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Notes on Happiness

The Greek notion of eudaimonia, which is a richer and I think less ambiguous concept than our typical conceptions of happiness, is nevertheless sometimes translated as “happiness,” which is understandable to the extent happiness has been formulated by some philosophers in terms welfare and well-being. But as Martha Nussbaum writes in a note on the Greek word in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1986):

“Especially given our Kantian and Utilitarian heritage in moral philosophy, in both parts of which ‘happiness’ is taken to be the name of a feeling of contentment or pleasure, and a view that makes happiness the supreme good is assumed to be, by definition, a view that gives supreme value to psychological states rather than to activities, this translation is badly misleading. To the Greeks, eudaimonia means something like ‘living a good life for a human being,’ or as a recent writer has suggested, ‘human flourishing.’ Aristotle tells us that it is equivalent, in ordinary discourse, to ‘living well and doing well.’ Most Greeks would understand eudaimonia to be something essentially active, of which praiseworthy activities are not just productive means, but actual constituent parts [this could include virtuous actions as ‘excellences’ of character]. It is possible for a Greek thinker to argue that eudaimonia is equivalent to a state of pleasure; to this extent activity is not a conceptual part of the notion. But even here we should be aware that many Greek thinkers conceive of pleasure as something active rather that stative; an equation of eudaimonia with pleasure might, then, not mean what we would expect it to mean in a Utilitarian writer.”

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“It is philosophers who have the task of exploring what matters to us most—what is freedom? What is it genuinely for us to be happy? What is worth valuing and why?—but it is psychoanalysis that teaches us how we regularly get in the way of our own freedom, systematically make ourselves unhappy and use values for covert and malign purposes. Philosophy cannot live up to its task unless it takes these psychoanalytic challenges seriously.” — Jonathan Lear

“The parts of Freud’s writings that suggest some level of causal determination in fact coexist with his explicit view that one of the chief goals of psychoanalysis is to increase the patient’s ‘freedom’ (Freiheit), ‘autonomy’ (Selbstandigkeit), and ‘initiative’ (Initiative). Thus the aim of psychoanalysis is to ‘free’ (befrein) the patient from intrapsychic ‘chains’ (die Fesseln), which normally increases the patient’s ‘self-control’ (Selbstbeherrschung) and gives ‘the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or the other’ between conflicting motives. For Freud, it is the mark of a relatively healthy ego to be able to deliberate and exercise self-control and willpower in choosing and pursuing goals. [….]

Freud’s claim that the developed ego is guided by qualitative hedonism helps to bring out just how in his late writings ‘the programme of the pleasure principle’ is compatible with non-egoistic, and hence, moral behavior. This compatibility is largely a consequence of the fact that happiness as Freud uses the term for the goal of life is a different kind of end then the quantitative one of maximizing a single kind of agreeable feeling. ‘Happiness’ in life is an ‘inclusive end’ rather than a single ‘dominant end.’ That is to say, the activities through which it is sought are not means in an instrumental or neutral sense, but parts of a whole. To pursue happiness as an inclusive goal through such activities as artistic creativity, intellectual work, sensuality, love, and aesthetic appreciation is to enjoy each of these activities as contributing something qualitatively unique to a life plan. Insofar as these activities are means, it is in the sense of being constitutive of the comprehensive end of happiness in life as a whole. It is only through such activities that genuine happiness in the sense of ‘positive fulfillment’ is possible [Here we see Freud’s conception of ‘happiness’ is close if not identical to the classical Greek concept of eudaimonia, or at least several well-known conceptions thereof and which we might translate in the best sense to mean or imply the possibility of human fulfillment, the triune nature of which arguably entails, minimally and broadly speaking, freedom (as self-determination), human community, and self-realization. The converse of such human fulfillment could be said to found in the several senses in which Marx employs the concept of alienation throughout his writings.] [....] Freud does not construe narrowly, then, the happiness at which the ego aims as always involving a self-interested goal. To the contrary, persons are observed to find pleasure in a whole range of activities, including fulfilling the needs of others, and even in moral conscientiousness. For there is ‘satisfaction’ to be obtained in acting benevolently in accordance with one’s ‘ego ideal’ and ‘a feeling of triumph when something in the ego coincides with the ego ideal.’”— Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991)

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We need not assume that freedom, at least insofar as it thought conducive to happiness, as a necessary yet not sufficient condition requires or implies “maximally unbounded and unburdened choice,” in correspondence with the classical Liberal belief that “people tend to fare best when they possess, more or less, the greatest possible freedom to live as they wish,” a belief Daniel N. Haybron views as central to “liberal optimism” or what I would term, perhaps more precisely, “libertarian (liberal) optimism.” This optimism, which rarely distinguishes between welfare, well-being and happiness, has an “elective affinity” with prominent features of capitalism wherein consumption (‘understood in a broad sense that includes aesthetic pleasures and entertainment as well as consumption of goods in the ordinary sense’) defines the best life for the individual and thus the more opportunities for and occasions of consumption are though to bring about pleasure and happiness. Liberal capitalism advocates the free choice of life-style, but “… forgets that the choice is to a large extent preempted by the social environment in which people grow up and live. These endogenously emerging preferences can well lead to choices whose ultimate outcome is avoidable ruin or misery. “

Please see Haybron’s The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008). For a taste of rather different understanding and interpretation of what freedom might or should entail, in other words, a conception that does not presuppose or assume the unconditional value of “maximally unbounded and unburdened choice.” See too Jon Elster’s Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and the essays collected in Jonardon Ganeri and Clare Carlisle, eds., Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66) (Cambridge University Press, 2010). On how this more modest (realistic?) conception of what freedom ideally entails is compatible with Marxist conceptions of self-realization and human fulfillment, see Elster’s article, “Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Whether one believes in religion or not, we are all seeking something better in life—the very notion of our life is toward happiness. — The Dalai Lama

Happiness, it is said, is seldom found by those who seek it, and never by those who seek it for themselves. — F. Emerson Andrews

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling. — Margaret Lee Runbeck

Most of us, I suspect, possess or cleave to a desire or wish to be happy. “Most of us” the requisite qualification because, in the words of the late Nel Noddings, “there are some gloomy souls who deny that happiness in our chief concern and claim something else as a greater good ….”¹ We may even think our status as human beings or persons brings along with it (despite the awkwardness of the locution) a right to be happy, that the pursuit, as it were, of happiness is part and parcel of human nature or the human condition (and thus we may come to resent or at least get angry at those people or things we believe interfere with or are obstacles to our justified pursuit or just deserts). As for what happiness in fact is or consists of, we are not certain; at least we perhaps have only a dim conception, or a vaguely intuitive sense of what makes us happy. Happiness may embody or represent that which enhances our welfare and well-being, what makes life meaningful or brings self-fulfillment (or eudaimonia). We may want to define happiness so it is not circumscribed solely by “health, wealth, and the ups and downs of everyday life,” but the satisfaction of minimal criteria for material welfare and well-being may be a necessary yet not sufficient condition for happiness.² Or we may be content to see happiness as simply the converse of suffering, of the absence of suffering (of various kinds). We may believe happiness is an occasional, momentary, episodic, indeed occurrent emotion or affective state (arising from more or less familiar gratifications or either well-known simple pleasures or complex pleasures).³ Or, we may view it more along the lines of a disposition (i.e., with a potential to be actualized), one that takes either the form of a mood (e.g., ‘he’s been rather happy of late’) or a general affective or even character trait, as in, “He’s such a happy person.” It might be the case that what we entertain as the “stuff” of happiness—no matter how assiduously, passionately, or obsessively entertained—is an illusion, a fantasy, an impossible desire or wish. What is perhaps more disturbing or frightening is to consider the possibility that the conscious wish or desire for happiness, to be happy, is routinely or ritually undermined by our unconscious, the appreciation or awareness of which may come to us all too late in life. More transparently, and in the words of the Dalai Lama, it may merely be the case that “we often employ misguided means in our attempts to be happy and wind up creating more causes for misery instead.”

In any case, it is likely that the desire or wish or intention to “be happy” is not one that can be directly sought, in other words, it is one with that class of mental states or states of affairs that cannot be (directly) willed, indeed, the deliberate pursuit of such states represents the irrationality, performative contradiction, or sheer folly of “willing what cannot be willed” (the late psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Leslie Farber). If that is true, and I lack sufficient reason to doubt it is not, then happiness is a welcome or unexpected by-product or side effect of some other action or activity, some other act or condition whose principal intention or motivation was not the desire or wish to be happy, even if happiness is somehow linked to or circuitously or indirectly caused by the original intention or primary motivation. Or it might be that we can only be happy when the desires or wish for happiness recedes, as it were, to the back of our minds, when we have forgotten the desire or wish to be happy, as we are no longer “self-conscious” about it, let alone obsessed with being happy (a Buddhist would put this in terms of not being ‘attached’ to happiness). Let’s assume for a moment that this is wrong, and thus that I’m able to deliberately pursue or perform or consume those (material or immaterial) things that bring me happiness, if only momentarily or episodically (this need not be simply the desire for instant gratification). In such cases, the happiness may itself be described as evanescent or degrading in intensity or quality over time, its character exemplifying what economists term “diminishing marginal utility,” its pleasures increasingly elusive to the point of vanishing altogether.

Whatever happiness is, it seems reasonable to hope that, at least in part, our happiness should be occasionally characterized as a consequence of seeing others happy, or of our ability to, as we say, make others happy. Put a bit differently, a portion of our happiness should be constituted by the joy or pleasure we find in witnessing the happiness of others, whether or not we have been complicit in or had anything to do with its outcome (which is verbally if not always honestly expressed when one says, ‘I’m so happy for you!’). See our last note below for this idea within Buddhism.

Notes

1. From her important book, Nel Noddings, Happiness and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2. On the apparent paradox of a precipitous decline of happiness in the midst of increasing plenty (or the putative pleasures of ample and conspicuous consumption), please see Robert E. Lane’s The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000).
3. “Yet attempts to account for happiness’s value in purely hedonic terms seems to miss something. They do not account for the appeal of criticizing hedonism on the grounds that it is psychologically superficial. It seems important to note the psychological depth of happiness, the fact that it involves more of our psychologies than just their phenomenal surfaces. Why? The answer lies mainly in the connection that happiness makes with the self.” Daniel M. Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008): 182. We need not assume here any essentialist notion or independent identity of “the self.” As the Dalai Lama points out, “[the] ‘I’ is designated in dependence on our body and mind, yet when we search for a findable thing that that is “me,” we can’t find it within the body or mind, the collection of the two, or separate from them.” Furthermore, “[a]lthough we cannot pinpoint anything that is the self, the existence of a person who creates causes and experiences effects is undeniable.” Please see, passim, The Dalai Lama and Thubten Chodron (Bhikṣu Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Bhikṣuṇī Thubten Chodron) Approaching the Buddhist Path (The Library of Wisdom and Compassion, Vol. 1) (Wisdom Publications, 2017). While I’m not aware of any systematic treatments, anukampā, “sympathy,” is discussed in the first part of Harvey B. Aronson’s Love [his translation of mettā] and Sympathy in Theravada Buddhism (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980). In Pāli, the term is said to literally mean “trembling along with” or “to vibrate towards.” I mention this because the notion of “sympathetic (sometimes ‘altruistic’) joy” or muditā, taking joy in the happiness or good fortune of others (the converse of envy), is one of the four “divine abidings” or “immeasurables” or “sublime attitudes” (both objects of meditation and virtues to exemplify), the others being mettā (loving-kindness or benevolence), karuṇā (compassion), and upekkhā (equanimity; cf. sophrosyne).

Further Reading: Chapter 15, “Caring about Oneself—Happiness and Sadness,” in Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000): 449-472.

“As one writer insisted, ‘Don’t mistake pleasures for happiness. They’re a different breed of dog.’ Certainly, upon first reading, ‘pleasure’ may sound disreputable, whereas ‘happiness’ sounds morally acceptable, thanks in part to the famous, if ill-understood phrase in the Declaration of Independence guaranteeing the citizen’s right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Perhaps because of the Declaration’s lofty aspirations, few have troubled to think through the connotations attached to the words ‘happy’ and ‘happiness.’ True, there is an idea behind Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index, that money can’t buy enough contentment, just as ideas spur UC-Berkeley’s ‘Science of Happiness’ project and the academic revival of interest in phenomenology. But evidently, the modern preoccupation with happiness is a symptom of the industrializing and industrialized world. To today’s smart thinkers who equate ‘happiness’ with ‘being satisfied with one’s life as a whole’ (a state of being, rather than a response to a given stimulus), the early thinkers who are my subject would have replied that seeking such an ambitious and unattainable goal would likely end in dissatisfaction and greater unhappiness. Indeed, sheer overreach may have brought about the current Euro-American paradox; ergo talk of happiness is most prevalent in the very populations heavily reliant upon anti-depressants and opiates. It is moreover hard to ignore the disturbing racist and culturalist overtones of recent ‘Happiness’ projects, lodged in the universalist presumption that all cultures everywhere have replicated the same set of emotions and emotional triggers as US citizens today. …[T]he vocabulary for several American virtues relating to happiness (the virtue of ‘cheerfulness,’ for example [I would add ‘positive thinking’ and being an ‘optimist’]) do not seem to exist in the classical writings in China, though an absence of literary evidence does not insure that cheerfulness was absent from daily life.

The Ancients with clear-eyed, even brutal frankness noted the manifold ills to which all people are prey: sickness, decrepitude, death, natural catastrophe, and slander among them. Fully cognizant of the level of destruction that ill luck, bad timing, or vengeful powers can wreak upon the innocent, the thinkers discussed in these pages advised followers to devise and adhere to programs and practices that promised a fair chance of shielding people, as much as humanly possible, form the worst slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Each person, they said, can learn to give and take pleasure, despite the calamities that beset ordinary lives. In addition, those already favored by fortune may learn how to magnify their blessings. The closest counterpart to the modern tropes linking autonomy to pleasure is the continual profession by Chinese elites of their determination to avoid enslavement to other people and things. This admirable clarity about life’s constraints—so greatly at odds with American positive thinking—precludes mindless optimism. In consequence, no writings in classical Chinese, so far as I know, denote or connote ‘happiness’ either in its older Western sense of ‘favored by fortune’ or in its modern connotation of ‘a free state of blissful autonomy.’ The thinkers reviewed in this book would mock the fond hope that one can ‘stumble upon happiness.’” — Michael Nylan, The Chinese Pleasure Book (Zone Books, 2018)

Recommended

• Annas, Julia. The Morality of Happiness (Oxford University Press, 1993).
• Bortolotti, Lisa, ed. Philosophy and Happiness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
• Davies, William. The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015).
• Feldman, Fred. What Is This Thing Called Happiness? (Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Griffin, James. Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Clarendon Press, 1986).
• Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Haybron, Daniel M. Happiness: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Daniel Haybron, “Happiness,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/happiness/.  
• Kahneman, D., E. Diener and N. Schwarz, eds. Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1999).
• Lane, Robert E. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000).
• Lobel, Diana. Philosophies of Happiness: A Comparative Introduction to the Flourishing Life (Columbia University Press, 2017).
• Noddings, Nel. Happiness and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Sumner, L.W. Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1996).
• Wallwork, Ernest. Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991).

This post is freely available for viewing or download (as a pdf doc.) at my Academia site.

Etiquette, good manners, and social norms

   

It would be tedious and perhaps depressing to narrate the myriad instances of rudeness, inconsiderateness, and generally ill-mannered behavior that one comes across in daily life, at least in this country, and at least where we live. Of course, when people observe basic social norms, including norms of politeness and consideration, such behavior is unremarkable because expected and more or less routine, on the order of a secular ritual. It is only transgressions of norms of “civility” and good manners that remind us of the need and value of such things, their disappearance or decline prompting us to reflect on social and cultural order more generally. My wife and I find ourselves, nonetheless, sharing stories of these violations and the apparent corrosion of basic behavioral norms every time we venture outside the house (perhaps that makes us feel better about ourselves, varnishing our self-mages if you will). I often wonder if our observations and complaints are more than mere anecdotal evidence, perhaps attributable to us being in our mid-sixties, verging—charitably speaking—on being crotchety old folks that are the staple if not stereotypes of the sit-coms and movies of our generation. I do not doubt there are causal pathways and feedback loops that operate in the larger society involving mass and social media, including the disturbing behavior of an increasing proportion of politicians and public officials at all levels of politics. But that is a topic for another day and perhaps too obvious in cause and consequence to warrant further attention. And I’d rather not share the little things I try to do to by way of putting my finger in the proverbial dike (I may at the same time fantasize teaching the other person a lesson, or delivering a swift punch to the face, but the better side of me typically triumphs, at least as long as I’m sober), as these actions are not very imaginative or unusual but simply reflect the manner of my upbringing, including attendance at a Catholic school. All of that was of course reinforced in various social settings and circumstances (by our neighbors, my parents’ friends, and so forth).

