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Stop cheering, start pushing

As a vote in the US Congress passes, with far too much blind opposition and also far too much cheering, it's refreshing to hear a civilized discussion about healthcare in the US. Not in the Congress, of course, or in the mainstream media.

An elementary moral point must be made: without universal healthcare, barbarism prevails in any society. This bill is arguably a lessening of that barbarism, possibly even significantly. But barbarism still prevails.


Those who cheer for this legislation must be careful, lest they be mistaken for cheering for the barbarism, albeit reduced, which it implements.

The following discussion is a good example of a debate from a civilized perspective.

Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader: A discussion on Healthcare, Politics, and Reform

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/18/dennis_kucinich_and_ralph_nader_a

On the left, Nader:

this is the latest chapter of corporate Democrats crushing progressive forces both inside their party and against third parties...

there will be 180,000 Americans who will die between now and 2014 before any coverage expands, and hundreds of thousands of injuries and illnesses untreated. This bill does not provide universal, comprehensive or affordable care to the American people. It shovels hundreds and billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the worst corporations who've created this problem... For the drug companies, it's a bonanza.

On the right (for once), Kucinich:

I don't like much of anything of what's happening here, except to say that I think that down the road we need to jump over this debate and go right to a bigger debate about how do we get healthcare that's significant, how do we supplant the role of private insurers...

the whole system is wrong. But, you know, there's a point at which you are in the system and you have to figure out, is there a way to try to use the moment to move in a direction that gives you a chance to keep pushing the point.

Indeed. Stop cheering, and use the moment to move in the direction out of previous barbarism, out of the new version of barbarism, and towards a minimal degree of civilization.

On militarism

During the US wars in Indochina, a tumult of protest and activism at Stanford brought many momentous changes to the university. Among these was the banishment of the ROTC from campus. But recently, the suggestion has been made in the faculty senate that the ROTC return to campus; a committee has been formed to investigate the matter. These developments have provoked much discussion, including among current and former campus antiwar activists.

In this discussion, even among activists, I have been a little surprised as to which arguments have and have not been made. In particular, one argument seems to have been missing: the argument against militarism. This is a glaring omission, and the argument should be made. And so I think it is worth chiming in with my view, to present my version of this argument. As I consider anti-militarism an involved question, this is long; read in your own time!

* * *

At present, one of the main arguments keeping ROTC off campus is its anti-queer prejudice, enforced through the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy. But it would be deeply deficient, in my view, to oppose military recruiting, ROTC, etc, on campus merely for such reasons. It may be enough to add in the history of US foreign policy, as some have noted: what the US military does, has done, and will do if things continue on their current course --- these are all shocking and reason enough to oppose its presence on campus anywhere.

But these are the easy arguments. The argument against militarism is a bit more difficult to make, strategically, I would say, but it is a deeper one and in the end it goes to the heart of the system we oppose in opposing wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobody has yet made the argument against militarism per se, but I think someone must. Such an argument may appeal to activists more than others. But I think that is not just a quirk of us strange creatures. I think it is because this argument is correct, because we are right when we make this argument. It is an argument that is deeply offensive to received conventional barbaric wisdom: there are formidable propaganda forces at work to instill and indoctrinate the population with the opposite view, and formidable cultural forces at work to demonize it. Anti-militarism is a dangerous set of ideas, threatening to power, poorly understood by the population at large, and easily demonized in current cultural conditions. Reactionaries will have no trouble trying to paint anti-militarism as a bunch of "hippies" making peace signs and drawling "war is bad" as their sole argument against militarism. But that is all the more reason to make the argument, make it clearly, and make it well. In my view there will be no end ot the vast worldwide injustice and destruction such as currently seen in Iraq and Afghanistan until not only these particular wars, but the systems and institutions supporting them, are all effectively opposed and neutralised. Militarism is an integral part of this system.

So, why oppose militarism? The argument is much stronger than the mere observation that war is bad.

* * *

When we speak of militarism we speak of many things. Perhaps it is not even a well-defined term. I am afraid I cannot give you a one-sentence definition of militarism. Let me give some overview of what I mean when I say I oppose militarism.

Militarism is integrally connected to a substantial part of the State apparatus, the Congress, and the economy at large. It is a principal instrument of State foreign policy; indeed, for the US, the principal instrument. In this sense the US State is heavily invested in militarism.

Militarism plays a prominent role in culture. Its operations are affected by, and in turn affect, gender relations, race relations, class, and sexuality. In general, the size, freedom, and legitimacy of a military is a measure of a society's readiness to embrace illegitimate force: it is therefore a measure of uncivilization. As the US is a nation of about 1/20 of the world's humans and 1/2 of its military spending, the level of uncivilization is clear.

Militarism is fundamentally connected to authoritarianism; and its obverse, obedience. The military is the instrument of brute force at the international level, and it often acts lawlessly (more on this below). As long as there is a strict chain of command, ideal soldiers in existing militaries are mindless automatons carrying out orders. Even when the orders are pure murder. Albert Einstein put this best:

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Militarism is fundamentally connected to patriarchy and homophobia. This is hardly a controversial statement, at least at the cultural level. By its nature, any culture of fighting wars and killing will celebrate aggressive, macho aspects of human nature. With that comes the entire cultural-historical legacy of women's oppression and queer oppression. There is a fundamental cultural, psychological, and philosophical connection between militarism, patriarchy, and homophobia. But to attack only the most obvious aspects of this homophobia, such as the "Don't ask don't tell" policy, must necessarily rest upon the most anaemic of analyses.

The military's daily duties are to train killers and to find the optimal implementation of destruction and murder. In this sense, institutional and habitual, there is a fundamental and obvious connection between militarism and death --- spiritual death as well as physical destruction of property and of the living organism. As a military acquaintance of mine once said, "What we do is kill people and break their stuff." The military is a machine for the creation of monsters --- and I think many within the military realise this. There has been a long process within the military of optimizing the process by which the instinct to avoid killing another human being can be overcome --- or better, overlaid with conditioning to kill without thinking, without the impulses of humanity kicking in, leading naturally to massive psychological trauma.

This process of monster-creation is not just obvious from the training sessions where recruits yell "Kill kill kill!". The military is the cultural and institutional embodiment of death. And a culture of worship of the military is a necrophiliac culture. The unthinking applause for a marine is not only applause of reflexive obedience and willing subjugation to authority and the State --- it is also applause for death. It is human society cheering itself into its own grave.

All of these give rise to deeper questions. The antipathy towards mindless murderous obedience must necessarily give rise to an uneasiness between anti-militarists and the military, and potentially the individuals within it. And it leads to some deep reflections on the nature of the military, as an institution, and its legitimacy. So let me make some comments on these questions, which are somewhat involved, but I think some things can be said.

* * *

In general, the relationship between the anti-war movement and the military has always been somewhat uneasy. On the one hand, the testimonies of anti-war soldiers are often powerful and moving. A soldier telling of their experiences, participating in atrocities, forced into impossible moral decisions, stumbling upon catastrophe, ordered unwillingly into barbarism, is powerful to hear. Nobody knows the horrors of war more than the people who participate in them. Moreover, anti-war soldiers appeal powerfully to mainstream audiences for whom the military is a sacred institution and the (false) patriotism of "serving one's country" is the highest moral virtue. And, even if they may have initially signed up for reason of this false, barbaric moral anti-virtue of flag-waving patriotism, anti-war soldiers are in general deeply moral people: they have come to oppose an institution (or at least its practices) to which they signed up voluntarily, and they have suffered all the consequences of opposing a powerful institution from the inside. The testimonies at the Winter Soldier conferences in the US, over recent years, were powerful beyond words. (Of course, this is the reason they were blacked out of the mainstream media.)

