War and Peace: My First Conference Presentation and My Weekend at Purdue (Part IV)

(Part I, II, III)

I was supposed to be the second of two people speaking at the third session. The other person, whom I have never met and shall remain nameless, did not show up to the conference. So I got a full session all to myself to speak about David Reubeni. This presentation was based on a paper I did for Dr. Robert Davis and I intend to use it in some form for my dissertation. My presentation was on the political thought of David Reubeni, an early sixteenth century Jew who claimed to be an ambassador from several of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Reubeni wandered around Europe for several years attempting to form alliances with various Christian powers to fight the Muslims and was taken seriously by a number of important people, including Pope Clement VII. I argue that Reubeni managed to create a power structure around himself and claimed the sort of authority usually reserved for states. His initial success in this endeavor was due to his claim that he was a representative of a political state and a man of noble birth.

Throughout his diary Reubeni continuously strives to portray himself as a man capable of using violence. Like a political state he and his followers use “legitimate” violence against those who do not have “legitimate” power and, by doing so, bring “peace,” “justice” and “order” to all. The fact that Reubeni represented a state and acting against individuals who did not represent states, by definition, meant that his acts of violence were legitimate and that they were just and that the actions of his opponents were, by definition, illegitimate. In keeping with his interest in violence, Reubeni took a great interest in the instruments of violence such as swords, armor and particularly guns and his ability to possess and use them. I offered an analysis of several episodes found in Reubeni’s diary, where we see him playing the role of a statesman, engaging in acts of violence and thereby attempting to bring about justice, order and peace.

My intention was to move beyond the traditional issues regarding Reubeni - Reubeni the messianic claimant and Reubeni the con-man. He may have been a fraud, but he was also a brilliant political thinker, with a plan of action built around issues pertaining to this world and not just apocalyptic expectations. Ultimately, and this is the main point of my dissertation, I wish to, following in the footsteps of Norman Cohn and Richard Popkin, challenge the distinction between apocalyptic Messianism and earthly politics.

If readers of this blog are interested I might post a fuller version of the paper As I was the sole presenter at this session I spoke for a little longer than my allotted twenty minutes and we had a longer than usual question and answer session afterwards. The people in attendance were simply a fantastic audience so this session ended up going on for close to the allotted hour.

After attending a conference full of post modern liberal sophistry, I was looking forward to driving back to Columbus with Cory Driver. We were driving through rural Indiana (Sarah Palin’s real America) when we stopped at a gas station. In what can only be described as something out of a comedy sketch, the gas station was named Gas America.

I went inside and did not find Achmed the Dead Terrorist behind the counter. Instead I found what looked to be a perfectly normal American girl.

Mary Beard - The Politics of Reviewing

Today Ohio State was privileged to host Dr. Mary Beard who spoke on some of the practical issues of getting reviewed and writing them, both issues that are of great practical concern to me. I must say that she was an absolute gem both as a speaker and as a human being. Here are my notes for the lecture. As always any mistakes are mine. Dr. Beard has actually posted a piece on her stay in Columbus including a brief overview of this lecture. She even refers to the blog question I asked. So see here for that.

Dr. Beard is a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge in England and one of the pioneering women in the field of classics. She is also the editor of the classics section the Times Literary section (TLS) so she is on both sides of the reviewing fence. She both reviews and gets reviewed.

Any interesting book is bound to get some bad reviews so it should worry a person if they do not get any bad reviews. To start with the actual process, which is the same for any mid-range literary broadsheet, no one looks at a reviewer closer than the author. Most people just glance at the beginning and maybe the end. Reviews have minimal impact on sales. Most of the impact is when you have a reasonably popular book and you get a series of popular reviews. The important thing is to get reviewed, not whether the book gets good reviews or not. Never write a review that you are not prepared to say in front of the author. People do not mind you disagreeing with them as long as you are not nasty. This is not in the financial interests of TLS but never respond to a bad review. It just draws attention to it. If need be, have a friend respond.