   

By way of aiding our reflections on such things, I unreservedly recommend Amy Olberding’s book, The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2019). Incidentally, it was from the late Professor Herbert Fingarette (while a teaching assistant in the 1980s for his introductory undergraduate course on Asian philosophies) that I first learned to appreciate the “wrong of rudeness,” in particular, from a title Professor Olberding lists in her “works cited,” Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (Harper Torchbooks, 1972). My “study guide” for Confucianism has some basic concepts introduced and discussed that may spark your interest as well (it is found under ‘teaching documents’ on my Academia page).

Capitalist Ethos and Imperatives Corrupt Liberal and Democratic Education

Jacob Lawrence, The Library (1978)

Prelude

Literacy in the U.S.

• Nationwide, on average, 79% of U.S. adults are literate in 2022.
• 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022.
• 54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level.

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“In 1789 and for long afterward, in France and elsewhere, a single word often sufficed to explain the origins of the French Revolution: books. Just days after the fall of the Bastille, the radical journalist and politician Bertrand Barère wrote, ‘Books did it all. Books created opinion, books brought enlightenment down into all classes of society, books destroyed fanaticism and overthrew the prejudices that had subjugated us.’ Even counterrevolutionaries who saw the Revolution as a catastrophe agreed with Barère as to its cause: it was books or, sometimes, ‘philosophy’—by which they meant the great movement of ideas we now call the Enlightenment.

No serious historian today would attribute this kind of power to books alone. We recognize that the French Revolution occurred for many reasons. But no serious historian today would discount the importance of books either. This revolution, one of the greatest in history, did not just replace one king with another. It attempted to establish an entirely new regime, grounded in principles that authors had widely discussed before 1789: equality before the law, the sovereignty of the nation, religious toleration, the ‘rights of man.’ Books mattered.”—David A. Bell, “From Readers to Revolutionaries,” The New York Review of Books, June 27, 2019

What follows below is from an article “on the working class and the meaning of education,” Kenan Malik’s column in the Observer last month (31 July): “If education is all about getting a job, the humanities are left just to the rich.” It so happens that there is an equally cogent and compelling review essay at Jacobin by Kieron Monks on a new biography on C.L.R. James that in several respects complements Malik’s piece: “C. L. R. James loved seeing workers take ownership of culture that was thought to belong to their betters. He believed in the creative talents of workers, just as he believed in their power to secure their own liberation without direction from above.” In Monks’ words, James

“took satisfaction from seeing the proletariat take ownership of cultural forms thought to belong to their betters, from West Indian steel bands playing Rimsky-Korsakov to young cricketers from the barrack yards beating the English at their own game. James believed in the creative talents of the working classes just as he believed in their power to secure their own liberation without direction from above, a view that informed his rejection of Stalinism and the Communist Party. He idealized the direct democracy of ancient Greece as the most perfect system. [….]

And now Malik:

‘We rented a garret, for which we paid (I think) 25s a year, bought a few second-hand forms and desks, borrowed a few chairs from the people in the house, bought a shilling’s worth of coals… and started our college.’

So remembered Joseph Greenwood, a cloth cutter in a West Yorkshire mill, about how, in 1860, he helped set up Culloden College, one of hundreds of working-class mutual improvement societies in 19th-century Britain. “We had no men of position or education connected with us,” he added, “but several of the students who had made special study of some particular subject were appointed teachers, so that the teacher of one class might be a pupil in another.”

Greenwood’s story is one of many told by Jonathan Rose in his classic The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, a magnificent history of the struggles of working people to educate themselves, from early autodidactism to the Workers’ Educational Association. For those within this tradition the significance of education was not simply in providing the means to a better job but in allowing for new ways of thinking.

‘Books to me became symbols of social revolution,’ observed James Clunie, a house painter who became the Labour MP for Dunfermline in the 1950s. ‘The miner was no longer the “hewer of wood and the drawer of water” but became … a leader in his own right, advocate, writer, the equal of men.’ By the time that Rose published his book in 2001, that tradition had largely ebbed away. And, in the two decades since, so has the sense of education as a means of expanding one’s mind.

Last week, Roehampton University, in south-west London, confirmed that it is going to fire and rehire half its academic workforce and sack at least 65. Nineteen courses, including classics and anthropology, are likely to be closed. It wants to concentrate more on ‘career-focused’ learning. It is the latest in a series of cuts to the humanities made by British universities, from languages at Aston to English literature at Sheffield Hallam. These cuts mark a transformation in the role of universities that is rooted in three trends: the introduction of the market into higher education; a view of students as consumers; and an instrumental attitude to knowledge.

The 1963 Robbins report into British higher education argued for expansion of universities on the grounds that learning was a good in itself. ‘The search for truth is an essential function of the institutions of higher education,’ it observed, ‘and the process of education is itself most vital when it partakes in the nature of discovery.’ The 2010 Browne report on the funding of higher education took a very different approach, viewing the significance of universities as primarily economic. ‘Higher education matters,’ it insisted, because it allows students to find employment with ‘higher wages and better job satisfaction’ and ‘helps produce economic growth.’

The utilitarian view of education is often presented as a means of advancing working-class students by training them for the job market. What it actually does is tell working-class students to study whatever best fits them for their station in life. So, philosophy, history and literature increasingly become the playthings of the rich and privileged.

There is another way, too, in which the relationship between the working class and education has changed. A report last week from the think-tank the IPPR revealed the paucity of diversity among MPs, a subject of much debate recently. The IPPR says there is a 5% ‘representation gap’ on ethnicity – 10% of MPs have a minority background compared to 15% of the general populace. For women, the gap between prevalence in the population and in parliament is 17% and for the working class it is 27%. The biggest gap, however, comes with education – 86% of MPs have been to university compared to 34% of the population at large. The cleavage between voters and those who govern them is expressed through the class divide but even more so through the education gap. The proportion of women and minority MPs has increased over the past 30 years while that of working-class MPs has fallen dramatically. In the 1987-92 parliament, 28% of Labour MPs had a manufacturing, manual or unskilled job before entering parliament. By 2010, that was 10%, rising to 13% for the 2019 intake. For Tories, unsurprisingly, the figure was consistently below 5% and fell to just 1% in 2019.

Part of the reason for the decline in working-class MPs is that the institutions that gave workers a public platform, in particular trade unions, have waned. The RMT’s Mick Lynch, and his success in defending workers’ rights, has caught the public imagination. Fifty years ago, there were many Mick Lynches because the working class was more central to political life.

At the same time, education has become a marker of social difference in a novel way. As Western societies have become more technocratic, so there has developed, in the words of the political scientist David Runciman, ‘a new class of experts, for whom education is a prerequisite of entry into the elite’ – bankers, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, pundits, academics. The real educational divide is not ‘between knowledge and ignorance’ but ‘a clash between one world view and another.’ So, education has become a marker of the Brexit divide.

All this has led some to claim education, not class, is Britain’s real political divide. It isn’t. Education is, rather, both one of the most significant expressions of the class divide and a means of obscuring it. ‘If there is one man in the world who needs knowledge,’ wrote the Durham collier Jack Lawson in 1932, ‘it is he who does the world’s most needful work and gets the least return.’ That is as true today as it was 90 years ago.”

Relevant Bibliographies

• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Paulo Freire: A Reading Guide
• C.L.R. James: Marxist Humanist and Afro-Trinidadian Socialist
• The History, Theory and Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
• The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy, and Law
• Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity
• Progressive Philosophy of Education and Pedagogical Practices
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

Sherry F. Colb 1966-2022 — In Memoriam

I routinely check out the blog posts at Dorf on Law, and this morning I came across something completely unexpected (although her illness was known to others) and heartbreaking news: Professor Dorf’s “co-blogger, co-author, colleague, best friend, and wife for over 31 years—died this morning.” Here is the notice at Cornell Law School where Sherry F. Colb was the C.S. Wong Professor of Law. In the words of Bridget Crawford at The Faculty Lounge, “Professor Colb will be missed by so many. May her memory be a blessing.” Speaking for myself and on behalf of my co-bloggers, we offer our deep condolences to Michael C. Dorf and his family.

Update: For links to one of Professor Colb’s books as well as her work available online, please see here and here at Larry Solum’s Legal Theory blog.

Morally and Politically Responsible Rhetoric: how does reason persuade?

       

Arguments are effective as weapons only if they are logically cogent, and if they are so they reveal connexions, the disclosure of which is not the less necessary to the discovery of truth for being also handy in the discomfiture of opponent. — Gilbert Ryle (qtd. in Garver below)

The title of my latest bibliography is (yes, it’s a mouthful) “Toward Assessing the Apparent Imperatives and Possible Constraints of Digital Media and Artificial Intelligence (AI): communication, speech, and rhetoric in a fragile technocratic capitalist and constitutional democracy.” Whenever I compose these lists, I try to read a substantial amount of what appears by my lights to be the crème-de-la-crème of the literature in English. Hence this quote from Eugene Garver’s indispensable work, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (University of Chicago Press, 1994):

“Reasoning does not automatically persuade, yet, if artful rhetoric [which speaks to or implies character] is argumentative, nothing but reason persuades.”

As Garver elsewhere explains, it is “obvious why character or ēthos persuades: the end of rhetoric is belief or trust, and belief and trust attach primarily to people whom we trust, and only derivatively to propositions which we believe.”

Garver now states something which I suspect rubs more than a few professional philosophers the wrong way insofar as they hope or believe that sound, valid, or even quite plausible (i.e., coherent or well-formed) arguments should have some corresponding measure of persuasive capacity (I am not saying they fail to distinguish valid or sound arguments from persuasive ones, only that there is a tendency to think the former has some necessary connection to the latter):

“There is no reason to expect a correlation between degrees of persuasiveness and degrees of validity or coherence, or any other strictly logical value, as there is for ēthos and pathos [emotion or passion, for Aristotle, with regard to emotions in the Rhetoric, did not refer to any or all emotions but certain emotions in particular].”

       

There is of course more to this argument but suffice here to say that perhaps philosophers who profess belief in the values and purposes intrinsic to democracy (which has of late exposed its weaknesses and fragility in this country), especially those keenly interested in moral psychology and ethics, “public reason” (John Dewey, John Rawls, Gerald Gaus, Amartya Sen, et al.) and the various forms of communication in a—participatory, deliberative and representative—democracy, will come to appreciate and thus help cultivate the possibilities for and the various fora of morally and politically responsible public rhetoric.

       

Democracy and Digital Technology

       

I’ve put together a short reading list that speaks to questions that arise from “democracy and digital technology” (democracy in theory and practice, and in participatory, deliberative, and representative modes, all of which are essential to ‘open democracy’ in Landemore’s sense). It is intended to be part of a forthcoming larger list that will include material on “artificial intelligence” (AI) while widening the scope to address issues that arise within a democratic society that in significant and often insidious ways is malformed by capitalist political economy (as evidenced in our earlier post on Zephyr Teachout’s NYRB article). It will also contain works more philosophically and ethically oriented (reflecting my critique—some of which is here—of the many extravagant claims often made on behalf of AI):

• Aaker, Jennifer and Andy Smith (with Carlye Adler) The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
• Allan, Stuart. Online News: Journalism and the Internet (Open University Press, 2006).
• Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica. Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2015).
• Bennett, W. Lance and Alexandra Segerberg. The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Bernholz, Lucy, Hélène Landemore, and Rob Reich, eds. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
• Bimber, Bruce. Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Boler, Megan, ed. Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (MIT Press, 2008).
• Coleman, Stephen and Jay G. Blumler. The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice, and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Cowhey, Peter F. and Jonathan D. Aronson. Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets: The Political Economy of Innovation (MIT Press, 2009).
• Cram, Ian. Liberal Democracy, Law and the Citizen Speaker: Regulating Online Speech (Hart Publishing, 2022). 
• Deibert, Ronald, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, eds. Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008).
• Deibert, Ronald, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, eds. Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2010).
• Ess, Charles. Digital Media Ethics (Polity Press, 2nd ed., 2014).
• Fenton, Natalie, ed. New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age. (Sage Publications, 2010).
• Franda, Marcus. China and India Online: The Politics of Information Technology in the World’s Largest Nations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
• Gerbaudo, Paolo. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (Pluto Press, 2012).
• Henry, Neil. Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media (University of California Press, 2007).
• Hindman, Matthew. The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2009).
• Howard, Philip N. and Muzammil M. Hussain. Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Lessing, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (Penguin Press, 2004).
• Lynch, Michael Patrick. The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data (Liveright Publishing, 2016).
• Mandiberg, Michael, ed. The Social Media Reader (New York University Press, 2012).
• McCaughey, Martha and Michael D. Ayers, eds. Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2003).
• Murthy, Dhiraj. Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age (Polity Press, 2013).
• O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Broadway Books, 2016).
• O’Neil, Onora. A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
• Packard, Ashley. Digital Media Law (Blackwell, 2010).
• Papacharissi, Zizi A. A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Polity Press, 2010).
• Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015).
• Persily, Nathaniel and Joshua A. Tucker, eds. Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• Pickard, Victor. Democracy without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Solove, Daniel J. The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (New York University Press, 2004).
• Smith, Justin E. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning (Princeton University Press, 2022).
• Teachout, Zephyr. “The Boss Will See You Know,” The New York Review of Books, August 18, 2022. [This is a review of four books about digital surveillance, tracking, and performance monitoring of millions of workers in an affluent capitalist but deeply inegalitarian society.]
• Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (MIT Press, 2005).
• Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011).
• Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Books, 2016.
• van de Donk, Wim, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, and Dieter Rucht, eds. Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and Social Movements (Routledge, 2004).
• Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press, 2009).
• Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019).

Please note: relevant bibliographies are appended to our prior post.

Digital Surveillance, Tracking, and Performance Monitoring of Workers in the U.S.

The following is from selected parts of Zephyr Teachout’s “The Boss Will See You Now” (New York Review of Books, Aug. 18, 2022), a review essay of four recent titles about digital surveillance, tracking, and performance monitoring of millions of workers in an affluent capitalist and deeply inegalitarian society (conditions that amount to what Elizabeth Anderson terms ‘private government’).

With wholly atomized workers, discouraged from connecting with one another but forced to offer a full, private portrait of themselves to their bosses, I cannot imagine a democracy.

*          *          *

[….] “As it happened, the 1980s and 1990s were a major turning point in surveillance, the period when companies went on their first buying sprees for electronic performance-monitoring. In 1987 approximately six million workers were watched in some kind of mediated way, generally a video camera or audio recorder; by 1994, roughly one in seven American workers, about 20 million, was being electronically tracked at work. The numbers steadily increased from there. When videotape technology was supplanted by digital devices that could scan multiple locations at once, the cameras first installed to protect businesses from theft shifted their insatiable gaze from the merchandise to the workers.

The second big turning point in electronic performance-monitoring is happening right now. It’s driven by wearable tech, artificial intelligence, and Covid. Corporations’ use of surveillance software increased by 50 percent in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, according to some estimates, and has continued to grow.

This new tracking technology is ubiquitous and intrusive. Companies track for security, for efficiency, and because they can. They inspect and preserve and analyze movements, conversations, social connections, and affect. If the first surveillance expansion was a territorial grab, asserting authority over the whole person at work, the second is like fracking the land. It is changing the structural composition of how humans relate to one another and to themselves.

