Natural Law, Divine Rights, and the political theology of Carl Schmitt

Antoinette points out that property law is an innovation required by feudalism, insofar as the monarch and his lords required a means to transfer use and possession of the land to the peasantry while maintaining their fundamental sovereignty (understood by the phrase, "Every man's home is the King's castle.") She suggests that the capacity to promise is jurisprudentially and historically prior to property relations. I like this account, if only because it shows the fundamental difference between Roman juridical theory and the Anglo-European legal theory.

While I don't know much about Roman jurisprudence except what I've learned from Giorgio Agamben, I suspect that the Romans would have been primarilty interested in potencies and powers, and thus focused on the contract as the instantiation of the potent and profoundly human ability to speak for the future. The rights-discourse that liberalism favors is only possible under the auspices of the Christian God, who leases out properties like intelligence or goodness, but expects a return on his investment! Check out the parable of the talents, for instance.

The strange interplay in political philosophy between social contract theory and natural law still requires some explication, however. I think the solution has to do with the way that Hobbes and Locke posit natural rights as prior to the contract. Especially for Locke, and arguably for Hobbes, the naturalness or God-given nature of rights serves to delimit the sorts of things that a culture can contract away, and puts some common sense limits on the expected law 'n' order required in exchange for allegiance to a sovereign.

This brings up an interesting point from my earlier post, which is that the state's stabilization of the flux and flow of social life does not account for its unique decisive power. Beyond the mere reflection or correspondance of the state to the general situation, the institutions of the state develop the capacity to intervene, to create a new situation through policy dictates and legislation. Political thinkers like Hegel argue that this power to intervene reflects a corresponding power in one subsection of the people: the rich, acting together, can engage in projects that have similar decisive power. They can hire mercenaries, engage in large scale projects for the public good, keep a staff of firefighters, etc. On this account, the state takes on this role at the behest of the noble rich, basically coordinating their efforts.. Our allegiance to the sovereign or our obedience to the executive is dependent upon his continued respect for the contract we have made to provide these services. Under liberalism, we only make such contracts in order to further preserve and cultivate our property.

But I've been reading a lot of Carl Schmitt, lately, so I'm much more attuned to another element of state institutions, one that has again become obvious to us after 9/11. States can take decisions that do not meet with the approval of their constituents. Hegel thought that the monarchical executive was unavoidable, because committees and oligarchies are hamstrung by their plurality. The will is necessarily singular, even when it governs a nation-state. But Hegel thought that the executive would tend to support the rule of law, maintaining basic class divisions while attempting to preserve his own legitimacy by ruling wisely and well. Schmitt says, quite simply, "What if he doesn't?" What if the King, or the president, or the chancellor, takes up the reins of power and jerks them sharply?

Given the appropriate occasions (a fire in the Reichstag, a group of airplanes used as bombs, a war we are losing) the executive can justifiably say that we need to turn on a dime, do things drastically differently, and that there is no time for discussion and dithering and incessant chatter. "I made a decision. America will not wait to be attacked again. We will confront emerging threats before they fully materialize," could just as easily become Hitler's defense of the Night of Long Knives: "If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people."

I'm not equating Bush with Hitler (though the parallels are pretty spooky), but I think it is clear that executives become more powerful under states of exception, and only the executive can declare that state of exception. This strange interruptive power will always upset the regular order of governance, and it seems to be built into the basic structure of the decision. So when Heidegger turns to eventuation, you might say that he's simply pointing to an inadequacy in the metaphysics of Being that seeks to suppress Becoming. You can't hold back the event, so why get comfortable with the world as it is when it'll inevitably change? It's not that we need to amend the executive's powers, it's that the decision regarding wartime powers and executive privileges will eventually fall to someone. It'll eventually be the swing-voter on the Supreme Court, or that one Congressman, or somebody, who actually makes the decision. It may be a moving target, but wherever it lands, that's the sovereign.

During the month of November, 2000, the sovereignty of the United States of America switched from Florida swing-voters, to Katherine Harris, to Sandra Day O'Connor! They made the decision, and the rest of us watched, and because we couldn't fathom the loss of the rule of law, and everything the state stands for and against, we went along with the decision. That's how decisions work, and all because the state isn't simply a reflection of the people, but rather constitutes the people that it reflects. Like a son who looks like his father, the people see their will reflected in the actions of the State because they have been molded by it. It's not really sufficient, then, to say that its sovereignty is simply on loan from the people.

I'm not sure I like the direction that line of thought goes.

If I could do one thing other than write my dissertation...

...it would be to run deliberative polls, or to assist in running them, or just to participate in one.

Some questions for Professor Fishkin: how much does this cost? Do you generally run polls on public or private money? My idea is to get a bunch of rich philanthropists into a deliberative poll about deliberative polls themselves. You can have Richard Posner present the case against deliberation, then trounce him and take all that money and give me a job. It'll be fabulous.

