The Politics of Voting: Four Suggestions

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about voting. I have Jason Brennan to thank for having stimulated me to sustained thought on the subject, via his much-acclaimed book, The Ethics of Voting. As I’ve said before, I agree with Brennan’s thesis in a general way, but the more I think about the details of his argument, the less plausible I find them. (I find his arguments for voter disenfranchisement downright hopeless.) Here’s a link to the 2013 Reason Papers symposium on Brennan’s book, and here’s a link to an earlier critique at PoT of Brennan’s account of character-based voting.

I’ll have more to say about Brennan’s arguments as I find the time to write about them. Meanwhile, here are four quick thoughts on voting, three of them relevant to American elections, the fourth to Israeli elections. In each case, it seems to me that the wrong issues are being discussed–when they’re being discussed at all–and that we ought to change the terms of debate. Only the last of the four topics is relevant to Brennan’s work.

(I) Felon Disenfranchisement
There’s been a lot of talk in the past few years about felon disenfranchisement: felons in the U.S. (perhaps elsewhere, but I don’t know) are deprived of the right to vote. Here’s a fairly typical piece from The New York Times criticizing felon disenfranchisement as racist.

I find discussion of this topic confused. There are at least three different issues involved here; each needs to be distinguished from the others and discussed on its own terms.

(1) A first issue is: given an ideal definition of “felony,” and a well-functioning criminal justice system, should felons be permitted to vote, or should they be deprived of that right as an inherent part of their punishment?

My answer is, “they should be deprived of the right to vote.” I endorse a debt-based conception of punishment according to which, when we interact with someone, we owe him or her (at a minimum) respect for their rights. When someone violates those rights, he incurs a debt to the victim–a debt consisting of compensation for the lost value of the exercise of the victim’s right, among many other things. Punishment, in my view, ought to consist of repayment of that debt. If the debt can’t be paid in full–and for a variety of reasons, it may be impossible to do so–offenders can permissibly be deprived of those goods that would count as ill-gotten gains from crime.

Some simple examples: If you rob me, your voting to dispose of my income without having compensated me for the commission of the crime counts as an ill-gotten gain. Since you’re not entitled to such a gain, you can be disenfranchised. If you kidnap me, what you’ve done is illicitly to try to “govern” my actions by brute force. If I survive, you owe me compensation for your trying to rule me in this way. But voting is a case of ruling me, as well. So ruling me by the ballot counts as an ill-gotten gain (or would) until you’ve paid off the debt you incurred by kidnapping me. And so, once again, you can be disenfranchised until you do.

Suppose that the repayment-requirements on such debts are prohibitively high–high enough that they can’t typically be paid in full by anyone, regardless of how wealthy they are. On my view, government should in such cases have the authority to deprive offenders indefinitely of the right to vote. If you (the offender) can’t compensate me (the victim) for what you’ve done to me, you don’t have the right indirectly (i.e., by voting) to decide the disposition of goods that belong to me. And that, in effect, justifies the disenfranchisement policy we currently have. (For a somewhat similar view of punishment, see the work of Daniel McDermott, who defends what he calls a debt-based conception of retributivism. I’m not sure where McDermott stands on felony disenfranchisement, however.)

Suppose now that we think of government, on Lockean grounds, as a kind of mutual-defense pact for the protection of rights. In that case, any attack on the rights of any member of the pact is an attack on the rights of every party to the pact. By implication, a debt owed to the victim is simultaneously a debt owed to every party to the pact. If the debt in question cannot be discharged in full–and if the crime is serious enough, it probably can’t be–then the parties to the pact can permissibly deny the offender access to ill-gotten goods in lieu of full payment of the debt.

This resolves the old problem of the “missing beneficiary.” For example: if you murder me, you incur a debt to me for having done so. Of course, being dead, I’m not around to collect the debt. In that case, you owe a debt to the rights-respecting members of my society–via their agent, government. Now suppose that you can’t pay the debt in full. In that case, they can deprive you of certain categories of goods on my behalf as well as theirs. One good they can deprive you of is the right to vote: after all, your having that right would give you the right to dispose of the income that they have earned while you still owe them compensation for the right you’ve violated. And you’re not entitled to that. (Incidentally, even if I’m physically unavailable to collect a debt for having been murdered or wrongfully killed, I could during my lifetime have set up an escrow account as an insurance policy in the event of my murder/wrongful death. In that case, an offender might still be obliged to compensate me posthumously, with the proceeds going to my heirs or to the state, as my will or lack of one implies.)

Something similar would apply to rape, to assault and battery, to drunk driving, and to plenty of other recognizable felonies. In short, I don’t see why, as long as we define “felony” properly, felons should be allowed to vote. The debts they’ve incurred to the rest of us are sufficiently high that we needn’t worry so much about whether they have the right to govern us, or dispose of our income. They don’t. I don’t mean to suggest that we have no obligations toward them. I just means that access to the ballot isn’t one of them.

(2) Second issue: is the operative definition of “felony” in the U.S. a good one? Does it, on moral grounds, include and exclude the appropriate items?

I’d say: “no” and “no.” This issue is the one that, in my view, actually gives rise to the felon disenfranchisement controversy. The real problem, it seems to me, is that we’ve made felons of people who shouldn’t be felons, and in consequence of that, have deprived people of the right to vote who should have it. If doing so has adverse racial consequences, my suggestion is: redefine “felon” more narrowly, so as to exclude certain categories of crimes from the list of felonies. If we do, I suspect that the “felon disenfranchisement” problem (insofar as it is a problem) either disappears or is greatly reduced in scope.

(3) Third issue: regardless of the definition of “felony,” is the U.S. criminal justice system systematically and unjustifiably biased against certain populations or sub-populations?

My answer: “probably.” No matter how we define “felon,” there will probably be residual problems in our criminal justice system, some of them with adverse racial consequences–some of them just plain old unjust–and those problems need to be addressed. But the resolution of those problems is not facilitated by the enfranchisement of felons. Convicted murderers, rapists, batterers, and drunk drivers have no distinctive insight into the rights and wrongs of criminal procedure. Nor does it make much sense to bank on the possibility that some small fraction of those convicted felons might be innocent (I’m sure some are), and might impart the wisdom of innocence to us via the ballot. The probabilities of that happening are tiny enough to render the venture as a whole quixotic.

The bottom line is that instead of crusading for voting rights for murderers, kidnappers, rapists, robbers, etc., we ought to be redefining “felony” and actively reforming the defects of our criminal justice system. Felon enfranchisement is just a distraction from those far more important tasks.

(II) Voter ID laws
Now consider voter ID laws. Here’s a usefully balanced article, also from the Times, suggesting that voter ID laws, while problematic, do not have the large-scale effects that some have alleged of them.

The standard argument for voter ID laws is that they pre-empt or minimize voter fraud. The standard argument against them asserts that there is little evidence of voter fraud in the U.S., that voter ID laws have racist effects, and that contrary to their proponents’ rhetoric, voter ID laws are covertly there to produce racist effects.

Once again, however, all this seems to me a distraction from the real issue. To see why, consider the tacit implication of the arguments against voter ID laws. Why, according to those arguments, are voter ID laws unfair? Spelled out, the answer is that large numbers of Americans lack the means to obtain photo IDs for themselves. Lacking access to photo IDs, they can’t meet the requirements of voter ID laws, and are de facto disenfranchised by them.

Suppose ex hypothesi that that’s true, and pause on it for a moment. Voting aside, isn’t that precisely the problem in need of discussion and rectification? How is it that large numbers of people in a first world country do not have access to the means of self-identification? Even if we do away with voter ID laws, the underlying problem remains in place. In other words, even if you don’t need an ID to vote, you need it for other things. How are people without IDs expected to open bank accounts, visit the doctor, or travel by plane–or get driver’s licenses, library cards, discount cards, or government benefits, etc.? Either they’re to do without these things because they lack ID, or they need access to these things, and must therefore obtain access to IDs. I would opt for the latter option, but no matter how you slice it, the issue is not voter IDs, but access to IDs as such.

The scarce-access-to-IDs situation seems to me a good argument for having some equivalent of a national identity card in just the way and for just the same reasons that so many other countries have them. Here’s a case for them, from the Washington Post.

I agree with the reasons the Post gives for having them, but I’d give one more. It’s been argued by critics of social contract theory since Hume* that express consent theories of consent to government do not or cannot work because we never in fact consent expressly to government. I suppose that that’s partly true, at least for natural-born citizens; we don’t consent to government in the way that we consent, say, to the terms of a credit card. But I see national ID laws as a chance to respond to that problem. Why not structure the task of getting a national ID so that the act of getting one either requires express consent to the government issuing the card, or requires explicit non-consent? If you consent, you get an ID card, and with it, the benefits and burdens of “membership” in the polity. If you refuse consent, you don’t get a card, and can be denied the benefits of membership while being spared the burdens.

There are, to be sure, lots of complications here, many of them entangled in debates about immigration and immigration policy. I can’t settle those here. I would just say that it seems to me that the mechanism I describe is possible, and that its existence would rebut Hume-type arguments against consent, and solve some other practical problems as well. At the very least, focusing on our ID problem–which has significant adverse effects on people’s living their lives–beats focusing on a voter ID problem that seems not to have any significant effects on voting.

(III) Low voter turnout
Now consider the low voter turnout issue. The problem here is supposed to be that relatively few voters show up to vote. In partisan terms, that means that Democrats fare badly in the elections (which, of course, matters more to Democrats than to others). In more general terms, it means that our democracy is not as “robust” as it could be. Personally, I happen to think it means that the ballot choices we’re typically offered aren’t worth voting for, whether for or against. Here’s a website, FairVote.org, devoted to discussion of the issue. Once again, however, it seems to me that much of the discussion there and elsewhere is focused on the wrong things.

