Nagel on sexual perversion (part 1 of 3): the argument

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After a brief interlude on identity politics, I’m back to a far more savory topic–sexual perversion. I mentioned two posts ago that I was going to be discussing Nagel’s 1969 Journal of Philosophy paper, “Sexual Perversion” in my ethics classes. (By chance, I happen to be covering the same paper with a student who’s doing a senior thesis on BDSM. You really have to wonder whether the people who pay the tuition bills for these students bargained on their studying any of this at a nice, respectable Catholic institution like Felician, The Franciscan College of New Jersey. “How will any of this help my son or daughter find remunerative work?” Hmm.) Anyway, having pored over Nagel’s paper, I thought I’d discuss a bit here. This first post of two just lays out Nagel’s argument. The next post will offer my criticisms, and draw some lessons. (And yes, the second post is already written, so this isn’t one of my perennially broken promises about multi-part postings.)

Here’s the structure of the argument. It’s meant as a pointillistic summary of Nagel’s claims, not as representing the steps of a formally deductive argument. (Incidentally, I’m using the version of Nagel’s article that’s reprinted in the 1979 British edition of his book, Mortal Questions.)

The ground-setting argument: uncontroversial preliminaries

  1. We have a concept of ‘sexual perversion’; by unpacking it, we come to understand the nature of sexual perversion.
  2. There are three platitudes about sexual perversion that structure the inquiry from the outset, so it’s justifiable in this context to adopt them without argument. (a) First, what is sexually perverse is in some sense “unnatural,” though this is precisely the controversial concept in need of explication and defense. (b) We’re entitled to start with a list of uncontroversially perverse activities, and use them as fixed points for the rest of the inquiry, e.g., shoe fetishism, bestiality, sadism. (c) Perversions are in essence inclinations, or structured forms of desire. They are not best understood as particular actions divorced from some appetitive etiology.
  3. In addition to the platitudes in (2), there are two fundamental assumptions that also structure the inquiry, not quite as basic as the platitudes, but still essential to the inquiry. They require some argument, but not much. (a) Sexual perversion has a complex psychological structure. That’s because sexual desire isn’t a simple biological drive (like, e.g., digestion or circulation), something we can more easily come to see by reflection on hunger (which is itself not a simple biological drive). (b) Sexual desire is desire for the particularity of a particular individual. Or as Nagel himself puts it, “The object of sexual attraction is a particular individual, who transcends the properties that make him attractive” (p. 42).

The quasi-Sartrean appeal to phenomenology

  1. A good point of entry into the concept of sexual perversion is Sartre’s account of sexuality in Part III of Being and Nothingness. Unfortunately, taken at face value, Sartre’s account is—though insightful—somewhat obscure and leads to absurd results. It also makes very large presuppositions that can’t be defended or even explicated) in a journal article, so for present purposes (meaning Nagel’s purposes in the original article) our point of entry has to be Sartre-inspired view rather than a textually-faithful adoption of Sartre’s own. The essential Sartre-inspired view is as follows:
  2. Sexuality is an embodied reciprocal interaction that affords a specific form of mutual visibility to both partners.
  3. The interaction mentioned in (2) involves a complex interplay of voluntary and involuntary factors: arousal is involuntary, the choice to express it is voluntary, but the actual expression is a complex combination of voluntary and involuntary. In one sense, it’s controlled by the agent; in another sense, the agent allows himself or herself to act spontaneously, controlled by desire itself. So the aim of sexual activity is to make visible the complex interplay of voluntary and involuntary forces at work in oneself to the other (and vice versa).
  4. Nagel repeatedly insists that sexual desire is experienced, phenomenologically, as an ‘assault’—language later taken up by Korsgaard in The Sources of Normativity to suggest that desire as such is experienced, phenomenologically, as an ‘assault’. It’s not clear whether this claim is essential to Nagel’s thesis, and if so, how: I’m inclined to think that it’s an idiosyncratic add-on, but I’m not totally sure. (The language of “desire-as-assault” is essential to Korsgaard’s thesis, and Raymond Geuss correctly takes her to task for it in the discussion section of Sources of Normativity. I think Geuss’s criticism of Korsgaard probably applies to Nagel as well, but again, I don’t know what, if anything, that ultimately implies for Nagel’s thesis.)
  5. The preceding phenomenological account–especially the “visibility-affording” conception discussed in [3]–is the sexual ‘norm’ against which desires that don’t conform to it are deviations. The extreme deviations are perversions.
  6. Among the (to Nagel) more obvious perversions are “narcissistic practices and intercourse with animals, infants, and inanimate objects” (p. 49). Nagel doesn’t explicitly discuss masturbation, so it’s not clear whether “narcissistic practices” is a euphemism for masturbation or denotes a broader category of pathologically narcissistic activities that overlaps with narcissistic instances of masturbation. (In Sexual Desire, Roger Scruton distinguishes between masturbation conceived as relief for “a period of sexual isolation…guided by a fantasy of copulation” and masturbation conceived as a replacement for sexual encounter itself [p. 317]. Arguably, Nagel’s “narcissistic practices” refers to the latter, not the former, but he doesn’t explicitly say.)  Though Nagel doesn’t explicitly discuss pornography, he regards voyeurism and exhibitionism as perversions; since pornography is arguably an instance of both, I think it follows that Nagel’s view entails that (the use of) pornography is a perversion. But that’s my inference, not Nagel’s claim.

