Author: john mcgowan

Holding Professors Accountable in the Midst of Political Attacks on the University

I was a participant in a roundtable on public higher education last Friday that included two UNC faculty members, a senior associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, two current students, a state legislator (Republican), a business man who is also a big donor to UNC, a former member of the UNC board of trustees (from the financial world), and the executive directors of two right wing think tanks in the state, including the notorious Pope Foundation (which has recently changed its name to the Martin Institute.)  The Pope Foundation, as well as the John Locke Foundation (the other group represented), has been consistently critical of UNC courses in women’s and sexuality studies, requesting syllabi and then criticizing specific professors and courses in the public media.  More generally, they have both been scornful of the language of “diversity.”

The context for the conversation was a forthcoming book by our ex-Chancellor and the founder of our undergraduate program in entrepreneurship in which they argue 1) that universities cannot and should not be run like corporations, and 2) that the basic social contract that generated support for public higher education from 1950 to 1990 is now badly strained, if not completely broken.  Their book sets out to find a way to repair that broken compact.  So the goal of the round-table, which was filmed, was to discover if there was any common ground on which to build in the effort to heal the rift.

Substantively, not much was accomplished.  Everyone was on their best behavior, perhaps because being filmed.  Our right wing guests didn’t have much to say; they mostly listened.  Everyone affirmed the idea of a liberal arts education; everyone seemed to sign off on the notion of “access,” another key theme.  Similarly, there was no push-back against the idea that the universities of North Carolina were an economic driver—and a major reason why we were not Mississippi.

Our businessman philanthropist was the one who said we, as a society, were failing to invest in our future—and that tax cuts had gone too far.  No one really took up that point, although the state legislator was willing to say that tax cuts needed to stop—and that “maybe” we had gone too far in that direction.  When asked about the legislature’s thinking about higher education, he denied there was any hostility to it.  The legislature simply faced a number of competing demands when it came to budgeting—and all of those demands were legitimate, good things to support.  He made it sound all ideology-free, just a matter of making do with the available resources.

It didn’t help that our dean told the group that North Carolina was still the 4th best state in the nation in terms of its support of its higher education system. (NC started out in 2008 as one of the best–and the pace of cuts here in NC was similar to the pace across the whole country, so we did not fall in this particular ranking.) That fed an unjustified complacency in the room—unjustified because it allowed everyone to ignore the ways recent actions have hurt instruction on our campuses and limited access.  The egregious mandate from the Board of Governors (which rules over the whole system, as distinct from the Board of Trustees for each individual campus) that only 25% of tuition increases can be used to fund need-based aid never came up.  (I have seen that number reported as 15% in the UNC Alumni magazine; I was pretty sure it was 25%, but could be wrong.)  Thus, as the BoG approves tuition hikes, it makes sure the most vulnerable are hurt by them.  Their rationale was that more affluent students should not be “taxed” to supplement the fees of less affluent students.

I have a friend who attends BoG meetings regularly.  He confirms that they hate Chapel Hill in ways that they don’t hate NC State or the other schools in the system.  There is no consistency either to their hatred or to their ways they would like to transform UNC, Chapel Hill.  He characterizes the BoG members as the wealthiest people from their rural communities—who have witnessed the precipitous decline of those communities after the death of tobacco and textiles and the furniture business (the three pillars of the NC general economy prior to 1990.)  NC was never a rich state, but it was one that functioned for all of its citizens.  Now we have a very prosperous middle of the state—with per capita incomes that rival Connecticut’s—yoked to a depopulated east (except for the booming ocean front resorts) and an Appalachian west where the poverty levels match those of Mississippi.  Governing a state that is both Connecticut and Mississippi is well-nigh impossible.  But the legislative power rests in the hands of the white Mississippians.

