Sutton's cab ride
My friend Sutton has a nice post on a cab driver he met recently whose son was a marine, killed in Afghanistan.
Bloomsday 100, part 2: the coverage
Before writing a little on Joyce's Ulysses myself, I wanted to do a coverage roundup. Here's it's facilitated by Arts & Letters Daily, which has already compiled one for me.
It's a mixed bag.
Start with Steven Schwartz, in The Weekly Standard. Most of his article is a cliff-notes summary of the novel; the interesting part is the opening, where he tries to make Joyce safe for today's conservatives! Sorry Schwartz: Joyce kicked himself out of his own country, out of his own church, even (in a way) out of his own language. Joyce disengaged himself from all group loyalties; he shouldn't be turned over to the kinds of critics who would make him loyal to God and country. (For good measure, leftists and progressive will have some trouble with him as well.)
This, for instance, is Stephen in the 'Telemachus' episode. He's being harassed by an Englishman named Haines, who is clueless as to the depth of Stephen's resentment of the British presence in Ireland:
Joyce was against organized religion, never legally married. And he walked a precarious and lonely line with his direct challenges to British Imperialism and simple Irish nationalism. I don't think conservatives should approve.
The reactions of cultural conservatives are more accurately represented in some quotes in Tim Cavanaugh's piece in Reason:
Not that Dale Peck is necessarily a conservative. But don't be misled by these quotes; Cavanaugh's piece on Ulysses' ongoing popularity despite the difficulty actually warms towards its topic. In my view, the reason to go back to Ulysess isn't the fart jokes, and it isn't the 'mythic method'; it's the fact that Joyce writes some of the most beautiful sentences in the English language. I think Cavanaugh knows this, though it only really becomes apparent that he's a fan of Joyce at the end of the article.
This piece, by Jonathan Wilson in the New York Times, doesn't have much to say about Ulysses itself, though I did find it informative. It's actually on the history of Jews in Ireland. Most of the Jews who moved to Ireland in the earlier immigration came from Lithuania, in the late 19th century (Leopold Bloom, though Joyce places his ancestry in Hungary, resembles them). But the numbers of these 'old school' Irish Jews have declined, while a small burst of Israeli high tech people have started what might be a new wave of Jewish immigrants. One thing I didn't know about was the anti-Jewish pogrom which also occurred in 1904:
Interesting. I don't recall seeing references to the pogrom in the novel, though Joyce certainly takes the side of Bloom (and Jews) against bigots and nativist Irishmen.
Andrew Martin's excellent piece in the Telegraph is a rough recreation of the travels of Bloom in Dublin, completed a few weeks ago. It's highly entertaining reading -- best for its one-liners expressing the glaring contrast between the romantic poverty of Bloom and Stephen's Dublin and the upwardly-mobile, multicultural Dublin of today:
Three quid! Oy, vey. Another nice one:
Michael Dirda's take on Bloomsday in the Washington Post is solid and businesslike. It's nice that he quotes the final soliloquy beyond just the final seven words; it reminds one that even this passage from Ulysses, considered the most quotable from Joyce's entire corpus, is in fact a wee bit scandalous:
The scandal of the allusion to sex in a passage which also aims to transcend the drag of the everyday is that even this moment of transcendence is marked by the small kind of eroticism. Philosophical ideals (mind) and the physical experience of the world (body) are tied up in an intimate knot.
[UPDATE: A couple more...]
This short letter, in Slate, by novelist Jim Lewis, questions the place of Ulysses, and modernism more generally, as a source of inspiration for today's writers.
Another novelist, John Banville, writes on his attempts as an adolescent in rural Ireland to actually get ahold of Ulysses, which was viewed by many Irish Catholics as 'one of the dirtiest books ever written'. (Though the novel was banned in the U.S. and England for many years, it was never banned in Ireland.)
The original review of Ulysses, in the New York Times.
Joyce reading from Finnegan's Wake, via MP3 (via Maud)
The BBC is having a contest for 80 word summaries of the novel. (via Maud)
It's a mixed bag.
Start with Steven Schwartz, in The Weekly Standard. Most of his article is a cliff-notes summary of the novel; the interesting part is the opening, where he tries to make Joyce safe for today's conservatives! Sorry Schwartz: Joyce kicked himself out of his own country, out of his own church, even (in a way) out of his own language. Joyce disengaged himself from all group loyalties; he shouldn't be turned over to the kinds of critics who would make him loyal to God and country. (For good measure, leftists and progressive will have some trouble with him as well.)
This, for instance, is Stephen in the 'Telemachus' episode. He's being harassed by an Englishman named Haines, who is clueless as to the depth of Stephen's resentment of the British presence in Ireland:
-- After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.
-- I am the servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.
-- Italian? Haines said.
A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.
-- And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.
-- Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?
-- The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.
Joyce was against organized religion, never legally married. And he walked a precarious and lonely line with his direct challenges to British Imperialism and simple Irish nationalism. I don't think conservatives should approve.
The reactions of cultural conservatives are more accurately represented in some quotes in Tim Cavanaugh's piece in Reason:
Ulysses recently has drawn the fire of literary iconoclasts. "I will say it once and for all, straight out: it all went wrong with James Joyce," writes the dyspeptic critic Dale Peck, who condemns the book’s "diarrheic flow of words" and applauds himself for having spoken "heresy" against a canonical work. "Ulysses could have done with a good editor," the acclaimed novelist Roddy Doyle recently told an audience of crestfallen Joyce fans. "You know, people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written, but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it." Concludes the writer Stefan Sullivan in a recent Washington Times appreciation: "Ulysses is a pretty awful novel."
Not that Dale Peck is necessarily a conservative. But don't be misled by these quotes; Cavanaugh's piece on Ulysses' ongoing popularity despite the difficulty actually warms towards its topic. In my view, the reason to go back to Ulysess isn't the fart jokes, and it isn't the 'mythic method'; it's the fact that Joyce writes some of the most beautiful sentences in the English language. I think Cavanaugh knows this, though it only really becomes apparent that he's a fan of Joyce at the end of the article.
This piece, by Jonathan Wilson in the New York Times, doesn't have much to say about Ulysses itself, though I did find it informative. It's actually on the history of Jews in Ireland. Most of the Jews who moved to Ireland in the earlier immigration came from Lithuania, in the late 19th century (Leopold Bloom, though Joyce places his ancestry in Hungary, resembles them). But the numbers of these 'old school' Irish Jews have declined, while a small burst of Israeli high tech people have started what might be a new wave of Jewish immigrants. One thing I didn't know about was the anti-Jewish pogrom which also occurred in 1904:
There are, of course, blemishes in Ireland's historical relationship with its Jewish population: there was an infamous pogrom in Limerick, 120 miles southwest of Dublin, in 1904, when members of the town, inflamed by an anti-Semitic priest, the Rev. John Creagh, smashed Jewish homes, beat Jews on the street and organized a boycott of Jewish shopkeepers. As has been frequently noted, it's no accident that in ''Ulysses,'' the citizen, who challenges Bloom in Barney Kiernan's pub with the question ''What is your nation?'' and later threatens to ''brain that Jewman,'' carries copies of the radical nationalist newspaper The United Irishman, which had printed its editor Arthur Griffith's approving reports of the pogrom.
Interesting. I don't recall seeing references to the pogrom in the novel, though Joyce certainly takes the side of Bloom (and Jews) against bigots and nativist Irishmen.
Andrew Martin's excellent piece in the Telegraph is a rough recreation of the travels of Bloom in Dublin, completed a few weeks ago. It's highly entertaining reading -- best for its one-liners expressing the glaring contrast between the romantic poverty of Bloom and Stephen's Dublin and the upwardly-mobile, multicultural Dublin of today:
If you wanted to unite two great clichés, you would say that Dublin was a city of literary alcoholics, but I've never been in a city more conducive to life on the wagon: you're not allowed to smoke in the bars any more, and a pint of Guinness costs the equivalent of at least three quid.
Three quid! Oy, vey. Another nice one:
I climbed out in O'Connell Street, where I found myself standing on a pavement plaque marking the site of Lemon's Sweet Shop, which is mentioned in chapter two of Ulysses: "Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl shovelling scoopfuls of cream for a Christian brother." Lemon's is now a sportswear shop, from which a man in a Nike cap frowned at me.