The difficult cases

  1. The cases discussed in the preceding section are ones that Nagel regards as relatively obvious. Near the end of the article, he turns briefly to discussion of the difficult cases: sadism, masochism, and homosexuality. Nagel clearly means to be discussing voluntary cases of sadism and masochism, but I wonder whether what he says about voluntary sadism is also meant to apply to cases of sexual assault. If so, sexual assault–or at least cases of sexual assault where the infliction of pain was intended and/or involved–would be cases of sexual perversion.
  2. Sadism and masochism turn out to be perversions “because they fall short of interpersonal reciprocity” (p. 50).
  3. “Sadism concentrates on the evocation of passive self-awareness in others, but the sadist’s engagement is itself active and requires a retention of deliberate control which may impede awareness of himself as a bodily subject of passion in the required sense” (p. 50). In other words, if visibility is the aim of sexual relations, sadism serves to render one’s passive nature invisible.
  4. “A masochist on the other hand imposes the same disability on his partner as the sadist imposes on himself. The masochist cannot find a satisfactory embodiment as the object of another’s sexual desire, but only as the object of his control” (p. 50). At some level, masochism is a failure in the “awareness of oneself as an object of desire.” (Though I think he’s on to something, I find Nagel’s discussion of masochism obscure and hard to gloss.)
  5. Meanwhile, Nagel regards it as “doubtful” that homosexuality is a perversion. Nagel’s judgment about homosexuality will strike twenty-first century readers as overly hedged, but in mitigation, recall that the paper was written in 1969, four years* before the American Psychiatric Association changed its collective mind about homosexuality. At the time, I think that Nagel was taking a somewhat unpopular minority position (but I’m a little hazy on the sociology).
  6. Having said that, Nagel suggests uneasily that what makes the issue unclear is that homosexuality seems as though it could be a case of arrested heterosexual development. “There is much support for an aggressive-passive distinction between male and female sexuality” (p. 51) which Nagel thinks is missing from homosexual activity. I think what Nagel is really gesturing at here is the idea that in heterosexual relations, men and women are in some sense sexually complementary, male aggression and female passivity being a (stereotypical?) proxy for that. So he finds himself wondering out loud whether there is any such counterpart in homosexual relations. He concludes that there probably is (or easily can be) and thereby concludes that homosexual activity is not a perversion

The convoluted coda: perversion and all-in moral judgment (or: what does it all mean?) 

  1. Nagel ends with a somewhat contorted discussion about the relationship between perversion, sexuality, and all-things-considered moral judgments. It turns out that when we say that X is a perversion, the claim we’re making about it is a very weak and equivocal one about what to say or do about it.
  2. If X is a perversion, then non-X sex is “better as sex” than perverted sex.
  3. But (according to Nagel), X can be a perversion and yet be preferable to unperverted sex, even if it’s not better “as sex.”
  4. X’s being perverted sex doesn’t necessarily mean that acting on X is morally wrong; faced with a choice between perverted sex and no sex, there are cases in which perverted sex is preferable to no sex, hence morally justified.

I know I’m supposed to leave the criticisms for the next post, but I can’t resist a general comment right here before I get to it. Then as now, Nagel’s paper strikes me in the way that so much of Nagel’s work strikes me—a mixed bag, but more worth reading than most work in analytic philosophy, despite lacking the “rigor” of a lot of analytic philosophy, and despite being relatively unintegrated with “the literature.”  On the plus side, the paper is (like just about everything Nagel writes) clear, profound, learned, original, insightful, fruitful, provocative, and right about a lot of things. On the negative side, the paper is also maddeningly hand-waving, question-begging, and glib, while managing simultaneously to be simplistic, ambiguous, and convoluted.

To its credit, “Sexual Perversion” reads more like an old-fashioned essay than a standard-issue “peer reviewed journal article,” but that very fact leads one to wonder how it got published in JPhil in the first place, i.e., what “peer review” meant in New York philosophical circles in 1969, and whether its meaning one thing in 1969 and another thing in 2015 has any bearing on what counts as good and bad philosophy from one decade to the next. Anyway, ambiguities aside, suffice it to say that there’s enough in the article to make getting through it well worth the trip.

Feel free to comment on Nagel’s argument or my rendition of it in the combox. I’ll offer some criticisms and other observations in my next post.

*I corrected an error in this sentence: I originally misstated the date of the APA’s decision as 1970. It was 1973.

Postscript, February 7, 2015: My friend Michael Young, who’s been lurking in this discussion, sends along this piece, “Guys and Plastic Dolls” from the online magazine Narratively. It’s about–you guessed it–guys who have romantic relationships with plastic dolls. I take it that the behavior described in the piece counts as a Nagelian perversion, since it satisfies both the “narcissistic practices” and “inanimate objects” provisos. I can’t wait to bring this one to the attention of my ethics students at Felician. I think I already know what they’re going to say, if they can manage to articulate their response in words. I guess the Narratively piece gives new meaning to a line from Lady Gaga’s song, “Paparazzi“: “We’re plastic, but we still have fun!”

Feel the love: theocratic dust-up at the Austin corral (or: Public Reason comes to Texas)

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It takes a lot to make me proud to be from New Jersey, but after watching this video, all I can say is that I’m glad I’m not from Texas:

Here’s a companion piece. The gist:

AUSTIN–Rep. Molly White, R-Belton, directed her staffers to ask Muslim visitors–in town for Texas Muslim Capitol Day–to pledge allegiance to the U.S.

“I did leave an Israeli flag on the reception desk in my office with instructions to staff to ask representatives from the Muslim community to renounce Islamic terrorist groups and publicly announce allegiance to America and our laws,” she said on Facebook. “We will see how long they stay in my office.”

The Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations on Thursday hosted the annual Texas Muslim Capitol Day as “an opportunity for community members to learn about the democratic political process and how to be an advocate for important issues.”

One obvious puzzle here: why would a state legislator put an Israeli flag on her desk, and demand respect for it from American citizens?

Second puzzle, less obvious: why do Muslims need a special designated day to visit the state’s capitol? And why must they visit as Muslims, in specifically sectarian guise? Doesn’t that suggest that they intend to vote strategically, as a bloc–i.e., that they’re lobbying? Of course, the presence of the Israeli flag on Molly White’s desk suggests that they have company.

Third (set of) puzzle(s): Is there a Texas Jewish Capitol Day? A Christian one? A Buddhist one? How about an atheist one, or one for Marxists, Aristotelians, or Petit-influenced small-r republicans? And if not, why not?

Fourth puzzle, yet subtler: how long before the Republican Party implodes under the influence of people like Molly White and Co.?

Fifth puzzle, the subtlest of all: what would Rawls say?

(ht: Minaret of Freedom blog)

Adultery, strip clubs, flirting, and virtue

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I’m talking about sexuality in my CORE 350 ethics class at Felician. It’s a minefield. The subject is hard to talk about anywhere, but especially in a classroom–and especially in a classroom at a Catholic college. There’s the simultaneous danger of being so candid that you offend someone, or so anodyne that you sound out-of-touch and irrelevant. Never mind that the professor is himself a walking stereotype of some sort–a divorced middle-aged academic who manages to make everything he says on the subject either sound dreadfully abstract or else really dirty. But of course, that’s what makes the topic so much fun.

Our first text has been the Commentary on the Sixth Commandment (against adultery) from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I’ve tried to impress upon my students the fact that I’m neither hoping to inculcate Catholic moral doctrine in them, nor discussing the Catechism simply to tear it down, but just using it a source of authoritative moral teachings on the subject so as to figure out what to make of what it says. Teaching it is a good exercise for me because I find so much of what it says so ridiculously implausible: I have to work a bit to make it plausible to them. But I’ve been surprised to find some scattered agreement as well. Of course, the same thing might be said about my students’ beliefs about sexuality, as the following conversation illustrates.

Today’s in-class discussion focused on lots of things–marriage, procreation, homosexuality, etc.–but ended with a free-wheeling discussion of adultery. Here’s what the Catechism says about it:

Adultery

2380 Adultery refers to marital infidelity. When two partners, of whom at least one is married to another party, have sexual relations – even transient ones – they commit adultery. Christ condemns even adultery of mere desire.170 The sixth commandment and the New Testament forbid adultery absolutely.171 The prophets denounce the gravity of adultery; they see it as an image of the sin of idolatry.172

2381 Adultery is an injustice. He who commits adultery fails in his commitment. He does injury to the sign of the covenant which the marriage bond is, transgresses the rights of the other spouse, and undermines the institution of marriage by breaking the contract on which it is based. He compromises the good of human generation and the welfare of children who need their parents’ stable union.

I was in a casuistic mood, so I decided to ask my students what counts as a case of adultery. I found their answers bizarre, but then, I find most people’s views on sexuality bizarre (except my own). The question was intended to elicit their views, not to to tease out the official view of the Church. Incidentally, some demographics: The class has 30 students in it, and consists predominantly of women aged 18-21, a few men of the same age, a few women in their 30s and 40s, and a few nuns in their 30s, I would guess. Since we’d discussed homosexuality earlier, and the Church’s definition of adultery presupposes heterosexual marriage, the conversation was about heterosexual marriage.

Here are their answers:

1. Is sexual intercourse with someone outside of the marriage an instance of adultery? –Yes.

2. Is oral sex….? –Yes.

3. Is phone sex….? –Yes.

4. Kissing on the lips…? –Yes.

5. Flirting without physical contact…?–Yes.

6. Ogling a member of the opposite sex…? –Yes (though there was dissension on this one).

7. Going to a strip club…?–No (?!)

I don’t know about you, but these answers make no sense to me. Or perhaps I mean that I can make sense of them–in the sense of figuring out the underlying rationale–but that they strike me as incoherent.

The most glaring incoherence seems to me the one between (7) on the one hand, and (5) and (6) on the other. Let me ignore the apparent incoherence between (6) and (7), since it’s not entirely clear to me that the people asserting (7) were also asserting (6). But the people (young women) most vehemently asserting (5) were also vehement about asserting (7), and that really does strike me as incoherent, or least as wildly mistaken. The claim here seems to be that if you flirt with someone, you are cheating on your marriage because it involves “thoughts or feelings” of an adulterous nature, thereby (I suppose) falling under Christ’s condemnation of the “adultery of mere desire.”

That seems to me an implausible conception both of marriage and of adultery, but let it go for now. I can see the rationale for it, assuming that one adopts implausible conceptions of both marriage and adultery–very rigoristic ones. What is hard to see is why the very person who adopted such a conception of flirting would then turn around to insist that strip clubs didn’t involve adultery.

