56 years ago, I was a young associate professor in the Columbia philosophy department, on leave for the year to teach at Rutgers University, but still living half a block from the Columbia campus on 115th St. between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive. My wife and I had just had our first child, Patrick, who was about two months old when things blew up on the campus. It is not an important part of the story, but it is worth noting just for the sake of keeping the history correct, that there were actually two student protests that spring. The first was carried out by a group of white students associated with SDS, who occupied the administration building to protest Columbia’s involvement in war work supporting the Vietnam war. The second was carried out by a group of black students who occupied Hamilton Hall to protest Columbia’s announced intention to build a new gymnasium and Morningside Park, which the residents of Harlem considered part of their world. The new gymnasium, needless to say, would be open only to Columbia students, not to residents of Harlem.
And here we are again. In 1968, the Columbia University
administration, headed by Grayson Kirk, handled the whole matter very badly, with
the result that David Truman, a distinguished political scientist who was
widely thought to be the next president of Columbia, was forced to complete his
career as the president of Mount Holyoke College instead.
How might the current president of Columbia have handled the
matter better? The answer seems to me to be obvious, but for reasons which are
equally obvious I am sure it never so much as occurred to her. As soon as the
first evidence of student concern about the disaster in Gaza popped up, she
should have called in the managers of the Columbia endowment and told them to
sell all the shares in companies in any way involved with Israel’s attack on
Gaza. I gather the Boeing Corporation makes bombs that the United States has
been delivering to Israel and that Israel has been dropping on the Palestinians.
I am sure there are other holdings in the endowment that are suspect in the
same way. There are undoubtedly also ways in which the University is involved
with Israel, and they should have been put on hold by the president. Then she
should have asked for a meeting with all of the students, of any faith, and
whatever their position on the current situation in the occupied territories.
She should have told them that the official position of the University was that
there should be an immediate cease-fire, a commitment by all parties to a two
state solution, massive aid to the people of Gaza, and a demand that the US
government withhold military aid to Israel so long as Netanyahu continues to
insist that he is going to continue the war. She should have stated that if
they wished to establish an encampment on the Columbia campus, they were
welcome to do so and that so long as they did that she would join them there, conduct
the business of the University from the encampment, and call on all faculty and
students to join with her.
This would, of course, have had a dramatic effect on the
political situation and it would have encouraged other private universities and
colleges to do the same. (There is some question whether public universities
could take this sort of political position but there is nothing to stop the
presidents of those universities from announcing their personal support for a
similar political stance.)
It is I think obvious that there is not the slightest
possibility that anything like this will ever happen. As I say, they never
learn.
126 comments:
I disagree with your recommendation that “She should have told them that the official position of the University was that there should be an immediate cease-fire, a commitment by all parties to a two state solution, massive aid to the people of Gaza, and a demand that the US government withhold military aid to Israel so long as Netanyahu continues to insist that he is going to continue the war.”
A better approach (too late for Columbia and many others now) is that set out in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report on the univesity’s role in political and social action: “The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”
For the university—or it’s high-ranking administrators—to a position on an issue inherently discourages dissent. It’s job is to make dissent safe for all sides.
Not funny!
In college I would have liked this sort of dry Swiftian irony, but I no longer do. This is called “growing up”.
For every 20 earnest and sincere protesters, there’s one wiseacre like yourself. I suggest that you, professor, seek a younger audience and target that audience with your humor. I’m sure you’ll find your fans there.
With all due respect Professor, that is none, your policy if followed, is a recipe for genocide, and not the so-called genocide against Gaza. Next you'll teach a TED talk on motorcycle maintenance, about which you are as ignorant as you are of our conflict with the Palestinians.
You are not a philosopher but a propogandist, who is proud of his ignorance and has more in common with Jesus than with Socrates.
What is it about blog commenting that it attracts such insulting ad hominem as the above posts from John Pillette and Anonymous? Will they practice civil, mature discussion when they grow up? Let's hope so.
Well said, Prof. Wolff. And well said David.
I really have no idea what you mean. Everything I write is coming from a place of—nay, is saturated in and dripping with—100% top shelf single malt Sincerity™.
I wasn’t always this way. In college I was a real wiseass, but once I grew up and learned enough to be able to emulate my betters (like Joe Liberman and the Clintons) I changed my ways for the better.
It’s called being Mature™ and I urge everyone to learn how to do it.
Anonymous,
How is what Professor Wolff said " a recipe for genocide" ? Why do you say the( so-called) genocide against Gaza? Certainly, Dropping 2 thousand-pound bombs on many innocent women, children, and noncombatants and holding back food, medical supplies, and water in short the necessities for life, not genocide? You imply that philosophers take no side which has been shown, by people more thoughtful than me, to be ill-thought. Who's side are you on and in favor of what? is more the question with more weight, at least to me.
I suppose to say Professor Wolff is "proud of his ignorance " needs no defense from me since on its face it is without any validity whatsoever and points to your ignorance. Professor Wolff can certainly speak for himself but I think its a plain stupid remark.
Brown University has decided to hold a referendum among students and faculty to decide whether to divest from Israel or not.
That will promote a rational discussion of the issues rather than slogans and insults from both sides. That's what a university is about, promoting rationality and a civilized conversation about the issues.
Columbia not only had the students occupying Hamilton Hall arrested, but evicted Barnard students from their dorms in the middle of the night (see Leiter today). That is very heavy-handed and unnecessarily repressive.
The Columbia University Senate passed a resolution in February this year that would seem consistent with Leiter's apparent interpretation of the Kalven Report principles. The resolution states in part, "the University and its leaders should refrain from taking political positions in their institutional capacity, either as explicit statements or as the basis of policy."
(My previous comment is not showing, so I will re-post it.)
RPW: She should have told them that the official position of the University was that there should be an immediate cease-fire, a commitment by all parties to a two state solution, massive aid to the people of Gaza, and a demand that the US government withhold military aid to Israel so long as Netanyahu continues to insist that he is going to continue the war.
Brian Leiter, I gather, would disagree vehemently.
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/letters/administrators-should-stay-silent-on-political-issues
Citing the principles embodied in the University of Chicago's 1968 Kalven Report, Leiter has argued on a number of occasions that university administrators should remain silent (neutral) on political and social issues of the day so as not to hinder their faculty's and students' freedom of expression. (What junior faculty would risk publicly supporting positions in contradiction to official positions pronounced by their departments?)