On the title "Liberal"

I can never decide whether to call myself a 'liberal.' A lot of the time, you're only presented with two options, and I think in those situations it's okay to glom on to some basic party affiliation: Democrat/Republican, leftist/rightie, progressive/conservative, etc. But when you're writing about yourself, you've got the power to present yourself in your own terms, so there seems to be no reason to settle for easy dichotomies. In those situations, I'm still not entirely sure how to refer to myself.

As for liberalism, my objection generally is that it's a misnomer. I suspect that most people who read this are aware of the difference between the liberalism of Locke and Mill, and the current usage of the term. In a nutshell, liberalism simply indicates a regime guided by constitutional restrictions on state intrusion into the private sphere and a respect for property. (Property is both a bundle of rights and the archtypical right: all rights are 'properties' of individuals, and all rights generally reflect the exclusion, use, transfer, or possession of something, like one's speech or one's body.)

Beyond the homophone problem, I often disagree with the version of rights and property that sustains pretty much the entire political spectrum in this country. So far as I've been able to discern, I have too thick a sense of the Good to be a strict libertarian. I suspect that there are many matters in which communally organized governance should involve itself, whether that be civic and moral education, or environmental and labor regulation. I oppose home schooling and the strange usage of the 'takings' clause that many Republican jurists favor in order to combat community oversight.

Yet it seems like the strategy of identifying 'liberal' with 'libertine' has been wholly successful: the thin liberty by which one requires the government to leave one to enjoy one's privacy gets too easily conflated with the licentiousness we are supposedly engaging in that privacy. So whenever I hear a fellow-traveler accused of 'liberalism' in that particular snearing tone that suggests that she has inappropriate relations with her pets, I want to stand in solidarity with liberals. After all, bourgeois property-rights were very progressive when the King effectively owned everything and loaned it out to his subjects until the whimsy struck him to take it back. I'm glad Locke spent the time to deflate the supposed divinity of the sovereign, too. (And watch out during this NSA wiretapping scandal for the Supreme Court to remind us that the executive's power is unified and came directly from the English monarchy! Never mind that we, like, had a revolution.)

Anyway, back to being a 'liberal.' Sometimes I prefer the term 'progressive,' because the implication is that I'm hoping things will get better. But this is a little like calling oneself an optimist; it's not a political position, it's a mood. Certainly I suspect that many conservatives are driven by a cynical convinction that things will keep getting worse unti the world ends, so the best course of action is to stem the tide of modernity. That's why they try to conserve traditional values, and hew to settled hierarchies and business models that have worked ages and ages, or at least for several fiscal quarters in a row. But I'm actually a bit suspicious of progress, too. I suspect that we've lost a lot, especially compared to the Greek polis, or even the heady days of the American Revolution.

On the other hand, I've got these perhaps irrational pockets of hopefulness. I'm optimistic that some developments might improve our situation. I hope that we Americans will someday learn that it is always wrong to torture people, for instance, the same way I hope that my friend's baby will learn to walk and talk and control her own bowels, like a big girl! But I'm skeptical enough of progress that I think it would be a bit disingenuous to call myself a progressive (since I once thought that our country had already learned to control its own bowels... I mean, its intelligence community.)

The term that has the most promise, from my perspective, is 'egalitarian.' I wish a lot more people referred to themselves this way, especially politicians. In the US, egalitarian populism often meets with the charge of 'class warfare,' as if making corporations and rich people pay taxes was the same as throwing Molotov cocktails and disseminating seditious literature. But frankly, I like class warfare, (and seditious literature, actually) or at least I think it's uniquely important to what politics really is, rather than what it's come to look like. For one thing, the Democratic big three, race, gender, and sexuality, strike me as categories worthy of attention insofar as they have import for class. If non-whites weren't predominantly poor, or women too often relegated to a strange secondary class of housework, I wouldn't be as interested in feminism and post-colonial studies. A lot of people complain that there is a collusion between class issues and cultural production, such that we repress and avoid canonizing the work of non-whites and women, and I'm willing to go along with that too, if only because it means that there might be some good seditious literature to be had.

The funny thing about homosexuality, of course, is that it's not really a class or cultural issue. As Sedgwick puts it, "Not only have there been a gay Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust, but their names are Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust." Rich people seem to be gay about as frequently as anybody else (though there are more poor gays because there are more poor people.) Still, given the role that marriage plays in accumulating capital, it does seem that disallowing marriage has had some impact on the microeconomic situation of homosexuals. But I'm just saying that so I don't have to admit that I object to restricting marriage for basically liberal reasons. The other way to put this position is that legalizing gay marriage is a matter of equality of opportunity (even if it's simply the opportunity to be overfed, bored, and vaguely dissatisfied.)

So, call me an egalitarian. I won't duck the other labels when I don't have to, but at least now we're clear.

