The Class/Race/Generation/Political Divide

Back with a little tidbit from Bertrand Russell’s Human Society in Ethics and Politics: “Traditionalists hold their opinions more fanatically than their liberal-minded opponents and therefore have power out of proportion to their numbers.  A man who publicly advocates any relaxation of the traditional code can be made to suffer obloquy, but nothing of the sort can be inflicted upon benighted bigots” (125).

Lots can be said about this—and count on me to say lots.  For starters, we have here the usual contrast between mild-mannered liberals, lacking fire-in-the-blood passion, and visceral conservatives.  The politics of reason versus the politics of passion. “The best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats).  I am not very convinced.  More plausible, I think, are explanations that look to “loss aversion” and to the superiority in “reality” of what is over what could be.  In my experience, those proposing reforms always meet with fierce resistance; stepping into the unknown always is based on uncertain gains balanced against very obvious losses.  What will be destroyed by the change is concretely There.  Those who are just fine with current arrangements will have a direct, straight-forward case for outrage.  “Jeopardy” in Albert Hirschman’s anatomy of the “rhetoric of reaction.”  Your changes will jeopardize the good things we enjoy now with no guarantee that what you put in the present’s place will be better.  You, the reformer, are inflicting an easy to identify harm.

Russell believes that “most of the disagreements that occur in practice are, not as to what things have intrinsic value, but as to who shall enjoy them.  The holders of power naturally demand for themselves the lion’s share” (110).  Is this true? That is, are there actually very few deep moral disagreements; rather, the real source of disagreement is about the distribution of the goods that everyone agrees are actually good.  That shifts the moral terrain significantly; the focus becomes who legitimately is entitled to a share and who legitimately can be denied a full share.  I am inclined to think conservatism is always, au fond, about legitimating unequal distribution.  The grounds for cutting some people out—race, meritocracy, education, expertise, various social and moral stigmas, citizenship—vary widely, but the basic goal is the same: to justify inequality.  We fight over the goods–not over what should be designated good.  At least in most instances.  Sounds plausible.

One maddening thing is that unequal distribution could (possibly) be justified by scarcity.  If there was not enough to go around, then some might have to do without.  But there is ample evidence to show that removing the condition of scarcity does little to quell the urge toward unequal distribution.  The drive for status, for hierarchy, for distinction, leads to inequalities as steep and as cruel (i.e. tending to total deprivation) as scarcity.  Russell does not pay much attention to the deep desire for status.  He is no sociologist.  But he believes that the “desire for power” is basically universal, as is the abuse of that power by any who possess it (118).  His only solution to this snake in the garden is sublimation: “to educate in such a manner that acquired skills will lead the love of power into useful rather than harmful channels” (118).  Like Freud and William James, he seeks for a “moral equivalent” of war, competition, status seeking, and the desire to dominate over others.

Not much cause for optimism there.  I do think “loss aversion” can help a bit here, as can a ground-level sense of fairness, of justice.  Russell is not keen on appeals to justice.  “I think that, while the arguments for approximately equal distribution are very strong wherever an ancient tradition is not dominant, they are nevertheless arguments as to means, and I do not think that justice can be admitted as something having intrinsic value on its own account” (117).  The idea is that justice is a means to peace—where peace produces a stable society in which everyone can enjoy the goods they have without fearing the violence of either the strong seekers of power/privilege/wealth/status or the aggrieved violence of the deprived.  Self-interest in such peace and the stability/security it provides is the foundational rock, not some commitment to justice per se.

I think Russell is wrong about that.  I think a disinterested (for lack of a better term) outrage about perceived violations of justice is a much stronger—and independent—motive than he allows.  It is, of course, true that many disputes that claim to be about justice are masking self-interest.  But I do not think that is always to case.  The same psychologists who uncovered “loss aversion” with their ingenious experiments have also noticed that people will be satisfied with less for themselves when a distribution procedure is seen as “fair.”  A real life example is elections.  People accept being on the losing side of a vote if they think the vote was fairly conducted.  One sign of deep trouble in our democracy is the growing refusal to accept the outcome of elections.  When results trump procedures, democracy is in trouble.  Even then, radicals on both sides—left and right—will shout that the vote was not “fair,” that is was fraudulent in one way or another.  A pretty infallible sign of the far-out radical left is the deep conviction that the “real majority” in the US favors the radical’s own program, refusing to countenance all the evidence that the American public is just not that leftist.

I am inclined to believe that those who are driven by an inordinate desire/need for power are a small minority, akin to the small set of adepts that Randall Collins claims can actually commit sustained violence.  (In his book Violence.)  That small number prey on the rest of us.  Our part in life is to try to ward them off, to resist them, and to get on with the business of living.  The powers of resistance are pretty strong; not always sufficient of course but able in many instances to frustrate the seekers of power.  It is not the insecurity of the tyrant that makes him miserable (in my view and pace Plato).  The control of the means of violence is pretty thorough, plus the tyrant’s delusions of grandeur include a sense of immunity to the normal vulnerabilities of the flesh (think of all those 80 year old Senators).  No, what makes the tyrant’s life miserable is the limitations on his power.  Finally, it’s just damned hard to get other people to do what you want them to do.  They resist—passively more often than actively, by not paying attention or doing things half-assedly, or just melting away.  The art of not being governed, as James Scott calls it.  It’s the path that Fred Moten and David Graeber recommend.  Just ignore the tyrant, as far as that is possible.