But that is explicitly what they said. They believed that men go to strip clubs to “admire female beauty,” and that doing so is sexually innocuous, whereas flirting involves something like emotional attachment and lust, which is clearly adulterous. In other words, the average patron of a strip club patronizes, say, The Harem or Satin Dolls in the detached way that a hifallutin aesthete might go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to “admire the beauty” to be found in the paintings of J.M.W. Turner–or, maybe more precisely, in the portraits of John Singer Sargent. Put yet another way, the average patron of the average Jersey strip club is going there for an experience no different from the guy who goes to the Frick Collection to gorge his lustful eyes on Lady Agnew of Lochnaw:

Somehow, I doubt it. I have a sneaking suspicion that my female students have been fooled by their boyfriends into thinking that the strip club experience is more of an exercise in aesthetic formalism than it really is. Who knew that there were so many budding Nick Zangwills in the strip clubs of north Jersey? Let’s hope that the ASA is on the case.

Anyway, the dispute in question turns on a straightforwardly factual matter. If flirting is adultery because it involves the wrong thoughts and desires, then if going to a strip club either involves the same thoughts and desires (or more intense versions of the same ones), on this conception going to a strip club is (even) more obviously a case of adultery than flirting. I leave the rest as an exercise for the social psychologists or strip club enthusiasts out there.

Personally, I take the answers to questions (1)-(3) to be fairly obvious, though I’ve met people who would contest (3), and I suppose Bill Clinton in his own way famously contested (2), as did many of his defenders. It’s an interesting question what exactly ties (1)-(3) together, though I suppose the general answer is obvious: sexual activity (involving contact) by one married person with someone outside of the marriage.*

I don’t think (4) is obvious. I agree that kissing someone who isn’t your spouse is wrong, but personally, I don’t think it’s a case of adultery. (A small minority of my students agreed, but most disagreed.) Part of the issue here turns on turpitude, and part on–for lack of a better term–phenotypic dissimilarity. I think “adultery” should be reserved for serious offenses, and though I think kissing is an offense, it isn’t nearly as serious as having sex with someone. So it ought to be separated somehow. Further, though kissing is obviously sexual I think there’s an obvious phenotypic difference between an act that can in principle lead to orgasm and one that can’t. So I think the concept of “adultery” ought to reflect that. One student pointed out (correctly, I think) that there are cultures or contexts in which kissing on the lips is not thought to be a sexual act at all. There’s another reason for thinking that kissing and adultery are distinct.

I don’t think that (5) is either wrong or a case of adultery. This claim of mine set off a minor firestorm in class. But there’s a bit of an ambiguity here: you may not have realized this before (and neither, I think, did W.B Gallie), but “flirting” is an essentially contested concept. In other words, there’s flirting and then there’s flirting. Here is a standard definition of the term:

flirt

flərt/
verb
gerund or present participle: flirting
  1. 1.
    behave as though attracted to or trying to attract someone, but for amusement rather than with serious intentions.

The last clause is the key to the definition. X flirts with Y if and only if X has no serious intention of being romantically involved with Y and (I would add) knows that the same is true of Y.

It’s a serious and interesting question whether people are psychologically capable of pulling off flirtation in this sense, and can have knowledge in the requisite sense under the relevant conditions. Maybe so, maybe not. It’s also a serious and interesting question whether, regardless of that, the activity of flirting has any justifiable rationale. Maybe so, maybe not. But if we assume that people can flirt in the defined sense, I think it’s obvious that flirting is not a case of adultery. I happen to think that flirtation has a justifiable rationale: it has essentially the same rationale that joking around has in non-sexual contexts. Flirting is a safe, and I would add, necessary way of acknowledging the presence of sexual tension in relationships that are (or ought) otherwise to be non-sexual, and a safe means of catharsis of the relevant tension. Done properly, flirtation is harmless. It’s just hard to do properly, and harder still in a milieu where no one understands what it’s about, and where it’s equated with adultery. Ultimately, it’s probably safer not to flirt, but better to learn how to do it right.

I won’t belabor the point, but “ogling,” like “flirting” is an essentially contested concept. But it would take a whole new post to get that issue right.

It’s unfortunate that we didn’t discuss so-called “emotional affairs” in class, but alas, we didn’t. The moral status of emotional affairs is increasingly one that we Americans have farmed out to mental health care practitioners, so that the most authoritative answers to questions about them come from sources like WebMD. This makes me wonder whether philosophers should be in the business of competing with rival websites of our own–WebPhD, WebPhil, something like that. But no matter what we say, we’ll never be able to compete with the MDs on reimbursement.

The underlying philosophical issue here is one common to Christianity and Aristotelian virtue ethics, but that involves more psychological complexity than one finds either in the Gospels or the Nicomachean Ethics. Every significant sphere of life, including sexuality, has to be governed in some way by the virtues. But the virtues can’t be understood in a superficially behavioristic or legalistic fashion as demanding conformity with a series of pat prescriptions. They involve acting for the right object, in the right way, at the right time, from the right cognitive, affective, and behavioral dispositions, etc. It’s an enormously difficult job to explicate the latter idea in an informative, non-banal way that’s fully responsive to moral complexity.

Contrary to the Catholic Church, I don’t happen to think that “chastity” is a virtue, and don’t think that “lust” is an offense against it. But some virtues–honesty, integrity, justice, pride–do govern sexuality, and when they do, they require the agent to adopt some beliefs and not others, and by implication, to have some attitudes and not others, and some forms of affect and not others, etc. So one danger is to think that sexual ethics is a matter of mere conformity with a list of behavioral-legal prohibitions. But there’s another danger lurking here: of thinking that full Aristotelian virtue requires suppression of anything that seems like it’s incompatible with observing obvious behavioral-legal prohibitions. In other words, if full virtue proscribes adultery (as I’m sure it does), there’s a tendency to think that full virtue requires the agent to suppress any thought or desire that is, in a vague sense, adultery-positive or adultery-proximate.