Skin to Skin: Between Logos and Flesh

Sometimes when I read too much I get very quote heavy; rather than letting my own voice through in my writing, I can't think of a better way to say it than the way I just read it. So when Merleau-Ponty explains the problem with Husserl's project in two pages in the midst of The Visibile and the Invisible, I can't think of a better way to proceed than to copy his words down.

"It is by considering language that we would best see how we are to and how we are not to return to the things themselves....

The philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him, and an inexplicable weakness: he should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made. But everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself....

[What he seeks] would be a language of which he would not be the organizer, words he would not assemble, that would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their meaning, through the occult trading of the metaphor--where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and of each image, but the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their transfers and their exchanges.... If language is not necessarily deceptive, truth is not coincidence, nor mute....

Because he has within himself the need to speak, the birth of speech as bubbling up at the bottom of his mute experience, the philosopher knows better than anyone that what is lived is lived-spoken, that, born at this depth, language is not a mask over Being, but--if one knows how to grasp it with all its roots and all its foliation--the most valuable witness to Being....

Philosophy is an operative language, that language that can be known only from within, through its exercise, is open upon the things, called forth by the voices of silence, and continues an effort of articulation which is the Being of every being." (VI, 125-7)

The best and the worst thing about this text is that it seems to be the last word on the topic. A statement of openness that forecloses discussion, it was work like this that seemed to spell the end of philosophy. But Merleau-Ponty discouraged that kind of talk, so I think he's blameless of the hubris of people like Heidegger or Strauss, who seemed to believe that the only interesting way to do philosophy was their way. Instead, he's simply culpable for being so damned good.

I find inspiration in the notion of a project that grasps language in its 'natural intertwinings,' that seeks 'lateral relations' rather than 'manifest meanings.' What are the lateral relations within the vocabulary of governance and justice? How can words be 'naturally' intertwined? How can the ontological difference (the Being of every being) be understood as an 'effort of articulation'?

M-P concludes that this is only possible if we give up the potency/actuality, real/ideal distinction that drives post-Aristotelian metaphysics. In its place he pushes the fleshy, embodied metaphors that cut through phenomena/noumena in favor of a "sensible world" that "emigrates... into another less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change flesh, abandoning the flesh of the body for that of language, and thereby would be emancipated but not freed from every condition." (VI, 153) The flesh of politics brings the body politic into sharp focus. Bodies are characterized by health, strength, and beauty, rather than justice, power, or virtue. Is there a specifically active, communal sense of health that should guide governance, perhaps one that takes the notion of constitution to be a substantial rather than simply formal matter?

Whether building fortresses, and many other things that rulers frequently do, are useful or not

From the NYRoB:

"A critical mistake was made," observed the American security analyst Anthony Cordesman as early as September 2003. "By creating US security zones around US headquarters in Central Baghdad, it created a no-go zone for Iraqis and has allowed the attackers to push the US into a fortress that tends to separate US personnel from the Iraqis."

The Green Zone has apparently become an idyllic suburban transplant in the midst of a Baghdad that resembles the Beirut of the 80's. Private security forces are supplanting the American military, and the rich and white population travel in heavily armed convoys. You'd have thought those silly neo-conservatives would have read their Machiavelli.

"The best fortress a ruler can have is not to be hated by the people: for if you possess fortresses and the people hate you, having fortresses will not save you, since if the people rise up there will never be any lack of foreign powers ready to help them." (The Prince, Chapter 20)

The military likes bases and safe spaces, and I can't blame them for that. So do I! The problem with the Green Zone is that it divides the country into safe (green) and unsafe (red) spaces. The goal ought to have always been to make the whole country green! As the matter stands, the average Iraqi is stuck out in the Red Zone with the insurgents, and can only preserve his or her own safety by siding against the Western invaders.

You know, everyone says that conversatives are supposed to be better at making war than liberals. I don't buy it. The bad Straussians in this administration are just smart enough to trick the rest of us into doing something we ought to have known better about, but still too stupid to realize that all the liberal 'whining' and 'cowardice' was in fact wisdom.

States as persistent political entities

What is the relationship between the state of things and the political State? This is Badiou’s question, after you take away all his mathematical obfuscations. Machiavelli suggests the initial connection: starer, the verb for persistent existence. From this we derive the 'state,' the thing that lasts beyond particular politicians. Politics, after all, doesn't mean what we think it means: for a long time, political questions were questions about the best regime. Only recently have we decided that politics is the lottery-cycle by which we select the next party to run our specifically democratic/capitalist regime.

Does the ontological difference between beings and Being have a political expression? Perhaps Jean-luc Nancy starts this conversation with the difference between the various freedoms (from fear, from want, to pray, to speak) and Freedom itself. Indeed, Nancy takes the relationship to be quite perfect, since freedom comes to resemble the becoming or happening of events, rather than a particular human's action. Freedom stands in for the novelty or instability at the heart of futurity. Is there a crucial distinction, then, between esserer and starer? Is this a false distinction? Between lo stato, the state, and mode of persistent standing characterized by starer, we can perceive an analogous difference. It is not the same, however. In English and French, this is expressed by “going” or “aller.” "Ca va?" ("How’s it going?") becomes in Italian or Spanish, "Come stai? Sto bene." ("How does it stand with you? It stands well.") This persistent state of being is the ‘way it’s going,’ the trend or prevailing movement.