Suppose that we want to increase voter participation. (There are reasons not to want to, having to do with wrongful voting and voter incompetence, but set them aside.) In that case, I’d offer two proposals:

(1) Put a “None of the Above” option on the ballot, so that voters can vote against all the (other) options on the ballot. As things currently stand, you can write “NOTA” as a “write in” on the ballot (I regularly do), but few people realize this, and most people surmise, correctly, that write-ins are meaningless. (I’ve encountered poll workers unaware of the fact that NOTA is a write-in possibility.) But if “NOTA” were on the ballot, it would be at least as significant as any other option on the ballot, and all those disgruntled voters who don’t vote because they dislike all the options might now vote in order to express that view.

(2) Move Election Day from Tuesday to the weekend. Yes, a small minority of mostly religious voters might be inconvenienced by that move (if so, they can use absentee ballots), but as it stands, huge numbers of working people are inconvenienced by Election Day’s having to compete with the workday. Change the day, and I suspect you’d increase voter turnout.

(IV) Voting and the right to complain
Let me move now from American to Israeli elections, or more precisely, elections in Jerusalem. When I visited Israel/Palestine in 2013, I was both surprised and dismayed to discover that while East Jerusalemite Palestinians have the right to vote in Jerusalem’s municipal elections (though not in Israeli national elections), they almost unanimously refuse to exercise that right, even though their exercising it would substantially change the political landscape of Jerusalem, and benefit them. The argument I heard from Palestinians was that voting would legitimize Israel, which they refuse to do. Sadly, the few Palestinians who offered to run for municipal office, or to vote for pro-Palestinian candidates or causes, were widely regarded by other Palestinians as traitors to the Palestinian cause.

I find that a self-defeating and incoherent set of attitudes. East Jerusalemite Palestinians widely accept–and demand–government benefits from Israel, so it makes no sense for them to refuse to exercise political rights that are on offer from Israel, especially if the refusal to exercise those rights merely disempowers those who refuse to exercise them. The fact is, the budget for government services in East Jerusalem is in the hands of non-Palestinian Israelis, as are decisions bearing on the protection of Palestinian rights. As things currently stand, decisions on both sets of issues are made in ways that ignore or violate Palestinian rights. I would argue that respect for one’s rights is essential to one’s well-being. As it happens, the only efficacious way of ensuring respect for Palestinian rights in Jerusalem is to make changes to the budget and policies of the Jerusalem municipal authority. And the only efficacious way of changing the budget and policies of that authority is to vote to change them. So the options are: vote to defend your rights, or acquiesce in their violation and the consequent diminution of your well-being.

Suppose that we each have a self-regarding moral obligation to promote our well-being (insofar as doing so is open to us). If so, give the preceding facts, Palestinians ought to vote. If “ought-hood” is sufficient for “duty” or “obligation,” then eligible Palestinian voters have a moral obligation to vote. Contrary to a recent argument of Jason Brennan’s, then, the case of East Jerusalemite Palestinians seems a picture-perfect example of the old saw that if you don’t vote, you shouldn’t complain–or more precisely, if you don’t vote, you shouldn’t complain about the things that voting would have improved, and that only voting can improve, at least for the foreseeable future. If you’re going to be taxed, and you’re going to be regulated, it makes no sense to stand by as your tax money is spent by everyone but you on everything but what matters to you. It likewise makes no sense to stand by as you are regulated to death by the people who are spending your money, as your rights go violated or ignored. Voting is in effect an act of self-defense, and self-defense is a moral obligation.

The obstacle here is supposed to be that it is not instrumentally rational for individual voters to vote, because individual votes cannot change the outcome of an election (or more precisely, cannot change the outcome of a sufficiently large election–a qualification that is sometimes relevant but often ignored in discussions of “voting,” as though all voting were large-scale voting). But if you know anything about Palestinian political culture, I think you’ll see that this objection is spurious. There is no need to worry about the efficacy or utility of individual votes qua individual if the voters in question don’t conceive of their votes in those terms in the first place. If voters naturally conceive of themselves as members of a solidaristic group, and can coordinate their efforts in a given direction as a group–and have a strong reason to do so, and might well be inclined to do so–then the unit of concern is not the utility of individual votes, but the the votes of voting blocs qua blocs whose members self-consciously act in concert.

I realize I’m describing an idealized case, but my point is, it’s a possible case. In fact, it’s more possible and plausible than half of the thought-experiments that clog the philosophical literature. (By the way, there is no contradiction between seeing yourself as an individual with an individual obligation to promote your well-being, and seeing yourself, qua voter, as part of a voting bloc. Membership in the bloc could precisely be what promotes your individual well-being, so that your individual well-being is what dictates membership and a solidaristic self-conception in the first place.)

Now suppose that Palestinians** get their act together, ditching the nationalist and Islamist rhetoric that has retarded their progress for decades. They come to see voting as an act of both collective and individual self-defense. They also see the defense of their rights as a contribution to the common good (which includes Israelis). Suppose (perhaps improbably but not impossibly) that the Israelis do not interfere significantly with Palestinians’ voting en masse.

Suppose further that Palestinians think of voting by analogy with having an intifada. In other words, as with the first intifada in the 1980s, they organize their efforts to vote strategically*** as a single unified voting bloc: they caucus, organize, and promise one another to vote for pro-Palestinian policies. Suppose that it is relatively obvious what these policies should be, and what the votes for these policies should be. Suppose, further, that voters are well-informed. Now suppose that a large number of Palestinians enter these caucuses voluntarily, and through caucusing, manage to ascertain (by mechanisms internal to the caucuses) that there are enough Palestinian votes among them to tip the scales of a given Jerusalem election. If so, each Palestinian voter could regard himself or herself as part of an assurance contract with all other Palestinian voters. And if so, each voter would have an obligation (to the others and to him or herself) to vote in the way he or she had promised in the contract.

My argument here is essentially that if you can organize a mass uprising–an intifada–you can organize a mass voter campaign. Further, if an intifada involves the implicit equivalent of an assurance contract (as it does), you can in principle model a mass voter campaign on an intifada, and turn the campaign into an activity that involves an actual assurance contract. But if contracts bind, an electoral assurance contract yields a duty to vote. So under certain nomologically possible conditions, there can be a duty to vote, and given this duty, it can be irrational to complain about unfair or harmful political policies if you don’t vote.

I can’t work through all the details here, but take a look at Brennan’s argument in light of the preceding. Either my East Jerusalem case is a counter-example to his thesis, or it’s a defeater for it. In the first case, it refutes the thesis as stated. In the second case, it suggests that the thesis is highly misleading as stated. Given that, my argument requires that Brennan qualify his claims about the ethics of voting in ways that take more explicit stock of cases like the East Jerusalem one–something that would substantially change the “flavor” of his theory.

I realize that Brennan has an explicit discussion of strategic voting in his book (Ethics of Voting, pp. 129-33), and that the discussion includes a “strategic voting clause” (p. 131), but I think almost all of what he says talks past what I’m saying here. What he doesn’t discuss either in the book or in the article I’ve linked to, is the possibility that you could have a duty to vote in cases like the East Jerusalem one, that your vote would matter in those cases, and that you’d have no right to complain if you didn’t vote. (See the notes below for a comment on “strategic voting.”)

While you’re looking at Brennan’s arguments, read his discussion of “the moral disenfranchisement of poor minorities” in The Ethics of Voting, pp. 105-7. I find the discussion very inadequate even on its own terms, but for present purposes it’s worth noting how narrow it is. Like so many American writers, in writing about “minorities,” Brennan structures his discussion around black-white relations in the U.S., assuming somehow that what he says about that will generalize elsewhere–everywhere. It doesn’t. In particular, he assumes that “poor minorities [will] overwhelmingly qualify as bad voters” by his criteria, and offers some rather handwaving suggestions about how they’re to handle–or how he would think about handling–their disenfranchisement.

What he doesn’t consider is the possibility that the issues in contention in a given election may sometimes be entirely straightforward and require nothing in the way of the social scientific “credentials” he regards as necessary conditions for eligibility to vote. Putting aside the American case, I think this is patently obvious in non-American ones, like that of East Jerusalem. It takes no special social scientific wisdom to figure out that your interests, your rights, and the common good are better promoted by someone who stands for fairness than by someone who makes no secret of wanting to subvert your interests, violate your rights and exclude you from the common good. If Brennan’s epistemic elite hasn’t figured that out, frankly, they have a lot to learn.

I’m hoping to spend the summer of 2015 in East Jerusalem teaching at Al Quds University. While I’m there, I intend to make the case for what I call rights-based strategic voting by Palestinians in Israeli elections. Feel free to hit me with objections in the combox if you disagree with the sketch I’ve just given of it. I may well be hit with more than that while I’m there, and I’d like to start my preparations now.

*Actually, Hume concedes, almost parenthetically, that consent is a possible basis for political legitimacy: “I only pretend [aver] that it has very seldom had place in any degree, and never almost in its full extent” (paragraph 20). But that claim is entirely compatible with consent’s coming to be the basis of political legitimacy in the future by concerted effort aiming to bring it about. Considered as an argument against Locke on consent, what Hume says in “Of the Original Contract” strikes me as a series of ignoratios elenchi.

