There is a great relief in hearing bad news, at least when one was expecting bad news. On hearing that a friend has indeed died, or that an election was not only lost, but lost badly, or that a tumor is inoperable, one can often discern a heavy breath, like a boot has lifted off the the hearer’s chest.

This seems like it might be true even when the news is the worst; despite the shock of this real tragedy, one is nonetheless freed from all the potential terrors that were until that moment haunting them.  What was once a minefield becomes a single crater. A pantheon of spectres evaporates in favour of one lone imp, somehow less terrible for being made flesh.

From which I would suggest we can learn something of the relationship between horror and terror. Would we rather feel the hammer come down, or have it still hanging over us?

Yet if one is unsure whether the news will be good or bad before it comes…

Last week, Sen. Romeo Dallaire spoke at the House about the Will to Intervene, (W2I) the report of a group proposing ways in which politicians, civil society and the media can assist in efforts to prevent mass atrocities. Fellow scholar Mirwais Nazhat also talked about his speech, and one the Senator had given earlier that day.

My concern with the Senator’s speech – and the short conversation I had with him afterward – was the foundation of his thoughts in the idea of ‘intervention.’ The Will to Intervene is, giving it a quick flip through, really about ‘the will to threaten and use military force’ or, to further demystify the unspeak: ‘the will to bomb or shoot (or threaten to bomb or shoot) perpetrators of mass atrocities.’ That is, the report is less broadly about the prevention of mass atrocities than it is about making real the promise of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the legal framework guiding so-called ‘humanitarian intervention.’

The report’s language of ‘intervention’, untied from its coddling, though now widely understood connection to humanitarian war-making, implies that states are free entities before we engage with them. It gives the impression that whatever attempted genocide or terrible war crimes or crimes against humanity might justify ‘our’ ‘intervention’ takes place against pre-existing pretense of disengagement, of absence; other societies fail to really obtain an existence for us until they threaten to repeat the kind of horrors perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews.

I am not a pacifist. There are times when murder – for that is what humanitarian intervention is founded on – may be the best or only way to avoid mass atrocities.  The question that the W2I sidesteps is the incredible importance of thinking about how we can not intervene, but engage to promote justice. Preventing a genocide is an undeniable good, but preventing a genocide in a way which avoids the massive loss of life involved in war is a greater good. If efforts were focused not on leveraging the will to deploy force or the threat of force, but on promoting more substantial justice, couldn’t two birds be killed with one stone? Indeed, if we think of justice as its own reward, doesn’t promoting justice to avoid both genocide and humanitarian intervention kill three birds with one stone – or, that is, save three?

I am not saying that its authors purposefully obscured these issues, just that I think consideration of them should be more central. Page 7 of the report talks about the structural factors which can lead to mass atrocities – including poverty and inequality. Yet the policy proposals are focused on R2P, not on structural factors. It becomes clear that the identification of these structural factors is solely instrumental: to identify those locations where there is a high risk of imminent genocide.

The problem here is as epistemological as it is ideological; I’m not sure that the report’s perspective is a result as much of liberal political philosophy as it is a privileging of increasingly-irrelevant understandings of our international relations universe. R2P is conceived of as a sui generis exception to the fundamental legal foundation of a pre-existing international system: the fundamental protection of the sovereignty of individual states. Reading on the modern realities of sovereignty reveals that while some its underlying assumptions are still quite relevant, others have lost their real ability to describe how the world truly functions. Deregulation of global financial markets, the centrality of the international financial institutions, the global arms trade, other trade flows, environmental treaties; all these constitute the world we live in as much as the protection of sovereignty; each in their own way is an exception to an ideal of sovereignty.

To think about how one way of undermining ‘sovereignty’ can promote justice – through violence – while ignoring how sovereignty’s already-existing occlusions, exceptions, derogations or reimaginings might themselves be leveraged to promote justice seems – what? disingenuous? shortsighted? dangerous? Let us say ‘less than ideal.’ Let us argue reductio ad Hitlerum. The Nazis came to power in the fallout of Versailles. What might have happened in Germany if that treaty hadn’t been so bad for Germany? Might we have avoided the series of events that led to the seizing of power by Hitler? That is, might we have avoided both the Holocaust and WWII?

