On Reading James Baldwin

At the end of the academic year, as a final reading for Classics of Social and Political Thought, I gave my students James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. There were a number of reasons for this: one of the climactic scenes takes place in Hyde Park, at a house they could easily walk to; it updates the conversation on race through the mid-60s, and gives them something newer than W.E.B. DuBois to think about; it allows them an option on racial questions that avoids lionizing Malcolm X or martyring Martin Luther King, both of which flatten the contradictions that make them interesting and admirable. Baldwin ends by conjuring up visions of black America on the south side of Chicago, and everywhere. His repeated line is "what happens to all that beauty?"--all those lives that are lost or forgotten.

I also assign it because I read it shortly after the end of my freshman year of college, and it had a profound effect on me. Baldwin came to me from Cornel West, who directed me to DuBois, and Malcolm X, and many of the other highlights of black American culture. I assigned it because I wanted it to have the effect on someone else that it had on me: a life-shaking realization of what the world was like for people who were not me. One might be inclined to view this as an example of thinking literature can change people: it certainly changed me. But, I have come to realize, it changed me because I was prepared to be changed.

Some relevant facts about me not otherwise known to the internet:
*From approximately 7th grade to approximately 10th grade, I was bullied. I've had a very slight sibilant S since childhood, which sounds not unlike a lisp, on occasion. I was tall and skinny and not particularly interested in sports or cars; I liked to read. This made me a target, and the epithets of choice implied homosexuality. These threats were mostly that--threats--except for a few brief incidents. But the threat of violence is psychologically damaging in its own way. Sure, the kids in the pickup truck who stopped as I was walking down the street to yell "fag!" at me were probably not going to get out of said truck and make good on their threats, but probabilistic knowledge is cold comfort. I had some small consolation in the fact that the basis of their threats was untrue and, lo and behold, the threats dried up not soon after I started dating my first girlfriend, but there's something about knowing you might be subject to violence for no reason under your control that's hard to shake.
*From 10th grade or so until my sophomore year of college, I had long hair. I have been stopped and frisked by the police for the crime of sitting on a friend's car (and been singled out from the people I was with for that honor), and been frustrated by the indifference that attached to attempting to report someone's official misbehavior--city and state police shuttled me back and forth so many times, each denying responsibility, that I eventually gave up. I've had the experience of store owners send employees around to follow me and make sure I don't shoplift or otherwise cause trouble (and make sure I saw them so I knew it was intentional). When I took introductory philosophy as a freshman, the instructor asked if any of us had this particular experience--the only other one to raise her hand was the one person of color.

My experience was not the universe of experiences: I was only subject to force, never viewed as a threat. It was limited: only a few minutes or hours or random days through a small number of years. It also no longer applies: I look like the sort of person who gets called 'sir' when I wear a suit, and I do. (I additionally had the defiant-teen's ultimate defense, that the various charges stated or implied against me weren't true)

But I think about that radical element that's always been present in my political views, the way in which it was obvious to me that Baldwin was right, that the experience Malcolm X described actually happened, that Ralph Ellison had correctly apprehended both the white and black experience of racial interaction, and it becomes apparent that I responded to all that work because I was primed to recognize the truth in it. The victory it gives is minor: I'm not sure I'm a better person for having read it, though it does make one more aware of the ways in which one falls short, not an insignificant addition. You pick Baldwin because he recognizes all of it, including the continual struggle to be slightly better. It's hard to think of a more fitting task to direct people towards when they're young.

Democracy is about feelings, y'all, and not procedural regularity.

I mean: the law was dumb, as are Texas' filibuster rules. But:

1. The action of crowds attempting to hold up a vote might (depending on circumstances) be democratic, but it's also not even remotely liberal. (Imagine the sides being reversed, and see how you'd feel about it. If you'd feel exactly the opposite, it's not a good political model.)

2. Thinking that politics is good or right when you get the emotional rush of a victory is not good. The entire point of politics (and law) is that sometimes you lose, and that's okay, because you want the other side to respect the outcome when you win.