**For brevity, I use the word “Palestinian” throughout, but I don’t really mean to be restricting that to ethnic Palestinians. I’m using “Palestinian” as short-hand for those who would actively organize for and act on behalf of Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem. The bulk of those people would most likely be ethnic Palestinians, but not all of them would. It’s just too cumbersome to be explicit about this in every sentence.

***I’m using the term “strategic” in its colloquial, not its technical sense. In its technical sense, “strategic voting” is voting for candidates or policies that are contrary to one’s sincere preference, in the hopes that doing so will realize some preferred outcome. In the colloquial sense, “strategic” voting is simply voting to bring about some end by means of a collectively-adopted political strategy for bringing the end about. I happen to think that the technical concept of “strategic voting” is a confused and equivocal one, but that doesn’t matter. My scenario makes no reference to insincerity on voters’ part.

Postscript, Nov. 30, 2014 (relevant to proposal I, felon disenfranchisement): This blog post, at Slate Star Codex, is well worth reading on the race and criminal justice in the United States. It complicates the picture, but I don’t think it changes anything I said about felon disenfranchisement. Hat-tip: Kate Herrick.

Postscript, April 5, 2015 (relevant to proposal IV, voting and the right to complain): Useful background on the political situation in East Jerusalem, from the London Review of Books.

Postscript, December 25, 2015 (relevant to proposal II, voter ID laws): An interesting article in The New York Times about Mayor DeBlasio’s “New York ID” program and the obstacles to success it’s facing at area banks. All things considered, the program seems a step in the right direction.

To Fish or not to Fish?

Posted on November 24, 2014 by gbarnes14 under Uncategorized

One of the happiest discoveries that I ever made in my youth was fishing. I discovered it one summer in the lakes region of central New Hampshire, when I was 12 years old. My grandfather sent me to a little brook to fish for brook trout. The brook was tiny, and when I first saw it I thought “There aren’t any fish in here.” Then I took a step toward the brook, and it happened. Like little streaks of blurred lightning under the rippling, bubbling water, they flashed out in every direction. I was stupefied. I was amazed. I was in awe. And I was hooked. From then on, I was an avid angler.

But now I am having doubts. Over the years I have often thought to myself that if I had to defend our treatment of animals in a debate with a smart critic, I would lose that debate. But until now I have managed to put the issue out of my mind. Then, last week, two things happened. First, Andrew Chignell came to the Center for Philosophic Exchange and gave a talk about the ethics of eating meat. That got me thinking again, and doing some more reading. Second, I discovered a recent book by a biologist named Victoria Braithwaite, entitled Do Fish Feel Pain? I have not read the book yet, but from the reviews that I have read, it sounds like she makes a pretty good case that the answer is “yes.” I plan to read the book soon, and I will tell you if that turns out to be false. In the meantime, I am struggling with this question. If fish do feel pain – if they suffer when I hook them and pull them out of the water, then should I stop fishing? I’m going to share a few open-ended thoughts about it here, and then listen with interest to what the rest of you think.

There is one thing that I feel fairly certain about. Pain is morally significant. If an action causes pain, then that is at least a pro tanto moral reason not to perform that action. So if fish feel pain when I hook them and pull them out of the water, then that is at least a pro tanto moral reason not to fish. I think that I am familiar with most of the standard reasons to discount animal pain, and I find them all unconvincing. They all seem to amount to saying, in one way or another, that “We’re smarter than they are, so their pain doesn’t matter.” My response is that pain hurts just the same, regardless of how smart you are. Of course, I agree that the lack of certain kinds of intelligence precludes the possibility of certain kinds of pain. For instance, if fish do not project very far into their futures, then they probably do not fear death in exactly the same way in which a human being would. But that does not change the fact (if it is a fact) that they feel pain, and that their pain hurts, and that hurting is a bad thing. So I don’t find this whole “we’re smarter” line of argument very helpful in this context. That is not to say that there are no morally relevant differences between human and nonhuman animals. I’m not arguing for that here. My present position is just this: fish pain is a pro tanto reason not to fish, and therefore if fishing is to be justified, then there must be a morally relevant reason for doing it that outweighs this reason not to do it. What could that be?

Robert Nozick once said that his view about animals was “Kantianism for human beings, and utilitarianism for everything else.” Let’s try that out, and see where it goes. I do enjoy fishing. I enjoy it immensely. Is it possible that my enjoyment of fishing is sufficient to outweigh the negative value of fish pain? At this point the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons leaps clearly into view. How could I possibly make a reasonable comparison between the fish’s pain and my enjoyment? Even if I can discern that fish feel pain, how could I measure or quantify it in such a way as to make a comparison with my enjoyment of fishing? I find that extremely difficult to do. Maybe the empirical evidence will help me here. I will find out. But if I cannot make the comparison, then it seems to me that I should err on the side of not causing harm. In that case, it seems that I should forgo fishing. On the other side, however, there is my love of the activity, and the long, personal history that I have with it. That seems to count for something too. But here again, I really don’t know how to weigh it.

Well, as you can see, I am in the throes of this question, with no clear answer. Here is one possibility, which intrigues me. When I think about fishing now, and I imagine catching a fish, the fact that the fish might be feeling pain comes to forefront of my mind. Maybe what I should do is to read the book on fish pain, and then go fishing. If I hook a fish, and I am fully aware of the pain that I am causing, maybe my conscience will tell me what I ought to do. Maybe I should trust my own reaction at that moment. Or should I? I really don’t know.

“This video is private.”

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I’ve updated my post from earlier this month on The Atlas Society’s panel discussion, “The Objectivist Movement Today.” Apparently, the champions of “Open Objectivism” have decided to “privatize” the video of the panel I had criticized. In other words, if you try to access it from their website, you get a message that says, “This video is private.”

I would reconstruct the (obviously enthymematic) argument involved here as follows:

1. If the video is out of sight, it is out of mind.

2. If the video is out of mind, it is unreal.

3. If the video is unreal, then Khawaja’s criticisms of its contents are unreal, too.

4. The video is out of sight!

Hence

5. Khawaja’s criticisms of the video’s contents are unreal.

From (5) it follows straightaway that you need not take Khawaja’s criticisms very seriously.

Yes, it does follow. But is it true? The answer is “private,” but accessible to anyone with a functioning brain and introspective access to it.

Reminder: “Psychiatric Medications: Promise or Peril?” Fall 2014 Felician Symposium

Posted on November 23, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Here’s a reminder, for those of you in the New York/New Jersey Metro Area, of our upcoming symposium, “Psychiatric Medication: Promise or Peril? An Interdisciplinary Discussion.” The symposium is the third annual one sponsored by the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs, and is co-sponsored by the Felician College Department of Psychology, and Felician’s Graduate Program in Counseling Psychology. It takes place Saturday, December 6 between 1 and 5 pm in the Castleview Room on the Rutherford, New Jersey campus of Felician College. The Castleview Room is located on the second floor of the Student Union Center on the Rutherford campus. (The GPS address is 223 Montross Ave., Rutherford, NJ, 07070.)

The topic is timely enough as it is, but has been made particularly so by recent coverage of the issue in The New York Times, among other places. Check out this article on psychiatric drug use in children, as well as these follow-up letters on the same article. This review of Yochi Dreazen’s The Invisible Front discusses the use of psychiatric drugs for PTSD in returning veterans. Also worth checking out is Alan Schwarz’s controversial series on ADHD in The New York Times, which you can find by scrolling backward on his dedicated page at their website. Likewise worth checking out (and more supportive of the use of medications) are guest posts at the Times by Richard Friedman of Weill Cornell Medical College.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the popular literature on psychiatry, but I’ve found the work of Peter Breggin, Gary Greenberg, and Peter Kramer illuminating in addressing the important background issues. (For whatever it’s worth, despite his reputation among libertarians, I have generally not found the work of Thomas Szasz particularly helpful. And despite her reputation among mainstream readers, I have very mixed feelings about the work of Kay Redfield Jamison.)

Here’s the line-up of presenters at the Felician event:

Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America;
Raymond Raad, a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City, and Fellow in Forensic Psychiatry, Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons;
Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy at Dowling College in Oakdale, New York, and editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews; and
Peter Economou, Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at Felician College, and Founder of The Counseling Center of Hoboken and Springfield, New Jersey.

Raymond Raad replaces Cheryl Kennedy of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, who unexpectedly had to cancel. I’m very grateful to Ray (who lurks on PoT) for doing the event on such short notice.

Whitaker’s work features prominently in a much-discussed two-part review by Marcia Angell in The New York Review of Books; for another view of Whitaker’s work, check out this highly critical review by E. Fuller Torrey, along with Whitaker’s response.

If you’re interested in issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology, and don’t know Christian Perring’s Metapsychology Online Reviews, you probably need to head there ASAP (see link above). [Added later: Perring is the author of the entry for “Mental Illness” for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the main reference work in the field.]

Peter Economou not only has the distinction of having founded a Counseling and Wellness Center in New Jersey (see link above), but of being on the New Jersey State Board of Psychological Examiners (aka “the licensing board”)–and of being my academic advisor in the counseling program at Felician.

Hope to see some of you at the symposium.