There are two responses to the demand for such a radical realignment of thinking. The first is that promoting substantial justice and not just retributive justice is hard. That’s a fair answer, but I think that it’s insufficient. Those who promote such views are saying that they are willing to pay in someone else’s blood the toll of having their arguments pass muster for the powerful. This is especially troubling in light of the fact, pointed out to me by another fellow scholar, that the entire discourse of the Will to Intervene is founded in a discourse of ‘our’ will to intervene in ‘other’ countries. Think that we’re incapable of massively abusing force on internal enemies? Just watch us. Think that our young people can’t sustain a culture of irrational violence? How about 23 violent crimes per year for every hundred people, two thirds committed by those under 24 –  in a city with five universities. Glad that ours is a society innocent of turning economic resentments into xenophobia? If only it were so. Other ‘enlightened’ nations are no shrinking violets on these fronts.

If we took seriously the idea that every state has a right to do violence to states whose internal affairs they consider to be ‘atrocious’, do we imagine that this rule will meaningfully apply to the United States, to Canada, to Europe? Do we believe that this rule will meaningfully apply to China?

If not, then R2P allows the powerful to continue to maintain the injustice of the status quo while allowing them to use massive violence when that system breaks down. The Will to Intervene is simply the extension of a project which supports a selective sovereignty which privileges certain countries and populations, without challenging the basic distribution of power in the world, and without questioning the way in which that power distribution might contribute to the problem which the writers are interested in doing something about: mass atrocities.

The ‘too hard’ rebuttal to the argument for a reorientation of anti-genocide efforts is also internally incoherent: the entire basis of the W2I project is in the idea that dominant power interests aren’t already onside, and need to be challenged. If R2P was already a de facto reality then W2I wouldn’t be needed. Senator Dallaire and his colleagues make a claim that their position is founded in challenging a paradigm of sovereignty founded in entrenched interests. I think that they are bona fide in that effort, and sincere in that audaciousness. Seeing Senator Dallaire speak, one is given the sense that he would be as radical as necessary in his worldview if he could reduce the incidence of the kind of horror he saw in Rwanda. But he is a General first; perhaps that’s why he is thinking about military solutions to complex problems.

There’s a second answer, of course, one which I find much more interesting. That’s the answer from Pangloss, often somehow the fallback position of unreconstructed liberals: we are living in the best of all possible worlds. The second answer might go something like this: capitalism is good, there is much less scarcity than there used to be because of it, less scarcity means less violence, and facts speak for themselves: there is, indeed less violence, and fewer people dying from it as a result. The job of the world community shouldn’t be to get in the way of the system that’s got us here, but to clean up the mess of those marginal cases that didn’t get the memo.

For a variety of reasons, that’s an argument that I am interested in engaging with; my work is very much engaged with whether, in thinking about prosperity and justice, we can have our cake and eat it too. Nonetheless, I also have a reply to the answer from ‘liberalism.’ Sovereignty, as we imagine it right now, stands starkly in the way of the idealization of the very capitalism supported by the liberal argument. As put by Unger, a world system – I am talking here about limits on immigration combined with the universalization of free trade – which gives rights to things and denies those rights to people, is a cynical, hypocritical perversion of the principles implied by liberal capitalism. Opening borders to immigration might not be a solution to the problems which have historically led to mass atrocities, but isn’t there a strong argument that their dissolution could significantly reduce the scale of such violence?

Not surprisingly, I am told that I am not alone in these criticisms. I still have to pick up a copy, but apparently Anne Orford has raised similar concerns in her Reading Humanitarian Intervention.

What does it mean for an animal to be a social one? In a review of a handful of books about cognitive neuropsychology, Ziff and Rosenfeld explain one aspect of how mental processses are inherently connect to the social environment:

Animals and infants conduct this miniature version of natural selection by means of what Changeux terms “cognitive games.” One well-known example concerns cries of alarm in African vervet monkeys. Adult monkeys use a simple but effective vocabulary of sounds that warn against danger: a loud bark for leopards, a two-syllable cough for eagles, and a hissing sound for snakes. Surprisingly, researchers found, baby monkeys hiss at snakes without explicit instruction. Changeux writes, “Snakes seem to arouse a sort of innate universal fear, which probably developed fairly early in the course of the evolution of the higher vertebrates.” When adult monkeys confirm the baby’s judgment with their own hisses, the infant’s genetically produced prerepresentation is rewarded and reinforced.