Those rural legislators—and the supporters that they have appointed to our Board of Governors—have no remedies.  They don’t know any better than anyone else how to revive the dead economies of the places where they grew up and where they still live.  They look at Chapel Hill and see an elitist, rich, and complacent institution that takes thousands of kids from the Raleigh and Charlotte suburbs, while taking one or two top students from the rural high schools, turning up their noses at the rest.  So they (Chapel Hill) sneer at us (white Southerners), while stealing away our best and brightest—who they turn into Democrats and snobs, people who are never going to come back to the dying towns they grew up in.  And while they are turning down our kids as not good enough, they (in the name of diversity) are giving slots to all those blacks, Latinos, and Asians who have crowded into the outer suburbs and inner cities of our state.

When it comes to solutions, these guys (again, I am going on the reports of my friend) swing wildly and incoherently between free market fundamentalism and socialism.  They can move from praise of the market to suggesting all kinds of state interventions on the turn of a dime.  They don’t know what to do, but they know who the enemy is, and they want to lash out and do some hurting.

None of that came to the surface in our polite conversation.  The right-wingers in the room would, I assume, distance themselves from the no-nothings.  But the real conflict is that these educated, smooth right wingers (Paul Ryan types) are against public education.  They are Milton Friedman acolytes.  Education is a private investment that families make in their future—and schools get lazy, complacent, and inefficient when not subjected to competition and the resultant market discipline.

I am not as hostile to these arguments as most faculty members are.  And maybe when I expressed my version of anti-complacency, I was guilty of trying to placate the right-wingers in the room.  (Note that all of this is implied; they did not articulate any such arguments in our conversation.)

Here’s how I make the case.  I was in a room with some financial world people—hedge fund managers, and folks at Goldman Sachs—just shortly after the election in November 2008.  The financial guys (and they were all guys, about 10 of them in a mixed crowd of about 25 total where the other 15 were not financial types) all agreed that the Democrats (Nancy Pelosi was their particular bête noir; I guess because dissing a woman was better in their eyes than dissing a black man) were going to screw the nation’s economy horribly with their urge for regulations and taxes.  Nothing about the financial collapse seemed to have altered one iota these guy’s confidence that they knew what they were doing—and about how to best organize the nation’s economic well-being.  Sure there had been some mistakes, but they knew how to fix them.  Just keep those no-nothing politicians from messing things up.

My reaction was predictable.  These guys need to be accountable; there needs to be watch-dogs, and there needs to be consequences for bad results.  And my argument is that it works no differently for teachers.  We should be accountable for outcomes.  We claim we are teaching these students—and should hardly expect the public we claim to serve to be satisfied when we assure them: “Don’t worry.  We know what we are doing and we know your kids are learning lots and lots.”

That’s not good enough.  To take just one example: there is now tons and tons of research that shows that presenting information (in no matter what format: a book, a lecture, a power point presentation) has very little impact.  People do not learn things by being told them.  Active learning produces vastly better results for the retention of information and the fuller comprehension of that information (as demonstrated by the ability to put it to use in different contexts).  Yet many of my professorial colleagues resist that finding.  Lectures and reading books worked well for them—with no thought about the fact that they are outliers or for finding ways to promote learning for the majority of their students, not just a talented minority.

Even more basic.  We are now required to state the course’s objectives on our syllabi—and are encouraged to think about how our pedagogical strategies and our assignments (what students are asked to read, write, do projects or reports on etc.) might lend themselves to achieving those objectives.  Again, many of my colleagues think of this as philistinism, as creeping corporatization.  The nerve of asking that we define “outcomes.”  I have no patience for such responses.  We (the professors) are the anti-intellectuals we claim to abhor when we refuse to a) take seriously the research about what enhances learning and what does not, and b) refuse to self-consciously and critically think about our own goals and strategies in the courses we teach.

In short, the public has as much right to ask teachers to justify their practices and to reform them when results are not particularly good as they have the right to insist that bankers be regulated by external watch-dogs.

The measures are the hard part.  Numerically based assessments of learning outcomes are crude at best, and worthless at worst.  But stricter assessment of outcomes is coming—and it is in the interest of professors to be deeply involved in the establishment of the metrics.  I am reasonably confident that qualitative assessment will be our friend, not our enemy.  My bet is that such assessments will prove, rather conclusively, that education does not scale well.  There are not many efficiencies that will actually produce better results.  As teachers, we should stand staunchly and unequivocally for getting the best results for all of our students—and such results are not going to be achieved (in most cases) by on-line courses or 350 pupil lecture courses.  In some select instances, on-line instruction may prove effective—and we (the professors) should embrace such cases.  Any money saved can be used to promote more hands-on teaching in places where that is required.

