Turgid Weekend Reading

By John Ballard

In the wake of recent political developments I have indulged a little navel-gazing.
What follows was composed last week, April 11, but because I got an assignment which took five or six hours it was after sundown before I finished. Rather than publish at that time I delayed one week.

Those who read my offerings are already a micro-minority and I have no desire to thin the number further.  

I have been thinking about two recent recent events that are aftershocks more than earthquakes, but both arise from Barack Obama's tectonic plate-shifting. Regardless of whatever may be said of this man he clearly makes decisions that risk a potentially deadly line of friendly fire. As expected he is the target of ad hominem attacks from opponents, but the number of former-supporters who feel betrayed is growing, like an infected cut getting worse instead of healing. And just as the cut begins to heal, he tears off the scab and scratches, making the wound worse than before.[Alas, it's only Thursday and he puts out a presidential order that gay and lesbian partners cannot be denied visitation in any hospital which receives federal funds. Same like LBJ desegregating hospitals in the wake of Medicare, and he did it himself, not delegating it to a subordinate. Many Christians squirm and others will actually complain aloud because this president is behaving more Christian than they. There he goes again...]

The events I have in mind are this week's approval of extrajudicial assassination and the political equivalent of a different kind of human sacrifice, the withdrawal of Dawn Johnsen's name as legal counsel nominee for the Justice Department. A case can be made that these developments puzzle together as one skirts the edge of the other from a legal standpoint. (The shadow of John Yoo looms long these days -- see Robert Wright's column on targeted assassinations in Tuesday's NY Times -- , stretching well into this administration's second year along with the still warm ashes of a unitary executive, not yet extinguished... still hot enough, in fact, to spark flames at any time.) It takes courage to confront one's enemies, but only a fool takes a chance confronting his friends. And Barack Obama is willing to be regarded as such a fool. Why else would he advance the first of these events and through benign neglect allow the other to occur, knowing that the effect would be seen by his supporters as yet another betrayal?

As I pondered this question I recalled something said many years ago by a friend who signed up for a college course in philosophy. The reason he was interested in philosophy, aside from having to select an academic elective, was a very human need we all have to understand better who we are and why we act and think as we do, both collectively and individually. It's the last hurdle we jump as we matriculate from childhood to adulthood. And once we feel both feet firmly planted in adulthood, most of us have found a satisfactory answer and forgotten the question.  Everyone's answer comes from all corners of faith, history, politics, and philosophy, but for most of us once the answer is discovered we then organize the rest of life in an orderly way, checking the plumb line occasionally, but rarely examining the place from which it hangs.

So my friend entered an introductory philosophy class with an open and inquiring mind, eager to find answers, once and for all, to all his important questions of life. After manfully struggling a few weeks with the ancient Greeks, Augustine, Kant, Descartes, Kierkegaard and others -- survey courses do a good job of truncating data but fare poorly when it comes to understanding -- he said to me about mid-term "You know, studying philosophy is nothing but intellectual masturbation. I thought I was going to really learn something important but I may as well have been taking a class in art." He soldiered on to the end of the quarter, added another undergraduate credit to his transcript and graduated with a liberal arts major documenting that he had successfully met all the undergraduate requirements of the institution.

I have several readings for today that are important for anyone thinking about the two political events mentioned at the start. To most of the reading audience who arrived at adulthood years ago, like my friend who got a bad taste in his mouth from a single taste of the academic approach to philosophy, these readings will seem like nothing more than intellectual masturbation. But for an inquiring few, those willing to risk questioning some of their basic assumptions, looking at the world from a different perspective, these two readings by Justin E.H. Smith will be stimulating. 

Just a Few More Words about Philosophy and History 

Recently I've been working fairly intensively on a virtually unknown character named Jacob Bruce, aka Iakov Vilimovich Brius, a nobleman of Scottish descent who was born in Moscow in 1669, served as an advisor to Peter the Great, is known to have practiced black magic in the observatory of the Sukharev Tower, had a massive personal library that included the works of Gassendi, van Helmont, Huygens, and Newton, to name a few, and maintained a lengthy correspondence with a certain G. W. Leibniz. I am gradually becoming convinced that Bruce played an important role on at least one of the fronts on which the conflict between Newtonianism and Leibnizianism played out in the early 18th century. This summer I will be visiting the archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg to determine whether this conviction is justified.