But on the other hand, there is no getting around the fact that every soldier is a trained killer. And, in the absence of conscription, in the absence of aggressive external military threat, every soldier is a trained killer who willingly signed up to be a trained killer, for reasons that may be difficult to justify. Of course the reasons given are usually not sadistic: but even commonly-given reasons like "serving one's country", "patriotic duty", or family tradition, all collapse upon the slightest examination. It is trite to have to say in the 21st century that we should have no loyalty to any country but to humanity, to justice, to the moral good; that you don't have to do what your dad did; that patriotism in the form of worship of a flag is a moral idiocy; that nationalism beyond the liberation of oppressed groups and societies, and the preservation of cultural heritage, is provincial nonsense --- but we must continue to say it. Of course this is not a complete set of reasons why people join the military. Given the absence of economic opportunities for people in many parts of the US, the military offers good prospects. Given the general level of ignorance about the history of US foreign policy, it's not surprising that the military is regarded as a noble institution: it offers discipline, it abhors waywardness and indirection, it knocks you into shape. In lands of unemployment, drug use, and street violence, military violence and adventure is hardly a worse alternative. In peacetime, it is a safe (physically as well as economically) way to get through university or college. Many people in the military, even in the US, I am sure could not give a rat's arse about flag-waving bullshit. Of course I cannot second-guess the reasons of every military recruit. But the point remains: there is tension between any soldier and antiwar politics.

This tension is a source of continual struggle for movements against war and militarism; but struggle is good, struggle maintains vitality.

Soldiers themselves are one thing; but they are individuals, and they are often good people. In opposing militarism, however, we focus more on the military institution itself, than the soldier as individual. In general, in all social analysis, we must draw a distinction between institutions and the people who occupy them. This is an obvious point but it is often lost, and usually missing from mainstream analysis --- institutional analysis goes to the root of the system, is inherently radical, and it leads to too many disturbing conclusions. In opposing militarism we are not prejudiced against soldiers. In opposing the State we are not prejudiced against every public sector employee. In opposing turbo-capitalism we are not prejudiced against every bank employee. In opposing capitalism per se we are not prejudiced against every property owner, manager, rich person or boss. People are people, and if nothing else they are redeemable; institutions, being the systems, habits, roles occupied by people and to which they must conform, require no such sympathy. Militarism is a point of view against certain institutions, roles, and cultures within society, rather than individuals, and although this is a difficult point for many people to understand, it is an elementary one. All institutional analysis is, formally at least, independent of the individuals holding positions within that institution.

Thus, if the military, as an institution, causes horrid effects on the individuals within it; tends to engage in atrocities, violence, overthrow of legitimate popular governments --- these are good reasons to oppose militarism; they are in my view largely valid reasons. But we can say something more fundamental about the nature of the military itself.

* * *

Having made the qualification that we speak of institutions rather than people, let us make no bones about it. What is the military, as a social institution?

The military is the State's will to power. It is, by definition, the instrument by which the State exerts brute physical force over the world. All force is prima facie illegitimate --- reasonable minds may differ, I would say, about when physical force can be justified; they may differ on whether it is ever justified on the scale writ large of war. At the small-scale level there are clear situations where physical force can be justified, for instance pushing a person out of the path of an oncoming train. But the burden of justification on those who advocate force is always heavy, and it is rarely borne out. Any military institution is, therefore, a prima facie illegitimate institution. Its right to exist depends on proof that the world, at the international level, is so savage that standing armies are required. Indeed the world at the international level is savage, but much of this is caused by the US military, not prevented by it. Peacekeeping efforts are another matter, and may even bear out the need for a military. But anyone who says that a military is necessary must do so with a heavy heart and a tear in their eye. Anyone who says that a military is a desirable institution is confused or sadistic.

Therefore, the military is dangerous; it demands massive institutional checks and balances on it. As long as it exists, the savagery of the military's animating purpose must be tamed by some countervailing dynamic. We must ask: what are the countervailing dynamics against violence and the use of force? We see these from the smallest interpersonal level to the most global scale. I think that analysing this question at the individual scale has important implications for the question at the global scale.

At the interpersonal level, violence is prevented by many mechanisms. In the first instance, it is prevented by social norms, habits and social respectability: it is not polite to start arguments, or to fight. And while social respectability, in its more class-based and elitist forms, may be putrid, at a minimum it prevents the use of force. Beyond that we have psychology and social dynamics, reason and culture: we have evolved as social animals, we know instinctively how to get along, or at least avoid the worst confrontations; and we can be convinced to avert them. Beyond that again we have the law, acting upon society to restrain it: in most quarters it is stronger to say that someone is breaking the law, than to say that they are behaving badly; note that the force of law, while resting upon the threat of judicial punishment, acts quite independently of the State which implements it. The law, in this sense, is not a moral code of what should and should not be done, but a set of prohibitions on the worst deviations from moral conduct; this is as juridical law should be, for not every immorality deserves judicial punishment. But as a final sanction against violence, there is State authority, acting with its usual brute force --- and often worse violence than that which it is supposed to prevent --- through its constabulary or para-military forces. The need for a police force, like a military, can only be justified upon the basis that society is not yet sufficiently advanced to be free of violent conflict of its own accord; since most societies are shockingly unjust, such conflict is inevitable, and the role of the police force will be to maintain power and privilege. The argument for an *armed* police force, however, is much weaker than the argument for a police force per se; recall that many of the most peaceful contemporary societies are those in which most police are routinely armed with nothing more than a stick. In a good society, the withering away of the State precisely means that there is no need for police to repress conflicts arising from injustice; that the law is internalised, and acts through the force of individual reason than through coercive State action; that people take control over their own lives and learn to live with each other. It is in this sense that anarchism is the highest possible form of human social organisation, and the most optimistic political philosophy. It may be a vision unlikely to be achieved except in the long term; but it is a positive vision nonetheless, a direction towards which we aim.

But the same applies at the local level of police forces and sheriffs, as at the global and international level of national militaries. The State institutions supposedly designated to prevent violence --- the police, the para-militaries, the courts --- may not achieve their goals, and they may often cause more violence than they prevent. But in the democracies, the State's coercive power over its citizens is severely curtailed under the law. If the State wants to punish you, it must have a clearly defined crime to charge you with; it must tell you what you are charged with; it must inform you of your rights; it must provide you with a lawyer; your must be heard in public before an independent judge and a jury of peers; you must be able to testify or not testify in your defence; the burden is on the State to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that its charges are borne out, and otherwise you are free. These are fantastic achievements of centuries of struggle, limiting the violent apparatus of the State, civilizing the State from its natural condition of lawless authoritarianism.

In a similar way, while militaries still exist, as a minimal step, they must be tamed by force of law, the law governing the use of violence in international relations. International law is only minimally developed; it is still in embryonic form; the world at the global level lags centuries behind many nations in its political development. But it has already developed a minimal set of rules for the use of force; these exist in customary international law, in various national and international court judgments, in treaties and conventions and the UN Charter. Moreover its content is appropriate and mostly defensible: it takes the minimal position that the use of force is prima facie illegal, unless some justification can be found. The only justifications recognised are self-defence and the vote of the UN Security Council --- these are not without their problems, particularly the Security Council --- but the general prohibition on war is sound.

There is no supra-national State to enforce international law; this law, by its nature, it must depend upon its internalisation and political pressure, rather than State coercion, for its implementation. International law is constrained to act only in its most legitimate form, by the power of its moral force. There are increasingly judicial mechanisms at the international level, but these are still embryonic.