Some long-haul truckers have to drive a fifty-foot flatbed truck six hundred miles a day with a video camera staring them down the entire time, watching their eyes, their knuckles, their twitches, their whistles, their neck movements. Imagine living in front of that nosy boss-face camera for months on end as it scans your cab, which serves as your home most of the time. On one of many angry Reddit forums about driver-facing cameras, a trucker wrote that he’d put up with one only ‘if the company owner gives me a 24/7 unrestricted stream in to his house.’ ‘Those few hundred miles a day is the only time I completely have to myself and I feel as if it is being tainted,’ added another. ‘I just want to pick my nose and scratch my balls in peace man.’ A bus driver described the human desire to ‘pull a weird face or talk to yourself or sing along with a song…. I could feel how much less cortisol was flowing through my body in my second job where the buses were older and did not have cameras inside. It makes you unhealthy and run down.’

Employers read employees’ e-mails, track their Internet use, and listen to their conversations. Nurses and warehouse workers are forced to wear ID badges, wristbands, or clothing with chips that track their movements, measuring steps and comparing them to coworkers’ and the steps taken yesterday. The wristbands that now commonly encircle your skin, caressing your median nerve, might in the future be used to send signals back to you or your employer, measuring how many minutes you spend in the bathroom. Amazon, which minutely tracks every moment of a warehouse worker’s activity, every pause and conversation, has a patent for a wristband that would, the Times reported, ‘emit ultrasonic sound pulses and radio transmissions to track where an employee’s hands were in relation to inventory bins’ and then vibrate to steer the worker toward the correct bin. A ‘SmartCap’ used in trucking monitors brainwaves for weariness.

Off-the-shelf human resources software can monitor workers’ tone of voice. One major firm, Cogito, touts its product as ‘the AI-informed coach [that] augments humans through live, in-call voice analysis and feedback.’ While workers are making fifteen dollars an hour fielding angry consumer complaints in a cubicle, they must pay heed to a pop-up screen that starts flashing if they talk too fast, if there is overlap between their voice and the customer’s voice, or if a pause is too long. ‘Empathy at scale,’ the company boasts.

In one sense, intimately tracking behavior is old news: the business model of tech companies like Facebook and Google, after all, relies on tracking users on- and off-site. The commodification of data is in its third decade. But surveillance and automatic management at work are different. Workers can’t opt out without losing their jobs: you can’t turn off the camera in the truck if doing so goes against company policy; you can’t rip the recording device off your ID card. And worker surveillance comes with a powerful implicit threat: if the company notices too much fatigue, you might get overlooked for a promotion. If it overhears something it doesn’t like, you could get fired.

The political implications of ubiquitous employment surveillance are monumental. While bosses always listened in on worker conversations, they could only listen rarely—anything more was logistically impossible. Not now. Employees have to assume that everything they say can be recorded. What does it mean when all the words, and the tone of those words, might be replayed? Whispering has lost its power.

In many cases, worker surveillance is installed for ostensible safety reasons, like the thermal cameras installed to protect customers and coworkers from a worker who has a fever. But it is not, it turns out, good for our well-being. Electronic surveillance puts the body of the tracked person in a state of perpetual hypervigilance, which is particularly bad for health—and worse when accompanied by powerlessness. Employees who know they are being monitored can become anxious, worn down, extremely tense, and angry. Monitoring causes a release of stress chemicals and keeps them flowing, which can aggravate heart problems. It can lead to mood disturbances, hyperventilation, and depression. Business professors from Cornell and McMaster Universities recently conducted a survey of electronic monitoring in call centers and showed that the stress it caused was as great as the stress caused by abusive customers. Workers felt that monitoring was used for discipline, not improvement, and that the expectations were unreasonable and the use of monitoring unfair. They preferred a human boss to an ever-present robot spy with the power to affect their paychecks.

Is it any surprise that truckers’ mental health is suffering? Or that call center employees are breaking down? Truckers and call center workers report a kind of destabilizing fog, a constant layer of uncertainty and paranoia: which hand gesture, which bathroom break, which conversation was it that caused me to lose that bonus? ‘I know we’re on a job, but, I mean, I’m afraid to scratch my nose,’ an Amazon driver told Insider for a story about the company’s driver-facing cameras. She didn’t share her name for fear of reprisal. [….]

All of this is demoralizing and dystopian, but what does it have to do with democracy? Elizabeth Anderson’s lively and persuasive 2017 book, Private Government, offers a partial answer. Anderson, a political philosopher at the University of Michigan, shakes the reader by the shoulders to get us out of the strange rigidity that pervades public discussion of government. Employment is a form of government, she argues, one that is far more relevant and immediate for most people than the Washington, D.C., kind.

A powerful company like Amazon, for instance, sets its own terms of employment—and in so doing impacts those of UPS drivers and the broader logistics industry. Private employers with industry-wide influence have coercive power—what Anderson calls governing power. Private government, personified by private guilds or by state-sanctioned economic monopolies in soap, salt, and leather, was the central target of intellectuals and activists like John Locke and the Levellers. Anderson sees in Locke, Adam Smith, and others a belief that the arbitrary power to debase and discipline is a threat to a free society, wherever it appears, and that public, accountable government should protect against private tyranny.

Many modern ‘thinkers and politicians,’ she argues, are ‘like those patients who cannot perceive one-half of their bodies:’ they ‘cannot perceive half of the economy: they cannot perceive the half that takes place beyond the market, after the employment contract is accepted.’ As a result, companies are generally treated as wholly private. Many private-sector workers, Anderson writes, live under ‘dictatorships in their work lives. Usually, those dictatorships have the legal authority to regulate workers’ off-hour lives as well—their political activities, speech, choice of sexual partner, use of recreational drugs, alcohol, smoking, and exercise.’

For her, service workers who clock out, or technicians and realtors and cooks who seem endowed with substantial freedoms, are burdened by a legal system that allows corporations to fire a worker based on off-the-clock activity. The speech rights of workers are practically nonexistent except as they explicitly relate to labor organizing, which, Anderson argues, is effectively a dead letter these days because of the difficulty of enforcement and the fear of challenging the boss’s tactics.

How did things get so bad? Anderson believes the root issues that enabled the current dystopian workplace go back generations. When the Industrial Revolution shifted the ‘primary site of paid work from the household to the factory,’ it imported the long tradition of wholly arbitrary power within the household, in which children did not have freedom vis-à-vis their parents, and wives had limited freedom vis-à-vis their spouses. The Industrial Revolution could have provided an escape from the private tyrannies of home life, but instead it replicated them. During the heyday of the Ford Motor Company, its Sociological Department began inspecting workers’ homes. Anderson writes: ‘Workers were eligible for Ford’s famous $5 daily wage only if they kept their homes clean, ate diets deemed healthy, abstained from drinking, used the bathtub appropriately, did not take in boarders, avoided spending too much on foreign relatives, and were assimilated to American cultural norms.’

Anderson points out that while Apple does not visit people’s homes today, it does require retail workers to open their bags for inspections before coming into work. We take this for granted, she notes, but should we? Nearly half of Americans have undergone a suspicion-less drug test. And many workers have no protection from getting fired for what they say on social media. To those who claim the workplace isn’t government because you can quit, Anderson retorts, ‘This is like saying Mussolini wasn’t a dictator, because Italians could emigrate.’

Anderson isn’t focused on surveillance, but her work suggests two things. First, that to address the constant spying, we should focus on power, not just the technology. Labor rights and antitrust enforcement must be first-level responses to the current—and worsening—structures of power. Second, we should treat employer surveillance as we do any governmental surveillance—in other words, with deep suspicion. It is a truism that governmental surveillance chills speech and debate and erodes the public sphere; once we can perceive the workplace as a site of government, we can perhaps build a political movement for greater freedom in the places where working Americans spend most of their waking hours.

To make sense of the reality we are in, we need to be able to talk to one another without fear of our conversations being used against us. The private conversations among workers—and friendships, debates, questions—are part of the cohesion and connection that enables not just labor organizing but public life. When everything we say is being listened to—especially by a smaller and more powerful cadre of employers—it can become easier not to speak. This is not unlike the political totalitarianism that Hannah Arendt warned against, where the state aims to disintegrate both the private and the public by submerging the private into the public and then controlling the public. The logical conclusion of workplace surveillance is that the private sphere ceases to exist at home because it ceases to exist at work, where visibility into the worker’s life is unrestrained. [….]

It is no coincidence that routine work surveillance followed closely on the heels of the Reagan antitrust revolution and the collapse of private sector unionization. Nothing except unionization or new laws would stop an employer from taking all the data it is gathering from sensors and recordings and using them to more precisely adjust wages, until each worker gets the lowest wage at which they are willing to work, and all workers live in fear of retaliation. This is no more sci-fi than Facebook and Google serving users individualized content and ads designed to keep us on their services.

Tracking technology may be marketed as tools to protect people, but will end up being used to identify with precision how little each worker is willing to make. It will be used to depress wages and also kill the camaraderie that precedes unionization by making it harder to connect with other workers, poisoning the community that enables democratic debate. It will be used to disrupt solidarity by paying workers differently. And it will lead to anxiety and fear permeating more workplaces, as the fog of not knowing why you got a bonus or demotion shapes the day.

This matters because work is not an afterthought for democratic society; the relationships built at work are an essential building block. With wholly atomized workers, discouraged from connecting with one another but forced to offer a full, private portrait of themselves to their bosses, I cannot imagine a democracy.”

 Relevant Bibliographies

• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice
• Human Rights
• The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy, and Law
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

 Image found here.

The attempted murder of Salman Rushdie and generalizations about "Islam"

Reflections on the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie as it relates to widespread perceptions and characterizations of, and generalizations about, “Islam.” See too this statement from Suzanne Nossel of PEN America. Update: Nossel’s opinion piece for The Guardian.

Perhaps not surprisingly, more than a few folks on the internet are using the occasion of the assault/attempted murder on Salman Rushdie in New York to spread or reinforce rash or hasty generalizations (and the informal fallacy of ‘converse accident’) that serve to confirm their ignorance of Islamic traditions and embolden their biases and prejudices about “Islam” while also indulging in a kind of virtue signaling that brings virtual applause in its wake. These generalizations concern “Islam” as a religious worldview and philosophy as well as those who are self-described or identified as Muslims. There is nothing peculiar about Islam vis-à-vis other religious worldviews and ideologies or other secular worldviews and ideologies that stands apart in this case provided we understand that individuals, groups, movements, sects, authorities, institutions, and so forth will often invoke their worldviews or ideologies to motivate, justify or excuse actions that we generally hold to be immoral and criminal. In other words, these ideologies and worldviews can be used for good or ill, rightly or wrongly, for peace or violence, and so forth: there is a spectrum of reasonable and rational rationalizations at one end, and irrational, immoral, or perverse rationalizations at the other end (‘rationalization’ in a pejorative sense).

To be sure, some ideologies are morally problematic ab initio, so to speak, such as fascism or Stalinism or Maoism. At other times and places, religious and secular worldviews (examples of the former: Poland, India, the U.S., Sri Lanka, Myanmar, etc.; …of the latter: Party-State Socialism /Communism, Nazism, etc.) become paired with forms of nationalism, and in such cases we find religious beliefs and identity harnessed toward non-religious, non-spiritual and immoral or unethical goals or ends (and thus we have a manifest contradiction between means and ends, wherein there is a failure to recognize the choice of means can distort or destroy otherwise justifiable ends). And of course in the history of religious and secular worldviews and ideologies, we are likely to find occasional currents, periods, places, etc. in which what occurs in the real world, on the ground as we say, bears little or no relation to a normative model or picture of the principal beliefs and values and virtues found in these worldviews. It is simply unavailing and uninformative to refer to these ideologies and worldview in toto without the necessary distinctions and specifications that history and the social sciences can provide alongside the relevant immediate conditions and circumstances that allow us to make sense of an action or event. In short, there is nothing significant or important or meaningful we can infer about “Islam” as such from the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. And nothing I have said diminishes our horror and disgust over this egregiously immoral and criminal act of personal violence.

Alas, fatwas have become a fairly indiscriminate legal category, with opposing religious authorities and jurists formulating fatwas that suit their interests and the majority of Muslims are left to their own devices, so to speak, when it comes to acknowledging or assessing their validity or significance. The Wikipedia entry has some excellent discussion of this in the latter half of the article. The young men (and occasionally women) that resort to these acts of violence around the world suggest, it seems to me, that this is not, strictly speaking or peculiarly, about religion, but about their sense of individual and collective identity, moral psychology, recognition and self-worth, in which case one can find justification, warrant, rationalizations, what have you in any number of ideologies and worldviews, secular or religious, political or nationalist, for such acts of violence (hence the many mass shootings in this country). On occasion of course, ideologies and worldviews appear to be altogether missing from the motivational structure, in which case one looks closer to home and upbringing for causal variables (some grievance, slight, disrespect, abuse, and so forth). This is not to say some fatwa or prospect of reward played no role whatsoever in the attempted murder of Rushdie, but we need to account for why some individuals choose to go this route while many others would never even consider doing such things: what sorts of individuals are readily moved to the tipping point?

*     *     *

As for fatwas [fatāwā] (an incredibly complex topic in Islamic jurisprudence), this snippet from the Wikipedia entry on same is informative:

[….] “In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini used proclamations and fatwas to introduce and legitimize a number of institutions, including the Council of the Islamic Revolution and the Iranian Parliament. Khomeini’s most publicized fatwa was the proclamation condemning Salman Rushdie to death for his novel The Satanic Verses. Khomeini himself did not call this proclamation a fatwa, and some scholars have argued that it did not qualify as one, since in Islamic legal theory only a court can decide whether an accused is guilty. However, after the proclamation was presented as a fatwa in Western press, this characterization was widely accepted by both its critics and its supporters, and the Rushdie Affair is credited with bringing the institution of fatwa to world attention. Together with later militant fatwas, it has contributed to the popular misconception of the fatwa as a religious death warrant.

Many militant and reform movements in modern times have disseminated fatwas issued by individuals who do not possess the qualifications traditionally required of a mufti. A famous example is the fatwa issued in 1998 by Osama bin Laden and four of his associates, proclaiming ‘jihad against Jews and Crusaders’ and calling for killing of American civilians. In addition to denouncing its content, many Islamic jurists stressed that bin Laden was not qualified to either issue a fatwa or declare a jihad. The Amman Message was a statement, signed in 2005 in Jordan by nearly 200 prominent Islamic jurists, which served as a ‘counter-fatwa’ against a widespread use of takfir (excommunication) by jihadist groups to justify jihad against rulers of Muslim-majority countries. The Amman Message recognized eight legitimate schools of Islamic law and prohibited declarations of apostasy against them. The statement also asserted that fatwas can be issued only by properly trained muftis, thereby seeking to delegitimize fatwas issued by militants who lack the requisite qualifications. Erroneous and sometimes bizarre fatwas issued by unqualified or eccentric individuals in recent times have sometimes given rise to complaints about a ‘chaos’ in the modern practice of ifta [to give an (often legal or religious) explanation].

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, a group of Middle Eastern Islamic scholars issued a fatwa permitting Muslims serving in the U.S. army to participate in military action against Muslim countries, in response to a query from a U.S. Army Muslim chaplain. This fatwa illustrated two increasingly widespread practices. First, it drew directly on the Quran and hadith without referencing the body of jurisprudence from any of the traditional schools of Islamic law. Secondly, questions from Western Muslims directed to muftis in Muslim-majority countries have become increasingly common, as about one-third of Muslims now live in Muslim-minority countries.

Institutions devoted specifically to issuing fatwas to Western Muslims have been established in the West, including the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA, founded in 1986) and the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR, founded in 1997). These organizations aim to provide fatwas that address the concerns of Muslim minorities, helping them to comply with sharia, while stressing compatibility of Islam with diverse modern contexts. The FCNA was founded with the goal of developing legal methodologies for adopting Islamic law to life in the West. The ECRF draws on all major schools of Sunni law as well as other traditional legal principles, such as concern for the public good, local custom, and the prevention of harm, to derive fatwas suitable for life in Europe. For example, a 2001 ECRF ruling allowed a woman who had converted to Islam to remain married without requiring her husband's conversion, based in part on the existence of European laws and customs under which women are guaranteed the freedom of religion. Rulings of this kind have been welcomed by some, but also criticized by others as being overly eclectic in legal methodology and having potential to negatively impact the interpretation of sharia in Muslim-majority countries.