Yet, controversially:
University administrators have often relied on [the Kalven] report to avoid taking action on politically contentious issues. The University [of Chicago] was one of only a handful of universities to refuse to divest its endowment from companies doing business with apartheid South Africa. More recently, the University has cited the Kalven Report to justify its refusal to divest from the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. In one particularly extreme instance, the University even refused to divest from companies doing business in Darfur during the genocide in that region, over the objections of professor John Hope Franklin, one of the original authors of the report. He called the situation “so tragic that it qualifies as the exceptional instance where…divestment is consistent with the core values of our report.” Despite Franklin’s commentary, the University determined that the genocide in Darfur did not constitute an occasion where the “corporate activities of the university…appear incompatible with paramount social values.”
--Sam Joyce, "When Do We Listen to the Kalven Report?"
https://chicagomaroon.com/26408/viewpoints/column/listen-kalven-report/
The text of the Kalven Report actually includes a provision which should allow for divestment & disassociation from countries committing mass human rights abuses:
"There is another context in which questions as to the appropriate role of the university may possibly arise, situations involving university ownership of property, its receipt of funds, its awarding of honors, its membership in other organizations. Here, of necessity, the university, however it acts, must act as an institution in its corporate capacity. In the exceptional instance, these corporate activities of the university may appear so incompatible with paramount social values as to require careful assessment of the consequences."
Also,
to the extent that recent public opinion surveys from Israel/Palestine can be relied on, most Israelis and most Palestinians are opposed to a two-state solution. Why should the US seek to impose one on them?
"The Two-State Solution Is an Unjust, Impossible Fantasy"
Tareq Baconi, April 1, 2024
Eric and others,
There are many green mutual funds to invest in these days, that is, funds that don't invest in companies which pollute. It appears to be a viable investment strategy.
Add to that not investing in companies which manufacture arms and I don't see why universities couldn't adopt a green, no-arms investment profile.
I don't believe that that would be controversial, nor would it involve taking a side in any current international or domestic conflicts.
Otherwise, universities are going to get into a lot of problems because if they don't invest in Israeli companies, even green and no arms ones, then why are they investing in Chinese companies (what about Tibet?) or in U.S. companies (what about Guantanamo? etc, etc.) or Saudi companies (what about women's rights'), etc., etc.
There aren't too many states with clean hands, except maybe Luxemberg. Even Switzerland, given its banking laws, aids and abets corrupt dictators and gangsters all over the world.
Eric @8:13 pm
IMO, the US can't really "impose" a two-state solution. But (again IMO) it should do what it can (and much more than it has in recent years) to bring the parties to a two-state solution, because that remains -- despite all the obvious difficulties -- the most realistic and achievable path to a peaceful and lasting resolution of the I/P conflict.
The main alternative on offer is a one-state arrangement with equal citizenship rights for all Palestinians and Israelis in the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. Given demographic and other trends, that would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, which I think is a non-starter as far as much, or most, of the Israeli public is concerned, and therefore would be unlikely to be agreed to by any Israeli negotiator. Another alternative is some kind of confederation, but I think that is actually a variant of the two-state solution.
Some knowledgeable people think a two-state solution should be abandoned, but they have not, as far as I can tell, shown how a one-state solution is at all achievable, nor why Israeli negotiators would agree to it. There is at least a chance though that both sides, subject to nudging from the outside, would agree to a two-state settlement. If the horrible events of recent months have any good consequence, it may be a renewed push, with more active involvement of outside countries (not only the U.S.), for a two-state settlement. It is long past time for it.
p.s. Two items on my to-read list: Mark Heller and Sari Nusseibeh, No Trumpets, No Drums: A Two-State Settlement of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict (1991) and Sari Nusseibeh, What is a Palestinian State Worth (2011).
Unfortunately, no one has yet been able to explain to me how a two-state solution can be realized against the interests of Iran. I also think that many of the contributions here completely ignore the fact that there is such a thing as "Iran's interests". I think the term "interest" alone is cynical in this context. I can just imagine American universities searching their investments to see if they are connected to arms supplies to Israel, while Tehran re-coordinates its supplies to Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia and Hamas.
What seems striking to me is that administrators haven't done the truly obvious thing, just let it happen and ignore it.
The spring semester's ending, most students will be moving away from campus for the summer, the encampments will peter out on their own.
Ask the campus police to keep an eye on things in order to avoid what happened at UCLA (pro-war counterdemonstrators attacking the encampment leading to several hours of street fighting before the police intervene), and just ignore the encampments.
The situation at Columbia didn't escalate until the administration escalated their response by calling the cops and having students arrested. The students weren't impeding university business, there's no reason to even address the protest (other than pleasing conservative politicians).
Alternatively, do what the administration at Brown did, promise an ongoing conversation about University assets invested in the war industry and schedule a vote 6 months from now by the relevant decision making body. University administrators love nothing more than dialogue with community stakeholders (or whatever), so this solution seems right up their alley (a long series of meetings with lots of listening and learning culminating in a vote which maintains the status quo).
Calling in the stormtroopers seems like it shouldn't even be on the menu of options for responding to these sorts of protests.
Perhaps I’m misremembering, Barney, but have not Hamas’s origins and how it came to power and the conditions under which the Gazans have been forced to live for the longest time been explored at some length in this blog as well, certainly, elsewhere. The burden of these explorations would contradict your perceptions of these things.
Why do we, the left, always have to moderate our struggles so that you (the mainstream liberals) get elected and get your way?
Why don't you (the mainstream liberals) for once consider our demands seriously so that we support you in the election with a clear conscience and without polarizing slogans and demonstrations?
Why doesn't Biden refuse to give more military aid for offensive weapons to Israel so that Israel is forced to withdraw from Gaza? That way the demonstrations end, we all vote for Biden, etc.
Israel has a right to exist. Hamas is a terrorist group. Israel needs to build a better border fence and the U.S. should continue to aid Israel with defensive weapons like the anti-missile defense system.
Israel is going to have to learn to live in a region where lots if people hate them and Israel has every right to defend its borders, but no right to invade Gaza, committing multiple war crimes against civilians.
Professor Wolff has suggested, as has Professor Brian Leiter, that Israel selectively assassinate Hamas terrorists as they did the terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Oympics. I agree with that.
Prof Peter Bohmer, Evergreen State, January 16, 2024 (from a much longer essay):
"... My parents grew up in Vienna, Austria. The German military and Nazis were welcomed by much of the Austrian population when they invaded in spring 1938.... [My parents] were denied visas to Australia and Canada because of these countries’ antisemitic immigration policies. After a few rejections, my parents were admitted to the U.S. in June 1939. My grandfather and at least four other relatives were gassed to death in concentration camps.