In every national military, then, this force of law must act. It is true that there are some checks on the US military, included under the US Constitution: the military is under civilian control; Congress is given the power to declare war; and so on. Needless to say, these are utterly ineffective today. Every general should be a professor of international law, not just a connoisseur of the forms of destruction and domination. Every soldier should be given courses on not only international humanitarian law and the laws of war (as occurs in some militaries now) but also the public international law of when force can and cannot be used in international relations. Every soldier, every officer, and more importantly every general, should be put on trial or court-martialed for every violation of the UN Charter and conventions against the use of force in international relations. Every soldier should be free to refuse to participate in a campaign or an operation breaching these laws --- and arguably should have even more personal freedom over their own role in the military. Operational considerations aside, every order within the military must rest upon consent. Every army should not be a formation of automatons under arms and mindlessly obeying orders, but a free citizen militia, in the original sense of the word, implying individual choice and autonomy. This is all, of course, only to the extent any standing army should exist at all, as long as the world remains barbaric at the international level.

As long as a military does not possess these basic features of civilization, it should be regarded as an illegitimate institution. At the very least, it does not belong in any other civilized institution, such as a university.

* * *

If nothing else, we should remember the following: the abolition of ROTC from some university campuses, such as Stanford, was an awesome achievement, an advanced achievement, far more advanced a victory than would be, say, not permitting torturers and instigators of aggressive war to teach classes celebrating their crimes. It may be true that the victory was in part a lucky turn of history, caught up in the details and the currents of the time. That does not diminish the scale of the victory. If, thirty, forty years later, all the arguments have been forgotten, all the activists have moved on, and everyone has gone to sleep while we regress backwards to militarism, what hope is there?

Have no doubt about it: the fight for a better world is a fight not only against the most obvious injustices like aggressive war, war crimes and torture. They may be in one's face at Stanford but they are very much the tip of the iceberg. The fight for a better world is also a fight against militarism, against patriarchy, against homophobia, against racism, against class division, and against hierarchies of illegitimate power --- not only the tyrannical military chain of command, but also the tyrannical orders of the boss in every capitalist workplace all the way through to the web of mechanisms by which State and corporate power holds the world in economic and spiritual chains.

Whether to focus only on the tip of the iceberg, or to focus on deeper aspects of the system, is an important and difficult strategic choice --- the question must be constantly revisited and the approach re-negotiated within a movement. I understand that antiwar groups often focus on the easy questions at the tip of the iceberg. There is good reason for that: with political action, one wants to win concrete gains. Educating the population in a culture of obedience and worship of authority, where dissent is marginalised and ridiculed, is a difficult process, and one does not want to alienate the audience immediately by proceeding first to the most challenging questions. Starting with a radical critique may do more than alienate the mainstream; it may lead to marginalisation and a loss of perceived legitimacy among the more establishment sectors of progressive movement --- even if the analysis is sound, even obvious, even correct at the level of scientific truth.

Much conventional wisdom collapse upon the slightest examination. We all know that we live in a world of Sunday truths, repeated unthinkingly, utter nonsense. Reflexive support, admiration, veneration of the flag, the geographical nation, the State, the military, are among the worst of these. They must be overcome.

And war is bad too.

Savaging the Tapestry of the Law

Getting off the bus at Berkeley, my stop is right next to the law building.

I know that is where John Yoo, the torture lawyer, is a professor.

There are over a thousand students and faculty in the law school, who go there all the time.

And everybody knows what John Yoo has done, and that he is in the school there.

So what else would you do but go in?


* * *


Approaching the Berkeley law school, on a massive monumental inscription, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr intones:

When I think thus of the law, I see a princess mightier than she who wrought at Bayeux, eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever-lengthening past --- figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life.

Let us put aside for a moment any potential differences with such a hagiographic description of the State and its judicial apparatus.

Let us merely ask: could there be any more beautiful description of precisely that which Yoo's work has systematically destroyed?


* * *


Entering Boalt Hall, the building housing the school of law, one sees students working hard, lectures in progress, the usual goings-on of an academic paradise.

On bulletin boards are plastered advertisements and posters: for law journals, talks, panels, conferences, classes, and more.

Many of these posters advertise a talk on the obscuranta of the Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution: a debate on "Unenumerated rights".

Hardly the best-known amendment, and hardly the sexiest topic.

But the moderator of this debate is none other than John Yoo.

So what else could you do but make a note of it?


* * *


The strategy seems clear: a gradual normalisation of academic presence, testing the waters with esoteric scholasticism.

There is no advertisement of the event online: google searches turn up nothing. Clearly attempting to fly under the radar.

From lower to higher profile events, evidently hoping that, step by gradual step, nobody will remember the dictum from Nuremberg:

The prostitution of a judicial system for the accomplishment of criminal ends involves an element of evil to the State which is not found in frank atrocities which do not sully judicial robes.

Even the dedicated activists of Fire John Yoo have nothing of it at their website.

So what else could you do but notify firejohnyoo.org?


* * *


A protest is held, and press conference given, below the mighty words of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Nonviolently, peacefully, even politely, we march into the school.

Some in jumpsuits, some carrying pictures, some wearing ribbons, the procession enters the library.

Have you ever seen police blocking off access in a public library?


* * *


The room is full, explain the officers, looking a little guilty: someone exits the room even as they say it.

Full minus one equals full --- the officers of the Law now deny arithmetic and the conservation of matter.

There is no sense to it, but Yoo's intentional nonsense wrought far worse.

But with the Law's tapestry so savagely riven, and the architect inside, what could one expect?


* * *


But I looked beyond the Law's tapestry, here represented by automatons under arms, brute force blocking off publicly owned bookshelves.

And I looked at the students all around studying: we had speeches but we kept it quite quiet in the library.

Almost every one refused to make eye contact. Elsewhere I have seen the secret smile, the secret wink, the secret fist, the secret delight in violation of obedient social norms. Not here.

Should we pity the children --- but they are not children! Should we educate them --- but they are highly intelligent!

Should we teach them the law in law school? Is it too confusing to differentiate academic debate from criminal behaviour?

There were some students with us, but the silence spoke to me. It whispered of late Weimar Germany.

Do they have too much work? Stress? Debt? Is protest inherently crazy? I felt like a homeless outcst beggar pleading for change.

But I will plead for change, as long as it is necessary.

Why did it take a peripatetic mathematician, on a research visit, on wanderings preoccupied with symplectic geometry, to instigate this?

Jules Verne

Today I went to the Jules Verne museum. Nantes being his home town, the local government has established a museum in his honour. There is also an enormous mechanical elephant, in Verne-ian style. Since the temperature here has finally climbed back above freezing, the elephant was out on the streets today, about 50 people on board, spraying random passers-by with water. This seems like it would be more fun if it were actually hot; apparently, although above zero now does actually feel kind of warm to me, I haven't quite acclimatised sufficiently.

Verne's fiction today seems childish, sometimes racist, Orientalist, sometimes nakedly imperialist. Apparently his work has suffered from poor English translations. They are Boy's Own tales of an era long gone, pioneering antiques of science fiction. But there is still something delightful about it, some untainted childlike optimism about progress, technology, the world, discovery, science, adventure, and the universe.

As he says:

Il y a là une poésie grandiose, uné poesie qui n'est plus humaine seulement, mais planétaire, interplanétaire, si j'ose ainsi parler

(There is there a grandiose poetry, a poetry no longer only human, but planetary, interplanetary, if I dare say it.)

