Increasingly, I’m running across the view that true opposition to the Charlie Hebdo attack, and true dedication to free speech, requires reprinting the Muhammad cartoons that got the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists (and others) killed. A corollary of this view is that if you don’t reprint them, the terrorists will win, and those who don’t reprint them are contributing to their “victory.” Here’s a crystal clear version of the view, from the combox of BHL (via Mark Friedman):
By murder, these terrorists are attempting to shrink the moral space available to everyone else. They are trying to place certain ideas off limits. There is only one effective way to reclaim this space, and it is not just to condemn and punish them, and to express our love and solidarity with the victims. No, the only way is to repeat and amplify the original message; in other words to republish on a wider scale the cartoons that mock and insult Muhammad. Every publication that claims to care about free expression should do this. Otherwise, whatever we do to these particular terrorists, they have won.
I don’t buy it. Here’s my response (I’ve rephrased one sentence, but retained the same basic meaning):
How does it expand moral space to demand that everyone either reprint the cartoons or be regarded as giving aid and comfort to terrorism? That sounds more like trapping everyone in a false dichotomy: it’s either your idiosyncratic preferences or else being regarded as a terrorist-sympathizer.
If I just happen not to like the Muhammad cartoons, but explicitly come out against the terrorists and in favor of free speech, your view implies that I have to reprint them against my own aesthetic judgments–or else I’m helping the terrorists win. As far as you’re concerned, no matter what someone says, no one can sincerely be in favor of free speech unless he or she reprints the cartoons. That demand doesn’t “expand” anything but the license to poison the well.
If someone shot Jeff Koons on religio-aesthetic grounds, would I be obliged to festoon my blog with his artwork? At that point, I’d hope that someone might shoot me, on grounds of mercy.
If a modern-day Julius Streicher came into existence, then got shot for publishing a modern-day version of Der Sturmer, would we all then have to reprint this?
I think pluralism implies that we get to choose our own way of defending free speech, as long as it’s a genuine and sincere way of doing so.
In that “genuine and sincere” spirit, I wanted to draw attention to a comment on my earlier post, by PoT’s own Derrick Abdul-Hakim:
The attack on Wednesday marked a threshold for me, a day signifying a point of no return. Wednesday’s attack had the hallmarks of a neatly scripted horror film. But it was no horror film. It was violence in real time. The attack wasn’t just an attack on a magazine or its sacrilegious protocols to defame and mock. It was a coldly calculated attack on liberty itself. Whatever happens next, going forward after Wednesday will require us to rethink some of our conclusions and come to terms with a few hard truths. By “us” I don’t mean those of us in North America, Europe, or Australia. I mean Muslims. I can’t speak for every Muslim, but I’m sure I’m not alone in my reflective mood.
Going forward we must bear some degree of accountability. I don’t mean we should collectively bear responsibility for what happened. No Muslim apart from the thugs who carried out the heinous act ought to take responsibility for it. However, at some point we have to admit there are those within our vast communities who believe it is morally acceptable to resort to tribal rage in the name of grievance, those who sanctify it, and those who are utterly complacent about it. We’ve used the grievance trump card for decades now. It’s time to man/woman up and place blame where blame is due. Non-Muslims now have grievances against us.
We also must come to terms with the reality that there are those within our midst who believe there is scriptural warrant for aggression. They’re not a fringe, microscopic minority. They exist in every corner of the Muslim world. Referencing statistics about how the majority of us are serene and law abiding is at best evasive. In addition to that we must also call out those who justify or advocate for violence, and call them out loudly and unequivocally. Sure, it’ll be a cosmic struggle, one that in some quarters will be taken as an act akin to treason. It’ll result in communal libel, slander, accusations of all sorts, etc. But we’re also aggressive promoters of local and global jihad (struggle). And if jihad is a virtue worthy of its honorific status then weaselling out of doing what’s right is no excuse. It’s time to put our money where our jihad-filled mouths are.
Lastly, we ought to cut ties with non-Muslim enablers who attempt exonerate the violent ones among us from accountability by placing blame on “external causes” or explanatorily epiphenomenal notions like “extremism”. The Nicholas Kristofs of the world who believe they can commentate on Muslim affairs without reference to agency do us more harm than good.
I doubt half of this will be met. Nonetheless, let my thoughts here serve as a piece of electronic evidence that there’s at least one Muslim who refuses to bury his head in the sand.
Jazak’allah. One of these days, we’ll have to hash out the “Allah” part of that, but for now, I’ll just stick with the jazak.
PS, a nice post on Charlie Hebdo, with illuminating historical perspective, by Tim Sandefur at Freespace (ht: Carrie-Ann Biondi).
I woke up yesterday morning, looked at the obituaries, and resolved that before the day was done, I had to say something about the passing of Martin Anderson, described in The New York Times’s obit merely as “a conservative economist who helped shape American economic policy in the 1980s as a top adviser to President Ronald Reagan.” According to the Times, Anderson “died on Saturday at his home in Portola Valley, Calif. He was 78.”
By day’s end, however, Martin Anderson’s peaceful death at 78 had come to seem like an irrelevancy, hijacked and displaced by the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris–a sick and sad replay of recent events in Peshawar and Ottawa, among other places. This video is eloquent testimony to the dignity of Paris–of France–in the wake of the attacks. (Nicholas Kristof properly points out–in an otherwise soporific column in this morning’s Times–that more people were killed in a suicide bombing in Yemen on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks as were killed in Paris. It’s an interesting question why “we” are more focused on Paris than on Yemen, but “we” are.)
The truth is, I never particularly liked the Muhammad cartoons for which Charlie Hebdo became famous, and for which its staff has now been targeted. I found them tasteless, pointless, unsubtle, and unfunny. But in the wake of the attacks, the slogan du jour—Je Suis Charlie–happens to be true. We have the right to be discursively tasteless, pointless, unsubtle, and unfunny. No one has the right to kill us, or even to lay a finger on us, for it. And we each have to fight, or at least struggle, for that right. Those of us who don’t fight the enemy directly, with weapons, at least have a responsibility to declare our opposition to that enemy, and in so doing to stand in solidarity with its victims–thereby making ourselves a target for its attacks.