Michael Dirda's take on Bloomsday in the Washington Post is solid and businesslike. It's nice that he quotes the final soliloquy beyond just the final seven words; it reminds one that even this passage from Ulysses, considered the most quotable from Joyce's entire corpus, is in fact a wee bit scandalous:
and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
The scandal of the allusion to sex in a passage which also aims to transcend the drag of the everyday is that even this moment of transcendence is marked by the small kind of eroticism. Philosophical ideals (mind) and the physical experience of the world (body) are tied up in an intimate knot.
[UPDATE: A couple more...]
This short letter, in Slate, by novelist Jim Lewis, questions the place of Ulysses, and modernism more generally, as a source of inspiration for today's writers.
Another novelist, John Banville, writes on his attempts as an adolescent in rural Ireland to actually get ahold of Ulysses, which was viewed by many Irish Catholics as 'one of the dirtiest books ever written'. (Though the novel was banned in the U.S. and England for many years, it was never banned in Ireland.)
The original review of Ulysses, in the New York Times.
Joyce reading from Finnegan's Wake, via MP3 (via Maud)
The BBC is having a contest for 80 word summaries of the novel. (via Maud)
Bloomsday 100 (part 1): A link, and the infallibility of water as paradigm and paragon
In the Village Voice, a competent description of Bloomsday 100 by Andrew Lewis Conn (ok, unfair; here is a gentler review).
And here is Bloom (from the 'Ithaca' episode of Ulysses) on why he loves water. All of the words in bold were unfamiliar to me, so I looked them up, and included definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary at the end of the post.
multisecular: that has existed for many ages; recurring in, or involving many ages (OED)
neap tide: designating or relating to a tide occurring just after the first or third quarters of the moon, when the high-water level is lowest and there is least difference between high- and low-water levels (OED)
freshet: a small stream of fresh water (OED)
minch: ??? (OED has it as British slang, related to secrecy; "Who know what he does when he goes out minching in the middle of the night?")
tarn: a small mountain lake, having no significant tributaries (OED)
artesian: pertaining to Artois, or resembling the wells made there in the 18th cent., in which a perpendicular boring into a synclinal fold or basin of the strata produces a constant supply of water rising spontaneously to the surface of the ground. By extension applied to water obtainable by artesian boring (OED)
luteofulvous: of a tawny, yellow color (in Botany; OED)
rhabdomancy, rhabdomantic: use of a divining rod (synonym: 'witch-wiggling'; OED)
hygrometric: pertaining to the humidity of the atmosphere (OED)
Scutchmill: a mill for preparing flax (OED)
lacustrine: Of or pertaining to lakes (OED)
And here is Bloom (from the 'Ithaca' episode of Ulysses) on why he loves water. All of the words in bold were unfamiliar to me, so I looked them up, and included definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary at the end of the post.
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
multisecular: that has existed for many ages; recurring in, or involving many ages (OED)
neap tide: designating or relating to a tide occurring just after the first or third quarters of the moon, when the high-water level is lowest and there is least difference between high- and low-water levels (OED)
freshet: a small stream of fresh water (OED)
minch: ??? (OED has it as British slang, related to secrecy; "Who know what he does when he goes out minching in the middle of the night?")
tarn: a small mountain lake, having no significant tributaries (OED)
artesian: pertaining to Artois, or resembling the wells made there in the 18th cent., in which a perpendicular boring into a synclinal fold or basin of the strata produces a constant supply of water rising spontaneously to the surface of the ground. By extension applied to water obtainable by artesian boring (OED)
luteofulvous: of a tawny, yellow color (in Botany; OED)
rhabdomancy, rhabdomantic: use of a divining rod (synonym: 'witch-wiggling'; OED)
hygrometric: pertaining to the humidity of the atmosphere (OED)
Scutchmill: a mill for preparing flax (OED)
lacustrine: Of or pertaining to lakes (OED)
One Nation, Under 'Culture'
Another day, another big surprise.
It didn't occur to me that the court might make use of the weakness of Michael Newdow's custodial claims to avoid the substantive issue of whether "under God" violates the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. Justice Stevens' majority Opinion describes this course of action as 'prudential.'
I can see what they mean: it would be such a controversial decision to remove "Under God" that the Court shouldn't do it in a case where the father has questionable standing. (Of course, this reasoning seems to open the way for a married couple to file an identical lawsuit. The implication is that the decision in a repeat case would be much closer to 50-50; possibly the phrase 'Under God' would then be found unconstitutional)
Of course, the media didn't really play up the custody/standing question when the arguments were being presented to the court a few months ago. Then, the emphasis was on Newdow's charisma (a lawyer by training, he was representing himself, often impressively), and on the places where the arguments of Ted Olsen (for the government) seemed to fall apart (see this New Republic piece for example). Now, Dahlia Litwhick, at least, seems quite cognizent of the custody issue. Funny how things become obvious once the Supreme Court says them...
Culture One annoying hobbyhorse, which relates this legal issue to debates in the humanities, is the use of the word 'culture'. Even now, it is troubling that Justice Rehnquist's opinion relies so heavily on it:
But "national culture" is a distraction from the substantive issue, which is whether the phrase "under God" is a form of religious expression. Congress's original arguments (recurring in the Rehnquist/O'Connor opinion) that phrases like "Under God" or "In God We Trust" refer to a merely "historical" idea of God strike me as specious.
The simple truth is, the phrase "Under God" positively affirms the existence of God. It may be in our "national culture," but it goes against our national law. People (here, Rehnquist) often use the word 'culture' conservatively, to indicate an attribute of a society that runs so deep it can never be changed. But nothing is permanent; the state makes changes that affect the social order, and run contrary to majority opinion and tradition, all the time. There are times when the state has to intervene against 'culture' in the interest of creating reforms that improve civil rights for its citizens. This was one of them...
[Note: I wrote a somewhat tentative post on this back in April.]
It didn't occur to me that the court might make use of the weakness of Michael Newdow's custodial claims to avoid the substantive issue of whether "under God" violates the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. Justice Stevens' majority Opinion describes this course of action as 'prudential.'
In our view, it is improper for the federal courts to entertain a claim by a plaintiff whose standing to sue is founded on family law rights that are in dispute when prosecution of the lawsuit may have an adverse effect on the person who is the source of the plaintiff's claimed standing. When hard questions of domestic relations are sure to affect the outcome, the prudent course is for the federal court to stay its hand rather than reach out to resolve a weighty question of federal constitutional law.
I can see what they mean: it would be such a controversial decision to remove "Under God" that the Court shouldn't do it in a case where the father has questionable standing. (Of course, this reasoning seems to open the way for a married couple to file an identical lawsuit. The implication is that the decision in a repeat case would be much closer to 50-50; possibly the phrase 'Under God' would then be found unconstitutional)
Of course, the media didn't really play up the custody/standing question when the arguments were being presented to the court a few months ago. Then, the emphasis was on Newdow's charisma (a lawyer by training, he was representing himself, often impressively), and on the places where the arguments of Ted Olsen (for the government) seemed to fall apart (see this New Republic piece for example). Now, Dahlia Litwhick, at least, seems quite cognizent of the custody issue. Funny how things become obvious once the Supreme Court says them...
Culture One annoying hobbyhorse, which relates this legal issue to debates in the humanities, is the use of the word 'culture'. Even now, it is troubling that Justice Rehnquist's opinion relies so heavily on it:
All of these events strongly suggest that our national culture allows public recognition of our Nation's religious history and character. In the words of the House Report that accompanied the insertion of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge: "From the time of our earliest history our peoples and our institutions have reflected the traditional concept that our Nation was founded on a fundamental belief in God." H. R. Rep. No. 1693, 83d Cong., 2d Sess., 2 (1954).
But "national culture" is a distraction from the substantive issue, which is whether the phrase "under God" is a form of religious expression. Congress's original arguments (recurring in the Rehnquist/O'Connor opinion) that phrases like "Under God" or "In God We Trust" refer to a merely "historical" idea of God strike me as specious.