How to get a review in TLS? It comes out every week and has a circulation of forty thousand, which translates into a readership of at least one hundred thousand. Rupert Murdoch owns TLS but, as naïve as this sounds, there is no direct interference. Likely it serves him as a useful cover when he gets accused of downgrading things. Books come in boxes and get put down by some wage slave. Most things reviewed get sent by the publishers. It helps if TLS occasionally does a foreign, non-English, book every so often so those they seek out. There are more politics and favoritism than one would like to hear. There are some big names that automatically get reviewed. There is probably no person in the classics who gets that status. It helps if you can match up a book with a reviewer who can write an interesting review of it. You sometimes need some boring reviews, though. In the end, though, you do need to sell. There is bad luck but there is not much that is sinister. One should not send a book to a reviewer whose view on the book you can already predict. Beard once nearly sent a book to a reviewer who had just walked off with the author’s husband. One should try to get a reviewer slightly out of his main area of expertise. She likes to get a mix of views from reviewers. Beard may not agree with Victor Davis Hanson’s politics but he writes a good review. One has a one in forty to a one in fifty chance of getting reviewed for something in the classics. This is rather good considering that for novels it is more like one in two-hundred and fifty.

Reviews are terribly important still. There is something important about critical comment to serve as a gatekeeper as things move out into society. There is much less of a problem with review assassination than with brown-nosing. People are all too willing to be nice than to be critical. There is an issue of democracy. Beard worries about people reviewing books they know little about and it immediately winding up on people’s desktops. Graduate students tend to be highly patronizing. It is important to show that you have engaged the argument. She advises that one avoid adjectives like “simplistic” and “outrageous.” Do not assume that because an author did not mention something they were unaware of it. One should honestly state the argument and no one is going to object if you are critical. Her advice to graduate students who want to start reviewing is that they should start with something very technical that they, in particular, know something about. If it misfires it is less likely to come back to haunt them.

During the Q&A session, I asked Dr. Beard about blogs. As someone in the world of established print, I expected her to have a negative view. It turns out that Beard does not have the anxiety about blogs that she has about other forms of online media. With a blog, you get what you see. People write about what they read last week. Everyone knows that blogs have no quality control. Publishers in England have caught on to this and have started inviting bloggers to parties. There is going to be a creeping institutionalization of blogs. As of now, Beard likes what she sees though she suspects that things are going to change.

Another person asked Dr. Beard how one goes to the next step from being an academic writer, selling a thousand books, to actually becoming popular. As Beard mentioned previously, reviews do not help. What does help is getting on talks shows, into airplane magazines and front tables at book stores. It helps to get a big advance because that forces the publishers to try to sell your work. She strongly advises one to ask about the publicity budget. Finally, unless one hits it very big, one should not bother with an agent.

Dr. Beard’s final words of advice for writing reviews was not to start a review with poetry as it is a bother to set right and not to end with “thus we see.” Beard herself likes to start her reviews with an anecdote. Though admittedly this to can get rather formulaic too.

I asked her, after the lecture, if she was related to the famous early twentieth century American historian Mary Beard. She had a good laugh at that. Apparently her mother named her without ever having heard of Mary Beard. She herself only found out about her namesake as an adult.

The Faith of Jenny McCarthy and Her War on Science

I just posted a piece over at the ASAN of Central Ohio blog on Jenny McCarthy and her abuses of religion and science.

War and Peace: My First Conference Presentation and My Weekend at Purdue (Part III)

(Part I, II)

The second panel was on the Middle East and was chaired by Rebecca Nicholson-Weir. The first speaker was my new found friend Cory Driver from Ohio State. His presentation was titled “Traces of Silvers: Remembrances of Jewish Members of a Moroccan Mixed Ethnic and Religious Community.” Driver offered a reconstruction of Jewish life in the Moroccan village of Midelt, near the Atlas Mountains. There is no longer a Jewish community in Midelt, but he did some field work in the area. Particularly he struck up a friendship with one of the local inhabitants, who proved to be a rich source of stories. Midelt was actually the second place in Morocco to get electricity. This region is rich in apples and was originally settled by Berbers. There are different tribes in the area, which have a history of not getting along and there is some questions in reconstructing their conflicts as to who attacked whom first and stole the land. Jews served as clerks to the garrison nearby. Driver’s friend, was close to a Jewish family, the Azlars. They claimed to be descended from saints and that they had the power to bless objects, a service that their Muslim neighbors made use of. (This “ecumenical” use of saints was actually quite common between Jews and Muslims in North Africa and can be traced back to the Middle Ages. They were in the habit of giving candy to the local children as a way of getting them not to steal from them. They were involved in stealing grain from the government; government workers were paid to “lose” the grain. Things turned downhill for Jews particularly after the Six Day War in 1967. We have a case were a Jew was shot and killed for celebrating the Israeli victory. The picture that one gets is that while Jewish Muslim relations should not be romanticized, there existed fair amount of pragmatic co-operation.