Antisemitism, as anti-Jewishness, has been prevalent all over Europe and to a lesser but real extent in the U.S.... Many Jewish people as a response have seen their liberation and fair treatment as integrally connected with the liberation of all people, e.g., Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, the many socialist Jews, in the civil rights and anti-apartheid movement and in the Palestine Solidarity movement.
Because of this history of oppression, I grew up believing Jewish people would not oppress others. I was naïve. A majority of Jewish people in Israel and around the world support a Jewish dominated state. A Jewish state where Palestinians are systematically displaced from their land and are treated less than equal within the Israeli state formed in 1948; and less than human on the land Israel seized in 1967: the West Bank Gaza, and East Jerusalem....
In addition, Zionism means the right of return for anyone around the world who is Jewish while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their millions of descendants who were expelled...are not allowed to return.... A Jewish dominated State where Palestinians have lived for millennia is Jewish supremacy.
I am anti-Zionist which is fundamentally different from being ani-Jewish....
Apologists for Israel claim that the focus on Israel’s human rights violations of Palestinians is antisemitic because there are other countries that commit as bad or worse violations than Israel, e.g., Saudi Arabia. My response is that this is not antisemitic; it is important that Israel be strongly criticized. Rather than lessening our condemnation of Israel, let us increase our denunciations of other violators. In addition, no country today is a worse violator than Israel....
All Israeli governments, Labor, Likud, Netanyahu,... are rejectionist. This means they do not accept Palestinians as equals, nor Palestinian self-determination, neither in the past nor present.
Whether it’s one state or a real independent two state solution, it must center economic and political justice and equality for all, especially but not limited to Palestinians. This includes the right of Palestinians to return to inside the 1948 borders that Israel imposed. I believe most Palestinian groups, including Hamas would accept this (see, Hamas Contained by Tareq Baconi).
I am critical of those who ignore or even worse, support the mass killing by Israel in Gaza.... To defend Israel’s genocidal policies by calling it self-defense is horrendous....
The Hamas attack of October 7th shows the limits of this immoral strategy of Israel. Even if Israel destroys Hamas, oppression breeds resistance and Israel will eventually be defeated. Moreover, this security state strategy moves Israelis further to the right.
For moral and political reasons, the security of Jewish people and Palestinian people requires the end of the Israeli occupation, the end of U.S. support for Israel, and justice for all Palestinians.
The goal of a Palestinian socialist organization, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, DFLP, is, “a people’s democratic Palestine, where Arabs and Jews live without discrimination, a state without classes and national oppression, which allows Jews and Arabs to develop their national culture together”...."
https://sites.evergreen.edu/peterbohmer/a-jewish-anti-zionist-perspective-on-palestine-revised-and-updated/
In response to student-led demonstrations and an encampment protesting crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians, Evergreen State College has become the first US college to agree to work toward divesting from "companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories." The college has also agreed that it will no longer allow study-abroad programs in Israel.
The student protesters accepted the terms of the agreement and cleared the encampment on Wednesday.
https://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article288254270.html
Universities as Factories by Branko Milanovic.
Don’t-Laugh-Much Wallerstein raises an interesting question: why indeed must we on the left, who are pure of heart and understand what ought to be done, defer (yet again!) to our hated rivals, the liberals? Why shouldn’t they just do what we demand?
This is indeed a profound and enduring mystery, and one that has yet to be solved. We can only hope that some great thinker will eventually emerge who may perhaps explain to us why the social world is not only constructed the way it is, but why it remains that way—despite it being obviously constructed the wrong way round.
5 days of silence
is anybody there?
Hi,
I'd say that everybody has said what they have to say about the Israeli invasion of Gaza and the plight of the people there.
Why belabor certain points?
I see that the last comment is a snide remark by Pillette about myself, but I've learned from experience not to respond to those who are looking for a fight.,
The other topic in the U.S. news is Trump and Stormy Daniels, but all of us have already expressed how detestable we find Trump to be.
Maybe someone can start a conversation, not a fight, a conversation about some topic, but I'm out of new ideas.
I'm not sure that it would be a conversation rather than a fight, but the label attached to you struck me as rather trumpian, which led me to wonder, not for the first time, whether we're unfortunate enough to live in a time when speech has become more generally crude and coarse than in some earlier moments when something like civility reigned much of the time. Best wishes.
Thank you for your best wishes.
Is there less civility now?
I just listened to this interview with Mark Naison, active in the 1968 Columbia protest movement, a movement I also participated in although less involved than Naison.
He emphasizes that there was a lot less civility in the 1968 student protests than in those today.
The interview is conducted by Briahna Joy Gray, who for me is always a pleasure to listen to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbF-C14E_1A
I beg your pardon! From the evident pride with which you stated that you “don’t laugh often”, coupled with your explicit disdain for my undergraduate sensibility, I assumed that you would want your disinclination toward humor to serve as your honorific.
In any event, you should take it as it was meant—as a compliment! As an avid consu … I mean “reader” of the Great Books™, I know that the Greatest Thinkers in History were all terribly solemn. Just like Abraham himself, come to think of it … or Ken Burns.
Deep Thoughts and laughter (and all that might prompt it, e.g., mockery, irony, satire, parody, vituperation, you name it) are as immiscible as oil and water.
On the civility question, I'm of three minds: 1. Always be civil, even and especially when provoked. 2. As Wittgenstein wrote (I think it's in Culture and Value), 'Always descend from the heights of sublimity into the green valleys of silliness.' This might involve, say, referring to someone who has insulted you as the Mad Shyster or the Manic Sad Sack. 3. Paul Feyerabend used to say that he preferred old school insulting one's opponents to the more contemporary suppressed venom of something like 'my worthy opponent seems to have failed to notice that X'; Paul liked instead Luther calling Erasmus 'the devil's flatulence'.--For a second and third version of being of three minds: Wallace Stevens, from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: I was of three minds,/Like a tree/In which there are three blackbirds. And from Tom Clark's riposte Eleven Ways of Looking at a Shit Bird: I was of three minds/Like the man who has just seen three shit birds.
John Rapko,
It depends on your personality or personal preferences.
I don't enjoy insult contests. Some people do.
It's not an ethical thing, it's not a question of strategy or tactics.
Good natured kidding is one thing; insults are another. I'm with s.w. on this. I prefer the a civil discussion. Perhaps it's a preference of the aged, like me.