We no longer have literature to provide us with such dreams. Post-modern art in general abhors progress and optimism. Science has become too hard. Physics is buried under tomes of string theory machinations that may well turn out to become nonsense. It takes near a lifetime to reach the frontiers of mathematical understanding. Politically we have all the theory we need to liberate ourselves, and a century of history to ruin our dreams. Economically we are richer than ever, but stressed and unhappy as never before. Technologically we could create a paradise but instead we have killer robot drones, militarization of everything, total state surveillance, and criminalization of sharing information. Ecologically we know how to save ourselves but plough relentlessly toward distruction, like "yeast in a barrel, feeding and farting until they are poisoned by their own waste". It is an absurdity, a disaster. Maybe less so in France! But the point remains. The power of literature is awesome. It is not being used to its social potential. Where is a Jules Verne of today?

Requiem for Howard Zinn

The recent death of Howard Zinn is a tragedy, and leaves a great loss --- a vacuum, even --- amongst those who work towards peace and a better world.

But to say this is not enough. It is not enough to applaud his  pioneering intellectual work in history and historiography. It is not enough to praise his courage, intellectual and physical, against both vicious establishment academics and menacing police batons. It is not enough to admire his modesty, humour, good nature and kindness. It is not enough to celebrate his virtue while living deeply among the worst moral filth of the world --- namely, those destroyers of worlds whose legacy is whitewashed and handed down to children and to future generations as heroes with great names like Reagan, Clinton, Shultz, Rice, and Bush.

In short, it is not enough to say that Zinn was a great man for the obvious reasons. More is required. Zinn was a great man, but he was a great man of a special type. He was a great man of the type that plants the seeds for the renewal of the world. I do not mean this only in a philosophical or quasi-spiritual sense. I mean it in a concrete institutional sense.

Zinn waded through the most obscene filth on an everyday basis, both  as a professional historian and an activist for social justice. True, Zinn was not at a campus like present-day Stanford, where the mass murderers were actually physically present; but he wrote about it, talked about it, unceasingly for decades; he lived within it. He was a friend to Daniel Ellsberg and Daniel Berrigan, people whose proximity to that filth, and action in the face of it, led them to face the full force of the repressive State. He worked tirelessly within this cesspool --- all the obscenities and mendacity of great power, the jackboots with the fallout of a nuclear winter, the unerring brutality which killed and still kills the hope of the world.

Great power, in destroying these brief glimpses of humanity --- and especially the US State since it rose to great power status, in which it is now alone --- has not only killed hope, not only crushed it with military might, ensnared it with political might, and enslaved it with financial might. It has also erased it from memory: it has erased from the memory of humanity the crushing of its hope; it has erased from the memory of humanity, indeed, the radical formulation of hope itself. It has removed from collective consciousness not only the memory of the great struggles that it mercilessly slaughtered, but the memory of struggle itself, per se. Collective memory then lives in an anaemic, amnesiac twilight, bereft of the history of its soul, a soul artificially transplanted with sanitized fairytales, distracted by superficial overconsumption and lobotomised entertainment, and led into obsession with self, wealth, popularity and vanity. Collective memory is even, perhaps, bereft of the very notion of its social soul in itself, and the solidaristic impulses only clinch insofar as the fire spontaneously erupts, or catches across hermetically sealed boundaries.

The project of power in the contemporary era --- or perhaps better, the processes of powerful institutions which dominate the evolution of the contemporary world --- operate by various means: diplomatic, power-political, propaganda-journalistic, economic-structural, military-terrorist-barbaric. One merely runs through a list of the less powerful nations of the world --- and several of the more powerful ones --- to observe a litany of destruction in the last 60 years: Italy, Greece, the Philippines, Indonesia, Guatemala, Iran, El Salvador, Honduras, the Congo, Palestine, Brazil, East Timor, Guyana, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Ghana, Haiti... there are many nations on planet Earth, and few are immune. The books all testify to the facts, which are not in dispute. The yoke of indebted economic restructuring, the bullets fired into demonstrations, the rivers of blood, the mainstream-media articles celebrating the death of hope and the rise of tyranny, the establishment-academic tracts explaining the higher worth of the State's noble purpose --- these are all real enough and are not confined to the past. But one only needs examine one's own memory, education, and knowledge, and that of others, to notice how much of this is ever discussed, can ever be discussed. Usually, the answer is zero.

And so, the project of power has a foundation below all this. Structurally, the project of power is deeper than the instant death of proxy armies and killer robots; deeper than the grinding servitude of structural adjustment and the receiving end of "free trade"; deeper than the stenographic emollient that journalists pour upon the festering wounds of the present; deeper even than the subservience of approved academic truth that rises above the need for mere fact. Below it all is an historical project: to rewrite history. Nay better, it is an historiographic project: to rewrite what history is and how it is told, so that much of it is not told.

Of course, as with all institutional analysis, I do not say that any of this is deliberate or consciously willed by any individual person, though indeed sometimes it may be. (One need only read the diaries of CIA agents!) I say this is the outcome of the operation of systems of power. I say this is how the world has worked, and still works.

And so it is in this sense that the project of people's history, of  unearthing the histories of struggle, of retelling the stories long forgotten by dominant classes and power structures --- Howard Zinn's project --- goes to the foundation of the world. It is indeed planting the seeds for the renewal of the world, in a concrete sense. It is nothing less than an attempt for humanity to remember its own soul: its heroics, its mischief, its rebellion, its intransigence towards oppression, its occasional triumphs, and above all, its relentless tragedies. For we are not there yet: the present is merely the unfinished business of history.

* * *

Time evolves, and societies also. Different times require different  kinds of action, and people to carry them out. In various epochs of history, the most effective, most complete, most transformative person of that age would have had vastly different characteristics, traits, and values.


No doubt, in each age, the transformative woman or man must be an intellectual, although not necessarily one with a formal education: one who thinks, one who thinks critically, and one whose own mind is independent enough to hold beliefs against the current --- not only as against the vicious undertow of reactionaries and conservatives of every age; not only as against the crashing waves of fomentation and the swirling eddies of the minutiae of the present; but also as against the entire prevailing currents of the time. It must be an intellect strong enough to turn those currents in the direction of progress.

To turn those currents --- to be the transformative woman or man, to be complete --- requires more than mere thought, discourse, and debate; there must also be some form of action. At certain times in history, perhaps, the most effective agent of social progress would have been a street fighter; in other times and places, a national leader; in other times and places again, a guerilla; and in others again, a leader of nonviolent civil disobedience. It is not for no reason that the person whom Sartre called "the most complete human being of our age" was Che. Whatever one thinks of his judgment, in the present day, in the post-industrial West at least, violence against State military and para-military power is instant death, morally, politically, strategically, tactically, institutionally, and biologically. Nonviolence is the easiest conclusion of the historic present.

But the character of the present, at least in the post-industrial West, combines with this axiom of nonviolence to demand more of its transformative agents than ever before in history. It demands nonviolence in the face of injustice, provocation, inequality, avoidable death, justificatory doctrinal apparatus and oncoming catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. It demands optimism of the will in the face of a rational assessment of near-certain disaster. It demands knowledge and accuracy as against an a corporate and State propaganda apparatus which will ignore, and an academic establishment which will defame, debunk and ridicule the slightest of mistakes, even non-mistakes. It demands courage and hope as against a prevailing culture of apathy, materialism, and doom. And, in the age of the miniscule attention span, infantile popularity contests, and global disillusionment with vision for the future, it requires wit, humour, and panache.

The complete human being today has laid upon them all these demands. They are nigh impossible. The human being who can carry them out is infinitesimally rare.

Not everyone need carry out all these demands completely. Nor would I say that everyone needs to carry them out in order for the world to emerge from its present state of crisis with humanity intact.

But there must be people of this calibre, or all is lost.

Howard Zinn was one such person. He was a complete human being of our age.

Self-determination and Afghanistan

Self-determination is a central principle of international law.