In other words, if adultery is wrong, there’s a tendency to think that if a stray thought of adultery floats through my head, that thought is wrong and must be suppressed in the name of virtue. I think that’s a mistake that derives from a mistaken understanding of the way the mind works, and a mistaken account of the nature of virtue. From suppression of that sort it’s a short hop, skip, and leap to repression in the psychoanalytic sense. But repression is a defense mechanism–an offense against honesty, and a subversion of self-knowledge. At a minimum, virtue ethicists have to be more alive then they seem to be to the possibility that virtues can be a means of repression.

Anyway, there’s a lot more to say on this, but I can’t say it all now. I’ve said a bit on the website for my class. I hope to say more in the near future. Our next reading is Thomas Nagel’s famous paper, “Sexual Perversion.” Should be interesting.

Postscript: I edited this post for clarity after the initial submission.

*I rewrote this whole clause for clarity after the original post.

“King Abdullah–he dead.”

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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died last Friday. He’s to be succeeded by the new king, Salman. Like all Saudi monarchs, Abdullah was a despicable, repressive reactionary. Like all Saudi monarchs, Salman’s accession to the throne promises to be a classic case of “meet the new king, same as the old king.”

Here’s a link to Human Rights Watch’s page on Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. Here is Amnesty’s. Here is the State Department’s 2013 Human Rights Report on Saudi Arabia. Here’s more. Here’s an article on the Raif Badawi case. Let’s never forget this case, by the way. Together, what the two preceding articles show is that Saudi Arabia is a country where people get flogged for defending human rights, but where government officials go unpunished when they deliberately cause mass death. The late Pakistani journalist Tashbih Sayyid, editor of Pakistan Today, put the point to me in this way: “Muslims complain so loudly about the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank. What about the Saudi occupation of Mecca and Medina?” It sounds like a joke, but it really isn’t one. He might well have added: What about the Saudi occupation of the Arabian peninsula?

Here’s an article on Saudi Arabia’s criticizing Norway’s human rights record. This criticism comes from a country where it’s illegal for women to drive. Of course, to be fair, Saudi Arabia is making progress. It abolished slavery in 1962.

I don’t agree with defenders of Israel who insist that the movement to divest from Israel is “anti-Semitic,” but I do think there is a double standard in the way activists think about and deal with Israel by contrast with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has all the features that members of BDS find objectionable in Israel. Like Israel, Saudi Arabia is guilty of systematic human rights abuses. Like Israel, Saudi Arabia gets massive and systematic U.S. support. Like Israel, Saudi Arabia exerts enormous influence over the U.S. government. The difference is just that Saudi Arabia is a lot worse than Israel on every relevant dimension.

Unfortunately, there is no BDS-like movement to push back on Saudi policy in the way that there is in the Israeli case. There really ought to be: an anti-Saudi BDS would probably command more widespread popular support than does BDS against Israel. (Apparently, the Hillel organization at U Cal Riverside promoted an anti-Saudi divestment policy at one time, but I can’t seem to find it.) At a bare minimum, the time has come to start questioning the corrupting role of Saudi money in American universities. This phenomenon deserves scrutiny and challenge as well.

Though it’s now a bit dated, and I have some disagreements with it, I would highly recommend the late Said K. Aburish’s The Rise, Corruption, and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (Bloomsbury, 1995) as relief from the (cautious) accolades that are now being showered on Abdullah. A choice excerpt:

Like a rotting carcass, the House of Saud is beginning to decompose. This reality is ignored by its members and, except for perfunctory and infrequent mentions of their human rights record, by their friends. As usual, the people who have precipitated the decay are the last to admit their inability to halt it. In the case of the House of Saud’s Western friends, the creeping awareness that a crisis is approaching is balanced by a selfish desire in the governments concerned to conceal it and in the process shirk responsibility for it. (p. 303)

I would just add the proviso that the “selfish desire” flouts our actual interests. Though I don’t agree with the letter of his proposals, as long as we find ourselves involved with the Saudis, I have to agree with the spirit of this passage:

Enforcing these measures is a tall order. Above all, it calls for massive interference in Saudi internal affairs. But this is not as novel as it sounds: the West is already telling Saddam Hussein how to behave towards Shias and Kurds and it tells Egypt and other countries how to manage their financial affairs. In addition, it is totally manageable, for the House of Saud cannot survive without help. Furthermore, it cannot punish the West by withholding its oil because that would hasten the financial crisis and expedite the royal family’s demise. Last but not least, taking a chance with a corrective programme is a better long-term defence of the supply of oil than the present policy of securing it through a regime which threatens to self-destruct, and the prospect of having to fight the Arab and Muslim worlds for it. (p. 314).

The book opens with this dedication:

In memory of my friend Saud Ibrahim Al Muammer, who was tortured to death by the House of Saud, and of my mother, who mourned him as much as I did.

That one sentence conveys the bare essence of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As an allegory, so does the trailer below for the film “Syriana.”

We ought to be able and willing to assert the truth out loud: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has no right to exist. If any regime should be “erased from the pages of time,” Saudi Arabia is it. It’s good news that the King is dead. It will be better news when the Kingdom follows him.

Postscript: More multi-media dancing on the monarch’s grave:

And more!