In other words, we have to do from afar what the people of Paris have been doing in the streets of their city. We have to stand up–and stand out. That’s what flags are for. Ironically, the word jihad captures exactly the right nuances here, denoting a form of struggle that combines elements of violent fighting and non-violent struggle. What we need against the jihad of the fanatics is a counter-jihad of our own, one open both to Muslims and to non-Muslims–to anyone who stands to become a victim.
From the looks of it, the attackers in the Charlie Hebdo case appear to be “homegrown” French Muslims, members of France’s alienated underclass. In a strange way, then, the obituary for Charlie Hebdo bears an indirect connection to the one for Martin Anderson. The connection is supplied by the fact that both concern the causes of violence in an alienated underclass (where “causes” includes the agency of the attackers themselves).
Unfortunately, The Times’s obituary focuses on Anderson’s years in the Reagan Administration, making only cursory reference to his first book and masterpiece, The Federal Bulldozer (1964/1966).
An expert on welfare and relations between state and federal governments, Mr. Anderson published his first book, “The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1962,” in 1964. Years later he became a crucial architect of Reagan’s New Federalism — the handing over control of government programs to the states.
The passage conceals more than it reveals about the book. The first sentence seems to suggest that The Federal Bulldozer is fundamentally about welfare policy or state-federal relations. It isn’t. The second sentence suggests that The Federal Bulldozer provides the blueprint for Reagan’s New Federalism. It doesn’t. The author of the obituary seems randomly to have sandwiched an allusion to the book between random facts about Anderson that she felt obliged to cram into the obituary, whether or not doing so made for accurate or coherent reading.
In my view, The Federal Bulldozer deserves canonical status up there with Michael Harrington’s The Other America, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice, and Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. All five are must-read texts, especially for Americans: original, path-breaking, and interdisciplinary discussions of social issues that permanently affected the way we think about those issues.
The Federal Bulldozer is an unsparing critique of “urban renewal.” Whether you agree with Anderson’s conclusions or not, you can’t ignore the facts he puts on the table: he lays bare in exacting detail what happens when a government decides to “renew” a city by brute force, displacing its inhabitants and violating their rights in the name of “progress.” You don’t have to be a fan of the Reagan presidency to appreciate its claims; in fact, it helps not to be one. You just have to think that there are limits to what the state can do to “improve” the lives of its citizens, especially when “improve” is such a contentious idea, and the intended improvements “improve” some people’s prospects at the expense of others’. There’s a book waiting to be written about why it is that intelligent libertarians like Anderson have so often felt the need to make common cause with conservative Republicans like Nixon and Reagan, on the assumption that the Nixons and Reagans of the world are the closest approximations of liberty and justice to be found in American life. But until that book is written, feel free to ignore the Republican politics of Anderson’s later years to read what he had to say about urban renewal in The Federal Bulldozer.
Here’s a passage from Introduction to the Paperback Edition of the book:
The question that we should have asked in 1949, when the federal urban renewal program started, is long overdue now: Is it right to deliberately hurt people, to push around those who are least able to defend themselves, to spend billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money, so that some people might be able to enjoy a prettier city?
That answer is your own, and for those whose morals permit them to answer yes, there is another question: Has any city been ‘renewed’?
Here the answer is no. The federal urban renewal program has been, and continues to be, a thundering failure–with one important exception: it has exhibited an amazing talent for continued growth. (pp. vii-viii)
Here’s an excerpt from the book’s penultimate paragraph:
The personal costs of the program are difficult to evaluate. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forcibly evicted from their homes in the past and it will not be long before the number passes the million mark. The indications are that these people have not been helped in any significant way. Their incomes remain the same, they are still discriminated against, and their social characteristics remain essentially unchanged. …On balance, the federal urban renewal program has accomplished little in the past and it appears doubtful if it will accomplish much in the future. This raises a serious question: On what grounds does the federal government justify continuing and expanding the present program?
It is recommended that the federal urban renewal program be repealed now. (p. 230)
Three years after Anderson wrote that, race riots broke out across the country. According to the Kerner Commission’s report, urban renewal played a major role in producing those riots (though, for the record, the Kerner Commission ultimately came out in favor of an “expanded and reoriented” form of urban renewal):
Urban renewal projects, which were intended to clear slums and replace them with low-cost housing, in fact resulted in a reduction of 2,000 housing units [in northern New Jersey]. On one area, designated for urban renewal six years before, no work had been done, and it remained as blighted in 1967 as it had been in 1961. Ramshackle houses deteriorated, no repairs were made, yet people continued to inhabit them. “Planners make plans and then simply tell people what they are going to do,” Negroes [sic] complained in their growing opposition to such projects. (p. 70)
I don’t mean to imply that the depredations of urban renewal justify or even excuse rioting (whether in Newark in 1967 or Ferguson in 2014), much less that similar conditions in France excuse or justify the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. (For a good discussion of rioting, applicable both to 1967 and to 2014, see Jonathan Bean’s classic article, “Burn, Baby, Burn,” in The Independent Review.) I just mean to draw attention to a correlation: where you have the conditions that create a permanent or semi-permanent underclass, you can expect spectacular violence, even if the violence has its proximate causes in a lunatic ideology and/or the idiosyncratic psychoses of individual criminals and psychopaths. (And even if some of the attackers are rich.) If you gather such people into an army, they become the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or ISIS. If you concentrate them in certain underclass neighborhoods, and treat them badly enough for long enough, they become rioters. If you disperse them, they become the sort of terrorists we’ve seen in Peshawar, Ottawa, and Sydney. You can find people like that anywhere, even where the going is good (just think of school shootings in the U.S.). But you can practically be guaranteed to motivate them to act out if the going stays bad for long enough–as it has for decades in France.
I’m the last one to deny that Islam has a role to play in the explanation of Islamist terrorism. I think most educated people have by now been able to grasp that it does. But it’s worth remembering that even a paradigmatically Islamist coup like the 2007 Jamia Hafsa siege in Pakistan began, as so many such disputes do, with a clash over land: it began when the Capital Development Authority of Islamabad asserted the right to demolish mosques in the name of the Pakistani equivalent of urban renewal (thereby implying that the state owned the mosques and could demolish them at will). Islam is an idea, but we can’t understand the role an idea plays in the physical world unless we grasp how it relates back to the physical world.