In the case of Afghan self-determination it's probably also useful to point out that there is a sizeable Afghan peace movement, very courageous and principled, which the antiwar movement in the US should support. Malalai Joya, one of the leaders of this movement, has to be one of the bravest women in the world, confronting warlords, living under constant death threats, but continually speaking out against war and occupation. If Afghan self-determination is to mean anything, it must include voices like hers.

If the US government is to have any policy inside Afghanistan, it should include measures to (legally!) strengthen the position of those like Joya, rather than undermine them by propping up the Afghan "government" and escalating violence. The US decision to escalate seems to have come after much deliberation as to which type of bombing, which type of killing, which military tactics will serve US interests. the deliberations seems to have included all possible voices except those who advocate withdrawal and de-escalation, including the Afghan peace movement, the majority of the US population, and (I understand) most of the Afghan population. Obama's escalation has come precisely without considering the position of the Afghan peace movement, which is for an escalation in hospitals, schools, economic assistance, and aid.

That is, the decision to escalate is only possible because the US debate entirely excludes the voices of those on the receiving end of the policy; vastly increased levels of violence and military operations,  now similar to the height of the Soviet occupation, are only possible on the condition that self-determination be excluded as an axiom of US foreign policy, just as it is included as an axiom of international law.

Overpopulation controversies

A response to this article about overpopulation. Here follow some comments.


1. The author is racist, white separatist, ultra-anti-immigration, and heavily involved with the extreme right.

I do not use these terms lightly.

She is tied to the far-right and white-supremacist "Council of Conservative Citizens". It's a hate group, which has promulgated ideas of racial superiority, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and so on. In 1998 there was a big scandal that a lot of Republican party politicians in the southern US had close ties to the group. They are denounced by the mainstream right wing in the US, which in my view is extremist and radically regressive enough.

Substantial ties remain to Republican politicians. There is a good summary by the Southern Poverty Law Center here. See also here.


She is also tied to "The Occidental Quarterly", which describes itself as "devoted to the ethnic, racial, and cultural heritage that forms the foundation of Western Civilization". The journal is anti-immigration --- except from Western nations! --- and isolationist. It's also anti-Semitic: the "Anti-Defamation League", a Jewish organisation, has an article about it at
http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/Occidental_Observer.htm . The Anti-Defamation League itself is often quite despicable --- they denounce and make life hell not only for anti-Semites, which is fine by me, but also people who criticises policies of the state of Israel, thereby protecting policies of brutal occupation and repression in occupied Palestine. But their evidence regarding this publication seems clear.

Well, a single person is not a far-right hate group or an anti-Semitic journal. But she is on the editorial advisory board of the "Citizens Informer", their quarterly newspaper. And she is also on the editorial advisory board of "The Occidental Quarterly". She's on the national advisory board of the anti-immigrant group "Protect Arizona Now". So she is hardly on the margins of these groups or an unwitting participant. She's a willing and knowing part of all this. In fact within the anti-immigration movement she is seen as "the grand dame".

In her own words: "I owe it to my own and others' grandchildren to work to maintain the environmental, cultural, and social integrity of the United States, and to hold the federal government accountable for their constitutionally-mandated duty to protect this nation from invasion." Immigration apparently endangers the nation and threatens its cultural integrity. And she denies being a white supremacist but freely describes herself as "white separatist". See here.

So, she holds despicable views. Of course, being personally despicable and holding extreme racist and proto-fascist opinions does not disqualify you from talking about anything. She does have a PhD apparently. But this may well be relevant in evaluating what she has to say.



2. The immigration and aid stuff seems to come out of nowhere.

But it is now clear, knowing her background.

Sure, "foreign aid" and "immigration" are in the title, and the purpose of the article seems to be suggesting some government policies. But the immediate motivation for the article seems very different, at least the way it's written: overpopulation. It's perfectly legitimate to have a concern with overpopulation, although the author's motivations may well be a particularly racist form of overpopulation. With this concern, we then try to understand what makes fertility rates vary, which is also perfectly legitimate. We argue that it isn't so much prosperity/education/health/etc, again perfectly legitimately. We argue that sharp economic changes may make a difference, still legitimate. I will get to this fairly reasonable stuff in a minute.

But then we turn to aid and immigration, and the standard drops
through the floor.

The argument seems to be that foreign aid increases fertility, because it provides a sense of economic opportunity that encourages more child-bearing. That is a hypothesis, and an extremely surprising one: one hardly expects people in the poorest nations to base their family planning decisions, if they are decisions at all, on the existence or levels of foreign grants or loans. Nor would one think that the existence of emigration would affect family planning decisions, although maybe it is marginally more plausible. Either way, one would think there are many more immediate concerns. They are strange directions to take after what looks like a legitimate analysis of fertility rates. Given the author's racist views, perhaps they are more explicable. But, nonetheless, these are hypotheses. They require some evidence to support them. So let's consider the evidence given in turn.







(a) The argument regarding foreign aid.

How do we begin this argument? With a religious statement: "giving is a tenet of [US] foreign policy", the secular US religion that the US is the greatest, most glorious, most generous nation in the world. I'm sure this would come as a surprise to the victims of bombing, repression, terrorism, and murderous governments supported by the US. Moreover as regards foreign aid per capita, US spending is very low among developed nations.


After religion, we turn to ideology and unsupported supposition on behalf of the developing world: luckily most aid is now in the form of loans, so that the developing world does not think we are for fools, devious, or infinitely rich. The use of aid to support murderous regimes, for geopolitical machinations, to entrap poor nations in debt obligations, to support repressive militaries and paramilitaries, and to create demand for domestic constituencies, of course go unsaid. The only point is the religion, and the ideology --- we are too good for ourselves; but we shouldn't give to them, lucky we lend.

Well, this material is ridiculous but content-free. We then adduce material that worldwide foreign aid runs to the billions, even to the level where it is $20 per capita in Africa. (I'm not sure about what the timeframe is and can't find her source.) How does this aid affect fertility? Which countries receive more foreign aid, which less, and how do their fertility rates correlate? No evidence is given, whatsoever.

The only argument given is that "Such transfers of wealth cannot but perpetuate trust in one-world rhetoric--a belief that the community of nations can be relied upon to help, just like family. A sense of security grows... Efforts to plan for one's own future do not thrive in this climate". That the world consists of one planet is clearly a horrid communist plot, and obviously, feeling good about their place in a humane world free of borders, inequality and material scarcity, people in the developing world, where those properties of the world are most obvious, multiply like rabbits.

That this is seriously considered an argument --- and the only argument --- for the proposition that foreign aid increases fertility, speaks for itself. It beggars belief.

But it gets better. We have an argument for the converse --- that the absence of foreign aid decreases fertility. Two examples are cited: Mao's China and the Burmese junta. Clearly paradigm control cases. There could not be any other factors present, clearly; no, any difference must be attributed to the absence of foreign aid, which is clearly the defining characteristic of China and Myanmar.

As for China, somehow the absence of foreign aid as a causative factor dwarfs government repression and mandatory regulation of childbirth; or perhaps the absence of foreign aid was what caused the one child policy? The author's precise reasoning is unclear, but no matter. As for Myanmar, despite the lack of information and uncertainty among professional demographers, the author claims simply to understand everything: "But it is not unclear". Even if she is right that the cause was "lack of resources" (which seems to be her previous argument), it is not at all clear what effect foreign aid had on those resources.

So, this is astonishingly bad, and the evidence for this hypothesis is basically zero. Given the lack of evidence, one wonders why the author even wrote it. But her racist political views make it clear. One should also take note that the are also perfectly consistent with believing that the recipients of aid, usually not white, are lesser human beings; this is her view in any case.