In politics, this trend is supposed to be manifest or set into law through state institutions: the king’s whims, the people’s will, are both subject to all sorts of manipulations and perturbations. The State suspends those perturbations a bit, but not completely. The State's laws are not static, nor is the rule of law an utterly consistent, wholly unchangeable situation. In fact, thus understood, stasis itself takes on a different flavor: it is no longer the immortal and unchangeable, but rather simply the persistent and locally prevailing state of things. To stand is not to stand immobile, but rather to stand still. It does not preclude movement, but nor is it characterized by flux.

Heidegger’s notion of ec-stasis, standing-outside-oneself, initially intended to show the internal motion at the heart of stasis: the reaching forward (projection) and backward (throwness) of temporality, as well as the spatial diffuseness and plurality of every identity that claims to be sui generis or authentic. Yet at some point, it appears that Heidegger became more interested in the breaks and novelties of eventuations than the persistence of the work or the constancy of the product.

Note that the State doesn’t resist the dynamic flow of events: it simply has a tendency to steady them, to stabilize them, often by managing and regulating flows. From the regulator's perspective, a flow of currency or goods looks like a steady stream. Its velocity becomes a known and calculated quantity, and only the acceleration or deceleration of its flow remains to be quantified and stabilized. Large events, like accidents, assassinations, disasters, or even revolutions cannot destroy the state. They can alter it, sometimes even transform it into an unrecognizably new form, but the new political entity will tend to persist. A series of such insurmountable surprises will tend to institute l’etat de siege, the state of exception. Yet even when martial law sacrifices the patterns of authority for the brutal reign of physical force, it only does so in an attempt to discover what persists in the tumult: violence.

Terror alerts and polling data

JuliusBlog reminds us about the way the Bush administration abuses terror alerts.

Dems want freedom to speak

Ed Kilgore writes:

I think both sides in the usual intraparty debates are guilty of excessive "the enemy is listening" fears, and that we need to create a free-speech zone with some simple rules of civility (e.g., I won't call you crazy, and you won't call me spineless, just because we disagree).

The question of civility can only be addressed by a particular, relatively delimited community. This was the lesson of the 90's iteration of this conversation, though then it was called 'flame wars.' It's quite easy to gather a thoughtful group of civil adults that can discuss and debate strategy; simply set up an identity verification program (a small credit card transaction, for instance) and moderate discussions. (The WELL does this quite... erm, well.) If you guarantee that -some- real democratic strategists, with the ears of real politicians, are reading the posts, they will probably be very thoughtful indeed. They will also be very careful, very reverent, and not only civil, but obsequious.

If someone out there starts such a forum, I'd love to be invited. I can't imagine why they'd want me, though. I'm nobody special. Thankfully, blogs don't work on 'specialness'; here, anonymous strangers by the millions throw their ideas at the wall, and sometimes something sticks. They talk about cross-stitching, cross-dressing, and cross-burning with equal fervor and unequal intelligence. Early adopters gained readers and popularity, quit their day jobs, and started looking like the establishment. But there's always some new writer adopting Hunter S. Thompson's style or keeping a daily diary devoted to demography and statistical modeling. And the novelty, the energy, the otherness, and the insight will drive us to seek them out, probably with the help of some hyper-literate friend who scans blogs in her spare time.

This is all to the good; but for every undiscovered prodigy there are going to be thirty (or maybe three hundred) name-calling, misspelling, grammar- trashing, outraged fifteen year-old trolls posing as adults. Many of them will learn something from the experience of being schooled or ignored by serious-minded bloggers. All the same, so long as we are anonymous, there will be middle-schoolers acting like stock market analysts, men pretending to be women, conservatives posing as liberals, dogs and cats living together.... You get the picture. We can't keep them out, and frankly, we shouldn't want to. Cybernetic free-speech zones are just as preposterous as their real-world counterparts.

Spectacular Politics and Rancière's Radical Egalitarianism

The other night, my friend Steve Maloney was asking me whether politics, and specifically political theory, has been reduced to public relations. I like to think that, while it may be that our task is PR, (a) it may always have been, and (b) that doesn't have to be a bad thing. Peter Hallward has an article in the January/February New Left Review that where he basically takes up the same problem. It's entitled "Rancière's Theatrocracy," (sorry, paying subscribers only) and mostly deals with the work Rancière has done on the the relation between liberation politics and the staging of equality. In this "staging," we're meant to pick up a double entendre: both the theater and civil society involve a crucial staging. Public relations shades into pretending, costuming, and play-acting.