Postscript 2, February 6, 2015: I guess this article proves that Saudi malfeasance can elicit the attention of our legislators and government, but only if packaged within an implausible conspiracy theory that links the Saudis to 9/11. Memo to our political representatives: it doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to prove that the Saudi regime is repressive, and that our support for the Saudis is abetting that repression. (President Obama may not have gone to Paris after the Charlie Hebdo affair, but he made sure to to go Riyadh after Salman’s accession to the throne.) The work of Said Aburish and Robert Baer (among others) has been out there for decades, but doesn’t seem to have gotten commensurate attention or changed anything–not our gas-guzzling habits, not our support for the Saudis, and not our wide-eyed amazement when people from the regime complain about our baleful influence on it. I’d like to think that if we can get exercised about the implausible, the patently obvious should have its day.

On (Not) Avoiding Giving Offense

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Irfan’s recent discussions about the Charlie Hebdo affair and Islamic debates about iconoclasm have brought me back to a question that I’ve wondered about in the past and not come up with any satisfying general answer to: when and why should the fact that something I do will offend someone give me sufficient reason not to do it? When I was an undergraduate studying in Greece, the conventional wisdom among our group was that it was considered very offensive in Greece, and in many other parts of Europe, to recline with your feet up on a chair. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but everybody in the group believed it simply because a few apparently informed people insisted on it so strongly and seemed so stressed out whenever anybody put their feet up on a chair that we all assumed it must be true. Late one night in a hotel lobby, I was sitting with the one member of the group who was pretty universally loathed for a number of reasons, both good and bad. We were talking about something or other when he decided to get comfortable and put his feet up on the chair in front of him. I quickly tried to stop him, reminding him that people in Greece considered it very rude. He then treated me to a lecture on why cultural relativism was false, and how he used to be a cultural relativist when he was an anthropology major, but that realizing the falsity of cultural relativism was one of the reasons he’d decided to become a classicist and study the ancient Greeks, who were so much wiser about these things. Since cultural relativism is false, he reasoned, there was nothing whatsoever wrong with putting his feet up on the chair; the Greeks have their fussy conventions, but by nature there is nothing wrong with treating a chair as a stool.

Now, I was even less philosophically astute then than I am now, so I didn’t make what I would now think of as the obvious rejoinder: the thought that you should avoid offending and upsetting people for no good reason does not presuppose or entail “cultural relativism” or any such thing, and the fellow was just weaving a sophomoric, pseudo-sophisticated rationalization for being insensitive and lazy (I don’t remember what I said in response, but it was probably something likewise sophomoric and pseudo-sophisticated, though of course more true). I take it to be fairly apparent that, ceteris paribus, the fact that some action of mine will offend people tells against my doing that action. But of course, cetera are often not paria, and while I’m pretty certain that the marginally greater comfort of resting my feet on a chair does not defeat the reason I have to avoid offending and upsetting people who are showing me great hospitality, I’m likewise pretty certain that in a vast range of cases the sheer fact that someone will find my words or actions offensive by itself gives me no reason to speak or act otherwise. Since I loathe the tendency of some purportedly neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists to simply wave their hands at points like these and talk about the importance of judgment and the fine discernment of practical salience by the virtuous person, I’d like to be able to say something more. What can we say?

One thing I think we can say is that when we can accomplish the same goals by means of one action that offends and another that doesn’t, and the non-offensive alternative isn’t significantly more costly, inefficient, burdensome, or the like, we have a pretty decisive reason to prefer the non-offensive alternative (I’m ignoring cases in which another person is being disrespectful or otherwise provocative, in which case we might even have reason to prefer the offensive alternative). That’s just another way of saying that, ceteris paribus, we should avoid offending people. To take an easy case, if I can say “excuse me, I’m sorry” when rushing past someone in an unavoidably obtrusive way, I should do that rather than simply being obtrusive and obnoxious. Less straightforward, but still sensible, I think: if a textbook can educate students about Islam just as well without depicting Muhammad, then the offense that the images would cause gives its authors and editors good reason to refrain from depicting him. But these cases are easy, at least to my mind, because as I see these scenarios there is nothing at all at stake; the only significant difference is that one alternative offends and the other does not. But when it comes to, say, kissing my girlfriend in public or uttering the sentence “Islam is false” during a conversation in a public space, I frankly don’t care whether anyone is offended (I’m tempted to say: that’s their problem, not mine). If the alternatives are withholding my displays of affection and the straightforward expression of my opinions to a wholly private sphere, then it seems to me that the cost of avoiding offense is too high. But I’m not sure I can say anything satisfying about how to assess those costs in a non-arbitrary way beyond appealing to my intuitive judgments.

On the one hand, I’ve sometimes wondered how far the difference between cases in which I have reason to avoid offense and those in which I don’t can be understood in terms of whether my action leaves the would-be offended people the opportunity to ignore me, so that I am not in effect forcing them to be faced with what they find offensive. To say “Islam is false” while walking down the street or sitting in a restaurant does not intrude on anyone; to run around town with a megaphone shouting “Islam is false!” intrudes upon people (again, I’m assuming that the people in question are themselves not intrusive or otherwise disrespectful or provocative). But the more I think about this sort of account, the more implausible it seems, and it seems implausible for just the same reason that certain sorts of libertarian appeals to the non-aggression principle seem implausible: it tries to bracket out the question of whether people have good reason to be offended by what I say or do, just as the simplest versions of the non-aggression principle try to bracket out questions about whether people’s consent or lack of consent is reasonable. This bracketing strategy leads to all manner of wildly counter-intuitive conclusions in both cases, and yet the principles seem to be defensible, if at all, only by their ability to explain a wide range of intuitively obvious judgments as well as to help settle more contentious cases (if there is some other, more foundationalist style argument for the non-aggression principle or its narrower, offense-centered version, I haven’t seen it; certainly the sort of thing that Rasmussen and Den Uyl offer, and that I think I have sometimes heard from Randians, comes nowhere close to justifying any principle nearly so strong as these) . So I’m led to wonder whether the better route would be to think simply in terms of whether people are reasonably offended or not, and whether my actions and words are actually disrespectful.