That’s what our anti-Islamist ideologists have failed to do. They are instinctive Hegelians: as far as they’re concerned, the Idea of Islam enacts itself as world spirit and somehow induces Muslims to kill in the name of God. But which Muslims, and why them? The implicit answer seems to be an appeal to concomitant variation: more Islam means more violence; hence the more Muslim a person is, the more prone to violence he’ll be. But this explanation founders on an obvious fact: some Muslims are very devout, but disinclined to violence; others are very violent but disinclined to devotion. We can either accommodate this fact at face value (“the face value interpretation”), or re-interpret it so that the non-violently devout are less Muslim than the violently non-devout (“the revisionist interpretation”). There are plausible arguments to be made either way, but–at face value–I think the face value interpretation is more plausible than the revisionist.
The face value interpretation suggests the need to get our minds around the other part of the explanation for terrorism. Supposing that Islam has a role to play in the explanation of Islamist terrorism, why does it play that role for some Muslims but not for others? What is it that the differentiates the religious terrorist from the religiously devout non-terrorist? In the first case, my hypothesis is that religion serves to intensify a sense of alienation; in the second, religion serves to confirm a sense of belonging. The first leads to violence; the second does not.
That leaves us with a different set of questions, however. Why do some people fasten on the alienation-inducing elements of religion, and others focus on the elements that confirm a sense of belonging?
I don’t have a full answer to the question. Part of the answer, I’d speculate, is that in the nature of things, religion lacks the conceptual resources to differentiate successfully between the two elements, and all of the Abrahamic religions are a relatively seamless blend of both alienation- and solidarity-inducing elements (including elements that alienate believers from reality itself). Every religion requires some commitment to fideism, and fideism undercuts the conceptual resources you need to make the relevant distinction. As a lapsed Muslim, I can identify the features of Islam that still appeal to me (and many do), and reject the features that don’t (and many don’t). I’m free do that because I don’t regard any part of the faith as binding on me. But I couldn’t do that if the whole faith were binding on me. If it were, I’d have to find a way to accommodate every genuine element of the faith. And I don’t think that can be done in a way that allows for a clean distinction between alienation- and solidarity-inducing elements of Islam (or any Abrahamic religion).
The other part of the answer is that where you find a propensity to religiously-induced alienation, you invariably find state-driven socio-political dysfunction. State-driven socio-political dysfunction is dysfunction driven by coercion. It’s much easier to induce a sense of alienation in someone if you take from him–or people like him–his sense of control over his physical (or economic) environment. Unemployment will do it (I’m assuming that a significant aspect of unemployment is explained by state policy). So will some equivalent of urban renewal, or some form of over-regimentation or over-regulation (recall that the Arab Spring began as a response to over-regulation). Add a long history of state-sponsored coercion to the mix–whether in the form of Jim Crow or the colonization of Algeria and its aftermath–and you induce a stronger sense of alienation, especially, I think, if the state-sponsored coercion in some sense represents the democratic will of the dominant majority. Add widespread racism to the mix, and the toxicity increases.
So far I’ve focused on factors external to the persons in question.But those are far from exhaustive.Some people subjected to those conditions become criminals or terrorists, but some don’t. What distinguishes the two groups?
Here, it seems to me, one needs to appeal either to straightforwardly moral or psychiatric predicates–the predicates that, in my view, do the most explanatory work, even if they do so in the context of background factors of the sort I’ve been describing above. There is the sheer psycho-pathology of a certain kind of male who refuses to accept responsibility for his life, who egregiously fails to negotiate life’s relatively ordinary trials and tribulations, who lashes out at others for his own perceived (and often accurate) sense of inadequacy and failure, and who feels an abiding sense of humiliation and shame for his perceived (often accurate) sense of failure. There’s also the role played by a confused discourse in which one side offers caricatures and cartoons of its adversary, and the other side responds to those caricatures with a tribalized sense of grievance and resentment.
That may well be the tip of the iceberg, but “that,” it seems to me, is the set of beliefs and circumstances that unites rioters and terrorists, and serves as a partial explanation of their otherwise unintelligible violence. People feel the need to lash out when they feel out of control, and they feel out of control either when policies external to them rob them of control, and/or when they themselves act in ways that subvert their own autonomy, or when both things happen nearly simultaneously. The result is the need for a fantasy life that seems to restore a sense of control, and religion is the perfect source of the most violent fantasies as well as of the prospect of apparent control. (So are secular ideologies, including Marxism, libertarianism, and Objectivism–a topic for a different post.)
In short, a terrorist is a control freak who’s out of control. The most dangerous thing you can do is to laugh at a such a person, which is what Charlie Hebdo did. The result, as Charlie Hebdo themselves predicted, was mass murder.
Mr. Charbonnier, like the other Charlie Hebdo journalists, published under his pen name, Charb. His last published cartoon appeared in Wednesday’s issue, a haunting image of an armed and cross-eyed militant with the words, “Still no attacks in France,” and the retort: “Wait! We have until the end of January to offer our wishes.”
No one deserves to die for predicting his own death. There is no way to justify initiating force of any kind in response to a speech act that doesn’t itself initiate force. So there can be no justifying or rationalizing what happened yesterday in Paris.
But we owe it to ourselves to come up with a better way of conceptualizing Islamist violence than the one Charlie Hebdo offered. We can’t negotiate our way out of the quagmire by means of cartoons, caricatures, and derision. As Spinoza puts it, “I have taken great care not to deride, bewail, or execrate human actions, but to understand them” (Political Treatise, I.4). That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t deride, bewail, or execrate terrorism. It just means that understanding comes first. It also means that if we lack understanding, we have to seek it. And the truth is that a decade and a half after 9/11, we do lack it. But we still have time. And God knows, there’s no shortage of data to work with.
Postscript (added later). Here’s a thoughtful and insightful interview on Charlie Hebdo with Jacob Levy, of McGill (the link goes to a 3:08 minute interview at BBC’s The World). I’ve commented there on the inconsistencies and hypocrisies involved in French attitudes on free speech. I’m no expert on French politics, but I’ve discussed the politics of Islam in France in this longish essay in Reason Papers (esp. pp. 174-75 and 179-81).
PS 3, January 9, 2015: (apologies for the problems with paragraph spacing; this happens from time to time, but I don’t know how to fix it):
Events are taking place in France faster than I can keep up with them here. Meanwhile, David Brooks aptly reminds us that he’s not Charlie Hebdo, not that anyone would have thought that he was. One passage in his column particularly cries out for comment:
Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home. …
Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium.
