a conduit for the passage–into the reader’s world–of a written work. Naipaul’s further remarks make clear that while this initial stage of writing might seem otherworldly, what follows is most decidedly grounded in the concrete–in the very substantial acts of writing itself.

Second, even though no idea for a novel-length project came to fruition, the writer still has his writerly energies within and about him; they seek expression in the only way he knows how. So the writer writes; in this case, essays and reportage. The writer must write; something, anything. If not fiction, then something else. The novelist, thwarted, now seeks release in essays, which now bear the marks of having functioned as receptacles for his charged outpourings. Naipaul thus points us toward the notion of the writer as driven by energies that need discharging. (Failure to do so–in the right way, or at all–might account for some of the misery that writers seem to constantly experience.)

Third, the process of writing, the work of putting words to paper (or screen), now makes possible that which previously was not: the bringing forth of a novel. As the late Roger Ebert once noted, ‘The muse only visits while you work.” Here too, Naipaul confirms for us the wisdom of that observation. If inspiration for a novel is not forthcoming, then perhaps it might be facilitated by the writer’s best trick: writing. The very act of writing is the spur which brings forth the hitherto missing spark.

We may thus extract advice for the writer: You will often find yourself not able to write; inspiration will be felt lacking; at those moments commit to writing something, anything, even if not what you would have originally wanted to write; out of this seeming diversion, you might yet find a way back to the path you had originally wanted to set out on.