The needs of Western Muslims have given rise to a new branch of Islamic jurisprudence which has been termed the jurisprudence of (Muslim) minorities (fiqh al-aqallīyāt). The term is believed to have been coined in a 1994 fatwa by Taha Jabir Alalwani, then the chairman of FCNA, which encouraged Muslim citizens to participate in American politics. This branch of jurisprudence has since been developed primarily, but not exclusively for Muslim minorities in the West.

[….] In the pre-modern era, most fatwas issued in response to private queries were read only by the petitioner. Early in the 20th century, the reformist Islamic scholar Rashid Rida responded to thousands of queries from around the Muslim world on a variety of social and political topics in the regular fatwa section of his Cairo-based journal Al-Manar. In the late 20th century, when the Grand Mufti of Egypt Sayyid Tantawy issued a fatwa allowing interest banking, the ruling was vigorously debated in the Egyptian press by both religious scholars and lay intellectuals.

In the internet age, a large number of websites has appeared offering fatwas to readers around the world. For example, IslamOnline publishes an archive of ‘live fatwa’ sessions, whose number approached a thousand by 2007, along with biographies of the muftis. Together with satellite television programs, radio shows and fatwa hotlines offering call-in fatwas, these sites have contributed to the rise of new forms of contemporary ifta. Unlike the concise or technical pre-modern fatwas, fatwas delivered through modern mass media often seek to be more expansive and accessible to the wide public.

Modern media have also facilitated cooperative forms of ifta. Networks of muftis are commonly engaged by fatwa websites, so that queries are distributed among the muftis in the network, who still act as individual jurisconsults. In other cases, Islamic jurists of different nationalities, schools of law, and sometimes even denominations (Sunni and Shia), coordinate to issue a joint fatwa, which is expected to command greater authority with the public than individual fatwas. The collective fatwa (sometimes called ijtihād jamāʿī, ‘collective legal interpretation’) is a new historical development, and it is found in such settings as boards of Islamic financial institutions and international fatwa councils.

As the role of fatwas on strictly legal issues has declined in modern times, there has been a relative increase in the proportion of fatwas dealing with rituals and further expansion in purely religious areas like Quranic exegesis, creed, and Sufism. Modern fatwas also deal with a wide variety of other topics, including insurance, sex-change operations, moon exploration, beer drinking, abortion in the case of fatal foetal abnormalities, or males and females sharing workplaces. Public ‘fatwa wars’ have reflected political controversies in the Muslim world, from anti-colonial struggles to the Gulf War of the 1990s, when muftis in some countries issued fatwas supporting collaboration with the US-led coalition, while muftis from other countries endorsed the Iraqi call for jihad against the US and its collaborators. In the private sphere, some muftis have begun to resemble social workers, giving advice on various personal issues encountered in everyday life.

The social profile of the fatwa petitioner has also undergone considerable changes. Owing to the rise of universal education, those who solicit fatwas have become increasingly educated, which has transformed the traditional mufti–mustafti relationship based on restricted literacy. The questioner is now also increasingly likely to be female, and in the modern world Muslim women tend to address muftis directly rather than conveying their query through a male relative as in the past. Since women now represent a significant proportion of students studying Islamic law and qualifying as muftiyas, their prominence in its interpretation is likely to rise. A fatwa hotline in the United Arab Emirates provides access to either male or female muftis, allowing women to request fatwas from female Islamic legal scholars.

The vast amount of fatwas produced in the modern world attests to the importance of Islamic authenticity to many Muslims. However, there is little research available to indicate to what extent Muslims acknowledge the authority of various fatwas and heed their rulings in real life. Rather than reflecting the actual conduct or opinions of Muslims, these fatwas may instead represent a collection of opinions on what Muslims ‘ought to think.’”

  *     *     *

Readers wanting to investigate or explore some of the relevant material brought up in this post might look at the terms “fiqh” and “Sharī‘ah” in my study guide for Islam as well as my essay on “Democracy and Islam” (the latter is a bit dated here and there), both of which are freely available (to read or download) on my Academia page. It also helps to be conversant in the cross-cultural and comparative study of worldviews (religious and secular), a subject I have broached several times over the years at this blog.

Relevant Bibliographies

• The Modern Arab World
• The Bedouin
• Modern Iran
• Islam, the Arts, and Aesthetic Experience
• Islam and Jurisprudence
• Islam and Muslims in the U.S.
• Islamic Studies
• The Prophet Muhammad
• The Qur’ān (Translations, Commentaries, Studies)
• Sufism
• Theology and Philosophy in Islamic Traditions

Abortion and the Judicial Role

The Supreme Court’s abortion decision exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of the judicial role and our system of government. First, the majority primarily relies on a case involving assisted suicide which says that liberty rights must be “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition” (Washington v. Glucksberg) and proceeds to devote page after page showing that abortion was a criminal offence at various stages of our history.

What this amateur foray into abortion history misses, as the majority well knows, is that the Court has specifically denied that rights must be deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition. In upholding same sex marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges, disagreed with the Glucksberg test and pointedly observed that “rights come not from ancient sources alone. They rise, too, from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.” See also Lawrence v. Texas (same sex relations constitutionally protected). Griswold v. Connecticut (right to use contraceptives constitutionally protected).

The Court says that the rights to use contraceptives, to engage in same sex relations, and to same sex marriage are not in danger because they do not involve pre-natal life. This is a puzzling claim. The majority claims to be neutral about fetal life and abortion. It is not at all clear how neutrality is compatible with the majority’s claim. More important, the deeply rooted language is out of the bag. Why would anyone believe the Justices would not trot it out again?

Judges are just referees, say the conservatives, not policymakers. And there the Court steps into outer darkness. I am reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche dictum: “To have a system is to lack integrity.” A system in which judges do not make policy decisions is either a prescription for outdated stupidity (e.g., giving excessive weight to a history of racism or sexism) or an occasion for cheating on the system. Take my word for it. Prominent areas of conservative cheating include cases involving the First, Second, and Eleventh amendments.

Moreover, the conservatives are excessively romantic about the legislative process. All too often legislative decisions are made because money talks. So far as I am aware, the judicial process proceeds without legalized bribery. And elections are often personality contests where voters cannot focus on single issues in ways that judges can.

Finally, the conservatives apparently believe that wise political judgment and partisan political preferences are the same thing. In the area of abortion, the liberals refer to the right of privacy, or the right of bodily autonomy, or a general liberty right. This allows liberals to formulate outcomes that are consistent with fundamental human needs.

One of the conservative responses tells it all: “Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like.” Really? Is there anyone who thinks that the liberals would create such rights? Of course not. Judges exercise judgment. They are not just calling balls and strikes. Judicial policy making is not foreign to the Constitution. Indeed, Justice Felix Frankfurter was closer to the mark “Five justices of the Supreme Court are molders of policy rather than impersonal vehicles of revealed truth.”

The fascist cult of Trump v. participatory, deliberative, and representative democracy (Addendum, Aug. 7)

   

We should not indulge in denial, nor deceive ourselves, in other words, we should not look away (i.e. deliberately ignore) from what is before our eyes and ears: the fascism of the cult of Trump is not going away anytime soon; a conclusion that is neither alarmist nor simply reflective of partisan hyperbole. If you believe otherwise, you are not paying sufficient attention. I am—or will be—quite happy to be proven wrong and welcome reasonable arguments that attempt to persuade me that I am indeed mistaken.

In early spring of last year I stated that the so-called Grand Old Party has morphed into a political party of imaginary and delusionary grievance, of crass and cartoonish schtick, of denial and desperation, of repugnance and regression, of illusion and irrationality, of empty gestures and vain cynicism, of authoritarianism and (actual and aspirational) fascism, of obscene wealth and amoral power, of sycophants and cults, of self-deception and phantasy, of white supremacy and narcissistic privilege, of Christian nationalism, a faux populism of bread and circuses that has failed to conceal, let alone contain, a degraded and debased political practice mired in a toxic dump of greed, corruption, and sleaze. It is a politics that lacks any meaningful disposition to truth and evidences no concern whatsoever for either Liberal constitutionalism or democracy. The anti-democratic and now nakedly fascist “Trump effect” shows few signs of going away, despite the surprising if not encouraging defeat in Kansas of the referendum proposal for a state constitutional amendment that would end protections for abortion. Recent primary results in Arizona and Michigan are disappointing for those of us hoping more Republicans would openly disavow the fascist cult of Trump. People still shrink back from characterizing Trump, his ideologues and many if not most of his followers as “fascist,” yet there is abundant evidence testifying to the aptness of this descriptive characterization, one piece of which follows:

“He has extolled the value of racial purity, is vehemently anti-immigration, has cultivated close ties with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and is a speaker at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC, in Dallas. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, 59, is widely criticized around the world for systematically dismantling his country’s nascent democracy during his 12 years in power — but that hasn’t stopped him from emerging as a darling of many on the right in America.

Former President Donald Trump and his onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon are also speaking at CPAC, America’s top conservative conference. And both are fans of Orbán’s. Trump endorsed Orbán in January, three months before he was re-elected to a fourth term, and Bannon called the Hungarian leader ‘Trump before Trump’ in a speech in Budapest in 2018.

While Trump was voted out, Orbán, the first European Union leader to speak out in support of Trump’s campaign in 2016, looks unassailable, with control over the media, the legislature and the judiciary in Hungary. Meanwhile, the fractured left-wing, centrist opposition is marginalized.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who has interviewed Orbán and hosted his show from Budapest for a week in 2021, describes Hungary as a ‘small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.’ In January Carlson released a documentary titled ‘Hungary vs. Soros: Fight for Civilization’ — a reference to George Soros, 91, the Hungarian-born Jewish businessman and philanthropist who has become a scapegoat for Orbán and his allies. One Hungarian writer, Balázs Gulyás, said that in praising Orbán, Carlson had depicted Hungary as a ‘conservative Disneyland.’

Ahead of this week’s conference, Trump released a picture of him and Orbán together. ‘Great spending time with my friend,’ Trump said in a press release. ‘We discussed many interesting topics — few people know as much about what is going on in the world today. We were also celebrating his great electoral victory in April.’” — Patrick Smith for NBC News today (Aug. 4, 2022)

   

Recommended Reading

• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, revised ed., 1991).
• Alford, Ryan. Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
• Auestad, Lene, ed. Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac Books, 2014).
• Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1994).
• Brudner, Alan. Constitutional Goods (Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Cagé, Julia. The Price of Democracy: How Money Shapes Politics and What to Do about It (Harvard University Press, 2020).
• Cassam, Quassim. Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Coady, C.A.J. Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
• Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded ed., 1970).
• Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (Yale University Press, 1993).
• Collins, Adela Yarbro. “The Book of Revelation,” in John J. Collins, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity (Continuum, 2000): 384-414.
• Dahl, Robert A. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (Yale University Press, 2^nd, 2003).
• Desai, Meghnad. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, 2002).
• Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction (Verso, new ed., 2007).
• Elster, Jon. Ch. 8, “Ideologies,” in Elster’s Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1985): 459-510.
• Fromm, Erich (Barbara Weinberger, tr. and Wolfgang Bonss, ed.) The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study (Harvard University Press, 1984).
• Glass, James M. Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995).
• Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2016).
• Greenberg, Karen J. Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, 2016).
• Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism (Routledge, 1991).
• Griffin, Roger. Fascism (Key Concepts in Political Theory) (Polity Press, 2018).
• Gruen, Arno. The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward an Understanding of Human Destructiveness (Grove Press, 1992).
• Harcourt, Edward, ed. Morality, Reflection and Ideology (Oxford University Press, 2000).
• Hasen, Richard L. Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (Yale University Press, 2020).
• Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
• Hirschman, Albert O. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).
• Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Jamieson, Dale. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Keane, John. Violence and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
• Larrain, Jorge. Marxism and Ideology (Macmillan Press, 1983).
• Lee, Bandy, ed. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, expanded ed., 2017).
• Lefebvre, Henri (John Moore, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 (Verso, 1991).
• Lefebvre, Henri (John Moore, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (Verso, 2002).
• Lefebvre, Henri (Gregory Elliott, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 3: From Modernity to Modernism (Verso, 2005).
• Lernoux, Penny. People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism (Viking Penguin, 1989).
• MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking Penguin, 2017).
• Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Marlin, Randall. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (Broadview Press, 2002).
• Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Anchor Books, 2017).
• McGinn, Bernard, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Vol. 2: Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture (Continuum, 2000).
• Piketty, Thomas (Arthur Goldhammer, trans.) Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
• Przeworski, Adam. Crises of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
• Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Seidel, Andrew L. The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American (Sterling, 2019).
• Stanley, Jason. How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press, 2015).
• Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works (Random House, 2018).
• Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
• Straub, Michael S. Madness is Civilization: When the Diagnosis was Social, 1948-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
• Taylor, Gabrielle. Deadly Vices (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Therborn, Göran. The Killing Fields of Inequality (Polity Press, 2013).
• Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton University Press, 1998).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).

   
Several relevant bibliographies (embedded links):

• After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice
• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing – A Reading Guide
• Beyond Punitive Liberal Capitalist Society
• Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education
• Constitutionalism
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Ecological and Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
• Elections and Voting
• Global Distributive Justice
• The Great Depression and the New Deal
• Toward Green Democratic Socialism
• Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice
• Housing
• Human Rights
• Immigration & Refugees: Ethics, Law, and Politics
• The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy and Law
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
• Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law
• Punishment and Prison
• Social Security and the Welfare State
• Sullied Sciences
• Utopian Imagination, Thought, and Praxis
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

   

Addendum

Please see, “‘Fight the Barbarians’: The MAGA Movement Lays Out a Warpath at CPAC”

By Tim Dickinson, for Rolling Stone, Aug. 6, 2022

First, my brief comment by way of an introduction, followed by highlights from the article.