Philosophers–at least contemporary philosophers in the analytic tradition–love thought-experiments. I have no in-principle objection to the use of well-constructed thought-experiments, but on the whole find them mis- and overused in contemporary philosophy. (For a good discussion of what’s wrong with a lot of thought-experiments, I’d recommend reading the first chapter of Kathleen Wilkes’s Real People: Personal Identity without Thought-Experiments.) In any case, there’s something to be said for thinking about ethics and politics from an “ecological,” “in vivo,” or “naturalistic” perspective. And thanks to the wonders of You Tube, that’s now a possibility.
In that spirit, here’s an 8 minute, 42 second video of a street scene–prima facie, a crime, or series of them–in Wadi an-Nasara, near Hebron in the West Bank. It was filmed as part of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem’s “Camera Project.” Most of the relevant action takes place in the first four minutes of the video. Take a look if you’ve got a few minutes to spare. I’m curious what viewers regard as the right inference to make from what happens in the video.
Here are some candidate inferences, but feel free to supply your own in the combox.
(1) There’s no way to make any morally significant inferences from a video like this, depicting a single out-of-context event. Any inferences would be arbitrary and pointless.
(2) The only morally significant inference to draw is that bad things happen everywhere, including in Hebron.
(3) Nothing of great moral significance happens in this video. Kids act like kids, adults act like kids, and then the cops show up and stand around a bit. Nobody is hurt. Not exactly a man-bites-dog story.
(4) The video is yet more proof that we need to abolish the state, and with it, the state-based institutions of the police and the military. Events like those depicted in the video are distinctive to states. Abolish the relevant states and things would have turned out differently. Private security providers would done better.
(5a) The video is yet more proof of the evils of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. End the occupation, and events like this will stop happening.
(5b) Claim (5a) doesn’t go far enough. It’s all true, but it needs to be conjoined with a determinate plan of action, like BDS.
(6a) The video is yet more proof of the need for a specifically Palestinian state. In a Palestinian state, the settler thugs would have been apprehended, rather than being allowed to drive away.
(7a) The video is yet more proof of the need for Israel to annex the West Bank and put the Palestinians in their place. The whole thing began when Palestinian youths threw stones at the settlers.
(7c) Claim (7b) is true but doesn’t go far enough. What the video shows is that Palestinians and Israelis need a single ethnically integrated security force under the rule of law in a single state where both Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights, and where those rights are enforced under institutions that actively encourage equality.
(8) The video is cause for despair. It shows that the two sides are mired in perpetual conflict, and that nothing can change that. Prepare for more, and prepare for worse.
On 4 Dec. 2014 two settlers were driving near Wadi a-Nasara checkpoint when a Palestinian youth threw stones at them. They got out of the car and attempted pursuit. Footage by a B’Tselem camera volunteer shows that when the pursuit proved unsuccessful, they vandalized nearby Palestinian property. Police and soldiers who arrived at the scene did not detain the two and allowed them to leave unhindered. This incident is part of the reality of live [life] in Hebron, with the military and the police standing by as settlers take the law into their own hands.
Happy 2015.As is probably obvious, I’ve taken a bit of a break from blogging for the past few weeks, but I’m back now, with blogging on the brain. I have yet to complete December’s series on the psychiatric medications symposium at Felician, so I’m hoping to do that over the next few weeks. I never quite finished last July’s envisioned series on “honking go at a dangerous intersection,” so hopefully I’ll get to that as well. I have plenty more to say about emergencies as I finish a paper on that, and about egoism and virtue ethics as I finish a paper on that. I’m in the midst of revamping three courses–Ethics, Aesthetics, and International Relations–so I’ll be road-testing some of that material here. And I’m supervising two senior theses this spring on closely related topics–Hobbesian egoism and BDSM–so I’ll be musing about that, too. But for now, just some odds and ends.
(1) Best argument against libertarianism. I think of myself as a kind of fellow-traveler of libertarianism, but I’m decidedly not a libertarian myself, whether of the left-libertarian or BHL variety, or of any other kind. Over at BHL, Kevin Vallier asks readers for what they regard as “the best argument against libertarianism,” listing two himself, and promising to offer five more in the future. I won’t reproduce it here, but argument (2) on his list is what he calls “non-moralized notions of coercion.”
Vallier’s argument (2) corresponds in a rough way to my own argument against libertarianism, but I’d put the point somewhat differently than he does. As I see it, moralized conceptions of freedom are the only defensible ones out there. Moralized conceptions of freedom, in turn, entail moralized conceptions of coercion. But moralized conceptions of both freedom and coercion are more complicated than libertarians (or Objectivists) seem to realize. They’re more complicated to explicate, more complicated to justify, and have more messy and complex practical implications than polemical advocates of “the free market” seem to grasp. They don’t lead in any straightforward way (or in some cases lead at all) to the policy implications favored by free market think-tanks like, say, the Cato Institute. More fundamentally, I think they lead to a different set of normative priorities than those that occupy the thinking of most libertarians. But unpacking the preceding set of thoughts is a complex task for another day.
Anyway, here’s my contribution to the BHL discussion (the linked article is behind the paywall of Cambridge Journals Online):
The best argument against libertarianism is (2), and the best version of (2) that I’ve seen is David Kelley’s “Life, Liberty, and Property,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol 1 (1984). I think it’s a shame that Kelley’s article has only been cited 14 times in more than three decades. It ought to be much more widely known and discussed. It deals with the views of Nozick, Mack, and Steiner, and in doing so, anticipates many ideas now associated with BHL, decades before BHL came into existence.
Kelley’s argument is too complex to summarize here; I’ll just say that I highly recommend the article. As I write, the discussion at BHL has gotten up to 168 comments, but as usual with BHL’s combox, much of the commentary consists of pointless thread-hijackings. I’d be interested to hear what PoT readers think, whether about Vallier’s question, Kelley’s arguments, or anything related.
first five dual-language volumes will be released next week, [and] will include not only Sanskrit texts but also works in Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Prakrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and other languages. Projected to reach some 500 books over the next century, the series is to encompass poetry and prose, history and philosophy, Buddhist and Muslim texts as well as Hindu ones, and familiar works alongside those that have been all but unavailable to nonspecialists.