(I particularly liked the fact that Driver discussed some of the methodological problems with personal histories, an issue that I have discussed previously in this blog. He openly acknowledged that his source often contradicted himself with different versions of the same story. He presented what he took to be the most authoritative versions.)

The second presentation of the panel was “Conflicted Resistance: The Performance of Violence in Wild Thorns and Waltz with Bashir” by Aileen Esmat Genaidy of the University of Cincinnati. As Edward Said pointed out in Orientalism, Westerners tend to think of Arab nationalism as inherently violent. It is all a question of personal agency. Palestinian identity goes back before 1948 but has not become synonymous with the struggle with Israel. The novel Wild Thorns moves from mourning over 1948 to the romantic resistance of 1967 from the Palestinian perspective as various characters struggle to decide how best to resist Israel. The Israeli film Waltz with Bashir moves deals with the First Lebanon War. The director attempts to patch together his memories of the war. There is a narrative distance between the soldiers and the civilians. The film distorts the nature of the conflict both in terms of the actual violence and the symbols of it. Unlike Wild Thorns there is no sense of self agency for Arabs.

(So we actually had a real life anti Israel screed at this conference. During the presentation I thought I heard Genaidy use the term “Palestinian Genocide.” During the Q&A section I asked her if I had heard her correctly. She responded that yes she had used that term. She then backed off from it. So not only does she slander Israel, she does not even have the spine to defend herself. Someone else asked her about the film, the Reader, which had been criticized for taking away Jewish self agency. Lo and behold, Genaidy defended the Reader. So what we have learned is that one must be very careful to acknowledge Arab self agency, but it is perfectly ok to deny Jewish self agency.)

(To be continued ...)

A Conversation Between Daniel Hobbins and David Cressy

The History department hosted a round table conversation with Dr. David Cressy interviewing Dr. Daniel Hobbins about his new book, Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning. I have yet to read the book, Dr. Hobbins, though, was on my committee and I have taken several classes with him so Gerson and late medieval culture became part of my schooling. During the course of the event, other people also got the chance to put forth questions. This is my summary of the event based on my notes. As always, any mistakes made are mine.

Cressy: Authorship and Publicity Before Print is a book about conversations. There are four conversations in the book. The nature of this period, which you do not view as an extension of the Middle Ages, publication before print, the career of Jean Gerson and, finally, this a book about media and communication.

Hobbins: This project began with Gerson. I did not want this book, though, to be about just Gerson. This book changed from the original dissertation and I expanded it. Anyone who wants to use the term late for a period is heading toward trouble. Traditionally the late Middle Ages has been viewed as a time of trouble. I am responding to Johan Huizinga’s Autumn of the Middle Ages. Huizinga saw a decline from the twelfth century. He made heavy use of Gerson. In the words of one scholar: The last contribution of the Middle Ages was spoken before 1378 (Start of the Great Schism). One can also view this period as a harvest of medieval thought or as a precursor to humanism. There is a need to move outside of this box and see the late Middle as a period in its own right.

Cressy: Gerson seems to be everywhere in the book and he was a very important person in his own time, though his work did not manage to cross the channel or the Alps. Why is he outside of our narrative?

Hobbins: Gerson does not fit into the narrative. I would have a difficult time if I wanted to put him into a textbook. He is not the High Middle Ages and he is not the Renaissance. The Western Civilization textbook is not designed to teach that civilization does not develop linearly.

Geoffrey Parker: What role does the Schism play in the distribution of Gerson manuscripts? Why does Gerson not make it into England and Italy?

Hobbins: By the Council of Constance, there is this panic over Wycliffism. So you can see how easily texts can spread during this period. That being said, in this period, books are not distributing fluidly. For example, Thomas a Kempis was a bestseller but did not make it into Spain.

Barbara Hanawalt: What about Gerson’s dabbling in popular politics such as in the case of Joan of Arc?