I don’t think it’s disrespectful to anybody to kiss my girlfriend in public, or to say that Islam is false. If someone is offended by those things, the real reason I don’t much care isn’t that I think I’m giving them the opportunity to ignore me, it’s that I don’t think they have any good reason to be offended. There is nothing offensive about me kissing my girlfriend (does this even require argument?), and even if Muslims shouldn’t be offended by my view because my view is right and theirs is wrong (after all, if Islam is false, nobody has good reason to be offended by someone saying so), they certainly shouldn’t be offended by my expression of my belief (I’m certainly not offended when Muslims say that Islam is true; though you wouldn’t know it from watching cable news, to disagree is not ipso facto to be offended!). But this puts me in a position uncomfortably like that of my obnoxious companion in Greece; there’s no good reason to be offended by people putting their feet up on chairs, so we should just put our feet up if we feel like it. And yet I still tend to think that there are cases where it isn’t reasonable for someone to be offended, and yet the fact that I will offend them gives me good reason to avoid acting in a way that I might otherwise prefer. I don’t think Muslims have any good reason to be offended by depictions of their prophet, and I don’t think that Greek hotel keepers have any good reason to be offended by somebody putting his feet up on a chair late at night when nobody is around. But while I might simply be indifferent to whether the history book depicts Muhammad, I would still tell that obnoxious kid to get his feet off that chair.

So am I just harboring incoherent beliefs and attitudes, or is there some way to maintain that what matters most in thinking about whether I should do something that others find offensive is whether those people have good reason to be offended, and yet also to allow that, even if they don’t, I might still have good reason to avoid giving offense?

The institutional hegemony of least-common-denominator Islam

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In the postscripts to an earlier post on the Charlie Hebdo crisis, I mentioned that the widely-held proscription against images of the Prophet Muhammad lacks clear Islamic credentials. In saying that, I don’t mean to insist that we ought to lay great emphasis on what has or lacks such credentials. The fundamental principle at stake in the Charlie Hebdo affair is the right of free speech, which deserves protection regardless of the sensibilities of Muslims. As an atheist, the simplest description of my own beliefs contradicts Islam at its core–there is no God and Muhammad is not his prophet–and might well offend the sensibilities of many Muslims (and in my experience, often has). That said, I think it’s telling that the version of Islam that so often gets currency in the media is the lowest-common-denominator version–the version common to the most simple-minded Islamist and the most demogogic Islamophobe.

In the earlier post, I linked to essays by Hussein Ibish and Omid Safi, pointing out the obvious–that Muslims have often created and revered images of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s worth noting that there is also within the Islamic tradition (e.g., in Urdu poetry) a tradition of directing complaints to and accusations at God, and even of ridiculing Him for his essential unintelligibility. Here’s one example. Here’s another. (The latter is in Urdu. I’ll try to find serviceable online English translations of both at some point.)

The debate between iconoclasts and iconophiles is an intra-Muslim debate, not one that has obviously been settled in favor of the iconoclasts. In fact, iconoclasm has no clear scriptural warrant; it involves a sort of quasi-Platonic or neo-Platonic inference from the Qur’an’s strictures against idolatry to the putatively idolatrous implications of mimetic representation. Insofar as there is an argument for this view, I think it has its roots in Plato’s argument against mimetic art in Republic X. I haven’t studied the subject in great detail, but there’s a plausible Islamic argument against mimetic art (with Platonic overtones) in Ismail Faruqi’s little primer, Islam. Here’s another version of it. (The book version is, I think, a little more pointed in its iconoclasm.)

That said, I found the following bit of news outrageous. It’s from this article in today’s New York Times.

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington civil liberties advocacy group, said that the prevailing view among Muslims was that all imagery of the prophets, regardless of their religion, is offensive because it promotes the idolatry discouraged by the Quran.

“It’s an established cultural and religious norm,” he said. “You don’t do visual depictions of religious figures, whether that’s a positive or negative portrayal.”

Western sensitivity to the Muslim objections has a mixed history at best, particularly concerning images that portray Muhammad favorably.

In New York, for example, an eight-foot marble statue of the prophet, created by the Mexican sculptor Charles Albert Lopez, adorned the roof of a courthouse adjoining Madison Square Park for more than 50 years until it was quietly removed in 1955. But a coalition of Muslim advocacy groups failed in a 1997 effort to seek the removal or alteration of a frieze containing a likeness of Muhammad on the north wall of the Supreme Court’s main chamber. The prophet is among 18 revered lawgivers decorating the court’s interior.

“It was a respectful presentation, and nobody doubts that, even though it had the stereotypical image of the Quran in one hand and a sword in the other,” said Mr. Hooper, recalling the episode. “We just felt duty-bound to raise it.”

More recently, in 2008, the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations asked the publisher Houghton Mifflin to remove an image of Muhammad from “Western Civilizations: Ideas, Politics and Society,” a textbook. The company did so in the next printing.