PS., More grist for the mill: Though much of it is behind a paywall, I just happened to notice this piece by Mitchell Feinberg, “On the Moral Use of ‘Smart Drugs,'” in The Objective Standard. Perhaps readers who subscribe to TOS can tell us what Feinberg says. Meanwhile, neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland weighs in on the controversy in her recent book, Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain:

To the degree that I am optimistic, it is because there are scientific discoveries that obviously and unequivocally have been used to make life better–such as polio and smallpox vaccines; such as Prozac and lithium; such as hand washing by surgeons and the use of local anesthetics by dentists….(p. 23)

It does seem generally true that as we come to understand that a particular problem, such as PMS or extreme shyness, has a biological basis, we find relief–relief that our own bad character is not, after all, the cause and relief because causality presents a possible chance for change. If we are lucky and current science has moved along to understand some of the causal details, interventions to ameliorate may emerge. Even if a medical intervention is not available, sometimes just knowing the biological nature of the condition permits us to work around, or work with, what cannot be fixed. For some problems, such as bipolar disorder and chronic depression, medical progress has been greater than for other problems, such as schizophrenia and the various forms of dementia. As more is unraveled about the complex details of these conditions, effective interventions will likely be found. The slow dawning of deep ideas about the brain and the causes of neurological dysfunction has lifted us from the cruel labeling of demonic posesssion or witchery. (p. 31)

I take it that Churchland takes her neurophilosophical eliminativism about mind to prescribe support for the pro-medication (“promise”) side of the debate? If she doesn’t intend that, it’s not clear to me what she is saying. (Of course, it’s not clear to me how eliminativists can have intentions, either, but never mind.)

Postscript 2, November 30, 2014: Some excellent posts on psychiatric medications, care of Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex: SSRI’s, More Than You Ever Wanted to Know, and Such Crazy Feelings About Crazymeds.

My famous friends: name-dropping without (much) shame

Posted on November 20, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

A couple of days ago, I wrote a post dedicated in part to discussing the work of people I either don’t know, or barely know at all. Today’s post is just the opposite: a name-dropping attempt to bask vicariously in the glory of others’ accomplishments, simply because they happen to be friends or relatives of mine. There’s no credit like unearned credit! I’m going to bold everyone’s name below, just to make this post look more like the gossip column that it is.

My friend William Dale is Associate Professor of Medicine at Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. (He has a half dozen other titles, but never mind.) He seems to make it into The New York Times every other day for his work on geriatrics, but here’s the latest, about the connections between his work and the National Social, Life, Health, and Aging Project at Chicago. And yes, that’s him in the header photo of their page.

I’m not sure I know Jose Duarte well enough to call us “friends,” but we have hung out a bit, so I’ll gloss over the niceties. Jose has been creating waves for his research, with Jonathan Haidt, on the political biases of research in social psychology. Here’s a piece in The New Yorker about his most recent publication. And here’s a link to the paper itself, “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Research.”

My friend Stephen Hicks is celebrating the tenth anniversary of the publication of his 2004 book, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. It’s gone through God-knows-how-many printings, and at least five translations that I know of, with more on the way. (I’d like to put in a vote for an Urdu translation, by the way.) I’d like to think that I made some tiny contribution to the success of the book; as co-managing editor of Reason Papers, I happened to edit (all right, co-edit) one of the longer and more positive reviews of the book. But obviously, I couldn’t have done that unless Stephen had written the book (and Steven Sanders had written the review!) in the first place.

Finally, on the Famous Friend Front, my buddy Chris Sciabarra is featured in a piece on Ayn Rand in New York Magazine, improbably titled, “Ayn Rand, Girl Power Icon.” Amusingly, the piece opens with Chris’s professed puzzlement about the phenomenon, and only gets better from there.

I mentioned famous relatives. Did I tell you that my cousin Khawaja Saad Rafiq is the Minister of Railways for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan? I only mention that because here’s a piece featuring Saad bhai in the Pakistan Observer. In it, he takes issue with Jason Brennan’s thesis in The Ethics of Voting. According to Dr. Brennan, we have no duty to vote, but according to cousin Saad, the “Country Can Only Make Progress Thru the Power of Vote.” Well, Saad bhai doesn’t quite mention Dr. Brennan by name, but the implicit spirit of contention is there. I actually think that a conversation between Saad bhai and Dr. Brennan on voting would be a hilariously instructive affair for all parties. In fact, I offer in advance to serve as interpreter to overcome the language barrier* for the conversation. I rather doubt that the event will ever happen, but as a thought-experiment, I think it has a lot to recommend itself.

*PS, I kind of think that language would be the least of the barriers involved. Cf. Bernard Williams on real and notional confrontations, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 160ff.

Postscript, December 19, 2014: Amazingly, within a few weeks of my issuing a call for an Urdu translation of Explaining Postmodernism, Stephen Hicks has announced a forthcoming Hindi translation. Behold the power of PoT.

A pre-Thanksgiving expression of gratitude

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I’ve always had slightly mixed feelings about Thanksgiving—it’s not like Halloween is for me—but like most denizens of the First World, I certainly have my share of things to be thankful for. I suppose that sense of gratitude excludes the students who repeatedly fail to do the reading in the classes I teach (and text while I explain the reading they haven’t done); my loud and insensitive upstairs neighbors, who keep me up with with their late night and early morning stomping and yelling; the criminals who’ve recently been filling the police blotters with their exploits in my neighborhood; and the near-death experiences I have every day (often twice a day) while driving the Garden State Parkway. But there’s plenty to be grateful for despite all that. This post consists of an enumeration of some of those things–partly to express my gratitude in a public way, partly to induce readers to reflect on similar things in their experience, and partly just to share some of the discoveries involved. Call it a pre-Thanksgiving expression of gratitude.

One of the great joys of blogging is the opportunity it affords for discovering talented, dedicated people you’d never heard of before, and might never have heard of or interacted with but for the grace of WordPress. That goes for everyone who’s contributed to this blog since its inception this summer—co-bloggers, commenters, ‘likers’, and lurkers alike. Thanks to all of you. But I particularly wanted to take a moment to mention a small handful of bloggers and websites I’ve recently discovered through ‘likes’ on PoT, which have recently become big favorites of mine.

One is Brandon Christensen’s Notes on Liberty, which I’ve come to regard as the most interesting and intelligent libertarian blog on the Internet–and for whatever it’s worth (often, alas, very little), I’ve read them all. Between the NoL folks who come here (mostly Brandon) and the PoT heads who go there (mostly me), we seem to have developed a nice synergy between NoL and PoT, and I hope that continues.

When my brain is up to it, I sometimes visit Blogistikon, “a little storehouse of thoughts, puzzles, and problems about ancient philosophy.” It’s an acquired taste, I realize: one of their latest posts is on “relativity in the Peri Ideon,” and one before that was on Aristotle’s conception of opaque and transparent relatives. Frankly, some of it would be all Greek to anyone (when it wasn’t all Latin). But I enjoy it, when I understand it.

A more accessible favorite of mine is Jackie Hadel’s Tokidoki world travel photo blog, which I discovered by means of a surprise ‘like’ by Hadel on one of my posts. (We don’t know one another at all.) The sheer number of photos on her blog is pretty staggering, but the ones of Bethlehem, Hebron, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv brought back vivid memories for me. The ones of New York struck me as fresh and interesting, despite my having lived here (well, in New Jersey) for decades, and the ones of autumn in Japan not only induced me to want to go to Japan in the autumn, but managed to evoke some nostalgia for an autumnal trip that Kate Herrick and I recently took to southwestern Vermont, of all places. (You’ll have to look at Hadel’s photos to see why.) Hadel’s travel photos make an interesting study in comparisons and contrasts with those of my cousin Jawad Zakariya, who seems to have traveled just about as widely as she has—with eyes open and camera ready for some amazing shots, from Canada to Pakistan and points in between.

Browsing at Hadel’s site, I serendipitously discovered the poems of Kate Houck, which I now make sure to visit every few days, “for the love of words and what they inspire.” And I’m grateful to my Felician College colleague Richard McGarry for my belated but soul-gratifying discovery of the poetry of Mary Oliver. This particular discovery came not through the blog, but the old-fashioned way, after Rich pinned Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” to the bulletin board of the faculty lounge, where I happened to see it. (It’s worth mentioning, incidentally, that it’s a direct violation of Felician College policy to pin anything, poems included, to a College bulletin board without the express approval and imprimatur of the office of “Felician College Events and Conference Services.” The operative premise seems to be that college faculty can’t be trusted to communicate with one another by means of flyers or other posted material, unless their communications meet the approval of an “Events and Conference Services” administrator–whether or not the administrator can herself be trusted to understand what the communications are about. “Wild Geese,” was not, I’m afraid, an approved communication, so that in reading it, soul-gratifying or not, I was breaking the law.)

The preceding stuff is pretty ethereal, I’ll admit—political theory, ancient philosophy, travel photography, and poetry. I’m thankful for all of it, but ultimately, Thanksgiving is really about gratitude for elementally material things, like food, drink, clothing, and shelter. To that end, I thought I’d draw attention to this item on world poverty, itself brought to my attention by Kate Herrick. Here’s the abstract from a quietly mind-blowing 2009 working paper by Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-I-Martin, “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” recently discussed at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

We use a parametric method to estimate the income distribution for 191 countries between 1970 and 2006. We estimate the World Distribution of Income and estimate poverty rates, poverty counts and various measures of income inequality and welfare. Using the official $1/day line, we estimate that world poverty rates have fallen by 80% from 0.268 in 1970 to 0.054 in 2006. The corresponding total number of poor has fallen from 403 million in 1970 to 152 million in 2006. Our estimates of the global poverty count in 2006 are much smaller than found by other researchers. We also find similar reductions in poverty if we use other poverty lines. We find that various measures of global inequality have declined substantially and measures of global welfare increased by somewhere between 128% and 145%. We analyze poverty in various regions. Finally, we show that our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests involving functional forms, data sources for the largest countries, methods of interpolating and extrapolating missing data, and dealing with survey misreporting.