I cannot recall, from my days as a conservative evangelical, anyone holding to the belief that women who are raped are unlikely to get pregnant. But it wouldn't surprise me if it were widely held, and undiscussed even amongst those who the people holding the belief live and work with. People aren't dumb, in two ways:

1. People recognize they need to have some sort of empirical justification for the (normative) views they hold. Mostly due to a lack of imagination, these explanations have to be scientific, or 'scientific.' (I.e. there are other ways to assert empirical truth other than concocting a biological explanation, but these are out of vogue for a number of reasons.) Scratch any strange-seeming political or social belief for long enough, and there's an explanation to be found.

2. People recognize these explanations are crazy, or will seem crazy, and so greatly restrict the sphere in which they're discussed. It's entirely possible to have a discussion of what's wrong with abortion amongst a evangelical crowd without having recourse to biology; it's possible to discuss it as part of a policy debate without ever referencing these beliefs.

This approach isn't limited to evangelicals or abortion. The Catholic traditionalists I used to know would eventually admit that one of the reasons birth control was (morally) wrong is because it is a dangerous drug that can kill women, but that belief is unlikely to come up unless really pressed on the matter. Nor is this restricted to the right, or religious people: instructors (who have generally not taken economics of any kind) tend to decry the empirical ignorance of their students (who generally have) if that ignorance leads them to want to put Marx aside as irrelevant: Marx asserts a truth that's truer than standard economic explanations of what's wrong with his theory. (Granted, I also think this, but one has to let Marx take his lumps on those things about which he's wrong.)

The usual response to these beliefs cropping up is to mock them. However, as J.S. Mill would tell you, that's the wrong thing to do. People who are mocked are not going to change their minds; they will learn to hide their beliefs better. Changing beliefs requires patient explanation without condescension. Of course, people have difficulty managing this, and it takes a lot of time, which is why it rarely happens. But it's the only way it can happen.

It turns out, to my surprise as much as anybody's, that I have something to say about the ongoing scandal at the 'neo-Reformed' Sovereign Grace Ministries (which I have been following through Rachel Held Evans), and the label 'neo-Reformed' in general. What's more, this observation is drawn from my academic research, and not any personal investment in the story itself. Here's the observation:

The central concern of Reformed Christianity was, and is, authority: what is power, who gets to hold it, what are the limitations on that power, what do we do when it is abused. In this, it is unlike the Lutheran Reformation with which it is sometimes associated. Luther was concerned with matters of doctrine. I tend to believe my sincere Lutheran friends who think that these doctrinal issues are all that separate them from Rome; were the Pope to come out tomorrow and announce justification comes through faith alone, the issue would be settled. The more characteristic Reformed concern is with the fact that there's someone in a position to make that assertion in the first place: no one given that kind of authority could possibly use it well.

(Substantively important aside: Reformed Christianity is sometimes referred to as 'Calvinism,' which is a bad term for it: Reformed was a wide movement in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Alsace-Lorraine that eventually had significant inroads in England, France, Poland, and all of central Europe. Calvin was undoubtably the brightest star in that firmament, but he was hardly the only influence. After all, Reformed churches decided against Calvin's preferred communion schedule, despite its centrality to his thought.)

Reformed Christianity is built around the attraction to and the skepticism of charismatic individual leaders. Both elements are important. If you've ever read about Calvin's relationship with Geneva, it should be obvious that it's a two-way street. Even when Calvin was at his most powerful and influential, the city existed as an independent entity that could place serious limitations on his ability to act, and so it went in all the other prominent centers of Reformed.

John Witte, Jr.'s book The Reformation of Rights tracks one important political dimension of this debate, in the question over whether monarchy is the proper form of government. Calvin initially thought so, and argued for something like quietism in the face of persecution as a judgment or test of God. As Witte shows, Calvin eventually eases off this position, and adopts a moderate skepticism about political power, allowing for resistance in some critical cases, which conveniently happen to be outlined in the final three paragraphs of the final edition of the Institutes. The most prominent of Calvin's followers, Beza and Althusius, expand this insight and create modern resistance theory, which then provides the seeds for rebellions in the Netherlands, England, and America.

Bottom line: in a properly constructed historical understanding, Reformed Christianity argues that leadership carries a heavy burden, but also a much higher standard of scrutiny: we can and should expect of our leaders things we don't expect of ourselves; not for nothing does the Bible repeatedly warn about the increased dangers associated with teaching and leadership. It's not surprising if no individual human being can withstand that for their entire lives, and therefore it is the business of the community to be on guard and remove those who have proven themselves unfit to lead.