Or scream bloody murder—like the traditionalists do.  Take the moral high ground whenever any kind of change is proposed.  There were all those artists—Yeats, Proust, Galsworthy, Nietzsche—documenting (often lamenting) the death of the aristocracy as the 19th century became the 20th century.  A privileged class was losing some of its privileges, but more crucially was losing its relevance.  Its material well-being wasn’t threatened, but its right to lead, to set the tone culturally and to direct the nation politically, was slipping away.  Today, it’s white America that is slipping away.  In the popular arts, black America has set the tone for quite some time.  Look at our music and our sports (the NFL and the NBA).  The change has been less swift in film and TV, and even less swift in the non-popular arts like classical music and museum culture.  The difference this time (as contrasted to the period of 1880 to 1920) is that neither the declining class (whites) nor the ascendant one (non-whites) is gaining economically.  Instead, both groups are getting played by the 1% that is hoovering up all the wealth to itself. But the decliners, the traditionalists, are certainly screaming bloody murder.  To a lesser extent, so are the exploited.  (Or maybe they are screaming just as loud, but lack access to the channels–literally Fox and Limbaugh–that would allow their screams to be heard.  The corporate consolidation of American media condemns them to an outer darkness.)

Hence the generalized rage.  The whites has “loss aversion” to the max; they are increasingly irrelevant, feel disrespected, and increasingly insecure financially.  The non-whites, while accorded a certain kind of cultural power and respect (but only within elite circles in New York and Hollywood and, even there, inconsistently), are resolutely kept from getting a decent slice of the pie.  And everyone looks for someone to blame, with the sad, boring, classic American story of getting the poor whites to obsess about their non-white rivals to the advantage of the rich whites.  I wish I had a different story to tell.  Sometimes the truth is astoundingly uninteresting, completely predictable, and apparently immune to any kind of creative rewriting.  It just sits there, an indigestible lump.

No surprise, then, that we turn to the young for an imagined way out of this impasse.  Their much-vaunted sympathy for socialism coupled with their skepticism toward a capitalism that has not served them at all (no less “well”) is seen as the road toward radical transformation.  The radical always relies on a sense that “things can’t continue this way,” that the current arrangements are unsustainable.  But they are unsustainable only if people refuse to countenance, to suffer, them.  And things from my perspective have been intolerable for fifty years now.  And, somehow, little in terms of the basic structures of distribution have changed in the US—except for the worse.

I can’t help but think that American politics are still transfixed by the political, economic, and cultural upheavals of 1965 to 1975.  Just like mainstream economists are still fighting the battle against inflation of the 1970s (unable, apparently, to process that inflation has been a non-issue for Western economies since 2000), so our political fault lines divide along the axis of those who want to return to a mythical 1950s (its prosperity, its blue collar jobs, its women contentedly at home, its blacks out of sight and out of mind, its gays utterly invisible) and those who affirm the various upheavals that brought women, blacks, gays into the public view, with their noisy demands for attention, respect, and their due.  Astounding, really, how traumatic the 1960s were—and how long-lasting (as is the case with traumas) its after-shocks.  The problem is that it is the cultural upheavals (experienced as traumatic by some and liberating by others) that gets all the attention, that generates 90% of the heat.  The economic coup d’etat, every bit as traumatic as the cultural changes, mostly flies under the radar.  The consolidation of economic power never becomes the explicit topic of political inquiry or rhetoric.

Those fiery youth of the 60s did not effect some radical transformation. The few radicals, like some SDSers and Martin Luther King at the end of his life, who tried to “pivot” away from anti-war and pro-civil rights activism toward economic issues (the poor people’s campaign) didn’t get much traction.  (Although we should not forget that something akin to a basic guaranteed income for all was actually debated in Congress in 1971.  How far we have fallen from that high moment.)  Rather, as my daughter likes to remind me, the baby boomers have left the US—and the world—much worse off than they found it.  So I am not likely to place too much faith in the transformative power of today’s youth, even if the generational divide is once again as intense as it was in the “generation gap” years.  Sixties youth, after all, had the insouciance of those who felt immune to economic worry.  No such luck for today’s millennials as they step into the world of contract labor.  Welcome to the precariat.

The lines of this analysis are familiar enough, which (as I say) doesn’t mean they are not (roughly) true.  But David Graeber offers a different way to think of all this—and I will go in that direction in my next post.

Two Kinds of Reason?

The semester has obviously gotten the better of me.  Loads of things to catch up on in these notes.  So let me try to make at least a beginning.

I am reading Bertrand Russell’s 1953 book, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (Simon and Shuster, 1955), which is a summary of his ethics and political views.  Russell’s prose is extraordinary.  He is so clear, so direct, and so ready, in every instance, with an illustrative example.  He really seems to have mastered that Wordsworthian goal of being a man speaking to men (sic).  The tone is conversational, ever even-toned and reasonable, with a trick of his taking you (the reader) into his confidence when he reaches those knotty moments where he has no surefire solution to offer.

Russell is just about 100% a Humean utilitarian.  His position is that there is only one kind of reason: instrumental reason.  Reason is only at play when we are determining what means are most appropriate to the achievement of a particular end.  What Kant called the “hypothetical imperative”—willing the means that will lead to our announced goal.  For Russell, ends are determined by desire or passion (in the classic Humean formula).  Furthermore, Russell is pretty wedded to the notion that a pleasure/pain calculus can explain our desires—even if he rejects the idea (so loved by economists) that self-interest is “rational.”  The pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain is passional for Russell, not rational, based in feeling, not thought or logic.  Pleasure as an end is not a product of rational calculation, although figuring out how to achieve that end is a matter of rational calculation.