In short, just as we would be appalled at doctors who did not make use of data about results to influence treatment of future patients, we as professional educators should be eager to discover what works well and what does not—and have it guide our future practice.  To run away from such self-study, screaming “corporatization,” is irresponsible and, in my view, indefensible.  It also suggests we are terrified by what we might discover—which belies our publicly displayed confidence that we know what we are doing.

We are rightfully resentful of—and resistant to—a knee-jerk hostility to universities as elitist and left-wing, and to the professors as under-worked and over-paid sycophants.  But that doesn’t entitle us to a free ride and a total refusal to change our ways.  I am going to allow myself a gross overgeneralization: I have seldom met any group more conservative (in the sense of clinging to the established ways of doing things) than a faculty that prides itself on being progressive, even revolutionary.

Free Speech and Civility

I have, over the past month, been a member of a University committee that has produced a “resolution” that will have the faculty at UNC endorsing the “Chicago principles” on free speech.

I went into our deliberations deeply suspicious of this whole furor about “free speech” on campus.  If the ability to speak one’s mind freely is in jeopardy in the United States, it is not on college campuses the main threat exists.  An excellent law review article we were given to read made it very clear that case law is unambiguous: employees have just about no right to free speech.  The courts have upheld corporation’s right to fire any employee for just about any reason, including expressing an opinion the employer finds objectionable.  Similarly, high school students have almost no right to free speech—and absolutely no right to a free press.  High school newspapers are routinely censored and, it turns out, so are college newspapers.

I remain convinced that the furor over free speech on campus is a red herring, a typical jujitsu move by an authoritarian right wing that loves to portray itself as the victim of an authoritarian left.

Furthermore, I think that no one has a “right” to speak on a college campus.  Universities are in the business of evaluating knowledge claims.  Your opinion that the Holocaust did not happen or that climate change is not real or caused by human actions does not meet the minimum standards by which academia determines the legitimacy of statements.  The university can—and should—extend invitations to speak judiciously—and is fully justified not to extend such invitations to those who reject canons of evidence and logic that govern the identification of knowledge in specific fields, nor to those who espouse views that certain people should not be on our campus as students or teachers.

And, finally, I came in very sympathetic to the idea that speakers who express disdain and outright hostility to members of the university community should not be given an opportunity to express their uncivil (to put it mildly) views on campus.

Our deliberations changed my mind.  The lawyers in the room convinced me that, simply as a matter of law, there was no way to limit what could be said on a campus that is, after all, public property.  If someone wants to walk across our campus carrying a Confederate flag and spouting racist bile, there is no legal recourse but to allow him to continue (unless direct threats or incitements to violence are uttered).  And, on the whole, that’s a good thing.

Why a good thing?  Because I do remain convinced that threats to free speech come more from the right than from the left.  So it would be a massive mistake, at this moment (or any moment) in time, to let the right wrap itself in the mantle of free speech, while the left tries on various forms of abridging that freedom. Not only are the optics bad, but it is also a substantive mistake.  Just because the devil can quote scripture, that doesn’t mean we should cede the field to the devil.  Democracy, human rights, and now free speech have been slogans used by the right in the past twenty years to justify hateful and disastrous policies.  But we need to accept as inevitable that such terms will be contested—and that all sides will try to wrap themselves in the mantle of these high ideals.  It is one of the jobs of the left to fight the corruption of these terms, to fight for what we deem their proper and salutary referents.

So: I would much prefer that no one in our community invite Richard Spencer or Ann Coulter to come on campus to speak.  We are not compelled to invite anyone—and we should not dignify their bile with such an invitation. But we are also not in a position to keep them from walking onto campus and speaking their piece.

Finally, I did come to believe that a strong statement on free speech might prove useful to our university’s employees, who do not feel free to speak their minds. Unprotected by either academic freedom or tenure, they feel all the precarity that afflicts employees in this day and age.  Perhaps, they might be able to leverage this enunciation of principle to afford themselves more freedom.