These “dark, militant speeches” are not “thinly veiled calls for violence,” but the nakedly fascist rhetoric of those calling upon the Right to use violence against Democrats, whom they demonize in the kind of public rhetoric we find in incitement to genocide (which goes beyond ‘hate speech’) wherein in those one disagrees with, one’s political opponents, are characterized in Manichean (demonizing) and dehumanizing terms that place them beyond the pale as it were. This, to put it mildly, it is the anti-Liberal and anti-democratic rhetoric favored by fascists and authoritarians. It is an intensification and militarization of the insurrectionist language that preceded the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. And it is an exquisite exemplar of what psychologists term projection.*

• “Capitol Hill rioters [are] victims of a “Democratic Gulag.”
• “We are at war,” Bannon told the MAGA faithful. “We are in a political and ideological war.” Repeating the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, Bannon insisted that Joe Biden is an “illegitimate imposter.” Calling on Republicans to send “shock troops” to Washington, Bannon promised the crowd they had an opportunity to “shatter the Democratic party as a national political institution.” He alleged that the party has been overrun by “radical, cultural Marxists” and “groomers” who “want to destroy the Republic.” Bannon insisted the GOP must pursue absolute victory over “power-mad and lawless” Democrats, asserting: “There can be no half measures anymore.”
• Orbán — the Hungarian strongman fond of Nazi-style rhetoric against race mixing — received standing ovations for his stark address to the MAGA faithful on Thrusday. Orbán described European parliament and the federal government in Washington as “the two fronts in the battle being fought for Western civilization,” warning, “today, we hold neither of them, yet we need them both.” Orbán called on CPAC attendees and the far-right in Europe to forge a global movement. “We should unite our forces,” Orbán said, to “take back” Washington and Brussels.
• Ted Cruz … inveighed against what he called the “power hungry, abusive totalitarian nitwits” of the Biden administration and the Democratically controlled Congress. Cruz likened his service in the Senate to that of a gladiator: “It’s like the old Roman Colosseum where you slam on a breastplate and you grab a battle axe and you go fight the barbarians,” he said of his Democrat colleagues. “As they say in the military world,” Cruz continued, “it is a target-rich environment.”
• Cruz told the crowd, “We’re on the cusp of something extraordinary in this country … And each of you are the vanguard. You are the dangerous radicals. Like the men who signed the Declaration of Independence … like those who died at the Alamo, you are the courageous heroes,” he insisted, “fighting for liberty in our country.”
• [CPAC] welcomed to its stage Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist recently denounced as a hate extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center for his ties to “white nationalists, antigovernment extremists, members of the Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis.” Posobiec took his turn in the spotlight to promote the New Right (effectively the latest rebranding of the hateful “alt-right”). And he, too, painted the coming conflicts of the culture war in militaristic terms: “Are you ready for new ideas to actually take the fight to the front lines,” he asked, “because that’s where we live and we’re not stopping.”
• “We have an invasion at the border,” Kari Lake [the GOP nominee for governor in Arizona] insisted, referring to undocumented immigrants and refugees. Lake then vowed that, after being sworn in, she would mount a military response, even lacking approval from the Biden administration: “As soon as my hand comes off the Bible, we’re going to send the Arizona National Guard troops to the border,” Lake said. Insisting on the “sovereignty” of the states, she insisted: “We will take the fight to the federal government. We’re not going to be victims of what they’re doing to us.”
• The rhetoric of revolution and frontline confrontation went hand-in-hand with other speakers and presenters who cast the American left as demonic, evil, and destructive — in other words the kind of enemies who deserve to be dealt with harshly.
• In between speeches, CPAC promoted a documentary, hosted by chair Matt Schlapp, called The Culture Killers, which inveighs against a “great desecration” perpetrated by the left. ”Anything that’s good, anything that’s holy, anything that’s truthful is being attacked,” Schlapp insisted on video. The documentary describes America as “under siege from an enemy within,” with one voice insisting, over images of burning cars, “There is no end. These people will never stop, until you stop ’em.” 
• [Florida Sen. Rick Scott, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee] railed against Democrats as literally “evil” for pursuing an agenda he described as socialism.
• While damning the Democrats in terms that seemed to encourage political violence, CPAC speakers consistently minimized the actual political violence perpetrated by the MAGA movement on Jan. 6. Avowed “Christian nationalist” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for example, slammed Liz Cheney — chair of the committee investigating the Capitol insurrection — for pushing a “lie about Jan. 6.”
• [A] panel called “You’re Next: The Rise of the Democratic Gulag,” … presented Jan. 6 defendants not as alleged perpetrators of riot and insurrection, but as victims of a rigged judicial system.
• Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) … claimed that Jan 6. defendants have been the recipients of “Soviet-style justice” — alleging without evidence that prosecutors, defense attorneys, and federal judges have been “colluding” to secure predetermined convictions. The congressman insisted that “all of the institutions in the United States have been weaponized, not unlike the former Soviet Union” to create an “American Gulag.”
• [CPAC’s] … latest incarnation has become manifestly dangerous — more fascist than farce. It is holding up alleged perpetrators of political violence as martyrs. It is demonizing its domestic political opponents as diabolical “enemies within.” And it is giving MAGA supporters a militaristic frame for their charge to the “front lines” of America’s culture wars. In short it is playing with fire. But it’s the rest of us who may get burned.

* For brief definitions and more extensive introductions, see the term in Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds., Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (The American Psychoanalytic Association and Yale University Press, 1990): 149-150; as well as a more historically and theoretically oriented entry in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.), The Language of Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 1988 [Hogarth Press, 1973]): 349-355; and, relatedly, the term “projective identification” in Elizabeth Bott Spillius, et al., The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (based on A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought by R.D. Hinshelwood [1991]) (Routledge, 2011): 126-146.

Lots, Lotteries, and Sortition in Law & Politics

       

“There are two main questions we can ask ourselves with respect to the use of lotteries. First, under which conditions would they seem to be normatively allowed or prescribed, on grounds of individual rationality or social justice? Second, in which cases are lotteries actually used to make decisions and allocate tasks, resources and burdens? There is no reason, of course, to expect the answers to these questions to coincide. Hence we can generate two further questions. What explains the adoption of lotteries when normative arguments seem to point against them? What explains the non-adoption of lotteries in situations where they would seem to be normatively compelling? The last question is perhaps the most intriguing and instructive one. I shall argue that we have a strong reluctance to admit uncertainty and indeterminacy in human affairs. Rather than accept the limits of reason, we prefer the rituals of reason.” — Jon Elster, Solomonic Judgements: Studies in the limitations of rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1989): 36-37.

*          *          *

“Rigid application of some particular decision-making criterion to settle disputes might render adjudication less fraught with complexity and ambiguity. Depending on the criterion used, such application might even make the process of adjudication less partial. If the criterion is easy to apply, moreover, the costs of decision-making are likely to be reduced. One criterion which offers all of these qualities is random selection. Decision-making by lot is likely to be simple, objective, and cheap. ‘Cast lots and settle a quarrel, and so keep litigants apart’ (Proverbs 18: 18). Randomized decision-making will be, however, unreasoned. If a single argument rests at the heart of this book it is that, in law, faith in reason is sometimes maintained at too high a cost. The lottery, probably more than any other decision-making device, demands that this argument be accorded serious consideration.” — Neil Duxbury, Random Justice: On Lotteries and Legal Decision-Making (Oxford University Press, 1999): 175.

*          *          *

“Randomness is indistinguishable from complicated, undetected, and undetectable order; but order itself is indistinguishable from artful randomness.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Random House, 2010): 58.

*          *          *

As I noted in the comments to my syllabus that revolved largely around Athenian democracy in classical Greece, one of the topics prompted by that reading and research was “democratic rhetoric,” at least in its contemporary incarnation. I hope to compile a list for that subject soon. Meanwhile, I’ve completed another brief bibliography, once more, limited to twenty-five items (yet this list includes several journal articles), and likewise provoked by the aforementioned reading and research. With Professor of Law Neil Duxbury, I first became intrigued by this subject upon reading Jon Elster’s Solomonic Judgments: Studies in the Limitations of Rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1989), although it is also an important part of his later volume, Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens (Russell Sage Foundation, 1992).

       
Lots, Lotteries, and Sortition in Law and Politics: a very select bibliography

• Abramson, Jeffrey. We, the Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2000).
• Amar, Akhil Reed. “Lottery Voting: A Thought Experiment,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 1995: 193-204 (essay for Symposium on Voting Rights).
• Amar, Akhil Reed. “Choosing Representatives by Lottery Voting,” The Yale Law Journal, Notes, (1984) Vol. 93, 1283-1308.
• Barnett, Anthony and Peter Carty. The Athenian Option: Radical Reform for the House of Lords (Imprint Academic, revised ed., 2008).
• Bouricius, Terrill G. “Democracy Through Multi-Body Sortition: Athenian Lessons for the Modern Day,” Journal of Public Deliberation (2013) Vol. 9, Issue 1, Art. 11.
• Burnheim, John. Is Democracy Possible? The alternative to electoral politics (University of California Press, 1985).
• Callenbach, Ernest and Michael Phillips. A Citizen Legislature (Banyan Tree Books/Clear Glass, 1985).
• Carson, Lyn and Brian Martin. Random Selection in Politics (Praeger Publishers, 1999).
• Coote, Anna and Jo Lenaghan. Citizens’ Juries: Theory into Practice (Institute for Public Policy Research, 1997).
• Dowlen, Oliver. The Political Potential of Sortition: A Study of the Random Selection of Citizens for Public Office (Imprint Academic, 2008).
• Duxbury, Neil. Random Justice: On Lotteries and Legal Decision-Making (Oxford University Press, 1999).
• Elster, Jon. Solomonic Judgements: Studies in the Limitations of Rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
• Elster, Jon. Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens (Russell Sage Foundation, 1992).
• Gastil, John and Erik Olin Wright, eds. Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (Verso, 2019).
• Goodin, Robert E. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Goodwin, Barbara. Justice by Lottery (Imprint Academic, 2^nd, 2005).
• Hansen, Mogens Herman (J.A. Crook, trans.) The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Blackwell, 1991).
• Lafont, Cristina. “Deliberation, Participation, and Democratic Legitimacy: Should Deliberative Mini-publics Shape Public Policy?” The Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2015): 40-63.
• Landemore, Hélène. “Deliberation, Cognitive Diversity, and Democratic Inclusiveness: An epistemic argument for the random selection of representatives,” Synthese (2013) 190:1209–1231.
• Landemore, Hélène. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2013).
• Landemore, Hélène. Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2020).
• Landemore, Hélène and Jon Elster, eds. Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• Stone, Peter. The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision-Making (Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Stone, Peter, ed. Lotteries in Public Life: A Reader (Imprint Academic, 2011).
• Threlkeld, Simon. “Let Legislative Juries Decide Laws,” Dissident Voice, June 22, 2020.

How I am spending my summer “vacation” (and ‘Jack’ is not yet a ‘dull boy’)

This is one of the syllabi I’ve composed for myself this summer that touches on several areas of my research (e.g., democracy, law, moral psychology, virtues and vices, emotions, philosophy of mind and mental conflict ….). I’ve read some of these books in whole or part and am reading them again. I limited myself to 25 titles. I thought perhaps a few readers might be interested in this list.

One subject that has perked my interest of late is rhetoric, especially in an Aristotelian sense, both as it bears on democratic communication and discourse and insofar as it remains tethered to ethical or moral, logical and rational norms (hence when its function and appeal is not primarily emotional and when its arguments can be simultaneously sound and persuasive). Democratic rhetoric must be sensitive to the values, principles, and practices of democracy such that it should not be construed solely in instrumentalist terms, even if we remain, rightly, concerned about consequences. Democratic rhetoric can be crafted to suit its intended audience, which is not always “the people” simpliciter, but various “publics,” “groups,” “strata,” “politicians,” “classes,” and so forth. This does not mean it need appeal to or rely on existing (or ‘naked’) preferences or desires, on myopic or narrow self-interests, or on flattering its recipients or hearers (one might, however, allow for or encourage, especially at the beginning of a speech, what Cicero understood as captatio benevolentiae). Contrast this with the earliest forms of rhetoric in democratic Athens, wherein “the ideas and attitudes of the orators must reflect what the majority of their audience was only too glad to hear.” Indeed, inasmuch as it is democratic, it can and should often be (apart from descriptive or explanatory purposes, having to do say, with court rulings, legislation, or policy proposals) challenging or even provocative, motivating individuals and groups to see the proverbial big picture or appreciate the long-term … and so forth and so on (more later).

Finally, myriad and seemingly insuperable problems arise in a world of communication dominated by mass and social media and democratic rhetoric will have to speak to if not aim to solve at least some of these problems. At the very least, it will have to adhere to self-imposed norms and constraints fashioned with reasoned or reasonable and democratic warrant having to do with free speech, the value of which will be better appreciated if not cherished with the sustained and widespread praxis of such democratic rhetoric.

• Aristotle (H.C. Lawson-Tancred, trans.) The Art of Rhetoric (Penguin Books, 1991).
• Aristotle (Roger Crisp, trans. and ed.) Nichomachean Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Aristotle (T.A. Sinclair, trans.) The Politics (Penguin Books, revised ed. with bibliography, 1992).
• Balot, Ryan K. Greek Political Thought (Blackwell, 2006).
• Barnes, Jonathan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
• Cooper, John M. Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton University Press, 1999).
• Finley, M.I. Democracy Ancient and Modern (Rutgers University Press, revised ed., 1985).
• Gagarin, Michael and David Cohen, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Garver, Eugene. Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
• Gonzalez, Francisco J. Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (Northwestern University Press, 1998).
• Hansen, Mogens Herman (J.A. Crook, trans.) The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Blackwell, 1991).
• Kraut, Richard. Socrates and the State (Princeton University Press, 1984).
• Lonsdale, Steven H. Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
• Ober, Josiah. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton University Press, 1989).
• Ober, Josiah. Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton University Press, 1998).
• Ober, Josiah. Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton University Press, 2008)
• The Collected Dialogues of Plato, including the Letters (Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds.) (Princeton University Press, 1961).
• Price, A.W. Mental Conflict (Routledge, 1995).
• Price, A.W. Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Roberts, J.W. City of Sokrates: An Introduction to Classical Athens (Routledge, 2^nd, 1998).
• Steiner, George. Antigones (Clarendon Press, 1984).
• Vernant, Jean-Pierre (Jante Lloyd, trans.) Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (Zone Books, 1990).
• Vernant, Jean-Pierre (Janet Lloyd with Jeff Fort, trans.) Myth and Thought among the Greeks (Zone Books, 2006).
• Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Janet Lloyd, trans.) Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (Zone Books, 1990).

Ideas, Ideals, and Comparative Philosophy: The utopian dialectic of philosophy and revolutionary democratic praxis

     

Below one will find the “Epilogue” I recently appended to my latest iteration of the bibliography on Comparative Philosophy.

“A comparative philosophy that is worthy of both its constitutive terms cannot be simply about comparison. Simply comparing philosophies but not comparing them philosophically will not do. This is why fusion philosophy decidedly demands of the comparative philosopher not to be satisfied with the role of the comparatist. The comparative philosopher should aim beyond comparison at a philosophical argument (strictly or loosely understood) that can stand on its own, that is, it does not rely on the distinctness of the comparanda. The borders that any comparison necessarily erects should not be left intact as if untouched. Fusion means that borders that separate are at least de-emphasized, perhaps even torn into tatters, but in any case transcended.” — From the “Afterword/Afterwards” by Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber, co-editors of the volume Comparative Philosophy without Borders (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 

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“There are recognizable barriers from which men have always sought to emancipate themselves, in order to obtain access to something, and appropriate something, that is conceived time and again in the ideas of freedom, joy, happiness, etc., which no cynical irony can expunge. The inexhaustible possibilities of human nature, which themselves increase with cultural progress, are the innermost material of all utopias, and moreover a very real, and in no way immaterial material at that. They inevitably lead to the desire to transform human life.” — Rudolf Bahro

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“The hypothesis proposed in Eunomia* suggests that a society constitutes itself not only in the form of law and legal institutions and not only in the real-world struggles, political and economic and personal, of everyday life, but also in society’s struggle about ideas. The self-constituting of the international society of the twenty-first century will be no different. The infrastructure of international social consciousness is now very substantial. [….] Among the ideas which help to constitute a society are ideas of a particular kind, ideas which have been referred to traditionally as ideals. Our ideals allow us to say what is wrong with our world and to imagine ways in which it could be made better, and they inspire us to want to make a better world. In the 1990s it was possible to see the emerging of something which might be construed as the universalizing of human ideals. The pathos of that development lies in the fact that it was accompanied by something which can only be called the universalization of social evil. [….]

Theory [and philosophy] is a form of practice, since practice at any given time inevitably takes the form which theory [or philosophy] makes available at any given time. We see the world in the form in which our ideas present the world to us. Since the world, the natural and the human world, is the arena of our action, our action is formed by the form of the world formed by our minds. We enact the drama which our minds have composed. We speak the language which is available to us, seeing our potentiality and our purposes in the reality which we are able to speak. To change our idea of our world, to speak about the world in a new way, is to change what our world will become. The road from the ideal to the actual lies, not merely in institutional novelties, or programmes and blueprints of social change, but also, and primarily, in a change of mind. A revolution in society is also and, above all, a revolution of the mind.

Eunomia suggests that a society forms itself through a three-in-one process of self-constituting, an unceasing interaction between ideas and practice and [after Seana Shiffrin, democratic] law, a society’s ideal, real, and legal constitutions. It follows that changes in any one of its forms of self-constituting affect the total process of a society’s self-constituting, and that large changes are liable to have large effects on that process. The history of human social progress suggests that new ideas have what may be called a prevenient effect on the self-constituting of society. New social theory [like utopian imagination and thought] cannot, by and in itself, cause a fundamental change in the institutional structure and the everyday practice of a society, social change being the effect of so many other causes, physical and organic, and practical, which go far beyond the self-contemplating of the human mind. What theory can do is to provide a framework into which social change flows, an available mould or matrix, enabling us to understand, to control, and to shape social change. Social philosophy cannot dictate the form of the new social institutions [hence Marx’s reluctance to specify the various components of a communist society in a manner that would satisfy social scientists and politicians, as well as impatient revolutionaries and reformers alike]. New social institutions arise as new social philosophy meets actual and potential social reality in a given society. New social philosophy is an organism waiting for life to be breathed into by new social [democratic] practice [which is participatory, deliberative, and representative]. New social practice needs new social philosophy to determine the form of its organic growth.