All of which is to say that I agree with the argument here. This is precisely the wrong attitude:

Both women and children are taught that submission is part of a divine plan that should be embraced joyfully, and that even submitting to abusive men is noble and Christ-like. CLC pastor Joshua Harris quotes 1 Peter on this score, praising slaves who obeyed the masters who beat them as following Jesus’ example. Harris interprets this to mean that all Christians are called to submit, even when “suffering” under “unjust” leadership. Therefore wives are called to resist the “sinful” impulse to “fight back” against or even criticize husbands who misuse their “authority.”

...and drawing any implications from that attitude is therefore also wrong. It's not a Christian attitude, and it's not worthy of the proud history of Reformed Christianity on this subject, the one closest to its heart.

I agree with the argument here:

Which is another reason the technocrat avoids this mode of argument. Because to see people in this way is to be seen. If it’s about the empirical evidence and the abstract costs of acting or not acting, the expert can stay invisible and outside. But when we sit down to persuade through love or affection, we are naked and vulnerable ourselves. Our bodies and habits are as seen as those we are looking upon. The worst of all worlds is the person who borrows the grandiose certainty and intensity of public health and imports its rhetoric into more intimate kinds of observing and commenting upon others. There is no surer recipe for a flame war between “mommy blogs”, for example, than one blog attacking another’s vision of parenting in this kind of olympian voice, where the critic’s own family life is off the table and beyond the gaze. ...

Maybe the greatest reason that a neoliberal society doesn’t choose the route of caring and cherishing is the further obligations we might incur down that road. We might have to become far more subtle and careful about our entitled and dismissive readings of the ethical content of everyday life–and we might eventually have to do more than ask people not to do something.

I've been kicking around a paper on just war theory as it applies to post-conflict situations. The basic premise of the paper is simple: successful post-war reconstructions require an investment of decades, and everyone, from politicians to normative theorists on down, is devoted to strenuously ignoring this reality. Sometimes the objection is that continued involvement past the end of a war makes the specter of colonialism too possible, as though states with asymmetrical power don't have to figure out how to live in the same world anyway. Sometimes the objection is just that they/"no one" would be willing to accept that kind of commitment. Instead, we get hard-and-fast rules and institutional frameworks that allow people to give the impression of caring without the necessary--and messy--reality of trying to help other people do complicated things. In this respect, American treatment of Afghanistan is depressing: I'm not sure how much we did or could have done, but the resigned acceptance that things are probably going to get worse ("the Taliban will probably take over again, but they might be marginally better than a bunch of warlords, at least so long as you're not a woman") seems like an abandonment of responsibility because people are tired of having had that responsibility. (That's not to take a position one way or another on whether we should have been there in the first place. But being there, leaving and saying "oh well" seems like a necessary and regrettable outcome of the kind of bureaucratic state-level view of things.)

A fine essay at First Things that captures much of the reason for my own disenchantment with natural law thinking:

It is, after all, simply a fact that many of what we take to be the plain and evident elements of universal morality are in reality artifacts of cultural traditions. Today we generally eschew cannibalism, slavery, polygamy, and wars of conquest because of a millennial process of social evolution, the gradual universalization of certain moral beliefs that entered human experience in the form not of natural intuitions but of historical events. We have come to find a great many practices abhorrent and a great many others commendable not because the former transparently offend against our nature while the latter clearly correspond to it, but because at various moments in human history we found ourselves addressed by uncanny voices that seemed to emanate from outside the totality of the perceptible natural order and its material economies.

 One certainly may believe that those voices in fact awakened us to “natural” truths, but only because one’s prior supernatural convictions prompt one to do so. To try then to convince someone who rejects those convictions nevertheless to embrace those truths on purely “natural” grounds can never be much more than an exercise in suasive rhetoric (and perhaps something of a pia fraus).

