Life and Death

The Senate passed, by a vote of 89 for, 9 against, a 700 billion dollar defense bill yesterday, giving the Trump administration more to spend on the military that it had asked for. At the same time, that august body contemplates (and is within one or two votes of passing) a bill that would take away health care from millions. Truly, we have a political system in love with death and remorseless in its attacks on life.

This from Tolstoy’s late essay (1900), “Thous Shalt Not Kill”:

“That nations should not be oppressed, and that there should be none of these useless wars, and that men may not be indignant with those who seem to cause these evils, and may not kill them–it seems that only one small thing is necessary. It is necessary that men should understand things as they are, should call them by their right names, and should know that an army is an instrument for killing, and that the enrollment and management of an army–the very thing which kings, emperors, and presidents occupy themselves with so self-confidently–is a preparation for murder.”

If only it were a question of calling thing by their right names! Not that I underestimate the will to obfuscation, the will that led us to rename the Department of War the Department of Defense. I have a hard time describing–and dealing with–how dispirited I currently feel about the state of our nation and our world. Must humans be worshipers of death?

Church vs. State

The current battles between the politicians in North Carolina (both those in our state legislature and those on the Board of Governors for the state-wide university system) remind me of nothing so much as the battles between church and state as portrayed in the film, Beckett. Like the medieval church, the university, under the double banner of academic freedom and the right of professional expertise to self-governance, claims—and actually possesses—an autonomy that infuriates the statesmen. The politicians (despite their hypocritical claims to abhor state power and over-reach) are determined to bring the university to heel. It only exacerbates matters that universities generate a loyalty and affection among students and alums that politicians can only dream of attaining.

Put this way, the university is the Church. And, certainly, the university has plenty of analogues with the Church, especially in the pretension to and, sometimes achievement of, the otherworldly. Plenty of room for hypocrisy there—and undoubtedly no shortage of actual indulgence in that vice.

But I can’t help but view our power-grasping politicians through the lens of religion as well. I have tried, mostly successfully, during my life and academic career to resist those narratives that posit a sickness deep in the American soul, that see our nation as doomed by a darkness, an original sin, that means it is impossible we will ever live up to our high-falutin’ ideals. I don’t want to believe that racism explains all of the American past and the American present. I do want to believe that the US has done a decent—albeit far from perfect—job of providing a good enough life for a higher percentage of its citizens than have most societies in human history. But I cannot deny that the desire to believe these things may be making me blind to the uglier truth.

In any case, I read this in a Kipling story (“Watches of the Night”): “You may have noticed that many religious people are deeply suspicious. They seem—for purely religious purposes, of course—to know more about iniquity than the unregenerate. Perhaps they were specially bad before they became converted! At any rate, in the imputation of things evil, and in putting the worst construction on things innocent, a certain type of good person may be trusted to surpass all others.”

Now, you could say that the evangelicals meet their match in this regard with the “America is rotten to the core” crew. Fair enough. But what I want to ponder is the desire to punish. When I consider why these right-wingers hate the university—and consider the ways they express that hatred—what I see (among other factors, no doubt) is the desire to subject professors to “market discipline.” It is not enough to see evil. One must punish it. And the chosen instrument for punishment is the market. The right-wingers may be able to mouth all the virtues of the free market. But what they really like is that it punishes people, that it causes pain to the reprobate. How else to explain the need to hunt down the poorest and most vulnerable at every turn and make sure that they are suffering enough? It’s almost as if the prosperous cannot enjoy their riches without also knowing that some are excluded from that enjoyment.

Of course, the price for that enjoyment is “hard work”—and the right (reminiscent of Kipling’s comments on “suspicion”) is obsessed with the notion that there are people out there who are avoiding “hard work,” who are living off the fat of government largesse.

The university looks like a free consequence zone. Bad enough that students get to play on their parents’ and the state’s dime for four years. But that professors get to do so for a lifetime is truly insufferable! Teaching only two days a week! Summer vacations! Sabbaticals! And with fancy titles and exaggerated respect. There ought to be a law against it.

Destroying Public Education

Chris Newfield’s The Great Mistake (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) is a passionate denunciation of the failure to preserve (over the past 20 years) the incredible system of public higher education created in this country between 1945 and 1970. He places much of the blame on the acquiescence of top-level college administrators in the steady, slow drip of year and after year reductions in state subsidies. Death by a million cuts–without any strong push-back or effort to forge a constituency that would lobby against the cuts. As with our decaying bridges and power grid, we have witnessed a persistent refusal of our society to invest in the upkeep and growth of basic infrastructure.

