virtuosity

politics, war, , , , , , , , ,

How are we supposed to go on and keep trying at anything when there are things in the world that are so much better than anything we will ever be able to do? And how are we supposed to keep going on, with all the terrible things that we do to each other and the sense of loss that comes with trying to make it better?

When we try, we feel not a sense of satisfaction, but of having done too little. Raoul Wallenberg hands out passports to Jews in Budapest and it is 1944 and it is 1945 and maybe he was a spy for the Americans and he dies in a soviet prison and these thousands of Jewish lives were saved and he hid them in buildings rented out, 20 of them, 30 of them, and they had names like ‘the Swedish Library’ and ‘the Swedish Research Institute’ and they all had giant, oversized Swedish flags hanging out front and it was just this open secret, 10, 20, 25 000 jews with Swedish passports living inside these buildings in Budapest until the Soviet army showed up 6 months later.

He climbs on top of a train, and the police are shooting at him and maybe they are trying to miss. They don’t hit him and he hands out dozens, hundreds of passports to their upstretched hands and then the Germans let them out because you don’t shoot the Swedes, because they are neutral and it just doesn’t make any sense. But if you close your eyes you can kind of imagine it happening, like it says here on wikipedia ‘the Germans and the Arrow Cross were so dumbfounded they let him get away with it.’

And you just kind of realize that you can try all you want to be that good and to make a difference like that and then and then and then.

It’s just not reasonable to be the kind of breathless, sensitive young person who at 14 watches Schindler’s List and then just sits in the kitchen crying  and just kind of chokes through sobbing breaths while his parents stare at him somewhat dumbfounded because maybe you remember that Schindler at the end says ‘I could have done more’ and I, this 14 year old, can’t even talk to them and then my sobbing turns to weeping and I look up at them. It’s awful because I have a hard time even believing it myself, and it’s not that I love who I am now, but I do love who I was then because the whole world was open to him and he could have done anything, he could have ridden a mule across the Andes, become a champion kick boxer, sailed to China and he, I just never thought seriously about anything other than this at the time, says through the tears ‘I should be doing something. I should be doing something and I just don’t know what to do. What if I don’t do enough?’

As if there was some measure. Here is Howard Zinn reminding us that the world is backward, because the wrong people are in jail, and the wrong people are out of it. The United States has almost 3 million people under incarceration, had in 2008 almost 1.5 million adults in prison and 100 000 youth in prison and here’s the other thing – they execute children who’ve probably done terrible things and in many ways they’re not children anymore by the time they get sentenced but the government puts them under sedation and then they give them painkillers and then they put poison into their blood streams and they never wake up. And people say ‘they should have known better’ but that’s just it, they didn’t know better. If they had known better they wouldn’t have done it. And the government poisons these young men and they are broken and we have failed them, even if it’s not your country or mine exactly.

They execute men who grew up sexually abused and burned and ignored and mistreated who have grown up crazy and twisted and dissociated and they do terrible things. But if they are monsters did we make them that way and what’s our duty to them now and if they aren’t monsters then how can we kill them when they are defenceless? And now 62% of Canadians say that they think we should have the death penalty for murder and people think there should be the death penalty for rapists, just for good measure. So in this old video, Michael Ignatieff says in this clinical and detached way that we shouldn’t have the death penalty in Canada because it’s irrevocable like we might make a mistake and how can he be so cold? What makes it so that he can have talked to these people in Iraq and in Kosovo and in Croatia and all he can say is with like, surgical precision as you would say to someone who suggests that maybe the engine needs replacing that ‘well, that seems a pretty rash measure.’ Why can’t he just say with his head tilted that we can’t take it upon ourselves to kill people, to purposefully snuff out their life when they want to live, we can’t do it, because it’s wrong, because it’s wrong, because it’s wrong?

And I know that the answer is the same as the answer to why there are now almost 1 in 100 Americans incarcerated and yet none of them are George Bush or Dick Cheney. Because those of us who engage ourselves in politics just have to accept the political expediency of if you kill 600 000 people in an unnecessary war and hold people without trial and then empower people to torture them, then you get paid $400 a ticket to speak but in California if you shoplift three times you go to jail for life. Thousands and thousands of people are in prison for minor drug-related offences and yes, drugs are horrible for a lot of people, but then how is Tony Blair is a free man?

And you struggle every day with the question ‘what am I supposed to do’ and then you read too much and you watch too many movies and you listen to too much music and you find that you can talk about anything and you can talk at length about the qualities of any of this litany of things. You learn from Bourdieu that taste is a product of class and privilege, and yet you believe that the art, the literature, the music matters – that it is right, that you haven’t just soaked up the preferences of your parents. And yet…

There are these moments in books, where Gatsby’s boat beats on against the current ceaselessly into the past and now, here, in Helen DeWitt, we have this just incredible tour de force, a book that starts strong and almost every page is better and better and reading it makes you want to be better. Because her candidates are not better at, they are simply one after the other better. The hero is the hero by becoming, not by being already.

