Category: Uncategorized

Seeing the History of Human Freedom (Dustin Howes’s Second Post)

Here is Dustin Howes’s second post:

In this post I will address the historical arguments John forwards in his posts Defending Freedom and Collective Self-Rule.

Anthony Parel once remarked that Gandhi had been “taken over by nonviolence,” a striking point about our inability to see the full measure of his political thought. Similarly, nonviolence has been overtaken by the Indian Independence movement and the American Civil rights movement, obscuring our ability to see the full measure of its historical significance. I discuss both but place them in the context of larger trends. To do otherwise distorts our understanding of how political power has been exercised more generally. My argument in the book is that it has largely obscured the struggles that have gained freedom for many millions of people.

The three pillars of the nonviolent movement for freedom over the last two centuries are the abolitionist, women’s rights, and prodemocracy movements. The worldwide abolitionist movement was almost entirely nonviolent and indeed central to innovating the concept of what was then called nonresistance. I discuss the two important exceptions of the Haitian revolution and the American Civil War, but the organized efforts of committed, creative, relentless nonviolent activists is what brought an end to the most lucrative slave system in the history of the world. These activists succeeded in making slavery a signature moral evil and for the first time in history making it illegal everywhere. The women’s rights movement was born from women participating in abolition. With similar techniques and new innovations, feminists continue a worldwide struggle that achieved astonishing results. Without a single violent revolution, the women’s movement has already advanced freedom for more people than all the violent revolutions combined. Finally, prodemocracy, people power movements have toppled some of the most brutal regimes of the past century. The Velvet revolutions and the Arab Spring are perhaps the most prominent examples, but from Bosnia to Chile to the Philippines to South Africa nonviolence has spread democracy more effectively than violence. A potential fourth pillar is the labor movement, which I discuss extensively but has a complicated relationship to violence and nonviolence.

John asks if the organizations of voluntary collective self-rule that are the lifeblood of power require states that nourish them or at least allow them to exist. The answer is clearly no. In fact, they can form in the face of the most brutal attempts to stomp them out. They also transcend state boundaries and transform states. Regimes, laws, structures, armies, have all proven to be malleable to nonviolence, which is just to say the exercise of power by people without violence.

I discuss the Civil War in the book, but to address John’s point directly. The idea that the alternative to war was ” waiting” for the slaves to be free is strange and ahistorical. The reason the South seceded is because abolitionists were succeeding. The underground railroad in combination with making the international slave trade illegal, put tremendous pressure on the Southern economy. The idea that the Civil War accelerated the end of slavery is certainly the conventional wisdom, but half a million people dead, abolition the world over without violence, and the horrors of the post reconstruction backlash should give us pause.

Without reiterating the details of the first two chapters, I feel compelled to underscore some of the main points when it comes to the history of slavery. The Haitian revolution is the only successful large scale slave rebellion in the history of the world. Even uprisings of tens of thousands of people had all failed. Freeing the slaves of one’s opponents in warfare is a common occurrence historically and the American Civil War is another example of that. But none of the previous examples were part of a movement to make slavery itself illegal. The idea of ending slavery and the political process of passing the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments ended slavery as much as the war. Both were unimaginable until abolitionists articulated and struggled for them.

Without reiterating the details of the argument I make in my first book, I want to underscore some of the main points as they link up with the new one. John asks if Britain “was wrong to fight the Nazis.” My argument is not that all violence is unjust. Nor do I argue that violence is always ineffective. Instead, I stipulate that violence can be just and politically effective. My argument is that nonviolence shows that violence is never necessary. This is a consequence of freedom and also means that violence, even if politically effective, cannot ultimately forward the particular cause of human freedom. If there is a tragic aspect to the history of freedom, it lies in the quixotic efforts to achieve freedom with violence because it appears violence is the only option. In fact, it never is. As John reminds us in another post, the Nazis were fighting for freedom too.

Sacrifice/Self-Sacrifice

Anyone who thinks about violence has to, at some point, attempt to come to terms with sacrifice. The staged killing of a victim (whether animal or human) is part of just about every known religion. So here is a violence deliberately chosen and carefully scripted. What it its logic? Why has it been seen as necessary and/or beneficial in so many cultures?

I have hardly got good answers here. Everything I have read on sacrifice–from Mauss to Bataille to Girard–has puzzled me. I only want to say two thing here.

Like Waldo everywhere present but never center stage, the notion of self-sacrifice lurks throughout Howes’s book. (There is an index entry on self-sacrifice, so Howes clearly knows this is an element of his whole position.) Here’s one instance: “[F]ollowing the moral law may require self sacrifice. Given that others often fail to practice self rule, the immediate consequences of doing so may be physically harmful to the person who acts according to their duty. Gandhi was more clear about how this public demonstration of self-sacrifice might affect others. By holding fast to the truth and refraining from destroying or attacking others, the satyagrahi would offer a model of self-rule and moderation that might change others” (185). This passage points toward both of the things I want to say.