I beg your pardon again. This is not an “insult contest”. Have I called you a “motherfucker”? A “peckerwood”? A “fuckface”? A “shitfucker”? A “cocksucker”? An “asshat”? A “cunt”, “prick”, “dick”, or “asshole”? A “turd” or “piece of shit”? A “moron”, “idiot”, or “retard”? A “nitwit”, “dimwit”, “halfwit”, or “fuckwit”? A “baboon”? A “jackass”? A “fool”? A “knave”? … A … a … “Methodist”?
I have NOT. Having called you none of those things, this is not an “insult contest”. It is a very Mature™ discussion regarding the appropriate level and type of humor (or as you might put it to yourself, “humor”?!?) for such a serious milieu as a blog comments section.
(BTW, I was totally unaware that Luther had a potty mouth. But if, as it now appears, he was not a Serious Man, then the reformation—and by extension modernity itself—was some kind of awful mistake.)
John Rapko’s mention of Luther (er war ein Runks) reminded me of my favorite Luther scatological aphorism (auf English): “you can’t squeeze farts out of a dead pigeon.” As for civility, it’s good that we have reached that level, but we surely didn’t get here just by being civil(ized). It’s also interesting that Stormy Daniels is every bit as smart as Trump’s current gang of mercenary lawyers. Who would have thought it? Stormy und Drang.
s. wallerstein,
I didn't mean to suggest that you (or anyone) ought to, or out to enjoy, engaging in insult contests. As I said, I'm of three minds about this, much like a tree in which etc. Maybe it's just poor or self-serving memory, but I can't recall insulting anyone until I got targeted for a sustained barrage of insults (as well as harassment, for which I ended up with $37,000+) after I objected to the San Francisco Art Institute's promotion of animal abuse in art, specifically their exhibition of Adel Abdessemed's animal snuff videos under the title 'Don't Trust Me' in 2008. After receiving insults for a couple of years, I decided that it was really okay to respond with evidence-backed insults of the most vigorous defamers and slanderers. It was was it was. A few years later I happened to watch George Galloway's testimony before the U. S. Senate, and I found myself wishing I had responded instead in the manner of Galloway.--Didn't Jesus insult the money-lenders and Pharisees?
John Pillette:
I'm confident that you'll enjoy the Luther Insulter: https://ergofabulous.org/luther/
Don’t let it be said that I exempt myself from criticism. It was indeed naïve and simplistic of me to draw a hard line between the world of ideas and idealism (with its sincere and earnest protesters) and the concrete reality of money, bombs, tanks, political influence, lobby groups, elections, and all the rest. On further reflection I can see that one clearly governs the other and so a better world may simply be scolded into being!
In related news, I have established a “go fund me” in support of a much-needed intellectual project to correct a minor error I’ve detected in our favorite materialist philosopher. In this project I will employ teams of researchers (i.e., broke-ass grad students) to go through the entire Marx-Engels corpus and put the Hegel back in. This should take at least a week or two, but at the end of it we will all have a nice up-to-date philosophy that we can all really USE moving forward!
I see the Biden has limited the delivery of some heavy weapons to Israel. I also see that responses that range from crickets to attacks from Netanyahu and other Israeli officials as well as from Republicans and Jill Stein.
The world is smaller then it was 40 years ago:
https://theconversationus.cmail19.com/t/r-l-tdldptl-bpsiddld-b/
aaall,
Biden paused a shipment of mostly heavy bombs already in the pipeline as a (belated) way of trying to exercise leverage on Netanyahu re Rafah etc. and underlining his (Biden's) opposition to a full-scale move into the center of Rafah by the IDF w.o an adequate evacuation plan.
However belated and partial, this was (imo) a good move by Biden, and was praised (correctly, imo) by e.g. Sen. Van Hollen (D-Md.) So I don't know where you get the notion that the responses other than criticisms consist of "crickets" (unless you think Chris Van Hollen is a "cricket").
(Btw, a minor [non-substantive] point but you continue to write the word "then" when you mean "than." E.g., "the world is smaller then [sic] it was 40 years ago." Haven't clicked on the link so idk what the sentence refers to.)
Actually I don't think I get the 'a two state solution' part of the post. Not to emphasize whether I agree or disagree, but at this time, I'm trying to understand how somebody can seriously be talking about a two state solution, as if that's a relevant sort of notion. You and Biden. It's not an impossible fantasy? Hasn't this been derided as impossibly naive for years? Washington's favorite prescription? Triumphantly launched by the United States more than three decades ago? I figure maybe 'other potential solutions'. I can think of nothing that doesn't seem exceedingly challenging.
I have another opinion, that the university administration and trustees govern the school. Given the transient nature of the student body, it is questionable whether a small subset of this ephemeral group should wield such significant influence over the university's long-term financial strategies and decisions. Giving control to students on a limited issue such as this would encourage future attempts to seize control from the trustees. Here we have a group of students who are not stakeholders in the investment decisions of the university.
It also seems relevant that it's not that Columbia or other schools are investing directly in the likes of the Israeli Military Industries. Say, divest from companies that make plastic explosives, ball bearings, screws, and rat poison. Divest from Caterpillar on the grounds that its bulldozers were used to breach the Israeli border on Oct 7 so Hamas could launch its spree.
Danny,
What's your solution to the conflict in Palestine?
Re Danny's comment:
I don't want to get into the question of divestment but I would like to say this about "stakeholders": students are part of the university and are thus among the stakeholders in its decisions. The fact that they are there for a limited period does not, imo, matter much; they're still "stakeholders."
Whether or not students are technically "stakeholders", universities should present at least the illusion that they are spaces where rational and civilized dialogue about the issues of the day are not only permitted, but also fomented and that includes taking into account the opinions of students, both from organized student pressure groups and from students at large, in the decisions of the university authorities about the issues of the day.
That's why I believe that what is happening at Brown, where the Board of Trustees will consider the opinions of students about the Israel/Gaza issues before coming to any decisions about divesting from Israel, which means the issue can be discussed on campus rationally and without slogans from either side, is a good sign.
I said above and reiterate that universities, rather than specifically divesting from Israel, should adopt policies of investing in green assets and not in companies which make arms or tecnologies for warfare.
I reiterate that students should not be expelled for expressing vehement opinions about the horrid situation in Gaza or for chanting slogans like "from the river to the sea".
I would not chant that slogan myself, because it does not lend to fomenting a rational discussion on how we get out of this mess, but as I said recently in another context, no one is 50 at age 19. That is, at 19 kids don't see nuances that you see at age 50.
However, no one starts out on step 23 of a 50 step path. You start out on step one and
while at age 19 some kids have advanced to step 3 or 4, most are at step 1.