And next I visit Rod, who’s is really no slouch himself when it comes to just being impressive and prolific and thoughtful, and I am only 90% of the way through her (DeWitt’s) book and – take a breath – it’s called The Last Samurai and I ask Rod ‘what should I read?’ I want to know about the law, I want to understand what it is I am supposed to do and what it has to do with the law and how we can be good and how we can make this place we live better. I am complicit in its shortcomings and we are all complicit in them and we could do so much better than all of this suffering. I am breathless and I am weak. I want to try again. Fail again. Fail better. My question to him is about the law and it is not about the law. It is about practice, what we do, the terrible things that we can do to each other and that we do to each other and the small kindnesses and insights and braveries that can overcome it. I tell him that I have decided to spend some time thinking and I tell him some of the things that I have been thinking about and some of the things that I have been reading. He puts his hands behind his head for a moment and then he chuckles and then he screws up his forehead. He says Hmm and he says this is like a desert island book and he says. I say it’s not like a desert island book, because I have time, and he says before I finish Beethoven’s sonatas. And I say I don’t read music and he says the full collection of Walker Evans and I say I don’t know who that is and he tells me about Walker Evans, who narrated by photograph the death of the American farm. And he says you want something with words. And I say well and he says Paradise Lost and well, I guess I was hoping he would say Kelsen, who could tell me how they pretend the law is supposed to work. Or Bourdieu, who would tell me where the law sits inside everything else. Or some political theorist or legal theorist I hadn’t heard of or some other one that I know about but don’t really know about.

And now I am downloading 33 sonatas on 9 cds and I am looking at Walker Evans and then I finished the Last Samurai and now instead of writing a book about Burma, which is a story that someone else is telling already, I have to write about Job and how we can’t know God’s will and so we can’t presume to know whether anyone deserves what they get, and I have to write about humanitarian intervention because if we are going to demand the impossible then we should demand an impossible that doesn’t require us to drop bombs on people’s heads and I am going to have to write an essay in which I ask and try to answer ‘what makes Dan Deacon work?’ and then I am going to have to spend 33 hours or so trying to listen to Beethoven and I am going to have to read Paradise Lost and I am going to have to try to tie it all together because that’s what being honest about the question ‘what am I supposed to do’ means. It means that I can’t presuppose that any of this stuff doesn’t matter to that question.

I tell Rod about Wallenberg, or that I plan to use Wallenberg in something and he says ‘or who they say he was’. And I say but I don’t want to use Wallenberg, I just want to use what they say about Wallenberg. And he says well, but we should celebrate the story and not the person and I say yes exactly because for me, it is the story that matters, it’s a good story and he says well yes but what if so was Mein Kampf’?

And I think for a tiny second that maybe we need to be sure, that I need to be more sure than just it’s a good story. But then I can’t think of any way to be more sure than that so I say ‘but my story is better’ and he says yes and then he says that’s the right answer.

So I try and commit to writing better stories but I know they’ll never be good enough and it’s almost as if you could die. But you can’t, because, well, then why bother with all that blue and gold?

Swedish Institute for Practical Ethics and Breathlessness and then

For younger readers

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If you’re younger than me, and you’ll still be under 30 by the end of December this year, then here’s [pdf] an opportunity for you. The Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism at McGill University here in Montreal, is hosting The Global Conference on Human Rights in Diverse Societies. It runs from October 7th to 9th this fall.

Prior to the conference, they’ll be holding an International Forum for Young Leaders, from Monday October 4th to Thursday October 7th.  Chosen participants will have all costs covered, including travel expenses to and from Montreal, accommodation, and conference fees covered for the full 6 days.

They’re looking for under-30s who:

  • Hold a social science degree – in law, political science, economics, sociology, history, cultural studies, anthropology or any other relevant field – preferably at a graduate level
  • Have relevant field experience
  • Show a demonstrated commitment to the area of human rights and/or social justice
  • Show a demonstrated commitment to work independently

Here’s the application form. Deadline is February 28th. Here’s more info about the conference itself.

Am I a writer?

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A friend and I argue science, and social science, and literature. She posits, with a grin, ‘in the end, its all anthropology.’ We bring a way of seeing to the world, we create a record, a reflection, of what we see, of what we think we see, of who we think we are. What is cultural practice is also cultural reading. That reading is a record, not only an event. This is the uncomplicated – and yet unfathomable – insight that all the world’s a text. This textuality doesn’t absolve us from choosing a way of living, of choosing a way of seeing. I reflect on Camus, who suggests the opposite: the bottomless reflectivity of meaning gives us the impossible burden, the irreplacable gift of making just that choice. In writing, as in living, we must start by asking ‘why?’