Hobbins: Gerson preached at court so he was part of a political network. There is a move away from mendicants to having the secular clergy occupy these positions. His big cause early in his career was the assassination of the Duke of Orleans in 1407. This leads to his work on tyrannicide. This work is quoted by James I in the seventeenth century. Gerson ended his life in exile after Paris ended up as part of the Anglo-Burgundian regime in 1418. His work on Joan of Arc was used at her retrial in the 1450s.

Cressy: What did it mean to be a public intellectual in the fifteenth century?

Hobbins: There is not the coffee house public of the eighteenth century but there is a public discourse. You have theologians reaching a wide public. How does this fit into a narrative of decline? That being said this could not have been more than ten percent of the public. This is still, though, far more than the audience reached by medieval scholastics such as Aquinas.

Gregory Pellam: Gerson was responding to Petrarch. Was this a key feature in the development of a French nationalism that the French are always correct?

Hobbins: In the fourteenth century English theologians are being condemned by the papacy for mixing logic and theology. Gerson is part of this anti-English tradition. Nationalism is a very controversial issue. Is Joan of Arc an example of nationalism? She was hearing voices telling her to go support the king of France against the English so God, in her view, supports France as opposed to the English.

Cressy: We have a public that is being fed news. It would seem that this is a public sphere.

Hobbins: Jurgen Habermas, when dealing with the Middle Ages, talks about nightly courtly publicity. He simply co-opted the traditional image of the Middle Ages, without dealing with the wider culture.

(The political philosopher, Jurgen Habermas is the author of the controversial thesis that the eighteenth century saw the birth of the "public sphere." Medievalists have been quite keen on showing that there was a public sphere during the Middle Ages. The question becomes what counts as a public sphere. It is clear that there existed a more of a public than Habermas thought. Habermas was writing during the 1960s at a time when medieval studies was still a study of church and aristocracy. Since then scholarship has "discovered" the common man and have made him a historical force to be reckoned with. There is a similar debate with nationalism. Nationalism is usually associated with the nineteenth century. Did it exist during the Middle Ages? Depends on how you define nationalism.)

To what extent was Gerson concerned about his work getting outside of his control?

Hobbins: Scribes mangling texts was a common concern going back to antiquity. Gerson, though, writes in praise of scribes. He recognized the important role that scribes play in putting forth his ideas. He lived to see his work being distributed. He gathered material that he wrote to be distributed. Imitation of Christ is often wrongly attributed to Gerson. Why did Gerson not write it? He never took the time to write a masterpiece.

Cressy: Gerson’s brother served as a sort of manager. He helped distribute his work.

Hobbins: We would still have Gerson without his brother. A Dominican like Aquinas would have had a stationer copying his work and passing them along. Gerson also had a privileged circle of copyists.

Cressy: Any comparison to modern times? Modern issues seem to play a large role in your book.
Hobbins: We are in a transitional time. Printed texts are imitations of manuscripts that is the only way they could have caught on. Gerson is almost begging for a printing press. He had his work put on tables so people in mass could read them.

History 112: The French Revolution and Napoleon

1. I know we said that Jefferson was influenced by the Enlightenment. How much and in what way did the American Revolution influence the French Revolution?
2. I noticed a resemblance between our Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of Rights. Is there some sort of connection?

First of all there is the practical connection between the American and French Revolutions as the main reason why, come 1788, that France is in the financial mess it is in is because of what they spent helping the colonies in terms of both military and financial aid. By the way, America never paid back the money it borrowed from France. Also there is the ideological issue as both the Americans and the French were influenced by the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers could look across the Atlantic and say: look, these policies we are advocating are working in America so why not try them here in Europe. (In truth America during the 1780s was not in good shape with the Articles of Confederation. But progress is relative; at least we were not resorting to cannibalism or holding our females in common.)

3. What were the effects of the French Revolution (and the Declaration of Rights) on other countries?
4. My question has to do with the influence of the French Revolution. Ihave heard many times that aspects of the French Revolution were usedin countless revolutions and wars. Can you briefly go over them?