The simple truth is, the phrase "Under God" positively affirms the existence of God. It may be in our "national culture," but it goes against our national law. People (here, Rehnquist) often use the word 'culture' conservatively, to indicate an attribute of a society that runs so deep it can never be changed. But nothing is permanent; the state makes changes that affect the social order, and run contrary to majority opinion and tradition, all the time. There are times when the state has to intervene against 'culture' in the interest of creating reforms that improve civil rights for its citizens. This was one of them...
[Note: I wrote a somewhat tentative post on this back in April.]
Good Coverage of Torture through Kleinman
The best coverage of torture at Abu Ghraib, the DoD torture memos, and the Bush administration's authorization of the use of torture is at Mark Kleinman.
Through Kleinman, there are links to:
The Daily Telegraph: The Red Cross has leaked documents to the U.S. media that will show that Pentagon officials authorized the interrogation methods at Abu Ghraib.
U.S. News: The U.S. was trying to keep some prisoners 'secret'. Also, General Barbara Fast was probably responsible for the Army's refusal to release prisoners who were known to have done nothing.
A discussion on his own blog: On whether and when it might be appropriate to suspend Constitutional liberties. He cites a supreme court opinion in 1949 by Justice Jackson, suggesting that suspending constitutional liberties to free association might be appropriate if the U.S. faced a problem like that of the Fascist thugs that took over the streets of Germany in the early 1920s. Though interesting, Kleinman argues, such arguments are not appropriate to the current conjuncture.
This story on Yahoo news: The testimony of a Sgt. Samuel Provance, who witnessed the abuse and intimidation of a 16 year old Iraqi boy, in order to get the boy's father to talk.
A Dana Priest article in the Washington Post: Priest finds that the Pentagon approved 24 interrogation techniques for use in Guantanamo Bay in August 2003. The list is, as Kleinman points out, pretty tame. None of the things we've seen in the photos were authorized in the August '03 list. There is also some debate about whether the memo leaked last week was actually approved in the end by the Pentagon.
Through Kleinman, there are links to:
The Daily Telegraph: The Red Cross has leaked documents to the U.S. media that will show that Pentagon officials authorized the interrogation methods at Abu Ghraib.
U.S. News: The U.S. was trying to keep some prisoners 'secret'. Also, General Barbara Fast was probably responsible for the Army's refusal to release prisoners who were known to have done nothing.
A discussion on his own blog: On whether and when it might be appropriate to suspend Constitutional liberties. He cites a supreme court opinion in 1949 by Justice Jackson, suggesting that suspending constitutional liberties to free association might be appropriate if the U.S. faced a problem like that of the Fascist thugs that took over the streets of Germany in the early 1920s. Though interesting, Kleinman argues, such arguments are not appropriate to the current conjuncture.
This story on Yahoo news: The testimony of a Sgt. Samuel Provance, who witnessed the abuse and intimidation of a 16 year old Iraqi boy, in order to get the boy's father to talk.
A Dana Priest article in the Washington Post: Priest finds that the Pentagon approved 24 interrogation techniques for use in Guantanamo Bay in August 2003. The list is, as Kleinman points out, pretty tame. None of the things we've seen in the photos were authorized in the August '03 list. There is also some debate about whether the memo leaked last week was actually approved in the end by the Pentagon.
A Critique of 'Islamic Science' in EPW
In this week's Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), S Irfan Habib attacks the idea that there is an 'Islamic Science'.
It is a helpful complement to the arguments posed by Meera Nanda on 'Hindu Science,' in her recent book Prophets Facing Backwards as well as in many recent essays (I responded to one such here).
Critics of people like Nanda (and of myself) make much of the fact that we critics of Hindutva spend an inordinate amount of time 'Hindu bashing.' But articles like Habib's provide evidence that a similar kind of critique has been occurring for more than a century amongst secularized Muslims, especially in South Asia. In passages like the following, Habib sounds like a slightly less polished version of Nanda (which is to say, I approve):
The last point is especially provocative -- in the discourse of religion-ized science, the call for 'cultural pluralism' is often a mask for more ethnic particularism. What is really desired is actually monocultural -- a strong civilizational alternative to Europe -- rather than true 'plurality'.
Habib cites 19th century reformers and thinkers who argued that the great tradition of scientific and philosophical synthesis under the Abbasid era (8th-13th centuries C.E. ) was essentially extinct by the era of European mercantile capitalism and colonialism. These writers felt strongly that the center of scientific advancement in the modern world was Europe, and European scientific methods were therefore to be studied and adopted by Muslim scholars. Habib is most convincing when he writes on people like Maulvi Obaidullah Ubedi and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who argue that the dissemination of 'Europeanized' learning would directly benefit the Muslim world as a whole.
There are, however, some confusing passages in Habib's essay, including an account of the Kolkata/Calcutta based thinker Maulvi Karamat Ali that seems to accept a version of 'Islamic Science' after all ("The whole Koran is full of passages containing information on physical and mathematical sciences. If we would but spend a little reflection over it we should find wondrous meanings in every word it contains"). Habib nevertheless includes writers like Ali with the other 19th century Muslim modernizers without acknowledging the attendant tensions and contradictions. This seems strained; at times Habib seems to be arguing that the passages advocating what is clearly a version of 'Islamic Science' in Ali are less important than the passages in the same writer's work that dismiss it. Habib's argument would be better served by acknowledging that the texts he is working with are rife with contradictions. For instance, he would gain credibility among the pro-Islamic crowd if he explored the ideological implications of the fact that many of the writers he works with were loyal to the British.
Because of the fuzziness on points of interpretation and analysis, in my view Habib's essay is probably most useful for its strong polemical value rather than its scholarship. That polemical value is encapsulated in synthetic moments like this one:
This is an interesting series of gestures. First Habib denies a major Eurocentric premise (i.e., Plato--> Leonardo was a non-stop flight) by insisting on the advanced status of medieval Islam. But he does so not in order to posit an Islam-centric concept of history; rather, he suggests that the Arab world in the medieval era was a hub of ideas and knowledge-production precisely because it was so tolerant and multicultural.
The lesson can be forward-projected to the west in our own era: one reason European and American universities continue to be so innovative is that they have been inviting to scholars and ideas from all over the world. [The seat of global learning may move entirely to Europe; with the Patriot Act, the openness of the U.S. is now in question.]
As for the question of the provenance of modern scientific thinking, that is just a pill that scholars with non-western cultural affiliations will have to swallow. But why worry about provenance? As Abdus Salem put it: 'There is only one universal science, its problems and modalities are international and there is no such thing as Islamic science just as there is no Hindu science, no Jewish science, no Confucian science nor Christian science' (quoted in Habib).
It is a helpful complement to the arguments posed by Meera Nanda on 'Hindu Science,' in her recent book Prophets Facing Backwards as well as in many recent essays (I responded to one such here).
Critics of people like Nanda (and of myself) make much of the fact that we critics of Hindutva spend an inordinate amount of time 'Hindu bashing.' But articles like Habib's provide evidence that a similar kind of critique has been occurring for more than a century amongst secularized Muslims, especially in South Asia. In passages like the following, Habib sounds like a slightly less polished version of Nanda (which is to say, I approve):
All those who argue for a science based on religion begin with a critique of modern science questioning the value free nature of science, emphasising the destructive nature of certain of its products. The fact that the practice of modern science has created serious problems for human society was not a discovery of born again fundamentalists. There have been critiques of science from within the community of practising scientists as well as from Marxists and anarchists like Marcuse, Kuhn, Feyerabend and others. In the name of critical perspective, some of the current interlocutors are pushing for a sectarian agenda, making modern science look like a monolithic European product with a Christian ethic. In the name of indigenous knowledge traditions, the religious essentialists are attempting to foreground one dominant tradition and threatening in the process the very idea of cultural pluralism.
The last point is especially provocative -- in the discourse of religion-ized science, the call for 'cultural pluralism' is often a mask for more ethnic particularism. What is really desired is actually monocultural -- a strong civilizational alternative to Europe -- rather than true 'plurality'.
