Jurisdynamics Network

The Rosenbury Deanship and Class Bias

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 17:33:10 +0000

Laura Rosenbury became the Dean of UF law after a failed search in which the central administration was pushing of all people, Anthony Acosta. Why she was selected in the second search no one knew. Her faculty interviews were fine but not unusual. Now as everyone knows, she will be the President of Barnard. Quite a step up I would say and a little mysterious since she has had no experience with undergrads, has only a law degree, and writes for non referred journals.

Still, when she was hired the Law School was pretty much a wreck and, therefore, the Provost must have seen in her a grittiness that would lead to risk taking and major changes. He was right. The improvements she made cannot be underestimated. When she was hired the Law School was an outlaw operation. It ignored University policy on most things and that was corrected. It had so-called centers in specific areas of law that made no sense in terms of UF's mission and were out of compliance with what it meant to be a center according to University regulations. Most were abolished.

When she arrived students wanting to be associated with a journal by writing on had to write on a different topic for each journal. It made no sense to put then through this torture. That changed. The primary law review advisor had a vise like grip on the job. He was replaced by a scholar and some practices that I never quite understood were ended.

The LLM in Tax was a sleepy little segment of the law school. It was highly ranked because there were so few LLMs in tax and had, at times, some big names in the area. When she arrived the applicant pool was poor, few people were regarded as nationally know tax scholars, and there was talk of disbanding it all together. One way or another (there is a whole story on this) the program came under intense scrutiny, Changes were made.

For the first time in 10 years committee assignment began to make sense. This too is a long story but I will cut it short by saying the former dean seemed to have a single objective -- to keep being dean. Consequently, committee assignments appeared to be driven by political considerations.

I am positive there are more things she accomplished and I cannot say what role any of these factors entered into her "promotion" to Barnard. Also these changes did not require an infusion of funds from the central administration.

So was there a down side? She was know to lose her temper sometimes and at others break out in tears when things did not go her way. She vetoed faculty candidates, so I have been told, that did not attend the "right" schools. I have heard of but was not witness to instances of abusive behavior toward staff -- only those beneath her, if course. As far as those above her he was the ultimate yes person. As an example, when here only a short time she was introduced to a group as young a vivacious by a student, This was a big deal to her an she even wrote about it. But within a few years she was carrying out DeSantis' orders and labelling the new hand picked right wing President the "embodiment of academic freedom." Ambition breeds hypocrisy.

Her biggest public claim to fame came by raising the Law School ranking from the mid 40s in the USNews rankings to the high 20s. This is where class bias and ambition over all come in. A large part of raising the ranking was to raise the average LSAT scores of the entering class in two steps. First, she lowered the size of the class. This does not mean she rejected unqualified candidates. Plenty of qualified candidates were rejected. "Qualified" took on a new definition. It was not longer qualified to successfully complete law school and become a productive attorney. No, qualified became who would make Laura Rosenbury look like an effective dean..

The second step, was to enter the market for high LSATs and GPAs. I mean literally buying students with high scores by paying them thousands of dollar in tuition waivers and stipends. I asked many of them why they chose Florida and the consistent answer was "it made me the best deal."

What does this have to do with class bias. I know of no studies that do not show a positive correlation between socioeconomic class and standardize tests scores like the LSAT. I do not know you how GPA correlates with socioeconomic class but I suspect it is also positive.

Where does the massive infusion of money come that is used to subsidize students who already have advantages over the less affluent? Quite honestly, I do not know but to some extent, the Provost seems to have given Rosenbury a blank check. But where does it originate? Maybe some comes from law students and others stuck with paying tuition and taking out loans to do so. Some from grants from alums and some from taxpayers. If it all comes from wealthy alums that is one thing although it still seems crazy to subsidize those who least need it. I doubt Rosenbury gave a damn where it came from. If any comes from taxpayers, no matter how laundered by the State or the University, then it becomes a redistribution from those in lower socioeconomic classes to the relative well off. In short, as all elitists, Laura Rosenbury used those less well off to promote herself and. in some measure catch the eye of Barnard. The elites always figure out a way to do that.

Goodbye ... and thank you.

Fri, 01 May 2020 19:33:05 +0000

I will no longer be blogging at Ratio Juris owing to relentless problems at my end with viewing the blog and a sense that there are far fewer readers these days (and no comments whatsoever by would-be interlocutors). I am grateful to our regular and intermittent readers over the years. And thanks of course to Professor Jim Chen for convincing me to enter the blogging world back in 2008 (that makes for roughly 800 posts!). Should you be interested, I am still blogging, at least for the time being, at Religious Left Law.

All good wishes, Patrick

Happy May Day! (International Workers’ Day)

Fri, 01 May 2020 13:52:37 +0000

The following, albeit lightly edited, is from the Bread and Roses Centennial Committee’s (1912-2012) Facebook post several years ago accounting for the distinction between May Day and Labor Day in this country:

“Ever wonder why the U.S. celebrates Labor Day, the first Monday in Sept, while May 1 is a day recognized around the world as a workers’ holiday, a day of solidarity between workers of all nationalities? It was bound up with the struggle for the shorter workday – a demand of major political significance for the working class. ‘Eight hours for work —eight for rest—and eight for what we will.’

Already at the opening of the 19th century workers in the United States made known their grievances against working from ‘sunrise to sunset,’ the then prevailing workday. Fourteen, sixteen and even eighteen hours a day were not uncommon. The 1820s and 1830s are full of strikes for reduction of hours of work and demands for a 10-hour day were put forward in many industrial centers —the Mechanics’ Union of Philadelphia, led a strike of building trade workers in Philadelphia in 1827 for the 10-hour day — Lowell’s ‘mill girls’ Mill did the same.

The 8-hour day movement, which directly gave birth to May Day, is connected to the general movement initiated in the U.S. On August 20, 1866, delegates from over 50 craft unions formed the National Labor Union. At its founding convention the following resolution dealt with the shorter workday: ‘The first and great necessity of the present, to free labor of this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which 8 hours shall be the normal working day in all states in the American union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained.’
The First International adopted the Eight-Hour Day in Sept. 1866 at [its] Geneva Congress … : ‘The legal limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation of the working class must prove abortive .... The Congress proposes 8 hours as the legal limit of the working day.’

The Second International, held at Paris in 1889, designated May 1^st be set aside as a day upon which the workers of the world, organized in their political parties and trade unions, were to fight for the 8-hour day. The Paris decision had been influenced by events in the U.S. in 1886 where there had been a call for a general strike on May 1^st, 1886, for the 8-hour day.

Strikes and lockouts in 1885 increased to about 700 and the number of workers involved jumped to 250,000. In 1886 the number of strikes more than doubled. On May Day, 90,000 marched in Chicago, in New York, 10,000 marched to Union Square. Eleven thousand marched in Detroit. May Day rallies in Louisville and Baltimore were remarkable for their black-white unity. In NYC, labor leader Samuel Gompers, told the crowd, ‘May 1^st would be remembered as a second declaration of independence.’

But the event that guaranteed May Day a place in the history of the working class took place three days later at Haymarket Square in Chicago. There, an 8-hour Association was formed long in advance of the May 1, 1886 strike. Events of May 3 and 4, which led to what is known as the Haymarket Affair, were an outgrowth of the May 1^st strike. A demonstration on May 4 at Haymarket Square was called to protest a deadly attack of the police upon a meeting of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works on May 3, where six workers were killed and many wounded. The meeting was peaceful and ended when the police marched into the Square. A bomb was thrown into the crowd, killing a sergeant; a battle ensued and seven policemen and four workers were dead.

A witch hunt against militant workers, especially the anarchist leaders followed and eight men were arrested. The trial produced no evidence that any of them threw the bomb, nor that any of them had conspired to throw it. Prosecuting Attorney Julius Grinnel said in his closing remarks, ‘Law is upon trial. Anarchy is on trial. These men have been selected, picked out by the grand jury and indicted because they were leaders. They are no more guilty than the thousands that follow them…. Convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and save our institutions, our society.’

Seven men were sentenced to death; two petitioned for clemency and had their sentences commuted to life in prison; and 21-year-old Louis Lingg exploded a dynamite tube in his mouth while in jail. The four were hanged on November 11, 1887. One year after the hanging of the Chicago labor leaders, the American Federation of Labor voted to rejuvenate the movement for the 8-hour day May 1^st, which was already a tradition, was chosen as the day to re-inaugurate the struggle for the 8-hour day. Yet leaders of the A. F. of L. limited the strike movement. While May Day picked up momentum across the world, it lost steam in its country of origin. In 1905 the AFL disavowed May Day altogether, choosing instead to celebrate Labor Day on the first Monday of September, the national holiday sanctioned by the federal government in 1894. May Day in the U.S. was nevertheless still celebrated. In 1910 the Socialist Party brought 60,000 into the streets of New York City for May Day, including 10,000 women of the Shirt Waist Makers’ Union.”

Sundry Reflections in Honor of May Day (International Workers’ Day)

“Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously.”—Eric Hobsbawm

“In the Marxist tradition, self-realisation is the full and free actualisation and externalisation of the powers and the abilities of the individual. [….] Under suitable conditions, both [political democracy and economic democracy] can be arenas for joint self-realisation.”—Jon Elster

“We have gone so far as to divorce work from culture, and to think of culture as something to be acquired in hours of leisure; but there can only be a hothouse and unreal culture where itself is not its means; if culture does not show itself in all we make we are not cultured. [….] Industry without art is brutality.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Eleven Criticisms of Capitalism

Capitalist class relations perpetuate eliminable forms of human suffering.
Capitalism blocks the universalization of conditions for expansive human flourishing.
Capitalism perpetuates eliminable deficits in individual freedom and autonomy.
Capitalism violates liberal egalitarian principles of social justice.
Capitalism in inefficient in certain critical respects.
Capitalism has a systematic bias towards consumerism.
Capitalism is environmentally destructive.
Capitalist commodification threatens important broadly held values.
Capitalism in a world of nation-states fuels militarism and imperialism.
Capitalism corrodes community.
Capitalism limits democracy.

—From Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010)

Economic Democracy
“I have argued that economic Democracy, as a system, will be less alienating than Laissez Faire. To summarize the reasons: Workers will have more participatory autonomy under Economic Democracy, because the degree of workplace democracy will not be restricted by the capitalists’ need to keep open all options for profit. The labor-leisure trade-off should be more in accordance with the general interest under Economic Democracy, because workers will have a greater interest in promoting more flexible, less frantic, more meaningful working arrangements, as well as shorter hours and longer vacations, than do capitalists, who bear the costs and risks of such changers (under Laissez Faire) but do not receive the full benefits. Workers are likely to be more skilled under Economic Democracy, because neither competitive pressures nor the need for control will push so hard toward deskilling.”—David Schweickart, Against Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996)

America the Possible: The Values

[….] “Many thoughtful Americans have concluded that addressing our many challenges will require the rise of a new consciousness, with different values becoming dominant in American culture. For some, it is a spiritual awakening—a transformation of the human heart. For others it is a more intellectual process of coming to see the world anew and deeply embracing the emerging ethic of the environment and the old ethic of what it means to love thy neighbor as thyself. But for all, the possibility of a sustainable and just future will require major cultural change and a reorientation regarding what society values and prizes most highly.

In America the Possible, our dominant culture will have shifted, from today to tomorrow, in the following ways:

from seeing humanity as something apart from nature, transcending and dominating it, to seeing ourselves as part of nature, offspring of its evolutionary process, close kin to wild things, and wholly dependent on its vitality and the finite services it provides;
from seeing nature in strictly utilitarian terms—humanity’s resource to exploit as it sees fit for economic and other purposes—to seeing the natural world as having intrinsic value independent of people and having rights that create the duty of ecological stewardship;
from discounting the future, focusing severely on the near term, to taking the long view and recognizing duties to future generations;
from today’s hyper-individualism and narcissism, and the resulting social isolation, to a powerful sense of community and social solidarity reaching from the local to the cosmopolitan;
from the glorification of violence, the acceptance of war, and the spreading of hate and invidious divisions to the total abhorrence of these things;
from materialism and consumerism to the prioritization of personal and family relationships, learning, experiencing nature, spirituality, service, and living within limits;
from tolerating gross economic, social, and political inequality to demanding a high measure of equality in all these spheres.

We actually know important things about how values and culture can be changed. One sure path to cultural change is, unfortunately, the cataclysmic event—the crisis—that profoundly challenges prevailing values and de-legitimizes the status quo. The Great Depression is the classic example. I think we can be confident that we haven’t seen the end of major crises.

Two other key factors in cultural change are leadership and social narrative. Leaders have enormous potential to change minds, and in the process they can change the course of history. And there is some evidence that Americans are ready for another story. Large majorities of Americans, when polled, express disenchantment with today’s lifestyles and offer support for values similar to those urged here.

Another way in which values are changed is through social movements. Social movements are about consciousness raising, and, if successful, they can help usher in a new consciousness—perhaps we are seeing its birth today. When it comes to issues of social justice, peace, and environment, the potential of faith communities is vast as well. Spiritual awakening to new values and new consciousness can also derive from literature, philosophy, and science. [….]

Education, of course, can also contribute enormously to cultural change. Here one should include education in the largest sense, embracing not only formal education but also day-to-day and experiential education as well as the fast-developing field of social marketing. Social marketing has had notable successes in moving people away from bad behaviors such as smoking and drunk driving, and its approaches could be applied to larger cultural change as well.

A major and very hopeful path lies in seeding the landscape with innovative, instructive models. In the United States today, there is a proliferation of innovative models of community revitalization and business enterprise. Local currencies, slow money, state Genuine Progress Indicators, locavorism—these are bringing the future into the present in very concrete ways. These actual models will grow in importance as communities search for visions of how the future should look, and they can change minds—seeing is believing. Cultural transformation won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible either.” [….]—From James Gustave Speth’s “America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part II,” Orion magazine (May/June 2012)

“My Quarantine: The Calm of Collaging,” by Luc Sante

“The Covid-19 quarantine, which has in many other ways decimated my concentration, has revived my collage industry. I started making collages around age thirteen, in part out of frustration at my poor drawing skills and in part because of the lure of unpredictable found objects. The practice reached its peak in my twenties, when I made fliers for bands and had a hand in a zine or two. Then the scene changed, the bands broke up, and I no longer had an audience or a purpose. So I quit making visual work for nearly forty years. But the flame never entirely went out, as proven by the fact that I lugged my materials—piles of magazines, accordion folders full of clippings—from apartment to apartment and house to house, at least nine times.

What brought me back to action a few years ago was Instagram, which seems to include more people I know IRL [I had to look this up: ‘In Real Life’] than any other social medium—nearly all the most visually oriented of my friends. Instagram became a wall on which I could slap up my latest collage for a bit, before it got covered over by new stuff by others. I’m a performer; I have to work to some semblance of a crowd, however small. Getting a reaction stimulated me to keep trying to top the previous thing I put up. After about a year, though, even that flare-up subsided; my hobby ceded to more pressing matters. But then the quarantine came along. All of a sudden I was in need of a form of expression that would bypass the usual cognitive pathways. I had no reason not to make collages, and seemingly all the time in the world, since every day had become about a month long.

So I’ve been making collages in consecutive series determined by physical constraint: a ledger, a stenographer’s notebook, mounted industrial photographs, a deck of lotto cards. I have a vast trove of imagery to draw upon: the disbound and damaged books I collected while working at the Strand Bookstore after college, the New York Post headlines I hoarded in those same years, the bag of half-shredded movie posters I bought from a street peddler in the Nineties, the wildly random ephemera—a German medical textbook from the Twenties, crudely illustrated Spanish pamphlets from the Thirties, movie-star magazines from the Forties—that until recently I was able to glean from the book-exchange table at my local supermarket. Collage is a scavenger’s art: it forms the dead matter of the past into combinations that could only occur in the present; it builds a future from ruins. [….]

I enjoy the challenge of making something that can be consumed by the eyes with no thought involved, and at the same time introduce a thought that lies just on the edge of meaning, preserving maximum ambiguity. Collage-making suits the moment; it is a meditative practice that requires the regular exercise of fine motor skills. It imposes calm.” The entire essay is here.

Comment
In a very important sense, it is certainly true that Luc Sante’s quarantine is, so to speak, indeed “his,” and yet it reminds us that opportunities to exercise one’s agency (always within constraints of one kind or another) and creative abilities and powers, such as they may be, are the result of causes and conditions, the social and political forms of and control over which are in the main or generally speaking, above and beyond any one individual, raising questions of class, status, privilege, race, sex, and so forth. In other words, during this pandemic, the socio-economic, existential, and psychological circumstances one is facing are vastly different owing to the operation of these causes and conditions, reflecting, as they do today, in all parts of the world, vastly unequal conditions of freedom. (We leave for another day the questions and facts of social epidemiology that directly address the differential variables and causal factors accounting for the varying conditions and experiences of health, morbidity, and mortality exposed by this pandemic.)

I do not at all begrudge Sante’s use of his discretionary time under quarantine conditions to engage in an activity that lends itself to self-realization.* I know a law professor who is likewise availing himself of such an activity with his free time at home, in this case, making beautiful glass mosaics. Apart from appreciating the value of such activities, we might think of all those who are compelled to do other things with their time, much of which may be rarely or truly discretionary: stand in line for free food distribution; apply (or repeatedly attempt to apply) for unemployment benefits; finds ways to avoid an abusing spouse, parent or caregiver; plead with mortgage lenders, landlords or creditors to be excused from making the next payment or negotiating for different and more lenient terms; provide education for their school-age children; caring for others young and/or old, or helping those unable to fully care for themselves; and so forth and so on. As for what one does with what discretionary time one has, that too often reflects the aforementioned causes and conditions, much like working people will use their time off from work—their precious leisure time—to “escape” the reality of their working lives, to forget the work week and live for the weekend, or to simply nap or be lazy, watch TV (it hardly matters what one is watching), or to engage in a consumption or consumption-like activity that brings immediate satisfaction, instant gratification or pleasure….

Now and again a poor or working person may stumble upon an activity the purpose of which is to “achieve something,” in which “satisfaction is supervenient upon the achievement rather than being the immediate purpose of the activity” (of course a kind of pleasure or enjoyment may accompany the activity but there is something about its goal, the purpose that brings more lasting satisfaction or contentment or eudaimonia). This may be the result of the beneficent influence of a close friend or family member, or the memory of a particular or unusual event, or a learning experience of one sort or another; the point being that it is typically the case that many if not most of us have been socialized into an habitual preference, as it were, for consumption (hence ‘bread and circuses’ ideology), thus we’ve not leaned to value those activities that tend toward self-realization, the opportunities for such learning having been few and far between or virtually non-existent (there are always exceptions, but these are exceptions to the rule, not occasions for self-reproach or blame of those that fall within the class captured by the rule).