The Platonic critique of the poets and actors has always been closely associated with his distaste for Athenian democracy, since the same audience that could so easily be moved by the narrative manipulations of the tragedians could also be persuaded by passionate rhetoric and illogical sophistry. Many contemporary progressives find, in the light of democracy's recent failures to supply satisfying electoral outcomes, that democracy may not be all it's cracked up to be. The democratic penchant for short, assymetrical conflicts, combined the resurgence of the spoils system, suggest to these fair-weather progressives that a poorly-educated populace may not always be the best group to consult. In a number of different contexts, I've seen a creeping elitism amongst people who would once have cringed at the thought of hierarchies. As I understand it, the original neo-conservatives followed this same trajectory, moving from vanguardist communism to meritocratic rule-of-law.

This is where Rancière comes in. Like many of the other students of Althusser (Badiou, Balibar, Foucault, etc.) he has been trying to account for emancipatory politics without utopian teleology or deterministic materialism, the collapsed havens of orthodox marxists. The question that drives these thinkers, and my own thought, is how to side with the dispossessed, the dominated, the invisible, without falling into despair? Rancière began answering it by turning towards the pre-Marxists workers communes and proletarian self-emancipation projects theorized by Marx the scholar, and celebrated by Marx the pamphleteer. Rancière's first presumption is that Marx's efforts have come to stand in for the various and sundry projects that inspired them; by returning to the original source material, he hoped to wipe the slate of the tyrannical nation-state capitalisms of the Stalin and Mao, the absurd in-fighting and orthodoxies of the French Communist Party (PCF), and the association of communism with fascism and totalitarianism. His goal, in other words, has been to find what was lost in the institutionalization of these private and local liberations.

The best text for deriving his theory of emancipation remains his book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which takes up the theories of Joseph Jacotot, exiled from France when the monarchists came back into power during the Second Restoration. Stuck in Belgium, Jacotot still managed to teach poor children, with whom he did not share a language, to read Flemish. He developed an egalitarian pedagogical theory that levels the last bastion of elitism: intellectual superiority. He located supposed differences in capacity in the poor distribution of attention and knowledge, such that even motivational deficiencies can be charged to the inadequate expectations of the teacher. The trick Jacotot is famous for is showing illiterate parents how to teach their children to read! This removes even the supposed expertise of the teacher, and is definitely a spiritual ancestor (though apparently not an acknowledged contributor) to John Dewey's methods. This is radical egalitarianism indeed: you can see now the opposition I was pushing earlier between the vanguardist Trotskyists, who in their despair at the unteachable proletariat became corporate neo-conservatives, and a thoroughgoing equality that trusts the demos.

Hallward notes that this trust of the audience is partially dependent on removing even the distinction between actor and viewer: thus, the political demonstrations of recent globalization and antiwar protestors look more like Rancière's definition of politics than anything that happens between Russ Feingold and the GOP. Participation and festivity are key elements of the democratic theater Rancière wishes us to embrace. Being part of a crowd, demonstrating to yourself and each other the potency possible even to the disenfranchised, is the space where egalitarian staging takes place. This equality can be dissipated in an instant, of course, just as a crowd can be quickly whipped into a directed frenzy by a skilled orator, losing its self-direction along with its anarchism by submitting to the manipulations of a leader.

So long as it persists, however, this spectacular politics entails a Rousseauist carnival of freedom. No masters, no slaves, just a public, relating to itself without mediation. Rancière says, "All my work on workers' emancipation showed that the most prominent of claims put forward by the workers and the poor was precisely the claim to visibility, a will to enter the political ream of appearance, the affirmation of a capacity for appearance." As Hallward himself notes, this model of political action is incapable of sustaining or institutionalizing itself; it is spontaneous and ephemeral, improvised and aleatory. It happens and then subsides, leaving no great documents or lasting legislation. The real question is why we ever thought that emancipation could come by cementing our powers for collective action in established bureaucracies whose task is to suppress the very spontaneity that founded them?

Quashing nasty rumours

There's a rumour going around, perpetuated by bumper stickers and politicians, that "God is pro-life." It's an interesting claim, and since everyone seems to want God (i.e. the heavy guns) on their side, I thought I'd examine it.

Michael Sandel, (yes, that Sandel) while working on the presidential Council on Bioethics, wrung this statement from expert witness John M. Opitz, MD:

Sandel: "...[W]hat percent of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost?"
Opitz: "Estimates range all the way from 60 percent to 80 percent of the very earliest stages, cleavage stages, for example, that are lost."

Hmmm.... so, in 2003, there were about 4 million babies born in the United States. Given the most conservative estimate of 60% lost before parturition, that means that 6 million embryos were destroyed by natural causes. This is convenient, as it is the most popular estimate for Jewish deaths during the Shoah (Holocaust). Since I've previously railed against the equation of abortion with genocide, this seems apropos.

If I can find some global population statistics that chart total human population throughout history, I'm thinking of putting up a running total: Abortions: God v. Man. This would be especially interesting given plague and disaster death rates, plus historical v. current infant mortality rates. Sadly, I'm not a statistician, I'm a philosopher, so I'll continue to depend on the experts. The CDC recorded 857,000 abortions in 2000, so, to keep the numbers round, let's say 1 million.