LFC, that Biden's move was praised by some Democratic senators is sort of dog bites man. Even the non-Putinista Right fires on him and Bibi, etc. seem unimpressed. It has been asserted on the Left that Biden could merely flip a switch and the war would stop. That doesn't seem to be the case. Dumb bombs aren't F-16s and Israel isn't a client state and can no longer be considered an ally (whatever that meant back in the day and what I meant by mark to market). That part of the world is a gaggle of autocracies and absolute monarchies and Israel appears to be in a mean reversion. Along with Putin and Orban, the Israeli Right is seeking to Make America Great Again(tm) so there's that+.
Apologies for the typo. I am careless about that for some reason but usually catch it. Between ~6:30 AM and ~1:00 PM PT I'm usually focused on CNBC and monitors as well as just killing time.
s.w., the link I posted points out the problems with a simplistic call for "divestment." Expecting kids to understand that is unreasonable but adults with retirement plans should know better.
I drove into town yesterday and passed demonstrators (mostly kids) waving signs and flags in front of the county courthouse - pro-Palestinian on one side of the street, pro-Israel on the other (one thinks of Oscar Wilde's observation on fox hunting). "Liberation" into a fundamentalist autocracy (ask Iranians) doesn't seem like a very good deal and justifying oppression and genocide(?) with early Iron Age just-so stories and failed 19th century theories on economics and social organization ... Maybe the Middle East outside the natural assets and archaeology is just a waste of space.
Meanwhile:
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/indian-election-how-modi-has-stacked-the-deck-by-debasish-roy-chowdhury-2024-05?utm_source=Project+Syndicate+Newsletter&utm_campaign=1db6a8d042-op_newsletter_05_10_2024&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-1db6a8d042-107243374&mc_cid=1db6a8d042&mc_eid=000eabaa88
aaall,
I haven't had a chance to read your links about divestment but lots of folks have pointed out that if a university divests of an Israeli arms company, say, the firm that makes the Uzis, someone else will buy it and that's how markets work, especially today when markets are 24 hours and international.
I myself would not buy shares in a company that makes cigarettes or arms or pollutes, but I have money in the bank and I have no idea how the bank invests the money I deposit there.
So "clean hands" is a bit of an illusion. As Adorno says, "wrong life cannot be lived rightly" and I believe that's true. Still, I prefer to invest my money in firms that do not manufacture arms.
aaall,
I wrote a long comment in response to you and just decided to delete it. I think we don't have enough common ground to have a fruitful discussion, or more precisely I don't understand your views well enough to engage in a dialogue. I gather you dislike fundamentalist autocracy (as I do) and are alarmed by the strength of the Israeli Right (as I am), but these points of agreement do not translate into any policy ideas or suggestions about which we could have a discussion. Nor are your historical references clear or specific enough to let me know exactly what you're referring to. In effect, you seem to want to wave a magic wand and make the entire Middle East disappear. Needless to say, that is not possible.
Re: demands for disinvestment, a year or so ago I defended a USC academic in a Department of Defense debarment proceeding, and as part of that I got to take a look at the amount of money flowing DIRECTLY from the Pentagon into one of these hotbeds of Marxism (the research university). And by that, I mean I spent a few days combing through the fine print of the actual contracts between the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy and USC. Guess what, it’s a lotta money!
If you are wondering why the humanities are considered largely irrelevant by admins these days, take a look at the amounts and sources of money and you’ll understand why.
USC has an entire school (with its own campus and everything!), the “Insititute for Creative Technologies”, which is completely funded by the DoD as a “UARC” (a University Affiliated Research Center). And there are a number of such UARCs dotted all over the place, and military dollars flow (again, as directly as is possible) to places like Cal’s Computer Science Department.
Why USC? The military is weaponizing the technology of the culture industry: video games, CGI and so on. Adorno and Horkheimer don’t seem so off-base now, do they?
Anyway, the pursuit of moral purity by The Kids at USC seems a little arbitrary in its targets, when there is—literally—a big building with its own campus built by the Pentagon as part of the university. Maybe because it’s in Playa Vista (just north of LAX) and not on the main campus? Out of sight out of mind?
I should add that this is no secret. The ICT has its own website (as part of the USC website) where this is clearly laid out, and insofar as USC’s claim to fame is its film school, there has to be what we lawyers call “constructive knowledge” of all of this that is imputed to everybody at USC.
I just checked out the ICT on google maps. Area has really changed since I fled a couple of decades ago- used to ride horses around there in the 1950s, mostly bean fields and marsh. Hughes used to build jet fighters (and the Spruce Goose) there - I remember being at the beach (~ 2 miles west) and the jets would buzz the coast on test flights. Playa Vista is ~ 7 or 8 crow miles and a world away from the Exposition Park district where the main USC campus is located. If one lives west of Sepulveda, as I did for over thirty years, one knows that there is No Life East of Sepulveda - flips the (in)famous New Yorker cover. Film was long a thing at USC so the ICT was a natural - a friend got his film degree there back in the day. Besides, all this is merely an extension of Leni and Ronnie's projects.
s.w., not sure but I don't believe Chilean banks are allowed to own stocks. A problem in the U.S. is that Boeing e.g. is a Dow 30 and S&P 500 stock. I believe engineers, not MBAs, should build planes and bombs so I wouldn't want to own the company outside of an index ETF where it is unavoidable (e.g. .SPX is just numbers and SPY has well less then 1% of Boeing and Caterpillar as holdings - insisting on shedding Caterpillar,etc. seems dumb). Another problem is that I believe most South African ADRs were mining oriented while Israeli stocks are more diversified (tech, etc.).
LFC, recall the article on settlers I shared awhile back. As long as the dispositive vote in Israel consists of folks who consider Eretz Yisrael to be anywhere Abraham might have stepped while others in the area hate Jews just because there can be no neat policy solutions. ~1200 dead bodies sort of deflate the notions around people, nations, and safety.
aaall,
I don't know whether Chilean banks can own stocks, but they can and do issue mutual funds
which invest not only in Chilean shares, but also in a variety of international markets.
https://banco.santander.cl/personas/inversiones/detalles/fondos-mutuos
(in Spanish)
In addition, since Pinochet privatized the social security system, everybody has a private pension fund and the pension funds invest in international financial and stock markets without any concern besides maximizing returns.
Those funds run out after a while (the system sucks) and I now receive a modest government pension, thanks to Michele Bachelet's (second presidency 2013-2017) reform of Pinochet's
privatized pension system.