Finally, as Jon Elster points out, “[a]lthough self-realisation can be deeply satisfying, the satisfaction must not be the immediate purpose of the activity. Self-realisation belongs to the general class of states that are essentially by-products, that is, states that can come about only as the side effect of actions undertaken for some purpose, such as ‘getting it right’ or ‘beating the opposition.’

We should be fighting, in our capacity as individuals, as members of groups, organizations and social movements, as political representatives and public officials, for the day when everyone will be able to live under the conditions of equal freedom(s), for a day in which every person will have, for example, the substantive freedom to choose to engage, like Luc Sante, in “a meditative practice that requires the regular exercise of fine motor skills.”

* My understanding of this is shaped largely by Jon Ester’s treatment of the concept in his essay, “Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1989): 127-158.

Relevant Bibliographies

Related Posts

The Socialist Humanism and Psychoanalytic Critical Theory of Erich Fromm: Toward a Fresh Assessment

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 13:05:52 +0000

Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist whose books found a wide readership beyond the academic world. The following works are indispensable to providing a fresh assessment and critical appreciation of Fromm’s life and work. In other words, they combine to provide a rather different picture from the conclusion drawn by “leading scholars and social critics” on (loosely speaking) the Left (largely ‘New York intellectuals’) following the attack on Fromm and “neo-Freudianism” by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Beacon Press, 1955, and in 1966, with a new ‘Political Preface’) and their subsequent debate (1955-1956) in Dissent magazine. Lawrence J. Freidman reminds us that “decades after the encounter, leading scholars and social critics, including H. Stuart Hughes, Paul Robinson, Christopher Lasch, and Russell Jacoby, reiterated Marcuse’s line of attack against Fromm,” while dismissing or ignoring Fromm’s pivotal role in the founding years of the Frankfurt Institute (originally located at the Institute for Social Research [Institut für Sozialforschung] at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany).

Anderson, Kevin and Richard Quinney, eds. Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the Punitive Society. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Durkin, Kieran. The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Durkin, Kieran and Joan Braune, eds. Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory: Hope, Humanism, and the Future. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
Friedman, Lawrence J. (assisted by Anke M. Schreiber). The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Funk, Ranier, ed. The Clinical Erich Fromm: Personal Accounts and Papers on Therapeutic Technique. Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2009.

On President Trump’s dangerous decision to freeze funding of the World Health Organization (WHO)

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 13:20:52 +0000

Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, described Trump’s decision as “a crime against humanity,” tweeting “every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity.”(HuffPost)

The Trump administration’s decision to halt funding of the World Health Organization (WHO) is as—if not more than—politically, morally, and legally irrational, reckless and dangerous than its 2018 decision to no longer honor the promises made by the U.S. in The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. No such global entity is flawless (that is, beyond this or that criticism) in a post-Westphalian world order of nation-states subject to the cycles, manias, and crashes endemic to capitalist globalization and marked by post-imperialist world powers competing for hegemony. But WHO’s mandate, purposes, and programs are absolutely essential for all countries and peoples of the world, serving as a vivid reminder of our shared vulnerabilities, capacities, and powers as human animals on this planet. The desiderata of public health* cannot be satisfied by any nation alone, as diseases, epidemics, and pandemics do not respect geopolitical borders, and global coordination of the requisite scientific and medical expertise has long been demonstrated absolutely necessary to achieving the common goals of health and safety, human welfare and well-being, as well as human development and flourishing.

* * *

Here is an introduction to WHO from Wikipedia:

“The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. It is part of the U.N. Sustainable Development Group. The WHO Constitution, which establishes the agency’s governing structure and principles, states its main objective as ensuring ‘the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health.’ It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with six semi-autonomous regional offices and 150 field offices worldwide.

The WHO was established in 7 April 1948, which is commemorated as World Health Day. The first meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the agency’s governing body, took place on 24 July 1948. The WHO incorporated the assets, personnel, and duties of the League of Nations’ Health Organisation and the Office International d’Hygiène Publique, including the International Classification of Diseases. Its work began in earnest in 1951 following a significant infusion of financial and technical resources.

The WHO’s broad mandate includes advocating for universal healthcare, monitoring public health risks, coordinating responses to health emergencies, and promoting human health and well-being. It provides technical assistance to countries, sets international health standards and guidelines, and collects data on global health issues through the World Health Survey. Its flagship publication, the World Health Report, provides expert assessments of global health topics and health statistics on all nations. The WHO also serves as a forum for summits and discussions on health issues.

The WHO has played a leading role in several public health achievements, most notably the eradication of smallpox, the near-eradication of polio, and the development of an Ebola vaccine. Its current priorities include communicable diseases, particularly HIV/AIDS, Ebola, malaria and tuberculosis; non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and cancer; healthy diet, nutrition, and food security; occupational health; and substance abuse.

The WHA, composed of representatives from all 194 member states, serves as the agency’s supreme decision-making body. It also elects and advises an Executive Board made up of 34 health specialists. The WHA convenes annually and is responsible for selecting the Director-General, setting goals and priorities, and approving the WHO’s budget and activities. The current Director-General is Tedros Adhanom, former Health Minister and Foreign Minister of Ethiopia, who began his five-year term on 1 July 2017.

The WHO relies on assessed and voluntary contributions from member states and private donors for funding. As of 2018, it has a budget of over $4.2 billion, most of which comes from voluntary contributions from member states.” [….]

* * *

Here are a handful of titles that help one understand the immense importance of this UN agency responsible for international public health:

Fidler, David P. International Law and Infectious Diseases. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1999.
Fidler, David P. International Law and Public Health: Materials on and Analysis of Global Health Jurisprudence. Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publ., 2000.
Fidler, David P. The Challenges of Global Health Governance. New York: Council of Foreign Relations, 2010.
Fidler, David P. and Lawrence O. Gostin. Biosecurity in the Global Age: Biological Weapons, Public Health, and the Rule of Law. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Gostin, Lawrence O. Global Health Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

* Please see the following titles by Lawrence O. Gostin:

Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint (University of California Press, 3^rd ed., 2016)
Public Health Law and Ethics: A Reader (University of California Press, 3^rd ed., 2018)
Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Principles of Mental Health Law & Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Global Health Law (Harvard University Press, 2014)

Alternative and Complementary Medicine: a select bibliography (this post is not related to the coronavirus pandemic)

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 16:44:03 +0000

Alternative and Complementary Medicine bibliography

Apologia

This compilation is largely confined to books, in English. Its original motivation can be traced back to my research and unpublished writing on Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM) in conjunction with an abiding interest in Buddhism, in particular its relevance to the mind and human psychology. The inclusion of literature on the “placebo effect” is not intended to suggest or imply that alternative and complementary medicine is, in the end, simply reducible to evidence of placebo effects, although, as in (scientific) biomedicine, there is undoubtedly an awareness of its possible and probable role in the healing and health of both body and mind. The title of this bibliography—specifically, the term “complementary”—should make it clear that I don’t think alternative medicine and healing traditions are inherently superior to modern biomedicine, indeed, in my own case, I would likely seek out, in the first instance, a physician trained in modern biomedicine for diagnosing the symptoms of an illness that might afflict me; but there are a class (the boundaries of which are not well-defined) of bodily and mental ailments or afflictions that may be more amenable to the healing arts of alternative medicinal traditions, and some of these may even work in tandem (hence their status as ‘complementary’) with conventional biomedical treatments. For now, we might note with the neurosurgeon and professor of biomedicine, Grant Gillett, that these alternative or complementary models of medicine and healing “ask more subtle questions of the healing professions than can be framed by orthodox allopathic [science-based] medicine.”

Analogically and roughly speaking, I suspect alternative medicine is to biomedicine the way biomedical or bio-statistical epidemiology is to social epidemiology: the analogy is not perfect, if only because it does not encompass mind-body differences, as the mind—or the heart-mind, spirit, psyche/soul—falls more readily and overtly within the province of alternative medicine, although a subsidiary analogy finds the part played by “the mind” in alternative medicine vis-à-vis the body structurally similar to “social conditions” vis-à-vis individual persons (who are at once unique and similar to others individuals for the purposes of biomedicine). Finally, the fact that I assembled this bibliography during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is a coincidence bereft of meaning, save for the fact that I am homebound a bit more than usual and thus found the requisite discretionary time to put it together.

Bibliographies with more or less family resemblance to this compilation (embedded links) : (i) Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction; (ii) Bioethics; (iii) Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason; (iv) Buddhism and Psychoanalysis; (v) Death and Dying; (vi) Diseases, Epidemics, and Pandemics; (vii) Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice; (viii) Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy; and (ix) Sullied (Natural and Social) Sciences.

The three principal conditions of good (physical and mental) health

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 14:03:45 +0000

The following is based on one section from Lawrence O. Gostin’s Global Health Law (Harvard University Press, 2014: 414-419). I have edited and re-written some of this material, while what remains—in quotes—is from his book.

The three principal conditions of good (physical and mental) health:

The first encompasses the full range of socio-economic and political determinants that undergird the generalized welfare, well-being, and self-fulfillment or happiness (or eudaimonia) and thus make up the “full set of conditions in which people live and work.” Prominent among these determinants are education, income, housing, social inclusion, personal liberties, and robust forms of social and economic equality which are best realized through democratic principles, methods, and processes: participatory, representative, or deliberative (ideally, and sometimes in praxis, all three are evidenced in mutual, complementary and systematic form). In this case, underlying or “upstream” determinants: poverty (absolute or relative inequality), racist discrimination, illiteracy, lack of adequate shelter, indeed, failure to satisfy what are commonly thought to be basic needs, are “are linked to more direct (or downstream) risk factors” such as smoking, alcoholism and drug addiction, exposure to environmental pollutants (especially air pollution), domestic violence, endangerment in the workplace, stress, and so forth any and all combinations of which can lead to injury, sickness, chronic illness, disease(s), depression (and other kinds of mental illness), high infant and maternal mortality rates and lowered life expectancy. The “safety net” metaphor does not fully capture the full panoply of necessary determinants and conditions here.

The “second essential condition for good health is the provision of health care services to all individuals,” universal health care, as we say. Such “comprehensive coverage includes clinical prevention (e.g., testing, counseling, and vaccinations), medical treatment for injury and disease, and supportive care” for those who are in pain or suffering in body and/or mind. “These services range from primary care to emergency and specialized services, through to rehabilitation and pain relief. Universal health coverage aims to make all vital health care services available, affordable, and accessible to the entire population—poor/rich, physically and mentally disabled, and urban/rural. Effective health systems require health care facilities (clinics, hospitals, nursing homes), human resources (e.g., doctors, nurses, health care and community workers), and essential medicines [and other therapies] to serve the full range of needs within the population.”

The third condition, inextricably intertwined with the previous two above, is the “provision of public health services,” supported in the first instance by a national or federal government, in cooperation and collaboration with states, local and community governments and decision-making institutions and bodies. This provision of public health services should be suffused with a humane spirit and heartfelt sense of humanistic social solidarity based on individual human dignity and our shared human condition (or vulnerabilities) and nature as human animals. “Classical population-based services include hygiene and sanitation, portable water, clean air, vector abatement, injury prevention, health education, and tobacco and alcohol control [and gun control?]. Conceived more broadly, they include built environments conducive to good health such as green spaces for recreation, [aesthetic enjoyment, rest, solitude, community gardening], walking and bike paths, access to nourishing foods [including grains, fresh fruits and vegetables] ….” Public health services as such are an indispensable part of an adequate public health infrastructure. A robust public health system is predicated on a “habitable, safe environment.”

Suggested Reading (with an imposed constraint of 12 titles):

Berkman, Lisa F. and Ichiro Kawachi, eds. Social Epidemiology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2^nd, 2014.
Bhopal, Raj S. Ethnicity, Race, and Health in Multicultural Societies: Foundations for Better Epidemiology, Public Health, and Health Care. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Callahan, Daniel. The Five Horsemen of the Modern World: Climate, Food, Water, Disease, and Obesity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Daniels, Norman. Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Farmer, Paul, Jim Yong Kim, Arthur Kleinman, and Matthew Basilico, eds. Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013.
Fidler, David P. International Law and Public Health: Materials on and Analysis of Global Health Jurisprudence. Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publ., 2000.
Gillett, Grant R. Bioethics in the Clinic: Hippocratic Reflections. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Gostin, Lawrence O. Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
Gostin, Lawrence O. Global Health Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Gostin, Lawrence O., ed. Public Health Law and Ethics: A Reader. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
Valles, Sean A. Philosophy of Population Health: Philosophy for a New Public Health Era. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Venkatapuram, Sridhar. Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011.

Relevant bibliographies freely available on my Academia page: (i) Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction; (ii) Alternative and Complementary Medicine; (iii) Bioethics; (iv) Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason; (v) Buddhism and Psychoanalysis; (vi) Death and Dying; (vii) Diseases, Epidemics, and Pandemics; (viii) Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice; (ix) Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy; and (x) Sullied (Natural and Social) Sciences.

Paul Leroy Robeson (April 9, 1898 – January 23, 1976)

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 13:22:33 +0000

“Robeson Leroy Robeson was an American bass baritone concert artist and stage and film actor who became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism. Educated at Rutgers College and Columbia University, he was also a star athlete in his youth. He also studied Swahili and linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London in 1934. His political activities began with his involvement with unemployed workers and anti-imperialist students whom he met in Britain and continued with support for the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War and his opposition to fascism. In the United States he also became active in the civil rights movement and other social justice campaigns. His sympathies for the Soviet Union and for communism, and his criticism of the United States government and its foreign policies, caused him to be blacklisted during the McCarthy era.”*

Duberman, Martin Bauml. Paul Robeson (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).
Goodman, Paul. Paul Robeson: A Watched Man (Verso, 2013).
Horne, Gerald. Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (Pluto Press, 2016).
Robeson, Paul (Philip S. Foner, ed.) Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, and Interviews (Citadel Press/Carol Publishing Group, 2002, first publ. in 1978).
Sparrow, Jeff. No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson (Scribe, 2018).

* In the words of Paul Buhle, “For Robeson and his admirers—including younger generation figures such as Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee, who all took part in Freedomways magazine and honored Robeson in banquets during his last years—the Communist Party’s Popular Front had presented an interracial and global coalition whose loss left a vacuum. Long after the Soviet governments that made Robeson a symbol of anti-imperialism had collapsed, longer still since the glory days of the New Deal and the War Against Fascism, the sense of defeat, the grimness of the twentieth-century disappointment remains….”

Friedrich Engels, the English working class, and incipient social epidemiology

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 12:09:14 +0000

Friedrich Engels’ act of socialist sublimation on behalf of value-laden and principled social scientific description and causal explanation: “’I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to intercourse with plain working men,’ he explained.”

Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) was written during his 1842–44 stay in Manchester, the city at the heart of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, and “compiled from Engels’ own observations and detailed contemporary reports. After their first meeting in 1844, Karl Marx read and was profoundly impressed by the book.”

“[Engels] shows, for example, that in large industrial cities such as Manchester and Liverpool, mortality from disease (such as smallpox, measles, scarlet fever and whooping cough) was four times that in the surrounding countryside, and mortality from convulsions was ten times as high. The overall death-rate in Manchester and Liverpool was significantly higher than the national average (1 in 32.72, 1 in 31.90 and even 1 in 29.90, compared with 1 in 45 or 46).”

First, consider the description immediately below of what we now term “social epidemiology”¹ from Richard W. Miller’s Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and Social Sciences (1987). The reference to 19^th century Manchester immediately reminded me of Friedrich Engels’ “classic indictment” of this rapidly industrializing city in The Condition of the Working Class in England, hence our discussion of the book follows thereafter.

“In the organized pursuit of explanation, practical concerns may…dictate choice of a standard causal pattern. In the early nineteenth century, many investigators had come to explain the prevalence of certain diseases in certain places as due to filth and overcrowding. For example, the prevalence of tuberculosis in urban slums was understood this way. In these explanations, the microbial agent was not, of course, described. But the causal factors mentioned were actual causes of the prevalence of some of those diseases. If Manchester had not been filthy and overcrowded, tuberculosis would not have been prevalent. On the purely scientific dimension, acceptance of accurate environmental explanations probably did not encourage as many causal ascriptions as would a standard requiring explanation of why some victims of filth and overcrowding became tubercular, some not. Those who pressed the latter question were to lead the great advances of the germ theory. But in a practical way, the environmental explanations did a superior job, encouraging more important causal accounts. Guided by those accounts, sanitary measures produced dramatic reductions in tuberculosis and other diseases, more dramatic, in fact, than the germ theory has yielded. A perspicacious investigator might have argued, ‘We know that some specific and varied accompaniment of filth and overcrowding is crucial, since not every child in the Manchester slums is tubercular. But we should accept explanations of the prevalence of disease which appeal to living conditions. For they accurately, if vaguely, describe relevant causal factors, and give us the means to control the prevalence of disease.”²

Sridhar Venkatapuram summarizes the limitations of the prevailing biomedical (or bio-statistical) model of epidemiology, the model we’ve heard references to during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, although some journalists, medical experts, and astute observers have noted the differential toll the virus is taking on poorer and more vulnerable communities and groups (an example of the last being those incarcerated in jails and prisons), thus (inadvertently?) highlighting the constraints of that model:

“Three specific limitations of the prevailing model of disease aetiology are often at the centre of debates about the ‘paradigm crisis’ in epidemiology. These include its level of analysis, its inability to recognize distribution patterns, and its partially informed recommendations for policy. The current model, which evolved from the late-nineteenth-century germ theory of disease, recognizes three categories of causal factors. These factors include biological endowments, behaviours and external exposures to harmful substances or ‘agents.’ The resulting limitation of this model is that it operates only a single level, at the individual level, and expresses a form of explanatory individualism. Short causal pathways confined to the human body are studied, while the model precludes recognizing and supra-individual level factors or social processes as part of the longer causal chain in the production of disease. As a result, the model studies individuals in a vacuum and disconnected from other individuals; it is only focused on what happens on and within the skin of individuals.

Furthermore, populations are understood as just a collection of individuals with no emergent properties. Therefore, public or population health is just the summation of the health of individuals. An individual, proximate factor analysis is restricted in recognizing the longer causal pathways to disease in individuals and restricted in recognizing the causal factors of disease distribution in population.