(b) The argument regarding immigration

Thankfully, regarding immigration the author is more honest: she admits there is no evidence for the proposition. Studies are needed! She has a hypothesis, and is speculating. However, lack of an argument will not stop her arguing that to stop people multiplying we must both impoverish them and shut the door on migration.

By her own argument, fertility is caused by improving economic condition; yet, at least the sort of migration she is thinking of, economic migration from Latin America to the US, one would think, is caused by bad or deteriorating economic conditions. It is a contradiction; perhaps she can twist her way out of it somehow, but she makes no attempt and appears not to realise it.

She has some tables, apparently, of immigration and fertility rate data, but I can't see them. Apparently in "high-immigration countries" the fertility rates are declining, although she says they are "slow to decline". I don't know if such a correlation exists between immigration and fertility from what she says, but even if such a correlation appears, there is no reason to believe it to be causative.

One can imagine that a cause of grinding poverty could lead to both child-bearing (to bring in income for the family, contra her hypothesis) and economic migration (to escape grinding poverty). There are a lot of figures about the scale of undocumented migration to the US. This has almost no bearing on fertility. Perhaps the only, again unsubstantiated, statements are that: overpopulation is a "push factor" for migration; and communities in Latin America dependent on remittances may rationally calculate they should have more children to risk death and deportation crossing the Arizona desert. But again, despite sounding incredible, no evidence is given, and other factors like poverty and unemployment go unmentioned, which are the obvious ones.

Again, it is worth pointing out that, however flimsy the argument, this provides an excuse for racist anti-immigration policies: policies the author supports, on explicitly racist grounds.



3. Some of it is reasonable, and surprising

Before she gets to the anti-aid and anti-immigration business, she seems to cite facts and evidence that do appear surprising, about the "demographic transition". The essay is therefore an interesting example of how racist ideology can distort an otherwise seemingly intelligent mind.

The examples of East Africa, Egypt, Sudan, Brazil, Ireland, India, France, and others, are interesting. Surely "mainstream" demographers have considered them as well. These do seem to be counterexamples to the proposition, perhaps a mainstream one --- I'm not an expert in the field --- that rising wealth leads to lower fertility. Of course they do not contradict that wealthy nations today have low fertility rates, but they have important implications.

On the other hand, again these are only correlations. I am not an expert on these examples. I'm not sure how they fit into the global context.  I would want to see other work and explanations, by other studies. She does mention education, health, contraception, but does not consider other potential factors: women's rights, role in the workplace, etc.

This stuff is interesting. The racism aside, this gives nuance to the picture of how people have babies. Humans are complicated. They make decisions for all sorts of reasons.

But this article is disappointing because it following all this it becomes so atrociously bad, and probably motivated at least partly by the author's racism.

The slipperiness of language

I am taking a French class here since my French is so terrible. I can write French fine, thanks to google translate, and also read French fine... thanks also to google translate. (Reading or writing without an internet connection is another matter!)

For speaking French, when I know the word for what I want to say, fine also, but I don't know the words for what I want to say about 50% of the time. This is probably worse than for most people, since I always like to express things using big words and convoluted grammar. And so I end up most of the time playing the game of expressing my stupid comments with the words I do know. But in the 50% of cases where I know how to say what I mean, people seem to understand me fine.

As for listening to other people speaking French, this is still unbelievably bad. I felt like I improved in the first week here; I can pretty well pick out the sentence structure. And maybe I can understand like 2/3 of the words in any given sentence. Just not the important ones. For any sentence of any reasonable length I'm totally lost by the end of it. Some people seem to be able to get by on this level of understanding, but this requires some intuition about humans. Not so for mathematicians.

It's a bit different to what I thought, living with a foreign language. It's not like incomprehension all the time, it's not totally a matter of aimless staring of incomprehension --- though I do, actually, stare aimlessly without comprehending, all the time. (It's so terrible disappointing people, because I look like i should speak the language, I am white, male, grown-up, in an office, at a university, etc.) It's more like, you have a vague gist of what people are talking about, you know the general concepts they are talking about, but you cannot be sure of anything at all that anybody said.

French is full of too many false cognates, too many slight variations, too many words which sound the same, too many 1- or 2-syllable words, too many non-pronounced letters. It's a slippery, slimy, thing... maybe I understood, maybe I didn't, what exactly did you mean by that, and I know that there is no way for you to express it more precisely without switching to english. For a mathematician especially this is extremely frustrating.

Oh well, this will improve.

Torture and hypocrisy

Accepting the "after 9/11 was extraordinary" argument for torture would then justify torture in any more dire situation --- such as invasion by a foreign army or outright war. It would therefore justify torture (say) of US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, or in any war. It would make war crimes, in time of war, legal. It is a contradiction in terms.

There was a good article in the NY Times about foreign policy upholding dictators and murderers. This may sound impossible; but this restriction does not apply to the sins of others. Imagine if one could get this sort of honesty in one's own country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/world/africa/13francophone.html

"Woe to you... hypocrites that you are! You clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are filled with the results of greed and self-indulgence... First clean the inside of the cup and the dish, so that the outside may become clean as well."
- Matthew 23:25-6

Reflections on history

Given that today is the 20th anniversary of a pivotal event in history, perhaps some reflections on history are in order. But "optimism" is not the right word for it; neither is "pessimism".

Certainly, if we emphasise the world wars, utopian thinking seems like hopeless naievete. If one is to consider what human nature is capable of, the lower bound is barely imaginable: Holocausts, pogroms, pillages, rape, torture, assassinations, massacres, genocides, and war upon war upon war --- these are the fodder of history. It seems to me this is less appreciated than it should be. Among conservatives and capitalists, for instance, we often hear the argument that human nature is so bad that we cannot hope for anything else. But if they really appreciated how bad human nature can be, they would live in perpetual astonishment that we have what we have today. Those who truly understand the horrors of the human species and think they are unavoidable should not be conservative, or capitalist, but Hobbesian, monarchist, or fascist. I would agree that human institutions are established and upheld by fallible and corruptible humans --- but more: by murderous, vengeful, aggressive, malicious humans.

On the other hand, the range of freedoms, level of civilization, and social development achieved today would be scarcely imaginable half a century ago --- and entirely alien to society a century ago. This is not merely a statement about technology, but about attitudes and general social progress. And so on: the general position a century ago would be unimaginable a couple of centuries before that. For most of human history, any notion of governance other than absolute tyranny would be considered a naive pipe dream; any notion of individual freedom an unattainable and indulgent luxury; and any notion of social equality pure treason to the tribe, or caste, or class, or race, or nation. And more, we see a steady growth in the range of beings considered worthy, or "us", or worth defending: from the family, or tribe, to the village, the nation or race, to the civilization, to the entire world. Of course there are exceptions --- exceptions spelt out in destruction and broken lives --- but I find this identifiable.

A generally positive trend of course does not imply that we are approaching utopia. One may easily note that some of the greatest advances follow the greatest catastrophes --- the UN after the Holocaust and the second world war; government stabilization of the economy after the Great Depression; socialist revolutions erupting out of war; monarchies overthrown out of hunger; right back to the Persian invasion uniting the ancient Greeks and further. The next catastrophes which, on a sober analysis, seem quite likely to occur --- vast global climate change and the end of oil --- and those which are still highly possible, like global nuclear war --- are of such an order that we barely know if the human race will come out of it with any civilization intact. If we do, I would imagine that an improved social and political order would follow; but this seems to me by no means a likely outcome.

To ask what the human race is capable of, it seems to me not a complete answer to say we are horrible. We are, but we got this far, somehow. I see no reason why we cannot go further. Moreover, it's trite to point out how fast society changes today, and that society is changing ever more quickly. The only thing we can say about the world a decade or more from now is that it will be vastly, even unimaginably different.