Habib cites 19th century reformers and thinkers who argued that the great tradition of scientific and philosophical synthesis under the Abbasid era (8th-13th centuries C.E. ) was essentially extinct by the era of European mercantile capitalism and colonialism. These writers felt strongly that the center of scientific advancement in the modern world was Europe, and European scientific methods were therefore to be studied and adopted by Muslim scholars. Habib is most convincing when he writes on people like Maulvi Obaidullah Ubedi and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who argue that the dissemination of 'Europeanized' learning would directly benefit the Muslim world as a whole.
There are, however, some confusing passages in Habib's essay, including an account of the Kolkata/Calcutta based thinker Maulvi Karamat Ali that seems to accept a version of 'Islamic Science' after all ("The whole Koran is full of passages containing information on physical and mathematical sciences. If we would but spend a little reflection over it we should find wondrous meanings in every word it contains"). Habib nevertheless includes writers like Ali with the other 19th century Muslim modernizers without acknowledging the attendant tensions and contradictions. This seems strained; at times Habib seems to be arguing that the passages advocating what is clearly a version of 'Islamic Science' in Ali are less important than the passages in the same writer's work that dismiss it. Habib's argument would be better served by acknowledging that the texts he is working with are rife with contradictions. For instance, he would gain credibility among the pro-Islamic crowd if he explored the ideological implications of the fact that many of the writers he works with were loyal to the British.
Because of the fuzziness on points of interpretation and analysis, in my view Habib's essay is probably most useful for its strong polemical value rather than its scholarship. That polemical value is encapsulated in synthetic moments like this one:
Eurocentrism, a creation of an essentialist thinking process is being challenged by diverse essentialisms equally condemnable. "Civilisations don’t just clash", as pointed out by the well known historian of science A I Sabra, "they can learn from each other." Islam is a good example of that. The intellectual meeting of Arabia and Greece was one of the greatest events in history, he said, its scale and consequences are enormous, not just for Islam but for Europe and the world. Most of the Islamists repeatedly talk about modern science’s debt to Islamic civilisation but they seldom say a word about the Arab’s scientific debt to the pre-Islamic ancient civilisations from the so-called – 'jahiliya' phase. Can any Islamist tell us what was the source of Islamic science? Was it Quran or Hadiths or did it come straight through divine intervention of angels? It is certainly not true. Arab civilisation did not see the light of science till the middle of the eighth century. There was hardly any science during the Prophet’s time or even during the Khulafa-i-Rashedin’s (The Khalifas of The Right Way) period. It was during the liberal Muslim Abbasid and later Ottoman kings that science flowered in Islam. This was possible because the Abbasids welcomed Greek, Indian, Chinese and other sciences and got all these works translated into Arabic. Most of these scientists and translators who gathered in Baghdad were Arab Christians, Jews, Muslims and even Hindus from India and were sincere participants in the project called Islamic civilisation.
This is an interesting series of gestures. First Habib denies a major Eurocentric premise (i.e., Plato--> Leonardo was a non-stop flight) by insisting on the advanced status of medieval Islam. But he does so not in order to posit an Islam-centric concept of history; rather, he suggests that the Arab world in the medieval era was a hub of ideas and knowledge-production precisely because it was so tolerant and multicultural.
The lesson can be forward-projected to the west in our own era: one reason European and American universities continue to be so innovative is that they have been inviting to scholars and ideas from all over the world. [The seat of global learning may move entirely to Europe; with the Patriot Act, the openness of the U.S. is now in question.]
As for the question of the provenance of modern scientific thinking, that is just a pill that scholars with non-western cultural affiliations will have to swallow. But why worry about provenance? As Abdus Salem put it: 'There is only one universal science, its problems and modalities are international and there is no such thing as Islamic science just as there is no Hindu science, no Jewish science, no Confucian science nor Christian science' (quoted in Habib).
Insightful post on D'Souza
[Quit smirking, D'Souza!]
See Anjali Taneja, a med student and former Mutiny DJ, on some of Dinesh D'Souza's dishonest comments on the subject of Reagan's AIDS policies.
On community colleges vs. posh colleges
For a fascinating and unpolemical comparison of America's community colleges and its posh private liberal arts schools, see this piece, by Susan Sharpe.
Sharpe is a professor at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), and her daughter has just graduated from Reed College, in beautiful Portland Oregon. Reed is a place to get a first-class education, where it's not unlikely to find students who simultaneously play the flute beautifully, major in biology, and also start free vaccine assistance programs for sub-saharan Africa... It's a wonderful place to go if you're adventurous and not too politically or socially conservative. After a few years of wandering, most graduates will become professionals of one sort or another, though more than a few will commit permanently to alternative lifestyles or activism.
Community college is quite another story. Many are, as Sharpe points out, not too bad to look at in terms of physical plant, especially if the campuses are new and located in affluents suburbs such as Northern Virginia or Montgomery County, Maryland. But funding is short in terms of other niceties. Students are all trying to become professionals, and they quite often succeed.
For most of her article, Sharpe is unsentimental about the limitations of her students and of the environment she works in. But as paragraphs like the above show, she does become sentimental about what leads students to community college to begin with, as well as (elsewhere) what it means for the students who finally graduate.
Is that sentiment misplaced? I don't think so. Graduation from a posh college is a routine affair. Most students expect it, and are scarcely attentive during the ceremony. Graduation from community college, in contrast, reflects profound personal struggle against their environment and sometimes their own limitations (i.e., struggles with language, learning disabilities). The students aren't dry-eyed, so perhaps the professors who helped them through don't need to be either.
Sharpe is a professor at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), and her daughter has just graduated from Reed College, in beautiful Portland Oregon. Reed is a place to get a first-class education, where it's not unlikely to find students who simultaneously play the flute beautifully, major in biology, and also start free vaccine assistance programs for sub-saharan Africa... It's a wonderful place to go if you're adventurous and not too politically or socially conservative. After a few years of wandering, most graduates will become professionals of one sort or another, though more than a few will commit permanently to alternative lifestyles or activism.
Community college is quite another story. Many are, as Sharpe points out, not too bad to look at in terms of physical plant, especially if the campuses are new and located in affluents suburbs such as Northern Virginia or Montgomery County, Maryland. But funding is short in terms of other niceties. Students are all trying to become professionals, and they quite often succeed.
You go to community college because you are an ambitious kid whose parents don't have professional jobs. Because you are a girl in a family whose culture for thousands of years has valued education only for boys. Because you come from a family that never really thought about college for anyone, never saved for it or steered you toward it. You go to community college because you had a significant trauma during your adolescence: Perhaps you had an alcoholic parent, lost a sibling, lived in a household of chronic anger, suffered from depression or anorexia, did too many drugs. So you failed some of your high school courses, and the "good" colleges won't take you. You go to community college because you were born in another country and came to America too late to pick up English very easily. Because you landed a good job or gave birth to a beautiful baby right out of high school, and didn't look back for 10 or 15 years, when, suddenly, you thought about college. You go to community college because you have a learning disability, undiagnosed or untreated, that pushed you to the sidelines in school. Because you started at a four-year school and discovered that you weren't ready to leave home. And you go to community college because you believe that America is a society where intelligence is rewarded, and since you're such a fine, intelligent person, it's unnecessary for you to actually do any homework in high school, and suddenly you have a C average and your SATs are pretty good but, frankly, so are a lot of other people's, and the best offer you got from four-year colleges was their wait list.
For most of her article, Sharpe is unsentimental about the limitations of her students and of the environment she works in. But as paragraphs like the above show, she does become sentimental about what leads students to community college to begin with, as well as (elsewhere) what it means for the students who finally graduate.
Is that sentiment misplaced? I don't think so. Graduation from a posh college is a routine affair. Most students expect it, and are scarcely attentive during the ceremony. Graduation from community college, in contrast, reflects profound personal struggle against their environment and sometimes their own limitations (i.e., struggles with language, learning disabilities). The students aren't dry-eyed, so perhaps the professors who helped them through don't need to be either.
A few new blogs
New blogs added to the roll. Most will be familiar to people, but I've only started reading these people this week:
Mikhaela (Thanks for the link)
Sadly, No
Infoshop
Mark Kleinman
Josh Marshall
Froomkin
Intel Dump
Tiffin Box
Mikhaela (Thanks for the link)
Sadly, No
Infoshop
Mark Kleinman
Josh Marshall
Froomkin
Intel Dump
Tiffin Box
This guy is wrong (soldiers as slaves?)