For 2003:
Humans: 1 million
God: 6 million

I would argue that any God worthy of invocation (i.e., an intelligent designer, deist or participatory) would not design a system with such a lousy success rate if this deity were concerned primarily with the survival of all embryos. Thus, God is objectively not pro-life. If you believe in predestination or election, then all conceivable omnipotent and omniscient creator-Gods must be understood as pro-choice (not ours, though) and pro-death.

A fellow PSU alumnus, Dom Eggert over at Sentiments of Rationality, has been worrying about those crazy South Dakotans' test-ban on abortions. He cites the reluctance of conservatives to actually criminalize abortion in the way that seems consistent with their views, i.e. by charging mothers who seek abortions with murder. The upshot of the famous "Fire in the Fertility Clinic" test (which would you save, a freezer full of embyos or an unconscious nurse?) is, for my colleague, that pro-lifers must fully prosecute abortions if they want to ban it at all. It is not sufficient to prosecute the doctor who performs the procedure if we allow the mother seeking it to go free.

I like this argument, (since it's sound) but I have some concerns. I suspect I missed a talking points memo, because I've seen similar arguments popping up throughout the liberal blogging community. Obviously, there's been some strategizing over on the fundie side of things, and they're starting small. The liberal response has been mostly from the gut, however. I can't help wondering if the apparent contradiction between what pro-lifers think they can pull off politically and what their position entails is a gap we should be exposing.

The thing is, "embryos are human-beings," is a first-order proposition for these people. It's the primary principle of their moral and political identities. That's why they can call abortion genocide without investing equal energy and political capital into curtailing the Sudanese genocides, for instance. Militant pro-lifers, militant marxists, militant feminists, and militant cross-stitchers all derive a crucial sense of self from their position: they can't sacrifice those positions just because they are absurd. Instead, they'll twist the rest of their reality to fit the endangered proposition.

Won't pin-pointing contradictions in their position only help them to clarify it? When my students are trying to figure out how to be existentialists, I'll often work with them through this kind of maieutics. That's because I'm basically on their side... and that's what they pay me for. Right now, fundamentalists everywhere are trying to figure out how to deal with their new political hegemony. Why should we help them formulate their policies? I know it seems like we're making them look like fools, but that's not the effect I anticipate. When they realize they can't outlaw abortion without prosecuting mothers, they'll simply convince themselves to prosecute the mothers. And the result will be some self-satisfied, internally consistent fundamentalists, and a bunch of unwanted children with felons for parents.

Actually, *politics* is the experimental wing of political philosophy....

"Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools."

--Notes from a talk by Clay Shirky(?)

Shirky compares a Buffy fansite to Slashdot and suggests that moderated listservs are tyrannical. Ok, fine: troubling if true. But he's not just grandiose, he seems to be on to something.

I'm very interesting in the way questions are framed. Here's an interesting set of questions from the Guardian's Gary Younge, who seems similarly interested:

Do you think of yourself as white or British or both? Does it worry you that you got your job just because of your race? Where are you from? No, but really? Since this is where you live, don't you think you should try and integrate with other races more? Is your first loyalty to your God, or to your country? Is it true what they say about white guys? Given the genocide, slavery and colonialism unleashed in the name of Christianity over the last two centuries, do you feel your religion is compatible with democracy? Mr Grant, do you think of yourself as a white actor or an actor who happens to be white? I don't mind white people, but if they want to live here then why shouldn't they have to fit in with our traditions? Shouldn't the police be doing more to tackle white-on-white crime? Given the objectification of women in your culture and the rise in teenage pregnancies, don't you think it's time to ban young girls wearing make up? What do you make of the tribal conflict in Ukraine? I thought you asked for flesh-coloured tights? Don't you feel that this politically correct belief that we have to respect white people's feelings has stifled honest discussion and debate? Isn't it a shame that white people cannot pick more responsible leaders? What do you mean, you can't Morris dance? Don't you ever worry about being pigeonholed as a white person? Why aren't you doing more to check the rise in Christian fundamentalism? Who are your community leaders? Why should we balance our belief in human rights with our tolerance for Christians? What do white people think about Jews? How would you define "white" style? Mr Amis, why do you write about white people all the time? Don't you find that limiting? What are you doing for your people? Have you seen what the Bible says about women? Are you the token white guy? Don't take this personally, but why are white men so aggressive? Now the Olympics are over, can we finally admit that white people are genetically equipped to excel in archery and rowing? What is it with white people and homophobia? You know what white women are like, don't you? I understand that as a white person you come at this from a particular place, but can't you try to look at it objectively for a moment? Why do you people have such a chip on your shoulder? Don't get offended, I was only asking.