“Civil liberties” advocates like Ibrahim Hooper need some push-back, from thinking Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Muslims need to ask themselves: can self-appointed “leaders” like Hooper simply put their fingers in the air, detect the “consensus” (ijma) of Muslims, and dictate to Muslims what can and can’t be done? It doesn’t seem to matter to Hooper that the supposedly prevailing view of Muslim prevails in places where people conspicuously lack rights of free speech and free expression. How can anyone detect the consensus of Muslims in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Gaza? If you say the wrong thing in places like that, you get shot or have acid thrown in your face.  You Tube is banned in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia and Iran are totalitarian states. Egypt is a police state. Gaza is a virtual anarchy. What realistic chance of discussion or debate on iconoclasm versus iconophilia could reasonably be expected under such conditions?

Hooper knows this. He simply doesn’t care that debate is impossible and dissent is crushed. He thrives on it. And so, the prevailing view of Muslims–the ijma of the umma–is reduced to the least common denominator of thought, the unreflective prejudices of people under censorship. Amercan Muslims, in particular, need to ask whether they regard such dogmatism and authoritarianism as acceptable. It isn’t.

But non-Muslims have a stake in this, too. The Albert Lopez statue of Muhammad was taken down to pre-empt objections like Hooper’s. As for the surviving frieze of Muhammad, Hooper feels “duty bound” to raze it. He sniffles that the surviving frieze* depicts Muhammad in “stereotypical” fashion, with “an image of the Quran in one hand and a sword in the other.” Excuse me: so what? Is it Hooper’s contention that Muhammad had nothing to do with the Qur’an? Is it his contention that Muhammad never wielded the sword? The Qur’an was dictated to Muhammad, and he conquered Arabia. How can it conceivably be an objection that a work of art depicts him for the two accomplishments that Muslims themselves attribute to him?

I wonder what Ibrahim Hooper would say if I told him that I was “duty bound” to raise such questions with him. But I actually don’t merely intend to wonder. I intend to ask him and reprint his response here at PoT.

And I think the decision-makers at Houghton Mifflin could use a similar letter.

*I’ve corrected a few sentences in this paragraph before the asterisk. The original version confused the Lopez statue with the surviving frieze. The image above depicts the frieze, not the statue.

Postscript: Can anything be expressed any more without eliciting threats from someone? (The question sounds like a textbook exercise in the logic of quantification. Of course, any day now, someone will start threatening the authors of logic textbooks.)

A new semester and a new blog project

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The spring semester has just started up for me at Felician, and as usual, it’s going to be a busy one–five sections and two senior theses, for a total of five preps and 69 students. (Last semester was five sections and one tutorial, for a total of five preps and 120 students.) So I’ll be blogging less than I have for the last six weeks or so, and when I do, I’ll probably be staying away from topical/journalistic stuff and focusing more on stuff related to my teaching and research interests in philosophy and psychology. It’s also likely that PoT will be getting another blogger or two in the near future.

On the teaching end of things, I’ve decided to bring blogging into the classroom. So I’ve set up three Word Press sites–one for my ethics class (two sections of CO 350), one for my aesthetics class (PHIL 260), and one for my international relations class (PSCI 303). The ethics class focuses on five topics: sex, drugs, money, race/crime, and honesty/the virtues. My rather idiosyncratic aesthetics class starts by discussing the Charlie Hebdo controversy (and related ones), moves to a discussion (via Susan Sontag) of the depiction of others in photography, then moves to a reading of Lolita, followed by units on beauty,  “everyday aesthetics,” and the aesthetics of popular music. The focus in the last case is Adorno’s critique of popular music. The international relations class is basically historical in focus, but trots students through the World Wars, aspects of the Cold War, 9/11, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Gulf Wars. All of the sites are still works in progress, and I’ve described the rationale for doing the project on each site itself. Feel free to take a look.

For obvious reasons, Felician students will have top priority at these sites, but I’ve decided not to make the sites password protected or exclusive to Felician students. I think my students would profit from doing their work “out in the open,” subject to the gaze and scrutiny of the outside world, and perhaps non-Felician readers would profit from following along and seeing what we’re doing. Subject to that “students first” or “pedagogy first” proviso, I’ve decided to experiment with accepting comments from non-Felician readers. Obviously, I’ll have to use my discretion as to how non-Felician people interact with my students, but if you’re burning to make a point, feel free to send it along.

To all my academic readers: best wishes on the new term. Hope you’re as excited as I am to start mine. Just be grateful that you’re (probably) not teaching a 5+:5+ load–though I recently met someone who was teaching a 6:7.

Taking “Je Suis Charlie Hebdo” Too Literally

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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).

PS 2, January 14: Another excellent piece on Charlie Hebdo by Hussein Ibish. I wish I’d seen the Omid Safi piece to which he links, which makes such an obvious but cogent point.

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Guess who?

PS 3, February 7, 2015: A very useful piece in The New York Times on the authoritarian double standards of French laicite. 

From Martin Anderson to Charlie Hebdo and back

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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.)

It always feels a bit corny to insert a flag into a blog post, but after the anti-French stupidities expressed over the last decade in the U.S., I think we kind of owe it to them.

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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 2: An excellent piece by Hussein Ibish at Book Forum, “The False Piety of the Hebdo Hoodlums.”

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.

Cops, settlers, and stones in Wadi an-Nasara

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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.

(6b) Claim (6a) is true, and vindicates the Palestinians’ current drive toward statehood.

(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.

(7b) The video is yet more proof of the need for Israel to annex the West Bank and give the Palestinians some form of citizenship. Palestinians with de jure equality would have better access to justice than Palestinians without it.

(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.

Go ahead. I’m still mulling over my answer.

P.S., Here’s some explanatory text from the original site to make the action in the video a bit more intelligible:

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.
December 2014
Filmed by:

Suzan Jabber