The second limitation of the model is that it can only recognize certain patterns of distribution of disease and mortality across human beings. Because it can only group individuals according to biological features, behaviours, or external exposures, it has no internal source of information of grouping individuals by any other characteristics, namely, social characteristics. Grouping individuals according to social characteristics in this model would be seen as unscientific and political. Thus, the inability to group individuals according to social features precludes the model’s inability to analyse the possible causal impact of social conditions. [….] Epidemiology is interested in what causes diseases in human beings as organisms, not why disease is distributed unevenly in historically contingent and culturally specific social groups. The concern over distribution appears to be ‘normative,’ as it is about inequality, while the search for causation in individuals is seen to be scientific. [….]

The third limitation of the current model is that an explanatory model with restricted explanatory power and the limited capacity to recognize distribution patterns will prescribe only partially informed—and consequently incompletely effective—health policies.”³ [emphasis added]

The apparent contradiction or conflict between the “normative” concern over distribution and the “scientific” search for causation in and among individuals rests on a false dichotomy insofar as it fails to respect four interdependent principles from the American philosopher, E.A. Singer, Jr. (1873 – 1954), according to Hilary Putnam:

Knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of theories.
Knowledge of theories presupposes knowledge of facts.
Knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values.
Knowledge of values presupposes knowledge of facts.

Or, as Putnam himself put it in Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981), “every fact is value loaded and every one of our values loads some facts,” the argument for which was later filled out in Putnam’s The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 2002).⁴

In an article in The Guardian over ten years ago, Tristam Hunt⁵ wrote:

In the spring of 1863, toiling away at Das Kapital in the reading room of the British Museum, Karl Marx read again Friedrich Engels’s classic indictment of industrial Manchester, The Condition of the Working Class in England. He immediately wrote to his friend to re-congratulate him on a work of steely fury: ‘What power, what incisiveness and what passion drove you to work in those days. That was a time when you were never worried by academic scholarly reservations! Those were the days when you made the reader feel that your theories would become hard facts if not tomorrow then at any rate on the day after.’

Today, the power, incisiveness and passion of Engels's polemic remain undiminished. Far more so than Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present, Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class is the defining text of the British industrial experience. And, 150 years on, it speaks to our age with painful prescience—not only in its critique of the instability of the free market and the structural inequalities of British society, but in its unrivalled depiction of the inhumanity of capitalism. With Brazil, Russia, India and China experiencing just the kind of breakneck economic growth that transformed British society in the 1800s—villages turning into cities, peasants swapping fields for factories, and mass exploitation grinding out higher GDP—Engels’s polemic resonates with terrifying force.

The young Engels had in fact been sent to Manchester in 1842 precisely to rid him of radical sentiments. His father, a conservative textile manufacturer from the Rhineland, had been increasingly concerned about the circle of Young Hegelians Engels had been associating with in Berlin. Instead of dutifully performing his military service, he had succumbed to the beer rooms and lecture halls of Berlin University where the philosophies of Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach and David Strauss were debated with boozy gusto. All of which led him to abandon his Protestant faith for Feuerbach’s religion of humanity, before then falling in with the ‘communist rabbi’ Moses Hess who taught him that modern capitalism was just as dehumanising a force as Christianity. The solution, Hess suggested, was socialism: the abolition of private property and an end to the alienating effects of the money economy. And in the march toward socialism, England—where the industrial revolution had left a deep chasm between rich and poor and where the proletariat was most advanced—would provide the social kindling of revolution. Engels looked to use his two years in the north-west to marshal the material evidence he needed

From 1842-44, he worked during the day at the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, before plunging after hours into the Manchester underworld. ‘I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to intercourse with plain working men,’ he explained. He visited Owenite Halls of Science, spent time with Chartists, watched a brickmakers’ riot, and with his Irish lover Mary Burns sought out the human detritus of capitalist society. He found it on the south side of the city, just off Oxford Road, where some of Manchester’s 40,000 Irish immigrants huddled. Burns’s confreres were the most exploited, lowly paid and abused of all the city’s residents: ‘The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.’

Engels was relentless in charting the ‘social war’ waged by the middle class on the operatives of the industrial city. Workplaces—mills, mines, factories, farms—resembled crime scenes. ‘Women made unfit for childbearing, children deformed, men enfeebled, limbs crushed, whole generations wrecked, afflicted with disease and infirmity, purely to fill the purses of the bourgeoisie.’ He was inflamed by the Manchester middle classes. ‘I once went into Manchester with a bourgeois, and spoke to him of ... the frightful condition of the working people’s quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: “And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir.”’

Behind Manchester’s ‘planless, knotted chaos of houses’ there was a brutal logic to the urban form: ‘Cottonopolis’ was zoned along class lines to ensure that the rich never caught sight of what they had done to the poor. Manchester’s ‘money aristocracy’ lived in the ‘breezy heights’ of Cheetham Hill and Broughton and travelled along Deansgate into town ‘without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left.’ Engels understood that the city's spatial dynamics—its streets, houses, factories, and warehouses—were expressions of social and political power. The struggle between bourgeois and proletariat was tangible in street design, transport system and planning process.

Engels wrote Condition of the Working Class back home in Barmen, under the stern glare of his parents; it was first published in Leipzig in 1845. As such it formed part of a broader continental literature detailing the effects of advanced industrial growth on social conditions. Engels aimed the work at the Prussian bourgeoisie in the hope that such a stark depiction would lead them to choose socialism rather than Manchester’s free-market fundamentalism. [….]

The book now takes on a dimension beyond its obvious historical importance as a work of Victorian reportage and insight into the genesis of Marxism. In one of the largest mass migrations in history, some 120 million Chinese peasants have, since 1980, made their way from the country to the city, and to read accounts of contemporary urban China is to be thrown straight back into the cityscape of Engels. Cancer rates soar along polluted waterways; rivers turn black with industrial effluent; water is unsafe to drink; acid rain strips forests; some 300,000 die prematurely each year from air pollution; a generation of children is being brought up with high levels of lead poisoning. As China assumes the mantel of ‘workshop of the world,’ the special economic zones of Guangdong and Shanghai appear eerily reminiscent of 1840s Manchester and Glasgow. Compare and contrast, as the scholar Ching Kwan Lee has done, Engels’s account of employment conditions in 1840s Manchester—‘In the cotton and flax spinning mills there are many rooms in which the air is filled with fluff and dust .... The usual consequences of inhaling factory dust are the spitting of blood, heavy, noisy breathing, pains in the chest, coughing and sleeplessness .... Accidents occur to operatives who work in rooms crammed full of machinery’—with an account of working life by a Chinese migrant worker in Shenzhen in 2000: ‘There is no fixed work schedule. A 12-hour workday is [the] minimum. Our legs are always hurting. There is no place to sit on the shop floor. The machines do not stop during our lunch breaks. Three workers in a group will just take turns eating, one at a time ... The shop floor is filled with thick dust. Our bodies become black working day and night indoors. When I get off from work and spit, it’s all black.’ [….]

… [I]n the developed world, much of Engels’s analysis of the urban form reads as a telling critique of the gentrification programmes which entail the demolition of working-class neighbourhoods and curtailing the informal space of the city. Of course, the language has changed: policy-makers talk now of ‘sink estates’ rather than ‘slums,’ of ‘worklessness’ rather than ‘the residuum’ and in Britain the forces of progre

Diseases, Epidemics, and Pandemics: Basic Reading

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 23:00:23 +0000

I have said in online fora and to my dear wife that I would not be creating any more new bibliographies, only updating at least some of the existing lists. But I have changed my mind and hope this proves to be the sole exception. I was moved by the current pandemic to put together a basic list of requisite literature. Perhaps you will find a handful of titles of interest to explore (you might order books from your local independent bookseller): Diseases, Epidemics, and Pandemics: Basic Reading.

solitude, boredom … and spiritual exercises

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:46:55 +0000

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

This is an all-too-brisk and cursory introduction to a profound subject that depends on presuppositions, assumptions and premises having to do with human nature, metaphysics (and philosophy more broadly), psychology (individuation and self-realization), and spirituality. And it unavoidably involves matters that broach socio-economic, sociological, and political topics and questions (e.g., New Age nonsense, the commodification of mindfulness or ‘McMinduflness,’ and The Happiness Industry). The “suggested reading” that follows might whet your appetite for further exploration. See too the titles in these compilations: (i) Buddhism and Psychoanalysis; (ii) Human Nature and Personal Identity; and (iii) Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization.

For some folks, at least those of us who have our basic life-sustaining needs satisfied, down-time, alone time, or solitude can be—perhaps unintentionally or as a by-product effect—psychologically, morally and spiritually beneficial (these benefits are not necessarily immediate or obvious). Those familiar with the notion of “spiritual exercises” (found, for instance, in Stoicism, classical Yoga praxis, Buddhism, monastic or contemplative traditions, and other ‘therapies of desire’*) can avail themselves of this newfound discretionary time for such mental activity; there is of course a “bodily” dimension to such spiritual exercises, but it is by way of helping quiet the mind so as to incarnate or enhance the technique of prosoche (in short, ‘attention’) and self-examination generally, a fact often forgotten or ignored in contemporary forms of yoga practice which tend to emphasize its purely physiological or gymnastic benefits. There is nothing intrinsic to such spiritual praxis that renders it “quietist” in the sense that necessitates or implies abstinence or withdrawal from political involvement and action. On the contrary, some practitioners, be they Catholics, Buddhists, or agnostics, for example, will testify to its various virtues and values for persistent, principled, and courageous political action. Moreover, even episodic or sustained feelings of boredom (which can occur in conjunction with the aforementioned ‘exercises’) may likewise have unintended or surprisingly beneficial psychological and creative effects, as broached in this post from last year.

* A nice introduction to the notion of “spiritual exercises” is found in the first chapter of John Cottingham’s The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (see below).

Suggested Reading:

Bloch, Ernst (Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, trans.) The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
Capps, Walter. The Monastic Impulse. New York: Crossroad, 1983.
Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013.
Desikachar, T.K.V. and Hellfried Krusche (Anne Marie Hodges, trans.) Freud and Yoga: Two Philosophies of Mind Compared. New York: North Point Press, 2014.
Fiordalis, David V., ed. Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path. Berkeley, CA: Mangalam Press, 2018.
Ganeri, Jonardon and Clare Carlisle, eds. Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Gardiner, Michael E. and Julian Jason Haladyn, eds. Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2016.
Goodin, Robert E., et al. Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Haldane, John. “On the very idea of spiritual values,” in Anthony O’Hear, ed. Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000: 53-71.
Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Hoffer, Axel, ed. Freud and the Buddha: The Couch and the Cushion. London: Karnac Books, 2015.
Horney, Karen. Self-Analysis. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1942.
Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.
Kakar, Sudhir. Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2008.
McGhee, Michael. Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
O’Brien, Wendell. Boredom: A History of Western Philosophical Perspectives, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2009 (London: Faber & Faber, 1952).
Rojek, Chris. Capitalism and Leisure Theory. New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985.
Rojek, Chris. The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2010.
Rose, Julie L. Free Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Russell, Bertrand. “In Praise of Idleness,” in Russell’s In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2004 (1935).
Schor, Juliet B. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Shippen, Nichole Marie. Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Storr, Anthony. Solitude: A Return to the Self. New York: Free Press, 1988.
Svendsen, Lars (John Irons trans.) A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books, 2005.
Toohey, Peter. Boredom: A Lively History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

The reckless, anti-democratic and pathological rhetoric of President Trump

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 11:25:56 +0000

Given his public symptomatic display of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, we should not be surprised at Trump’s habitual rhetorical reliance in public speeches upon crude, hyperbolic, and often child-like adjectives and metaphors with corresponding homologous and associationist thinking: mistaking bigness for greatness; the quantitative valuation—in monetary or commodity terms—of virtually everything; obsessively tying together competition, size and success; the attraction of novelty (often mistaken for creativity); the thirst for sensationalism; an overweening sense of privilege and superiority (hence the megalomania and related plutocratic and kleptocratic dispositions) rooted in a lifelong fascination with power born of phantasies, illusions, and delusions, the harm of which is exacerbated by mendacious Manichean political propaganda within an overarching ideological framework of racist, xenophobic, and religious (i.e., right-wing evangelical Christian) nationalism. Sycophantic Republican Party politicians act in shameless collaboration with the often rabidly irrational, ill-educated, and authoritarian-minded members of that portion of the electorate that serves to protect and polish the fragile glass-like membrane that constitutes the president’s ego; together they exhibit pathological symptoms of a body politic exemplifying the dark side of the maxim “like attracts like.” As Thomas Singer writes in his contribution to the edited volume by Bandy X. Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2017: 281), “There are ways in which Trump mirrors, even amplifies, our collective attention deficit disorder, our sociopathy, and our narcissism. Therefore, this is less about diagnosing a public figure than about recognizing our own pathology.”*

Below is a sampling of the President’s language from one of the daily briefings (March 26) on the coronavirus pandemic. But first, a collection of stock adjectives and recent phrases from the President:

fantastic; terrific; great; unprecedented; never been seen before; like you’ve never seen; nothing like this; incredible; wonderful; the biggest; the largest; the best; we’re doing what’s never been done before; we inherited a mess; things will be terrific; it’s big and beautiful; it will be greater than ever before; we have the greatest healthcare system in the world; we have the greatest economy in the world; as I keep saying, it’s a hidden enemy….

”It’s a great point of leverage; it’s a great negotiating tool”
“there’s tremendous spirit from people and tremendous spirit with respect to these companies”
“And they’re all working very hard to produce product—different—all different products. We had very little product when we came. We built it up, and we’ve — we give it away as fast as we can to the different states. We’re also, as you know, building numerous hospitals and medical centers throughout certain areas in New York.”
“I’m working very hard on New York.”
“It’s really, by far, our biggest problem. Maybe it will be; maybe it won’t be.”
“We’re also doing some very large testings throughout the country. [….] [T]hey’ve done a very good job on testing, but we now are doing more testing that anybody, by far.”
“We do more in eight days than they do in eight weeks. And we go up, on a daily basis, exponentially. So, it’s really good.”
“But we have a tremendous paid sick leave provision for workers at no cost at all to the employers. And that’s a big thing: no cost to the employers.”
“But this is certainly, in terms of dollars, by far and away the biggest ever, ever done. And that’s a tremendous thing because a lot of this money goes to jobs, jobs, jobs, and families, families, families.”
“Nothing like that has ever been done in our country.”
“It’s a doubling up. $27 billion to build up the Strategic National Stockpile with critical supplies, including masks, respirators, pharmaceuticals, and everything you can imagine—because it was very depleted, like our military was depleted. Now we have a brand-new military. Never had a military like this. We have equipment either coming or it's already come. For the most part, it's already come. But we have a lot of things that will soon be coming—planes, missiles, rockets, lots of things. But the stockpile was very depleted, like everything else.”
“And I don’t think it’s going to end up being such a rough patch. I think it’s going to, when we open—especially, if we can open it—the sooner, the better—it’s going to open up like a rocket ship. I think it’s going to go very good and very quickly.”
“But I’ll tell you, the nonprofits have been fantastic; they’ve been great. They’re great people, actually. I know a lot of them.”
“We have 150 countries—over 150 countries where you have this virus. And nobody would ever believe a thing like that’s possible.”
“Nobody could have ever seen something like this coming….”
“It’s been incredible, how we’ve done. Remember this: More tests than anybody, by far.”
“And the news, the reporters, the media always likes to bring South Korea—they called me and they told me, ‘It’s amazing. Your testing procedures are amazing.’ Plus, we have a test that’s a very high-level test, and it’s a test that’s very accurate.”
“It’s hard not to be happy with the job we’re doing—that, I can tell you.”
“So now we will hear from our great Secretary of the Treasury. He has been working rather hard, I will tell you. Steve Mnuchin is a—he’s a fantastic guy and he loves our country, and he’s been dealing with both sides—Republican and Democrat. He, sort of, lived over in that beautiful building. It’s a very beautiful building. To me, one of the most beautiful buildings, actually, in the world. And he’s gotten to know it, Steve, very well.”

* See too, Lene Auestad, ed. Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (London: Karnac Books, 2014).

Suggested Reading:

Alford, Ryan. Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
Dahl, Robert A. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (Yale University Press, 2^nd ed., 2003).
Fontana, Benedetto, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, eds. Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
Garsten, Bryan. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006).
Gilbert, Alan. Democratic Individuality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Goldberg, Michelle. Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006).
Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton University Press, 2016).
Greenberg, Karen J. Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, 2016).
Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
Johnston, David Cay. The Making of Donald Trump (Melville House, 2016).
Klein, Naomi. On The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (Simon & Schuster, 2019).
Lin, Ken-Hou and Megan Tobias Neely. Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance (Oxford University Press, 2020).
MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains (Viking, 2017).
Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Anchor Books, 2017).
Pettigrew, Thomas F. “Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters,” Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2017): 107-116.
Piketty, Thomas (Arthur Goldhammer, trans.) Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
Seidel, Andrew L. The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American (Sterling, 2019).
Therborn, Göran. The Killing Fields of Inequality (Polity Press, 2013).
Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
Wills, Garry. Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (Penguin Press, 2010).

Ten Essential Books on Contemporary Democratic Theory and Praxis

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 14:50:13 +0000

Apologia

I made this list within the somewhat arbitrary constraint of ten titles, so as to render it manageable, which of course means a number of different works might have made it onto a compilation such as this if composed by someone else familiar with the requisite literature. I imagined myself teaching a two-part graduate level seminar (which has never happened nor will happen), relying on five books for each quarter or semester. The bias here is toward more theoretically informed works, but any theory deserving of the appellation is well informed by historical and sociological knowledge and chock full of philosophical and psychological presuppositions and assumptions. And the emphasis is on contemporary democratic theory and praxis. These titles should be deemed fundamental to anyone concerned about the necessary and possible meanings of the adjective “democratic” in the term “democratic socialism,” even if our authors are not directly speaking to the subject of socialism.