To change international social reality, we have to break the mould in which that reality has been formed. To take power over the future of international society, we have to take power over its self-constituting. To change the function and the functioning of the international social institutions which have been formed over recent centuries [largely thus not exclusively through the global entrenchment and incessant destabilizing, destructive, and demoralizing effects of the latest form of hyper-industrialized capitalism, which has finally and fully revealed itself as intrinsically hostile to equal liberties and freedom, humane and spiritual forms of community, as well as the natural world; undemocratic forms of political power have directly and indirectly aided and abetted these increasingly malign forces]. To take power over the social power which has caused so much social evil, so much human suffering over recent centuries, we have to use the form of power most readily available to us, the power of ideas. To bring order to the new world disorder which we have inherited from the twentieth century, we must use the ordering power of the human mind, its power to re-order its own order, and to bring order to disorder, the mind’s wonderful power to transcend itself and to cure itself.

And who are ‘we’? We are the people, nameless pawns in the game of diplomacy, human sacrifices in the rite of war. We are the people, permanent victims of the abuse of public and economic power—shackled in serfdom and slavery, herded like cattle into mines and factories and slums, into concentration camps and refugee-camps, driven at gun-point from our families and our homes, dehumanized by poverty and famine and disease, by the new slavery of consumerism and the mindless hedonism of popular culture. We are people with a permanent revolutionary possibility, the power to make a revolution, not in the streets [in which many of us would be slaughtered like factory farm animals] but in the mind. And the long journey of revolutionary change begins with a single revolutionary step. We can, if we wish, choose the human future. We, the people, can say what the human future will be, and what it will not be.” — Philip Allott, Eunomia: New Order for a New World (Oxford University Press, 2001)

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Epilogue (to the bibliography on comparative philosophy)

Comparative philosophy can be more than a well-motivated philosophical, intellectual, and theoretical or speculative exercise, more than just a genuine “meeting of minds,” however significant that alone happens to be within the conditions of multiculturalism and pluralism, conditions defined and shaped by religious and secular worldviews in conjunction with cultural and political traditions and philosophies, conditions conspicuous for the perseverance of varying degrees of episodic and intransigent conflict that at times descends into famine, war or genocide. In other words, on occasion comparative philosophy can be part of if not central to a utopian or idealistic endeavor in the best sense, one with cosmopolitan pretensions that have profound and far-reaching political consequences capable of transcending the moral weaknesses and limits of political realism and raison d’état, thereby achieving a Rawlsian-like “overlapping consensus” with world-historical ramifications, as was the case with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this instance, comparative philosophy was in some respects an unintentional by-product of the Human Rights Commission which met with and overcame considerable skepticism, uncertainties, and various obstacles that arose from “facts on the ground” (including great power politics and anti-colonialism):

“Was it really possible for a fledgling organization to produce a document acceptable to delegates from all the countries in a constantly expanding United Nations? By 1948, when the Declaration was put to a vote, the United Nations had fifty-eight member states containing four-fifths of the world’s population—twenty two from the Americas, sixteen from Europe, five from Asia, eight from the Near and Middle East, four from Africa, and three from Oceania. Could any values be said to be common to all of them? What did it mean to speak of certain rights as universal?

Anticipating such questions, the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recruited some of the leading thinkers of the day for a Committee on the Theoretical Bases of Human Rights. This blue-ribbon panel, chaired by Cambridge historian E.H. Carr, included University of Chicago philosopher Richard McKeon as rapporteur and French social philosopher Jacques Maritain, who became one of its most active members. In January 1947, as this group was coming together, UNESCO’s director, noted scientist Julian Huxley, had sent the poet Archibald MacLeish to the Human Rights Commission’s Lake Success meeting to apprise the commissioners of UNESCO’s interest in their work and its desire ‘to be as useful as possible.’ The philosophers’ group began its work in March by sending a questionnaire to statesmen and scholars around the world—including such notables as Mohandas Gandhi, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Benedetto Croce, Aldous Huxley, and Salvador de Madariaga—soliciting their views on the idea of a universal declaration of human rights. [….]

In 1948 the framers of the Universal Declaration achieved a distinctive synthesis of previous thinking about rights and duties. After canvassing sources from North and South, East and West [emphasis added], they believed they had found a core of principles so basic that no nation would want to openly disavow them [the General Assembly of the UN eventually adopted the Declaration without a single dissenting vote]. They wove these principles into a unifying document that quickly displaced all antecedents as the principle model for the rights instruments in force in the world today. [….]

The story of the parent document of the human rights movement [i.e. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights] is the story of a group of men and women who learned to cooperate effectively despite political differences, cultural barriers, and personal rivalries. It is an account of their attempt to bring forth from the ashes of unspeakable wrongs a new era in the history of rights. [….] [It] is to a large extent the story of a journey undertaken by an extraordinary group of men and women who rose to the challenge of a unique historical moment. The brief interlude between the end of World War II and the definitive collapse of the Soviet-American alliance lasted just barely long enough to permit major international institutions such as the UN and the World Bank to be established and for the framers of the Universal Declaration to complete their task. The members of the Human Rights Commission were well aware that they were engaged in a race against time: around them, relations between Russia and the West were deteriorating, the Berlin blockade raised the specter of another world war, the Palestinian question divided world opinion, and conflict broke out in Greece, Korea and China. [….] They had to surmount linguistic, cultural, and political differences and overcame personal animosities as they strove to articulate a diverse set of principles with worldwide applicability. [….]

With the exception of Eleanor Roosevelt, most of the members of the committee that shaped the Declaration are now little remembered outside their home countries. Yet they included some of the most able and colorful public figures of their time: Carlos Romulo, the Filipino journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his articles predicting the end of colonialism; John P. Humphrey, the dedicated Canadian director of the UN’s Human Rights Division, who prepared the preliminary draft of the Declaration; Hansa Mehta of India, who made sure the Declaration spoke with power and clarity about equal rights for women before they were recognized in most legal systems; Alexei Pavlov, the brilliant nephew of the conditioned-reflex scientist, who had to go the extra verst [the Russian equivalent of the ‘extra mile’] to dispel suspicions that he was still bourgeois; and Chile’s Hernán Santa Cruz, an impassioned man of the Left who helped assure that social and economic rights would have pride of place in the Declaration along with political and civil liberties.

Among the Declaration’s framers, four in particular played crucial roles: Peng-chun Chang, the Chinese philosopher, diplomat, and playwright who was adept at translating across cultural divides; Nobel Peace Prize laureate René Cassin, the legal genius of the Free French, who transformed what might have been a mere list or ‘bill’ of rights into a geodesic dome of interlocking principles; Charles Malik [a Lebanese academic, diplomat, philosopher, and politician], existentialist philosopher turned master-diplomat, a student of Alfred North Whitehead and Martin Heidegger, who steered the Declaration to adoption by the UN General Assembly in the tense cold war atmosphere of 1948; and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose prestige and personal qualities enabled her to influence key decisions of the country that had emerged from the war as the most powerful nation in the world. Chang, Cassin, Malik, and Roosevelt were the right people at the right time. But for the unique gifts of each of these four, the Declaration might never have seen the light of day. [….]

For everyone who is tempted to despair of the possibility of crossing today’s ideological divides, there is still much to learn from Eleanor Roosevelt’s firm but irenic manner of dealing with her Soviet antagonists; and from the serious but respectful rivalry between Lebanon’s Charles Malik and China’s Peng-chun Chang. There is much to ponder in the working relationship between Malik, a chief spokesman for the Arab League, and René Cassin, an ardent supporter of a Jewish homeland, who lost twenty-nine relatives in concentration camps. When one considers that two world wars and mass slaughters of innocents had given the framers every reason to despair about the human condition, it is hard to remain unmoved by their determination to help make the postwar world a better and safer place.” — Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Random House, 2001)

As Jack Donnelly has argued, this international consensus on human rights came about as (or prefigured) something much like—if not identical to—John Rawls’s later idea of an “overlapping consensus,” which provides a “descriptively accurate and morally attractive explanation” of how this particular international legal agreement emerged as a definitive expression of the “normative universality of human rights” (of course Rawls envisioned the possibility of this overlapping consensus arising on the political terrain of a liberal democratic nation-state, not in the international arena of nation-states). In other words, individuals and states, arguing from the premises of or taking a perspective generated from within their different “comprehensive doctrines” or religious and secular worldviews, were able to arrive at a consensual endorsement of the model of human rights embodied in the Universal Declaration, and thus this groundbreaking international human rights instrument was not founded upon or derived from any one particular religious or secular philosophy or worldview or “comprehensive doctrine.” This is one inspiring and ennobling exemplification of comparative philosophy enlisted on behalf of exemplary (and cosmopolitan) political and emancipatory values and purposes for the general benefit or welfare and well-being of individuals and humanity itself.

In addition to the Glendon title cited above, please see Jack Donnelly’s Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press, 2003) as well as Johannes Morsink’s The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). For further research, one might consult my bibliography, Human Rights: Philosophical, Legal, and Political Perspectives.

* “In Greek mythology, Eunomia was a minor goddess of law and legislation (her name can be translated as ‘good order,’ ‘governance according to good laws’), as well as the spring-time goddess of green pastures (eû means ‘well, good’ in Greek, and nómos, means ‘law,’ while pasturelands are called nomia).”

   

Buddhist Philosophy: a bibliography

My latest compilation is on Buddhist Philosophy. What follows is the introduction to the bibliography.

This list covers philosophically oriented Buddhist titles from within Buddhism, as well as works by those who bring modern philosophical arguments and methods of analysis (and phenomenology, hermeneutics, etc.) to their examination of Buddhist philosophy, occasionally comparing it to other philosophical worldviews (hence those writing first and foremost as Buddhists on the one hand, and those identifying as professional philosophers or using contemporary philosophy to study Buddhist philosophy, on the other; there is occasionally overlap between the two approaches). It also has titles that examine Buddhist psychology and several works on topics in Buddhist aesthetics and philosophy of art. I have a separate bibliography on Buddhist art as well.

Like most of my bibliographies, there are two constraints: books, in English (a few exceptions owing to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries [SEP]). While this list is fairly comprehensive, it is not exhaustive, still, it should be useful for most purposes, as many of the titles have excellent bibliographies to supplement our list, containing the requisite primary source literature.

While it might reasonably be said that one part of the threefold division of the Eightfold Path (Skt., āryāṣṭāṅgamārga) in Buddhism represents philosophy, namely, prajñā (sometimes translated as ‘wisdom’), meaning insight into the “true nature of reality” (involving both ‘discriminating knowledge’ and ‘intuitive apprehension’), the other two parts are no less relevant: sīla or ethics and samādhi (concentration or one-pointedness, mind-training, and meditation). Morality and ethics are of course one branch of philosophy in the West, and samādhi has to do with the Buddhist philosophy of mind and psychology (and the philosophy of psychology). At the same time, the Eightfold Path represents Buddhist spiritual practices, the tripartite structure consisting of eight complementary and mutually reinforcing parts, even if Buddhism is sometimes reduced to or largely associated with meditation (which is three of the eight parts). In contemporary philosophical terms, Buddhist philosophy is “therapeutic,” that is, it is “philosophy as therapeia,” thus its philosophy is intimately bound up with its “spiritual exercises.”

Those new to Buddhism should take the time and trouble to acquaint themselves with this worldview’s fundamental concepts and doctrines, so, in addition to the Eightfold Path: the Four Noble Truths (i.e., the ‘four truths [known by the spiritually] noble’): (i) suffering (duḥkha/dukkha), (ii) the origin or cause of suffering (samudaya), (iii) the possibility for the cessation of suffering (nirodha), and (iv) the path by which we can eliminate suffering and achieve liberation from saṃsāra (termed nirvāṇa/nibbāna) (the medical analogy: symptomatic diagnosis, etiology, prescription and cure available, and implementing the therapeutic regimen), minimally speaking, it entails following the Eightfold Path; the four “divine abidings” or “immeasurables” (brahmavihāra), namely, (i) loving kindness (maitrī/mettā), (ii) compassion (karuṇā), (iii) empathetic joy (muditā), and (iv) equanimity (upekṣā/upekkhā), which are ethical virtues but also meditative topics; pāramitās, which are spiritual and ethical virtues or “perfections” developed and practiced by a bodhisattva on the path to becoming a Buddha: (i) generosity or giving (dāna), (ii) morality or ethics (śīla/sīla), (iii) patience or forbearance (kṣānti/khanti), (iv) effort, vigour, and diligence (vīrya/viriya), (v) concentration, “one-pointedness” or meditation (dhyāna/jhāna), and (vi) wisdom (prajñā), to which were later added (by the Mahāyāna tradition) (vii) skillful method or means (upāya), (viii) vow(s) (praṇidhāna), (ix) spiritual strength or power (bala), and (x) knowledge or intuitive pristine awareness (jñāna);  pratītya-samutpāda/paticca-samuppāda or the “chain of dependent or conditioned origination” (this doctrine can be viewed as having metaphysical, logical, psychological, and ethical dimensions) thus, conditioned by (i) ignorance [avidyā/avijjā] are (ii) formations or karmic predispositions [samskāras], conditioned by formations is (iii) consciousness [vijñāna/viññāna], conditioned by consciousness is (iv) mind-and-body or name-and-form [nāma-rūpa/skandhas/kandhas], conditioned by mind-and-body are (v) the six sense fields (6 organs, 6 objects, and 6 kinds of sense consciousness) [sadāyatana/salāyatana], conditioned by the six sense fields is (vi) sense-contact [sparśa/phassa], conditioned by sense-contact is (vii) feeling [vedanā], conditioned by feeling is (viii) craving, or inordinate or improper desire [trsna/tanhā], conditioned by craving is (ix) grasping [upādāna], conditioned by grasping is (x) becoming [bhava], conditioned by becoming is (xi) birth [jāti], conditioned by birth is (xii) decay and death [jarāmaranam];  trilakṣaṇa/tilakkhaṇa, the three “marks” or characteristics of conditioned phenomena in saṃsāra: (i) impermance (anitya/annica), (ii) suffering (duḥkha/dukkha), of which there are three principal types, and (iii) no-self (anātman/anattā); skandha(s)/khandha(s): the five aggregates of “clinging,” that is, the five material and mental factors that take part in the rise of craving and clinging or grasping. They are also explained as the five factors that constitute and account for one’s character or personality or sense of personhood or personal identity, namely, (i) “form” or “matter” (rūpa), (ii) sensations or feeling (vedanā), (iii) perception or discrimination or distinguishing (saṃjñā/saññā), (iv) “conditioning factors” (saṃskāra/saṅkhāra) or the karmic effects on our mental activities and actions, and (v) consciousness vijñāna/viññāṇa; kleśa(s)/kilesa(s): mental afflictions that cloud and/or disturb the mind, tending to incite unwholesome deeds of body and speech and/or states of mind, often three (as ‘poisons’) in number: (i) greed or craving or inordinate often sensual desire (rāga or lobha), (ii) hatred or aversion (dveṣa/dosa), and (iii) delusion (moha), including connotations of confusion and ignorance (kleśas can include what we think of as the passions or passionate emotions but the term is not identical to ‘emotions,’ for which there is not a strictly equivalent term in Buddhism). And so forth and so on.

There is one indispensable reference source every serious student of Buddhism should have nearby: Robert E. Busswell, Jr. and Donald S. Lopez, Jr., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton University Press, 2014).

Finally, before approaching Buddhist philosophy it helps to be acquainted with other Indian philosophies (the argumentative milieu). Thus I have a list for Indian philosophy, a compilation on Buddhism with helpful introductory titles, and a bibliography for Jainism for those fairly new to Buddhism generally and Buddhist philosophy in particular. And with respect to Buddhism interacting with classical Chinese worldviews (Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist, for example), please see the bibliography for same. I welcome notice of titles believed conspicuous by their absence here. (I apologize for the missing supra-script and subscript diacritic dots.)

Migrants: The Significance of the Rights, Duties, and Obligations of Dignity, Welfare, and Well-Being

This post was prompted by a news item from the Los Angeles Times: “46 people believed to be migrants found dead in Texas tractor-trailer.”