Russell even ends up asserting (as do Adam Smith and Hume) that there is a “natural” (and, hence, presumably universal) tendency in humans to sympathize with the pain/suffering in others in ways that make the observation of others’ sorrows painful to the observer.  But he has to admit that this “natural” emotion is not everywhere present.  “Sympathy with suffering, especially with physical suffering, is to some extent a natural impulse: children are apt to cry when they hear their brothers or sisters crying. [Not true in my experience.] This natural impulse has to be curbed by slaveowners, and when curbed it easily passes into its opposite, producing an impulse to cruelty for its own sake” (87).

A thin reed indeed, if it so “easily” turns into its opposite: a delight in the suffering of others.  Yet it is very hard to see how you can even get ethics founded on emotion rather than reason started if you don’t posit some kind of sympathy.  That is, if your ethics must be derived from a primitive pleasure/pain impulse, then you have to figure out a way to ground caring about others’ pain in the fact of feelings of pleasure and pain confined to the self. Here’s Russell again; “I do not think it can be questioned that sympathy is a genuine motive, and that some people at some times are made somewhat uncomfortable by the sufferings of other people.  It is sympathy that has produced the many humanitarian advances of the last hundred years. . . . Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy” (155-56).  The extremely cautious language here (some, somewhat) perhaps reflects Russell’s recalling how Hume, despite his thoughts on sympathy, speculated/worried that it is not irrational for me to care more about a cut to my little finger than about 10,000 deaths in China.  If you begin from egotistic premises about pain and pleasure, that Humean thought is hard to refute.  I experience my pain quite differently from the ways I experience the pain of someone else, no matter how deeply I might feel for them.

The Continental tradition, ever hostile to utilitarianism, has sought to solve this problem by appeal to another kind of reason—one that is quite distinct from instrumental reason.  In Kant, it’s the reason of logic.  Ethics is to be grounded in the pain (I use this word advisably) we feel at self-contradiction.  The categorical imperative basically says that I cannot, except on the pain of contradiction, assume goods to myself that I would deny to others.  A radical egalitarianism is the only path to an ethics that avoids contradiction—and, this goes mostly unsaid in Kant, our sense of self-worth, of dignity, and integrity would be lost if we contradicted ourselves.  Just what our stake is in self-worth, dignity etc. is never specified.  It is simply assumed that we desire to esteem ourselves.  Russell, along with other utilitarians, would say that Kant, at bottom, also relies on pain—just the pain of being inconsistent instead of the pain of witnessing the suffering of others.  Then the question becomes which of these two pains would we take more pains to avoid, which is the more powerful motive.

Habermas’ version of a second kind of reason is “discursive reason.”  It shares some features with Kantian reason, especially in its egalitarian strictures that all are provided with equal access to the discourse that Habermas identifies as central to human interactions.  But Habermas also adds the rationality of being convinced by arguments (or viewpoints or even conclusions) that are best supported by the evidence and by the “reasons” provided to believe them.  Our beliefs, in other words, are potentially rational for Habermas—and those beliefs are not just confined to the designation of efficacious means.  Our ends can also be determined (at least in part) through rational argument, through discursive processes of intersubjective consultation/contestation that yield conclusions about what ends to pursue.  Desire is important, but does not entirely rule the roost.  We don’t necessarily have to express it as desire being tempered or corrected or revised by reason.  We can imagine desire and reason as born in the same moment, that way avoiding giving desire some of temporal or psychological priority—a priority that may get translated into thinking desire a stronger force or one that must be tamed (as in Plato’s image of desire as the horse that must be controlled by the weaker, but smarter, rider).  I think Habermas (like Martha Nussbaum in a somewhat different way) would want to say that desire and reason are intertwined (perhaps completely inextricably) from the start—a position that makes human beliefs and behavior susceptible to argument/persuasion, thus giving “discursive reason” a space in which to operate.

Reason in Habermas and Nussbaum, then, is secular and immanent; it is produced in and through human sociality.  And I think they would say that it works to create “sensibilities,” that our “moral intuitions” are the products of cultural interactions.  Certainly, I read Dewey as taking that position, which is a way of reconciling what can seem his over-optimistic faith in “intelligence” (that key Deweyean term) with his equally firm insistence that “morality is social.”  There is no transcendent rational dictate (as there is in Kant) that grounds morals, that even pronounces its fundamental “law” (i. e. never do anything that you cannot will that everyone do).  Dewey’s social historicism tries to account for both the variety in moral beliefs/intuitions across time and space and to capture the “force” of those intuitions, the fact that they are motivating and that we feel shame/guilt when we do not act in accordance with them.  The “intelligence” on which Dewey relies does seem to be consequence-based.  He seems to be saying that things go better for human lives—whether focused on individual lives or on the collective life of societies—when we adopt modes of “democratic association” that stress cooperation over conflict/competition and proved the means for all to actively pursue their chosen ends.

Still, the rub is there: what cultivates the sensibility of, commitment to, enhancing the well-being of others.  What, in Kantian terms, keeps me from using the other as means to my self-fulfillment, just as I use various non-human things that the world affords as means.  The Kantian path basically says we must have some way to designate some things (primarily human lives) as sacred, as never to be used as means.  Otherwise, utilitarianism will run roughshod over the world—and the people in it—during its pursuit of pleasure.  What is unclear is whether “reason” can get us to that designation of “the sacred” (defined as the “untouchable,” or as that which is always an ends, not a means).