Incidentally, we use the phrases “democratic capitalism” and “democratic socialism” with regard to democracy qualifying respective forms of political economy, which tends to insinuate the relative importance of political economy vis-à-vis democratic organization of our individual, social, and political lives, justified in large measure by its historical and descriptive salience. But it is perhaps more accurate and thus warranted to speak of “capitalist democracy” and “socialist democracy” (the latter of course distinguishable from ‘social democracy’). Consider, for example, the fact that the adjective “capitalist” here better captures the nature and scope of the severe limitations when not contradictions, distortions, and deformations of a would-be democratic polity and civil society attributable to capitalism. Socialist democracy, on the other hand, represents the historical, moral, and political endeavor to systematically and structurally overcome those contradictions, distortions, and disfigurations in a manner in keeping with the ideals, principles, and values, as well as the institutions, methods, and processes we consider intrinsic to democratic theory (sometimes better, ‘philosophy’). In short, socialist democracy is democracy deepened and extended so as to better enable our pursuit of justice, to equalize our essential liberties or freedoms, and enhance the probabilities for the mutual dialectical realization of individuality and community (in the logic and spirit of a gender-neutral fraternité), what the late David L. Norton referred to as eudaimonistic individualism (J.S. Mill preferred the term ‘individuality’ so as to distinguish it from the typically pejorative philosophical and psychological connotations associated with the word ‘individualism’):

“[E]udaimonism [a fortuitous conjunction, if you will, of happiness and self-fulfillment] is a variety of moral individualism, unlike some forms of individualism it does not conceive of individuals as ‘atomic,’ that is, as inherently asocial entities. [….] [It] recognizes persons as inherently social beings from the beginning of their lives to the end but contends that the appropriate form of association undergoes transformation. As dependent beings, persons in the beginning of their lives are social products, receiving not merely material necessities but their very identity from the adult community. The principle of association is the essential uniformity of associates, usually expressed in terms of basic needs. Subsequent moral development leads to self-identification and autonomous, self-directed living, but is associative as an interdependence based in a division of labor with respect to realization of values. The principle of this form of association is the complementarity of perfected differences. Accordingly, the meaning of ‘autonomy,’ if the term is to be applicable, must be consistent with interdependence. … [It thus] means, not total self-sufficiency, but determining for oneself what one’s contributions to others should be and what use to make of the values provided by the self-fulfilling lives of others. [In such cases,] [t]o follow the lead of another person in a matter he or she understands better than we is not a lapse from autonomy to heteronomy but a mark of wisdom. [….]

[T]he self here is conceived of as a task, a piece of work, namely the work of self-actualization [or what both J.S. Mill and Marx referred to as ‘self-realization’]. And self-actualization is the progressive objectivizing of subjectivity, ex-pressing it into the world. This recognition exposes as a fallacy the modern use of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ as mutually exclusive categories. Every human impulse in subjective in its origin and objective in its intentional outcome, and because its outcome is within it implicitly from its inception, there is nothing in personhood that is ‘merely subjective,’ that is, subjective in the exclusive sense. Narcissism (with which individualism is sometimes charged) is a pathology that tries to amputate from subjectivity its objective issue. It is real enough, and was a propensity of some romantic individualisms that judged experience by the occasions it affords for the refinement of the individual’s sensibilities. But the supposition that individualism is narcissistic subjectivism represents (again) a failure to recognize divergent kinds of individualism [again, Mill would say ‘individuality’]. For eudaimonistic individualism, it is the responsibility of persons to actualize objective value in the world.” And of course the assumption and attribution of such responsibility requires, in the first instance, the necessary “resources,” “primary social goods” (John Rawls), and “capabilities” or “functionings” (Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum), hence the pride of place accorded to democratic government and governance. Please see Norton’s Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (University of California Press, 1991), for an explanation of “eudaimonistic ethics,” “developmental democracy” (in reference to the individual), and the specification of the notions of “right” tradition and community (as the ‘sociality of true individuals’). The latter topic should be read alongside the discussion of various kinds of “community” in Goodin’s Reflective Democracy (2003).

The reader interested in exploring the depth and breadth of the relevant literature should consult the bibliographies on (i) Liberalism, (ii) Democratic Theory, and (iii) Social Security and the Welfare State, available on my Academia page.

Elster, Jon, ed. Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Gilbert, Alan. Democratic Individuality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Goodin, Robert E. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice after the Deliberative Turn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008
James, Michael Rabinder. Deliberative Democracy and the Plural Polity. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
Landemore, Hélène. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 ed.
Richardson, Henry S. Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Urbinati, Nadia. Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Urbinati, Nadia. Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Teaching children about animals: “inconsistency” and “confusion mixed with hypocrisy”

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 22:59:09 +0000

Learning to be a Dutiful Carnivore

Dogs and cats and goats and cows,
Ducks and chickens, sheep and sows
Woven into tales for tots,
Pictured on their walls and pots.
Time for dinner! Come and eat
All your lovely, juicy meat.
One day ham from Percy Porker
(In the comics he’s a corker),
Then the breast from Mrs. Cluck
Or the wing from Donald Duck.
Liver next door from Clara Cow
(No, it doesn’t hurt her now).
Yes, that leg’s from Peter Rabbit
Chew it well; make that a habit.
Eat the creatures killed for sale,
But never pull the pussy’s tail.
Eat the flesh from ‘filthy hogs’
But never be unkind to dogs.
Grow up into double-think—
Kiss the hamster; skin the mink.
Never think of slaughter, dear,
That’s why animals are here.
They only come on earth to die,
So eat your meat, and don’t ask why.

—Jane Legge, originally published in British Vegetarian, Jan./Feb. 1969: 59.

I came across this delightful poem of moral psychological insight in a no less profound and important essay by Cora Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” in Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford University Press, 2004): 100.

A bibliography on animal ethics, rights, and law.

The latest coronavirus outbreak in China: from epidemic to pandemic? (updated links)

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 18:05:48 +0000

In an earlier post based on the work of Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, I made an analogical argument from China’s experience with the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1961) in order to highlight at least two factors relevant to the manner in which the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping has handled the COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) outbreak: “the absence of adversarial politics and open journalism” in contemporary China. At least some of the shortcomings of China’s handling of this latest viral disease can be traced to the authoritarian government’s failure to establish (institutionalize) at least these two components of any healthy democratic polity: freedom of the press and political opposition (the former perhaps more pressingly relevant that the latter). Here I want to broaden the examination of this coronavirus epidemic beyond China. After observations from yours truly, there are links to some articles and posts I’ve found helpful in attempting to understand the many questions and topics broached by this latest viral disease bordering on a pandemic.

It is rather disconcerting that one cannot find substantive analysis of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak that speaks from the vantage points provided by global health law (or international public health law, including international law and infectious diseases), the modern history of epidemics and pandemics, and an integrative biomedical and social determinants epidemiological model that goes beyond exclusive focus on disease (this might help explain various things, including why the disease has spread to certain countries rather than others: at one level, this has an obvious explanation, but I think there’s more to be said here; as well as why it appears, to date at least, it is more virulent in some countries rather than others) [a partial exception to this complaint is found here]. We might also attempt to explain why this new coronavirus broke out where it did and ask to what extent these same social, economic, and health conditions are more or less replicated elsewhere. There are of course other questions to be asked, but it seems there’s a dearth of needed analysis (however provisional or tentative) and comments from the relevant experts in these fields, at least in public fora (are the mass media in part responsible for this state of affairs?). Perhaps it is because they don’t want to be seen as interfering with or even contradicting public statements issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) and/or domestic government health agencies like the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC). Be that as it may, it would seem these experts have an indispensable role to play in spreading requisite information and knowledge that can aid both citizens and government officials in deliberative discussions (and as part of planning) that are a prelude to or explain probable or possible executive, administrative, and judicial decision-making of one kind or another tied to this viral outbreak.

More pressing, we have a Presidential administration that, at bottom, does not have genuine respect for and understanding of the various roles and functions of modern Liberal democratic government and administration (hence the routine campaign rhetoric demonizing those who ‘work in Washington’), including the various regulatory agencies and bureaucracies. In effect, this has led to fundamental and alarming failure—a clusterf*ck if you will—to grasp what it means to have the requisite competence and expertise in place within the respective domains of the federal bureaucracy and these agencies. (In fact, this administration has been hollowing out these agencies—including those relevant to the public health crisis—in favor of private, high finance, and corporate power.) This is glaringly and painfully obvious in the manner in which the President and his administration has handled the coronavirus outbreak: the lack of basic knowledge and understanding among official spokesperson (including those testifying to Congress), the inability to deal with unreasonable fears and rumors and properly inform the public of basic facts and statistics (involving as well how to interpret those), the failure to timely or properly coordinate agencies and officials with the national government and, in turn, with state governments and international bodies as well (such as WHO in the first instance) and, closely related to the foregoing, their conspicuous ineptitude when it comes to availing itself of the powers of public speech or democratic rhetoric. Proper appreciation of both democratic deliberative governance and government administrative power as two distinct yet necessarily linked political phenomena is absolutely essential in dealing with a public health crisis of this kind. To date, Trump and his administration has demonstrated utter incompetence in handling public health matters arising from the coronavirus outbreak. Trump’s naming Vice President Mike Pence to lead the country’s response to the coronavirus does not inspire confidence, indeed, I think it’s symptomatic of the regnant incompetence: “Pence once called global warming a ‘myth,’ downplayed the health risks of smoking, and as governor of Indiana, led his state into an HIV crisis by cutting funding to Planned Parenthood and initially opposing needle exchange programs. The vice president also has no medical experience.”
* * *
“The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned that the coronavirus outbreak could cause ‘severe disruption’ to the lives of ordinary Americans, and urged families and communities to start making preparations. The extent of the spread of the virus in the US is uncertain, as the CDC stopped the distribution of coronavirus testing kits after they were found to be flawed. Working testing kits are now available in only a handful of states, and it is not clear when new kits will be ready. Donald Trump told journalists in India on Tuesday that coronavirus is ‘very well under control in our country’ and ‘is going to go away.’ However, the head of immunization at the CDC, Nancy Messonnier, said that disruption to everyday life may be severe as the virus spreads among local communities. ‘As more and more countries experience community spread, successful containment at our borders becomes harder and harder,’ Messonnier said in a telephone press briefing. ‘Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country. It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more exactly when this will happen, and how many people in this country will have severe illness.’

In the absence of a vaccine or medicines, other methods would be needed to contain the spread of the disease, including possible school closures, and telecommuting where possible instead of travelling to workplaces. ‘I understand this whole situation may seem overwhelming, and that disruption to everyday life may be severe. But these are things that people need to start thinking about now,’ Messonier said. ‘I had a conversation with my family over breakfast this morning, and I told my children that – while I didn’t think they were at risk – right now, we as a family, need to be preparing for significant disruption of our lives.’

The CDC acknowledged that the test kits it began distributing to state authorities earlier this month have been found to be faulty. The agency said in a statement that ‘performance issues were identified related to a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents which led to laboratories not being able to verify the test performance.’”
* * *
“[Bruce] Aylward [a World Health Organization expert] said that across China, about 80% of cases are mild, about 14% are severe, and about 6% become critically ill. The case fatality rate — the percentage of known infected people who die — is between 2% and 4% in Hubei province, and 0.7% in other parts of China, he said. The lower rate outside of Hubei is likely due to the draconian social distancing measures China has put in place to try to slow spread of the virus. Other parts of China have not had the huge explosion of cases seen in Hubei, Aylward said.

A case fatality rate of between 2% to 4% rivals and even exceeds that of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which is estimated to have killed upwards of 50 million people. A case fatality rate of between 2% to 4% rivals and even exceeds that of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which is estimated to have killed upwards of 50 million people. Even a case fatality rate of 0.7% — which means 7 out of every 1,000 infected people would die — is sobering. It is seven times the fatality rate for seasonal flu, which is estimated to kill between 290,000 and 650,000 people a year globally.”

California coronavirus case could be first spread within U.S. community, CDC says.
Although longer than even some of my blog posts, this is well worth reading: “Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China.” Be sure to check the links to some indispensable articles.
The Outbreak of COVID-19 Coronavirus: are the International Health Regulations fit for purpose?
From CNN: Fox News hosts accuse Democrats and journalists of “weaponizing” coronavirus to attack Trump.
From The New York Times: U.S. Health Workers Responding to Coronavirus Lacked Training and Protective Gear, Whistle-Blower Says.
From the London Review of Books: “The Word from Wuhan.”
By James Hamblin in The Atlantic: “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus.”
From HuffPost: “Mick Mulvaney Claims The Media Is Covering Coronavirus Only To ‘Bring Down’ Trump.”

Essential Reading:

Anand, Sudhir, Fabienne Peter, and Amartya Sen, eds. Public Health, Ethics, and Equity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Fidler, David P. International Law and Public Health: Materials on and Analysis of Global Health Jurisprudence. Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 2000.
Fidler, David P. International Law and Infectious Diseases. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Fidler, David P. SARS, Governance and the Globalization of Disease. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Gostin, Lawrence O. Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
Gostin, Lawrence O. Global Health Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Gostin, Lawrence O., ed. Public Health Law and Ethics: A Reader. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
Preston, Richard. Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come. New York: Random House, 2019.
Quammen, David. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012.
Venkatapuram, Sridhar. Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011.
Wallace, Rob. Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016.
Watts, Sheldon. Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

Image: Feature China/Barcroft Media/Getty Images

William Godwin (1756–1836), 2: The harmful effects of opulence on political and legal institutions

Thu, 27 Feb 2020 21:32:40 +0000

“The opinions of individuals, and of consequence their desires, for desire is nothing but opinion maturing for action, will always be in a great degree regulated by the opinions of the community [J.S. Mill would soon write about the pernicious effects of this ‘regulation’ of individual opinion]. But the manners prevailing in many countries are accurately calculated to impress a conviction that integrity, virtue, understanding and industry are nothing, and that opulence is everything. Does a man whose exterior denotes indigence expect to be well received in society, and especially by those who would be understood to dictate to the rest? Does he find or imagine himself in want of their assistance and favour? He is presently taught that no merit can atone for a mean appearance. The lesson that is read to him is, ‘Go home; enrich yourself by whatever means; obtain those superfluities which are alone regarded as estimable; and you may then be secure of an amicable reception.’ Accordingly poverty in such countries is viewed as the greatest of demerits. It is escaped from with an eagerness that the most indelible disgrace. While one man chooses the path of undistinguishing accumulation, another plunges into expenses which are to impose him upon the world as more opulent than he is. He hastens to the reality of that penury the appearance of which he dreads; and, together with his property, sacrifices the integrity, veracity and character which he might have consoled him in his adversity. [….]

Whatever tends to decrease the injuries attendant upon poverty decreases at the same time the inordinate desire and the enormous accumulation of wealth. Wealth is not pursued for its own sake, and seldom for the sensual gratifications it can purchase, but for the same reasons that ordinarily prompt men to the acquisition of learning, eloquence and skill, for the love of distinction and the fear of contempt. How few would prize the possession of riches if they were condemned to enjoy their equipage, their palaces and their entertainments in solitude, with no eye to wonder at their magnificence, and no sordid observer ready to convert that wonder into an adulation of the owner? If admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lacquey [‘archaic spelling’ of lackey] of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be an [sic] universal passion [capitalism has proved to be uniquely and extraordinarily adept at exploiting these intra- and inter-personal psychological dynamics and the subsequent ‘universal passion’ sketched by Godwin here]. Let us consider in what respects political institution is rendered subservient to this passion.

First then, legislation is in almost every country grossly the favourer of the rich against the poor. [….] Thus in England the land-tax at this moment produces half a million less than it did a century ago, while the taxes on consumption have experienced an addition of thirteen million per annum during the same period. This is an attempt … to throw the burthen from the rich upon the poor, and as such is an example of the spirit of legislation. Upon the same principle robbery and other offences, which the wealthier part of the community have no temptation to commit, are treated as capital crimes, and attended with the most rigorous, often the most inhuman punishments. The rich are encouraged to associate for the execution of the most partial and oppressive positive laws; monopolies and patents are lavishly dispensed to such as are able to purchase them; while the most vigilant policy is employed to prevent combinations of the poor to fix the price of labour, and they are deprived of the benefit of that prudence and judgement which would select the scene of their industry.

Secondly, the administration of law is not less iniquitous than the spirit in which it is framed. [….] In England the criminal law is administered with greater impartiality [than in France] so far as regards the trial itself; but the number of capital offences, and of consequence the frequency of pardons, open a wide door to favour and abuse. In causes relating to property the practice of law is arrived at such a pitch as to render its nominal impartiality utterly nugatory. The length of our chancery suits, the multiplied appeals from court to court, the enormous fees of counsel, attorneys, secretaries, clerks, the drawing of briefs, bills, replications and rejoinders, and what has sometimes been called the ‘glorious uncertainty’ of the law, render it frequently more advisable to resign a property than to contest it, and more particularly exclude the impoverished claimant from the faintest hope of redress.

Thirdly, the inequality of conditions usually maintained by political institution is calculated greatly to enhance the imagined excellence of wealth. [….] [I]t cannot be pretended that even among ourselves the inequality is not strained so as to give birth to very unfortunate consequences. If, in the enormous degree in which it prevails in some parts of the world, it wholly debilitate and emasculate the human race, we shall feel some reason to believe that, even in the [comparatively] milder state in which we are accustomed to behold it, it is still pregnant with the most mischievous effects.”

William Godwin (1756–1836), 1: On obscene wealth and the evils of poverty

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 14:33:46 +0000

While I am not in concord with all of William Godwin’s arguments in his classic book on what is christened “philosophical anarchism,” his ruminations are often quite provocative and worthy of sustained consideration. I happen to believe Marxists or socialists generally, such as yours truly, can benefit from an open-minded consideration of anarchist thought and praxis, that is, an examination not viewed solely through the political polemics and ideological lens of an earlier era. I hope to occasionally share, as below, snippets from his famous work, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (first published in 1793,* with two later editions).

“A perpetual struggle with the evils of poverty [Godwin is likely speaking of ‘absolute’ poverty, but much of what follows might hold for ‘relative’ poverty as well], if frequently ineffectual, must necessarily render many of the sufferers desperate. A painful feeling of their oppressed situation will itself deprive them of the power of surmounting it. The superiority of the rich, being thus unmercifully exercised, must inevitably expose them to reprisals; and the poor man will be induced to regard the state of society as a state of war, an unjust combination, not for protecting every man in his rights and securing to him the means of existence, but for engrossing all its advantages to a few favoured individuals, and reserving for the portion of the rest want, dependence and misery.