All that said, the Chicago principles seemed to me an aggressive, in your face, statement of the principle of free speech.  That is, those principles are couched in such a way to support the right wing narrative about the suppression of non-leftist ideas on campus.  So I rewrote the Chicago principles in a way that I thought a) softened their implied criticism of leftist censors and b) indicated that the law was not the only norm operative when considering the tenor of speech on campus.

My idea is that universities should be committed to productive speech, to dialogic exchanges that actually move the conversation forward, that build bridges across intellectual, political, disciplinary, and other divides.  We could, while acknowledging the stringencies of the First Amendment, also articulate a commitment to civility—and recognize that it was our collective responsibility as a community to realize those ideals of civility.  My thought was that universities could model the kinds of civil conversations that have become increasingly rare, even impossible, in our society.  I will even venture to say that I have been party to many such productive conversations over my years in academia.  The way that this committee’s meetings changed my mind offers only one example.

So here, in italics, is the way that I rewrote the Chicago principles, with the aim of outlining the legal norms while also adding to them an extra-legal statement of support for a norm of civility:

The University greatly values civility—and we remind all the members of our community that they share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect. The advancement of knowledge depends fundamentally on open-mindedness, which entails granting a hearing to even seemingly outrageous claims and views. Because all views share a right to free public expression, the University may restrict expression only if it violates the law, falsely defames a specific individual, constitutes a general threat or harassment, unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality issues, or is directly incompatible with the functioning of the University. In addition, the University may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the University. These narrow exceptions afford the University the ability to constrain speech and actions that would unduly interfere with others’ freedom of expression and/or are not instances of protected speech under the First Amendment. The requirements for civility and open-mindedness extend beyond such legal protections—and a truly welcoming and productive intellectual community requires forms of mutual respect and civility that cannot be mandated by law.

In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose. Indeed, fostering the ability of members of the University community to engage in such debate and deliberation in an effective and responsible manner is an essential part of the University’s educational mission.

This attempted revision proved a spectacular failure.  We have not yet had our faculty vote on whether to endorse the Chicago principles.  But we at UNC will vote on the unrevised principles (reprinted below), with their stringent statement of the legal requirements, including the Chicago principles’ explicit comment (in the unrevised principles) that “civility” cannot be used as a standard to censor someone’s speech.

What caused the failure?  Basically, the notion that appeals to “civility” would be used to silence unwelcome expressions of opinion.  The employees, especially, saw “civility” as a subtle—or not so subtle—form of censorship, of putting people in their place.  Politeness was a bar to candor as well as a way to shut people up.

I don’t fully know what to make of this argument.  On the one hand, it fills me with despair.  It suggests that people have no desire to be civil.  They just want to shout loudly and score points, tossing “red meat” to those on their side.  I guess we should never underestimate the pleasures of indignant self-righteousness.  It does seem emblematic of our times that civility is seen as a vice, not a virtue.

On the other hand, this seems a case where the current obsession with “privilege” is applicable.  Sitting where I do, as a tenured and respected member of the university’s faculty, my words in just about any setting are met with respect.  I seldom feel that I have not been heard, while no one dares to shut me up, and I have tenure to protect me even when I criticize the Chancellor in the press and at public meetings.  Civility, in other words, comes easy for me—and poses no threat.

I still want to make a plea for civility—one that returns to this notion of “productive” dialogue.  If we cannot foster respect for our interlocutors, we are not going to move forward.  Yes, it’s the old liberal dilemma—which keeps rearing its familiar ugly head precisely because it is a real dilemma.  How are we to respond to participants in the dialogue who are committed to shutting the dialogue down or to excluding some from participation in the dialogue?  I can’t believe that abandoning a norm of civility, based upon an attempt to establish mutual respect and an equal right to be fully heard, is a fruitful response to that dilemma.

Here are the unrevised Chicago principles:

 

[T]he ideas of different members of the University community will often and quite naturally conflict. But it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.