The alternative seems to be some kind of arbitrary fiat, the kind of decisionism that Derrida seems to adapt in the later stages of his career, or perhaps the kind of pre-rational “call” (or intuition) upon which Levinas bases his ethics.  The sacredness of the other is just asserted; it is not justifiable in any rational or argumentative way.  Just what the nature of its appeal is remains unclear.  What motivates one to heed the call?  To what within the self does the call touch? One answer leads to a kind of pantheism (I would read Hegel this way): the call resonates with that fragment of the spirit (or of the divine) that lurks within us, but which lies buried until activated by this voice from without.  That path, not surprisingly, is too mystical for me.  Yet it is clear that I am almost as equally suspicious of “reason” as some kind of power that can pull us up by our bootstraps, that can give us the terms of an ethics that we embrace as our own.

I am left, I think, with the idea that there are certain images of human possibility—both of individual exemplars (call them “saints” if you like) and of livable communities (call them “utopias” if you like)—that appeal to us as desirable visions of the forms life could take.  These visions are given to us by history (by religion, by literature, by philosophy, by the stories we tell)—and can become the focus of desire/aspirations, as well as the standards by which we criticize what does exist now.  In other words, articulations of the ideal (of ideas of justice) by philosophy and imaginations of the ideal in stories and literature, as well as certain concrete examples pulled from history form the basis of commitments that also are seen as ethical obligations, since it is shameful to act in ways that make realization of those ideals unlikely or impossible.  Is this “rational”?  Not fully or categorically.  But it can involve the deployment of reasons (in the plural), of arguments.  And in that sense Dewey’s appeal to “intelligence” might not seem quite so silly.  Intelligence is not a bad term to use for the assessment of our ideals and of the reasons they give us to act in certain ways as well as for assessing the possibility of the realization of those ideals.  At the same time, it seems to me that ideals do make an emotional appeal, so that the passional nature of our commitments can be acknowledged as well.

“Intelligence,” then, is a smudge term.  It’s meant the bridge the classical divide between passion and reason—in much the same way that Martha Nussbaum, in her work upon the emotions, has worked hard to demonstrate the contribution to “cognition” made by them.  Of course, the term “emotional intelligence” has entered the language in the past fifteen to twenty years.  It’s hard not to think that “intelligence” is doing a similar work to “judgment” in traditional faculty psychology.  In other words, as opposed to the Plato/Hegel line, which appeals to a transcendent Reason (with a capital R), or the Catholic theological line, which appeals to Revelation (with a capital R), we get the Aristotelean line, which aims to remain firmly grounded in the human and the here and now.  No divine interventions or even implanted divine sparks, just what our inborn mental capacities and emotional make-up renders possible. Russell is as addicted to appeals to intelligence as is Dewey.  “I would say, in conclusion, that if what I have said is right, the main thing needed to make the world happy is intelligence.  And this, after all, is an optimistic conclusion, because intelligence is a thing that can be fostered by known methods of education” (158).  I think it is almost inevitable that liberals will always end up appealing to education as the motor of improvement because they believe our ills are not permanently grounded in some kind of “nature” that cannot be re-formed.  Education is the means toward that re-formation.

But in that line (to which Hume and Kant, despite all their differences, both belong), the other sky hooks (besides education) that can get us out of being the mere pigs of J. S. Mill’s fears turn out to be either the needs generated out of human sociality or the mysterious processes of judgment (the topic of Kant’s third critique).  A utilitarianism shorn of both of these mechanisms can either throw up its hands at the issue of ends, just taking them for granted, in all their variety and perversity, as modern economic thought does.  Or it seems doomed to finding “altruism” and various other moral behaviors a deep puzzle, one only slightly assuaged by notions of “enlightened self-interest.”  In short, the problem for an utilitarianism—for any one who, like Russell, says there is only instrumental reason—is that it leaves us no way to talk about the formation of, the fixation on, ends. (This is the most customary complaint about pragmatism.) Those ends are just the product of passion, of the fundamental desire to gain pleasure and avoid pain.  Yet the actual variety of human ends, the number of things to which people are committed defies a simple calculation of pleasure or pain, indicates that utilitarianism’s psychology, its understanding of human motivations, is woefully inadequate to the actual complexities of human desires and calculations.

That said, accounting for the production of ends still remains a puzzler.  “Judgment” merely names the puzzle, gives it a site to reside. It hardly solves it.  Judgment stands as a way to explain that our moral views and our desired ends are not completely dictated to us by our culture.  That individuals in all worlds that we know of have the capacity to stand out against the prevailing practices and beliefs of their society.  They can, in short, submit those practices and beliefs to judgment.  But where do the standards by which the judgment is made come from?  That’s where some kind of notion of “intelligence” or “reason” or “cognition” (aided or not by the emotions) comes in.  Even in cases where the fact that judgment can be refined by education, where it can be developed in particular ways by particular exercises, there is still the sense that judgment also imparts an ability to stand apart from that education and those practices, to sit in judgment upon them.  I will be looking to see how Russell smuggles something like this capacity into his account of morals.  Judgment, I am saying, takes the place of that second kind of reason, that other “faculty,” that can do more than just indicate suitable means, instead offering us a way to make choices about ends.

Violence, the Irish and Religion

Here, from Maud Gonne’s autobiography, is her rationale for being a firm “physical force” advocate, scorning the “constitutional” road toward Home Rule pursued by the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1885 to 1914.