A second source of those destructive passions by which the peace of society is interrupted is to be found in the luxury, the pageantry and magnificence with which enormous wealth is usually accompanied. Human beings are capable of encountering with cheerfulness considerable hardships when those hardships are impartially shared with the rest of the society, and they are not insulted with the spectacle of indolence and ease in others, no way deserving of greater advantages than themselves. But it is a bitter aggravation of their own calamity to have the privileges of others forced on their observation, and, while they are perpetually and vainly endeavoring to secure for themselves and their families the poorest conveniences, to find others reveling in the fruits of their labours. This aggravation is assiduously administered to them under most of the political establishments at present in existence. There is a numerous class of individuals, who, though rich, have neither brilliant talents nor sublime virtues; and, however highly they may prize their education, their affability, their superior polish and the elegance of their manner, have a secret consciousness that they possess nothing by which then can so securely assert their pre-eminence and keep their inferiors at a distance as the splendor of their equipage, the magnificence of the retinue and the sumptuousness of their entertainments. The poor man is struck with this exhibition; he feels his own miseries; he knows how unwearied are his effort to obtain a slender pittance of this prodigal waste; and he mistakes opulence for felicity. He cannot persuade himself that an embroidered garment may frequently cover an aching art.

A third disadvantage that is apt to connect poverty with discontent consists in the insolence and usurpation of the rich. If the poor man would in other respect compose himself in philosophic indifference, and, conscious that he possesses every thing[sic] that is truly honourable to man as fully as his rich neighbour, would look upon the rest as beneath his envy [like the Hellenistic Stoic?], his neighbor will not permit him to do so. He seems as if he could never be satisfied with his possession unless can make the spectacle of them grating to others [for an updated examination of this at once economic and psychological phenomenon, see the last two chapters and conclusion of Nicholas Xenos’ Scarcity and Modernity (Routledge, 1989)]; and that honest self-esteem, by which the inferior might otherwise attain to tranquility, is rendered the instrument of galling him with oppression and injustice. In many countries justice is avowedly made a subject of solicitation, and the man of the highest rank and most splendid connections almost infallibly carries his cause against the unprotected and friendless. In countries where this shameless practice is not established, justice is frequently a matter of expensive purchase, and the man with the longest purse is proverbially victorious. A consciousness of these facts must be expected to render the rich little cautious of offence in his dealings with the poor, and to inspire him with a temper overbearing, dictatorial and tyrannical. Nor does this indirect oppression satisfy his despotism. The rich are in all such countries directly or indirectly the legislators of the state; and of consequence are perpetually reducing oppression into a system, and depriving the poor of that little commonage of nature which might otherwise still have remained to them.”

* See Pelican Books, 1976 and Penguin Classics, 1985. The Introduction by Isaac Kramnick is quite helpful. See too Mark Philp’s Godwin’s Political Justice (Cornell University Press, 1986) and his entry on Godwin for the SEP.

Toward recognition and appreciation of laudatory incarnations of communism

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 14:32:33 +0000

The following snippet is from Nelson Mandela’s speech (three hours long!) in the defendant’s dock at the Rivonia Trial on 20 April 1964:

After reminding those present at the trial that “there has often been close cooperation between the ANC [African National Congress] and the Communist party [SACP],” Mandela points out that “African Communists could, and did, become members of the ANC, and some served on the national, provincial and local committees.” This should surprise no one, after all, “for many decades Communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as equals; who were prepared to eat with us, talk with us, live with us, and work with us. They were the only political group which was prepared to work with Africans for the attainment of political rights and a stake in society. [….] In the international field, Communist countries have always come to our aid. In the United Nations and other councils of the world the Communist bloc has supported the Afro-Asian struggle against colonialism and often seems to be more sympathetic to our plight than some of the Western powers. Although there is a universal condemnation of apartheid, the Communist bloc speaks out against it with a louder voice than most of the white world.”
[As for whether or not Mandela himself was ever a member of the South African Communist Party/SACP (formerly the Communist Party of South Africa/CPSA), I believe he was, at least for a time. On this hotly debated question, see the brief article by Tom Lodge at openDemocracy.

The history of the twentieth-century taught us, there is Communism, and there is communism (or ‘socialism,’ without entering here into the possible distinctions): the former exemplified by the Party-State Communism of the former Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.), which became systematically and ruthlessly brutal under Stalin, eventually more or less extending its power over Eastern and parts of Central Europe (e.g., Albania, Poland, Eastern Germany, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria); the People’s Republic of China (where it became known as Maoism); and North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). I’m not interested in rehearsing these countries’ specific failures and accomplishments with respect to meeting basic needs, industrialization, quality of life, human rights, democracy, and so forth, or their putative proximity to or distance from this or that kind of Marxism or Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, what have you (i.e., their fidelity to or deviation from orthodoxy). In addition, there has been quite a few communist guerrilla movements, organizations, political parties (some of them coming into power at the local level or with party representation in ruling governments or coalitions), and individuals, some even with democratic and/or Liberal sensibilities or moments, as it were, especially those that have chosen to participate in democratically elected government or wider national liberation and freedom struggles.

In short, let’s just say there are some expressions or incarnations of communism that we might find both politically and morally endurable if not laudatory, forms we can both live and die with in self-respect and dignity (as avowed communists or sympathetic or solidaristic observers). These forms are “humanistic” and humane. You may prefer to view them as exceptions to the rule and I think that is correct, but they are no less notable and hopeful exceptions for all that. Owing in part to the limitations of my own research and knowledge, I want to mention just two such incarnations (thus there are others, including throughout U.S. history) for now: the history of communism in the Indian state of Kerala and the South African struggle against apartheid. I hope at some point in the not too distant future to introduce these provocative examples, beginning with the former case first. For now, I leave you with the titles pictured above.

As we are in the middle of Black History Month, I’d like to end by noting the many contributions of African Americans and Blacks generally to morally ennobling, courageous, and laudatory forms of socialism and communism as evidenced in the following compilations:

Is the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1961) of any relevance to the COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) epidemic?

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 00:16:11 +0000

First, please read the extract below from an article in the Los Angeles Times. I have a few comments after the piece by way of a possible or provisional answer to our question. That is followed with an op-ed piece also in the Times by Orville Schell, again with comments. Finally, an article in The Guardian provides yet further evidence for the analogical argument I derived (or simply borrowed) from the work of Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen.

“Political officials were fired and infection cases skyrocketed in China on Thursday, reminding a nation stuck at home and scientists watching worldwide just how little is known about the coronavirus outbreak that has infected at least 60,000 and killed more than 1,300 people. Previous numbers had been reassuring, with daily confirmations of new infections dropping from several thousand to around 1,000. Officials in Beijing, increasingly worried about the economic toll of the outbreak, urged people to go back to work. State media ran editorials about resuming international flights to China.

But on Thursday the case numbers shot up. Chinese health authorities reported 15,152 new cases of COVID-19 — the World Health Organization’s new name for the viral disease — overnight. Hubei province, the epidemic’s epicenter, accounted for most of the increase: The number of infections went up by 14,840, more than nine times the 1,638 new cases reported there a day earlier.

Then came the purge. Beijing announced that both the Communist Party chiefs of Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province were fired and replaced with officials known for ‘stability maintenance’ and closely allied with party chairman and President Xi Jinping. The sackings followed earlier dismissals including the Hubei health commission’s party chief and its director. The under-reporting of the breadth of the epidemic, believed to have originated at a seafood market in Wuhan, has been blamed on officials who suppressed information on the outbreak to save face among their superiors.”

* * *
There have been numerous reports of unreliable information coming from China about the number of people possibly infected by COVID-19 (heretofore and commonly known as the ‘coronavirus’) as well as the precise number killed by the virus. The article evidences concerns on the part of the national government about the manner in which regional and local Communist Party officials in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province have handled this viral outbreak (this hardly means those officials bear complete responsibility for any mistakes in this regard). It helps to keep in mind that China remains an authoritarian country and a one-Party “Communist” State (in many respects, it is capitalist and only nominally socialist, let alone communist). Still, it is not the China of the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958-1962)* or the Cultural Revolution (roughly 1966-1976). The “Great Chinese Famine” took place during the former period (1958-1961), resulting in estimated deaths ranging from 16.5 million to 29.5 million (with a few later estimates considerably higher than this). As Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen wrote in Hunger and Public Action (Oxford University Press, 1989), “While the failure the Great Leap Forward came to be widely recognized after the initial euphoria, the existence of the famine oddly escaped open scrutiny and even public recognition, until very recently [that is, until the 1980s, with several important works on this particular famine published after 2000].” I don’t want to focus on the probable causes of the famine, although it is “clear that there was an enormous collapse of agricultural output and income.” As Drèze and Sen explain, the famine was linked with “policy failures—first in the debacle of the Great Leap Forward, then in the delay of rectifying the harm done, and along with that in accentuating distributional inequalities through enhanced procurement and uneven sharing.”

I want instead to highlight what Drèze and Sen have to say by way of the comparative historical experience of post-independence India in dealing with famines (incipient and actual). First, they point out that “China did not lack a delivery and redistribution mechanism to deal with food shortages as the famine threatened in 1958 and later. Despite the size of the decline of food output and the loss of entitlement of large sections of the population, China could have done a much better job of protecting the vulnerable by sharing the shortage in a bearable way.” But here is the most salient difference with the famine experiences of post-independence India:

“What was lacking when the famine threatened China was a political system of adversarial journalism and opposition. The Chinese famine raged on for three years without it being even admitted in public that such a thing was occurring, and without there being an adequate policy response to the threat. Not only was the world ignorant of the terrible state of affairs in China, even the population itself did not know about the extent of the national calamity and the extensive nature of the problems being faced in different parts of the country.

Indeed, the lack of adversarial journalism and politics hit even the government, reinforcing ignorance of local conditions because of politically motivated exaggeration of the crop sized during the Great Leap Forward and the fear of local leaders about communicating their own problems. The pretense that everything was going all right in Chinese agriculture and rural economy to a great extent fooled the national leaders themselves. [….] Aside from the government’s informational inadequacy, which made its own assessment of the situation disastrously wrong, the absence of an adversarial system of politics and journalism also that that there was little pressure of the government from any opposition group and from informed public opinion to take adequate anti-famine measures rapidly.” In short, what occurred in China happened in spite of post-revolutionary China’s “outstanding record of entitlement promotion and enhancement of living conditions.” Thus Drèze and Sen conclude that “the precise feature of absence of adversarial politics and open journalism … contributed to the occurrence, magnitude, and duration of the Chinese famines of 1958-61….”

Again, the China of today is in many important respects different from the China of the period during the Great Famine (e.g., information circulates faster and far wider than in the earlier period). And of course famines and deadly viruses are two rather different socio-economic and public health phenomena. But I want to suggest one analogy remains pertinent based on the above discussion: “the absence of adversarial politics and open journalism” in contemporary China. I suspect at least some of the possible shortcomings (if that is in fact what we have here) of China’s handling of this latest viral disease can be attributed to both of these characteristic features of a healthy democratic polity: freedom of the press and political opposition (the former perhaps more pressingly relevant that the latter).

* “The Great Leap Forward (Second Five Year Plan) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social campaign by the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1958 to 1962. Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people’s communes. Mao decreed increased effort to multiply grain yields and industry should be brought to the countryside. Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas based on Mao’s exaggerated claims. They collected ‘surpluses’ that in fact did not exist, leaving farmers to starve. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster caused by these policies, and national officials blamed bad weather for the decline in food output and took little or no action. The Great Leap resulted in tens of millions of deaths. A lower-end estimate is 18 million and upper estimates find that some 45 million people died. About the same number of births were lost or postponed, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest in human history.

* * *
In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, “Xi Jinping rules China by intimidation and police coercion,” Orville Schell discusses the authoritarian regime’s handling of the 2019-nCoV outbreak, invoking the relevance of the “so-called ‘mandate of heaven’” [tian ming 天命]:

“In this Confucian scheme of things, heaven was said to choose rulers of good moral standing, whose virtuous statecraft and proper ritual observations kept heaven and earth in balance and society in a state of peaceful harmony. The cosmic favor bestowed on these chosen leaders by heaven was evident for all to see in such things as a stable social order and a contented populace. However, if a ruler violated these Confucian proscriptions, throwing heaven and earth out of balance, heaven might signal its displeasure with earthquakes, floods, meteors, droughts, famines and epidemics.”

This concept (and its derivative incarnate conceptions) is not an easy one to understand: see, for example, the essays in Christopher Lupke, The Magnitude of Ming: Command, Allotment, and Fate in Chinese Culture (University of Hawai̒i Press, 2005). And when paired with tian (see the ‘study guide’ for Confucianism for a short entry on tian), the possible meanings can vary (whatever the extent of ‘family resemblance’) by textual and contextual source, philosopher, philosophical “school,” ideology, colloquial use, and so forth. I mention this largely because I don’t think Schell gets things quite right here, especially with regard as to how Confucius himself understood tian ming, although we can agree this idea plays a pervasive part in Chinese culture and discourse, the terms “ming” and “tianming” dating back, as Lupke reminds us, to pre-Qing China. Leaving that quibble aside, Schell spells out the possible role the idea of a “heavenly mandate” is playing (and may yet play) in the outbreak and epidemic spread in China of the most recent coronavirus, 2019-nCoV:

“The idea of mysterious forces in heaven determining who rules China is antithetical, of course, to much of what the Communist Party has sought to instill in the Chinese people over the 70 years it has been in power. Still, Confucian thinking and forms of deeply rooted superstition continue to hold widespread sway across the country, including in leadership circles where a Confucian revival is in fashion.

Disease outbreaks are especially tricky within the mandate of heaven construct. Epidemics are, of course, a normal part of life everywhere in the world. But in the case of a disease perceived as spreading because a ruler (and the officials who serve him) failed to sound an early warning for self-serving reasons, it is not difficult for ordinary people to conclude that their leaders have angered heaven by abandoning virtuous rule. It’s not yet clear whether the Chinese people will start to see President Xi Jinping through this lens in the current outbreak, but as the virus spreads from the central Chinese city of Wuhan out around China and the world, he is certainly being besieged by criticism, especially on social media.

Xi’s neo-Maoist toolbox is stocked largely with Leninist instruments of control. But viral outbreaks operate according to their own rules, in their own autonomous universes, and the 2019-nCoV epidemic is beyond the influence of the usual party methods: political censure, intimidation by surveillance, police coercion or even imprisonment. The 2019-nCoV outbreak is confronting the autocratic Xi with a foe as imperious, unyielding, unrepentant and uncontrollable as his own regime. Despite an unprecedented government response to the epidemic and the virtual lockdown of millions of Chinese citizens, this invisible adversary continues to proliferate. In so doing, it has stripped Xi of his aura of invincibility in ways that no political dissident, opposition party or revolutionary movement ever could. And his tardiness in sounding the alarm against it, and then his inability to contain it, at least to date, has led to a growing public outcry and an upwelling of skepticism about his form of techno-authoritarianism.

Whatever happens next, Xi’s latter-day mandate of heaven has been called into question, just as the Nationalist rule was called into question during the late 1940s. Back then, Mao Tse-tung was helped to power when Chiang Kai-shek was perceived as having lost his mandate after becoming mired in corruption, self-interest, tyranny and famine. Then, in 1976, the Tangshan earthquake and the death of Premier Zhou Enlai were viewed by many as heralding the end of Mao’s own revolutionary dynasty. And now with social media savaging the Party’s handling of the present crisis, another wave of error and blame has taken hold in China to challenge the once seemingly invincible Xi.”

And now the concluding paragraph, which I severed from the above because it resonates with what I wrote in response to the question, “Is the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1961) of any relevance to the COVID-19 epidemic?”

“The current upwelling of negative sentiment must be taken seriously, even though it is not year clear what it will signify. Xi has managed to gain unilateral command of the Party and state structures by rigidly controlling the flow of information. However, in the present crisis the absence of free-flowing information has helped allow this epidemic to spread and become such a menace. And Xi’s failure to contain it will affect how his people view both him and his latter-day heavenly mandate to rule, long after the threat of this spreading disease has been brought under control and the economy begins to recover.” [emphasis added]

I repeat, the China of today is in many important respects different from the China of the Great Famine (e.g., owing in part to social media, ‘information’ circulates faster and far wider than in the earlier period). And again, famines and deadly viruses are two rather different socio-economic and public health phenomena. Yet one analogy remains dist

“Aside from questions of ethics and morality, torture is illegal. It’s also ineffective.”

Thu, 13 Feb 2020 13:03:04 +0000

“Growing up in a Jack Bauer-ized world, many of my generation have an indelible belief that torture works. There’s a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, so Kiefer Sutherland has to put a knife through the kneecap of the bad guy, threaten their family, and after some intense moments, the terrorist will give up the location of the bomb. Of course, in the real world, it doesn’t work like that. Aside from questions of ethics and morality, torture is illegal. It’s also ineffective. This was the bipartisan conclusion in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report of 2014, based in part on studies done by the CIA itself, which previously eschewed torture in favor of more reliable methods of interrogation.

Apart from being ineffective, torture is often counterproductive. Many of the detainees subjected to it simply lied to get it to stop. For instance, a detainee named Abu Zubaydah, a Guantanamo detainee who was subjected to lengthy torture, gave false statements about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were subsequently used to justify the 2003 U.S. invasion of the country.

However, the legal issues we deal with as defense lawyers go far beyond torture. Take the case of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi accused of masterminding the attack on the U.S. guided missile destroyer Cole in 2000. In addition to torture, his case so far has involved: 1) the government having secret listening devices in defense attorneys’ spaces; 2) the trial being forced to go forward despite having an unqualified defense attorney; 3) the judge trying to get a job with the Justice Department while overseeing the case, resulting in a federal appeals court throwing out more than three years of rulings; and 4) confidential communications between the judge and defense attorneys being inadvertently turned over to the prosecution. And that’s just from one detainee’s case.

Others have waited nearly two decades without their day in court.”

Please see Aaron Shepard’s op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times (Feb. 13, 2020), “John Adams would have defended the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.” (Aaron Shepard is a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps.)

See too: Torture: Moral, Legal & Political Dimensions — A Basic Bibliography

The lamentable state of the Fourth Estate in increasingly brittle and would-be democratic polities

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 13:42:23 +0000

“Can Journalism Be Saved?”
Nicholas Lemann for The New York Review of Books (February 27, 2020)

Lemann more or less discusses fourteen books in this review essay! It is quite good, indeed, indispensable for a timely, critical overview of contemporary journalism.

“What has happened in journalism in the twenty-first century is a version, perhaps an extreme one, of what has happened in many fields. A blind faith that market forces and new technologies would always produce a better society has resulted in more inequality, the heedless dismantling of existing arrangements that had real value, and a heightened gap in influence, prosperity, and happiness between the dominant cities and the provinces. The political implications of this are painfully obvious, in the United States and elsewhere: in journalism, the poorer, the more nativist, the angrier parts of the country (which vote accordingly) are the ones where journalism can’t deliver on its public promise because of its severe economic constraints. Journalism is a case in which it’s going to take a whole new set of arrangements, and a new way of thinking, to solve the present crisis.”