The freedom to debate and discuss the merits of competing ideas does not, of course, mean that individuals may say whatever they wish, wherever they wish. The University may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the University. In addition, the University may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the University. But these are narrow exceptions to the general principle of freedom of expression, and it is vitally important that these exceptions never be used in a manner that is inconsistent with the University’s commitment to a completely free and open discussion of ideas.

In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose. Indeed, fostering the ability of members of the University community to engage in such debate and deliberation in an effective and responsible manner is an essential part of the University’s educational mission.

As a corollary to the University’s commitment to protect and promote free expression, members of the University community must also act in conformity with the principle of free expression. Although members of the University community are free to criticize and contest the views expressed on campus, and to criticize and contest speakers who are invited to express their views on campus, they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe. To this end, the University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.

Social Movements, Institutions, and Rights

I have, obviously, been thinking a lot lately about how protest politics can take a form that actually moves the ball down the field, that has some impact.  The following post is in response to some feedback I have gotten from a friend about a more formal version of my complaint that leftist social movement fight shy of formalization, of institutionalization,–and thus rob themselves of the chance to have a real impact.  That essay is called “Intellectuals in Dark Times” and focuses in on the allergy to leaders, to any division of labor in contemporary movements like Occupy. And I am responding to my friend’s essay on the attempt to use the notion of “rights” to address environmental issues.

The usual line of thought is that social movements often fight shy of institutionalization, but that it is very hard for them to consolidate any gains if their goals are not taken up by some institution.  So, for example, a social movement can advocate for no discrimination on the basis of sexual preference, but until there are anti-discriminatory laws that formally recognize equality, provide means of redress against discrimination, and sanctions against those who discriminate, then the social movement can’t move from “protest” about the way things are to an actual change in prevailing conditions.

It is certainly—and importantly—the case that social movements are often very good at mobilizing a constituency toward some end, and in changing general cultural attitudes.  A classic case is the gay rights movement.  Another is MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving).  Attitudes toward gays and toward driving while drunk changed noticeably (and astoundingly quickly), largely because of those movements.  But I don’t see how that attitude shift is consolidated unless translated (as it was in both cases) into formal, legal changes.

So I would look at #MeTOO and Black Lives Matter in similar ways.  They are raising an issue to public awareness and (let’s hope) changing attitudes.  But until there are also legal sanctions for the police who shoot unarmed blacks (seems to be very, very, very slow progress on that front) or for men who harass women (still a long way to go), I can’t see those movements as successful.  What troubles me are the movements that fight shy of any kind of political, legal outcome at all.

The notion of “prefigurative” has become very common not just in the literature but in the expressed views of the anti-globalization activists.  I had not read Todd Gitlin’s book on Occupy when I wrote the essay.  It’s a good book and a quick read.  He bends over backwards to be sympathetic to Occupy’s anarchism and is good on its refusal to dignify politicians with the authority of being petitioned to.  Instead, the theory went, Occupy would create the society it wanted—not request some imagined powerful others (the politicians) to redress wrongs or reform the corrupt society.  The trouble of course was that Occupy’s alternative society proved unsustainable.  You need a lot of things to have a functioning society—and Occupy was against many of those things on principle.

Gitlin addresses the leaderless stuff as well.  So, yes, let’s say that #MeToo is leaderless. It really is a spontaneous outbreak, in many places at once, and helpfully consolidated by the new digital media.  No one voice stands out among the rest—and part of its glory is that egalitarianism.  The issue for me is: What next?  The open chorus of voices can continue quite some time, until people get tired of that, and move on to the next thing.  Some participants in Occupy, as Gitlin documents, were aware of this problem.  Members of the movement had to have something to do.  Maybe we should call this the tyranny of narrative.  There has to be some sense of forward movement, not just the continual repetition of the same. (I have the same objection to the left’s marches.  Just to keep marching accomplishes nothing.)

So leadership at the very least must devise tactics, things to do that will move the ball forward.  (Hardt and Negri in Assembly concede this point, but then claim the movement itself, as mass leaderless democracy, must devise the strategy.  But their tactics/strategy bright line is hard to understand and, I would think, even harder to maintain in practice.)