“A robber will not give up his spoil for the asking unless the demand is backed by force.  Once a constitutional party turns its back on physical force, because not being able to control it, . . . its days of usefulness are over.  It may linger on, but, being unable to deliver the goods, it falls shamelessly into the corruption of its environment.  . . . The funeral of the Parliamentary party should have taken place when its leader Parnell was lowered into his grave at Glasnevin in October 1891.  He had failed when he had repudiated acts of violence.  He was never a physical-force man himself, but he had walked hand in hand with physical force in the early days when luck and the spiritual forces of Ireland were with him, so that even ordinary words from his lips became charged with great significance and power.  Luck deserted him when he deserted the force which had made his movement great” (174-75). [The Autobiography of Maud Gonne, University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Charles Taylor, in his A Secular Age, spends hundreds of pages worrying the issue of violence.  Basically, he keeps insisting that humans experience some kind of mysterious or mystical connection to the “numinous” when engaged in or stand as witness to acts of violence.  He never gets more specific than that, but insists efforts to simply repress violence will never work.  Violence is as ineradicable as sex; religion both gropes toward a way of grasping the meaning of violent and sexual acts, while also providing forms (rituals and stories) that enclose those acts.  Here’s a typical Taylor passage along these lines (he repeats this point several times without ever getting more concrete):  “if religion has from the beginning been bound up with violence, the  nature of the involvement has changed.  In archaic, pre-Axial forms, ritual in war or sacrifice consecrates violence; it related violence to the sacred, and gives a kind of numinous depth to killing, and the excitements and inebriation of killing, just as it does through other rituals for sexual desire and union.  With the coming of the ‘higher,’ post-Axial religions, this kind of numinous endorsement is more and more withdrawn.  We move toward a point where, in some religions, violence has no more place at all in the sanctified life. . . . But nevertheless . . . various forms of sanctified and purifying violence recur.” {at which point Taylor instances the Crusades and the violence of ideologies like fascism and communism} (688-89).

Without ever saying so, Taylor seems to imply that religions that incorporate violence, that practice sacrificial rites, can thus contain it.  Whereas attempts to eradicate violence only lead to uncontrolled, massive outbreaks of the sort that characterized the 20th century.  At other points, he references William James’s idea of finding a “moral equivalent for war,” but doesn’t pursue that idea; rather, he seems faintly skeptical that some substitute would do the trick.  We want/need real violence because of that urge to connect to the “numinous.”  All of this goes mostly unsaid in Taylor because he cannot bring himself to simply endorse sacrificial practices.  Yet he is also committed to this idea that violence and the numinous have some kind of “deep” (his favorite word in the whole book) connection to one another—and thus religion has to attend to, even provide the means for, achieving, that connection.

What has this to do with Maud Gonne?  Yes, she offers a utilitarian defense of “physical force.”  The English robbers are never going to relinquish hold of Ireland unless forced to do so.  But there’s more.  Non-violent movements become corrupt (she argues); without the laying of one’s all, one’s life, on the line, there is no way to overcome the temptations of life.  The reformer will succumb to the fleshpots available to him; he will betray the cause in favor of his own comfort and advancement.  As in Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan (Gonne, famously, played the lead in its first public performance), only those who renounce everything to serve the Queen (Gonne’s autobiography was titled “Servant of the Queen” with that Queen being Ireland) can be trusted to serve the cause faithfully to the bitter end.

The logic here is precisely the logic of sacrifice, where in some weird way the proof of one’s absolute devotion to the cause, the willingness to die for it, becomes more important than the success of the cause itself.  Pragmatism and utilitarianism are spurned; caring about the ends violence might achieve is subordinated to the glorious commitment itself.  Such would seem to be the burden of Padriac Pearse’s sacrificial fantasies—embodied in the plays and pageants he staged—in the years just prior to the 1916 Easter Rebellion.  And, of course, the dating of that uprising at Easter was no coincidence.  The rising was a pageant itself of sacrifice leading to resurrection.

And as we see in Rene Girard’s work—and this idea lurks there in Taylor although never made explicit—an embrace of violence is palatable when connected to self-sacrifice.  Harder to countenance is murder, the killing of the other guy.  It’s the embrace of one’s own death that is fairly easy to sanctify; even ritualized killing of the other is harder to stomach.  For all her hatred of the English, Gonne devotes her life to the cause of aiding imprisoned Irish rebels and their destitute families, not to killing Englishmen.  The one time in her autobiography where actual violence seems in the offing, Gonne (to her credit) backs down and avoids pushing the confrontation to killing.  Gonne is speaking to a riled-up crowd, when the police arrive.  Here’s her rendition of the incident.

“’If you go on I shall give the order to fire,’ said the officer.

‘Go on, go on,’ cheered the crowd.

I heard an order given. I saw the constabulary get their rifles at the ready and heard the click of triggers.  Most of the men now had their backs to the platform and were facing the police; they had nothing but ash plants in their hands but were ready to fight; some still shouted for me to go on.

‘No,” I said.  ‘Men, you know your duty; the proclaimed meeting is now over,’ and I got off the car.

There was disappointment; one man said: ‘You should have gone on.’  I heard another man say: ‘You couldn’t expect a woman to fight.’  I said: ‘If you had guns I would have gone on; the rifles were pointed at you, not me. I couldn’t see unarmed men shot down.’

Again a wave of depression overwhelmed me. . . . Perhaps I had been wrong in not letting the Woodford evicted tenants fight and be shot down.  Dead men might have aroused the country as living men could not and at least made the evicted tenants a live issue.  I had not dared take responsibility; I had refused leadership and the situation was not of my own making” (301).

The practical triumphs over the ideal here, as I (for one) would wish it to.  But then she is led to wonder if bloodshed would have been impractical.  A massacre might, in fact, have advanced the cause, making it (ironically) a “live” issue.  She wonders if she, at the moment of crisis, has proved weak, has allowed inappropriate scruples to stop her hand.