The Murty will offer “something the world had never seen before, and something that India had never seen before: a series of reliable, accessible, accurate and beautiful books that really open up India’s precolonial past,” said Sheldon Pollock, a professor of South Asian studies at Columbia University and the library’s general editor.
That may not mean much to most people, but I personally find it difficult to contain my elation at the news. My own desire for the consumption of Urdu literature far outstrips my capacity to read it, to say nothing of my desire to read, say, Persian, Hindi, or Sanskrit literature. I suspect that there are many other people in my position, whether of South Asian background or otherwise. Happily, I suspect that many more people will now come to find themselves in that position, and will have the Murty Classical Library to “blame” for it.
The creation of the Murty library has in effect opened up a new world for many of us, and in reflecting on that fact, I couldn’t help comparing it favorably with the preposterous techno-fantasies valorized by people like Elon Musk, of colonizing new worlds on other planets, like Mars. The truth is that we have yet to discover the riches of the world we currently inhabit: in that respect, it’s telling that the Murty initiative is being conceived as a century-long project; it’ll take a century just to translate and digitize India’s literature (if “digitization” remains the relevant term for whatever technology exists in 2115). Who knows how long it will take to absorb and understand it? (Incidentally, it’s also telling that the Indian government was willing to spend $74 million to send a spaceship to Mars but couldn’t spare $5 million to digitize and publish the riches of its own national literature.) The series has been endowed by Rohan Murty, “son of the Indian technology billionaire N.R. Narayana Murthy.” Love it or hate it, I think one has to chalk this particular success up to capitalism and the institution of inheritance. There’s also a strange but delicious irony in the fact that we owe the existence of this series to the civilization that gave us Macaulay’s Minute.
(3) From Walden to Wild. Kate Herrick and I happened to see the film “Wild” on New Year’s Day, which I highly recommend to all and sundry. The film is based on the recent book of the same name by Cheryl Strayed, and Kate (who’s reading the book) tells me that the film is essentially faithful to it.
Three interrelated thoughts occurred to me while watching it. One was that the profundity of the film was of a sort that one rarely–if ever–finds in the professional academic literature on moral philosophy. The second was that I couldn’t help thinking that the film was, in a weird way, a twenty-first century version of Thoreau’s Walden. And the third was how unlike the professional philosophical literature Walden is.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. …To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worth of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Talk about New Year’s Resolutions. That’s from “Where I Lived, What I Lived For” in Walden. I don’t mean this as an accusation, only as a musing: in reading Thoreau today for the first time in years, I found myself wondering why it is that the professional literature spends so much more energy discussing Hume’s worry that the sun may not come up tomorrow, than on Thoreau’s insistence that it will.
(4) Rock or Bust. Despite my animosity for Ambien, I wouldn’t go as far as Thoreau. As denizens of the twenty-first century, we all know that we can no longer do without mechanical aids, whether to keep ourselves awake or put ourselves to sleep. If you need a mechanical aid of the first variety, my suggestion is to go out and get AC/DC’s new album, “Rock or Bust.” In my opinion, it’s a worthy successor to “Back In Black,” and a fitting capstone to their illustrious career.
In three decades of listening to, playing, and having arguments about them, I’ve heard all the “sophisticated” sub-musicological criticisms of AC/DC: “it all sounds the same”; every song is in the key of A major; every riff is based on “A,” “D,” and “G”; every solo is a variation on the A major pentatonic scale; the bass guitar just pumps out a steady stream of eighth notes (mostly A’s); the drumming sounds like a drum machine hooked up to a metronome set at 120; the vocals are indistinguishable from screaming; the lyrics are juvenile. But all those criticisms just raise the obvious question: how can something so (putatively) stupid sound so fucking good? I don’t know. I just know that it does.
Anyway, welcome to 2015, everyone. Turn the amps up high. Rock or bust.
I’m off to New England for the next week or so, with uncertain Internet access, so PoT will be on a sort of hiatus: I probably won’t be blogging until January, but my co-bloggers have free rein to blog away in my absence. As for comments: If you’ve already posted a comment at PoT, you can comment at will, but if you haven’t posted here yet, it may be up to a week before I manage to see and approve your comment.
Even an old non-believer like me has to admit that we owe Christianity a debt for the music it’s given us. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t quite true that the Devil has the best tunes: between God and the Devil, it’s actually a pretty close competition. Anyway, it’s customary to associate Christmas with Handel’s Messiah (which I love), but in the spirit of ecumenism for which PoT is known, I thought I’d leave you-all with something different: Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” a tune that manages to capture the spirit of the Christmas holiday but does so while appealing to Christian, Muslim, and secular listeners (based on close scrutiny of the lyrics). I owe my appreciation of it to Sister Maria Magdalena Vallellanes at Felician College, whose version of it invariably made me cry on the rare occasions when I attended (i.e., was forced to attend) mass. (Just to be clear: I mean, of course, that the beauty of Sister’s rendition of the song made me cry.)
There’s an intriguing exchange at the Boston Review Forum on the use and justification (or lack thereof) of empathy. The spar is between psychologist Paul Bloom and a host of star-studded critics (among them Jesse Prinz, Simon Baron Cohen, Peter Singer and Sam Harris). I have a personal interest in this topic as I work with prisoners, and much of the work I do with them involves empathy based support. I don’t have time to delve into merits and demerits of what Bloom says, but what he does say is worth thinking about even if what he says is puzzling or just plain false. Case in point:
Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data.
The takeaway line seems to be we’re all thoroughly biased in favour of looks, height, hair length/colour, ethno-tribal/national similarity, etc., thus too incapacitated for genuine empathy. And when we are genuinely empathetic we’re too focused on individuals as opposed to collectives or masses.
I’m lost on what all this is supposed to prove, assuming it proves anything apart from Bloom’s prior convictions. Assume we (Bloom as well?) are prone to feel empathy for attractive people, and equally assume we’re just as likely to feel empathy for those who share our ethnic or national background as we are for those who are attractive. What does that say about empathy as such? How do our inclinations towards “attractive” people underscore the biased or unbiased nature of empathy? Whatever the aetiology of our inclinations, they in themselves say nothing about empathy. Thus Bloom’s point is not only overblown but a blatant non sequitur.
As for empathy’s specificity, I’d like to know what Bloom has in mind for broad empathy, focused on groups or collectives or masses and what it would look like. Empathy only works on persons. And, without begging any essential questions, groups qua groups, collectives, and masses aren’t persons.