The French Revolution was closely connected to the Enlightenment. This is not to say that the Enlightenment caused the Revolution. Just that the Revolution made use of Enlightenment ideas. This made the Revolution an issue for anyone facing the issue of the Enlightenment, whether pro or against. In a way the French Revolution, with its turn to violence, harmed the cause of Enlightenment and by extension liberalism. The fact that the Revolution became associated with excess and extremism strengthened the hands of political and religious conservatives. I personally count it as a misfortune that it was France, with its strong anti-clericalism, that became the standard barrier of the Enlightenment. I suspect that we would have had a far healthier transition into modernity and a better grip on issues of religion and public life if it had been the English or German Enlightenments that took the lead.



5. There seems to be a pretty big contradiction between the idea of equality that the men of the French Revolution were fighting for and their suppression of women. How was this justified? One justification was that women didn't own property, so they were able to be overlooked, yet even if they did own property, they were still thrown into the "property-less" category. This seems like a terrible justification to me, so how did they get away with it? How much support was there in favor of sexual equality during this time?
6. In Chaumette's Speech at the General Council of the City Government of Paris Denouncing Women's Political Activism, he basically says women shouldn't be involved with politics because they will slack on their house work, which is so ignorant. But my question is on their involvement in the government. I was not aware women had tried to play a role in the actual running of the government, how common was this?

The idea of women playing a role in the government is still something very theoretical. At this point the issue of working class men taking a role in government is still being debated. Now the people debating this issue are fully aware of the stakes. If you assume that every person has some point blank right to take part in government, which traditional political thought had never accepted, than why not allow women to take part. At which point comes the counter liberal argument that it does not benefit the public interest to hand political power to just anyone. Taking part in government requires one to have a certain level of leisure and education. For someone to have a vote and be able to make use of it they are going to need to have the time to take off from work to go to the polls. (This is a problem that plagues the laboring class vote today. They are not willing to take the time off from work to go and vote.) More importantly one has to have the time and education to inform oneself about the issue. Otherwise one is just picking between random names. (When I go to the polls I tend to leave large parts of the ballot blank. I usually have no idea what platform various people running for school boards and other local offices are supporting.) In a society where there is no mass education and where most people do not much in the way of leisure time it makes sense to limit political power to those groups where, by and large, the people do have the necessary education and leisure.

7. Did the French have the same debates and arguments about slavery as we
did in the United States?

The French discussion of slavery is very similar to the one that the United States was having at this point in time. At this point slavery is something that exists but everyone assumes can and should eventually be gotten rid of. The slavery issue takes a radical turn in the United States with the invention of the Cotton Gin, which makes the production of cotton cloth economically plausible. Slavery, for the south, becomes not just something that exists but necessary for the existence of the “southern way of life.”

8. I don't quite understand what Barnave was saying about French colonies. Was he suggesting that people in these colonies should not be protected under the declaration, thus allowing them to import slaves from these colonies under the pretense that they don't share the same rights as the mainland French?

Antoine Pierre Barnave was advocating for the continued tolerance of slavery, at least for the short term, on pragmatic grounds. If the cause of world liberty rests on the success of the French Revolution and if the cessation of the French slave trade would harm France than the cause of world liberty requires that France continue its slave trade; opposing slavery is supporting tyranny. I admit that there is something morally repulsive about this logic, but he does have a point.

9. I find it odd that Napoleon would put his relatives as "dictators" in his recently obtained territories. Did they actually have training as military leaders? Where they as qualified and accomplished as Napoleon...or were some of them just mooching?

Some of Napoleon’s relatives were fairly talented like his brother, Jerome, and his step son, Eugene, were fairly talented. Others, like his brother Joseph, were less so. The funny thing about Napoleon is that he was attempting to created his own revolutionary version of Old Regime Europe.

10. Napoleon's empire seems to fall apart remarkably quickly after his downfall in the reading, is this a result of what was already occurring or more simplified than a truth of what was a in reality a longer process?

It was a fairly quick breakup. There were a lot of people who were very keen on breaking it up. It is a testimony to Napoleon’s great talent that he managed to keep his empire together for as long as he did.

ASAN Meeting Tonight

In response to the Autism Speaks Walk last fall and the creation of an Autism Speaks chapter on campus my friend Melanie (See here for her simply devastating letter to President Gee) decided to form an Ohio State chapter for the Autism Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) and drafted me as an officer. Unlike Autism Speaks, ASAN does not operate on the medical model for autism. Of particular interest, Autism Awareness does not have autistics in its leadership; it is run by neurotypicals on behalf of those on the spectrum. Autism Speaks believes that they need to speak for autistics because autistics are incapable of speaking for themselves. ASAN, in contrast, is operated, for the most part, by autistics and for autistics.