I don’t have the expertise to interpret their findings in any systematic or sophisticated way, and I realize that $1/day is a dismally low baseline. But an 80% reduction in world poverty rates over a 36 year period cries out for acknowledgement and gratitude, as well as for causal explanation and indefinite iteration. It’s debatable whether the cause of the amelioration is capitalism, globalization, or whatever, but the point is, whatever the cause, it can’t be chance. And that by itself is something to be thankful for, even if we still have a long way to go before everyone has in the way of material resources what a small minority of us can be thankful for having.

One last item, simultaneously from the world of spirit and of matter. For fourteen years now, my dear friend Carol Welsh has been fighting a recurrent brain (and now spinal) tumor called an “ependymoma.” She tells her story at her website, “Adult Ependymoma: A Patient’s Story.” That story has so far included “three brain surgeries, one gamma knife radiosurgery, a placement of a shunt, a course of radiation and oral chemotherapy called Temodar,” along with spinal surgery and a diagnosis of breast cancer. In the fourteen years that Carol has fought this disease—or these diseases, however one counts them–I honestly have not been able to grasp how a human being could endure such undeserved punishment and not only survive, but do so with Carol’s grace and equanimity. She is, as far as I’m concerned, the single most awe-inspiring paradigm of the virtue of courage I have ever known.

Among the many lessons I’ve learned from her, one philosophically interesting one is worth mentioning. We inherit a bias, largely I think from Aristotle, of conceiving of the virtue of courage in fundamentally masculine and militaristic terms. Aristotle tells us in Nicomachean Ethics III.6 that since death on the battlefield is the paradigm of courage, it is “wrong to fear poverty or sickness”; the capacity to face such fears is a mere analogue of courage, not the real thing. Carol single-handedly convinced me–by example rather than argument–of the anachronism and error of Aristotle’s account. It seems to me that William James was right, by contrast, to suggest the need for conceiving of moral equivalents to war, and by implication moral equivalents to the virtues valorized by war.

The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.

Having known Carol since college days, I’d say that Carol has for fourteen years exemplified the “better substitute” that James was wondering about. I’m thankful for the privilege of knowing someone with her courage.

Happy Thanksgiving Day, about a week and a half early.

Postscript, December 16, 2014: The Wall Street Journal story about world poverty made it to The New York Times the other day, describing it as “excellent news,” but burying it on the eighth page of the Sunday Business section. “[T]here is agreement,” the Times says, “that extreme poverty has been on the decline since the mid-1990s and that the decline has accelerated since 2000.” It then asks the obvious question: “What’s behind the shift?” But its answer is utterly uninformative:

Rising incomes in India and China are a major factor. Together, those two countries lifted 232 million people out of extreme poverty from 2008 to 2011 alone, according to one World Bank analysis.

OK, but why did incomes rise in India and China? Surely there’s a story there that deserves more comprehensive treatment than it’s gotten. On the face of it, it seems to me that libertarians have a better story to tell here than left-leaning liberals do. Liberals and leftists either need to tell a better story, or concede that libertarians have this part of the story right, and find a way of accommodating libertarian insights coherently within their conception of the economic world.

The Princetonian and the Discourses: James Baker III on ISIS

Posted on November 15, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

One more post on ISIS-induced militarism, and I promise to let it go. For now.

James Baker III was the speaker at my college graduation. Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything he said that day. He also presided (with President George H.W. Bush) over the first Gulf War, which I do remember protesting as a college senior. The argument I made at the time was that a first unfinished war would lead, inevitably, to a second war, and ultimately, to perpetual warfare over Iraq. But the costs of a finished war–one that overthrew Saddam Hussein–were far too high. So no war was better than either one or many. (The argument wasn’t original to me; I got it from my friend Tom Palmer, who came to campus at my invitation in the fall of 1990 to make the case against the war.)

Here is Baker, interviewed in the most recent issue of Princeton University’s alumni magazine, Princeton Alumni Weekly. It’s a fairly typical performance of the non-descript/pragmatist/faceless bureaucrat variety. This time, however, I’ve decided to take some time out to pay attention to what he says–and what doesn’t get said.

It’s typical of Princeton Alumni Weekly that having managed to land an interview with yet another Big Name Princeton Statesman, they insist on throwing him softball questions carefully calibrated to avoid any and all fundamental issues that might induce discomfort. “The former secretary of state talks about fighting ISIS,” we’re told, “perhaps with Iran’s help.” Predictably, the question that goes unasked throughout the interview is: why must we Americans fight ISIS at all? Having granted the premise that we must, the remaining questions are only a matter of tweaking the details: how do we win on the cheap, by inducing other people to do our fighting for us? Even on this relatively narrow issue, Baker’s answers are illuminating: they reveal the mental processes of a bureaucrat completely indifferent to moral principles, whose basic concern is how to leave all options open in an essentially Machiavellian quest to promote the so-called “interests of the state.”

The fight against ISIS looks like another example of asymmetrical warfare. What would victory over ISIS look like?

President Obama defined it when he said that our goal is to degrade and destroy ISIS, but we’re going to have a really tough time. These people are smart, they’ve acquired a lot of resources, and they’re committed. They’re brutal, of course, but they’re good fighters. I do not think we are going to be able to degrade and destroy them with airstrikes alone. We’ll at least need to have special ops forces on the ground to guide the airstrikes and to help the Iraqi army, which so far has not proven to be of much use. So it’s going to be a long, hard slog.

Our goal is to degrade and destroy them. We’re going to have a tough time. Airstrikes alone won’t do the trick, and the Iraqis can’t do the trick, so we’ll at least need special ops forces on the ground.

A few observations about Baker’s rhetorical techniques:

(1) The repeated emphasis on we stresses to the reader that “we” are already invested in the fight. We can’t stop now: we got involved yesterday. To back out now would be cowardice. So full speed ahead.

(2) He makes clear that ground forces are needed, and that the existing non-American forces cannot do the job. Since we Americans are already involved, however, we appear to have no choice (or so he implies) but to put some “boots on the ground.” But don’t worry. These boots-on-the-ground will not involve ordinary soldiers of the sort who might be your next-door neighbor or co-worker. They’re “special ops forces.” The mystique of the phrase makes them sound like ninjas of some exotic variety. And they won’t be fighting. They’ll be “guiding” and “helping.”

(3) Having assuaged any fears about putting “boots on the ground,” Baker insists cleverly on leaving his options wide open. He doesn’t say that we’ll only need to send special ops forces. He says that we’ll “at least” need them. Of course, “at least” is perfectly compatible with needing more than special ops forces. How many more is dictated not by James Baker or Barack Obama but by reality. But since “we” are already involved in the fight against ISIS, “how many more” means as many more as “we” need to do the job. And how many is that? Well, that’s an “unknown unknown,” as one of Baker’s successors put it.

That’s why Baker (and Obama) can afford to let the issue of precisely what is needed go unspoken. We only need to “know” that we “need” to fight; we don’t need to know, and can’t know, what the fight will require of “us.” When reality eventually makes its ultimatum–send yet more troops or be defeated by ISIS–reality can be blamed in its typically unpredictable way for “making” us send more than we ever bargained for, leaving the politicians who got us involved immune to criticism. Since no one ever quite decided to get us involved, no one can be held responsible for the degree of our involvement in the fight, and reality can be counted on to draw us further and further in–as it did in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and…Iraq. When it does, the only entity amenable to blame when things go wrong will be reality itself, and the only plausible remedy will be the renewed application of yet more force. “Fortune,” as Machiavelli puts it, “is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force….” (The Prince, ch. 25). Or by guile. He forgot to add that you can also revile her if you fail.

So get ready for a “long, hard slog,” even though no one has explained why any Americans should have to do any of the slogging. And get ready for it, Mr. and Ms. Average American Citizen, even though the slogging is only going to be done by a few special ops “helpers” and “guides” who aren’t supposed to be getting their hands dirty in this all-Sunni cagefight anyway. Taken literally, none of it makes any sense. But you’re not supposed to take it literally. You’re supposed to assume that James Baker, the former secretary of state, knows what he’s talking about–and that you don’t. If people took the James Bakers of the world literally, after all, they wouldn’t be in power.

The next few questions essentially do Baker’s work for him, establishing that no other set of ground forces can do the requisite job, except for the United States and Iran. Does that mean we Americans should send troops over there?

Would the American public support sending our troops back into Iraq?

No, and I’m not suggesting that we do that. This really should be the Sunni Arabs’ fight, but the truth of the matter is that it is more and more a huge civil war between the Sunnis and the Shia. Sending in large numbers of American troops would be a mistake, and I don’t think the public would accept it. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say we’re going to destroy ISIS, but we’re only going to do it from the air.

Note once again the characteristically non-confrontational and irrelevant character of the question asked of Baker. Instead of asking him straightforwardly whether American troops should be sent, the interviewer decides to turn him into an armchair sociologist. By this expedient, the relevant issue becomes the popularity rather than than the justifiability of sending troops (a common and predictable diversion in any Machiavelli-infected culture). The answer to the interviewer’s question is really too obvious to merit a place in the interview: there is no popular support for another “troop surge” in the Middle East, whether in Iraq or anywhere else. (Of course, given the notorious passivity of the American people, it’s not as though there would be much push-back if troops were sent, whether to Iraq or to Syria, or anywhere else. Eyes would still be glued to Kim Kardashian’s butt, one way or the other.) Baker realizes that this question is too soft even for his tastes, so he seizes the opportunity to make clear that he doesn’t intend to advocate anything as unpopular as sending American “boys and girls” (his phrase) to fight over there.