At least as far as economic institutions are concerned, the general pessimism has a clearly identifiable historical cause: indeed today it is the 20th anniversary of it. The horrors of the systems and governments that claimed to be "socialist" and offer the better alternative to capitalism are well known. Their collapse means that no alternative to capitalism appears to exist. (It does, but we have to look harder.) And their (false, in my view) claim to the label of "socialist" means that even to talk about a better system than capitalism is to enter a linguistic, definitional, and substantive political minefield.

The only scientific response we can give (if one were at all possible) to the question of what social systems are compatible with human nature is that we have no idea. We know some lower bounds but have no clue as to upper bounds. It seems clear that human tendencies and potentials may or may not flourish depending upon the environment, the institutions in which they develop --- we do not know how far. We can say that human nature is capable of supporting vastly morally and politically better systems than have been thought possible for most of history. Moreover we have multiple previous instances of false announcements of the "end of history". It would be extraordinary if that were actually the case today.

Can our "collective egoism" be transcended? Of course we all hope so. But we have no idea. All we can say maybe is that the collective of the egoism does seem to be historically broadening in scope --- and, probably, largely due to social movements against war and for international solidarity. In truth we have very little evidence as to how human beings would live in a democratic, participatory economy, free of the authority of the boss, of the shareholder, greed, the profit motive, the authoritarianism of property, and all the deadening and infantilizing pressures and incentives that come with a market system. Such a situation has barely ever existed. We have some evidence that it is possible, from a few isolated historical examples, usually crushed by military force at the disposal of power.

And so it does not seem that history has foreclosed on us yet. I would say there is still a light upon the hill.

But still I would say that human history is not necessarily a staircase to utopia. It does not automatically progress; on the contrary. It is made by women and men, who make choices about how they act and how they live their lives. The trajectory of a society can be changed, or perhaps, perturbed from its orbit; existing habits and institutions exercise a stranglehold over much of how people act and think. Marx seems right when he says that "Men [and Women!] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." But they must make it; it is not done for them, and it is their struggle to do so.

In the case of those seeking a better economic system, reflecting on the 20th century, and its culmination in the events of 20 years ago today, again to paraphrase Marx, the weight of history hangs like a nightmare over the brains of the living.

Of course we can only be glad at the fall of the authoritarian communist regimes. We are glad they are gone. But today, a day of capitalist triumphalism, relentlessly repeating that greed has conquered the earth, is not a day for optimism. And, on any rational analysis, optimism is hard to find. Rationally speaking, the human race usually appears (and is) headed towards disaster.

But if we do not force ourselves into an optimistic orientation, we guarantee the worst. This is Gramsci's optimism of the will.

Looked at another way, the potentials are clear. We have the technology to avert catastrophic global warming; we just need to implement it. We have technology progressing beyond our comprehension. We have a world fed up with capitalism, and yearning for something more: everywhere we look, in mainstream thought but even in popular culture, figures of power are demons and their system is leading us to doom. The institutions of global capitalism are no more than a few decades old, they are historically young. We have increasingly unified movements to oppose them, in spite of a vast propaganda apparatus to the contrary. We need a vision of what we want to achieve in this wondrous, still-young world, and then we can go out and build it for all the world.

And if we make it out of this century intact, who knows what we may achieve? It seems to me, therefore, imperative to ensure that we do.

Socialism as saintliness

As part of my ongoing efforts to understand humans, I recently read William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience". (Now, if only there were a book "The Varieties of Capitalist Experience"!) As you might expect, I do not share James' views on most things, but several passages are highly interesting.

Now, some of the following seems clearly wrong: Quakerism for instance seems to me to be perfectly compatible with non-violent resistance. And, it may grate upon the non-religious among you (it did on me a little): I would read "salvation" as something purely ethical, although James means something more.

And, as friends have pointed out, this is a highly exclusive version of socialism. Socialism, if it is anything, is democratic and inclusive, in which all can have their say, not only in the legislative-political but also in the economic realm.

Moreover, as religious friends have pointed out, the "doormat Christianity" of turning the other cheek, as it is usually understood, is not faithful to the original text of the gospels, which preach non-violent resistance, rather than no resistance at all.

BUT in any case, note that at the end he considers utopian socialists as the secular version of this saintliness, as an exemplary, visionary orientation. I would disagree with his unsupported judgment about practicability --- indeed he seems to be entirely contemptuous of them --- but the general characterisation to me seems valid. Note some of the language is surprisingly modern; this was written in 1901-2, but the "world yet to be born" is straight out of Arundhati Roy, and the "creative social force" and "potentialities for human development" are fairly modern socialist or anarchist formulations, I would say. The vanguard imagery (torch bearers! drops flung ahead of the crest of a wave!) is perfectly overblown, straight out of orthodox Marxism-Leninism --- of course this is "vanguardism" in its defensible sense of exemplary moral character, not the apologetics for Leninist authoritarianism with which that word has long been tainted.

The creation of a socialist heaven on earth, regardless of the existence of a heaven per se, of course is much older, as old as socialism itself --- an animating vision of all revolutionary and
transformative politics.

And, the "facets of the character-polyhedron" is an awesomely geeky formulation. What is this earth thing you call love?

Passage follows.

"
[S]aintliness has to face the charge of preserving the unfit, and breeding parasites and beggars. 'Resist not evil,' 'Love your enemies,' these are saintly maxims of which men of this world find it hard to speak without impatience. Are the men of this world right, or are the saints in possession of the deeper range of truth?

No simple answer is possible...

As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors. The saint may simply give the universe into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may by non-resistance cut off his own survival.

… We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving alms. The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also.

You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.

And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the wronger's person; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our imaginations.

The saints, existing in this way, may, with their extravagances of human tenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved themselves prophetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transformed them by radiant example and by the challenge of their expectation.

From this point of view we may admit the human charity which we find in all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, to be a genuinely creative social force, tending to make real a degree of virtue which it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are authors, auctores, increasers, of goodness. The potentialities of development in human souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed irretrievably hardened have in point of fact been softened, converted, regenerated, in ways that amazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators, that we never can be sure in advance of any man that his salvation by the way of love is hopeless. We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa-constrictors as of fixedly incurable beings. We know not the complexities of personality, the smouldering emotional fires, the other facets of the character-polyhedron, the resources of the subliminal region… The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torch-bearers of this belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wavecrest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy.

… If things are ever to move upward, some one must be ready to take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more powerfully successful than force or worldly prudence. Force destroys enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what we already have in safety. But non-resistance, when successful, turns enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects. … [G]enuine saints find in the elevated excitement with which their faith endows them an authority and impressiveness which makes them irresistible in situations where men of shallower nature cannot get on at all without the use of worldly prudence. This practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely transcended is the saint's magic gift to mankind. Not only does his vision of a better world console us for the generally prevailing prose and barrenness; but even when on the whole we have to confess him ill adapted, he makes some converts...

In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their impracticability and non-adaptation to present environmental conditions, analogous to the saint's belief in an existent kingdom of
heaven. They help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness, and are slow leavens of a better order.
"

-- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 355-60

An appropriate orientation

"implacable to the whole system of official values: the ignobility of fashionable life; the infamies of empire; the spuriousness of the church, the vain conceit of the professions; the meannesses and cruelties that go with great success; and every other pompous crime and lying institution of this world."

--- William James, on Tolstoy

The antiwar movement in the large, and measuring it

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/measurenonprofit

I read this article and thought it was interesting. I had some comments on it, which pertain to the antiwar movement at large, so I thought I would share them. Make of them what you will.