The process of writing my dissertation (about a figure erroneously placed in the natural law tradition) brought me around to this point: if one is not convinced that natural law exists as an abstract category whose contents can be deduced, one is stuck attempting to induce natural law principles from observed behavior. But, since human beings are products of culture no less than nature, and culture itself has transformative impact on each person from birth, and on mankind as a whole for tens of thousands of years, it will be impossible to sort out the 'cultural' from the 'natural,' as any good state-of-nature theorist will admit. Natural law then becomes a kind of shell game, smuggling in prejudices derived from religion in content-neutral packages. Karl Barth, in Part I of the Church Dogmatics, criticizes this approach for two closely related reasons: first, it opens itself to accusations of bad faith. Those who argue for natural law are only going to see in nature those things which are compatible with their religious beliefs, so acting as though the conversation were really a disinterested series of observations about nature will be hard for the non-religious conversational partner to believe. The second problem is that it induces, ever so slightly, a tendency to actually argue in bad faith on the part of the religious believer, to engage in self-deception about the aims and purposes of conducting a conversation on natural law in the first place.

The only concern I have that Hart omits is a Foucaultian one: appeals to nature are immensely powerful. That's why everyone makes them: the claim is being harnessed for its epistemological and rhetorical power, as a way of benefitting the side making it and preemptively disparaging opposition.

I am now teaching John Locke. Ostensibly, this should be one of the easier parts of the term: give them a bit of the First Treatise to make them appreciate the fine snark factory Locke could be when he wanted, and then move on to that font of the American Revolution, the Second Treatise. In practice, it's much more difficult than anything else in the sequence. No one, more than Locke, will write things which appear intuitive, obvious, and incapable of being adequately responded to. Pedagogically, this is not ideal. It also induces in me the tendency to think that there must be something wrong with that which is easily embraced by others--an instinct that, in this instance, is pedagogically helpful, since it helps concentrate my reading and teaching on the strongest possible objections to Locke's argument.

What stands out for me this time around is the centrality of rhetoric and the fiction of consent. Hobbes and Locke are both concerned with naming things properly according to a geometrical scheme that will allow conclusions to follow as in a mathematical proof. It's evident in Hobbes that this naming is in fact a form of re-naming, since a number of his definitions don't accord with common usage, but it's also true of Locke. The liberal project, for everything that is good and beneficial about it, does occasionally seem to be no more than fancy dress whose purpose is to disguise that centralized liberal (and eventually democratic) states are tremendously more powerful than the monarchical states they are replacing.* Worse, that power is more diffuse and harder to identify.**

Which brings us to Rod Dreher. One might think that this skepticism about the liberal project entails a conservatism that focuses on the importance of intermediate institutions to protect individuals against the state. Except, as it turns out, those institutions are subject to their own logic of preservation, which no less depends on disguising the reality of the power they hold. Thus, in the same day, Rod can mention actual problems with the function of Wall Street firms and the abuse crisis in the Catholic church and be describing the same thing in both cases: institutions take on a logic, and this logic is concerned more with self-perpetuation than anything else, no matter what the rhetoric might be. So it would appear, then, that the proper position if rhetoric is a problem is libertarianism: a moderate and reasonable skepticism about the claims to virtue of any institution.

And yet: the liberal state really is better than the monarchical state it replaces; firms and churches do actually do some good in the world.


*See, for example, criticism over the leaked White Paper on targeted killings, which, like the previous Administration's work on torture, appears to be a case of altering the meanings of words to the breaking point in order to justify an illiberal policy.

**(Filmer, for all his faults, at least thinks that power is one thing every time it appears in the world; Locke maintains that the nature of (legitimate) power differs depending on who is involved. On the one hand that seems truer, and on the other hand it seems to make it more difficult to answer his own central question: who has power?)

This is a pretty good example of poor historical thinking: if the question is the state of law in or around the year 5 BC (and the law in Palestine, not Rome), the right resource is probably not a Roman jurist who was born 170 years later, not least because there were some significant changes in the Roman state and its treatment of outlying territories over that time. Ulpian's not a bad resource to start out with, but he can't be the final word. (Also, it should hardly need saying: you don't solve this problem by quoting sources that are newer than Ulpian, unless they're based on newly available sources)

At the end of this term, which included Plato and Aristotle, I had my students read John Calvin. This was for a few reasons, one of which is that the division of terms at my present university usually means that the first ends with Machiavelli and the second begins with Hobbes, between which were a few events of significance in European and world history that would otherwise be neglected: the Reformation, the Peace of Augsburg, the Thirty Years War, etc. I also am of the opinion that Calvin is the interpretive key for the next term: Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau are all working in a world defined by, and reacting to, the concept of government espoused by Calvin.