I read Aleksandar Hemon in the Believer:

I want a book to contain a world—indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language. I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

I see a clue in those words. A defense, even, of serious academic writing. Is that all it takes to be a writer? I try to imagine writing without the assumption – the faith – that what I write, or will write, contains knowledge of the human experience that is not available otherwise. I read, in Wittgenstein, ‘a philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.’ I wonder if I can be a writer; if I might elucidate. I try to commit to showing the scars of my engagment with the world. I hope to earn the scars themselves.

Bad News and Good News

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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…

Justice and Intervention

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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.

animal psychology and the frozen ark

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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.

Yes He Can

politics, US

Adapted almost completely from my piece in the Faculty of Law student paper, the Ultra Vires. I know, it’s a bit late considering the last two weeks of primaries, but I stand by my analysis. Plus some of the links are worth reading.

It’s down to Hillary and Obama and a plurality of students at the U of T’s law school, like most Canadians, has thrown its support behind Obama for President. We’re in good company: the popular video riffing on the recent Obama ‘Yes We Can’ speech features Scarlett Johanssen, the woman who plays McDreamy’s ex-wife from Grey’s Anatomy, some familiar looking white guy pretending to play guitar, and of course the video’s producer, will.i.am. The Grateful Dead have thrown their lot behind Obama, though we’ll have to take their word that Jerry sends his best to the campaign from his great tail-gate party in the sky. The support of Joan Baez means an end to self-imposed exile from party politics.

I’m backing Obama too, though, on the basis of his strong anti-corpocracy message, I was a supporter of Edwards until his exit from the race two weeks ago. But I’m doing more than supporting Obama’s candidacy. I’m going to make the call – he’ll get the nomination. I’m currently batting 1000 in such predictions: I could have been two bits richer if someone had put money up against my call for Dion in the recent Liberal leadership race. As I suggested, the combination of anti-Rae and anti-Ignatieff sentiment combined to put Dion, no matter his failings, in the hot seat. The result was more complicated: without Gerrard Kennedy’s endorsement in the closing minutes of the Convention, I might have lost that bet.In that way, Obama has something in common with Dion: the strength of a key Kennedy endorsement or more exactly, the support of a handful of them. Though the clan is divided – with the noted environmental activist Robert K. Jr. backing Hillary – the endorsement of Ted Kennedy, JFK’s daughter Caroline and Maria Shreiver will certainly give a boost to the Illinois senator, not least because of skewed media coverage of the matter. Despite the split in the Kennedy support, there is no doubt that the shine of Camelot has been lent to Obama, not Hillary.

The candidates aren’t that far apart on policy. Since the beginning, the choice between the two has seemed like a choice between hope and experience. Ezra Klein puts a finer point on it, colouring the choice as one between Clinton as manager and Obama as visionary. There are good reasons to support a manager for President. America has painted itself into a corner in Iraq, flushed its economy down the toilet while running its debt up to unfathomable numbers, and tarnished its international reputation through divisive unilateralism, de facto endorsement of torture and spying on its own citizens. Supporters of Hillary point to her experience as proof that she will be a steady hand at the tiller while America tries to sail out of these shallows. She is, for Democrats, the ‘safe’ candidate. Obama, on the other hand, is so full of enthusiasm that (no exaggeration) he brings tears to the eyes of many Canadians with hope about what the United States can be.

Writing two weeks ago, one day before the Democratic race was shown to have not one but two horses, Michael Chabon suggested that arguments against Obama were pragmatic, not substantial. Sure, his friends said, Obama might be charming, intelligent, and sincere, but he is too good to be true. Someone so nice can’t cut it in the snakepit of politics, they said, and Democrats need someone who can win. His speeches may have inspired famous Californians to march to the beat of a new drummer but in American politics, Hollywood support is often a burden, not a blessing. Up until last Tuesday, arguments against Obama were founded not on his character or on his potential as President but on his ultimate chances as Democratic nominee.

Here’s the catch. Americans are ready for a Democratic president. Polls say that they’re ready for change, independents are voting in record numbers in democratic primaries, polls have the democrats in the lead, and election markets have a democrat taking the prize by a 50% margin. More importantly, Hillary may be slightly ahead of Obama in polls among Democrats but American voters, buoyed by McCain support over Hillary among independents, are much more likely to elect Obama as President with McCain as the Republican nominee.

Until now, Democrats have supported Clinton because they thought that Americans prefer safety over promise, security over potential, sound mind over the possibility of something greater. Polls show the opposite, that Americans as a whole, not just Hollywood, much prefer the visionary to the manager. In short, with McCain as challenger, Democrats can choose the ‘safe’ candidate who is more likely to lose, or take a risk on someone their fellow Americans like and who, in their hearts, they already like more, too. Even the persistently self-defeating Democrats can’t screw this one up.