According to the link the bank is just serving as an agent of the fund. That is separate from deposits to your account. Banks here also offer brokerage services. Those Chicago Boys really screwed you over.
aaall,
Ok, but the bank can lend money from my deposits to a company which pollutes or which commercializes arms, etc.
The Chicago boys were all heart compared to what Milei is doing in Argentina now.
Just now reading a poem from 1916 in Mandelshtam's Tristia:
This night is irredeemable.
Where you are, it is still light.
At Jerusalem's gates
A black sun has risen.
The yellow sun is more terrible--
Hush-a-bye, baby.
Jews in the bright temple
Buried my mother.
Bereft of priests, devoid of grace,
Jews in the bright temple
Sang the service
Over this woman's ashes.
The voice of Israelites rang out
Over my mother.
I woke in a radiant cradle,
Lit by a black sun.
aaall et al.,
When Gabriel Boric, now president, was a radical congressperson, along with the rest of the left, he called for the privatized pension funds to be taken over by the state and for those who work to pay into a general fund, which along with tax revenues, would support retired people.
However, the pension fund industries along with the right and the mainstream media have carried out an incredibly successful campaign against pensions being socialized, the most noteworthy being an ad campaign "Not with my money".
Polls show that an overwhelming percentage of Chilean want the money discounted from their paycheck to go into a private pension fund that is wholly THEIRS.
So with a lot of negotiation in congress and good luck Boric may be able to socialize a bit less than a fifth of paycheck discounts, which would go into a general pension fund.
Once again I’ll issue a call to the Political Scientists/Philosophers in the audience to correct what’s been called my “simplistic and naïve” thinking. And I’ll allow that my thinking on this issue has been off-base, but not in that direction.
Traveling into the dank vault of memory, I recall a distinction made somewhere between “secular” and “moral/religious” politics. As a certain type of person who is inclined toward the legalistic and materialist approaches, I can’t help but see the first as politics proper, and the second as a pseudo-politics, but let’s leave that aside for now.
I also recall a certain eminent Marxist philosopher telling an anecdote about a discussion with H. Marcuse on this issue.
What do I mean by “secular politics”? Consider a lawsuit. The two parties get together around a table on which is sitting (figuratively) a big pile of money, and they proceed to argue over who gets what portion. The “argument” may contain various “moral” considerations, but neither side takes these very seriously. Such a moral consideration only becomes “real” to the extent that it has a chance of persuading a finder of fact. Otherwise, the famous (and unimprovable) rubric holds, “money talks, bullshit walks”.
For the secular view of politics, enlarge this scenario and substitute the total social product for the pile of money and all of the various interest groups for the parties.
The “moral” approach to politics stands this model on its head. People should do the “right thing” because it’s right and other (materialist) considerations shouldn’t be considered at all. I think this is ridiculous and best left to Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, but like I said, that’s just me, and there are plenty of folks who feel otherwise (Peter Singer among them).
To use a computer metaphor, I can’t help but see an “air gap” between the two approaches, which may explain why “morality” on its own never leads to concrete social gains.
I’ll also allow that The Kids Today have (unwittingly it seems) raised an issue that has long fascinated me, viz., the political economy of the academy. Probably because I did not take my BA at a research university but instead at a ridiculous quasi-medieval DIY experiment located in the pinon bushes, and so I can’t help but consider the money flows into and out of these places as a total outsider.
"Polls show that an overwhelming percentage of Chilean want the money discounted from their paycheck to go into a private pension fund that is wholly THEIRS."
Amazing how many folks fall for that line - simian greed I guess. Bush tried it in his second term but Katrina and Pelosi ended that. Then 2008 showed the benefits of automatic stabilizers.
aaall,
What's happening with Milei in Argentina probably would interest you.
Hassan Akram is a brit with a doctorate in economics from Cambridge who lives in Chile and appears in a leftwing podcast every weekday morning. He's very bright, well informed and more leftwing than I am.
Akram claims (and I generally believe he knows what he's talking about in such matters) that the Chicago boys in Chile took their cue from Milton Friedman and that Friedman knows his economics, whatever one thinks about his evident lack of concern for the social effects of his policies.
However, Milei follows a number of ultra neoliberal anarcho-capitalist economists, who
unlike Friedman, are not first class technical economists.
s.w.,
I watched a webinar earlier today with Jennifer Burns, a historian who has written what she called the first full-scale archivally-based biography of Milton Friedman. She has a chapter on Friedman's visit to Chile. According to her (in a brief summary of that chapter in response to a question), Friedman did not mean his economic advice to Pinochet to be read as an endorsement of the regime and, when it became clear that many were reading it that way, he tried to distance himself from Pinochet. I have no interest in defending Friedman, I'm just reporting what Burns said. The session should become available on YouTube soon.
John Pillette,
I think you're comparing an empirical perspective on politics with a normative one. I would suggest that that is, in effect, comparing apples and oranges.
An empirical approach would ask why people do what they actually do. My view is that the answer often is a mix of "non-moral" and "moral" reasons ("moral" to them, not necessarily moral to us). So, for example, why did John Calhoun defend slavery? A big part of the reason was no doubt that the material interests of the American South, as he saw those interests, were closely tied to the "peculiar institution." But he probably also had a belief that slavery was morally right (incomprehensible as such a belief is today). In that sense, Calhoun's politics were a mix of "material" and "moral" considerations. So too some opponents of slavery were motivated by a mix of "material" and "moral" considerations (though in many other cases the opposition to slavery seems to have been entirely rooted in moral considerations).
All that, I would suggest, is analytically separate from the question of what people should do, which is a normative question.
So I think your comment @1:45 p.m., in pitting your "secular" view of politics against P. Singer, is comparing two different inquiries.
P.s. Personally I think studying history and politics would probably be pretty dull if it was all just a matter of people (read: interest groups) fighting over a pile of money (read: the "total social product"). That's some of what goes on, but ideas and ideals have always mattered too, or at least often mattered.
I don’t think it’s merely a matter of two different “perspectives”. One model is actually employed in the world we live in, it works and gets results and the other doesn’t. So I don’t think it’s “apples and oranges”, I think it’s more like “apples and some sort of decorative yet inedible gourd”. You can eat the apple but all you can really do with the gourd is put it on your coffee table and look at it:
Hey, what’s that?
That’s my decorative gourd!
Far OUT, man! I’ve got one of those, too!
From ’68?
Yeah!
So … mine’s pretty much just been sitting there for 50 years. Yours too?
Yeah, but just you wait, one of these days it’ll be gourds all the way down!