After spending a day, not so long ago, surveying a Soviet-published catalog of the marginal notes Bruce entered in some of the books in his library, I went out in the evening for drinks with various friends and friends of friends, one of whom, upon hearing that I am a professor of philosophy, had the bad timing and manners to ask me whether I am an 'analytic' or a 'continental' philosopher. Dear God, I thought. Here we go again.

I hope you will understand why, under the circumstances, to be asked such a question is a bit like being asked whether I am a Blood or a Crip. From my dusty archivalist's perspective, it is only through the most primitive narcissism of minor differences that identification with either of these descriptors could speak to anyone's sense of belonging. That is to say that I don't think these schools really exist, at least not in the way their most vehement supporters believe they do. I think the nature of the rift is sociological, not content- or methodology-based. From a true historian's perspective, in fact, the core presuppositions of the two self-identified camps are substantially the same.

That's enough to get you going. That's hot off the press, having appeared just last week, fresh from the mind of this fertile contemporary mind. 

If you make it to the end of that reflection, go next to a fascinating exchange between Smith and Gerald Dworkin, another eminent contemporary philosopher, as they discuss the pros and cons of capital punishment (CP) versus LIWP (life imprisoned without parole). As you read, reflect on the president's recent decision to authorize the extrajudicial assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen whose name and activities have been high-profile of late.

A Dialogue on the Death Penalty

Gerald Dworkin: Justin and I agree that capital punishment as currently administered in the United States, and in the absence of convincing evidence that it deters more than a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole (LIWP) for any crime, should be abolished. Where we may disagree --I put it this way because I am not sure what view I will emerge with at the end of this discussion-- is whether there is an argument for abolition that does not depend on contingent facts, such as that it does not deter, or that as currently administered the selection of who gets executed is both arbitrary (chance and luck play an enormous role) and unjust (the poor and racial minorities are executed at higher rates that those with money and those blacks who kill whites). For, as Justin points out elsewhere, believing that the facts are as they are is compatible with believing that in a world where deterrence is established and fairness reigns CP is justifiable. This position could be true even if one believed that as a matter of contingent fact our system will never be sufficiently just, and the evidence for deterrence will never be sufficiently strong so as to warrant CP. The first thing I want to do is see if Justin and I agree on a more rigorous definition of the issue. For it is, as I shall argue later, very important exactly how the problem is framed.

I propose that what the defender of what I shall call the non-contingent wrongness of CP must show is the following:

• There is no successful argument for the legitimacy of CP which survives empirical and normative scrutiny.


• In addition to this via negativa there is a valid positive argument whose conclusion is that CP is illegitimate which does not rely in an essential way on contingent matters of fact.
  

This last claim is difficult to formulate accurately. Does an argument which involves the premise �death is different� (whatever that may mean) rely on the fact that once we die we don�t come back to life? That, presumably, is a contingent fact. Does an argument which says that CP is �cruel� rely on some characteristic of CP that makes it cruel? But maybe that characteristic is not an empirical one. If one defines cruelty as acting in a way which is intended to cause great suffering to another person for its own sake then, although it is a contingent fact, whether or not CP is designed or justified by reference to this feature, if it is then it is not a contingent fact that it is cruel.

Justin Smith: Jerry's initial characterization of my position is right on. I do not yet know whether there is an argument against CP that is not based on contingent facts, though I am quite certain that it is not a contingent fact that CP is cruel. I believe that CP is indissociably rooted in a social practice that until very recently was explicitly cruel: one of its principal reasons for being was to set an example of the infinite power of the state over the lives of its subjects. It is thus not surprising that in most of the Western world, the practice of CP died away along with the shift to democracy, and even more definitively with the somewhat later shift to a conception of the ultimate end of the penal system as a corrective one.