I highly recommend reading this blog post by James Stacey Taylor at BHL on local government. I couldn’t agree more with Taylor’s central claim–that local government matters, and that anyone interested in politics should spend some time observing or participating in it. But I think I disagree with the specifically libertarian inference Taylor draws from the experience he describes with the Hopewell, New Jersey Planning Board. (I spent a decade living in the same general vicinity as Taylor, and like him, used to teach at The College of New Jersey. So I have a first-hand sense of the issue he’s describing.)
Taylor seems to infer from his experience that we ought to have less local government rather than more. I agree that when it comes to Planning Boards, we ought to limit their powers. I also agree that local government ought to be more evidence-based and transparent. But I don’t think the general lesson–less government–is the right one.
For one thing, I don’t think Taylor’s experience is really unique to local government. You find the same sort of behavior everywhere, including in the “organic, voluntary” activity he favors. Just imagine that the patch of land he describes was handed over to private developers without the intermediate step of having to pass through the Planning Board. Is there any reason to believe that developers wouldn’t have wanted to create a mini-city in the middle of what is now an open field? If there’s money to be made, they’d do it, and as for unintended consequences, if they could shift the costs to someone else, they’d ignore them and insist on the privacy of their non-existent data.
You might say, “They shouldn’t be allowed to shift the costs to someone else.” Correct. But that requires extensive government enforcement of laws that demand the internalization of externalities. Put it this way: would Taylor advocate the outright abolition of local Planning Boards? Having spent a fair bit of time observing them (in New Jersey), I would say “no.” They need to be put in their place, not abolished.
Second, I wonder whether Taylor would agree that in many cases, the unregulated parts of our lives could use more regulation. Regional differences may be at work here. Taylor lives in west-central New Jersey. I live in northeastern New Jersey. Patterns of life are quite different in the two places. But consider aspects of life that a northeastern Jerseyite would want regulated more tightly by government.
My first pick is traffic. I’ll just assert the proposition: we need more, and stricter, enforcement of traffic laws. We need to force people to slow down, to get off their cell phones while driving, to yield at yield signs, to stop at stop signs (or lights), to use their turn signals before they turn, to pay tolls, and not to honk their horns for purely expressive reasons.
Second pick: noise ordinances. Most towns have noise ordinances on the books, but many towns treat their noise ordinance as though enforcement of it were a frill or luxury. I see violation of a noise ordinance as a rights-violation fully on par with battery. Just imagine living next to a construction site and being woken up every damn morning by construction activity that’s begun before it’s legally permitted to begin (or that continues well into the night). Or imagine living next to a golf course where the landscapers habitually start work–with mowers and blowers–at 4:45 am, three hours before it’s legally allowed. You call the police and they act as though they have better things to do than enforce the law. My inference: we need more government.
Incidentally, it’s an interesting thing how one is to enforce noise-related violations within a private contract. Right now, my upstairs neighbors are making enough noise to wake the dead. That violates the lease agreement we’ve all signed with the landlord, which involves a promise to one another to keep the noise down. But how do I get that “legally enforceable” promise legally enforced? I could go to the landlord. He’ll ignore me. I don’t have standing to take my neighbors to landlord-tenant court. I’m not a landlord. But the lease’s being violated is a clear-cut rights violation. It’s a breach of contract. What’s happens to rights violations like this? The answer is that in the name of less intrusive government, they go unenforced. But the result is a diminution in some people’s quality of life. (Lovers of quiet are, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, America’s most persecuted minority.)
Third, idiosyncratic example: parking. For most of my adult life, I’ve lived in apartments where parking was tight. In one case, I rented a garage on the rental property so as to guarantee having a spot. In other cases, there was assigned parking. What do you do if someone parks his car in front of your garage (ignoring the NO PARKING sign as though it wasn’t there), or parks in your assigned spot (and you’re not willing to park in someone else’s)? If you complain to your landlord, you’ll be told, reasonably enough, to call the police. But if you call the police, the bizarre answer you will get in New Jersey is: “Sorry, we can’t do anything about it. You’re on private property.”
Pause on the absurdity of that answer. If someone were breaking in to your apartment, and you called 911, it would make no sense for the police to say, “Sorry, we can’t do anything about it. The break-in is taking place on private property.” But I’ve repeatedly had the “sorry, can’t help you” experience when I’ve called the police re parking. As it happens, the police’s “sorry, can’t help you” response involves a misstatement of state law (I’ll spare you the details*), but the fact remains that as written, state law is simply too weak on this issue. It puts too much of the onus on the victim of the rights violation to rectify the situation and not enough on the person who’s blocking one’s garage or parked in one’s assigned spot. Again, my inference: we need more, activist government in the name of rights enforcement.
I would defy any anarcho-capitalist to produce the non-governmental version of the resolution of disputes of the preceding variety. I had the opportunity to see what such attempts at “resolution” might look like when I spent time in the West Bank city of Bethany, which effectively lacks a government. (Officially, it is in Area B under the Oslo Accords, under joint Israel-Palestinian control. But de facto, it lacks a government.) Bethany is practically a controlled science experiment in anarchy. Suffice it to say that things really didn’t turn out the way anarcho-capitalists claim they will. Bethany is a case of “the Wild West” in the Near East–or maybe the Wild West in the Wild West Bank. (Incidentally, I don’t mean to be saddling Taylor with anarcho-capitalism. I have no idea what his views are on that. I just mean to be saddling anarcho-capitalists with Bethany. And yes, it’s that Bethany, the one where Jesus was buried. Burying him was one of the things that the Romans “did for us,” by the way. I’m not sure Jesus would have been buried under anarcho-capitalism.**)
Give me long enough, and I could extend this list pretty much indefinitely.
Anyway, I’m grateful to Taylor for a thoughtful post which broaches some interesting and important issues.
*Postscript, added later: The link in the text goes to the section of New Jersey’s state code governing private property and non-consensual towing. But here is the written response I got from the local Police Department after complaining about their refusal to tow vehicles that were blocking my egress from my garage.
The area of the garages at [name of apartment complex] are private property. The owners of the property basically give authority to building management to maintain the lands. If management feels a vehicle is parked on their property (that does not belong or parked improperly) [they] will call the Police. The Police will issue a summons (management will be called to court as a witness/complainant). The Police cannot tow the vehicle, because it is on private property. Management actually calls for the tow truck. The main road of the complex is considered quasi-public. In this area, the Police can summons and tow.