What follows this supposedly clear assertion is a disingenuous set of contortions. The fight over ISIS is really “the Sunni Arabs’ fight,” we’re told. Whew! What a relief! But wait a minute: if it’s a Sunni Arab fight, how is that “we” are so invested in it? We’re not Sunni Arabs. The relief at hearing Baker tell us that it’s not our fight only lasts as long as the realization that while he thinks it would be a mistake to send in “large numbers of troops,” we have no idea what “large numbers” means to him, and whatever it means, it’s compatible with sending in medium-sized numbers of troops. (Though Baker is no longer in power, I’m discussing all this as though he were; he certainly speaks as though he still is, and I don’t think his Obama administration counterpart is all that different from him.)

Baker goes on to point out that we “can’t have it both ways.” (He says “you can’t have it both ways,” as though we were the ones guilty of it, not him.) In other words, we can’t insist that the goal is to “destroy” ISIS but then to choose means insufficient to the end. Very true. But if we haven’t yet figured out how to generate means sufficient to the end of destroying ISIS–and selecting the most obvious and efficacious set of means to the end “would be a mistake”–then why adopt the end at all? Why wander into a morass without knowing how we’re going to get through or out it? Can it really make sense to adopt the end of defeating someone in war, but not bothering with the question of how it’s to be done–especially when it’s not clear right now that the question even has an answer?

Coming the other way around, suppose that you do adopt the end. Having done so, suppose you reject the optimal means to the end, but hold out for the possibility of endorsing a second-best set of means just slightly different from the optimum. So you won’t send in “large numbers of troops” (whatever that means) you’ll just send a fair number (whatever that means). In that case, aren’t you just playing a game with your audience, in the hopes that they’re either not reading you very carefully or not paying close attention to what you’re saying? It almost sounds Machiavellian.

Baker’s argument involves one last move. He can preserve the consistency of everything he’s said if he introduces a non-American source of anti-ISIS troops whose presence is at least semantically consistent with a non-large American troop presence in Iraq and Syria. The interviewer lobs him just the question to make the point.

It is in Iran’s interest as well to defeat ISIS. Is there an opportunity to find some common ground with the Iranians?

If you accept that winning this war will require troops on the ground, that we don’t have any available, that Turkey is not willing to put troops in, and that the Gulf states don’t have that many troops to send, I’d much rather have Iranian troops in there fighting ISIS than I would American boys and girls. The Iranians helped us in Afghanistan in 2001, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that they could do it again.

If we did work with the Iranians against ISIS, it would have to be done very quietly, because we would lose our Sunni Arab allies and it would create a firestorm in Congress. But I would be surprised [if] we weren’t working in concert with Iran right now at some level. There’s not one country in the world that doesn’t have an interest in seeing ISIS destroyed, so I think this would be an ideal place to build a truly effective coalition.

Pause on that. It’s a work of art, at least if prevarication is an aesthetic genre.

First of all, if we are not sending troops to fight ISIS, in what sense would Iranian involvement be a case of finding “common ground” with them? In that case, they’d be doing the fighting, and we would not be doing it. That’s not a case of finding “common ground,” but of our free riding on their efforts.

Perhaps I’m overdoing the criticisms here, you say. So let’s suppose, ex hypothesi, that a free rider can seek common ground with the party on whom he’s free riding, at least if they both desire the same outcome. The problem is that in this case, aside from the narrow goal of defeating ISIS, the United States and Iran aren’t seeking the same outcome. Each nation wants to impose its own hegemony over the region, and that hegemony involves radically different interests and goals. (After all, would we cheer if Iran replaced ISIS by Hezbullah? Obviously, the Iranians would.) So it makes no sense to claim that we share common ground with them once one looks past the concern of the immediate moment.

While we’re on this subject: if we had common ground with the Iranians, it wouldn’t be problematic that they happen to be the unintended beneficiary of our having overthrown Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But it’s Baker who tells us elsewhere in the interview that the Iraq war led to a problematic augmentation of Iranian influence in the Gulf. How problematic could it be if we’re both on the same side?

For that matter, if the Iranians can be trusted to be our allies in the fight against ISIS, then why begrudge them the atomic bombs they appear to want to build? We don’t begrudge such things to the Israelis, the Pakistanis, or the Indians, after all. Recall that the fight against ISIS is motivated in part by fears about ISIS’s acquiring the remnants of Iraq’s WMD program. Are the Iranians to be trusted with that, but not with their own weapons program?

Second point: the Iranians “helped us in Afghanistan” in the sense of facilitating our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. (The Iranians were opposed to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and wanted us to do the work of defeating their natural Sunni enemies.) In that case, they were free riding on us. Does Baker really mean that because we allowed them to free ride on us, they’ll now decide that it’s time for a bit of reciprocation and therefore allow us, in turn, to free ride on them? I wouldn’t bank on it. Obviously, if they decide to fight in a “common” cause with us, they will want a quid pro quo that involves our putting some “skin in the game.” But that is just what Baker is at pains to (half) deny. I suspect that that’s why, amidst all of the rhetorical and semantic confusion Baker introduces, he makes sure to end the whole passage with the word “coalition.” “Large numbers of American troops” may not be “available,” but ultimately, we must remember that we are part of a “coalition.” So maybe fewer-than-a-large-number of American troops will have to become available, lest we lose our place in the “coalition.” If that’s not what “working” with the Iranians means, I’m almost afraid to find out what it does mean.

Finally, note Baker’s assumption that Iranian involvement all has to be done on “the down low”–very, very quietly. Shhh! It might even be happening right now! So let’s keep it a secret, shall we? It’ll be between you, me, and James Baker. Granted, this is the age of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks, where secrets have a tendency to get out, and yes, Mr Baker just let the secret of “our” Iranian operations out in the online version of Princeton Alumni Weekly. But hey, we’re gentlemen, aren’t we? What happens in Princeton Alumni Weekly stays in Princeton Alumni Weekly. If we’re very, very discreet, there’s still a chance that the Sunnis and Congress can be kept in the dark about our pro-Iranian tilt, just as they were kept in the dark about our pro-Iraq tilt back in the 1980s, or for that matter, our paradoxical pro-Iran tilt at the same time (cf. the Iran-contra scandal).

Perhaps we ought to give Machiavelli the last word here.

A prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist. If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them…[T]hose [princes] who have been best able to imitate the fox have succeeded best. But it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple and so read to obey present necessities, that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived. (Machiavelli, Prince, ch. 18).

All I can say is: they don’t call James Baker’s alma mater “Princeton” for nothing.

P.S., November 16, 2014: This morning’s New York Times Book Review contains a trio of must-read reviews of books on the aftermath and costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: John Nagl’s Knife Fights; Yochi Dreazen’s The Invisible Front; and Daniel Bolger’s Why We Lost. It makes for vital but depressing reading. If you aren’t depressed enough yet, feel free to read Gary Bass’s review of Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916-1931, which ends with this cheery thought:

When democratic hopes for a perpetual peace inevitably withered, the fascists and totalitarians seized their fatal chance. As World War I was drawing to a close in 1918, Wilson said he was “thinking now only of putting the United States into a position of strength and justice. I am now playing for 100 years hence.” With only a few years to go until then, we are still reckoning with the awful aftershocks of that era’s failures.

Postscript 2, December 10, 2014: Just in case you thought that a discussion of James Baker, secretary of state in a previous administration, was irrelevant to the machinations of the current secretary of state, consider this article in today’s Times. In the hard copy New York edition, the title is, “Kerry Argues Not to Ban Ground Troops in Fight Against Islamic Militants.” Verbal gymnastics don’t get better than this:

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry urged Congress on Tuesday not to preclude the use of ground forces to fight the Islamic State as lawmakers consider setting limits on the nature and extent of American involvement in the military campaign against the group.

Mr. Kerry made his request in testimony before an unusual session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He underscored that the administration was prepared to negotiate over a measure authorizing the use of force, but he made clear that the administration believes it needs greater flexibility than many lawmakers seemed ready to allow.

“The president has been crystal clear that his policy is that U.S. military forces will not be deployed to conduct ground combat operations against ISIL,” Mr. Kerry said, using an alternate name for the group. “It doesn’t mean that we should pre-emptively bind the hands of the commander in chief or our commanders in the field in responding to scenarios and contingencies that are impossible to foresee,” he added.

Got that? The president has been crystal clear that U.S. military forces will not be deployed to conduct ground combat operations against ISIS. And that’s why the president is demanding that you give him the flexibility to deploy U.S. military forces to conduct ground combat operations against ISIS. It would be unreasonable, after all, for anyone to “pre-emptively bind” the president by a solemn promise that he himself made.

How is it that holding the most powerful man in the world accountable for not starting a war he promised not to start ends up sounding like a collective imposition of BDSM on an unwilling captive?

Postscript 3, December 14, 2014: I just happened to notice this article, “Following the Rise and Fall of Machiavelli,” in the Travel section of last week’s New York Times. It’s an interesting article, and obviously, I have no objections to the idea of visiting Florence to take a look at the world he inhabited (or visiting Florence for any other reason). But why the need to valorize Machiavelli as a political thinker and whitewash the argument of The Prince?

But even as Machiavelli was creating his masterpiece, he had fears it would be misinterpreted, seen by the court as less a letter of forgiveness to the Medicis than a master plan for Machiavelli and other ambitious types to orchestrate their own takeovers. After “The Prince” was written in 1513, his fears were almost immediately realized, the treatise was quickly vilified, and Machiavelli labeled “an agent of the devil.”