It is interesting that in many countries, such as Great Britain and France, the last vestiges of it survived as the form of punishment reserved for treason alone: this seems to me to have to do with the fact that under earlier, absolutist systems, CP, even though it was employed for all sorts of crimes, including murder, was in essence political, again in the sense that it demonstrated the power of the sovereign over the subjects. Long after murder and like crimes came to be seen as merely a criminal matter in Western Europe, and not a matter of state, direct crimes against the state could still be punished by death. The rest of the Western world eradicated CP by the late 20th century, even for treason, while somehow it managed to survive in the United States. Indeed it underwent a revival in the 1970s after some decades of desuetude, and in spite of a parallel commitment to individual rights at the political level, and to an understanding (which since the 1970s we may fear is only vestigial) of centers of punishment as 'correctional' institutions.

And so on...
You may notice that I didn't name this post "turgid" by accident. Before moving on to more fertile territory Smith gets in a wonderful lick at CP erasing completely its efficacy as a "corrective," thereby pulling part of the rug from under the whole of imprisonment as (scare quotes his) "correctional" institutions.

...there is at least one, so to speak conditional a priori argument against CP: if punishment is supposed to be correctional, then the death penalty is at odds with the purposes of punishment.

As a reminder, the focus of these readings is the two events I mentioned, one having to do with legality and constitutional foundations, the other with the larger question of capital punishment.

[Disclaimer here. For reasons too complicated to explain, not germane to this line of thought, I am morally opposed to capital punishment and largely indifferent to questions of legality or constitutional consistency. The first I regard as sub-Christian (which I recognize to be an invalid reason for most thinking people who demand something more vulnerable) and the second strikes me as irrelevant, considering how the meaning has shifted over time. My politics is perilously close to anarchy. This reflection is more for others to chew on than to light any candles in my own darkness.]

Before this dialogue, Smith reflected on the matter of violence in an essay which can be scanned a bit more quickly, How to Think about Violence. This question is not to be taken lightly, since violence is the seedbed from which both law and capital punishment sprout and grow. It's really true that if men were angel there would be no laws. And no one needs to be told how violence leads to war, although we sometimes need reminding that our own violence is an echo of that of the enemy we face.

An effective antidote to the persisting myth of the European monopoly on brutality in the New World is offered by Richard White, in his account of intertribal violence among Great Lakes Natives in the 17th century. "Every night as the Senecas traveled home," he relates, "they killed and ate a Miami child. And every morning, they took a small child, thrust a stick through its head and sat it up on the path with its face toward the Miami town they had left. Behind the Senecas came the pursuing Miamis, and at every Seneca campsite, brokenhearted parents recognized their child" (White 1991, 4-5). The images this report conjures up have been haunting me for the past few weeks, though I relate it here not to spread the infection, but rather as a point of entry into a question I would like to ask about the way philosophers talk about morality.

�

When I read this, I feel a mixture of revulsion and horror and, yes, awe. What I do not feel is the slightest inclination to moral judgment. I get the sense that to think about the case in these terms would be to make a sort of category mistake.
In the end, I suspect that getting people to not be violent will be about as difficult as getting them to not have sex. Over the past few decades, our society has largely come around to the view that the expression of sexuality is an expression of our true nature, rather than a lapse from it. A similar shift has not occurred with violence, and this is no doubt because, whereas sex is on balance worth keeping around (notwithstanding its various damages), violence is regrettable. It is regrettable that this is part of the behavioral profile of homo sapiens, and so we still prefer to pretend that it is not.
And yet people, mostly men, just keep doing it....

�

Ethicists want to find the definitive answer to questions such as: Should late term abortion be permitted? Should physician-assisted suicide be permitted? I have no idea how to go about answering these questions in a context-independent way. I feel like the only reasonable way to address these issues is to observe the actual range of things different human groups are capable of doing, and to strive to understand the circumstances --demographic, ecological, and so on-- under which they tend to do them. Should we permit late-term abortion? I have no idea, but I do know that most human societies throughout history have practiced infanticide. Should we permit physician-assisted suicide? No idea, but I do know medieval Japanese villagers and pre-contact Inuit regularly left their elders to die of exposure as a way of preserving scarce resources. Evidently, then, killing babies and old people is in fact part of the behavioral profile of homo sapiens, and so are raids on neighboring villages. And so, at least under some circumstances, is driving stakes through infants' heads and placing them along the road for their parents to discover.