Even more, I am arguing that moving the ball forward necessitates at some point the moment of institutionalization.  Which, of course, makes your question about the definition of institution central.  In some sense it’s a tautology: an institution is any formal structure that a) codifies its goals and procedures, and b) establishes the means to ensure its sustainability (over, at least, the medium term).  What are those “means” of sustainability?  For starters, at the minimum, the human and financial resources required to, so to speak, stay in the field.  There must be people who are doing the work and who we can be sure will be doing the work next week and (we hope) next year.  And there also must be people (the wider base) that can be called upon on for set occasions when a more massive presence is needed.  And there must be the money to support those people and the movement’s chosen activities.  Additionally, it is probably inevitable that there be some kind of by-laws (some rules of procedure) and some kind of division of labor (which may very well lead to hierarchy and also to forms of accountability).  The “formality” of institutions comes, then, from having a defined set of goals, an explicit codification of procedures and tasks that are aimed toward achieving that goal, along with a plan for raising the resources required to do the work to reach the goal.

In order to get that far, it also seems inevitable that you are going to need a) the wordsmiths who articulate the movement’s goals and core attitudes in ways that inspire people to join the movement and keep them inspired once they are in the door (the intellectuals if you will) and b) those who hold themselves personally accountable for the movement’s advancement toward its goals and inspire others to also assume similar responsibility (call these people leaders).  There are other roles, but you get the idea.

So I am not taking “the law” per se as the prototypical institution.  I guess I would say that an institution is “legal” once it has the political (or state) authority for its articulated codes and procedures to be enforced generally (i.e. over the whole citizenry of a state).  Many movements, then, will aim for its specific goals to become “legal” in exactly that sense.  But not all movements will have that aspiration.  Think of an artistic movement; it will be much looser in both its institutional forms than the civil rights movement (with its various organizations like the SNCC, the NAACP etc.) and with no desire to achieve legal reform.  But even something like Impressionism or Abstract Expressionism will depend on something more formal than a movement even if less formal than a full-blown institution if it is to thrive.  It will need to have fairly self-consciously formed networks of galleries, news and other media outlets, patrons, sympathetic museums, and a sense of who is in the fold and who isn’t.  It can’t, in other words, only exist in “presence,” in the face-to-face moments of direct interaction (which is what Occupy seems to aspire to—and, oddly enough, we can also say was often Arendt’s utopian vision of the political as an ephemeral “space of appearances” created by a group being together.  It is that Arendtian vision that Hardt and Negri–and Judith Butler in a different key that I find more convincing–are reaching for in their celebrations of “assembly,” the people coming out together to share time in the streets.)

So I guess I am arguing that I don’t see how a movement like #MeToo can advance its political agenda without institutionalizing to some extent—and that it can’t institutionalize without having some intellectuals and some leaders.  Does that—and here is the fear—make me a Leninist?  This worry is deeply ingrained in the left, quickly described (if over simplistically) as the debate between anarchists and advocates of “the party.”  It has more recently been re-inscribed as the debate between “direct” (or “participatory”) democracy and some acceptance of the need for “representation.”

Now I am really going to try your patience because I am going to tie your essay on rights to this classic leftist debate.  It is very common to think of rights as “legitimate claims.”  This is a very “pragmatic” way of theorizing rights—where “pragmatic” here refers less to Deweyean pragmatism than to the “pragmatics” of the linguists, which can be tied back to Wittgenstein’s insistence that the meaning of word resides in its use.  So think of rights as part of a “language game” or even of a “form of life.”  As a move in the language game, to state I have a right to something is to make a claim on the other players of the game.  That claim must, first, be recognized by those others as legitimate, as a claim to which they are accountable, answerable.  If I claim my right to your car, I will be dismissed out of hand.  But if I assert a claim to a high school education, that claim is most likely deemed legitimate within the prevailing language game in the US, but perhaps not when a teenage girl makes it in Afghanistan.

So, for starters, when we talk about rights, we are talking about (contestable) claims that we make upon one another.  A constitution and bill of rights represent attempts to place certain rights beyond contestability, to say that they are, for once and for all, legitimate.  Of course, that doesn’t stop them from being contested in individual court cases, but the constitution and bill of rights is supposed to provide solid grounds for deciding such cases.