Calvin does have a bad reputation, though, so I wasn't certain how the class would respond to it. Someone brought up the following passage, in particular:

This feeling of reverence, and even of piety, we owe to the utmost to all our rulers, be their characters what they may. This I repeat the oftener, that we may learn not to consider the individuals themselves, but hold it to be enough that by the will of the Lord they sustain a character on which he has impressed and engraven inviolable majesty. But rulers, you will say, owe mutual duties to those under them. This I have already confessed. But if from this you conclude that obedience is to be returned to none but just governors, you reason absurdly. Husbands are bound by mutual duties to their wives, and parents to their children. Should husbands and parents neglect their duty; should the latter be harsh and severe to the children whom they are enjoined not to provoke to anger, and by their severity harass them beyond measure; should the former treat with the greatest contumely the wives whom they are enjoined to love and to spare as the weaker vessels; would children be less bound in duty to their parents, and wives to their husbands? They are made subject to the froward and undutiful. Nay, since the duty of all is not to look behind them, that is, not to inquire into the duties of one another, but to submit each to his own duty, this ought especially to be exemplified in the case of those who are placed under the power of others.

To my surprise, the students found this to be reasonable: assuming away the worst possibilities of violence, it is generally true that duties don't (and cannot) depend on others first exercising their duties toward you. I think that's correct, but I was (erroneously, it seems) under the impression that it takes a greater amount of life experience to get to that point.

As I've thought about this passage more, though, there's something else that jumps out at me: it requires imaginative identification by Calvin and his reader with the role and station of women, and requires normalizing the complaints of the wife in this circumstance. It displays, in its way, a significantly more progressive attitude toward women than the other major figures of the term (who are, it must be said, a sorry lot, on the woman question). Normalizing the complaint of the wife: the role of the unhappy citizen is equated to the role of the unhappy wife. Calvin doesn't excuse or accept the bad behavior of the ruler; he considers the ruler to have a duty to act well, and thus the subject to have a right to expect that behavior; the citizen has been wronged in this process and the ruler stands under the judgment of God for having done so. It's merely that this wrong does not release the subject from their own obligations, so far as they go. Which means, for the analogy to work, that Calvin and his reader must think all the same things of the wife in this situation: if her husband fails to meet his husbandly duties she has been identifiably wronged, and he stands under the judgment of God for his failure. Moreover, the primarily male readership must admit the force of the wifely complaint in order for their own to have any merit. It's not feminism by any stretch, but it is a recognition that women are subjects in the social life of the polity and not merely objects to be acted upon (because men as citizens are subjects and not simply objects). Considering the last thing my students read before this was Machiavelli's suggestion that fortune is a promiscuous woman who must be beaten to give you what you want, Calvin is surprisingly enlightened.

Some thoughts on gun control and related matters*:

When I was in grad school, I once had the idea for a paper whose title would be "Easy Cases Make Bad Law." The idea came to me when putting together a term paper on the formation of the law for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Despite public perception, Nuremberg is generally considered a one-off in international criminal law, establishing few or no precedents binding on any subsequent courts, for the simple reason that the law was put together in a notably shoddy manner, punting on some questions of procedure and violating basic understandings of criminal law. It seemed obvious to me at the time (and having now taught the IMT a couple times, still seems obvious) that this procedural irregularity was entirely a feature of the rush to set up the court: Nazi leaders had to be tried right away, and it was obvious that most of them were guilty (of what exactly, in legal terms, was never clear), and so any institutional arrangement that worked quickly and produced the correct trial outcome would be accepted, no matter what other problems it may have had.

A discussion of this case would provide the launching pad for a more general discussion of law formation. Policy options often seem very clear, but law is an intensely messy procedure even in the best of circumstances. A law needs to have a good fit to the problem it is meant to address: it needs to be general, linking up as many relevant things in a class as there might be. But it also needs to be minimally tailored, doing the least amount that will be effective; it needs to be aware of negative externalities that all laws will impose because they aim to change behavior and that change cannot be predicted very well; it needs to recognize that laws are enforced by people with all their varied mental and emotional states, that organizations and laws have a way of building a logic that sustains their own existence, even if that logic bears little resemblance to the reasons for law in the first place.