Now, however, just before the 500th anniversary of the presentation of “The Prince” to the Medicis in Florence, theorists and political scientists not only believe that in parts it was indeed misread, but also that it, in fact, marks the starting point for modern politics, serving as a highly persuasive treatise on diplomacy and the behind-the-scenes maneuvering required to curry favor in an ever-changing political landscape. “One must be a fox in order to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves” — it was just this sort of pragmatic thought that has made him so important across the centuries. Leaders from John Adams to Bill Clinton have been influenced by Machiavelli, reciting from his work or studying his texts to put in context their own political times.

Amoral power worship is “the starting point for modern politics”? With handwaving views of that sort, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised or even much dismayed when our foxy leaders come to regard their own promises as traps, and make lying promises as a matter of routine, as illustrated by this article, “Senate Panel Approves Limited ISIS Fight, Reviving War Powers Debate.” President Obama’s erstwhile promise not to send ground troops has now become a debate over the tentative limits to be placed on the use of ground troops. Apparently, the debate over whether to send them ended before it began.

So this is what Machiavellian politics looks like in real life:

“We really don’t want to use ground troops,” said Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona. But, he added, to have that restriction written into law, “I think is not the right way to go.”

That is a view the administration shares. Secretary of State John Kerry testified before the committee on Tuesday that the president would fight any effort to preclude the use of ground forces because, he argued, there are simply too many unknowns.

We don’t want to use ground troops. That’s why restrictions on the use of ground troops are a bad idea. In other words, when you don’t want to do something, you insist on leaving all options on the table for doing it.

The President promised not to use ground troops. That’s why he’s fighting any effort to preclude using them. In other words, when you promise something, you make sure to facilitate breaking the promise.

The President has no idea what’s going on out there in Syria and Iraq. That’s why it’s crucial to send troops: you send troops when you have no idea what effect sending them will have, for what purpose, or with what scope. Amazingly, the article discusses the Senators’ refusal even to restrict the sending of ground troops to Iraq and Syria. Just in case you thought that Rumsfeldian epistemology was a thing of the past or restricted to members of the G.W. Bush Administration.

In other words, what we get from Machiavelli in modern politics are two essentially insane ideas that people nowadays would like to regard as the essence of “modern” wisdom: moral principles don’t apply to politics; consequently, there are no limits whatsoever on the use of force by the state.

In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant famously condemns the act of making a lying promise. According to Kant, once the lying promissor universalizes his maxim, he

sees at once that such a maxim could never hold as a universal law of nature and be consistent with itself, but necessarily be self-contradictory. For the universality of a law which says that anyone believing himself to be in difficulty could promise whatever he pleases with the intention of not keeping it would make promising itself and the end to be attained thereby quite impossible, inasmuch as no one would believe what was promised him but would merely laugh at all such utterances as being vain pretenses. (Ak. 422).

The problem is, I don’t hear laughter.

Analyze This: Thomas Friedman psychoanalyzes the Middle East

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I don’t think I can be accused of sympathies for Islamism (or Islam) any more than I can be accused of sympathy for communism (or Marxism). But there comes a point when “Western” criticism of Islamism becomes its own pathology, in the same way and for the same reasons that in the 1950s, McCarthyite anti-communism became its own pathology. Here’s a relatively mild but instructive example from a column by Thomas Friedman called “Freud and the Middle East.”

He starts reasonably enough:

When trying to make sense of the Middle East, one of the most important rules to keep in mind is this: What politicians here tell you in private is usually irrelevant. What matters most, and what explains their behavior more times than not, is what they say in public in their own language to their own people. As President Obama dispatches more U.S. advisers to help Iraqis defeat the Islamic State, or ISIS, it is vital that we listen carefully to what the key players are saying in public in their own language about each other and their own aspirations.

Of course, if this were true, it would help to be able to understand what they “say in public in their own language to their own people.” Friedman somehow claims to understand what they’re saying but shows no evidence of understanding the languages they speak. (He apparently has a passable knowledge of Arabic, but I don’t think he knows Turkish, and Turkish is the language at issue in much of this column.) Instead, he quotes throughout from a translation service. The service, MEMRI, has its own political agenda, and translates selectively from a relatively narrow range of items. That limitation doesn’t stop Friedman from giving his readers the idea that he has his thumb on the pulse of the region. His claim, rather sparsely supported, is that Sunni Muslims all–or, well, almost all–covertly desire to re-establish the ancient caliphate, and thus (almost) all harbor covert admiration for ISIS.

Here is what Friedman regards as evidence for his claim:

Well, at least Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in the modern world. No, wait, what is the name that Erdogan insists be put on the newest bridge he’s building across the Bosporus? Answer: the Yavuz Sultan Selim bridge. Selim I was the Sunni Turkish sultan who, in 1514, beat back the Persian Shiite empire of his day, called the Safavids. Turkey’s Alevi minority, a Shiite offshoot sect whose ancestors faced Selim’s wrath, have protested the name of the bridge.

They know it didn’t come out of a hat. According to Britannica, Selim I was the Ottoman sultan (1512-20) who extended the empire to Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, “and raised the Ottomans to leadership of the Muslim world.” He then turned eastward and took on the Safavid Shiite dynasty in Iran, which posed a “political and ideological threat” to the hegemony of Ottoman Sunni Islam. Selim was the first Turkish leader to claim to be both sultan of the Ottoman Empire and caliph of all Muslims.

Here in the States, we just finished celebrating Columbus Day. Christopher Columbus was surely a competitor with Selim I for imperial ambition and militaristic indifference to the Rights of Man. Now recall that Columbus made it to North American shores in 1492–a “crazy long time ago,” as one of my students put it to me. Does that mean that we aren’t part of the modern world, and that we still want to enslave indigenous peoples? After all, we haven’t just dedicated a mere bridge to Columbus, but a whole day to him. If not–and I assume not–why think that the Turks’ naming a bridge after an Ottoman sultan proves that they want to restore the caliphate?

Another cringe-making paragraph:

Vice President Joe Biden did not misspeak when he accused Turkey of facilitating the entry of ISIS fighters into Syria. Just as there is a little bit of West Bank “Jewish settler” in almost every Israeli, there is a little bit of the caliphate dream in almost every Sunni. Some Turkish analysts suspect Erdogan does not dream of building pluralistic democracy in Iraq and Syria, but rather a modern Sunni caliphate — not led by ISIS but by himself. Until then, he clearly prefers ISIS on his border than an independent Kurdistan.

I think I’d want better evidence of Turkey’s facilitating the entry of ISIS fighters into Syria than this. Biden, who has one major instance of intellectual dishonesty in his past, is also known for putting his foot in his mouth on occasion (or two, or…ten). On this particular occasion, he happens explicitly to have withdrawn the accusation against Turkey, so it’s mystifying how Friedman manages to exhume the comment from the dead and use it as Exhibit A of his thesis. One explanation for Biden’s withdrawal of the claim is that he really believes what he said, and was entirely justified in saying it, but simply fears the wrath of the Turkish president. Another explanation is that he spoke too hastily, lacked proper evidence, and realized that he’d embarrassed himself. I leave it to readers to decide between these two hypotheses. I only point out that Friedman neither provides the evidence to decide between them, nor bothers to inform his readers of the need to make a decision. Responsible journalism? No; in fact, it’s positively Oriental in its shadiness.

As for the next sentence in the passage, it’s a double-insult to those it accuses and a complete non-sequitur to boot. What on earth does Biden’s (withdrawn) accusation have to do with Friedman’s claims about non-Turkish Sunnis? And what conceivable evidence could support such a claim, whether about Sunnis, or about Israelis? How many Sunnis are there in the world, and what sample of them has Friedman met? How many of their languages does he speak? For that matter, how many Israelis has he met to justify the claim that they’re all settlers at heart? I’ve been covering inductive generalization with my critical thinking classes here at Felician, but these generalizations are too wild and preposterous even for use in a classroom exercise on fallacious reasoning. They’re the sort of thing I’d expect from an unhinged combox crusader at Jihad Watch, not from a veteran columnist at The New York Times. Under normal circumstances, we’d call generalizations of this kind “bigotry.” Under the present circumstances, one simply furrows one’s brow and wonders what the hell is going through Friedman’s mind.

What, finally, does the column have to do with Freud?

In sum, there are so many conflicting dreams and nightmares playing out among our Middle East allies in the war on ISIS that Freud would not have been able to keep them straight.

That’s it. Bring up “dreams” in one stray sentence in the course of a (very) half-assed column, and suddenly, you’re doing the psychodynamics of “the Middle East.” By this definition, I guess Osama bin Laden was a Freudian.

If you want to grasp the full meaning of the concept of “double standard,” turn from Friedman’s article to a report (first link just below) by the group AMCHA, purporting to document instances of anti-Semitism on American university campuses. The claim they make is that anyone sympathetic to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel is ipso facto an anti-Semite, ought to be branded as one by name, and ought to be treated accordingly. In fact, such academics, according to AMCHA, are to be blacklisted in full-dress McCarthyite fashion. Here is AMCHA’s idea of an operational definition of “anti-Semitism.” The AMCHA blacklist has recently been protested by a group of 40 professors of Jewish Studies, but it’s also gotten the support of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and others. It’s an unbelievable phenomenon, but really just the predictable result of about a decade-and-a-half of very aggressive lobbying by a certain right-wing brand of pro-Israel activist who would rather engage in libels and defamation than argument.