Perpetual Peace

The Enlightenment project was, if not exactly founded upon, at least encouraged and made international, by the challenge of Saint-Pierre's A Project for Settling an Everlasting Peace in Europe. All of the eighteenth century's philosophers took it up, and while they disagreed on the exact means, all felt that reason could lead the way. Saint-Pierre and Rousseau were persuaded that only an international federation, which brought together various European nations and restricted their sovereigns in military matters, could overcome the amour-propre (overweening self-regard) of monarchs. Voltaire challenged the notion that the rule of law would be sufficient to eliminate colonial violence, since he argued that the worst barbarities were performed by Christians against those whose religions they could not tolerate. In this, Voltaire demonstrates a keen grasp of the growing exportation of violence to the empires of the various European states, and argues that toleration for difference, inculcated through the unprejudiced use of reason, is the only solution. ("Peace, without toleration, is a chimera.") Yet Kant did him one better, arguing that understanding and logic alone could not enforce toleration, but that specifically moral reason must be cultivated: he eventually recognized that this would require a cabal of reason, a sort of secret Masonry that would attempt to change religious and political institutions from within by exerting slow, but constant, rational pressure. Neither rules nor education alone could accomplish world peace: it would be necessary to change both the institutions and the culture simultaneously, which could only happen over time.

In the twentieth century, we've largely given up on the association of reason with pacifism. It has become popular to show that Enlightenment sensibilities bring their own, much more deeply embedded reasons for intolerace and barbarity, such that Voltaire's hoped-for transition from religion to reason is the primary obstacle to peace. Perhaps the most famous argument for this view is Foucault's book Madness and Civilization, where he argues that our pathologization of difference has gained the respect of medical experts, who allow their prejudices to become diagnoses, and then torture their subjects in an attempt to make them 'well.' Foucault's work sparked a major shift in psychiatric practice, and his general concerns were popularized by novels like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Catch-22: today, we seem unwilling to electrocute those who make us uncomfortable.

Yet after two world wars, and in the midst of the Cold War, there did not seem to be any hope for a cessation of violence as such: just a softening of the domestic injustices that were close enough and small enough for a citizen to intervene. We have washed our hands of reason, since it seems only to supply firmer resolve in war and more dangerous weapons with which to fight it. What happened to any hope that an international federation like the UN might suppress hostilities? Obviously, the UN can't accomplish anything without abridging the sovereignty of its member-states, just as Saint-Pierre initially proposed. What about education? Well, with such ambivalence amongst the world's educators regarding the desirability of violence, it's no surprise that our children come out as divided as their parents and teachers. What about the cabal of reasonable men and women, committed to ending violence a little bit at a time? In this case, I think the pacifists are losing ground to the neo-conservative, fundamentalist, and totalitarian cabals, since the major problem with secrecy is that it always confounds the means of reasonable discourse.

The fact that reasonable people (libertarians, egalitarians, and thoughtful conservatives) are more concerned with marginal tax rates, identity politics, and electoral mishaps than with sharing their freedom from domination with the rest of the world, means that they've abandoned the most important part of their participation in reason. They've lost track of which goals are worth striving for and devoting your life to, and which ones are simply amusing or interesting diversions. The fact that many Americans think that freedom can be shared at the business end of a rifle means that they've misunderstood the entailment relationship between means and ends. We need, I think, a new course of study in teleological reasoning.

International Women's Day

So today is International Women's Day, smack dab in the middle of Women's History Month. Yet most people probably kicked off their month thinking about Ash Wednesday (or recovering from their first Mardi Gras without New Orleans,) celebrating Spring Break, or focusing on their studies, and I guess a lot of my friends are looking forward to St. Patrick's Day. So who's really taking the time to think about women or their history? GWB (the Great White Beast) took a moment to point out that he'd heard of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, and to make cracks about gendered language (haha, "ambassadresses"). Makes you wonder how 'international' women are faring with the gag rule on abortion, doesn't it?

As much as I like the notion of the holiday, the festive or serious commemoration of a struggle or a cause, I can't help wondering what we've got to celebrate. If you can't take a vacation day to go march in protest, why bring it up at all? And has anyone noticed that Women's History is playing second fiddle to the Red Cross, Irish Americans, Peanuts, Frozen Foods, Crafts, and Music in Our Schools, all of which also celebrate the month of March?

Duh... Terrorism is an 'ism'

The entry for "terrorisme" in the 1989 Encyclopaedia Universalis begins: "To terrorize does not mean to 'terrify,' to 'strike with fear,' but following [the nineteenth centurty lexicographer] Littré 'to establish terrorism, the rule of terror." (my translation) This usage of the word originated in the revolutionary government of France, specifically a period between September 1793 and July 1794 when the entire government was subsumed under the Committee for Public Safety, lead by Maximilien Robespierre, and thousands of people were put to death by Guillotin's beheading machine. This explains why the French still think of terrorism primary as government through arbitrary violence and state-sanctioned murder perpetrated on its own citizens. What we have come to call in English 'terrorism,' with its international and domestic (but unsanctioned) sub-divisions, is apparently unrelated, a false cognate.