Two additional, smaller considerations, on rights, and on the limits of law. On rights: the purpose of having a right to something means to recognize that we have to hold to it even when it would be easier, or more convenient, or safer, to put the right aside. One doesn't have to believe that rights are absolute trumps, but just that safety, expedience, or other quite-important considerations are things we accept rather than a loss of rights. If sufficient emergency justifies the suspension or revocation of rights, then they are not properly called rights: they're just nice policy things we'd like to have sometimes. The related point is that a system of law and government, no matter how coercive, is not going to be able to stop all violence, all risk, or all uncertainty. There will always be some.

Gun violence is a funny case because it illustrates so well how poor human beings are at estimating the odds of low-frequency events: mass shootings have a (slightly higher, still low) frequency even as gun violence and crime decline on the whole. But then, there are still people who think of cities as fantastically violent places even though you're better off in Manhattan, or Chicago, or LA now than 10 or 20 years ago. So also the general preference for driving to flying, even though the former is significantly more dangerous (a few months driving in Chicago have begun to change my own mental calculations on this point). One's feeling less safe has very little connection to whether or not one is objectively more safe. So feelings, however strong, will only get so far.

Alright, to the point: the problem with gun control laws is trying to build a general law out of the feeling of "this sort of thing can't happen." The suggested changes in law bear very little relationship to the enabling factors of the crime in question: what law is going to stop someone from taking the legally-owned weapon of someone else?

But more than this: the initial burst of "we have to do something" gets problematic when specifying the exact nature of the changes to gun policy that need to happen: the law can't be a list of generally-phrased items with a tapering "etc." at the end: it's a list of definite changes that have to happen. But the conviction that law needs to regulate guns isn't going to tell, for example, what specific number of rounds a clip should be limited to. 10? 15? 30? What's the principle on which that decision is going to be made? Is it possible to specify in any concrete way what would and wouldn't be possible with one number rather than another? If the answer to the difficulty here is just to ban guns (or a class thereof) outright, then it seems an admission that the actual difficulties is sculpting policy are too difficult and therefore it's better to avoid these questions entirely. But that, it seems, is problematic in its own way: I can't think of anyone who would accept this as a general governmental approach to social problems.

The reality is, I think, more difficult and less comforting: the death of anyone is a tragedy, all the more so when the means are violent and unnecessary. But the causes are complex, and many, and hiding behind it all is that tendency in human nature that makes the eradication of all violence impossible. To address all aspects of that problem head-on would require constant attention and action on the part of everyone and (as, for example, international criminal law tends to show) people don't like having that kind of responsibility. The difficulty of the solution doesn't change the problem.


*(A general note: people are not, generally, venial or stupid; people can be (and often are) mistaken, but we have a responsibility to take the views of others seriously; if you cannot imagine a serious circumstance under which people would hold a view opposed to your own, you have failed in your responsibility as a democratic citizen.)

This, pretty much.

Yesterday in class we read Calvin, which was interesting in the way that people with little exposure to the classics of Christianity reading them for the first time is interesting (i.e. "he's Calvin, so he must want to force his religious views into everything having to do with government," except that he very clearly does not, for comprehensible historical reasons). There was one objection that came up several times which I find, frankly, to be puzzling: Calvin's view is a bad one because his commitment to predetermination means you're being manipulated by forces outside your control. (This is not Calvin's view, but leave that aside for the moment)

I find this objection to be puzzling because I assume it's a view to which most of my students are committed anyway: if you're a materialist or if you follow Darwin, there's nothing but this view available to you: choices, dispositions, and options are given by large and structured forces which are completely out of your control and/or the cause-and-effect nature of all physical bodies eliminates the space for 'choice' in any relevant sense (Hobbes will be an interesting point of comparison). There is, of course, a sentimental attachment to free choice of the will that motivates some of the rejection of Calvin, and provides incentives not to follow the logic of materialism through to its consequences, but even so: kind of odd.

(It's also possible, I suppose, to be an indeterminist or a libertarian on questions of free will, but I assume the consequences of those views would be unpalatable as well. In fairness, these are questions I avoided dealing with for as long as possible in college (philosophically ending up with two-standpoint compatibilism long before I had any interest in Calvin), so I suppose I can't blame them for not wanting to do so, either.)

You will probably not be surprised to hear it, but I thought Ken from Popehat and Killer Grease basically got the election right.