We have our first meeting tonight at Barnes and Noble at 5:45 P.M (It works perfectly with our book club) and the Lantern even put out an article to help generate some publicity. This marks the second time in a week that I have appeared in the Lantern.

Bill Cosby at the Draft

Here is a great video featuring Bill Cosby commenting on the draft and channeling Mel Brooks’ 2000 Year Old Man. Since John Madden has retired (thank goodness) could we draft Cosby to fill his place?

History 112: the French Revolution (Q&A)

1. Was there a single event or meeting that caused France to volunteer tobe on America's side of the American Revolution? Or was it just, "We hate England too.”

The fact that Louis XVI helped the American colonies should serve to indicate that he was not the reactionary autocrat that proponents of the Revolution made him out to be. Louis XVI was part of a generation of “enlightened despots” who viewed themselves as upholders of Enlightenment ideals. A word should also be put in for a very effective American diplomatic effort, to court French upper class opinion. The main person in this was Benjamin Franklin, an American philosophe.

2. Davies writes that "the revolution was imminent in almost all of Europe." So why exactly did it break out in France first and not somewhere else? What was unique about France's situation that caused a revolution?

This is a million dollar question that historians are still debating. It is important to realize that this very much is a question. From our teleological perspective it is very easy to take it for granted that the French monarchy was hopelessly inept and that Enlightenment thought would inevitably lead to a revolution. In truth there were things right with the French government and it could have made the necessary changes to stave off revolution.
If I were living in 1788 and was told that either England or France would have a revolution and chop their king’s head off I would have said England. England had plenty of heterodox thinkers running around, an unpopular monarch, George III, intent on increasing royal power when he was not insane and plenty of useless aristocrats lording over the populace and creating popular resentment. Most importantly England had already got rid of their king once before, during the English Civil War. So what that the French government was bankrupt and bread prices were going through the roof, there is nothing unusual about that.

3. Why did Necker getting kicked off cause such a controversy?

Jacques Necker was the finance minister, who first pointed out that the government was heading toward financial disaster and that spending cuts, particularly in the realm of the royal household budget, were needed. This lost Necker his job. He then went public with this and did the unheard of thing of publishing the government budget. Necker was not an aristocrat; he was Swiss and came from a common background. Louis XVI brought him back in 1788 precisely because he was seen as someone who commanded the public trust. Of course this did help matters when Louis XVI continued to get annoyed with Necker for saying the same things that got him fired in the first place and fired him again. If you hire the “people’s man” because he is the “people’s man” and then fire him for saying the sort of things that made him the “people’s man” in the first place the people are going to take it quite personally.

4. The French revolution in itself seems very bloody and violent. However, I am still surprised when Davies writes, "The Revolution started to devour its own children...Danton and his associates were denounced and executed in April 1794, for questioning the purpose of the terror. Robespierre, the chief terrorist, met denunciation and death on 28 July 1794. "Is there a way of explaining the seemly illogical and counter-intuitive executioner's list of the French Revolution?

The fact that the Revolution turned to such violence should not be surprising. The Revolution from the get go was built around violence the moment things moved beyond the Tennis Court Oath to the Bastille. If you build an ideology around revolution and the notion of revolution having some innate value than the revolution has to keep going. How else are you going to keep the revolution going if not by going to further extremes? If there is going to be the side of revolution than there has to be a side of "counter revolution." So one has to continuously search for “counter revolutionaries.” If you get rid of the “obvious counter revolutionaries” such as royalists and Catholic loyalist than you have to turn those who are not revolutionary “enough” and make them the new “counter revolutionaries.”

War and Peace: My First Conference Presentation and My Weekend at Purdue (Part II)

(Part I)

The second paper was “The Moral Significance of Recognizing Violence in Pogge’s Borrowing and Resource Privileges,” presented by Mark Balawender of Michigan State University. Thomas Pogge attacks borrowing and resource privileges, arguing that the developed world acts as an enabler to authoritarian governments as they borrow money and cause economic harm to their people. This process of borrowing money in exchange for resource privileges allows corrupt third world governments sell out their own countries. There is not normative standard to judge the legitimacy of governments. This allows authoritarian governments to seize power and gain money quickly even though this harms the population. How does one deal with this from the perspective of liberalism which allows economic transactions that only incidentally cause harm to other people?