Which brings us back to the earlier passage—to Gonne’s analysis of Parnell, an analysis that actually seems to put some flesh on the bones of Taylor’s idea that violence connects us to the “numinous.”  Gonne argues that Parnell’s charisma in only intact so long as he remains tied to the ”physical force” revolutionaries. And that is because the “physical force” advocates are in touch with, bring forward into some kind of mysterious presence, “the spiritual forces of Ireland.”  Violence is the way those spiritual forces speak to us, through particular men who are its priests, its mouthpieces.  Here, eloquently stated, is Taylor’s conviction that violence provides a pathway to the numinous.

Of course, to a pragmatist skeptic like myself, the numinous here is better described as “nationalism”—and the cult of the nation seems to result in much more evil than good.  Taylor knows that, which is why he keeps stumbling on the vexed question of just what is the content of the numinous, just as he cannot specify an actual violent rite that we, with our modern sensibilities, could actually endorse.

Historical distance offers one out here.  Do I wish that the 1916 rebellion never took place?  One hundred years later don’t the rebels seem admirable heroes—even though I have no doubt that in 1916 I would have thought them vainglorious fools.  And didn’t their sacrifice actually achieve, in the long run, their ends?  Yes and no.  Plausible to say that there would have been no Irish Republic without the Easter rising.  Equally plausible to say that the ongoing violence of Irish politics throughout the 20th century was also a product of that rising.  No violence, it seems, without answering acts of violence, producing those cycles of violence that are all too familiar, and rarely conclusive, rarely actually creating a desired state of affairs.  There is always some rub, some imperfection, that justifies more violence—even if it is just the violence of revenge.

Would Taylor accept that the numinous is always out of reach—and thus no act of violence, even if it yields intimations of the numinous—ever satisfies?  Religion is born of frustration, of a longing for “something more” than what the ordinary provides—and violence is born of frustration as well.  Infinite desire in a finite world.  Or a desire for the infinite in a finite world.  We can dream of more than what we can actually have.  Taylor wants to honor how those dreams push us beyond the here and now, how they lead to the astounding, almost unbelievable, things that humans manage to do.  But why claim that destruction and violence are part and parcel of that reaching for what exceeds our grasp? Why not, instead, think of destruction and violence as the rage engendered by our reach falling short, as the spite (resentment) we feel against the world and against others when they disappoint our visions—or worse when someone else achieves what we have failed to accomplish?

One riposte from the Taylor side—and here we return to the power of nationalism—is that violence (like religion more generally) is a collective act.  Soldiers always talk of the astounding camaraderie, the enjoyed intimacy, of the platoon.  One of the things we long for is that kind of melting of the self into communion with others—and that melting can feel numinous, a connection to some larger and higher power.  Violence, like sex, is a way of escaping the self, of ecstatically merging it with others.  It carries us outside of ourselves.  That’s one of its attractions, its lures, its way of thumbing its nose at bourgeois calculations and prudence.  Violence is aristocratic (as in Yeats and in Gonne) or sub-bourgeois (as in Synge).  Taylor wants to tap that “noble” side of religion as well—a task made rather difficult by Christianity’s affinity with book-keeping.  The ledgers of sin must be kept so as to see if the reward of heaven will be won.  Hardly an ecstatic way of thinking.

Another, very different, note on which to end.  In Roy Foster’s wonderful book about the Irish revolutionaries, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923 (Norton, 2014), he mentions how naïve the “physical force” rebels were.  In some ways, they simply shared the naiveté of a Europe that went blithely to war in 1914.  A massive failure of imagination.  Violence is rarely attractive when seen close up, which is why historical distance is so often needed to sanitize it.  (We are back here to Grossman’s work on killing—which is only exhilarating at a distance except for a very few, exceptional, persons.)  I have always thought it greatly to Yeats’s credit that he mostly abandoned his romantic celebrations of violence once he witnessed actual violence during the 1920 to 1923 wars in Ireland.  Foster quotes Min Ryan, who “admitted afterwards that when Tom Clarke told her in 1916 that most of them would be ‘wiped out,’ it brought her down to earth with a bump. ‘I got an awful shock because I was living a most unreal kind of life as if nothing could happen to anyone.  I could hardly believe that we would take up arms at all and then I began to believe that we would come out of it alright.’”  Foster goes on to comment: “The five years from 1916 to 1921 would provide a steep learning curve” (72)  Why he excludes the two years of the Civil War, with its brutal executions, is a mystery.

In any case, the rhetoric that calls for violence is easy, all too easy, and very often disconnected from any real sense of what violence means or entails.  Again, violence is more palatable the more distance one maintains from it.  It is hard for me to imagine Taylor participating in the rites he seems to endorse.  Certainly, I want no part of them—even if the numinous were to arrive as promised.

Further Thoughts on Civil Disobedience

My colleague Eric Muller, who teaches at UNC’s Law School and has done important and wonderful work on Japanese internment during World War II, responded to my previous post about the toppling of Silent Sam as an act of civil disobedience in this way:

“A thoughtful and excellent piece about the nature of the act of toppling Silent Sam (our Confederate statue on campus) by my UNC colleague John McGowan. I am with him right up to the very last couple of lines. But I part with him there.

What is the moral justification for lying to the police – effectively committing the crime of filing a false police report – in order to impede the prosecution and possible conviction of those who engaged in civil disobedience? When a person thinks things through and decides to engage in an unlawful act in order to make a larger moral or ethical point, or to bring about some change, it seems to me that she has made the choice to risk prosecution and conviction. In fact, it’s precisely the acceptance of that risk that makes the act courageous and gives it broader meaning. So I am hard-pressed to see a case for others telling lies in order to prevent the outcome that the civilly disobedient person knowingly risked.