When we reserve the term 'terrorism' for institutional violence directed at domestic enemies, the actions of contemporary bombers and guerrillas appear to fit within the category of crimes. Indeed, even in the contemporary context there are good arguments for describing militant zealots and suicide bombers as criminals, guilty of crimes against humanity, or acts of genocide. It is not clear what the notion of 'terror' adds to our understanding of their aims and purposes, save that, like all crime, we fear becoming its victim.

This redescription does not even preclude waging the ‘war' on terrorism that the US administration coined following the 9/11 attacks: the so-called terrorists of Al-Quaeda are simply war criminals, part of ad hoc and non-territorial militaries who have attacked without a formal declaration of war. In either case (war or crime), we need not have invented new categories like 'enemy combatant' or 'terrorism.'

I usually point to G.W.F. Hegel to justify this alternative typology, since his reading of the French Revoluton is so crucial for me. Using the events of that revolution to critique the work of Jean-Jacques Rouuseau, he perfectly sums up the theoretical conflict that we would come to apply to the Nazis and the Soviets. Terror, for Hegel, was explicitly the weapon of the victorious faction. That is, it was intended to designate an instrument of the state in its claim to represent the general will, based on its failure to do so perfectly. Fear of death, which has been the absolute master from the first encounter between individuals resulted in physical conflict to determine superiority, is not the same as terror in Hegel’s use.

Terror is the specific fear of death by state sanction for opposing the will of the people in thought or action. It is a kind of subservience to the claim of universality that threatens to cause the individual to allow herself to be enslaved in body and mind. In practice, Terror is the result of fatal forms of punishment used injudiciously but in a juridical mode, rather than the gratuitous and random acts of deadly violence unleashed by factions with no state support at all.

On Hegel’s account, it is difficult to see why a suicide bomber would be called a terrorist, except perhaps that they espouse a cause. A politically motivated hijacker is no more than a criminal who, by his methods, denies the very notion of law or universal rule. Without state legitimacy, it cannot live up to the real fearfulness of a power that kills out of suspicion of intention rather than as punishment for an action. The very indiscriminateness of modern-day terrorist fatalities denies this possibility. Much closer to Hegel’s definition of terror would be the fear of being singled out as a potential politically motivated criminal; this fear of suspicion and accusation carries all the significant signs of terror.

Another sort of connection can be made between state-sanction and terrorism, both as a definitional matter and in practice. The myth of an outlaw billionaire mastermind, our current model for Osama bin Laden, corresponds best with the absurd arch-enemies that confront James Bond. Frankly, it is quite impossible to be a billionaire, or even a millionaire, without governmental support. Not only must those millions be issued as currency by nation-states and stored in banks, but they must be amassed with the assistance of political power and against the possibility of taxation or regulation. The weapons and training needed to commit acts of terrorism are only available at the behest, or through the willful ignorance, of nation-states and international regulatory bodies. In the case of al-Quaeda, both bin Ladin's initial fortune and his subsequent support can be traced to two nations, militaries, and covert espionage agencies: the USA and Saudi Arabia.

In a very real sense, then, the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01 were state-supported, and the 'rule of terror' instituted came with the implicit sanction of at least one nation-state: Saudi Arabia. Just as Robespierre, who was convicted and put to death on the guillotine using the same spurious rules he had instituted, did not know exactly what targets would be chosen by the terroristes, but merely gave them the justification that led to his own execution, my claim is not that either the US or Saudi governments expected the most recent attacks. However, part of my argument is that the reasonable expectations of bureaucracies fall far short of those occurrences for which they ought to be seen as the cause. Providing the tools, motivation, and financing for the murder of innocents is a necessary (and perhaps even sufficient) condition for those murders: it is a cause, and not an insignificant or approximate one.

Now, if Hegel's typology separates criminals from state-actors, and domestic state-actors from international ones, such that all acts of violence must be understood as either crime, state-terror, or warfare, what is the value in this new amalgamation that drives the so-called 'war' on 'terror'? Why move from clear distinctions to murky ambiguities? The answer, I believe, is that we have systematically participated in an error in judgment. By telling ourselves we are fighting terrorism, when in fact we're waging war, we've created a confused set of expectations and restrictions. Basically, we don't know what we are doing.

It's that simple: we wage war as if we are enforcing the law; we fight for freedom from mortality and danger, against organizations that do nothing to restrict our liberty, and we savor the irrational fear that notorious masterminds and fanatical bogeymen may be out to get us. In so doing, we separate ourselves from the thoughtful work that past generations have left us to deal with these problems: piracy and the hostis humanitis, suspicion of increasing our own state's powers for interminable emergencies, and the racial/religious intolerances that only bolster our own sense of righteousness. If the context were Protestants v. Catholics, or whites v. blacks, we'd know that these techniques don't work. For some reason, we think that this time, for this conflict, we've managed to discover an exception.