The full article is here.

(It seems there are a few more titles I will need to add to the mass media bibliography!)

Please note: should it be hard to read the book covers above just put your browser over any of them and click to see a larger image.

What is socialism? (part 1)

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 17:23:07 +0000

While the possible motivations behind this meme (our picture above) are likely sincere and well-intended, the meme itself is misleading because inaccurate and confused. As Chris Maisano explained in short contribution to The ABC’s of Socialism (Verso and the Jacobin Foundation, 2016) when similar memes circulated the last time Sanders ran for President, we find listed policies, programs, and institutions as “ostensibly socialist programs whose only commonality is that Uncle Sam carries them all out:”

“Some directly serve social needs and involve some measure of income redistribution (public libraries, welfare, the WIC program [Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children], Social Security, food stamps). Some seem thrown in for no good reason…. Others are basic operational activities that any modern government, regardless of its ideological orientation, would carry out (the census, fire departments, garbage and snow removal, sewers,¹ street lighting). And still others involve the vast apparatus of coercion and force (police departments, the FBI, the CIA, the military, courts, prisons and jails).”

Several of the items listed in this meme do serve to remind us that a number of significant institutionalized programs and entitlements we now take for granted were once advocated by socialists (and social democrats), both here and abroad. In the words of John Nichols, “Socialist ideas, now so frequently dismissed not just by the Tories of the present age but by political and media elites that diminish and deny our history, have shaped and strengthened America across the past two centuries. Those ideas were entertained and at times embraced by presidents who governed a century before Barack Obama was born.”² Maisano continues:

“In a country as deeply and reflexively anti-statist as the United States [of course there are contradictions here, as the military-industrial complex and the criminal justice system attest], the identification of socialism with government is perhaps the worst possible rhetorical strategy the Left could adopt. ‘Like the DMV? Then you’ll love socialism!’ isn’t a slogan that will win many converts. More importantly, conflating all government action with socialism forces us to defend many of the most objectionable forms of state activity, including those that we would want to abolish in a free and just society.”

More harmful and insidious in both intention and effect is the recent “red-baiting” by ostensible liberals who should know better. The most appalling instance of this comes courtesy of recent comments by MSNBC host Chris Matthews, as reported here by Peter Wade for Rolling Stone, (February 8, 2020):

“MSNBC’s Chris Matthews’ fear of socialism sparked an unbelievable post-debate rant about a possible Bernie Sanders presidency where he suggested the candidate might have cheered socialist-led executions in Central Park during the Cold War. Matthews began by praising Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s Friday debate performance but then veered off by warning viewers and a live studio audience about his personal views on socialism. The host suggested that Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders might have supported the violence of past socialist leaders. Matthews said he’d keep his opinions on socialism to himself, but quickly reversed himself.

‘I have my own views of the word “socialist” and I’d be glad to share them with you in private. They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War,’ he said. Matthews continued, ‘I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?’ Then Matthews made the connection to Sanders, claiming ignorance about whether or not the candidate did, in fact, support violence and public executions.

‘So, I have a problem with people who take the other side. I don’t know who Bernie supports over these years,’ Matthews said. ‘I don’t know what he means by socialist.’ When MSNBC’s Chris Hayes interrupted saying that Sanders is ‘pretty clearly’ in favor of the type of socialism found in countries like Denmark, which Matthews had said was harmless, Matthews again suggested Sanders might have supported violent regimes, asking, ‘Is he? How do you know? Did he tell you that?’” [….]

This is the kind of ranting and raving rhetorical bullshit we’ve come to expect from Republicans, their devotees, and the President, but to hear it from a longtime liberal is quite disconcerting, to put it mildly. While Sanders has avowed identification with democratic socialism, his actual political views and policy proposals—as well as his record as a politician—are more accurately characterized, as Chris Hayes insinuated above, as social democratic, which is too often mistaken for or confused with democratic socialism in contemporary American politics (social democracy of course had its origins among democratic socialists on European soil).

And to make matters worse, or at least adding insult to injury, we now have another MSNBC veteran, Joe Scarborough, nodding his head in agreement when former Democratic strategist James Carville screams about the “leftward lurching” of the Democratic Party (having conveniently forgotten how far to the Right the party has moved across the political spectrum over several decades), a lurch that’s made him “scared to death” of the November 2020 election. Carville doesn’t like Sanders’ policy proposals and is frightened by what he tendentiously describes as his “ideological purity.” Carville is shrewd enough, however, to state he’ll vote for Sanders if he’s the party’s nominee: “Look, Bernie Sanders isn’t a Democrat. He’s never been a Democrat. He’s an ideologue. And I’ve been clear about this: If Bernie is the nominee, I’ll vote for him. No question. I’ll take an ideological fanatic over a career criminal any day. But he’s not a Democrat.” There is a robustly conservative and calcified wing of the Democratic Party (its contribution to neoliberalism) that has dominated the national political scene for some time now, and today it is compulsively chanting “Sanders can’t beat Donald Trump” and “He’s not electable” in the hope that it will act as a self-fulfilling prophecy or culminate in successful wishful thinking.

In a future post, I will recommend a short list of books I believe essential to thinking carefully, thoughtfully, and critically about what socialism has been, should be and yes, can be. For now, I will provide an all-too-brief synopsis that, for me at any rate, gets to the heart and soul of what socialism means. Minimally speaking, it takes us beyond “capitalist democracy,” that is, beyond the Welfare State in its three principal forms: liberal (including its most tenuous form: ‘neoliberal’), corporatist, and social democratic. Under socialism, the commodity logic, vagaries and ‘predatory nature’ (G.A. Cohen) of markets will no longer rule (directly and indirectly) our lives.

Socialism endeavors to instantiate the sundry benefits (with corresponding burdens) of representative, participatory, and deliberative democracy throughout all sectors of society (in the first instance, the commanding heights of economic production, corporations, banking, and other institutions of political economy). It is especially important with regard to principles of planning (at all levels of government or governance) and investment decisions, neither of which should be the institutional or structural prerogative of any de facto or de jure economic or political elite. The principles of egalitarianism and notions of community (as the late G.A. Cohen argued, one fundamental requirement of which is that ‘people care about, and, when necessary and possible, care for, one another, and too, care that they care about one another’) are paramount, the former an attempt to correct for disabilities, disadvantages (class and otherwise, including all those for which the person cannot be held reasonably responsible, be they natural or social) and (eliminable) vulnerabilities, while simultaneously enhancing a person’s capabilities and possibilities for individuation and self-realization (or what some term‘ self-actualization,’ the latter depending in the first instance on the former) as indicative of progress in individual freedom and moral autonomy.³

Socialist modes of organization depend on clarity with regard to principles of socialism. And before we spell out such principles, we should state forthrightly that socialism involves presuppositions and assumptions about human nature (e.g., that are, as we say, open-ended and ‘perfectibilist’ in the sense intended by both Godwin and Condorcet, in other words, this does not entail the achievement of ‘perfection’) and psychology as expressed in a number of different worldviews throughout history and around the globe. This does not imply anything heroic or especially virtuous on the part of everyone in a would-be socialist society, given that things are organized so as to take advantage of the better parts of our nature.

By way of conclusion, I quote from Jerry Cohen: “Any attempt to realize the socialist ideal runs up against entrenched capitalist power and individual human selfishness. Politically serious people must take those obstacles seriously. But they are not reasons to disparage the ideal itself. [....] The socialist aspiration is to extend community and justice to the whole of our economic life [where the ‘economic’ is understood in the sense of Marxian political economy, thus a much richer conception than that which dominates conventional economics].”

Notes
1. Yes, it is true that there was once something christened “sewer socialism” in this country, as socialist mayors in Milwaukee fought for sewers, among other things for the poor and working class. “Local political opponents dubbed these mayors ‘sewer socialists,’ a term that was soon embraced by them and their supporters. ‘Some Eastern smarties called ours a “Sewer Socialism,” wrote Emil Seidel, the first of the mayors, in office from 1910 to 1912. ‘Yes, we wanted sewers in the workers’ homes; but we wanted much, oh, so very much more than sewers.’ He and his successors, Daniel W. Hoan (1916–40) and Frank Zeidler (1948–60), sought to clean the city—both literally and metaphorically—tackling corruption while improving public works system and public health. [….] Seidel, who won the 1910 mayor’s race by a landslide, perhaps spelled out the platform most clearly in his memoir: ‘We wanted our workers to have pure air, we wanted them to have sunshine, we wanted planned homes, we wanted living wages; we wanted recreation for young and old; we wanted vocational education; we wanted a chance for every human being to be strong and live a life of happiness. And, we wanted everything that was necessary to give them that: playgrounds, parks, lakes, beaches, clean creeks and rivers, swimming and wading pools, social centers, reading rooms, clean fun, music dance song and joy for all.’” From Linda Poon’s article for CityLab, “Who Were Milwaukee’s ‘Sewer Socialist’ Mayors?”(March 13, 2019): https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/03/milwaukee-socialist-mayors-history-hoan-seidel-zeidler/584674/
2. John Nichols, The “S” Word: A Short History of and American Tradition … Socialism (Verso, 2011): xii.
3. It perhaps cannot go without saying, but it appears that many socialists, at least those with an intellectual disposition or philosophical bent, and others more intuitively or inchoately, believe that socialism can contribute to human happiness or eudaimonia (see the passage from former Milwaukee mayor Emil Seidel in the first note above), that it is capable of providing a necessary (thus not necessarily sufficient) condition for self-fulfillment and meaningful moral autonomy. Indeed, I would argue that socialism is a species of what David L. Norton defines as “eudaimonism,” which in turn, is a variety of moral individualism, and “unlike some forms of individualism it does not conceive of individuals as ‘atomic,’ that is, as inherently asocial entities [I happen to think such forms are fairly rare, at least in political philosophy, so this may be a straw man, although solipsistic ‘bootstrap-pulling’ and ‘self-made man’ ideological myths obdurately persist in conservative and libertarian circles]. [….] [E]udaimonism recognizes persons as inherently social beings from the beginning of their lives to the end but contends that the appropriate form of association undergoes transformation. As dependent beings, persons in the beginning of their lives are social products, receiving not merely material necessities but their very identity from the adult community. The principle of association is the essential uniformity of associates, usually expressed in terms of basic needs. Subsequent moral development leads to self-identification and autonomous, self-directed living, but is associative as an interdependence based in a division of labor with respect to realization of values. The principle of this form of association is the complementarity of perfected differences. Accordingly, the meaning of ‘autonomy,’ if the term is to be applicable, must be consistent with interdependence. … [It thus] means, not total self-sufficiency, but determining for oneself what one’s contributions to others should be and what use to make of the values provided by the self-fulfilling lives of others. [In such cases,] [t]o follow the lead of another person in a matter he or she understands better than we is not a lapse from autonomy to heteronomy but a mark of wisdom. [….] [M]oral development leads to self-identification and autonomous, self-directed living, but is associative as an interdependence based in a division of labor with respect to the realization of values. The self-fulfilling life of each person requires more values than he or she personally realizes and is dependent upon other for these values. The principle of this form of association is the complementarity of perfected differences. Accordingly this meaning of ‘autonomy,’ if the term is to be applicable, must be consistent with interdependence. [This] means, not total self-sufficiency, but determining for oneself what one’s contributions to others should be and what use to make of the values provided by the self-fulfilling lives of others. To follow the lead of another person in a matter he or she understands better than we is not a lapse from autonomy into heteronomy but a mark of wisdom. [….] [T]he self here is conceived of as a task, a piece of work, namely the work of self-actualization. And self-actualization is the progressive objectivizing of subjectivity, ex-pressing it into the world. This recognition exposes as a fallacy the modern use of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ as mutually exclusive categories. Every human impulse in subjective in its origin and objective in its intentional outcome, and because its outcome is within it implicitly from its inception, there is nothing in personhood that is ‘merely subjective,’ that is, subjective in the exclusive sense. Narcissism (with which individualism is sometimes charged) is a pathology that tries to amputate from subjectivity its objective issue. It is real enough, and was a propensity of some forms of romantic individualism that judged experience by the occasions it affords for the refinement of the individual’s sensibilities. But the supposition that individualism is narcissistic subjectivism represents (again) a failure to recognize divergent kinds of individualism. For eudaimonistic individualism, it is the responsibility of persons to actualize objective value in the world.” Socialism expands both the range and type of opportunities individuals acting alone and in concert (as members of civic groups and communities) have for fulfilling their responsibility to realize or actualize objective value(s) in the world.” Please see David L. Norton’s Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (University of California Press, 1991).

President Trump is well-versed in “projection” as a dark art of illiberal and anti-democratic rhetoric

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 13:37:13 +0000

I thought to share the following material because President Trump so routinely exemplifies “projection” in a pathological sense (given his megalomaniacal narcissism). The most recent instance of this occurred yesterday at the National Prayer Breakfast in which he indulged in his penchant for rambling, disjointed, and angry diatribes (another ‘stream-of-consciousness monologue’), apologizing to his family “for having to go through a phony, rotten deal by some evil and sick people,” namely, Democratic members of Congress and all those who assisted them in his impeachment. As the article in today’s Los Angeles Times notes, Trump “veered from sarcasm to scorn,” “toggl[ing] between brash triumphalism and maudlin self-pity, at times vindictive and vulgar, blithely attacking Democrats and basking in ovations from scores of Republican lawmakers, aides and political allies who crowded into the East Room of the White House.”

Here are a couple of definitions of “projection” from dictionaries for psychoanalysis:

Projection (it has a slightly different meaning in Kleinian thought with the notion of ‘projective identification’)—“A mental process whereby a personally unacceptable impulse or idea is attributed to the external world. As a result of this defensive process, one’s own interests and desires are perceived as if they belong to others, or one’s own mental experience may be mistaken for consensual reality. The ideas or feelings that a person cannot tolerate may unconsciously undergo a transformation before they are projected, as is often the case in paranoid projection.” [….] Projection is arguably “ubiquitous in both normative and pathological states. The difference lies in the degree to which one believes in the validity of the projection as one’s idea or another’s, that is, in one’s capacity for reality testing.”

Projection—“A mental operation by which feelings and desires that a subject rejects or refuses to recognise are treated as if they emanate from within another individual. It is a defensive operation in that the subject is able to disavow unacceptable affects and wishes. Projection figures prominently in, for example, racist attitudes, where disavowed ideas are attached to some hated group; in paranoia, where self-criticism is experienced as reproach from others, and in phobias, where some internal danger is felt to be emanating from an external source, which can then be avoided to produce a greater sense of safety.”

For more extensive treatments of and elaboration upon this fundamental Freudian concept, please see:

Laplanche, Jean and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.) The Language of Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 1988/first published in 1973 by Hogarth Press).
Moore, Burness E. and Bernard D. Fine, eds. Psychoanalysis: The Major Concepts (Yale University Press, 1995). See the word in the index, as it is not the subject of any one chapter topic.
Spillius, Elizabeth Bott, et al. The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (Routledge, 2011/based on R.D. Hinshelwood’s A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 2^nd, 1991).

Bible study (‘biblical literacy’) in public school classrooms

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 01:19:06 +0000

From an article in The Conversation (January 16, 2020):

“As the 2020 election approaches in the United States, President Donald Trump is adding school prayer to the list of contentious issues up for debate. After Trump promised in early January to ‘safeguard students’ and teachers’ First Amendment rights to pray in our schools,’ his administration announced new guidance on Jan. 16. The Department of Education will now require schools to document that they do nothing to impede student prayer. The Trump administration will also mandate that schools report student grievances related to prayer.

This announcement comes after a year in which officials in six states, including the populous swing state of Florida, considered bills permitting the study of the Bible in classrooms. Last January, President Trump tweeted his support for these laws. The evangelical proponents of the legislation insist that the Bible would be treated as a historical and literary source, not as a means of religious guidance. Critics oppose them for fear that their real intent is to teach Christianity. Efforts to return religion to public schools threaten to reignite one of the oldest debates about the separation of church and state.” [….]

Comment by yours truly:
The teaching of “biblical literacy” in public schools is a blatant violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, or so I would argue. In asserting this proposition, there need be no underlying or correlative claim that all religious worldviews are devoid of “truth” (e.g., largely nonsensical, childish, delusory or illusory), or that they serve as vehicles of dangerous or insidious conceptions of what constitutes the “good life” for citizens in a would-be democratic policy, or that they are somehow contrary to individual eudaimonia or personal fulfillment.

If one is only going to teach “biblical literacy” in a public school classroom it amounts to favoring one (the de facto predominant) religious tradition or worldview, Christianity (or perhaps in some sense two religious traditions, if we include Judaism, although teaching ‘Old Testament’ literacy is not providing a Jewish perspective on this literature; of course even the teaching of ‘biblical literacy’ risks favoring one particular form of Christianity, be it of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or, most likely, Protestant provenance), unless one is going to teach religious literacy in general, thereby including scriptures or “sacred” texts from many other religious traditions, in effect, relying on a Deweyan or Rawlsian principle of Liberal democratic pluralism. Bible study of this sort in schools is not only a constitutional violation, it is yet another expression of a resurrected and vigorous if not virulent form of Christian nationalism (which often spills over into white supremacist ideology) in the U.S., propounded explicitly or implicitly in varying degrees at all three branches of the federal government, as well as finding fervent expression at state and local levels in our country. The anti-democratic and violent risks associated with religious nationalism, unfortunately, can erupt in quite different religious worldviews (often described as ‘major religious traditions’), especially those associated with a majority of citizens in a particular country. It is an ongoing and grave threat to (Liberal) democratic values, principles, and practices, wherever it occurs: India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Poland ….

Among the values supported by the Establishment Clause,* five in particular are diminished or violated by the teaching of “biblical literacy” in public schools:

the protection of religious liberty and autonomy, including the protection of citizens being compelled to support religious worldviews and ideologies to which they are opposed or at least do not want to promote or favor;
equal citizenship with regard to worldviews, both religious and non-religious;
the protection of the (historically and sociologically documented) destabilizing political effects of a polity actively divided among religious or sectarian lines;
the protection of a modern, distinctively Liberal democratic political community;
the protection of the autonomy of the state to secure and promote a distinctively public and secular interest in the pursuit of an otherwise elusive common good.

Steve Shiffrin finds the Establishment Clause protects at least two other values which are not at issue (at least directly or obviously) with specific regard to the teaching of biblical literacy: “it protects churches [or synagogues or mosques … or simply ‘religious worldviews’] from the corrupting influences of the state [a value conservative evangelicals in this country have failed conspicuously to appreciate!],” and it promotes religion in the private sphere [which of course can reverberate, for better and worse and in myriad ways, into the public realm]. Shiffrin also points out how these seven values often conflict, a topic we will not broach here.