A useful analogy is the case of two parallel paths one higher up than the other where the rocks from the higher path can cause harm to those on the lower half. Such a situation is okay where the population freely chooses which path to take. What happens when you have a case where the path one chooses is dependent on one’s social or economic status? This would create a different moral situation. Thus such instruments of global Capitalism as lending money to corrupt third world regimes in exchange for resources should be classified as forms of violence and should be viewed as wrong within the parameters of liberalism.

I found this presentation amusing mainly because it reminded me so much of Talmudic dialectics. As a good traditional liberal I oppose the aiding and abetting of authoritarian regimes. As a believer in free markets, though, I have the ultimate weapon against such regimes, Capitalism. Under free market conditions it is not in my interest to support authoritarian regimes even when control over their natural resources. Such regimes are likely to fall and the new regime is unlikely to respect its predecessor’s agreement, particularly if they are able to make the case to the world that this was a bargain made between thieves, designed to impoverish the country. I raised this issue with Balawender and he responded that Pogge had used a similar argument.

The final presentation of the first session Nathan Stout of Western Michigan University, “The Torture Memo: A Philosophical Critique” Prof. John Yoo’s Torture Memo, on behalf of the Bush administration, allowed for extreme interrogation tactics. Yoo defines Al Qaida members both as enemy combatants and as unlawful combatants. He assumes that 9/11 was a declaration of war on the part of Al Qaida and therefore the United States entered a formal war with Al Qaida no different than a war with a established state. This makes what happens next to fall under the military; Al Qaida fighters are military combatants. On the flip side, since Al Qaida does not keep to the established protocols of war, they are unlawful combatants, no different than spies. Congress does not have the authority to interfere with the President’s handling of unlawful combatants and the President is free to do with them as he wishes. How does one go about defining combatants and unlawful combatants? We assume that enemy combatants lose their rights to life and liberty because they choose to participate in war. This is in keeping with Just War theory. An unlawful combatant wishes to fight while maintaining the protections of a non combatant; he therefore loses the rights of lawful combatants. Yoo’s model would require one to assume that Al Qaida soldiers had a right to fight to begin with. Yoo, though, rejects the notion that Al Qaida is in any way a legitimate political entity. This being the case one should not be able to say that the United States is at war with Al Qaida.

I have not studied Yoo’s arguments, though the argument he makes seems to be very similar to the one that I made in a debate on Atheist Ethicist. I argued that the Al Qaida fighters held on Guantanamo Bay get the worst of both situations. As out of uniform combatants they have no legal rights. As prisoners captured during combat they do not need to be tried. The challenge being raised against Yoo seems to have a very simple solution, accept that Al Qaida is a political entity and should be treated as a state. I raised the scenario with Stout where Al Qaida would have acted “legally.” Al Qaida issues a formal declaration of war on the morning of 9/11 before they hijacked the plans. Uniformed Al Qaida soldiers get past security and hijack civilian airliners. After somehow getting all civilians off the plans they then crashed the planes into military targets such as the Pentagon. America declares war against Al Qaida and invades Afghanistan. Uniformed Al Qaida fighters clash with American forces out in the open, away from civilians, and are captured. I would have no problem with saying that Al Qaida prisoners should, under such circumstances, be treated with full legal rights as if they were from England, France or Canada and protected from torture. Since this is not the case, I have no problem in stripping Al Qaida fighters of their legal rights and handing a blank check to our government to torture them.

(To be continued …)

RVA’s Response to “Does History Have any Utilitarian Value?”

Here is RVA’s response to my recent post on the purpose of history specifically and the humanities in general. This is part of a running conversation going over a number of posts and I encourage readers to go back to the beginning. One of the perks of writing a blog is that one gets to come in contact with many interesting people. It has certainly been a pleasure talking to RVA, though he has chosen to maintain his anonymity, which I respect. 