[Time for a Sister Souljah moment]
I know he's a former Denver Bronco. But being a star athlete doesn't get you off the hook for writing stupid columns for the Denver Post.
Sorry, Reggie Rivers, you're wrong. U.S. soldiers may be under-paid, disproportionately from minority backgrounds, and under-armored. They may be currently involved in a poorly planned, immoral mission, sent by draft-dodging leaders who need to go back to west Texas and stay there...
They may be all those things, but they are not slaves. They volunteered for this; they're getting paid. Just a reminder: the 10 million + Africans who were brought here came at the end of muskets and bayonets, and they were forced to work through whips, chains, and rifles. They did not volunteer and they were not paid diddly squat. Hence, not a valid metaphor.
He's subsequently partially apologized, and explained his position a little better. Ok, I forgive you now, Reggie Rivers.
I know he's a former Denver Bronco. But being a star athlete doesn't get you off the hook for writing stupid columns for the Denver Post.
Sorry, Reggie Rivers, you're wrong. U.S. soldiers may be under-paid, disproportionately from minority backgrounds, and under-armored. They may be currently involved in a poorly planned, immoral mission, sent by draft-dodging leaders who need to go back to west Texas and stay there...
They may be all those things, but they are not slaves. They volunteered for this; they're getting paid. Just a reminder: the 10 million + Africans who were brought here came at the end of muskets and bayonets, and they were forced to work through whips, chains, and rifles. They did not volunteer and they were not paid diddly squat. Hence, not a valid metaphor.
He's subsequently partially apologized, and explained his position a little better. Ok, I forgive you now, Reggie Rivers.
Zygmunt Bauman's doubts about 'postmodernism'
Zygmunt Bauman is a well-known postmodernist philosopher originally from Poland, now retired from teaching and living in England. In his recent book Liquid Modernity Bauman gave a signal that he was turning against 'post'-al terminology, if not the modes of thinking one associates with postmodernism. I recently read Liquid Modernity (trans. 2002) as well as Community (trans. 2001), and recognized Bauman's line of thought to be roughly similar to that of Fredric Jameson or (in his more sane/lucid moments) Jean Baudrillard. For postmodernists, something is happening differently in the present moment: Space is imploding, time is imploding. And Marx's famous 'All that is solid melts into air' is turning out to be literally true.
But courtesy of Political Theory Info, I recently came across an interview in Eurozine where Bauman takes a rather different stance. It's worth quoting at length:
I tend to agree, above all, with the idea that 'postmodernity' necessarily suggests that modernity is over, and that the attempt to reload the concept with various alternative spins is unconvincing. I also agree that there are novel aspects to the present conjuncture, which need to be described using 'positive' terminology. 'Globalization' and 'hybridity' are examples of positive descriptors, though both terms are actually quite limited; more terms are necessary.
In contrast to any of the alternatives to modernity, Bauman (in his book, and to a lesser extent in his interview) proposes a concept of liquid modernity, which I find interesting, but less than convincing. Though he never abandons the terms 'modernity' and 'modernization', the concept still maps chonrologically and conceptually to the idea of postmodernity he is questioning above. For Bauman, what is novel about the present moment (aka, modernity II, liquid modernity) is the sense that the old social bonds of family and community are being replaced by concepts of identity that are by their nature fluid and flexible. Modernity originally aimed to break primordial social bonds only to reform and relocate individuals in even stronger, new bonds (such as the nation, or the nuclear family). Liquid modernity means strong bonds are out entirely.
I don't agree. I would allow that some forms of social order are indeed more flexible, but it's for certain people, and in certain circumstances. Bauman mentions the transition from a patriarchal society ordered by marriage to one where the idea of cohabitation is increasingly the norm. He's thinking of Europe; it's not particularly true in the U.S., though it may become so once gay marriage is normalized.
Even if the transition in family structure were to become universal, this liquefaction doesn't apply to other aspects of social life. It doesn't change the fact that for billions of people, strong bonds of identity centered around religion, family, nationality, and ethno-linguistic particularity, are still at the core of social being. Even in the states in Europe where 'marriage is passé', there are strong movements to limit or cancel immigration from the south and the east -- in the interest of preserving national identity.
In both Community and Liquid Modernity, Bauman addresses the question of class and labor, often with clever and provocative insights. For instance, he is compelling (if not utterly original) on how Fordism and Taylorism have dehumanized labor by instrumentalizing workers. Also, in his analysis of the contemporary breakdown in the idea of community, Bauman is careful to point out that it is first and foremost the cosmopolitan elites who 'secede' from community (he calls it the 'secession of the successful'), to the privatized spaces of gated communities, automobiles, and airport lounges. In contrast, non-elites are still bound by their particularities -- by community.
The class-basis of Bauman's 'secession' theory is good -- so good, it swallows up Bauman himself. In Liquid Modernity, it seems to me that Bauman himself is guilty of thinking about globalization's effect on space and time from the international airport (or worse, from the hotel swimming pool), rather than from the city street or the impoverished farms of the world's rural hinterlands. For people without money, without a visa, etc. modernity is not liquid, it's hard.
Despite his interesting gestures to the contrary, it seems to me that Bauman is still a utopian postmodernist.
But courtesy of Political Theory Info, I recently came across an interview in Eurozine where Bauman takes a rather different stance. It's worth quoting at length:
ZB: I've some time ago distanced myself from the "postmodern" grid of the world-map. A number of reasons contributed.
To start with, the concept of "postmodern" was but a stop-gap choice, a "career report" of a search - still on-going and remote from completion. That concept signalled that the social world had ceased to be like the one mapped using the "modernity" grid (notably, the paths and the traps changed places), but was singularly un-committal as to the features the world had acquired instead. [...] About the qualities of the present-day world we can say now more than it is unlike the old familiar one. We have, so to speak, matured to afford (to risk?) a positive theory of the novelty.
"Postmodern" was also flawed from the beginning: all disclaimers notwithstanding, it did suggest that modernity was over. Protestations did not help much, even as strong ones as Lyotard's ("one cannot be modern without being first postmodern") - let alone my insistence that "postmodernity is modernity minus its illusion". Nothing would help; if words mean anything, then a "postX" will always mean a state of affairs that has leaved the "X" behind. [...]
I had (and still have) reservations towards alternative names suggested for our contemporaneity. "Late modernity"? How would we know that it is "late"? The word "late", if legitimately used, assumes closure, the last stage (indeed - what else one would expect to come after "late"? Very late? Post-late?) - and so it suggests much more than we (as sociologists, who unlike the soothsayers and clairvoyants have no tools to predict the future and must limit ourselves to taking inventories of the current trends) are entitled responsibly to propose. [...] I would perhaps embrace George Balandier's surmodernité or Paul Virilio/John Armitage's hypermodernity, were not these terms, like the term 'postmodern', too shell-like, too uncommittal to guide and target the theoretical effort.
I tend to agree, above all, with the idea that 'postmodernity' necessarily suggests that modernity is over, and that the attempt to reload the concept with various alternative spins is unconvincing. I also agree that there are novel aspects to the present conjuncture, which need to be described using 'positive' terminology. 'Globalization' and 'hybridity' are examples of positive descriptors, though both terms are actually quite limited; more terms are necessary.
In contrast to any of the alternatives to modernity, Bauman (in his book, and to a lesser extent in his interview) proposes a concept of liquid modernity, which I find interesting, but less than convincing. Though he never abandons the terms 'modernity' and 'modernization', the concept still maps chonrologically and conceptually to the idea of postmodernity he is questioning above. For Bauman, what is novel about the present moment (aka, modernity II, liquid modernity) is the sense that the old social bonds of family and community are being replaced by concepts of identity that are by their nature fluid and flexible. Modernity originally aimed to break primordial social bonds only to reform and relocate individuals in even stronger, new bonds (such as the nation, or the nuclear family). Liquid modernity means strong bonds are out entirely.
I don't agree. I would allow that some forms of social order are indeed more flexible, but it's for certain people, and in certain circumstances. Bauman mentions the transition from a patriarchal society ordered by marriage to one where the idea of cohabitation is increasingly the norm. He's thinking of Europe; it's not particularly true in the U.S., though it may become so once gay marriage is normalized.