It’s worth wondering how any of this convoluted legal analysis is supposed to help someone whose garage is blocked but needs to get the car out of it to go to work. I ended up taking a taxi to and from work at a cost of over $100. That happened several times before I made my complaint to the police. In fairness to my local PD, they’ve been pretty responsive about other things, including my insistence that they paint a stop line at an ambiguous intersection so that it was crystal-clear where to stop. From an email to me from the local police chief: “Stop line placed on Watchung roadway. —Chief Goul.” Thanks, Chief.
**Postscript, added later: On second thought, the last two sentences before the asterisk are ridiculous assertions which I’ll leave in the text but now disown. Tradition has it that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimethea, who wasn’t in any relevant sense a Roman. I only wrote what I wrote as an excuse to throw Monty Python into the mix, but it’s totally inaccurate and potentially offensive–to Christians, anarcho-capitalists, and above all Christian anarcho-capitalists–so I hereby repent and take it back. I concede: Jesus might well have been buried (and for that matter, crucified) under anarcho-capitalism.
Apologies, but I’ve been too distracted by the Peshawar attacks and by grading to write the posts I promised to write on the psychiatric medications symposium. I promise to get to that soon. (I have a lamentable tendency to promise multi-part posts and not deliver on them, but I’m making it a New Year’s resolution to do otherwise.) Meanwhile, Peshawar it is.
There’s been some good commentary on Peshawar, much—though not all–of it by Pakistanis. I linked to some of this commentary in a previous post. Here’s some more–a lot more.
Here’s a good symposium in The New York Times—C. Christine Fair, Ahsan Butt, Musharraf Zaidi, and Pir Zubair Shah. The discussion, however, is misdescribed by the Times as a “debate.” In fact, the four contributors mostly agree with one another; no one says anything particularly controversial or new. It’s still worth reading, however, since much of what they say is true. Irfan Husain makes similar points at Dawn (Karachi) in “The Poison Within.” But the best single piece of analysis I’ve seen is this short piece in The Friday Times (Lahore) by Najam Sethi, “Deja Vu?” If you read just one thing about Peshawar, read that.
Nadeem Paracha’s brand of humor is probably an acquired taste, but I found his “Anatomy of an Apologist” (in Dawn) both grimly accurate and screamingly funny.
A few things I’ve read strike me as worth reading on diagnostic grounds for the muddled thinking they involve. This well-meaning piece by Imtiaz Gul (Friday Times) is a perfect example. Much of what Gul says is perfectly sensible, but I had to shake my head at this passage:
A Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) revenge strike was expected since the army launched the Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan on June 15. As the army focused increasingly on Waziristan and the Khyber region and exuded triumphant confidence, the TTP carried out the lethal attack last month at the India-Pakistan border, killing at least 60 people watching a flag-lowering ceremony. The month of Muharram passed relatively peacefully, prompting many of us to empirically conclude that the graph of violent acts had come down considerably.
But as it turned out with the Peshawar mayhem, the TTP, though badly bruised by the combination of the Operation Zarb-e-Azb and the CIA-led drone campaign which saw about a dozen strikes between mid June and early this month, had something else up its sleeves.
What Gul describes as an “empirical conclusion” is actually a blatant non-sequitur. The army launches an anti-Taliban operation; the Taliban strike back in November. A month passes, and Gul thinks: “Well, that’s that! They won’t attack again!” Then they attack again, and he concludes: “If the events of the last weeks were an indication the Peshawar attack was in the making ever since.” So which is it—did he expect them to attack, or did their attack come as a surprise after what he thought was a downward trend in attacks by them? Gul’s simultaneous presence on both sides of that question strikes me as representative of a deeply-rooted confusion in the Pakistani intelligentsia—caught between commonsense and wishful thinking.
For an even deeper muddle, I’d suggesting reading “Pakistan’s New Warriors Against the Taliban” and “Peshawar School Attack Indicts Pakistan’s Misplaced Priorities,” by Rafia Zakaria in Al Jazeera America. I have a lot of respect for Zakaria’s intellect and for her activism on other issues, but here her claims really border on the preposterous. The “new warriors against the Taliban” turn out to be Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri–names that will be meaningless to non-Pakistani readers, but will strike many (most?) Pakistan-knowledgeable readers as an inadvertent joke rather than a serious suggestion. (See below for discussion of Imran Khan.)
The second article of Zakaria’s articles claims, offhandedly, that the Peshwar attack proves that military options won’t work against the Taliban; hence we should dispense with them. That claim is a textbook case of ignoratio elenchi: a single successful attack by the Taliban cannot prove that military options against the Taliban are a failure; after all, the failure to use military options against the Taliban might lead to even more successful attacks by the Taliban. As Zakaria herself concedes, no policy is foolproof, so it makes no sense to seize on a single event as conclusive evidence of the failure of a policy. In saying that drone attacks “have done little to diminish the Taliban’s capacity to carry out such operations,” she flouts both common sense and systematic empirical evidence to the contrary. There is no conclusive evidence either way, but the existing evidence suggests that drone strikes are the best of the available options. I can’t really do justice to Zakaria’s argument as a whole right now, but some of what I say in the combox of my last post (in response to Matt Faherty et al) is relevant to Zakaria’s arguments as well.
Some Pakistanis have refused to condemn the attacks altogether. Notable among them is Zakaria’s hero Imran Khan, who is misdescribed as “condemning” the attacks in this statement (You Tube video, in Urdu). What he says in the statement is little more than a well-crafted contribution to the art of prevarication. He offers his condolences to the bereaved, tells us that he has postponed his own political activities for later in deference to the collective need for mourning, tells us that he’s on his way to Peshawar to seek more “details” before saying anything substantive, and then offers a very vague criticism of “whoever” might have committed this dastardly deed (“jis nay yeh kiyah“). As everyone by now knows, the Pakistani Taliban have taken responsibility for the shooting: though Khan speaks of the nation standing together in unity, what “everyone” knows seems to exclude Khan himself. I am not sure how Rafia Zakaria’s proposed “warrior against the Taliban” can deserve the description she gives him if he can’t even manage to condemn the Taliban for having engaged in a massacre of 130-odd children (not the Taliban’s first massacre, by the way, and not their last: just another massacre that “Taliban Khan” has failed to ascribe to the Taliban and failed to condemn under that description, while insisting on negotiations with them and ignoring the past history of failed negotiations with them).