Be it by land or water (the number of the latter being far more numerous than the former), these deaths are not accidents, unavoidable, or some senseless misfortune (leaving aside forced migration during war for now, which is a special case). They are a predictable result of inhumane, cruel, and unnecessary immigration policies. With the ecological and economic havoc caused by global warming, the migratory results of which we are already witnessing, matters will only worsen. We should not turn a blind eye, put our heads in the sand, or indulge in deliberate denial, however tempting during such troubled times as ours, when the scale and scope of our environmental, political, and economic problems can feel daunting if not overwhelming. These are our fellow human beings who want many of the things that most of us need and desire, first and foremost to live a life that reflects a commitment from those who possess the requisite influence and power to demonstrate a principled and practical concern for their welfare and well-being, to recognize their right to life, to show fundamental respect for one of the historical aims of Liberalism: meaningful individual and collective responses to universal human dignity, the inherent dignity of human beings. Consider, for example, the following from Allen Buchanan:

“Whether or not the notion that the international legal human rights system is grounded in and serves to affirm the inherent dignity of humans is a central feature of the system [I happen to believe it is an axiomatic presupposition of the system], it is surely at least a desideratum for a justification of the system that it can make sense of this notion given its prominence. [….] [T]he relevant notion of dignity can be understood to include two aspects. First, there is the idea that certain conditions of living are beneath the dignity of the sort of being that humans are. [….] Let us call this first aspect of dignity the well-being threshold aspect. The second aspect of dignity is the interpersonal comparative aspect, the idea that treating people with dignity also requires a public affirmation of the basic equal status of all and, again, that if they are not treated in this way they suffer an injury or wrong. [….] The well-being threshold aspect of dignity concerns whether one is doing well enough for a being of the sort one is; it makes no reference to how one is treated vis-à-vis others. The interpersonal comparative aspect has to do with whether one is being treated as an inferior relative to other people. The point is that one’s dignity can be respected in the well-being threshold aspect and yet may be compromised in the interpersonal comparative aspect.” — From Buchanan’s The Heart of Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013): 99-100.

Some Relevant Bibliographies

• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Human Rights
• Immigration & Refugees
• Beyond Inequality
• The Political Philosophy of Liberalism

The elusive nature of democratic law in a crumbling liberal democratic capitalist society

The right-wing judicial ideologues on the Supreme Court have only a tenuous grip on conservatism. Their recent rulings exemplify what they used to decry as “judicial activism,” rendering them inconsistent and hypocritical. Moreover, they’ve revealed an equally inconsistent if not incoherent, cynical, and manipulative legal interpretation of the doctrine of stare decisis. Their understanding of rights is illiberal given its ad hoc and regressive disposition. Finally, they’ve demonstrated the irrationality, vacuity and anti-democratic nature that shadows the “Originalist” doctrine of constitutional interpretation. Thus not surprisingly, their rulings warm the perfervid hearts and stir the addled minds of Christian nationalists and anti-democratic militants in this country, including first and foremost, the fascist members of the cult of Trump. I stop here lest my anger get the better of me.

See: “The Week from Hell,” by Eric Segall at Dorf on Law.

The scientific character of psychoanalytic theory’s philosophy of mind and therapeutic praxis

       

Hilary Putnam’s “scientific realism” (there are several conceptions of this realism) entailed, among other things and for example, “the affirmation of the theoretical or ‘unobservable’ entities of our successful sciences, especially physics, e.g. the reality of electrons.” I would argue, as have others in philosophy and psychoanalysis, that psychoanalysis as a science¹ likewise affirms the existence of theoretical or unobservable entities (that make for the ‘reality’ of unconscious and ‘primary process’ mentation which is ‘a-rational and associatively-based,’ this unconscious reality can be both ‘dynamic’ and cognitive or ‘adaptive’) with epistemic and explanatory effects or consequences, for instance, the corresponding mental states are causes of desires, beliefs, and behavior … and psychic disorders of various kinds (contrast ‘secondary process mentation,’ which involves awareness, is largely rational, rule-following, and ‘logical’ in the manner of common sense, allowing us to see psychological events as continuous or determinist, causal, rational, and explainable). This notion of primary process mentation (along with secondary process mentation) is part of the psychoanalytic theory or philosophy of mind which, after Linda A. W. Brakel, I understand to be fundamental or foundational in the sense that it is the “core psychoanalytic theory with the clinical theory (or theories) derivative thereof.”

As philosophers of science can readily attest, “all scientific theories, methods and techniques have a discrete number of basic and underlying and necessary presuppositions.” Brakel proffers “five foundational precepts [or propositions] that comprise the basic presuppositions of psychoanalysis.” She notes that while there is not agreement among psychoanalysts about the precise nature and number of these presuppositions and assumptions, they should be able to agree that these presuppositions and assumptions are “… (i) taken for granted, (ii) used to derive other psychoanalytic concepts and propositions, and when functioning (iii) generate psychoanalytic data … [where] psychoanalytic data most broadly include everything reported and taking place [largely or eventually, by way of ‘free association’] in psychoanalytic sessions—e.g., dream contents; psychological symptoms …; [changes in] … mood; sexual concerns; slips of the tongue and parapraxes …; phantasies and daydreams; and reports of strong feelings about past persons and persons in the present, including the analyst.” The following are the first three assumptions (I, II, and III), followed by “one methodological tool” [or method] (IV), and one corollary (V):

(I and II) — “The first two assumptions, psychic (psychological) continuity and psychic (psychological) determinism are best considered together. They are psychology-specific versions of two general assumptions that are in place given any scientific theory. Continuity presumes some sort of regularity or lawfulness in the phenomena under study,² and determinism means simply that the operation of cause and effect is presumed. To assume psychic continuity then is to take for granted that all of the agent’s psychological events—including those that look inconsistent or even incoherent such as pathological symptoms (for instance, phobias to water, benign animals or of open places), slips of the tongue, and parapraxes—are regular/lawful in a particular psychological way for that agent; namely that every psychological event can be understood as psychologically meaningful to that individual. Similarly, to assume psychic determinism is to presume that all psychological events –even those that look incoherent—have at least as one of their causes, a psychological cause, and can thereby be explained (at least in part) on a psychological basis. So for example, a dream element, a delusion, a confabulation all can be presumed to be necessarily regular and lawful phenomena with physical and psychological causes such that these phenomena cannot fail to be psychologically meaningful to the dreaming, delusional, or confabulating agent. Put another way, there is no dream element, delusion, or confabulation, in fact no psychological content possible for a particular person that will not have been caused by some aspect of that person’s psychology and that will not thereby be meaningful to that person.”

(III) — “The third assumption of psychoanalysis is that there exists a dynamic (psychologically meaningful) unconscious. It is posited because without such a postulate many psychological events ‘seem’ neither psychically continuous nor determined. [By way of example, Brakel proceeds to narrate a vivid account of a slip of the tongue she experienced.] [….] [T]he assumption of interceding unconscious processes and contents allows psychological determinism and continuity to be evident generally, even in those psychological events (such as neurotic symptoms, dream elements, delusions, and hallucinations) seemingly inconsistent to the point of frank bizarreness.”

(IV) — “The one methodological tool necessary for psychoanalysis is free association. Free association as part of the foundational core of psychoanalytic general theory has an interesting status in that it functions in a dual manner. First, free associations demonstrate apparent violations of psychic continuity and psychic determinism by revealing psychological events like parapraxes and symptoms that seem incoherent, with no meaningful psychological cause. Second, free associations resolve the apparent violations in continuity and determinism by providing the psychological contents, which when taken in conjunction with the assumption of a dynamic unconscious, can render what was seemingly inconsistent as quite continuous, now admitting of transparent psychological causation.” [Brackel then provides a compelling illustration of the dual functioning of frees association from the analysis of one of her patients.]  

(V) — “The final element comprising the foundational structure of psychoanalytic general theory—positing primary and secondary processes as two formally different types of mentation—is best described as a corollary to the other fundaments. The corollary status obtains because positing primary and secondary processes follows from and is demonstrated by the application of the three [foregoing] basic assumptions and free association. [….] Secondary process thinking is the largely rational, rule-following, ordinary logic of adults in the alert, waking state. Primary process thinking, in contrast, is a-rational and associatively based. When the secondary processes predominate, psychological events look continuous, caused, explainable, and rational. [….] Primary process thinking, on the other hand, is clearly not rational. Instead, it is a-rational. [….] Its hallmarks, in addition to the absence of ordinary rationality, displacement, and the type of feature-based categorizing by resemblance shown above [i.e., the two personal examples she provided in III and IV above that I’ve left out], include condensations (combining thoughts that by ordinary logic do not belong together), categorizations by contiguity in time and/or space, and substitutions of part for whole. Dream elements perhaps provide the most obvious, plentiful, and accessible examples of primary process contents demonstrating the effects of the operations (in all combinations) of these many a-rational processes.” [Brakel informs us in a note why she chose the term ‘a-rationality’ rather than irrationality: ‘A-rationality’ is much broader in its application than is ‘irrationality,’ the term more typically employed. Whereas irrationality implies rationality that has gone astray, entailing a dispositional capacity for rationality, a-rationality implies no such thing. Thinking, for example, can be a-rational if it is ‘not-yet-rational’ as in very young humans and ‘never-to-be-rational/but good enough for survival’ as in certain birds and mammals.’]

       

Notes

1. It is a science of subjectivity or the person, one that is in part parasitic on existing natural and social sciences and the humanities, although its philosophy of mind and psychological theory account for both its novelty, including its clinical practices within traditions of care and healing of the psyche generally and mind-body medicine or therapeutics in particular.

2. As Brakel notes, this is not “tightly constrained,” which is one way of saying science deals in generalities, that theories are schematic insofar as they introduce “order” into experience, some sort of taxonomy or classification of the relevant empirical facts; the taxonomy is scientific to the extent it is sufficiently universal so as to be employed consistently by the relevant community of scientists; at bottom it is a matter of “pattern recognition.” Any such classification is a “theory-laden” activity that unavoidably involves some reference to the surrounding intellectual and social environment. Philip Kitcher and other philosophers of science have shown how theory construction strongly resembles a cartographic practice, our theories being very much like maps. In the words of John Ziman:

“Almost every general statement one can make about scientific theories is equally applicable to maps. They are representations of a supposed ‘reality.’ They are social institutions. They abstract, classify and simplify numerous ‘fact.’ They are functional. They required skilled interpretation. And so on. The analogy is evidently more than a vivid metaphor. [….]

Thus to state that a certain ‘effect’ has a certain ‘cause’ merely corresponds to pointing to an ‘itinerary’ on a more general theoretical map. Such a statement is meaningless unless combined with other information about the scientific context in which it is to be interpreted—that is to say, how it is connected with other statements of cat or theory about the entities involved. Indeed, scientific theories can often be mapped as abstract networks, where nodes of fact and/or concept are cross-linked in many dimensions by laws, formulae, family resemblances or other functional relationships. [….]

… [S]cientific theories have to be understood as purposeful generalizations. Indeed, one of the achievements of the social sciences is to provide people with unsuspected ‘meanings’ for many cultural features of their lives. The entities that figure in a scientific theory are selected and simplified to suits its scope and function. Scientific theories, like maps, are under-determined. They are products of their time and place. They emerge out of the exercise of originality and scepticism in a disputatious community. Of course there are moments when a novel scientific theory seems precisely right. But its form and substance are neither pre-ordained or permanent. Even the most compelling theory is usually shaped by unconscious aesthetic and utilitarian criteria. [….] Even good scientific theories, like good maps, can present the same ‘domain’ in a great variety of very different forms. [….] [It is of course important to keep in mind that] a map is not the same as the geography it represents.”

Ziman makes several more points about scientific theorizing applicable to psychoanalysis. First, scientific knowledge and reasoning are not “ruled by formal logic.” In other words, algorithmic compression and mathematical formalism are not absolutely necessary for scientific theories if only because “not all the scientifically observable features of the world can be measured, and not all the results of scientific measurement can properly be treated as variables in mathematical formulae.” We must be alert to the “well-known danger of making unrealistic or over-simplified assumptions about real-world entities in order to set up a tractable mathematical model of their behaviour. As Hilary Putnam reminded us and Ziman reiterates, “the domain of science [and rationality itself] extends far outside the scope of formal reasoning,” and “scientific reasoning varies from discipline to discipline. [….] According to the circumstances, valid scientific reasoning may involve the evaluation of testimony, empathic understanding of human behaviour, pattern recognition, category formation, classification, generalization, analogy, unification and, above all, the grammar of a natural language. [….] In effect, scientific rationality is no more than practical reasoning carried out as well as possible in the context of research.”

Coda

As Agnes Petocz writes in her persuasive contribution to the edited volume by Boag, Brakel and Talvite, “Almost everyone agrees that the question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis has been ‘done to death.’” But neither side has budged in this often passionate and sometimes acrimonious debate. I think Ziman’s book (cited in the references below) helps us clarify how it is not at all difficult to explain the several ways in which psychoanalysis can amply qualify as a science. On the other hand, and ironically, mainstream academic psychology, which fancies itself as a “real” (if not ‘hard’) science in contrast to the fraudulent credentials of psychoanalysis, is actually on quite brittle grounds and fragile footing insofar as it is “shot through with misconceptions of science and is thus scientistic rather than genuinely scientific.”

References: Most of the material for this post was taken from Linda A.W. Brakel, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and the A-rational Mind (Oxford University Press, 2009). She expands a bit on this argument in chapter six of the volume she edited with Simon Boag and Vesa Talvite: Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting (Routledge, 2018 [Karnac Books, 2015]). The extensive material from John Ziman in the second note is from his book, Real Science: What it is, and what it means (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Relevant Bibliographies

• Addiction: Transdisciplinary Perspectives
• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• Dreams and Dreaming
• The Emotions
• Health: Law, Ethics, and Social Justice
• Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Philosophy, Psychology, and Methodology for the Social Sciences
• Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
• Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law

What Is Science?

   

Propaedeutic

“Science is under attack. People are losing confidence in its powers. Pseudo-scientific beliefs thrive. Anti-science speakers win public debates. Industrial firms misuse technology. Legislators curb experiments. Governments slash research funding. Even fellow scholars are becoming sceptical of its claims. And yet, opinion surveys regularly report large majorities in its favour. Science education expands at all levels. Writers and broadcasters enrich public understanding. Exciting discoveries and useful inventions flow out of research laboratories. Vast research instruments are built at public expense. Science has never been so popular or influential.

This is not a contradiction. Science has always been under attack. It is still a newcomer to large areas of our culture. As it extends and become more deeply embedded, it touches upon issues where its competence is more doubtful, and opens itself to well-based criticism. The claims of science are often highly questionable. Strenuous debate on particular points is not a symptom of disease: it signifies mental health and moral vigour.

Blanket hostility to ‘science’ is another matter. Taken literally, that would make no more sense that hostility to ‘law,’ or ‘art,’ or even ‘life’ itself. What such an attitude really indicates is that certain general features of science are thought to be objectionable in principle, or unacceptable in practice. These features are deemed to be so essential to science as such that it is rejected as a whole—typically in favour of some other supposedly holistic system.

The arguments faovouring ‘anti-science’ attitudes may well be misinformed, misconceived and mischievous. Nevertheless, they carry surprising weight in society at large. Those of us who do not share those attitudes have a duty to combat them. But what are the grounds on which science should be defended?