(And this is not even to mention the fact that if hundreds of people file false police reports, that will impede the prosecution not just of the people who toppled Silent Sam, but will slow the administration of justice in that jurisdiction more generally. What’s the moral case for that?)”

Eric’s response has pushed me to think through my notions of and intuitions about civil disobedience.  I will end up, to a fairly large extent although not entirely, disagreeing with his disapproval of having many people step forward as perpetrators of the toppling—but it is going to take me some time to get there.  So I am begging your indulgence and your patience as I try to work this through.

Civil disobedience is the act of disobeying a law, where the justification for that disobedience is an appeal to some other standard of judgment apart from sheer (or mere) legality.  In the name of justice, of the right, of the good, or even of a “higher” moral law, a civil disobeyer says: “I cannot act legally in this case because it violates my sense of what is the right thing to do.”

Such an act can be individual.  Some pacifists and some conscientious objectors will defy conscription laws because, as a matter of individual conscience, they cannot participate in a war.  How they define participation can also vary, with some COs willing to serve as medics or in other non-combat roles, while others think that any assistance offered to the war effort is wrong. Those who take this latter position have two choices: one, to go to prison or two, to attempt to evade the law’s punishments (by, for example, going into exile, as many did during the Vietnam War.)  Evasion could also, of course, just mean lying low, trying to avoid the law’s notice.

It seems to me that everything changes drastically when acts of civil disobedience turn rhetorical—that is, when such acts are not a question of an individual attending to her own conscience, but are publically enacted violations of the law that seek to demonstrate to fellow citizens that law’s deficiencies.  An act of civil disobedience, in such cases, is the staging of a dramatic argument.  It asks the non-participating spectators, those who are simply witnessing this forced (by the civil disobeyers) confrontation between the law and those who deem it unjust, to decide what side they are on.  Do these spectators favor the continuation of the law in question and favor the fullest prosecution of the civil disobeyers—or do those spectators recognize that the law is deficient in this case, and actually want to thank the disobeyers for making that fact dramatically clear?

First consequence of this rhetorical view: the act of civil disobedience must be public, must be visible.  The CO doesn’t necessarily turn his evasion of conscription into a public spectacle.  But those who practice civil disobedience in an attempt to sway public opinion, as a tactic within a larger plan to change the law, must act in public—and, in fact, desire the widest possible publicity in order to grab the attention of the widest possible public.  Thus, as distinct from the ordinary criminal, who tries to break the law invisibly, the civil disobeyer performs his law breaking in the light of day.  Otherwise, she cannot achieve her goal, which is extensive public deliberation about the justice of the law.

Breaking the law in full view means that evading punishment becomes difficult, if not impossible.  In fact, as Eric alludes to in his comment, many theorists of civil disobedience take the full assumption of responsibility for the act of disobedience as a crucial component of civil disobedience. The dignity and the impact of the act is heightened by the stalwart presentation of oneself in the public sphere: I committed this act of disobedience in the name of these principles, and am fully willing to be called to account by the law for my action.

Let’s call that the heroic model of civil disobedience—and I use that term “heroic” completely .  The gambit here is that the spectacle of the law prosecuting these individuals of conscience will aid the cause of revealing the law’s injustice (according to the “other” standard being appealed to against the law’s own standards). The nobility of the disobeyers (their integrity and willingness to undergo punishment from an unjust law in the name of their alternative notion of what is right) furthers the attempt to sway public opinion to their side.

And, certainly, we needn’t be utterly rhetorical about this.  Stoically accepting responsibility and punishment is not just a rhetorical ploy; it also accords with the disobeyer’s own sense of dignity, which includes differentiating her acts from those of a criminal.  That is why, for so many dissidents, the distinction between a political prisoner (a prisoner of conscience), and a criminal prisoner is such an important one.

The heroic stance can be summed up in this way:  I did this act, I did it in full public view because I am proud of this act since I fully believe it was the essentially right way to act even though it was illegal, and I will take full responsibility for the consequences of the act, including being punished by the law.

But there are alternatives to the heroic view.  And those alternatives are what I need to explore here.  I am deeply attracted to the heroic view—and fully respect Eric’s position that the heroic route is the way to go.  But I do think there are circumstances where it is not the optimal strategy—and I find (as I reflect upon these matters, as Eric has pushed me to do) that I am willing to jettison some of the heroic in the name of effectiveness.  I am committed to civil disobedience successfully leading to the reformation or repeal of bad laws—and unheroic approaches may be more effective in some cases.

Let me throw out a big question first, even though I will postpone full consideration of how to answer it.  Why should I, who think a law unjust, enable (through cooperation with the process of prosecuting me and others for violating it) the smooth functioning of that law?  Having stated the point so abstractly, let’s think about it applies in four different cases.

Case 1: One way to render a law a dead letter is massive non-compliance.  Prohibition in American history is the obvious example, but there are others.  Any law’s effectiveness depends on large-scale voluntary compliance.  If the strategy of dissenters is to inspire wide-spread non-compliance, there is no particularly compelling reason to adopt the heroic strategy of being prosecuted.  Instead, the strategy is to make the law look ridiculous, incredible.  They want to (think they can) stop us from doing that?  Let them try.