* I have borrowed and modified the language of the first five of the seven values listed by Steve Shiffrin in Chapter 4 of his book, The Religious Left and Church-State Relations (Princeton University Press, 2009): 41.

Attorney General William Barr acting on behalf of (Judeo-)Christian Nationalism

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 14:06:50 +0000

Religious nationalism—be it Zionist (at least most of its forms, the exceptions being rather unpopular if not existing only on paper), Judeo-Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, what have you—is extremely dangerous wherever it rears its hydra-headed individual and group pathologies, and thus not only, say, in Israel, Iran, India, Myanmar, or Poland, but in the U.S. as well. This is a regressive, anti-Liberal, and anti-democratic ideology that refuses to comes to grip with the values of institutional secularism and genuine political pluralism for democratic societies, while denying the fact that non-religious worldviews are perfectly capable of finding adherents who abide by moral principles and are capable of being as ethical—and sometimes far more ethical—than any avowed religious believer (as M.K. Gandhi well understood). This form of toxic nationalism is extremely simple-minded in its putative diagnosis of what ails contemporary societies, and its prescriptive phantasies, when not messianic or apocalyptic in intent, are messianic or apocalyptic by default, in any case, they envision an irrational, impossible, and purely regressive return to a world that never existed.

From The New York Times (Dec. 29, 2019), “Bill Barr Thinks America Is Going to Hell” And he’s on a mission to use the ‘authority’ of the executive branch to stop it. By Katherine Stewart and Caroline Fredrickson

[….] “ … [A]t least since Mr. Barr’s infamous speech at the University of Notre Dame Law School, in which he blamed ‘secularists’ for ‘moral chaos’ and ‘immense suffering, wreckage and misery,’ it has become clear that no understanding of William Barr can be complete without taking into account his views on the role of religion in society. For that, it is illuminating to review how Mr. Barr has directed his Justice Department on matters concerning the First Amendment clause forbidding the establishment of a state religion.

Mr. Barr has embraced wholesale the ‘religious liberty’ rhetoric of today’s Christian nationalist movement. When religious nationalists invoke ‘religious freedom,’ it is typically code for religious privilege. The freedom they have in mind is the freedom of people of certain conservative and authoritarian varieties of religion to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove or over whom they wish to exert power.

This form of ‘religious liberty’ seeks to foment the sense of persecution and paranoia of a collection of conservative religious groups that see themselves as on the cusp of losing their rightful position of dominance over American culture. It always singles out groups that can be blamed for society’s ills, and that may be subject to state-sanctioned discrimination and belittlement — L.G.B.T. Americans, secularists and Muslims are the favored targets, but others are available. The purpose of this ’religious liberty’ rhetoric is not just to secure a place of privilege, but also to justify public funding for the right kind of religion. [….]

This form of ‘religious liberty’ is not a mere side issue for Mr. Barr, or for the other religious nationalists who have come to dominate the Republican Party. Mr. Barr has made this clear. All the problems of modernity — ‘the wreckage of the family,’ ‘record levels of depression and mental illness,’ ‘drug addiction’ and ‘senseless violence’ — stem from the loss of a strict interpretation of the Christian religion.

The great evildoers in the Notre Dame speech are nonbelievers who are apparently out on the streets ransacking everything that is good and holy. The solutions to society’s ills, Mr. Barr declared, come from faith. ‘Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct,’ he said. ‘Religion helps frame moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline.’ He added, ‘The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion.’

Within this ideological framework, the ends justify the means. In this light, Mr. Barr’s hyper-partisanship is the symptom, not the malady. At Christian nationalist gatherings and strategy meetings, the Democratic Party and its supporters are routinely described as ‘demonic’ and associated with ‘rulers of the darkness.’ If you know that society is under dire existential threat from secularists, and you know that they have all found a home in the other party, every conceivable compromise with principles, every ethical breach, every back-room deal is not only justifiable but imperative. And as the vicious reaction to Christianity Today’s anti-Trump editorial demonstrates, any break with this partisan alignment will be instantly denounced as heresy.

It is equally clear that Mr. Barr’s maximalist interpretation of executive power in the Constitution is just an effect, rather than a cause, of his ideological commitments. In fact, it isn’t really an interpretation. It is simply an unfounded assertion that the president has what amount to monarchical powers. [….] Mr. Barr’s constitutional interpretation is simply window dressing on his commitment to religious authoritarianism. And that, really, gets to the heart of the matter. If you know anything about America’s founders, you know they were passionately opposed to the idea of a religious monarchy. And this is the key to understanding the question, ‘What does Bill Barr want?’

The answer is that America’s conservative movement, having morphed into a religious nationalist movement, is on a collision course with the American constitutional system. Though conservatives have long claimed to be the true champions of the Constitution — remember all that chatter during previous Republican administrations about ‘originalism’ and ‘judicial restraint’ — the movement that now controls the Republican Party is committed to a suite of ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the Republic that the founders created under its auspices

Mr. Trump’s presidency was not the cause of this anti-democratic movement in American politics. It was the consequence. He is the chosen instrument, not of God, but of today’s Christian nationalists, their political allies and funders, and the movement’s legal apparatus.” [….] The entire piece is here.

When does "all" mean all? Parol Evidence and UCC 2-202

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 13:04:55 +0000

Courts sometimes struggle to properly apply the parol evidence rule, particularly when it comes to 2-202. In Qwinstar Corporation v. Anthony, the district court considered application of section 2-202 and its exceptions. Quinstar Corporation (“Quinstar”) contracted to purchase the “all of [the] right, title and interest in and to the” inventory of a competitor, Pro Logistics, LLC (“Pro Logistics”), for $50,000 and to employ its owner, Curtis Anthony (“Anthony”), for five years at $200,000 per year. During negotiations Pro Logistics provided Quinstar an inventory list dated January 2013 showing parts valued over $4.7 million, but the parties did not sign their contract until months later. In the interim, Pro Logistics continued to sell inventory. Quinstar did not make any independent assessment of the inventory. When a dispute developed a year later over the amount of Pro Logistics parts remaining on hand, Quinstar terminated Anthony’s employment and brought suit for breach of contract, claiming that Pro Logistics breached by not transferring all the assets recorded on the January 2013 inventory list. The district court granted summary judgment to Anthony.

The Eighth Circuit Court of appeals affirmed as to the inventory, using the parol evidence rule. The court rejected Quinstar’s arguments that the January 2013 inventory list delineated what “all” inventory purchased meant and found the agreement to purchase “all” of the inventory was “unambiguous,” such that no parol evidence was admissible “to contradict, explain or supplement the terms.” The court also noted that the contract contained a merger clause “superseding all oral and written proposals, representations, understandings and agreements . . . .” The court concluded that “all” meant “all inventory he had at the time [the contract] was executed” and that the merger clause applied. The court observed that “[h]ad the parties wished to define the ‘assets’ to include all parts described in Anthony’s inventory list, they could have incorporated that document into the [contract] by reference.”

While appearing correct as to result, the court’s analysis of the merger clause doesn't address section 2-202(2)’s standard toward admissibility that permits extrinsic evidence “unless the court finds the writing to have been intended also as a complete and exclusive statement of the terms of the agreement.” The court’s analysis also does not take into account that, under comment 1, a finding that language is “ambiguous” is not even a “condition precedent to the admissibility of course of dealing, usage of trade and course of performance used to explain or supplement the agreement. Ultimately, this mattered because without the parol evidence “Quinstar . . .presented no evidence that Anthony failed to deliver the inventory he possessed at the time the [contract] was executed" and was "unable to prove that Anthony breached the contract.”

Toward New Models for the Scale and Practice of Agriculture, No. 4

Wed, 09 May 2018 12:46:46 +0000

Our first, second, and third posts in this series are, respectively, here, here, and here.

“Agribusiness lab breeds its few poultry lineages at the level of grandparent stock before shipping out the product to clientele around the world. The practice in effect removes natural selection as a self-correcting (and free) ecological service. Any culling upon an outbreak or by farmers in reaction to an outbreak has no bearing on the development of immune resistance to the pathogens identified, as these birds, broilers and layers alike, are unable to evolve in response.

In other words, the failure to accumulate natural resistance to circulating pathogens is built into the industrial model before a single outbreak occurs. There exists no room for real-time, ecologically responsive, and self-organized immune resistance.

From a world away, human breeders and vaccines must somehow track microscopic molecular trajectories across dynamic mixes of myriad local pathogen variants, a Sisyphean task. It’s a system that appears able to repel pathogens only under the kind of biosecurity and biocontainment that often can’t be implemented in developing countries and even in some developed countries. No ecologically selected resistance, surrounded by a fence. The image of a broken arm, pale and mushy in a cast, comes to mind. Or perhaps more appropriately, a pale mushy wing.

Setting aside barn architecture, reifying capitalism’s angry fight against nature, and the resulting effect on flavor and nutritional fitness of the food produced, Fortress Filièreshould be subjected to an additional query. Does it even work?

In increasing the rate of livestock turnover, blocking entry by low-pathogenic strains, and restricting selection to grandparent stock, intensive farming is forced to increase the precision of its biosecurity efforts if only in order to keep deadlier pathogen variants from emerging in a context of no or little new natural host resistance.

We can ask of there are combinations of harvesting rate and finishing time selecting for virulence and/or transmissibility that supersede the precision of which the industry is capable or is willing to pay for. At what point does the nature of the problem supersede the margins dedicated to its solution?

The last is perhaps a silly question, as how could we possible assume companies are responsible for the dangers that originate on their property? Sarcasm aside, it offers an explanation for the lengths to which agribusiness goes to externalize the integral environmental, social, and health costs of their operations to any and every passerby—governments, consumers, workers, livestock, and the environment. Agribusiness, some of the largest companies in the world, can’t afford them otherwise.” — Rob Wallace, 21 June 2011, in Big Farms Make Big Flu (2016): 222-223.

Toward New Models for the Scale and Practice of Agriculture, No. 3

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 13:34:59 +0000

Our first and second posts in this series are, respectively, here and here.

“The logistics of a just, equitable, and healthy agricultural landscape here in the United States would remain a problem if Michael Pollanhimself, Wendell Berry, or better yet Fred Magdoff were appointed Secretary of Agriculture. Decades-long efforts pealing back agribusiness both as paradigm and infrastructure, however successful, would require a parallel program. With what would we replace the present landscape?

As a black hole about its horizon, a poverty in imagination orbits the question stateside. The vacuum is most recently felt in the developing animus between public health officials and artisan cheesemakers. What Europe has long streamlined into amicable regulation, the United States has lurched into clumsy opposition: cheese wheels are increasingly treated as suitcase bombs filled with Listeria.

After [more than] sixty years of industrial production Americans have quite forgotten the logistics of real food.

There are three broad classes of alternatives floating about the small but growing food movement. Prelapsarian fantasies widely prevalent would have us return to the family farm as it never existed. On the other hand, the microgeographic localism now emerging appears as much a victim of diminished expectations, provisional classism, and the constraints imposed by a scarcity of working examples as of agribusiness’s stranglehold on the market. If pursued to the logical and logistical conclusions, both options, as geographer David Harvey noted in a recent radio interview, would likely contribute to the kinds of famines that predated industrial development (as opposed to the very different famines that originate in today’s global capitalism).

There are, however, visionaries here and abroad who have blocked out broader possibilities tied to both the contours of our historical present and the globalized economy. This third class appears based on real-life experience and some intriguing, albeit often preliminary, experimentation:

1) In his campaign for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture, dairy farmer Francis Thicke (pronounced TICK-ee) described a regionalization encompassing trade policy, energy, farm structure, and environmental regulation. [….]

2) With the support of the Mexican government, Zapotec Indians have developed a certified-sustainable, community-controlled forestry. Plain pine is sold to the government and … finished goods, including furniture, are produced in an on-site factory. The Oaxaca cooperative, still a work in progress, plows a third of its profits back into the business, a third into forest preservation, and the rest into its worker and the local community, including pensions, a credit union, and housing for its children studying at university.

3) Dialectical biologist Richard Levins, collaborating with Cuban colleagues on ecological approaches to local agriculture and public health summarizes some of the many adjustments a new agriculture anywhere may require … :

‘Instead of having to decide between large-scale industrial type production and a ‘small is beautiful’ approach a priori, we saw the scale of agriculture as dependent on natural and social conditions, with the units of planning embracing many units of production. Different scales of farming would be adjusted to the watershed, climatic zones and topography, population density, distribution of available resources, and the mobility of pests and their enemies.

The random patchwork of peasant agriculture, constrained by land tenure, and the harsh destructive landscapes of industrial farming would both be replaced by a planned mosaic of land uses in which each patch contributes its own products but also assists the production of other patches: forests give lumber, fuel, fruit,, nuts, and honey but also regulate the flow of water, modulate the climate to a distance of about 10 times the height of the trees, create a special microclimate downwind from the edge, offer shade for livestock and the workers, and provide a home to the natural enemies of pests and pollinators of crops. There would no longer be specialized farms producing only one thing. Mixed enterprises would allow for recycling, a more diverse diet for the farmers, and a hedge against climatic surprises. It would have a more uniform demand for labor throughout the year.’

Rather than to the expectations of an abstract neoclassical or all-too-real neoliberal model of production, the scale and practice of agriculture can be flexibly tailored to each region’s physical, social, and epidemiological landscapes on the ground, interconnecting ecology and the economy. Under such an arrangement not all parcels will be necessarily profitable. As Levins points out, whatever reductions in income farms accrue in protecting the rest of the region must be offset by regular redistributive mechanisms. [….]

There is a dawning realization that Big Ag, whatever its power and infrastructure, is, to use an iconic Texanism, all hat and not cattle. Propping up the empire is little else but a raw greed and political power turning biology—human and animal—into cash at any and all costs. The paradigm behind the food and farming—ostensibly the industry’s raison d’être—is bankrupt to its core.

When the use value of food, of all things, is traded in for surplus value, humanity’s survival is nothing less than threatened (and the integral pleasures of eating abandoned). When most commercial grade poultry feed is purposely laced with arsenic to keep bird flesh pink over shipment and sale, there is seriously sociopathic denialism at work. When U.S. livestock are stuffed with up to 28 million pounds of antibiotics annually solely to accelerate growth to a finishing weight, providing stock enough protection only until their industrial diet kills them, perversity verges on perversion. When livestock monopolies manipulate already cheap and highly subsidized prices by forcing farmers to sell their animals all at the same time, a criminality masquerades as the law of the land.

And yet even in the face of such unprecedented power and a relentless propaganda, a swelling number of Americans are coming around.” [….]

Rob Wallace, from an article in Farming Pathogens, 16 December 2010 (Big Farms: 118-123)

Toward New Models for the Scale and Practice of Agriculture, No. 2

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 01:17:03 +0000

Our first post, with an introduction to this series, is here.

“Dumping grain on another country is a classic maneuver in economic warfare. When a country’s borders are opened by force or by choice, by structural adjustment or by neoliberal trade agreement, when tariffs and other forms of protectionism are finally scotched, heavily subsidized multinational agribusinesses can flood the new market with commodities at prices less than their production costs.

That is, these companies are happy to sell their foodstuffs abroad at a loss. That doesn’t make sense, you say. Aren’t these guys in business for profit? They are indeed. The deficits are in actuality a cold-blooded calculation. The objective is to drive previously domestic sectors unable to compete with that kind of pricing, out of business. Once the mom-and-pop competition is rubbed out, Walmart-style, the multinationals, their competition cleared off the field, can impose what prices they please across a market they now dominate. [….]

When what is illegal at home in the United States is perfectly legal elsewhere, move your operations offshore. In many countries of the Global South, few labor laws and environmental regulations are on the books. For those that are, enforcement is lax or bribed away. On the other hand, when what is legal in the United States in banned elsewhere, export U.S. rules. Subject other countries’ domestic operations to the kind of discipline of the invisible hand one’s own multinationals avoid like the plague. Impose a protectionism in reverse. [….]

In a kind of bioeconomic warfare, agribusiness can prosper when deadly influenza strains originating from their own operations spread out to their smaller competition. No conspiracy theory need apply. No virus engineered in a laboratory. No conscious acts of espionage or sabotage. Rather we have here an emergent neglect from the moral hazard that arises when the costs of intensive husbandry are externalized. The financial tab for these outbreaks is routinely picked up by governments and taxpayers worldwide. So why should agribusiness bother with ending practices that repeatedly interrupt economies and will someday produce a virus that kills hundreds of millions of people? Companies are often compelled to invest in livestock vaccination and biosecurity—however incomplete—but if the full costs of outbreaks were placed on their balance sheets larger operations as we know them would cease to exist.

Corporate farms are also able to skirt the economic punishments of the outbreaks they cause by their horizontal integration. They can weather the resulting bad publicity and intermittent breaks in their commodity chains by increasing production in affiliates elsewhere. [….] A supply chain arrayed across multiple countries can compensate for the interruptions in business, even as it also, ironically enough, increases the risk of influenza spread.

In contrast, many small farmers suffer catastrophically from this virus dumping, even when they’re under contract to agricultural companies. Smallholders typically can’t afford the biosecurity changes needed to protect themselves from such outbreaks in the first place or the wholesale repopulation of their livestock in the aftermath (even when subsidized in part by the government). Living market day to day, they can’t afford the losses incurred upon their already thin margins when their operations are disrupted by the government-imposed quarantines and culling campaigns that follow.

That’s nasty. But the insult to injury is in agribusiness’s faux-righteous follow-up. And here we see the kind of conscious manipulation at the heart of grain dumping. In an act of evil genius, multinationals support national efforts to institute biosecurity standards only the largest companies can afford. [….] The diseases that wipe out Big Food’s smaller competitors also offer an opportunity to cripple them between outbreaks.”

Rob Wallace, from an article in Farming Pathogens, 11 November 2010 (Big Farms: 112-117).

Toward new models for the scale and practice of agriculture

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 14:08:23 +0000

Over the course of a month or two (perhaps longer), I’m going to occasionally post snippets from a handful of Rob Wallace’s rhetorically pungent, intellectually incisive, and politically powerful collection of essays in his book Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatchers on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science (Monthly Review Press, 2016). Early last year I posted notice of an article in New Left Review, 102 (Nov/Dec 2016): “Ebola’s Ecologies: Agro-Economics and Epidemiology in West Africa,” co-authored by Rob Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, appending a list of suggested reading that included Big Farms. I will post bits and pieces from the book sans the notes and with slight editing (e.g., in the interest of length, I’ve left out some of the many examples that illuminate the arguments), although I may provide some embedded links (some of which may be in the book’s notes). As this work—with notes—is well over 400 pages, the material I’m sharing is best viewed as providing but the slightest taste of its contents, although I hope it is sufficiently representative and enticing enough to stimulate your desire to read it in toto.