Many supporters of science simply challenge the various specific objections put forward by various schools of anti-science. In doing so, however, they usually assume that the general features in dispute are, indeed, essential to science. They may agree, for example, that scientific knowledge is arcane and elitist, and then they try to show that this need not be a serious disadvantage in practice. The danger of this type of defence is that it accepts without question an analysis which may itself be deeply flawed. In many cases, the objectionable feature is incorrectly attributed to ‘science,’ or is far from essential to it. Dogged defence of every feature of ‘the Legend’—the stereotype of science that idealizes its every aspect—is almost as damaging as the attack it is supposed to be fending off.”—John Ziman, from the opening pages of his book, Real Science: What it is, and what it means (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

*          *          *

“[Hilary] Putnam’s denial that there is a unique and complete description of the world in some metaphysically privileged vocabulary (say, the language of the natural sciences) reflects his commitment to conceptual pluralism. For example, a chair can be usefully and truthfully described in the language of physics, of carpentry, of furniture design, or of etiquette without it being the case that these vocabularies are reducible to some favored or fundamental vocabulary.” — From the editors’ Introduction to Putnam’s Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism (Harvard University Press, 2012)

*         *          *            

“After the uncritical rejection of science and the postmodernist (and ill-informed) dismissal of its claims to objective knowledge, there has in recent decades been an equally uncritical embrace of the dubious idea that the natural sciences, particularly the neurosciences, have something important to say about, even have the last word on, art, ethics, politics, the law, economics; that they may transform the study of those topics into a properly grounded discipline; or, more ambitiously, that brain science is, or will be, the key to understanding humanity. Humanities will (at last) come of age as animalities. New interdisciplinary pursuits have emerged prefixed by ‘neuro,’ ‘evolutionary,’ or even ‘neuro-revolutionary,’ embodying the hopes of advancing our understanding of the law, of ethics, of aesthetic experiences.” — Raymond Tallis, Seeing Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science (Agenda Publishing, 2020): 21

   

I am assuming that, like me, most of you are not scientists (no doubt some of you are). Furthermore, you likely have in mind some notion or picture of what science is, leaving aside for now how you arrived at this conception (e.g., testimony, formal and informal learning, ‘authority’ of one kind or another, inferences and speculation, etc.). I am going to conjecture, with all due respect, that what you happen to believe about science—be it tentatively or confidently—is likely, or for the most part, mistaken or at least radically incomplete. One reason for this, I suspect, is owing to ideological conceptions of science that have arisen both spontaneously and deliberately from various quarters and precincts our capitalist and hyper-industrialized society and culture (a topic for another day). One prominent form of such ideology goes by the name “scientism,” which has a religious like faith in the properties, virtue, and power of (especially ‘natural’) science(s) (and technology, for that matter), often viewing physics as exemplifying same, an ideal archetype or model of what science can and should be.   

I confess to having the temerity or perhaps chutzpah to propose a list (the number of titles being fairly small as such things go) of works that I have found helpful in sketching what I take to be the best conception(s) of science: what science is and should be. Being neither a scientist nor a philosopher should disqualify me from undertaking such a task, but one of the liabilities of intrinsic to an independent researcher and autodidact* in many fields of intellectual inquiry is that one feels free to question prevailing forms of intellectual and moral expertise and authority, however necessary they remain to our collective coexistence, welfare and well-being. This list is thus owing to my (perhaps idiosyncratic) reading regimen in science and the sciences, including philosophy of science, although it is safe to say that I cannot keep track of the latest literature in this regard, especially insofar as that means academic journal articles for which I often lack the privilege of access.

That said, here is my list of twelve titles I think a “layperson” can read by way of getting a more or less true or better conception of science than the one most of us currently entertain. Our authors of course do not always agree with each other on this or that feature, purpose, or value of science, but these works have strong family resemblance with each other to the extent that the follies and vices of scientism or what John Ziman called “the Legend” are studiously avoided.

• Cartwright, Nancy. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Galison, Peter and David J. Stump, eds. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford University Press, 1996).
• Giere, Ronald. Science without Laws (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
• Giere, Ronald. Scientific Perpectivism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
• Hesse, Mary. Models and Analogies in Science (Sheed and Ward, 1963).
• Kitcher, Philip. Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2001).
• Kitcher, Philip. Science in a Democratic Society (Prometheus Books, 2011).
• Longino, Helen E. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton University Press, 1990).
• Putnam, Hilary. Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism (Harvard University Press, 2012).
• Rescher, Nicholas. Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science (Clarendon Press, 2000).
• van Fraassen, Bas C. Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

   

Further Reading: Please see, first, my Notes on Science and the Sciences, and then the compilation on “Sullied Sciences,” which has an appendix with a much larger list of titles should your appetite be whetted by the material above. An exemplification of science utilized on behalf of both democratic and socialist principles, values, and practices is found in this bibliography: Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity. Finally, a list which I hope to update soon may also be of interest: Ethical Perspectives on the Sciences and Technology. All of these items are freely available for viewing or download on my Academia page.

* I am “self-taught” in the sense that I lack proper credential and academic degrees in the domains I am speaking about. Thus I am not, nor is anyone for that matter, literally “self-taught.”

Moral Values

In 1956, Oxford University planned to give an honorary degree to Harry Truman. Elizabeth Anscombe dissented. Truman authorized the dropping of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anscombe did not deny that Truman’s decision saved lives by speeding up the end of the war. She denied that the end justified the means. We should think of this when we condemn other war crimes. Our country is not pure.

I get this example from the Wall Street Journal’s book review section this past weekend.  Heather McAlpin reviewed Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman and The Women Are Up to Something by Benjamin Lipscomb. The four women are Anscombe, Philippa Foote, Mary Midgely, and Iris Murdoch.  These four women wrote against the then dominant strain in moral philosophy, namely the view that moral values were subjective and not objective. It is a wonderful review. I came away with the impression that both books were worth reading. To my mind, the mystery is how philosophy could have sunk so low that it needed to be brought back to life.

Therapeutic Healing and the Placebo Effect: from Qusṭā ibn Lūqā’s medicinal power of “persuasion or suggestion” to “open-label placebos”

   

None of what follows this introduction is written by yours truly, still, I thought it might be of interest to some of our readers. It concerns subject matter I hope to address now and again over the summer. Long-time readers of this blog will be aware of my abiding interest in the values and purposes of psychoanalytic theory and therapy, especially in the wake of Adolf Grünbaum’s critique of psychoanalysis,¹ as it provoked vigorous philosophical arguments and debates both about the scientific standing of psychoanalysis in general as well as specific beliefs, hypotheses, and theories within psychoanalysis in particular, some of which do not depend upon or pivot around the science question, and which I happen to believe has been resolved in favor of Freud and psychoanalytic psychology (be it Freudian, Kleinian, etc.). Psychoanalysis can thus in part be characterized as a novel science of human subjectivity (the other principal part being clinical therapeutic analysis) which encompasses fundamental properties of human nature, the constitution of the individual person or personhood, and the nature (hence philosophy) of mind. It is “novel” in the sense that it is neither simply a natural nor a social science while partaking of and transcending both, bringing to the fore, among other things, an extension of so-called folk psychology, a richer and more complex philosophy of mind, as well as model of human development and individuation. It addresses the possible and plausible reasons for as well as the prospects for the relief of, mental, existential, and physiological kinds of human pain and suffering as a mind/body therapy. It builds upon and in some respects still resembles modes of healing and “care of the psyche” found in shamanic, religious, magico-religious or alchemical, medicinal, psychological, philosophical and other traditions. And given prior attempts at integrating Marxism and psychoanalysis, I think this science of human subjectivity can, when combined with Marxist sensibilities, contribute to filling out a reasonable if not persuasive biosocialpsychological model that does justice to individual human beings, groups, and the contexts, settings, and situations they find themselves in that either enable and facilitate, constrain, or inhibit our efforts to attain human happiness (if not eudaimonia), welfare and well-being. In our follow up post, we will briefly look at the nature of the placebo effect in psychoanalysis, as well as, and perhaps more importantly, examine a psychoanalytic explanation of the psychological mechanisms underlying the placebo effect proffered by Linda A.W. Brakel.²

*          *          *

“Although the modern use of the term [placebo] and an awareness of how frequently the placebo effect is a factor in treatment have a relatively short history, it has frequently been argued that the placebos have been at the heart of therapeutics during most of medicine’s history. [….] But with so much in the history of successful therapeutics retrospectively attributed to the unknowing use of placebos, it is well to be reminded that, however unaware most healers may have been, the knowing use of placebos dates back a very long way. [….] [I]n the Physical Ligatures of Qusṭā ibn Lūqā [al‐Ba῾labakkī] (ca. 820–912), the placebo effect and suggestion were given a significant place in therapeutics. [….] His Physical Ligatures was ‘a learned “high medicine” text on the empirical use of magic,’ in which he made the point, ‘on no less authority than Plato,’ that ‘the mere belief in the efficiency of a remedy will indeed help in a cure;’ and numerous manuscripts and early modern printings suggest that his work was widely read in the West. Qusṭā maintained that ‘a benefit of some drugs in some circumstances is the effect that they have on the mind, provided patients believe them to be remedies. Most of his prescriptions involved ‘the power of persuasion or suggestion;’ and he clearly recognized the placebo effect when he said that ‘the action of a medicine may be no more than the effect the suggestion has on the mind.’” — Stanley W. Jackson, Care of the Psyche: A History of Psychological Healing (Yale University Press, 1999): 281-282.

*          *          *

“Given that placebos are such a powerful treatment on their own, we might ask ourselves: why are they not being used as a treatment more widely? One of the biggest barriers is an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, placebos are highly effective for certain symptoms and conditions, and can have a real therapeutic effect. On the other hand, to benefit from placebos, the predominant thinking has been that people need to be misled into believing they’re taking an active treatment. Since most medical authorities worldwide have agreed – for good reasons – that lying to patients isn’t a best practice, this reliance on deception has prevented the widespread use of placebos as treatments in and of themselves.

… [There is an] emerging research trend [that studies the] possible beneficial effects of placebos given without deception, also known as ‘open-label placebos’ or ‘non-deceptive placebos.’ In a foundational study in 2010, researchers at Harvard Medical School randomised patients experiencing irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) symptoms into either an open-label placebo group or a no-treatment control group – and crucially, all the patients knew which group they were in. The researchers told patients in the open-label placebo group that the placebo effect is powerful, that the body can respond automatically to taking placebo pills (similar to the classic conditioning example of Pavlov’s dogs, who salivated at the sound of the dinner bell), that a positive attitude helps but is not required, and that it is vital to take the pills faithfully for the entire 21-day study period, regardless of their belief in the pills. By the end of the study, even though the placebo pills contained no active ingredients, and despite the patients knowing they’d been taking placebos, they reported fewer IBS symptoms and more improvement in overall quality of life than patients in the no-treatment control group. [….]

So what’s really going on here? It’s not the sugar pill itself that leads to these changes in psychology and physiology, and it’s not magic either. Research in medicine and psychology on both traditional and open-label placebos suggests several mechanisms at play.

One is people’s expectations, or the positive belief that a treatment might have beneficial effects. In open-label placebo studies … people are often told that a belief in the placebo isn’t necessary, but they are encouraged to keep an open mind. Some of the clinical studies have involved volunteers for whom many other treatments have failed, and so they have added reason to hope that this experimental, slightly unorthodox treatment might work for them. Emerging research suggests that this belief might be partially responsible for the benefits. [….] Another possible mechanism is conditioning, in which the body learns to associate beneficial effects with an action or ritual. Many of us have had repeated experiences of taking pills that help reduce our symptoms – ibuprofen for a headache, NyQuil for a cold, or Pepto Bismol for an upset stomach. Over time, the body may learn to associate taking a pill with symptom relief. So the very act of taking a pill itself can catalyse the body’s own capacity for healing.

This conditioning is sometimes done explicitly in research with open-label placebos. In one clinical study, researchers asked patients recovering from spine surgery to pair their active pain medication with open-label placebos and also to take the placebo pills on their own. The placebo pills began exerting their own pain relief. Compared with the control group who received treatment as usual, patients who also took the open-label placebo pills consumed approximately 30 per cent less daily morphine in the days after surgery.

There are also other, less well-studied mechanisms that may be at play in open-label placebo effects. For example, when someone starts taking a treatment – placebo or not – they often begin paying closer attention to their own minds and bodies. Most conditions and symptoms fluctuate over time. For example, when we are experiencing a headache, even if we don’t take any medication or other action, the severity of that headache will naturally decrease over time. People who take open-label placebo pills may hope for improvement, making them more attuned to times when their symptoms subside. Other research shows that medical rituals – whether that’s taking a pill, getting an injection, or merely having a cup of tea and taking a hot bath – can evoke both expectations for healing and a conditioned response. Thus, the act of taking pills faithfully can become a healing medical ritual in and of itself.

Now that we are seeing an accumulation of evidence that open-label placebos might be helpful, researchers and clinicians are starting to think about how to apply them in practice to benefit patients. [….] Current and future research is continuing to shed light on which conditions open-label placebos might be best-suited to. As the field grows, a debate must follow: will open-label placebos ever become part of mainstream medicine? Is it better to focus efforts on convincing doctors (and patients) that open-label placebos can be effective, or should we better understand the mechanisms of open-label placebo effects and try to harness those mechanisms in conjunction with active medications and treatments, such as by boosting patient expectations? Will open-label placebos ever be more than a semi-fringe last resort for conditions and patients for whom most other treatments have failed?

Of no small consideration is the fact that, with little money to be made from prescribing sugar pills, the influential pharmaceutical industry has no incentive to promote this kind of medication over patented, privatised medications and treatments. In many ways, research on open-label placebos is still in its infancy. The next 10 years may determine the ultimate impact of this research. As the field progresses, one of us (Darwin) plans to continue to investigate and optimise open-label placebo effects on stress, anxiety and depression in both clinical and non-clinical settings.” — Darwin A. Guevarra and Kari A. Leibowitz, “Why placebo pills work even when you know they’re a placebo,” Psyche, March 9, 2022.

*          *          *

“… [M]any remarkable healings of the past that had been attributed to magic, to miracles, to faith, or imagination in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to be considered the results of suggestion, and more recently these same healings have been attributed to the placebo effect. Saying that suggestive effects are nothing but placebo effects, or vice versa, seems an acknowledgment that these two phenomena overlap one another. At the very least the suggestion of help is usually an element in the use of placebo. Further, among the factors that [Arthur K.] Shapiro³ views as significant in the placebo effect are faith, hopeful expectations, the healer’s manner and attitude, and the doctor-patient relationship, all of which have been considered significant for successful suggestion in healing contexts.” — Stanley W. Jackson, Care of the Psyche: A History of Psychological Healing (Yale University Press, 1999): 282

   

Notes

1. Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (University of California Press, 1984). The best counter-arguments to Grünbaum are found in many of the titles in section 1 of my bibliography on psychoanalytic psychology and therapy. For one of the later rounds of this exchange, see the edited volume below by Boag, Brakel, and Talvite.
2. See her chapter, “The Placebo Effect: psychoanalytic theory can help explain the phenomenon,” in Brakel’s Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2010): 137-146.
3. Arthur K. Shapiro, “The Placebo Effect in the History of Medical Treatment,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1959, 116: 298-304.

References & Further Reading

• Benedetti, Fabrizio. Placebo Effects (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2014).
• Boag, Simon, Linda A.W. Brakel, and Vesa Talvitie, eds. Philosophy, Science and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting (Routledge, 2018 [Karnac Books, 2025]).
• Brakel, Linda A.W. “The Placebo Effect: psychoanalytic theory can help explain the phenomenon,” in Brakel’s Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2010): 137-146.
• Brown, Walter A. The Placebo Effect in Clinical Practice (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Evans, Dylan. Placebo: Mind over Matter in Modern Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Guevarra, Darwin A. and Kari A. Leibowitz, “Why placebo pills work even when you know they’re a placebo,” Psyche, March 9, 2022.
• Harrington, Ann. The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008).
• Harrington, Anne, ed. The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Harvard University Press, 1997).
• Jackson, Stanley W. Care of the Psyche: A History of Psychological Healing (Yale University Press, 1999).
• Jopling, David A. Talking Cures and Placebo Effects (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Kolber, Adam J. “A Limited Defense of Clinical Placebo Deception,” Yale Law & Policy Review, Vol. 26, 2007; San Diego Legal Studies Paper No. 07-87.
• Miller, Franklin G., et al., eds. The Placebo: A Reader (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
• Moerman, Daniel E. Meaning, Medicine and the ‘Placebo Effect.’ (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
• Shapiro, Arthur K. and Elaine Shapiro. The Powerful Placebo: From Ancient Priest to Modern Physician (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
• Wilcox, Judith and John M. Riddle, “Qusṭā ibn Lūqā’s Physical Ligatures and the Recognition of the Placebo Effect,” Medieval Encounters, 1994: I: 1-48.

 Relevant Bibliographies

• Addiction
• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• Dreams and Dreaming
• The Emotions
• Human Nature, Personhood, and Personal Identity
• Notes on Science and the Sciences
• Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
• Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law