Even if the transition in family structure were to become universal, this liquefaction doesn't apply to other aspects of social life. It doesn't change the fact that for billions of people, strong bonds of identity centered around religion, family, nationality, and ethno-linguistic particularity, are still at the core of social being. Even in the states in Europe where 'marriage is passé', there are strong movements to limit or cancel immigration from the south and the east -- in the interest of preserving national identity.
In both Community and Liquid Modernity, Bauman addresses the question of class and labor, often with clever and provocative insights. For instance, he is compelling (if not utterly original) on how Fordism and Taylorism have dehumanized labor by instrumentalizing workers. Also, in his analysis of the contemporary breakdown in the idea of community, Bauman is careful to point out that it is first and foremost the cosmopolitan elites who 'secede' from community (he calls it the 'secession of the successful'), to the privatized spaces of gated communities, automobiles, and airport lounges. In contrast, non-elites are still bound by their particularities -- by community.
The class-basis of Bauman's 'secession' theory is good -- so good, it swallows up Bauman himself. In Liquid Modernity, it seems to me that Bauman himself is guilty of thinking about globalization's effect on space and time from the international airport (or worse, from the hotel swimming pool), rather than from the city street or the impoverished farms of the world's rural hinterlands. For people without money, without a visa, etc. modernity is not liquid, it's hard.
Despite his interesting gestures to the contrary, it seems to me that Bauman is still a utopian postmodernist.
U.S. Sikhs in the news
There are still many jobs you can't do in the U.S. if you wear a turban and beard. You can't join the army, you can't be a police officer (in most places), and you can't work for Disney, to name just three (Disney still requires its employees to be clean-shaven).
A converted Sikh subway driver named Kevin Harrington was taken off the job a few weeks ago and reassigned to a low-profile position. Also removed from his post was a driver with dreadlocks. They were told their refusal to wear the required MTA caps on the job was the reason. But Harrington made a big stink about it -- he'd been a driver for 23 years, and this was the first time he had ever been bothered about the turban.
The New York Times article speculates that the reason for the reassignment is the lawsuit the MTA is fighting against female Muslim MTA employees, who are suing to be able to wear Hijabs (the article calls the headscarves Khimars) on the job. Uniformity was suddenly important, so all religious apparel needed to be discriminated against equally.
But the MTA backed down, and now Harrington and the unnamed dreadlocked dude are back on the job. Newsday strikes a note of celebration, and alludes to the ongoing cases involving turbaned Sikhs who want to work for the NYPD as traffic cops. I'm hoping that the MTA will also back down (or, at worst, lose its case) regarding the Hijab-wearing Muslim employees.
Also Nikki Randhawa-Haley, of South Carolina, is running for State Legislature as a Republican. She has been doing pretty well, though she's a little behind in the primary race. Typically, this story is only being covered in the Indian media.
It seems like every South Asian running for office in this country is a Republican. Why do I get the feeling that, if I were to suddenly change my party affiliation overnight, there would a be a job waiting for me?
A converted Sikh subway driver named Kevin Harrington was taken off the job a few weeks ago and reassigned to a low-profile position. Also removed from his post was a driver with dreadlocks. They were told their refusal to wear the required MTA caps on the job was the reason. But Harrington made a big stink about it -- he'd been a driver for 23 years, and this was the first time he had ever been bothered about the turban.
The New York Times article speculates that the reason for the reassignment is the lawsuit the MTA is fighting against female Muslim MTA employees, who are suing to be able to wear Hijabs (the article calls the headscarves Khimars) on the job. Uniformity was suddenly important, so all religious apparel needed to be discriminated against equally.
But the MTA backed down, and now Harrington and the unnamed dreadlocked dude are back on the job. Newsday strikes a note of celebration, and alludes to the ongoing cases involving turbaned Sikhs who want to work for the NYPD as traffic cops. I'm hoping that the MTA will also back down (or, at worst, lose its case) regarding the Hijab-wearing Muslim employees.
Also Nikki Randhawa-Haley, of South Carolina, is running for State Legislature as a Republican. She has been doing pretty well, though she's a little behind in the primary race. Typically, this story is only being covered in the Indian media.
It seems like every South Asian running for office in this country is a Republican. Why do I get the feeling that, if I were to suddenly change my party affiliation overnight, there would a be a job waiting for me?
The next phase of the scandal -- the torture memo
A Defense Department memo authorized and approved by the Bush Administration has been leaked (read it here).
A story about the memo appeared on Monday in the Wall Street Journal (not available for free from the website, though the story can be read at Infoshop).
Left bloggers, especially those with law degrees (Mark Kleinman, Josh Marshall, Michael Froomkin, Philip Carter), are already analyzing the text of the memo and trying to figure out just where it goes off the rails legally and constitutionally. The memo is a finely-argued thing, but clearly its intention will not be served now that the Abu Ghraib scandal has broken. No one will be trying to use the arguments of this memo, I trust, to get the MPs and Military Intelligence people involved off the hook (the memo actually cites the Nuremberg Defense -- aka 'I was only following orders' -- as a viable defense for these soldiers).
The memo seems to be important because it proves that the US military use of torture goes much higher than some 'bad apple' soldiers and contractors. Classifying prisoners at Guantanamo as 'enemy combatants', as well as the need to keep them off U.S. soil, are both mentioned in this memo as ways to justify 'light' torture as policy. How high does it go? That is still being revealed.
Because of the Reagan frenzy, so far only a few news organizations have picked up the story with the urgency it requires. Newsweek/MSNBC has a story about it. The New York Times has a story that emphasizes the Democrats' outrage at the memo during hearings questioning John Ashcroft, not on the contents of the memo itself:
So it will come down to that -- memos exist that explain why torture should not be considered illegal under U.S. Federal law, but no direct authorization of torture can be found. And Ashcroft 'doesn't remember' whether he discussed the question with Bush...
If Ashcroft can get away with signing off on the memos designed to circumvent U.S. and international laws regarding torture, why can't Bush get away with it too?
After all, no one (or so we're told) ever directly ordered the soldiers and contractors to torture anyone -- the administration only told them it would be ok and legal if they did decide to torture.
A story about the memo appeared on Monday in the Wall Street Journal (not available for free from the website, though the story can be read at Infoshop).
Left bloggers, especially those with law degrees (Mark Kleinman, Josh Marshall, Michael Froomkin, Philip Carter), are already analyzing the text of the memo and trying to figure out just where it goes off the rails legally and constitutionally. The memo is a finely-argued thing, but clearly its intention will not be served now that the Abu Ghraib scandal has broken. No one will be trying to use the arguments of this memo, I trust, to get the MPs and Military Intelligence people involved off the hook (the memo actually cites the Nuremberg Defense -- aka 'I was only following orders' -- as a viable defense for these soldiers).
The memo seems to be important because it proves that the US military use of torture goes much higher than some 'bad apple' soldiers and contractors. Classifying prisoners at Guantanamo as 'enemy combatants', as well as the need to keep them off U.S. soil, are both mentioned in this memo as ways to justify 'light' torture as policy. How high does it go? That is still being revealed.
Because of the Reagan frenzy, so far only a few news organizations have picked up the story with the urgency it requires. Newsweek/MSNBC has a story about it. The New York Times has a story that emphasizes the Democrats' outrage at the memo during hearings questioning John Ashcroft, not on the contents of the memo itself:
Mr. Ashcroft strove to make a distinction between memorandums that may have provided theoretical legal justifications for torture and his assertion that there had never been any directive that actually authorized its use.
But the memorandums, by their numbers and their arguments — aimed at justifying the use of interrogation techniques inflicting pain by spelling out instances when this did not legally constitute torture and the inapplicability of international treaties — have produced outrage from international human rights groups and members of Congress, mostly Democrats.
Over the past few weeks, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have disclosed memorandums that show a pattern in which administration lawyers set about devising arguments to avoid constraints against mistreatment and torture.
So it will come down to that -- memos exist that explain why torture should not be considered illegal under U.S. Federal law, but no direct authorization of torture can be found. And Ashcroft 'doesn't remember' whether he discussed the question with Bush...