I'm very much intrigued by your assertion that the "humanities have no utilitarian value." I often struggle with this question and have not come to a conclusion, although I sympathize with your position. I would argue that whether the humanities have any utilitarian value ultimately depends on your conception of what a "legitimate" society should look like. To play the devil’s advocate, I’ll venture a counter-argument, noting at the outset that I don’t necessarily agree with the following theory. The discipline of history has intrinsic utilitarian value because it insulates “history” from political and social propaganda by government and organized factions. If we assume that historians strive to be honest and earnest, objective inasmuch as possible, then they serve two important roles (which I delineated from your Part III post): 1) preservation of primary sources, 2) creation of objective secondary sources. (Assuming that the creation of an “objective” body of discourse is itself possible.) These two functions have practical value, not for the scholarly or academic issues they study and analyze, but because the work of historians collectively creates a body of discourse that strives for an authentic recitation of historical events. Each individual historian is himself superfluous, but the collective construction of history becomes the fruit of their labor. This body of discourse will then be protected by historians from outsiders (e.g. governments) and other historians who seek to “falsify” or “distort” history to suit their own political or social ends. The mere fact that than an objective body of discourse exists lets an individual in society make a comparison between “history” and “interpretations of history” by outsiders. If one's conception of a "legitimate" society requires it to sincerely acknowledge its own history, then preservation of its history becomes vital, and therefore History has a utilitarian function. The utilitarian value DOES NOT emerge from learning lessons from the past, but from preventing the manipulation of a society's history to suit political/social ends (e.g. Eastern European autocrats selectively constructing Nationalist ideologies to suit their political ends in post-Communist Europe). On a related note, I sometimes wonder what it would be like living in a world without formal historians. Informal and ad hoc history would be similar to how American Law treats "out-of-court statements presented for the truth of the mattered asserted": hearsay. It would be distressing to encounter a society where history would have no more depth than a Wikipedia entry. Is formal History inevitable in any advanced human society? Not sure, but probably not. I think stable societies are a fragile phenomenon and there is no guarantee of their continuance. Thus even if History becomes formalized in a society, its continued operation is always premised on the continued stability of the State, which is never a guarantee. I can also imagine police states in the distant future which are repressive far beyond anything the 20th century encountered. When societies begin to disintegrate, there's a strong possibility of losing substantial portions of the accumulated knowledge of a civilization (which was why Seldon thought an Encyclopedia Galactica was necessary in light of the coming collapse of the Empire, even though this was only the Foundation's purported purpose). Is formal history necessary for a legitimate society? Murky. I would say probably because it would otherwise be difficult to combat the construction of self-serving narratives by social, political and religious factions. In some respects, attempts at formalizing History would be inevitable because there would always be skeptics and dissidents (at least I hope there will be!) who would challenge self-serving historical narratives, and some skeptics would in turn attempt to formalize the History to prevent its usurpation by others. Or it could be that skeptics would merely create their own counter-self-serving narratives to advance their own interests?

Panel Discussion on Disabilities at Ohio State

This past Wednesday I participated in a panel discussion on disabilities and campus life sponsored by the Mount Leadership Society. The Lantern did an article on it titled “Students with disabilities highlight resiliency, optimism.” I would like to thank the Mount Leadership Society for hosting such a wonderful event and the Lantern for covering it. As one of the panelists I am featured in the article:

Benzion Chinn, a graduate student in the History Department, had the group laughing at some of the bizarre situations he's gotten into because of his Asperger's syndrome. Once, he said, police were called on him for the exaggerated motions he was making while speaking. He was only asking his professor a question about his test, but someone had mistaken his demeanor as threatening.
He said he has difficulty processing social information, such as body language. "So when people are silent and I am just talking on and on about 16th century religion wars, I assume that people are really, really interested," Chinn said. "On the flip side, what I am very good with is analytical forms of information, particularly text." He joked about how convenient this is for all the reading he has to do in the pursuit of his Ph.D.

For a more detailed discussion on the police incident see here.

Ohio State’s History Department’s Ranking

In a previous post I mentioned that Ohio State has a very good history department. According to U.S. News and World Report, Ohio State’s history department ranks twenty-fourth in the nation with a score of 3.8. To my chagrin, though, Michigan’s history department actually ranks seventh right along with Columbia. Of course for graduate school what matters is finding a professor to work with and I could not be happier working with Dr. Matt Goldish.