First, I think we reach here the nub of the resistance to pacifism. Why should I submit myself, sacrifice myself, to the violent other? Do we really believe the rape victim should sacrifice herself instead of acting in self-defense?

But let me hasten to add that this is not some kind of reductio. Just the opposite. It indicates how profound and radical pacifism is. The logic of self-defense is congruent with the logic of much violence: i.e. some people, because of their behavior, deserve to be physically harmed or otherwise restrained/punished for their actions. In forgoing this logic, pacifism is revealed to be “beyond good and evil.” It is not concerned with separating out the worthy from the unworthy, those who are to be shielded from violence and those who are to be subject to it. Pacifism refuses to legitimate any violence. And in the name of that all-inclusive vision, and in the attempt to bring about a world of non-violence, it accepts that victimage may be imposed on the pacifists.

So I do not think you can have a full-bore pacifism without accepting the terrible, yet sublime, consequence of self-sacrifice. Instead of violently attacking the other, the pacifist accepts the violence inflicted upon her by the other. This seems close to insane–and makes pacifism a path that appeals to very few.

But the pacifist can hope that her actions are exemplary, are an illustration of a different way to live with others. She may not live to see that new day, but her voluntary acceptance of victimage might enable that new day to dawn.

Which brings me to my second point. Sacrifice is meaningless if not publicly staged, if not visible. There must be spectators. This is true both practically and theoretically. Practically, it means that non-violent social movements will only succeed when their stoic acceptance of violence inflicted by their opponents is broadcast to the body politic as a whole. Protest is theatrical and rhetorical. It is aimed toward winning hearts and minds, at converting those who currently have not chosen sides. The protesters say two things: one, come join us, and two, we occupy the moral high ground vis a vis our opponents. (I think it is almost always “the moral high ground”; protests work very differently–and usually not non-violently–when it is a question of advancing or defending particular interests, not moral principles). If a regime can succeed in keeping the protestors out of the media, out of general sight, the protests do not have much chance of succeeding.

Theoretically, this theatrical nature of sacrifice connects up to ritual and to tragedy (understood here as the plays put on during the Greek Dionysian festivals). This may connect as well to public executions and to lynchings. The point is about public displays of violence–where the violence is scripted, mostly contained to a few chosen victims, and allows for some kind of participation by the congregated public. Here’s where I lose the thread. The persistence and near-universality of such public stagings of violence is obvious. How to explain their omnipresence baffles me. Just why have they proved so necessary to social cohesion?

Self-sacrifice, it seems to me, would stand as an attempt to intervene in not just generalized violence but also in particularized sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is an attempt to rewrite the scripts of such rituals. Self-sacrifice seems to require publicity in exactly the same way that sacrifice does. But if sacrifice constitutes a public through its shared animosity toward the victim, self-sacrifice tries to constitute a public based on a repudiation of the dividing line between us, the outraged innocents taking vengeance, and them, the unworthy ones who have called forth our righteous wrath.

A First Reaction to Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal

Behind the curve as usual, I have just finished reading Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (NY: Henry Holt & Co., 2014). I have many things to say about the book, but two preliminary comments for now.

At the broadest level, Gawande’s book advocates for a shift in focus from disease to “well-being,” especially in medicine’s dealing with the elderly. Doctors and other care-givers should be enabling well-being, not focused on defeating disease. His position resonates with the interest in well-being that is currently evident not only in the “medical humanities,” but in policy circles (such as the World Health Organization) as well. In general, I would link this shift as part of the “capabilities” discourse initiated by Amartya Sen and carried on by Martha Nussbaum. The goal is to think about—and to enable “flourishing.” What counts as a full life, instead of “bare life” (to use Agamben’s term), should be at the center of our efforts.

Right now, however, I want to focus on a different point. On assisted suicide, Gawande writes: “In the Netherlands, the system [for allowing and enacting assisted suicides] has existed for decades, faced no serious opposition, and significantly grown in use. But the fact that, by 2012, one in thirty-five Dutch people sought assisted suicide at their death is not a measure of success. It is a measure of failure. Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end. The Dutch have been slower than others to develop palliative care programs that might provide for it. One reason, perhaps, is that their system of assisted death may have reinforced beliefs that reducing suffering and improving lives through other means is not feasible when one becomes debilitated or seriously ill” (244-45, my emphasis).

One in thirty-five seems to me a very low percentage. But, more to the point, this passage comes fairly late in a book that has described, in excruciating (to this layperson) detail, massive surgical interventions on the bodies of eighty and ninety year old patients—while also documenting how such interventions rarely prolong life significantly. A major theme of the book is how surgeons and others rarely manage to convey an accurate sense of the time-frames involved when such interventions are undertaken: patients and their families usually think they are buying five to ten years when twelve to eighteen months is much closer to the mark.

Yes, the book does consistently argue that those extra twelve to eighteen months can be worth living, especially if doctors, patient, and family have all explicitly identified concrete and realistic goals for that time period. But the book also shows how difficult it is to say that this next intervention, even if it buys some extra time, will actually buy anything approaching a life worth having. And everything in the book and in my own personal experience demonstrates just how difficult (close to impossible in fact) it is for patients and families to choose death, even where that is the most sensible choice. Meanwhile, doctors are just about professionally and ethically completely forbidden to recommend death.