Ken:

This time it's really different! For sure! There are certainly demographic and cultural shifts going on in this country, and they will have an electoral impact. But I beg you, try not to be one of those people who buy into the "this represents a fundamental shift in the American electorate" narratives. In my lifetime, I heard it in 1980 and 1984 and 1992 and 1994 and 2000 and 2006 and 2008 and 2010, when one party or the other found favor, and there was much talk of "permanent majorities" and the like. Take it with a grain of salt.

I'm teaching mostly first-years and, as it happens, my first year of college was also a presidential election year. This made me feel both nostalgic and sad: I have never cared about a presidential election as much as I did in 2000, but I also regard this as essential to my mental health and emotional maturity. Because it's good to have the experience of passionately caring about something transient, especially while you're young: your hopes inevitably get disappointed and you recognize that the permanent majority you were hoping for will never materialize and, in any event, there's always another election. But at 18 or 19 it's hard to see that politics is a realm in which it's difficult to impose your will, and so little good can happen (but a lot of bad certainly can).

As it happens, on Wednesday we were reading Book One of Augustine's On the Free Choice of the Will, and were talking about temporal law. The eternal law addresses and concerns the things that are always just, but it's of limited use for actual politics because human beings have will. We drew out the implications of the problem of free will: it means that, even when people know perfectly well what the right thing to do is, they can choose not to do it. Thus you need temporal law, which is a system that attempts to restrain the worst of the impulses that arise from free wills. In discussing this, I think the students began to get a sense of what makes politics tragic: that it's a losing and imperfect battle against people who you can't really control anyway. This is the big, important point to realize: there is no salvation in politics. If you can learn to not expect it, you can avoid falling prey to the temptation to overvalue it. And that is, so far as I can see, the beginning of political wisdom.

On whether the desirability of peace provides sufficient reason to attempt to end all war: I tend to agree with Norm that the moral case for war in at least some instances stands, regardless of whether most wars fit within that category. I was having lunch with a friend and colleague a few months ago who was putting together a course on violence and political theory, who asked me the following question: what's the best single justification for the use of force in humanitarian intervention? The problem is, of course, that any potential justification can be abused, and the use of force itself is a blunt instrument to solve any problem, and force itself creates a lot of problems. And so the answer has to rely, once again, on the tragic vision of politics: we live in a world where some people will use force to attempt to do unjust things, and at least some of the time, the proper (i.e. only sufficient) response is to use violence in return; aware of its problems but willing to employ it anyway.

I have been developing a (not remotely original) thesis that the real problem with politics in America is that it lacks a sense of tragedy: people tend to focus on advancement and progress, indeed, people tend to assume both as facts of the world, and therefore tend to assume that political decisions are about fairly apportioning from the ever-expanding pie. (Case in point: if you just followed the ads in the swing state I call home, you'd think that there were two groups, "the rich" and "the middle class," the latter of whom is in perpetual danger of not receiving enough. Groups never mentioned: "the poor.") No one should ever have to sacrifice anything, and things going wrong are always completely preventable. All of which is, of course, nonsense: there are always people who will make out poorly no matter what the arrangement of political and social institutions, and that's something we need to be aware of.

That's a long introduction to say that one can see this sanitization process happening in remembered history as well, of which there exists no better example than the Holocaust: so much literature, film, etc is devoted to the exceptional cases of survivors, people who fight back, etc, that it's quite easy to forget that if you happened to be Jewish in Europe, then things went badly for you indeed, and that this required the active and passive assistance of the majority of the population.

Political theory inside baseball: I am pretty sure I did not adequately appreciate Peter Euben when I had regular access to him. His essays and books are uniformly useful for both collecting and evaluating all the research on a topic, and then working through the implications of those arguments with, it always seems, some special emphasis on how one might explain it to a reader who has never encountered the text before. For "insightful scholarly comment" to "useful point for discussion with undergrads" ratio, I can't imagine anyone better.

On Boycotts:

Stipulate the following: a boycott designed around primarily economic ends--attempting to deny to a company or organization a sufficiently large amount of money that it would contribute in a notable way to the company's inability to continue in the future--is destined to fail. For almost any company, it will be difficult to organize enough people to make an economic impact, and to keep them committed for long enough to make that impact felt. The difficulty in organizing anything so simple as a one-day boycott (see for example the endless waves of "gas price protest" emails that went around in the late 90s) should make this clear.