1. Measuring is good when possible!

Being a scientist (and a mathematician at that), I like data. Observing and measuring is good. If you can find things to measure, more power to you.

However, I can see some difficulties in the context of the antiwar movement. In particular, some things are hard to measure; and more, some important or essential things that an activist group should be doing, might have completely zero short-term measurable effect. Some details follow.

2. The scale of antiwar goals.

To stop, or even prevent, a single war is a massive, world-historic event. To reduce the US national military budget, say to a level comparable to the rest of the world, even more so: that amounts to a total restructuring of the economy. To stop militarism, more so again: that is a culture and an economic and institutional inertia written deeply into american life. And, to stop jingoistic patriotism --- the insane loyalty to a single geographic region with some arbitrary boundaries denoting the fates of long forgotten kings, emperors and imperialists who once carved up the earth for themselves --- indeed amounts to a complete change of american life: so that every wave of the flag is met with curiosity or stupefaction, rather than with cheers and tears; so that the "american" in american life it more or less ceases to exist, to the extent it denotes anything more than a geographic location.

Make no mistake, the antiwar movement has these as goals, and not just in the US, but everywhere. They are not complete goals --- a world with all these achieved might still be one of rank inequality, authoritarianism, and thwarted human life. One might argue they are best pursued alongside others --- perhaps it can only be done along with a restructuring of the rules of international trade, greater international economic and political integration, debt forgiveness, the satisfaction of humanitarian and economic needs and so on; or more radically, the restructuring of the global economy, economic democracy, north-south reparations, finding a better economic alternative to capitalism, etc.

Nonetheless, the broad antiwar goals are goals for the long term. They chart a course for human history. Their time-frame is measured in centuries --- even as the insanity and potential for catastrophe is so great as to demand that they be achieved now. Thus, one expects progress to be slow, even negligible; but one wishes, and needs, it to be done now.

Of course there are more local and immediate goals too, but the big picture must always be kept in mind, where measurable progress can be expected to be indistinguishable from zero even in the best possible case.

3. Sometimes vast changes happen unpredictably --- in the meantime, ideas are important.

Events like the founding of the United Nations and the end of the cold war were world-changing --- and entirely unpredictable a few years beforehand. Nobody would have advocated the second world war, or (say) the invasion of Afghanistan, in order to achieve these goals. The end of the second world war was indeed the impetus for the founding of the UN, but it is a superficial reading of history to regard that as the sole cause. These were not mere elite decisions, not merely the brokering of power by beloved leaders.

The creation of the United Nations built upon a century of pacifist organising and activism, the advocacy of various schemes of international integration, agitation for the outlawing of war (achieved in 1928 by the Briand-Kellogg pact, and today binding on all nations as customary international law), and the work of organisations like the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom. Nobody could have measured any progress whatsoever towards international integration until the first world war led to the League of Nations; and after its demise, again, until the second world war led to the UN. History is unpredictable, but the course of history depends upon the ideas and institutions that are in existence; the power of those ideas; and the balance of forces those ideas and their supporting institutions have at their disposal. By measurability standards the WILPFs and the Bertha von Suttners of the world are clearly zero or close to it. By the standards of history, they are monumental.

The conclusion must be that in political activism, the mere propagation of ideas --- perhaps even the mere existence of active organisations working for those ideas --- is of value in itself. Having an organisation, having people willing to meet regularly, putting time into the cause, in itself is something. Of course, the more people doing it, the wider the ideas spread, and the more clearly they are formulated and powerfully they are expressed, the better. Some of this may be measurable. But much of it surely cannot.

In any case I think, in the activist context, the proposition that no measurable effect implies no political effect is not always true.

4. Sometimes vast changes happen after long struggles --- at the beginning, nothing was measurable.

An insistence on measurability would have stopped people speaking out against the Vietnam war for many years --- as I recall, Kennedy first sent troops in around 1963 but the protest movement did not pick up until the end of the decade. Recall the stories of Chomsky and fellow activists going to speak every weekend, I think at the Boston Common --- with a significant police presence, not to beat up the antiwar protestors (as we see more usually today!), but to protect Chomsky and company from being beaten up by pro-war onlookers. An absolutely hopeless situation --- and disorganised at that --- but without this sort of persistence, the later massive movement could never have arisen.

More generally, the situation for most serious activists --- those antagonistic to power, to received ideology, and not subservient to some faction of power (like the CAP Shwarz refers to) --- almost always seems hopeless. Power is strong by definition, it has legions of unthinking supporters, and no shortage of subservient academics, pundits, and intellectuals. Challenging a political and intellectual hegemony is tough work! The best approach however seems clear: have a realistic analysis, but do what is required for the cause and for the good. As Gramsci put it: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

History shows that it can be done. And, often it is drastic. The pace of change can quicken, dramatically. Ideas can be widespread, and regarded as good, just as impractical. Many people are not prepared to act until they believe that others are prepared to act. Political action is self-referential, at least at first, its philosophy is logically circular, as with much of social life --- but it happens. And it cannot happen without an impetus that is non-measurable up to the instant it occurs, collapsing the nesting of logical brackets, and making a reality of the common knowledge that we think other people think we think they think.

5. The local situation may also make measurability hard.

None of this is to say that measurable effects should not be noted where possible, just that good work may not always have short-term measurable consequences. For campus organising, I can think of some sorts of measurements that could be made. But thinking about it, the same problems seems to apply even to goals local to a single campus. Getting the local war criminal prosecuted would be monumental in US history. Stopping, or placing further institutional limits on, military research would be a massive shift in the direction of the whole university --- one can well argue, at least to a first approximation, that Stanford built itself into a world-class institution precisely by taking government money for military-related research. Moreover, current military research on campus is institutionally protected by white-washed reports and "academic freedom" and runs together with the vast sums of "defence"-related money supporting the economy of not just Stanford, but the entire country --- military Keynesianism.

In addition, arguably the low-lying fruit (no classified research on campus, no ROTC on campus, for example) have already been won by movements long ago (well, the 1970s!).

But, the general idea seems fine. Activist groups should have identifiable goals, visions, and so on. And activist groups should not be wasting their limited time and resources by doing things which do not help their cause --- or by not helping their cause as much as they potentially could.

I would just say to be on guard that too much of a focus on short-term measurability could potentially detract from the sort of cultural and ideological change that is, in the long run, central to any antiwar, or anti-imperialist, or pacifist mission, and which seems nigh impossible to measure objectively.

Information and actions, nuclear weapons, indefinite detention

1. Nuclear Weapons

Obama has made several rhetorical commitments to nuclear disarmament; there is also an ongoing Nuclear Posture Review. Now is the time to push him to do something substantial about it.

From the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation:
Video -- U.S. Leadership for a Nuclear Weapons-free World
http://www.wagingpeace.org/


Tell President Obama to Make Dramatic Nuclear Cuts
http://capwiz.com/wagingpeace/issues/alert/?alertid=13704431

From TrueMajority:
A Nuclear Free World
http://act.truemajorityaction.org/t/120/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=33

From Peace Action:
Petition to President Obama for Nuclear Weapons Abolition
http://www.peace-action.org/nukes/campaigns/nptpetition.htm

From the Union of Concerned Scientists:
President Must Match Actions to Words on Nuclear Weapons
https://secure3.convio.net/ucs/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=2095




2. Indefinite detention

The Obama justice system
by Glenn Greenwald
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/08/obama/index.html


Petition from Amnesty:
Stand Against President Obama's Proposed Indefinite Detention Regime
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=12497&ICID=T0906A02&tr=y&auid=5026108

Petition from ACLU:
Stop Indefinite Detention
https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?amp;cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1625