So, not to belabor the point, it would (it seems to me) require a sea-change in sensibility for people to face up to the ending—and to not grasp at medical straws. That the Netherlands has made some progress (one in thirty-five?!) toward effecting that sea-change seems to me a noteworthy accomplishment. And the claim that their policy of assisted suicide has made the Dutch backwards in palliative care is tenuous at best and tendentious at worst. Gawande’s examples in the book of what it means to live “to the very end” did not convince me that those last 12 months or so were actually worth living. They more often seemed like medical horror shows to me.

John Barth

On about page 475 of an edition of Giles Goat Boy that runs to 650 pages, I have thrown in the towel. I read the full novel back in graduate school (circa 1975), at a time when I took John Barth and his work very seriously indeed. In 1975, I would have listed Barth along with Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and E. L. Doctorow as just about the only American novelists whose publication of a new work was an “event,”one that gave me something that I needed to read. At that same time, Derrida, Foucault, and Habermas were the three thinkers whose work had a similar status for me (although it is also true that I read just about everything Ricoeur published because he was my real guide to the thickets of “theory”).

When did Barth fall off this pedestal, become just another writer who had written too much and whose work could be safely ignored? Around 1980 in my case, when I tried to make my way through Sabbatical and felt I knew everything that was coming twenty pages before its arrival. By 1995, the same was true of Derrida and Habermas. They repeated themselves ad nauseum and all their tricks, all their insights, all the ways that their unique takes on the world had proved illuminating, were now all too familiar territory. There was no need to keep reading them.

We readers are very cruel. We crave novelty and praise extravagantly the writers who deliver it. Then we grow jaded and move on. A writer’s stock falls precipitously. Just look at the Wikipedia page for John Barth and you will see how precipitously. He has barely half a page and the novels after Lost in the Funhouse (1973) are not even discussed, although they are listed. He’s yesterday’s news.

But having just tried and failed to get all of Giles down the hatch, I have to say that Barth has not aged well. True, I do still teach The End of the Road from time to time–and students still enjoy its hip knowingness. But what Giles makes clear is how sophomoric Barth’s humor is, and how thin his Camus inspired insistence that whether or not to commit suicide is the overwhelming question of one’s existence. Hard to tangle with the details of life when it is seen from the height of such an abstraction.

Of course, Mailer and Bellow haven’t aged well either. I recently re-read Herzog (Bellows’ 1964 National Book award winner) and it’s simply a bad novel. It’s not just Bellow’s ante-deluvian attitude toward women, or the unreflective whining of his hero; it’s also that the philosophical musings are jejune. All this might be somewhat OK if there was a sense that Moses Herzog was a self-pitying sap whose moanings told us something about contemporary culture. But there’s no indication of a distance between Moses’s self-image and Bellow’s assessment of his response to his misfortunes or his belief in the perfidy of those around him. At least the similar paranoias of Philip Roth’s characters are entertaining in their wild exuberance, not just the mid-level pissing and moaning of Bellow’s hero. Here I was just amazed that people even found Herzog good or important.

At any rate, I do think we readers are cruel to our writers. But there is also the question of what writers manage to fulfill Ezra Pound’s famous injunction to “be news that remains news.” How not to age out, if not so quickly as today’s newspaper, still just as inexorably?

And how do we readers keep from playing the game of ranking? Of saying these are the writers who still count for something? And how do writers age graciously, keep reinventing themselves instead of repeating themselves?

Anyway, I am not saying the Derrida and Habermas are worthless–only that a little of them goes a long way. You hardly need to keep up with everything that poured from their pens. Foucault and Barthes seem to me a different case. Perhaps it’s because Foucault was always grounded in historical particulars instead of airy theorizing. But it’s also because he was always striving to find a way to explain those particulars without ever really quite nailing an overarching explanation down. In any case, I feel a need to read all of Foucault. And Barthes just kept reinventing himself. He is always surprising, so I have never gotten tired of him.

How about the novelists? Who do I feel a need to keep reading? Roth probably comes closest–as many people have noted. He certainly has had the best old age of any American novelist of the past fifty years. For a while (longer than for most authors), I felt moved to read everything new from Rushdie. But now he has fallen off that list. Pynchon and Delillo I find hopeless. Doctorow is spotty; The March is a terrific novel and I think Ragtime has aged well. His seems to me a rather unique case; he kept trying new things all the way to the end, and sometimes he pulled it off and other times he did not.

Right now, I look forward to anything new from Julia Glass. But I can’t think of anyone else besides her.

I do want to praise more than disparage. So future posts will concentrate on novels I have found deeply satisfying. There are plenty of them, even if there are many more mediocre novels, the ones that I start to read, but then put aside. And usually in those cases I do not get anywhere near as far as page 475. So Barth can’t be all that terrible.