Case 2: Jim Crow laws.  The strategy here was not direct violation of those laws—with the consequent punishment of such violators.  Instead, the strategy was to stage massive public demonstrations to publicize the widespread dissent from those laws.  The aim was repeal (or the court nullification of the laws as unconstitutional) and the enactment of new legislation (Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Bill) that would make segregation illegal.  If laws were going to be violated in this movement, it would be the violation of laws that hampered public expressions of opinion.  More to the point: the civil rights demonstrators provoked their opponents into over-reaction, which played badly to a wider national audience.  Before he turned to economic issues and to racism in the North, MLK won the rhetorical battle.  His movement did so, in part, by having its members go to prison, but much more important was the public spectacle of the battering of non-violent demonstrators by infuriated police and other public authorities.  Arguably, the anti-Vietnam protestors were not as rhetorically successful because not as disciplined in their non-violence and because they never had—or created—the solidarity among whites that the civil right movement (at least until 1965-66) achieved among blacks.

Case 3: Immigration laws.  When Trump was elected, I figured that meant I would end up getting arrested some time in the coming four years.  It was just a matter of time—and of choosing the occasion where I felt it might make some positive difference, or be such an urgent matter of conscience that I would have to make a stand.  I assumed the real push-comes-to-shove moment would involve immigration.  If the Trump administration were to attempt to expel (for any reason) undocumented immigrants from my community or to harass/deport foreign students on our campus, I would feel compelled to do something to hinder such efforts.  Here is the case where I find myself most at odds with Eric.  I would consider every and any way of hindering the  law’s enforcement justified (and imperative upon me personally) in that case—and think the heroic stance would be utterly counter-productive.  The goal would be to throw as much sand into the gears as possible—using every single tactic that could frustrate the law’s ability to operate.  I wonder how Eric would think about this case in relation to the internment of the Japanese during World War II.  I think also of the Danish all wearing yellow stars as a way of frustrating the Nazi’s murderous anti-Semitism.  This would precisely be the case of presenting the law with more perpetrators, more deemed guilty under its understanding of guilty, than it could handle.

Case 4:  Silent Sam.  So what kind of case is Silent Sam?  A very odd case once I am forced to think hard about it.  Odd, first of all, because of the ambiguities I have noted (in my previous post) about whose property the statue is anyway. And then there is all the stuff about “destruction of property” as referenced in the statement from Margaret Spellings et.al.  Which is really a red herring, because the real nub here is a specific state law—not some general set of property rights. That specific state law says that a certain class of property—namely memorials on public property—are removed from all public deliberation about their desirability.  It is widely acknowledged that general property rights do not trump all other considerations.  There are grounds on which property rights can be overruled or suspended.  But the state law on the public memorials says that kind of debate cannot be held, that kind of case cannot be brought forward. In short, it takes out of a community’s hands, the ability to decide, after a due process of deliberation, whether it wants a memorial present or not in its community.

It is, as I also mentioned in my previous post, precisely in cases where legal methods of appeal and redress are blocked that civil disobedience is most likely to occur.  Again, the Jim Crow South offers the classic example.  When the law and public officials and the courts are completely stacked against you, civil disobedience is one of the few alternatives left (violent rebellion is another).  Legal avenues for the removal of Silent Sam appeared completely blocked.  (Of course, as Eric eloquently argued in public—and within university circles—that there was a legal pathway for removal available, but the university refused to pursue that path, not by rejecting it outright but by refusing to ever acknowledge that such a path existed.  A frustrating approach to the whole dilemma of Silent Sam to say the least.  But from start to finish, the university’s leadership has failed miserably in its response to the presence of Silent Sam on our campus.)

A further oddity: even though we have this state law that was blocking any legal way to remove or move Silent Sam, the protestors were not interested in the repeal of said law.  They just wanted to remove Sam, the law be damned.  So once they toppled Sam, their work was done.  (Unless if gets undone by an effort to re-install the statue.)  Unlike many cases of civil disobedience, there is no on-going need to demonstrate the law’s injustice, to win over a public to the law’s repeal.

Thus, their work being done, why not “try to get away with it”?  We did the right thing, the demonstrators might think, so why should we be punished for it?  Eric’s position, which I respect and 20% agree with, is that the toppling of the statue only becomes a criminal action, not an act of civil disobedience, if you try to evade punishment.

But here’s where I take my 80% stand: it was a collective act of civil disobedience.  Allowing the law to single out a handful of “ring-leaders” will only support their desired narrative of a “few” trouble-makers and outside agitators.  I think the rhetorical battle is ongoing in this case—and that one key rhetorical point to make is that there is wide-scale endorsement of Monday’s action, which includes wide-scale endorsement of the means used (an unauthorized toppling of the statue) and thereof a wide-scale acceptance of responsibility for that action.  If that gums up the works, so be it.

There is, after all, fairly wide discretion about which laws to enforce—and to what extent.  Making it both absurd and costly to enforce the protection of Silent Sam, making the state divert what are always limited resources, to this particular vendetta, helps to make the argument about their priorities and their values that we—those against the prominent presence of Silent Sam on our campus—have been trying to make all along.

In short, it seems to me an acceptable tactic of a campaign of civil disobedience in certain cases to make the functioning of the law in question difficult.  And in cases where there are wide divergences of opinion, I also think that standing in solidarity with those in your camp is incredibly important.  There will be various attempts to divide and conquer going forward, some dependent on making the costs of solidarity high, some dependent on painting the dissenters in certain kinds of way—and then tarring fellow travelers with the same brush.  Anticipating this ongoing rhetorical battle, I still think (despite Eric’s cogent arguments) that counter-acting the law’s attempt to identify a few perpetrators by a mass declaration of guilt is the right move.  My “moral case” (which is what Eric asks for) is based, then, on these claims of solidarity, in the name of the collective that both enacted and endorsed the toppling—and which wishes to resist the attempt to label it the action of just a few outliers, some easy to isolate and dismiss dissidents.