Rob Wallace, an evolutionary biologist, is currently an advisor for the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy (IATP) and a visiting lecturer at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Global Studies. He blogs at Farming Pathogens.

* * *

“For the past three decades, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have made loans to poorer countries conditioned on removing supports for domestic food markets. Small farmers cannot compete with cheaper corporate imports subsidized by the Global North. Many farmers either give up for a life on peri-urban margins or are forced to contract out their services—their land, their labor—to livestock multinationals now free to move in. The World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Investment Measures permit foreign companies, aiming to reduce production costs, to purchase and consolidate small producers in poorer countries. [….]

Clearly agribusiness, structural adjustment, global finance, environmental destruction, climate change, and the emergence of pathogenic influenzas are more tightly integrated than previously thought. The nest of dependencies requires fuller investigation. [….]

While the argument has been made that corporate food supplies the cheap protein many of the poorest need, the millions of small farmers who fed themselves (and many millions more) would never have needed such a supply if they had not been pushed off their lands in the first place. A reversal need not involve ending global trade or an anachronistic turn to the small family farm, but might include domestically protected farming at multiple scales. Farm ownership, infrastructure, working conditions, and animal health are inextricably linked. Once workers have a stake in both input and output—the latter by outright ownership, profit sharing, or the food itself—production can be structured in such a way that respects human welfare, and, as a consequence, animal health. With locale-specific farming, genetic monocultures of domesticated animals which promote the evolution of virulence can be diversified back into heirloom varieties that can serve as immunological firebreaks. The economic losses influenza imposes upon global livestock can be tempered: fewer interruptions, eradication campaigns, price jolts, emergency vaccinations, and wholesale repopulations. Rather than jury-rigged with each outbreak, the capacity for restricting livestock movement is built naturally into the regional farm model. [….]

Rather than to the expectations of an abstract neoclassical model of production, the scale and practice of agriculture can be flexibly tailored to each region’s physical, social, and epidemiological landscapes on the ground. At the same time, it needs to be acknowledged that under such arrangements not all parcels will be routinely profitable. As [Richard] Levins points out, whatever reductions in income farms accrue in protecting the rest of the region must be offset by regular redistributive mechanisms. [….]

From the article, “The Political Virology of Offshore Farming,” first published in Antipode, November 2009 (Big Farms …: 50-84).

Documentary on Dolores Huerta: “Dolores”

Wed, 28 Mar 2018 22:38:43 +0000

Some readers—as viewers!—may be interested (assuming you’ve yet to see it) in the recent documentary on the remarkable and inspiring life of Dolores Huerta on PBS (Independent Lens): “Dolores.”

And should you have missed its earlier posting, here is my bibliography for “César Chávez & the United Farm Workers … and the Struggle of Farm Workers in the U.S.”

Image: “Yreina D.Cervántez’ 1989 mural La Ofrenda, painted under a bridge in downtown Los Angeles.... In it, Cervántez—an artist and Chicana activist—pays homage to Dolores Huerta, co-founder with César Chávez of the United Farm Workers of America.”

Famine: History, Causes, and Consequences — A Select Bibliography

Sat, 24 Mar 2018 23:20:47 +0000

My latest bibliography, on the history, causes, and consequences of famine, is here. Compilations with significant family resemblance:

Down on the Farm: Nostalgic Ideological Hegemony in the Service of Agribusiness, Big Data, and AI, or, Capitalist Agriculture and Country Music

Sat, 24 Mar 2018 17:14:18 +0000

“Agriculture Wars”

By Nick Murray (March 12, 2018), for Viewpoint Magazine

“The town of Maricopa may be surrounded by Arizona desert, but a small plot of land near its northern border may qualify as the most closely studied piece of farmland our planet has ever produced. Here stands the LemnaTec Scanalyzer. Weighing some 50,000 pounds, the device sits on a steel gantry that moves back and forth along tracks that line the field. It monitors the growth of every plant below it, and by the end of the day it generates five to eight terabytes of data. What it records could help scientists develop the next generation of genetically modified seeds. The University of Arizona, the company LemnaTec and the U.S. Government, which funded the project through the Department of Energy, all agree: this could be the future of agriculture.

‘Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process,’ Raymond Williams says in Keywords.It described ‘the tending of something, basically crops or animals.’ Eventually, by way of metaphor, the word was ‘extended to a process of human development.’ But the roots run deeper still: for much of human history, culture, in the sense of ceremony and arts, has been tied closely with cycles of agriculture, from work songs in fields to celebrations of harvest. In America, this tradition sees some of its most potent representation in country music. The genre has produced countless songs about life on the farm, but few are as straightforward as Alabama’s ‘American Farmer,’ from 2015. ‘They’re out there every morning, planting those seeds in the ground/Riding those big wheels, until the sun goes down,’ sings the group’s frontman, Randy Owen. Owen tells a familiar story, paying tribute to the wholesome grit of the farm tradition. Yet with the nature of farming accelerating rapidly into the future, the labor he describes could soon be obsolete. Not many farmers will ever have access to a 50,000 pound robotic field scanner, but if the corporations that dominate the agriculture industry get their way, farmers will see their work transformed by smaller devices like drones, automated tractors, and mini-robots that crawl the ground.

At the front of this shift is the German company Bayer AG. We usually associate the name Bayer with aspirin – or heroin, which it trademarked in the late 1800s – but the pharmaceutical giant has steadily grown into one of biggest names in agriculture. In 2014, its market capitalization – the value of its outstanding shares – stood around $112 billion. This should soon rise: Bayer is now in the process of acquiring the American seed and pesticide firm Monsanto, itself worth around $66 billion. Now, on Bayer’s ‘Crop Science’ website, the company promotes technological upgrades geared to the future. One article mentions another ‘scanalyzer’ that ‘allows an automated measuring of crop growth.’ But planting those crops can be automated too, and to this end, Bayer promotes a robot called Prospero, an ‘agricrab’ that scuttles across fields, drills holes and deposits seeds.

Prospero’s inventor, David Dorhout, imagines a small army of these on every farm, a ‘swarm of autonomous robots’ doing all the things Alabama’s American Farmer used to do. So what happens to the farmer? Dorhout has already considered this: ‘The farmer acts like a shepherd, giving his swarm instructions,’ he says. ‘Then his robots carry out these orders by communicating with each other through infrared signals.’ In bigger picture, robots like Prospero will ‘change the role of a farmer from being a driver to an instructor, which robots will pick up,’ Dorhut continues. They will ‘alleviate the physical work of farmers, which gives them more time to focus on the economic part of their business.’

If country music gave voice to many American farmers during the 20th century, what does it have to say about the fundamental shift in farm labor that is coming to define the 21st? If farmers become robot herders, spending more time in Quicken than in the field, what will that mean for the culture that grew out of it? Will representations of farm work, like those in country music, keep pace with its realities?

The ongoing process of automation affects jobs in just about every sector of the economy, yet for farming, the shift toward robots creates a unique ideological problem. That’s because in American culture, the farmer usually represents self-sufficiency, both personal and national – the ability to live with two hands, connected to the land, without the need for modern devices like robots and computers. In country music, no song makes such a claim quite as forcefully as Hank Williams, Jr.‘s ‘A Country Boy Can Survive.’

A Number Two hit in 1984, ‘Country Boy’ beings by foretelling an apocalypse: ‘The preacher man says it’s the end of time, and the Mississippi River she’s a goin’ dry.’ The resulting environment of scarcity and conflict divides urban from rural, businessman from farmer. You can guess which side adapts quickest. Though as Hank tells it, the rural country folk barely need to adapt at all. They already know how to plow a field, harvest heirloom tomatoes and ferment wine. ‘I got a shotgun, a rifle and a 4-wheel drive,’ he sings. What more does one need?

Williams’s country folk are drawn from myth as much as fact. Subsistence farming was once common in regions like Appalachia, but by 1984, the practice was nearly extinct. In the coal mines that the singer mentions, subsistence farmers were violently incorporated into the markets of capitalism. Those still in business tend to grow one crop, like wheat or corn, as nodes in a supply chain that extends around the globe. If ‘Country Boy’ is an indignant song, some its fire seems to come from this fact: the singer has missed the first era of American household agriculture, so he eagerly anticipates the divine providence that will bring about a second.

Thus ‘Country Boy’ is at once nostalgic and millenarian. It claims to speak for the working class yet it rejects solidarity with the urban poor. Over 30 years later, it remains one of country music’s major points of reference. We hear its title spoken at the end of tracks like Montgomery Gentry’s ‘Daddy Won’t Sell the Farm’ and looped throughout Blake Shelton’s ‘Boys ‘Round Here.’ Search its title alongside the name of just about any male country star and there’s a good chance you’ll find shaky cell phone footage of a live cover.

So what happens when even farmers lose the skills that Hank Williams, Jr. is counting on? We can begin to trace this shift even in the multiple versions of ‘A Country Boy Can Survive.’ On songs like the anti-gay, anti-disco ‘Dinosaur,’ Hank Williams, Jr. proudly proclaims his obstinacy, his refusal to change with the times. But when it comes to ‘Country Boy,’ even he has twice amended his own tune. In 1999, Williams collaborated with George Jones and Chad Brock on a ‘Y2K Version’ of ‘Country Boy Can Survive.’ The update emphasized the country boy’s distance from Wall Street; a new line proclaimed that ‘if the bank machines crash, we’ll be just fine.’

Yet two years later, after the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, Williams returned to the studio to record a new version called ‘America Will Survive.’ The original had seemed to imagine a world after America, and took its own shots at downtown Manhattan, hardly acceptable in late 2001. But this latest iteration attempted to reconcile the earlier contradictions – urban and rural, farm and finance – in defense of a nation that will now triumph together. As Hank sings:

Our flag is up since our people went down
And we’re together from the country to town
We live back in the woods, you see
Big city problems never bothered me
But now the world has changed and so have I.

A changed world needs changed country stars. Enter Luke Bryan. [….]

[And now, article’s conclusion.]

Harlan Howard famously described country music as ’three chords and the truth.’ This connection-turned-cliché is one reason why companies like Bayer work so hard to become associated with country music. There’s reason to doubt the political efficacy of benefit concerts, and one may certainly hesitate to call for more, but in the 1980s and ‘90s Farm Aid somewhat successfully used music – especially rock and country – to link farming with liberal politics suspicious of big business. These politics may be milquetoast, but for corporations like those described above, that link can pose an existential threat – a bigger threat even than the money that Farm Aid raises for charity, the organization’s nominal purpose. The Here’s to the Farmer campaign should be understood in part as an intervention responding to this particular problem. Its purpose is not just to build brand awareness in the United States, but to break this chain: to encourage country listeners to identify less with a political position than with the brands themselves.

This state of affairs is troubling, but there is no reason to assume it should be final. A corresponding intervention might not just attempt to undo the advances of companies like Bayer, but rather to raise the stakes further, beyond even the bourgeois politics of organizations like Farm Aid. Such a move only seems far-fetched if we fix country to descriptors like ‘conservative’ and ‘traditional’ while ignoring the antagonisms that take shape in the music itself.

One such antagonism lies between the desire for autonomy or self-sufficiency and growth of capitalism, which requires people to submit to the market. Country music may be used to reinforce this submission, but intervention in country music might also attempt to change the way this desire is articulated within the genre, linking its fulfillment to a new anti-capitalist politics. Something like this can only happen through engagement with country music and the spaces in which it takes place. If it doesn’t happen, we might expect to hear more songs like Upchurch’s revanchist rap. Lacking anti-capitalist politics, this same desire for self-sufficiency can produce not socialism but nativism and fascism.

Meanwhile, many of the farmers that country music claims to be speaking for continue to engage in their own forms of cultural resistance, in Raymond Williams’s pre-industrial sense. After the ratification of NAFTA in 1994, indigenous farmers in Mexico, often aligned with the Zapatista movement, rejected hybrid corn seeds, arguing that they displaced native plants and destabilized local economies. In 2010, a group of Haitian peasants promised to burn hybrid seeds that Monsanto shipped into the country in the guise of earthquake relief. Now, back in the United States, two new varieties of open-pollinated corn seed have been bred specifically so that farmers can save their seeds without risking cross-pollination from hybrids or GMOs in neighboring fields. Their names? ‘Rebellion’ and ‘Revolt.’”

The full article is here. (Nick Murray is journalist based in New York City. He is a former editor at Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, and has contributed to the New York Times, Pitchfork, and Vice.)

Image: Prospero – “This micro planter from Iowa cultivates fields in a swarm: Its six legs provide the necessary stability for uneven farmland. Prospero checks whether a certain section of the soil has already been planted. It digs holes, places seeds, marks the spot and if required also sprays fertilizer or herbicides.”

“Animal Colonialism: The Case of Milk”

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 13:50:12 +0000

New article of interest: Mathilde Cohen, “Animal Colonialism: The Case of Milk,” American Journal of International Law Unbound (September 2017) Volume 111: 267-271.

[Being a vegan, and with a significant portion of my worldview best described as Marxist,* I’m predisposed to find the argument in this very short article congenial. No doubt others will view it differently.]

The first two paragraphs:

“Greta Gaard writes that ‘[t]he pervasive availability of cows’ milk today—from grocery stores to gas stations—is a historically unprecedented product of industrialization, urbanization, culture, and economics.’ To these factors, I would add colonialism and international law; the latter understood broadly to include the rules considered binding between states and nations, transnational law, legal transplants, international food aid, and international trade law. Until the end of the Nineteenth Century, the majority of the world population neither raised animals for their milk nor consumed animal milk. Humans are unique in the mammalian realm in that they drink the milk of other species, including beyond infancy. With the European conquest of the New World and other territories starting in the Sixteenth Century, dairying began to spread worldwide—settlers did not set out to colonize lands and people alone; they brought with them their flora, fauna, and other forms of life, including lactating animals such as cows and sheep.

Bridging the gap between scholarship on animal colonialism and on imperialism and motherhood, this essay argues that lactating animals became integral parts of colonial and neocolonial projects as tools of agro-expansionism and human population planning. Due to its disruptive effects on breastfeeding cultures, the global spread of dairying has not only been detrimental for the welfare of animals, but also for humans, especially mothers and their children. I recognize the simplistic aspect of grouping and analyzing together disparate epochs, regions, peoples, and animals in an inter-imperial historical vein. I do not mean to imply that these epochs, regions, peoples, and animals belong to a coherent whole, but only that despite their diversity, they have experienced comparable forms of state-building projects centered upon the consumption of animal milk. As an aside, animal protection law and advocacy is often critiqued for its supposed cultural imperialism, but as the following discussion illustrates, it may be that the lack of concern for animal welfare exhibited by legal systems was bequeathed by hegemonic European colonizers.”

* At least I’m in good company, the Dalai Lama having recently reminded us that he too is a Marxist. Please see this recent interview: Anup Dhar, Anjan Chakrabarti, and Serap Kayatekin, “Crossing Materialism and Religion: An Interview on Marxism and Spiritual with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 28, Nos 3-4: 584-598.

Commercial Law Podcasts Now Available Through CALI

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 13:45:36 +0000

Need to brush up on Secured Transactions and Payment Systems basics? Great news. CALI (Computer Assisted Legal Instruction) is now offering podcasts on a variety of UCC topics. The podcasts are available on the CALI website, through the Podcast app on most phones (using the Lawdibles channel) and even through Itunes (again Lawdibles). UCC topics include:

Payment Systems Introduction Podcast
Payment Systems: Being a Holder in Due Course: Personal Defenses Podcast
Payment Systems: Being a Holder in Due Course: Real Defenses Podcast
Payment Systems: Credit Cards Podcast
Payment Systems: Debit Cards Podcast
Payment Systems: Effect of the Instrument on the Underlying Obligation Podcast
Payment Systems: Employer Responsibility Podcast
Payment Systems: Fiduciary Duty and Liability of Representatives Podcast
Payment Systems: Fraudulent Signatures, Alterations and Negligence Podcast
Payment Systems: Holders Podcast
Payment Systems: Imposters and Fictitious Payees Podcast
Payment Systems: Indorsement Liability and Transfer and Presentment Warranties Podcast
Payment Systems: Indorsements Podcast
Payment Systems: Instruments Signed for Accommodation Podcast
Payment Systems: Liability of the Parties on a Negotiable Instrument Podcast
Payment Systems: Negotiable Instruments Vocabulary Podcast
Payment Systems: Who Can Bring a Claim on a Negotiable Instrument Podcast
Payment Systems: Who Can Enforce a Negotiable Instrument Podcast
Payment Systems: Who is a Holder in Due Course Podcast
Secured Transactions: Priority: Buyers v. Secured Parties Podcast
Secured Transactions: After-Acquired Property and Future Advances Podcast
Secured Transactions: Bankruptcy and the Automatic Stay Podcast
Secured Transactions: Basics Podcast
Secured Transactions: Debtors’ Names Podcast
Secured Transactions: Fixtures Podcast
Secured Transactions: Lapse, Continuation, and Termination of Security Interests Podcast
Secured Transactions: Perfection of Security Interests Podcast
Secured Transactions: Possession, Control, and Automatic Perfection Podcast
Secured Transactions: Priority: Purchase Money Security Interests (PMSI) Podcast
Secured Transactions: Priority: Sellers v. Secured Parties Podcast
Secured Transactions: Proceeds and Related Concepts Podcast
Secured Transactions: Repossession of Collateral Podcast
Secured Transactions: Scope of Article 9 Podcast
Secured Transactions: True and Disguised Leases Podcast

Enjoy!

JSM

Ricardo Flores Magón, PLM, and the Labor Struggles of California Farmworkers

Sat, 16 Sep 2017 15:23:49 +0000

“Cipriano Ricardo Flores Magón (known as Ricardo Flores Magón; September 16, 1874 – November 21, 1922) was a noted Mexican anarchist and social reform activist. His brothers Enrique and Jesús were also active in politics. Followers of the Magón brothers were known as Magonistas. He has been considered an important participant in the social movement that sparked the Mexican Revolution.”

Migrant workers harvest corn on Uesugi Farms in Gilroy, California (2013). U.S. Department of Agriculture