But baby monkeys require more explicit instruction in protecting themselves against predators, such as eagles, to which they have been less genetically conditioned. At first,

newborn monkeys react to any form that flies in the air, which is to say to the class of birds as a whole. Then, gradually, a selective stabilization of the response to the shape of dangerous species takes place…. If the first cry of alarm is sounded by one of the young, the nearest adult looks up. If it sees a harmless bird, it does not react. But if the young monkey has spotted a martial eagle, the adult reacts by emitting a cry of alarm that confirms the presence of danger…. The adult’s cry of alarm validates a pertinent relationship between shape and sound that is established in the brain of the young monkey.

This process of learning alarm cries through trial and error, reward and suppression, demonstrates the kind of cognitive games that are played out constantly through the brain’s interaction with the environment.

What this means in context is that, while some of the important information about the species environment is encoded in genetic material, some of it is encoded in social information; but more specifically, in the brains of individual animals. If you take the animal away from its social milieu, in important ways, it ceases to be the same animal. Not only is it less able to survive in its normal habitat, but there is likely other social information which would simply disappear in the absence of older generations. This is likely old hat to many biologists who work to understand evolution, but it is a remarkable insight. Evolution happens across animal brains, just as it does in human brain.

What are the ramifications of this insight? In England, a group of scientists is working on storing the genetic information of the world’s endangered species. The hope is that one day, if technology allows, the material can be used to restore the species to the wild should they disappear.

The problem with their plan is that it completely fails to take into account the lessons offered by Changeux about the nature of animal evolutionary success. For many species, that success is highly contingent on a social environment of other animals, not just a compatible physical environment. Without an older generation to impart the wisdom of the ages, indivduals form any species thawed out in the future won’t have the mental environment that currently ensures their survival. No matter how impressive our biotechnology gets, it isn’t going to provide sufficient tools for the rebirth of species destroyed by our current reshaping of the world.

It is far from writing, and there is no way that it makes up even a hundred words.

But, in justification of my addiction to 3quarksdaily, here is a sample of the random, but often striking edification that they bring into my life:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhcjeZ3o5us]

There is great promise in the ability to copy and paste such magic. Hannah Arendt suggested that culture was once about edification – the urge to make oneself better by experiencing the creations of others. Long before I was around to mull it over, she worried (in Between Past And Future) that this urge underlying culture was undemocratic, because most people have little to gain from improving themselves – they don’t want culture, they want entertainment. The space between the populism of mass entertainment and the aristocracy of hoi-polloi ‘art’ is hard to bridge, and leaves a gaping chasm where a truly democratic practice of art should be. Contra Arendt, I am filled with hope that there is space for a truly popular culture, and this piece – not only accessible in the haunting beauty it admits in such a short time, but accessible in being online, free in every sense of the word – provides some promise of bridging that chasm. I do hope that Google doesn’t ruin this wonderful tool.

Brevity. Soul. Wit.

Thus answered (with apologies to the Bard) to my own question: what makes writing interesting?

I have spent a great portion of the past 8 years reading, but not writing. Mike recently started an email salon, whose current topic is orbiting around what Bill Readings has referred to as The University in Ruins. One of the many problems with our system of higher education is that it leaves so many of its graduates still unable to express themselves about anything but a sliver of their own opinion, and often that opinion is attached to a topic about which most people know nothing – and care for only a little bit less.

In my case, despite a ‘minor’ and two years of something else, 120% of the credits I was supposed to earn has left me most capable of telling you how one might prove that Kepler’s formulas describing the elliptical orbit of bodies around a gravitational centre (not quite true when there’s more than two bodies) can be derived from Newton’s simple formulas describing the scale of the force exerted by gravity (less true near the speed of light). Yet I am far less able to express even the most basic of half-truths I have been gathering about the desperation of human life or the dizziness of our relations to one another from magazines, blogs, films, books, or best yet, the overflowing of conversation that have each in their share soaked up my ‘spare’ moments for the past 8 years.

So, here it is. The first shot over the bow of a planned 109 600 words. I have given myself three years at 100 words a day to learn how to half-express myself in digital ink. To become a writer who, at least when not travelling near the speed of light, hits somewhere near the truth. To shorten, sharpen, and swing a little more in my words, while I aim for sweet, sensible expression, out here among the multitude of bodies.

If I don’t trip up, I’ll try and stumble on something worth talking about, too.