MLK Jr. to R. Abernathy in a phone conversation taped by the FBI, a transcript of which has only recently become public:
"Of course we have to pretend we think segregation is wrong, but all that's merely for show. What we really care about is the fact that segregation locks Blacks out of economic opportunities and deprives them of the ability to get ahead in the capitalist economy."
Abernathy: "Yes."
MLK: "There's a big pile of money on the table but only some people are allowed to fight over it. We want our slice of the total social product. Of course, if I'd said that at the March for Jobs and Freedom instead of 'I have a dream,' probably no one would remember my speech."
Abernathy: "Right."
Next up: explaining all of Louis XIV's wars exclusively by reference to greed and money. (Film at midnight.)
@LFC,
so this is a transcript of a phone call that was recorded by the FBI?
What do you think of the content?
As an aside, the question just occurred to me:
What can we expect in the future when AI can model every voice? Great prospects for the science of history.
Achim Kriechel,
I took the conversation between King and Abernathy to be fictional, invented by LFC.
I don't believe that King would have said that, especially in a phone call that he must have known would be taped, and that's LFC's point, if I understand what he's getting at.
LFC has quite a subtle sense of irony and humor.
That's just my take. I could be wrong.
Yes, the conversation is fictional.
P.s. I think my sense of humor was likely keener in the 10th grade than it is now (when I wd not make any particular claims for it), but whatever...
Re: the conversation between King and Abernathy: As Abraham Lincoln said, don't believe everything you read on the internet.
MLK is the go-to example cited for the effectiveness of the politics of morality. But he was a last-minute, largely decorative addition to the March on Washington, the icing on the cake. The cake itself was baked by organized labor, which is what made it effective, as the flexing of actual political muscle, not some notional morality standing on its own. Nobody, apart from a two-year-old, wants a cake that is just icing.
The March on Washington only became known as the backdrop to MLK’s speechifying as a result of his post 1968 apotheosis. As such, the (inevitable!) citation to MLK is yet another example of the Huit-Tarded approach to history and politics. The Kids Today are taking appearance for substance and assuming that moral suasion alone (that is, without any kind of political-economic clout underneath) is sufficient, because they’ve seen this line repeated in endless PBS documentaries and elementary school textbooks.
(Actually, I think that that’s giving them too much credit. I don’t think any of them really believe that a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” is going to achieve anything on the ground in Gaza where the ostensible objects of their charity reside, but arguendo let’s assume that they really see what they’re doing as a politics.)
Lest I be accused of anti-gourd-ism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4hGSR5njZE
I am much more than a gourd ally, I am a gourd super-fan!
@ J. Rapko
LOL
Pillette,
You're making the mistake of conflating several different things.
Here's three different questions:
What is the causal explanation for why society is the way it is?
What should society be like?
What should I, individually, do?
The second and third of these are moral questions. Answering them requires moral argument. Only the first is a strictly empirical question.
So, it's too quick to go from people making moral arguments to the conclusion that therefore they're endorsing a "politics of morality." If politics involves empirical questions about how to bring about social ends, then that's just a different type of question from the moral question of what we should do. (That's not to say they're unrelated, maybe it's immoral to take politically ineffective action, but the questions are still distinct).
When someone claims that universities ought to divest from military industries, they're trying to answer the moral question of what the university should do. What justifies that answer to the moral question may or may not be the consequences of that action. Plausibly, there are other morally relevant considerations besides what effects an action will have. For example, you might be concerned about being complicit in a world historical evil like the mass killing of Palestinian children even if removing your complicity isn't guaranteed to stop the killing.
I’m not conflating those three questions; I’m saying that question 1 is of overriding importance and must take priority; question is theoretical and mostly premature; and question 3 matters not at all.
Conventional morality (a/k/a bourgeois morality), which is the only kind of morality that is allowed to exist under our current mode of production, applies a different order of importance to these questions.
Pillette,
Maybe question 3 doesn't matter to you, but it does to others.
Are you the new Moses who decrees what should or should not matter to others?
No, Moses was an Iron Age authoritarian with no sense of humor. I’m much more important than him.
The fact that Q. #3 “matters” to everybody means that conventional morality is circumscribed. Nobody can wriggle out from under the burden of their precious sense of individual morality, which is what they have to do in order to enter into and accomplish something real in the realm of politics—which is necessarily plural, not individual.
On a more personal note, am I the only one who is sick and tired of hearing some middle-class NPR-totebag-carrying, Prius-driving, fair-trade-coffee-drinking bore regale me with the particulars of his “personal” sense of morality? It makes me want to go to Texas and hang out with some whisky-drinking, quail-hunting oilmen.
If the “virtuous” among us are unbearable to everyone but themselves, then maybe their “virtues” are mostly illusory.
What am I saying?!? Moses was a BRONZE Age authoritarian.
Pillette,
Why do you presuppose that all of us want to "accomplish something real in the realm of politics"?
I am for one never imagined that I was ever going to accomplish anything. I just did not want to participate in certain games, for example, the pragmatic political game you
laud. I never want to be mainstream anything or anybody.
That's not a moral option. That's an aesthetic option or maybe even just a personal idiosyncracy.
I don't eat meat and haven't for 25 years. I don't ever lecture anyone about it, but meat turns me off. I'm not interested in the meat eating game or in hanging out with
quail hunting oilmen. They bore me, they irritate me, they're obscene.
Yes, I vote and I'm a member of Convergencia Social (president Boric's party), I signed up so that Boric could have enough signatures to get on the ballot. I donate money for political campaigns. The kids (in Convergencia Social) are alright. So too the kids protesting against Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Maybe my political posture is an artistic one, a personal art action.
I recall Auden's poem on Yeat's death. That's me, not a great poet of course, but I make nothing happen and yet what I have to say is "a way of happening, a mouth".
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
I know that most of “us” (by that I mean “you”) don’t want to accomplish anything real in the realm of politics. You want to hug yourselves while you read the news with your morning coffee.
(And you’re boring me now about your vegetarianism. I don’t presume to think that others are interested in what I wank off to, and that’s a LOT more interesting than the lifestyle choice of beans and rice.)
You’ll recall that in that poem Auden describes himself and his cohort (Auden, Spender, Isherwood) as “silly”: “You were silly like us”. Yeats had some wooly ideas for sure, but he was never silly like them. He was an Irish Senator, and so was eager to take part in the “game” of politics.
Pillette,
Is that a hint of indignation I detect?
On what grounds, if not moral, could anyone reasonably be critical of someone else's choice not to engage in politics? Maybe you think individuals have a duty to try and improve society and that hugging oneself while reading the news over the morning coffee doesn't do anything to discharge that duty?