The lesson here seems to be that you can make unrestrained generalizations about the covert imperial ambitions of Arabs and Muslims based on absolutely nothing–and that you can engage in character-assassination of critics of Israel based on about as much. Further, you can do it in the serene and untroubled conviction that there’s nothing wrong with either thing. You just start here: Arabs and Muslims are irredentist fanatics, and accusations of anti-Semitism can be made of them (or those who support their causes) off the cuff; when it comes to character-assassination, precision is a very low priority. It’s easier to make an accusation than to defend oneself against one, after all. Make the accusation, and you’re half-way home: in a climate of opinion in which the presumption of innocence no longer applies, the damage has already been done.

What we’re witnessing, I think, is the derangement that arises from prolonged immersion in the rhetoric and psychodynamics of warfare. We’ve been at war for so long, and the activity has corrupted our minds so completely, that discourse on topics related to the Middle East now seems to have devolved into something genuinely psychopathological–into schizoid fantasy and hysteria. In other words, welcome to the place where civilization and its discontents merge into the psychopathology of everyday life. It’s going to take more than a few sessions on the couch to work this one out.

Postscript, November 13, 2014: Here’s more grist for the mill, so to speak: The New York Times reports this morning that “[m]embers of a Turkish nationalist youth group assaulted three visiting American sailors in Istanbul yesterday, hurling balloons filled with red paint at them, putting white sacks over their heads and calling them murderers.” Twelve of them were later arrested. Here is the Pentagon’s characteristically tone-deaf response to the event: “A Pentagon spokesman, Col. Steve Warren, was more blunt [than the American Embassy], saying that the assailants ‘appeared to be thugs on the street’ and were ‘a great discredit upon the Turks and the Turkish reputation for hospitality’.”

Honestly, where do they get these “spokesmen” from? That the attack was thuggish and wrong I don’t dispute. But is a single attack by a dozen thugs a “great discredit” upon the reputation of the people of a whole country? I wonder whether Col. Warren has any idea how many visiting foreigners are attacked and robbed when they visit the United States–to say nothing of how they’re treated by border control guards at our ports of entry and exit. Do individual crimes against foreign visitors reflect on my reputation, yours, Col. Warren’s, or that of the American people? How would they? The claim is patently ridiculous, and yet we pay “spokesmen” like Warren handsome sums to make claims like that. Is it any wonder that the stereotype of the “ugly American” persists?

Anything Goes: Further Studies in American Foreign Policy (Veterans Day Edition)

Posted on November 11, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Pausing to observe American foreign policy in the making is like pausing to observe a car wreck on the highway: there’s no point in doing it, but there are times when it really can’t be helped. It’s always just the same gruesome scene, but today is Veteran’s Day, so there’s no averting one’s eyes from the mechanism that creates the veterans we’re supposed to be “celebrating.” In honor of that day, today’s blog post will be an exercise in decoding the euphemisms of war-talk, and translating them into our wholesome native tongue.

The lead story in yesterday’s New York Times was, “Obstacles Limit Targets and Pace of Strikes on ISIS.” Three passages in it are particularly instructive. Here’s the first:

President Obama’s decision last week to double the number of American trainers and advisers in Iraq, to about 3,000, and request more than $5 billion from Congress for military operations against the Islamic State was viewed as clear acknowledgment of the challenges in fighting a limited war. They are especially acute when Washington’s allies on the ground in Iraq and Syria need far more training to battle a formidable adversary that offers little in the way of clear targeting.

In an interview broadcast Sunday, Mr. Obama said he had made his decision, announced Friday, in order to accelerate the mission by taking a set of fresh, if incremental, steps toward greater involvement.

“What it signals is a new phase,” the president said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“What we knew was that phase one was getting an Iraqi government that was inclusive and credible, and we now have done that,” he said. “And so now what we’ve done is rather than just try to halt ISIL’s momentum, we’re now in a position to start going on some offense. The airstrikes have been very effective in degrading ISIL’s capabilities and slowing the advance that they were making. Now what we need is ground troops, Iraqi ground troops, that can start pushing them back.”

Here’s the second:

“The airstrikes are buying us time. They aren’t going to solve the problem by themselves,” said Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff and a former top commander in Iraq. “It’s going to take people on the ground, ground forces.”

General Odierno said the priority was developing “indigenous forces” to retake territory from ISIS. “Over time, if that’s not working, then we’re going to have to reassess, and we’ll have to decide whether we think it’s worth putting other forces in there, to include U.S. forces,” he said.

And here’s the third:

Senior American commanders are preaching patience and warning against trying to replay previous air campaigns on the shifting battlefield of Iraq.

“Every air campaign is different and can’t be a reflection of a past one,” said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey G. Lofgren of the Air Force, the deputy commander of coalition air forces in the Middle East. “A lot of people would like us to drop hundreds of bombs and make the problem go away, but it’s not that kind of war.”

The first passage tells us that we have entered a war that can only be won by the use of ground troops. The two possibilities for the use of grounds troops are either Iraqi troops or American troops. Iraqi troops cannot win the war, but the passage tells us that while we are doubling the military advisers we send to Iraq, we will not be sending American troops there. If this sounds like a classic case of willing the end but not willing the means, maybe it does because that’s what it is.

The second passage, asserted by a subordinate of the president, tells us that in fact, we will have to send American troops, whether the president likes it or not. This claim has the merit of willing the end and willing the necessary and available means to it. It has the demerit of contradicting what the president just supposedly said. It remains unclear whether Odierno is defying the president, in collusion with the president, or simply hasn’t gotten his story straight. The bottom line, however, is that what he says about the insertion of U.S. troops contradicts the president’s assurances that they won’t be sent.

As we all know, anything follows from a contradiction. So what the conjunction of Obama’s and Odierno’s claims amount to is: anything goes.

The third passage, asserted by a subordinate of the president’s subordinate, tells us simultaneously that the war’s course is unpredictable, inscrutable, and discontinuous with past experience–and that it is a war of a knowable and determinate kind, a fact known by past experience of wars of that kind.

That’s a contradiction, too. So the third passage, like the conjunction of the first two, underscores the same message: anything goes.

When it comes to the conduct of our foreign policy, what I think we’re being told is that anything goes. Given that, this video strikes me as the only fitting response to the absurdities of our military leaders.

I’d like to think that we’re bound to answer when they propose.

On a more serious note, in honor of Veterans Day (or more precisely, of the veterans themselves) please consider making a donation to the Walter Reed Society, or some comparable organization. Huge numbers of veterans still need our help–and at this rate, indefinitely will.

Interstellar

Posted on November 9, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I saw “Interstellar” last night–somewhat pathetically, the third film I’ve managed to see in the theaters this calendar year. (The other two were “Omar” and “Atlas Shrugged 3.”) My advice: ignore the nay-saying critics and see it. I didn’t quite understand it, and haven’t quite digested it, but absolutely do not regret having seen the 10:30 pm showing, and staying until 1:20 am.

The two best reviews I read were A.O. Scott’s in The New York Times, and Dana Stevens’s in Slate. The film does have some flaws, however, and David Denby’s review in The New Yorker is a painless guide to them.

P.S., Before the feature presentation, I saw a preview for a forthcoming Ridley Scott film, “Exodus: Gods and Kings.” I’ll probably be there when it opens in December, but I’m kind of hoping we don’t get the ancient historical reprise of the other “Exodus” film. I have to admit that one of these days, I’d really like to see a film version of the Exodus story as depicted from the Canaanite perspective: “Promised Land: Invasion of the Yahwists.” Rated NC-17 for violence and potentially unsettling political implications.

Postscript 2, November 12, 2014. Here’s an interesting real-life postscript to the movie, the European Space Agency’s successful landing of its spaceship Rosetta/Philae on Comet 67P/Churuyomov-Gerasimenko.

Postscript 3, November 16, 2014 (HERE BE SPOILERS): The ending of “Interstellar” seems preposterous to those of unschooled in the relevant physics, but from what I’ve been reading, it’s basically on-target (not that I know). I saw a piece by Neil deGrasse Tyson that gave a scientific thumbs-up to the film, but I lost track of it, so here’s a piece from Time that seems to come to the same conclusions.

Postscript 4, November 20, 2014 (MORE SPOILERS!). The commentary on “Interstellar” keeps coming, and I keep reading it. Here’s an intelligent piece by Dennis Overbye, mostly focused on the science of the film.

By contrast, David Brooks, who focuses on the non-scientific elements of the film, is predictably vacuous, as he is on most subjects. Brooks is right that the film offers some insightful depictions of non-romantic love. But this gets things wildly wrong:

On top of that, there is an even more attenuated love. It’s the love humans have for their ancestors and the love they have for the unborn. In the movie, 12 apostles go out alone into space to look for habitable planets. They are sacrificing their lives so that canisters of frozen embryos can be born again in some place far away.

Nolan wants us to see the magnetic force of these attachments: The way attachments can exert a gravitational pull on people who are separated by vast distances or even by death. Their attention is riveted by the beloved. They hunger for reunion.

Actually, you could more plausibly argue that Nolan wants us to see the perversity of such attachments–attachments to potential beings that require the sacrifice of actual ones. Can we really love our distant and anonymous ancestors, much less love frozen embryos? The claim is simply preposterous, and ignores what the film is really about.

More Brooksoid blather:

Bloggers have noticed the religious symbols in the movie. There are those 12 apostles, and there’s a Noah’s ark. There is a fallen angel named Dr. Mann who turns satanic in an inverse Garden of Eden. The space project is named Lazarus. The heroine saves the world at age 33. There’s an infinitely greater and incorporeal intelligence offering merciful salvation.

But this isn’t an explicitly religious movie. “Interstellar” is important because amid all the culture wars between science and faith and science and the humanities, the movie illustrates the real symbiosis between these realms.

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Monthly Archives: November 2014