The constitution, of course, also does something else.  It established that the state’s power will be placed in the service of protecting those rights herein designated as legitimate.  The problem Arendt highlights—and that became salient in the wake of World War II but which Madison already was writing about in the 1780s—is how to handle situations where what we have come to think of as rights must be protected against the state’s abrogation of them.  What is the enforcing, protective power in that case?  And also what about people who are “stateless.”?  To whom do such people even address their claim—and who will protect them since they are not recognized as any state’s responsibility?  The notion of “human rights” was created in the context of also creating international organizations such as the United Nations as an attempt to address this dilemma.  This attempted solution has proved woefully inadequate to solve the problem, but nothing better has been devised (or instituted).

Now, on top of that crisis/failure, comes the dilemma your essay highlights: how to think the rights of non-human entities.  Since I think of rights as discursive, as established within a language game of call (claim) and response, I don’t see how the rights of non-human entities can figure into the game unless they are “represented” by humans.  That is, there is an inevitable “translation” here.  We can think of that translation as going in either direction (I don’t think it makes much difference which description we choose.  Others might argue it makes a huge difference.)  Alternative one would be to say that we take a notion of “rights’ developed in human political discourse as a way of talking about, adjudicating, and acting upon the claims we have/make upon one another as we attempt to live together in a shared world—and we now transpose that notion of rights as a handy way to talk about the claims non-human entities could/would/should make (if they could talk) as co-inhabitants of that same shared world.  So humans are “extending” rights to non-human entities by couching the perceived needs of those entities in “rights talk.”  (The anti-humanists would object here that the perceiving of those needs is done by humans.)

The alternative would be to say that non-human entities have various ways of communicating their needs and requirements to us—but (I would still argue) it requires an act of translation, from those non-human communications into the human language of rights, to have the non-human claims enter into our political discourse of rights.  In other words, I don’t see how the non-human enters the realm of rights except as voiced by a human advocate.  I know radical anti-humanists hate this conclusion, but I don’t see how to avoid it.

So we seem to be left with: Rights talk is a human contrivance—so all application of rights talk to the inhuman involves a questionable translation of humanist terms to a sphere distinct from the human.  (I think your essay was tending in that direction.)  The only way out of this would be to let the non-human speak for itself.  But I guess I am with Wittgenstein: if the lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand him.  No understanding across that barrier without translation—with the sense that yes, of course, something is going to be lost in the translation, but that’s the best we’ve got.  The search for pristine, perfect solutions aspires to a logically unassailable state that is unattainable, while also imagining a moral purity that sees every trade-off as reprehensible.  William James says the “trail of the human serpent is over all.”  Once within human languages, we are doomed to “representation” with all its imperfections and inadequacies.

Goaded by those imperfections, we keep on writing, thinking maybe the next time I will say it better.

Honor

Arendt never appeals to honor—and, no doubt, she would find the concept antique.  But both her celebration of “public happiness” and her comments on the desire to excel in public, to live a life worthy of becoming the stuff of stories,  point to her desire to find some account of motives that transcend the desire to satisfy material, bodily needs.  On the one hand, denigration of the body has a long history in Western thought, with both Greek and Christian variants.  On the other hand, that suspicion of the “material” gains a new impetus in the 1950s from the twin perspective of Arendt’s anti-Marxist repudiation of materialist philosophy and her equally ant-consumerist suspicions of “materialist” consumer culture.

Love of the world, then, is meant to describe a commitment that extends beyond the selfish desire to accumulate material goods, just as her resolutely non-material “action” and its production of an ephemeral “space of appearances” introduces something utterly distinct from the necessities connected to “life.”

What I am pursuing here is her account of what motivates “action” (understood in her strict sense of the term).  The good action directly strives for is called, at various times in her work, “freedom,” or “renown.”  Actors want to win the admiration of others even as they also (in Nietzschean fashion) simply enjoy the expenditure of energy that is action.