Another Taliban-apologetic-seeming figure is Maulana Abdul Aziz, the imam of the notorious Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) in Islamabad who, when asked to condemn the attacks on a television talk show, refused to do so. Here’s the video (in Urdu). (Note: I had some technical difficulties in watching it all the way through. It breaks up a lot.)
Like Imran Khan, Maulana Abdul Aziz mostly engages in uncontroversial offerings of condolences, then changes the subject to the sins of Pervez Musharraf, then finally admits that the massacre “shouldn’t have” happened. There’s no disputing that it shouldn’t have happened, but saying that neither answers the question he was asked nor amounts to an authentic condemnation of the act. I admire the acuity and persistence of the show’s hostess, Nadia Mirza, who three times asks Abdul Aziz exactly the right question to ask under the circumstances: Does Maulana Abdul Aziz sahib intend, morally speaking, to equate the military’s campaign against the Taliban with the Taliban’s campaign against Pakistan? There’s nothing more clarifying than an answer–or a non-answer–to the right question asked in the right way. What we get here is a non-answer which licenses the inference that Abdul Aziz’s implicit answer is at least a yes: he at least equates the two things and may well regard the Taliban’s campaign as more justified than the government’s. Incidentally, Maulana Abdul Aziz can be very adamant about giving and demanding straight answers when it suits him to do so. (The preceding link goes to a You Tube debate in Urdu.) So we shouldn’t assume that he’s habitually too wordy to get to the point on the massacre.
There has been a popular uprising of sorts against Maulana Abdul Aziz and against the Lal Masjid as an institution. As an imam, Maulana Abdul Aziz is on the government’s payroll, and ordinary Pakistanis justifiably want him off of it. I agree with that, but I have to say that I find some aspects of the anti-Lal Masjid backlash a problematic and ill-conceived misplacement of priorities. It’s true that the “clerisy” has apologized for the Taliban and for terrorism. That’s evil, but it can’t legitimately (or efficaciously) be fought by anti-hate speech regulation, which is what many activists are now calling for. Pakistan needs more free speech, not less. Unless they’re making specific threats, the immorality of the “clerisy” ought to be brought into the open, and exposed to the light of day–not suppressed, repressed, and driven underground. Mill’s argument in chapter 2 of “On Liberty” is pertinent here. I wonder if anyone has ever translated it into Urdu.
Actually, what needs exposure and discussion is the connection between mosque and state in Pakistan, not a campaign of retaliatory anti-blasphemy laws, whether religious or secular. (Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration is pertinent here. Urdu translation, anyone?) A suggestion for inquiry: think about how Pakistan resembles Israel, and look at the trouble that Israelis have brought on themselves by insisting on the Jewish character of “the Jewish state.” Another suggestion for inquiry: think about the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and how such an amendment might work for or fit into Pakistan’s constitution. It might not, but it’s more worth discussing than the viability of anti-hate-speech legislation targeting the mullahs.
For deeper analysis, I’d recommend reading the work of Ahmed Rashid. You probably couldn’t go wrong by hanging on every word Rashid writes about Pakistan, but I’ve found his recent work for the New York Review of Books and the Financial Times particularly enlightening. It’s all good stuff, but I’d particularly recommend “Pakistan Must Unleash the Military Against the Militants,” “Pakistan’s Offensive Against Militants Is Right,” “A Different Pakistan,” and “The Motives Behind the Taliban’s Brutal Attack” (all accessed via the preceding link). Much of this functions as a riposte to those, like Rafia Zakaria, who think that the Taliban can somehow be handled by non-military means.
I disagree with Rashid, however, that the military means in question should be American. Rashid’s long to-do lists for the American government-in-South-and-Central-Asia are an unwitting description of the mechanics of imperialism. As I’ve suggested elsewhere (in response to another enthusiastic partisan of imperialistic to-do lists), it’s time for the U.S. to ratchet back its imperial involvement abroad, and at a minimum, to get the hell out of South-Central Asia–as our good president promised us when we elected him back in 2008.
Though he’s not nearly as well known as Rashid, my friend Khalil Ahmad of the libertarian Alternative Solutions Institute in Lahore has a similar take in this piece, “Hopeless in Pakistan,” sans Rashid’s problematic neo-imperialist prescriptions for the United States.
Meanwhile, it’s time for Afghans and Pakistanis to take ownership of their own war against the Taliban (possibly with the help of Indians), and time for us Americans to patch together our own country–a country whose health care system is a disaster, whose criminal justice system now regularly leads to riots, whose higher education system is a bit of a shambles, which hasn’t managed to come to terms with illegal immigration, and which faces a cybersecurity threat not from the Taliban but from North Korea. In other words, it’s time to put the specter of 9/11 behind us and move on to resolving the actual problems we face. There’s no contradiction involved in saying that, and in wanting the government of Pakistan to prevail in battle over the Taliban.
To bring things back to the present, read these two pieces in this morning’s New York Times, “Pakistan’s Old Curse,” and “Pakistani Forces Kill Dozens of Militants.” As memories of the massacre inevitably fade, these two articles indicate where the action will be in the future.
Postscript, January 8, 2015: Here’s a nice tribute to the victims, via Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Zehra Nigah, by my cousin Fawad Zakariya. It’s from his blog, “Moments of Tranquility” (the blog is in English, but this post is largely for the Urdu-competent). I was stunned to discover from the exchange in Fawad’s combox that You Tube is banned in Pakistan.
I’ve updated my post calling for a boycott of the Ayn Rand Society to add some comments on an essay recently published in The Atlantic by John Paul Rollert of the University of Chicago.
Update within the update, December 19, 2014: James Otteson and Peter Boettke (who are speaking alongside Yaron Brook at the ARS session in a few days) have both contacted me privately re the boycott. Otteson expresses a reluctance to break his prior engagement with ARS. Fair enough; I only wish I’d urged him to back out sooner, when it might have been more feasible. Boettke disagrees with me about the need for a boycott. I’d prefer to air my disagreement with Boettke in the open, but I’ve respected his wish to keep our disagreement private. Thanks to both of them for responding.