The purely economic boycott fails for another reason, though: it is, and only can be, a purely negative, punitive act. The point of the economic boycott is to punish. This fact has consequences for the public perception and inner constitution of the people engaging in the boycott. Public defenses of the boycott too easily slide into the realm of the vindictive, making it difficult to engage more members of the public and encouraging punitive counter-protests. Similarly, the desire to boycott is coterminous with the desire to punish: thankfully, most human beings lack the ability or interest in punishing someone else for an extended period of time. If you rely on hate, however deserved and however attenuated, that becomes a hard burden to carry.

Counter-thesis: successful boycotts aim at moral, rather than economic, ends. The idea behind a moral boycott is this: that the people involved would rather do great inconvenience to themselves than accept unjust or unfair treatment from the persons being boycotted. Thus the Montgomery bus boycotts: the point was not to bring down the system in a purely economic sense, which would have been difficult or impossible, but to show in the willingness to personally take on hardship, difficulty, and inconvenience, the injustice of the system they oppose. The attitude is internally focused: rather than hating the people perpetuating the injustice and punishing them, the boycotters direct that urge inward and make their suffering the sign of their cause. It is this that grabs attention: nothing is more confusing to an American than someone making their life more difficult when it might be easier--nothing is more certain to force our attention. So also for the divestment movement in South Africa: a capitalist company that forgoes profits becomes a powerful signal.

I am both a political theorist specializing in the 16th/17th century and a Protestant, so while I will probably buy this, a book in which volume 1 ends with Machiavelli and volume 2 begins with Hobbes makes me break out in hives. After all, it's not like anything important happened between 1513 and 1651.

Had an interesting discussion today with an old grad school friend about Michael Walzer's new book, In God's Shadow, where Walzer interprets and discusses the political implications of the Hebrew Bible. Surprisingly, given his work on social criticism, on the politics of Exodus, and his general political leanings, he mostly rejects the idea that there is any discernible political vision embodied in the text. We pondered the strangeness of this view, especially coming from one committed to the project of Israel, and eventually segued into the strange idea that the New Testament, of all things, is the decisively political portion of the Christian Bible. The evidence is straightforward:

1. Paul and Peter both feel it necessary to enjoin Christians to follow the political authorities (Romans 13 was once memorably summarized to me as "pay your taxes"), which implies that it was unclear whether Christians had to follow any political authority at all. Obviously, Christianity's roots in Second Temple Jewish messianism are relevant here: Paul et al are mostly reminding Christians that they are not to be the Essenes or other radical/revolutionary Jewish sects.

2. On the other hand, the central insistence of the New Testament is that "Jesus is Lord," which has been helpfully glossed by Oliver O'Donovan, N.T. Wright and others as "...and therefore, Caesar is not." Christianity is incompatible with empire, and anti-imperial in its most basic essence.

3. Paul saves himself from execution in the book of Acts by announcing himself as a Roman citizen. The idea that citizenship could possibly matter is as foreign to the Hebrew Bible as the idea that following the political authorities is something that a person might choose to not do.

It was #3 in particular that led us to wonder whether the heightened political nature of the New Testament had to do with the very different circumstances of politics under Roman as opposed to Near Eastern empires. Hebrew Bible politics are limited in part because there are very few potential outcomes for the average person: you fight or you don't; if you fight, you win or you lose; if you lose, you're enslaved or killed. Roman politics, for however autocratic it was, opened up ever-so-slight a space for individual-level political action.

(We also discussed the possibility that the date of canonization in the Hebrew Bible had something to do with this: post-biblical works like the Wisdom of Ben Sira mention, with admiration, the Senate, but Biblical politics have already been decisively settled by the failure of the monarchy and the experience of exile. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, which include the post-Biblical books and those denoted by Protestants as 'Apocrypha' have a smaller margin to close in this regard.)

I read The Closing of the American Mind for a graduate seminar, and recall being distinctly unimpressed. The famous complaints about music came off as so much "kids these days" rhetoric. And while conservatives want to conserve something, but that something is usually not Freud, Nietzsche, and 1930s politics (though this is no more arbitrary than wanting to preserve 1950s politics, which is more common). This article, however, has almost convinced me the book may be worth revisiting.