I see a double problem here, a Scylla and Charybdis, if you will.  Scylla is the contempt for the body, for mere life.  We have already seen this with Ruskin declaring “life is the only wealth” and then going on to tell us the terms upon which different living creatures should accept death.  Arendt’s version of this line of thinking comes in her meditations on Socrates in her late work.  Living out of harmony with oneself, sacrificing one’s integrity and moral ideals simply in order to survive in a despicable regime like Hitler’s, is to win life on terms where it is not worth having.  So we get two things here: a standard by which some lives are ruled deficient, and a denigration of the bodily as (at best) an insufficient basis of value judgments or (at worst) a positive detriment to making value judgments.  In the second case, whatever pertains to the body and its needs should be ruled out of court when considering the worth of a human life.  Pushed even further, to the Hegel master/slave phenomenon,  the person who would prioritize “life” over other (more worthy) standards ends up a slave—and (perhaps) rightfully so.  This final bit is not Hegel because he has his dialectical reversal coming, but it is not clear that Arendt offers any such escape.  She seems simply contemptuous of the modern consumer who has no sense of or taste for the joys of public life.  Such people are living swinish (Mill), unfree (Arendt) lives.

The Charybdis here is trying to identify a non-pernicious standard of value that doesn’t simply reduce to supplying material needs.  We certainly seem to need a non-utilitarian, non-economic, set of motives—and those motives should, in some form or another, include moral considerations addressing our desired relations to others and to the planet.  Reductionism (Kenneth Burke’s “debunking”) can only lead to cynicism.  If everyone is always out for the main chance; if it’s the struggle for life that overwhelms all else, then we get the macho “eat or be eaten” with its concomitant scorn for all the sentimental claptrap about decency, rights, love, altruism etc.  Yesterday’s New York Review of Books offers a poignant example.  James Shapiro reviews a new interpretation of Hamlet that basically argues that the play shows Shakespeare revealing humanist claptrap to be the hot air that it really is.  Hamlet delays because he can’t face up to the realpolitik of courtly life, while spouting half-baked humanist truisms that he has neither mastered nor believed.  Hamlet is a fatuous young fop—and the play reveals his fatuousness.  And Shakespeare is a complete nihilist.  A perfect reading for our current political moment.  There are no barriers of any sort (religious, moral, humanist) against sheer brute power.

When Arendt comes to this point, in her meditations on morality under the supreme conditions of Nazi rule, she can only conclude that the kind of integrity, the felt need to live a life in accord with the moral principles one had understood as one’s own, is rare, but not impossible or utterly unknown.  She famously says that the Nazis showed that most people will change their moral code as easily as they will change their table manners.  (She probably should have said as easily as they will change the kinds of clothes they wear in response to changes in fashion.  We also have Shakespeare’s marvelously cynical statement in The Tempest –spoken by the villain Antonio—that “For all the rest,/They’ll take suggestion as a cat laps milk;/They’ll tell the clock to any business that/We say befits the hour” (Act 2, sc 1, 289-92).  Most people will say what the powerful tell them to say.)  In short, Arendt has only a very thin reed to offer us; there will be some who will die rather than live the life totalitarianism puts on offer, but only “some” and they will not be effective in face of the ruthless totalitarians.  A very short step from cynicism—or maybe the better term in despair.

Despair is certainly one quite understandable response to our dark times.  And maybe the long bloody track of human history makes a sensible response altogether to “the human condition.”  For we can consider one last twist of the knife: honor (or morality) might seem, if it exists, a bulwark against sheer power.  But then honor and morality themselves are so often used to justify violence.  Honor killings, as well as the fact that “honor” is so central to warrior cultures, reminds us that the “doux commerce” of the bourgeoisie was supposed to usher in a kinder and gentler era.  The bourgeois critique of honor is hardly entirely off-base; the same can be said of the atheists’ critique of sectarian violence.  The Nietzschean conclusion that humans can turn anything into the occasion for oppression and violence appears to hold.  Despair and misanthropy seem to follow in course, accompanied by a fierce sarcasm about all the high-falutin’ words with which humans dress up their shitty behavior to one another—and to non-humans.

I want a standard of decency that will hold, some kind of barrier against the flood of exploitation.  I don’t see one on the horizon at the moment.