If Ashcroft can get away with signing off on the memos designed to circumvent U.S. and international laws regarding torture, why can't Bush get away with it too?
After all, no one (or so we're told) ever directly ordered the soldiers and contractors to torture anyone -- the administration only told them it would be ok and legal if they did decide to torture.
Alternatives to Said (Buruma on Bernard Lewis; the War in Iraq)
Bernard Lewis is generally disliked by progressives, especially those in postcolonial studies. And while there are indeed many places where I disagree with his arguments, I've personally found it worthwhile to read his books (I've only started to do so in the last two years; I've thus far read What Went Wrong? and Cultures in Conflict). Edward Said, author of Orientalism and the late doyen of postcolonial theory, was in many ways an intellectual arch-rival to Lewis on the question of Europe's scholarly analysis of the cultures outside of Europe. To put it simply: Lewis is comfortable characterizing the world outside Europe from a position of knowledge (Orientalism); Said always questions the motives western scholars have for making the characterizations they make (anti-Orientalism).
These days I find some of Said's 'big arguments' less than fully convincing. I've been seeking alternatives that are more directly grounded in empiricism and evidence, and I'm less concerned about 'who is speaking' than what is being said and on what factual basis. I've reached my limit with arguments motivated by questioning the 'conditions of knowledge production', and I've come to crave liberal quantities of actual knowledge of the human experience -- political, cultural, religious, historical, and of course literary. It's a less sophisticated approach to knowledge (call it intentional naiveté), but it has completely changed my attitude to what I am doing. It has at once made me much more humble, and increased my respect for people who can claim direct expertise in specific fields through knowledge of multiple languages, experience with primary source materials, and deep history.
Lewis is one among many scholars out there who has made some actual knowledge available for general readers, even if he has sometimes done so with bias; one should read him with an antidote such as Rashid Khalidi (who has a healthy respect for the conventional concept of 'expertise,' even if he comes out on Edward Said's side more often than not in his actual political analysis).
Ian Buruma has a balanced critique of Lewis in this week's New Yorker. Rather than focus on his sympathies for Israel, Buruma looks closely at the evolution of Lewis' ideas about western intervention in the Arab/Muslim world. For Buruma, Lewis' failing is not that his basic perceptions of the Arab and Muslim worlds are wrong because of some deep-seated (if unconscious) hostility, but rather that he loves the culture he studies too much: "It is a common phenomenon among Western students of the Orient to fall in love with a civilization. Such love often ends in bitter impatience when reality fails to conform to the ideal. The rage, in this instance, is that of the Western scholar. His beloved civilization is sick." Here I worry that Buruma is being a little simplistic -- my Saidian response is still instinctive -- isn't it possible that Lewis' love for the civilization he studies was a paternalistic love, affectionate to be sure, but only workable from a position of dominance?
In earlier essays, Lewis (starting in the 1950s) suggested the west exercise caution in attempting to remake the Arab and Muslim worlds. He also sometimes wrote with great affection and respect for the role of Islam especially in the lives of believers, as in this passage that Buruma quotes:
After 1990, the recognition of Islamic 'greatness' disappeared, and Lewis' emphasis shifted to an analysis of "Muslim rage" (perhaps, as Buruma claims, more from disappointment than from racism). But the bitter tone has sharpened, so much so that in the reprint of the essay quoted above in Lewis' newest collection of essays (From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East), the passage cited above has been removed, suggesting that Lewis' new constituency of readers would find the respect expressed in the passage above disturbing rather than reassuring. Since 9/11, Lewis has been a hero in the Anti-Terror Wars, and has been influential with the hawks in the Bush administration. He was one of the early advocates of the war in Iraq, claiming with Rumsfeld that American soldiers would be greeted as liberators rather than conquerors. Sadly, no. For Buruma, it is this abandonment of political and cultural caution that ultimately discredits Lewis.
What bothers me most, however, is the sense that Lewis has abandoned his original scholarly constituency (Islamic studies scholars) in favor of two new ones. The new omission of respect (as in the passage quoted above) suggests that Lewis now wants to be read primarily by: 1) the policy-makers who create spurious justifications for war, and for whom respect is less important than Kissinger-ian 'realism', and 2) the thousands upon thousands of everyday political cynics and anti-Islamic chauvinists who make books on 'Muslim rage' shoot to the top of the bestseller lists.
These days I find some of Said's 'big arguments' less than fully convincing. I've been seeking alternatives that are more directly grounded in empiricism and evidence, and I'm less concerned about 'who is speaking' than what is being said and on what factual basis. I've reached my limit with arguments motivated by questioning the 'conditions of knowledge production', and I've come to crave liberal quantities of actual knowledge of the human experience -- political, cultural, religious, historical, and of course literary. It's a less sophisticated approach to knowledge (call it intentional naiveté), but it has completely changed my attitude to what I am doing. It has at once made me much more humble, and increased my respect for people who can claim direct expertise in specific fields through knowledge of multiple languages, experience with primary source materials, and deep history.
Lewis is one among many scholars out there who has made some actual knowledge available for general readers, even if he has sometimes done so with bias; one should read him with an antidote such as Rashid Khalidi (who has a healthy respect for the conventional concept of 'expertise,' even if he comes out on Edward Said's side more often than not in his actual political analysis).
Ian Buruma has a balanced critique of Lewis in this week's New Yorker. Rather than focus on his sympathies for Israel, Buruma looks closely at the evolution of Lewis' ideas about western intervention in the Arab/Muslim world. For Buruma, Lewis' failing is not that his basic perceptions of the Arab and Muslim worlds are wrong because of some deep-seated (if unconscious) hostility, but rather that he loves the culture he studies too much: "It is a common phenomenon among Western students of the Orient to fall in love with a civilization. Such love often ends in bitter impatience when reality fails to conform to the ideal. The rage, in this instance, is that of the Western scholar. His beloved civilization is sick." Here I worry that Buruma is being a little simplistic -- my Saidian response is still instinctive -- isn't it possible that Lewis' love for the civilization he studies was a paternalistic love, affectionate to be sure, but only workable from a position of dominance?
In earlier essays, Lewis (starting in the 1950s) suggested the west exercise caution in attempting to remake the Arab and Muslim worlds. He also sometimes wrote with great affection and respect for the role of Islam especially in the lives of believers, as in this passage that Buruma quotes:
“Islam is one of the world’s great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that. Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world.”
After 1990, the recognition of Islamic 'greatness' disappeared, and Lewis' emphasis shifted to an analysis of "Muslim rage" (perhaps, as Buruma claims, more from disappointment than from racism). But the bitter tone has sharpened, so much so that in the reprint of the essay quoted above in Lewis' newest collection of essays (From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East), the passage cited above has been removed, suggesting that Lewis' new constituency of readers would find the respect expressed in the passage above disturbing rather than reassuring. Since 9/11, Lewis has been a hero in the Anti-Terror Wars, and has been influential with the hawks in the Bush administration. He was one of the early advocates of the war in Iraq, claiming with Rumsfeld that American soldiers would be greeted as liberators rather than conquerors. Sadly, no. For Buruma, it is this abandonment of political and cultural caution that ultimately discredits Lewis.
What bothers me most, however, is the sense that Lewis has abandoned his original scholarly constituency (Islamic studies scholars) in favor of two new ones. The new omission of respect (as in the passage quoted above) suggests that Lewis now wants to be read primarily by: 1) the policy-makers who create spurious justifications for war, and for whom respect is less important than Kissinger-ian 'realism', and 2) the thousands upon thousands of everyday political cynics and anti-Islamic chauvinists who make books on 'Muslim rage' shoot to the top of the bestseller lists.
Alternative Views of Ronald Reagan
He is beloved in the gay community (via Bentkid; also see Bob Mould) for ignoring the spread of the AIDS epidemic in its early years. Supporters of democracy love him for his support of right-wing militias in Latin America, which toppled democratically elected governments. Africa loves him, because of his support for 'constructive engagement' with Apartheid South Africa. Yes, the all-white government of South Africa needed all the support it could get!