In North Carolina at the current moment, the animus against public higher education is not a matter of simple neglect or short-sighted stinginess. There is an active push to dismantle the state system, an attack that ranges from undercutting student aid packages for less well-off students to interfering with core curricular programs to shutting down research institutes and centers. None of this has the slightest economic rationale, since the universities are demonstrably the economic drivers in a state that has managed the transition away from its traditional industries—tobacco, textile, and furniture—to the “new” economy reasonably well. (Poverty in the state is still a severe problem, but located precisely in the eastern and western regions that are furthest away from the universities.) No, despite all their talk of economic rationales, the Republicans in the state legislature simply hate the universities, especially Chapel Hill, for everything that we stand for: the “liberal” values of free thought and diversity.

In one conversation this week, a fellow faculty member who (because of fund-raising responsibilities and by virtue of his academic discipline) interacts often with these powerful—and hostile—critics of the university, said that he can never figure out “their end game.” After they cripple the university, what is the utopia they imagine? What good will they have achieved? They seem to be set on destruction for destruction’s sake.

I mentioned this conversation to another academic later in the week—and he offered a theory. Your mileage may vary. But I found his thoughts intriguing and, at least, semi-plausible. Education is a billion dollar “industry” that remains frustratingly outside of normal profit-taking business. Destroy public education and you create a whole new market for capitalism. Think of it as equivalent to health-care. We know that providing health care is a public good and a human necessity. But keeping the provision of health care private means large profits for insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, and various other players. Now think about an education sector structured in similar ways. Education is also a public good and a human necessity. Piles of money to be made if it is privatized.

None of this requires a conspiracy theory. Just the knee-jerk hostility to everything that is public among our free-market ideologues and the determined effort to erode all publicly provided services and goods. Outsource it all—so that someone somewhere makes a profit, even as working conditions for those in the trenches get steadily worse and the actual beneficiary of services is left to fend for himself or herself. A scary and depressing thought, precisely because it is a future too easy to imagine.

Unorthodox Reflections on Charlottesville

New York Times article, with video, of shot fired during the Charlottesville rally.

As everyone has commented, the right wing marchers in Charlottesville were heavily armed, thereby making a mockery of any notion of free speech in the public square. Dahlia Lithwick in Slate has that angle nicely covered.

I want to focus in on the fact that, so far as I can discern, the only shot actually fired that day is the one captured in the video embedded in the New York Times article. That’s a miracle. Impressive, really. All accounts suggest that was some fairly strenuous fighting going on. Yet no one pulled the trigger, except that one guy, and he fired into the ground.

That’s relevant to my current obsession with the impediments to violence and, from the opposite side, with what incites violence. All the evidence suggests (the best place to review this evidence is Randall Collins’s book, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory [Princeton Universioty Press, 2008]) that the impediments to violence are very strong. Famously, studies done after World War II discovered that in most cases 75% of troops in combat never even fired their weapons.

My supposition is that people need to be authorized to commit violence–except in cases where they are responding directly to violence against them. And even when authorized–as the World War II case shows–the reluctance to be violent is still a strong impediment.

Clearly, the right wingers don’t think of themselves as reluctant to use violence. Maybe that’s bluster, and maybe that’s true. Collins suggest that there are virtuosos of violence just as there are virtuosos in other endeavors. But my suggestion is that even the virtuousos need to be given permission. Violence always must justify itself against the assumption that it is wrong. It must have a story to tell about why it was necessary.

So my thought is: the Charlottesville show of force was a message. We are armed and we are ready to resort to force if you do certain things, i.e. take down Confederate monuments. So one question is: what actually would move all these right-wing militias to the actual deployment of force. They are clearly threatening force, but what would actually move them to use it.

This is also why, it seems to me, these militias are addicted to arcane, hair-splitting interpretations of the Constitution. They need the law to be on their side to justify their resorting to force. That is certainly how the two Bundy escapades worked. They provided themselves with crackpot legal justification.

If we think back to the street fights in 1930s Germany, we have a case where violence from both sides was one instigator, but also where the state quite simply unleashed the thugs. Similar instances (in Egypt for example or in China during the Cultural Revolution) can also be cited. The violence against blacks in the South was socially sanctioned from 1870 to 1965–and Kennedy’s reluctance to intervene in the early 1960s allowed Southerners to still count on the fact that local justice systems would wink at their violence while their social cohorts would approve of it.

That, of course, is why Trump is so dangerous. He hasn’t gone so far as to designate certain people enemies of the nation, but he hasn’t exactly embraced the equal right of everyone to be here (to put it mildly). Still, he hasn’t openly endorsed violence, even as he has winked at it. What he has done so far is enough justification for the outliers and loners, but not enough to swing the militias into concerted action. In short, we have not seen any organized violence as of yet, although we have had these organized rallies that are built around the threat of violence. If we reach a point where the courts refuse to prosecute, watch out. (Just as the courts’ absurd interpretation of the 2nd amendment has given us people parading with assault rifles on our streets.)

Is there really something, some political event, that would push the militias into action? That possibility is certainly less remote than left-wing violence in the contemporary US. But it still seems pretty remote to me. The two Bundy stand-offs were the closest we’ve gotten there–and they never came close to being wide-spread movements.