Etcetera,,,

Lest we point our civilized fingers at savages, do we need reminding how our own atavistic behavior erupts from time to time? Our pre-adult population in uniform, given proper training and inspiration to be patriotic at all costs, sometimes sink to the depravities and excesses of war. And yes, there are photos and videos to document those behaviors as well as otherwise responsible adults who defend them.

This depravity of human behavior is not limited to North American aboriginal peoples. A few years ago a blogger I followed at the time was so shocked at the way Confederate forces were depicted in the movie Cold Mountain that he did a search which uncovered an unsavory description of events that might well have occurred only three or four generation back in a few family trees.

In the hills of Northern Alabama lived a minority group of whites who refused service in the Confederate army when the Civil War commenced. A group known as the Home Guard was dispatched to enforce the conscription of their young men.

Murder or political assassination was a constant threat for Alabama unionists who chose to remain at home. Three sons of Solomon Curtis were all killed in Winston County. Joel Jackson Curtis was killed in 1862 for refusing to join the confederate army. George Washington Curtis, home on leave from the union army, was killed by the home guard in his yard while his wife and three children watched. Thomas Pink Curtis, the probate judge of Winston County, was arrested near Houston by confederate authorities in 1864 and taken to a bluff on Clear Creek where he was summarily executed with two shots to his right eye.

Henry Tucker, a private in Company B, of the 1st Alabama Cavalry, US, was arrested by the Home Guard at his home in Marion County and tortured to death. He was tied to a tree, castrated, his eyes removed and his tongue cut out before he was literally skinned alive. He is buried at Hopewell Cemetery, south of Glen Allen, Ala.

But Tucker�s vicious death was avenged. Home Guard leader Stoke Roberts who personally directed the torture of Tucker, was eventually caught by a group of unionists near Winfield. They took a long iron spike and drove it through his mouth and out the back of his head and nailed him to the root of a big oak tree.

�
��
�

Our president is bending some rules and openly violating others.
He is compromising the fundamental philosophical, legal and political underpinnings that got him elected.
He is doing so with little explanation and without apology.
Mixed messages are coming from the Oval Office regarding matters legal, moral and/or constitutional.

What is his ultimate objective? What are his alternatives? And if he is to be replaced, then who would that replacement be?

In the matter of extrajudicial assassination I am opposed, but in the same way that I am opposed to capital punishment or being a military combatant, I cannot argue that mankind can do without those functions any more than it can do without violence or sex. I know from personal witness that there are plenty of good people wearing US military uniforms who are willing, if not eager, to kill strangers whom they have never seen, plant explosives that will injure and kill innocent people long after conflicts are resolved, or allow children to die should they be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I am not prepared to be dogmatically judgmental about the executive orders of the president.

I know also that extrajudicial assassinations have become one of the modern tools of war, used not only by allies and enemies alike, but by our own forces in the guise of "covert operations" or some such euphemism. I would not be shocked if some whistleblower revealed a file of already whacked American citizens. For me, the only distinction I draw between the president's announcement and any other killing of the same stripe is that he has the balls to say what's happening without mincing words.

For the record, I remain a die-hard loyalist. America only has one president at a time, and then only for four years. At worst, eight years is as bad as it gets, and in the meantime Congress and the Supreme Court can bring about far more problems by action or inaction than can be generated by the Executive Branch. All told we have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not supporting the president with the same blind, fact-denying loyalty that animates partisan opponents. By doing so we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. 

�

Within hours of this writing, another Evert Cilliers' piece came on line. His take-no-prisoners approach to explaining the Obama phenomenon deserves close scrutiny. He has a gift for acidic prose requiring more courage than I have to write. But you may count me as one of his fellow-travelers. He was and is a blogger, but for reasons yet to be explained his blog voice went silent a couple of years. He returned with a vigorous and challenging post January 19 and I'm looking forward to what he writes next. 

If anyone is still reading, I thank you.