What a great president. In fact, he wasn't even all that popular (Clinton was more popular in the two years after Monicagate than Reagan was after Iran-Contra). Jobs and growth were also better under Clinton. Finally, Reagan talked a lot about tax cuts and rolling back the Welfare State, but according to Paul Krugman (as well as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation) he didn't do either.
Balanced: The Guardian. Best paragraph:
Satirical: Michael Bérubé. Best paragraph:
Enumerative: David Corn. Nice, though it would help if someone would explain all of the perfectly culled phrases:
Some of these references are things most people don't know or don't remember. I was too young to remember James Watt (he was forced to retire after he used the lovely phrase "a black ... a woman, two Jews and a cripple" to describe the diversity of a committe he had created). Ditto for Elliot Abrams (who lied flagrantly to Congress about Iran-Contra, including US support for groups that are known to have committed major atrocities in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua); Reagan later pardoned him.
Economic: Paul Krugman
Gay, HIV Positive, and Somehow Still For Reagan: Andrew Sullivan
Sullivan's pro-Reagan policy strikes me as particularly confused. Take, for instance, these sentences:
So why the gap between 1983 and 1986? Where was Reagan for those three years? And secondly, notice the squirming over the question of who supported the funding for AIDS research -- it was the Democrat-dominated Congress.
[UPDATE: More!]
Pure Spite: Christopher Hitchens in Slate
All rightie, then!
Outrage: Mark Weisbrot (via To The Teeth)
Strategic: John Nichols in The Nation (via To the Teeth)
I think Nichols' line -- 'what can liberals learn from Reagan?' -- is a little cynical. He is arguing that charisma and confidence are values to be emulated, because they help establish a connection with voters. Moreover, even ideals that are thought to be political impossibilities can in fact be accomplished with skillful manipulation.
But we don't need more Reagans and Nixons; we need people who can persuade, when persuasion is necessary, and who know how to take their lumps.
What a great president. In fact, he wasn't even all that popular (Clinton was more popular in the two years after Monicagate than Reagan was after Iran-Contra). Jobs and growth were also better under Clinton. Finally, Reagan talked a lot about tax cuts and rolling back the Welfare State, but according to Paul Krugman (as well as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation) he didn't do either.
Balanced: The Guardian. Best paragraph:
Matters went altogether too far in the Iran-Contra affair, when the White House staff (and, almost certainly, the president himself) conspired to sell arms to revolutionary Iran, in defiance of declared government policy, and use the money to support the insurrectionary forces in Nicaragua, in defiance of congressional directives. The chief villain of the piece, Colonel Oliver North, was lucky to escape prison, but Reagan himself deserved to be impeached for the business. He escaped because few could bear the thought of struggling through another Watergate, and, anyway, no one hated or feared him as they had Richard Nixon.
Satirical: Michael Bérubé. Best paragraph:
Then came Ronald Reagan. From the day he kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a stirring defense of states' rights, I knew that it would soon be morning in America again-- especially for us white people. Reagan's sunny optimism and traditional values brought America together again in a time of national self-doubt, and his decision to open his campaign in the little town where James Chaney, Andy Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered only sixteen years before, championing "states' rights" in a way that every Thurmond-loving Dixiecrat would understand, let us know that the period of Negro domination of government was finally coming to an end. It's true that Reagan himself wasn't openly opposed to any individual black people-- just things like the Voting Rights Act-- but then, he didn't need to be. We knew perfectly well what he was talking about, even if he didn't.
Enumerative: David Corn. Nice, though it would help if someone would explain all of the perfectly culled phrases:
The firing of the air traffic controllers, winnable nuclear war, recallable nuclear missiles, trees that cause pollution, Elliott Abrams lying to Congress, ketchup as a vegetable, colluding with Guatemalan thugs, pardons for F.B.I. lawbreakers, voodoo economics, budget deficits, toasts to Ferdinand Marcos, public housing cutbacks, redbaiting the nuclear freeze movement, James Watt.
Getting cozy with Argentine fascist generals, tax credits for segregated schools, disinformation campaigns, "homeless by choice," Manuel Noriega, falling wages, the HUD scandal, air raids on Libya, "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa, United States Information Agency blacklists of liberal speakers, attacks on OSHA and workplace safety, the invasion of Grenada, assassination manuals, Nancy's astrologer.
Some of these references are things most people don't know or don't remember. I was too young to remember James Watt (he was forced to retire after he used the lovely phrase "a black ... a woman, two Jews and a cripple" to describe the diversity of a committe he had created). Ditto for Elliot Abrams (who lied flagrantly to Congress about Iran-Contra, including US support for groups that are known to have committed major atrocities in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua); Reagan later pardoned him.
Economic: Paul Krugman
Over the course of this week we'll be hearing a lot about Ronald Reagan, much of it false. A number of news sources have already proclaimed Mr. Reagan the most popular president of modern times. In fact, though Mr. Reagan was very popular in 1984 and 1985, he spent the latter part of his presidency under the shadow of the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton had a slightly higher average Gallup approval rating, and a much higher rating during his last two years in office. [...]
But Ronald Reagan does hold a special place in the annals of tax policy, and not just as the patron saint of tax cuts. To his credit, he was more pragmatic and responsible than that; he followed his huge 1981 tax cut with two large tax increases. In fact, no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people. This is not a criticism: the tale of those increases tells you a lot about what was right with President Reagan's leadership, and what's wrong with the leadership of George W. Bush.
Gay, HIV Positive, and Somehow Still For Reagan: Andrew Sullivan
Sullivan's pro-Reagan policy strikes me as particularly confused. Take, for instance, these sentences:
As for research, we didn't even know what HIV was until 1983. Nevertheless, the Reagan presidency spent some $5.7 billion on HIV in its two terms - not peanuts. The resources increased by 450 percent in 1983, 134 percent in 1984, 99 percent the next year and 148 percent the year after. Yes, the Congress was critical in this. But by 1986, Reagan had endorsed a large prevention and research effort and declared in his budget message that AIDS "remains the highest public health priority of the Department of Health and Human Services."
So why the gap between 1983 and 1986? Where was Reagan for those three years? And secondly, notice the squirming over the question of who supported the funding for AIDS research -- it was the Democrat-dominated Congress.
[UPDATE: More!]
Pure Spite: Christopher Hitchens in Slate
The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.
All rightie, then!
Outrage: Mark Weisbrot (via To The Teeth)
Mr. Reagan is often credited with having caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, but this is doubtful. He did use the Cold War as a pretext for other interventions, including funding and support for horrific violence against the civilian population of Central America. In 1999 the United Nations determined that the massacres of tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly indigenous people, constituted "genocide." These massacres -- often involving grotesque torture -- reached their peak under the rule of Mr. Reagan's ally, the Guatemalan General Rios Montt. Tens of thousands of Salvadorans were also murdered during Mr. Reagan's presidency by death squads affiliated with the U.S.-funded Salvadoran military.
But it was Mr. Reagan's efforts to overthrow the government -- democratically elected in 1984 -- of poor, underdeveloped Nicaragua that almost brought down his presidency. Congress cut off aid to Mr. Reagan's proxy army, the Contras, as a result of pressure from Americans -- led by religious groups -- who were disgusted by the Contras' tactics of murdering unarmed teachers and health care workers.
Strategic: John Nichols in The Nation (via To the Teeth)
Ronald Reagan was a master politician who understood how to package rightwing ideas in appealing enough forms to get himself elected and, sometimes, to implement his programs. Even when Americans did not like the ideas Reagan was peddling--as in 1984, when polls showed Democrat Walter Mondale's ideas were significantly more popular--they liked Reagan. Throughout his career, Reagan benefitted from the penchant of Americans to embrace politicians who seem to be at ease with their ideology. This sense that true believers are genuine creates confidence in citizens, lending itself to lines like, "Even if you disagree with him, you know where he stands." And such lines translate on election day into votes that frequently cross ideological and partisan lines.
I think Nichols' line -- 'what can liberals learn from Reagan?' -- is a little cynical. He is arguing that charisma and confidence are values to be emulated, because they help establish a connection with voters. Moreover, even ideals that are thought to be political impossibilities can in fact be accomplished with skillful manipulation.
But we don't need more Reagans and Nixons; we need people who can persuade, when persuasion is necessary, and who know how to take their lumps.
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