No, in order to be “indignant” I would have to regard Gaza Encampments and “self-care” (hugs all around!) as being somehow “unfair”. I do not. I regard all of this as mere silliness. In fact, just of the sort of silliness engaged in by Auden, who skedaddled in 1939 and became the poet laureate of middlebrow New Yorker liberalism.
Pillette,
That doesn't ring true. You've spent a remarkable amount of time writing critical comments about something if the only real criticism you have of it is that it's silly (if that even counts as a criticism). After all, why shouldn't people be silly? Maybe especially, why shouldn't college students be silly?
THAT’S MY POINT. This whole thing is silly and yet it’s being discussed as if it were not.
As an antidote to the sort of po-faced Serious Poetry on Serious Themes (e.g., September 1, 1939) consider ee cummings’s scurrilous attack on Auden and Spender themselves:
flotsam and jetsam
are gentlemen poeds
urseappeal netsam
our spinsters and coeds)
thoroughly bretish
they scout the inhuman
itarian fetish
that man isn't wuman
vive the millenni
um three cheers for labor
give all things to enni
one bugger thy nabor
(neck and senecktie
are gentlemen ppoyds
even whose recktie
are covered by lloyd's
Pillette,
But if the reason you think it's silly is because you don't believe in morality and the reason other people think it isn't silly is because they do, then you're not going to convince them it's silly by arguing that it's politically ineffectual. They're protesting the mass killing of Palestinians not because they think their protests are sure to make it stop, but because they think the mass killing of Palestinians is bad, evil, wicked, etc.
But you keep turning the conversation back to "these protests won't make the killing stop." But that's besides the point. The protestors think the killing is evil and so conclude they should express their condemnation. You don't think the killing is evil (because you don't believe there really is any morality, hence no possibility for anything to actually be evil).
So you shouldn't be arguing about whether the protests are effective if you want to convince people they're silly. You should be arguing about whether morality is real.
There's nothing actually wrong with bombing Gaza to smithereens you silly college students! That's just the bourgeois morality you've been brought up to believe! There is no good or evil, there's just a pile of money and you've got to amass enough power to get what's yours!
Pillette,
I detect a homophobic strain in the poem you quote. Are you sure that you don't want to delete it? If you do, I'll delete this comment too.
I'm sure you consider my comment as stemming from my bourgeois middlebrow liberal silliness, but homophobia is the lowest you can go.
Yes, the two of you have outed me not just as a nihilist, but as a homophobic one into the bargain! Smooth move. Don’t tell me, both of you must have been Master deBaters in college.
I think that the focus should be on Gaza itself. And by that I mean the ACTUAL PLACE, with the bricks and dogs and people and everything. And FOR THE RECORD I think that dropping bombs on ACTUAL PLACES is bad, not just in general but in this instance in particular.
But the discussion has been about the political utility of such “protests” and I submit that the political utility of them is less than zero (“less than” because they can only help the rightwingers both here and over there).
I didn’t say they had no utility. For the protestors they have utility, but this utility accrues only to the protestors themselves, by making themselves feel good … about themselves.
Look at it this way. When I read the news with my morning coffee (as I do, just like everybody else) I may (1) have the usual liberal’s reaction (which is to say to myself “tut tut tut”); or I may (2) have the “radical” comp-lit professor’s reaction (which is to say to myself “settler-colonialism!”); or I may (3) have the Crown Heights reaction (which is to say to myself, “terrorists!”).
But what do all three of these seemingly disparate moralities have in common?
They all have the exact same amount of utility (zero!) to the poor schmuck in Gaza who is at that moment trying to dodge an incoming artillery shell. My having one kind of “morality” versus another while SITTING in my ARMCHAIR makes NO DIFFERENCE at all.
I DOESN’T MATTER WHAT PEOPLE THINK IT MATTERS WHAT THEY DO.
Honestly, people! I feel like I’m the only one who does the readings up in here. Please turn to your copy of “Theses on Feuerbach”.
(And no, I don’t consider your comment to stem from your middlebrow liberal silliness, it’s stemming from your philistinism, which is related to but is not exactly the same thing.)
Pillette,
You're punching in the air.
I'm sure that a smart guy like yourself can think up insults which hurt me, but you have to pay a little attention to the guy you're insulting to make sure that you're hurting him.
Maybe with trial and error you'll find just the right insult for me. So far you're not doing well.
Pillette,
I don't understand how you can say that the question "what should I do?" doesn't matter at all and then say when pressed "it doesn't matter what people think, it matters what they do." How else are we supposed to figure out what to do except by answering the question "what should I do?"
I'm not trying to engage in this as a college debater, I'm trying to press on what I think is an incoherent worldview. You want to have it both ways, a clean materialism devoid of metaphysically spooky values, but at the same time filled with sarcasm and vitriol aimed at the people you think are acting wrongly. Either get rid of the moral value and own up to the nihilism, or allow that there really are such things as right and wrong and give up your classical Marxist street cred. But don't whine when the implications of your views are pointed out to you.
By the by, doing the reading doesn't mean taking what Marx or Marxists say as the gospel truth. One might think for oneself and come to disagree with Marx on some philosophical point, for example, on the nature and aim of moral philosophy.
Scholars disagree about what Marx's views on certain matters were. That's partly because Marx wrote a lot and not all of it may be free of ambiguity, tension, and even (gasp!) perhaps an occasional contradiction (in the ordinary sense, not the Marxist sense, of that word). There is no one single inerrant way to interpret a figure like Marx (or Kant, as RPW has said here in the past in noting that his reading of Kant is one of several possible ones).
T.J. says that one might come to disagree with Marx on some philosophical point. Yes -- one might -- and one might also come to disagree with Marx on some non-philosophical point(s). I won't elaborate on that because it's not directly relevant to the discussion, but for Pillette to imply that he has the master key to Marx, and that his worldview partly stems from that, and that everyone else has not read Marx, and that he is the only one familiar with the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (or the other theses), is kind of pathetic.
In Capital itself there is morally charged language. The reference to capitalists as "moneybags" (taken by RPW for the title of one of his books) shows that (as do other possible examples).
It's possible that the protests have in some cases detracted attention from the Gaza situation contrary to the protesters' intentions. That might be in some cases a reasonable line of criticism. One could also, I suppose, critique the demand for divestment. But the argument that the protests lack a proper philosophical and political foundation because the Kids haven't read Marx (or Machiavelli) and they're unwitting Hegelians is, imo, pathetic in its lack of persuasiveness.
I beg your pardon yet again. This is not an “insult contest”. A philistine is a person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I submit that your recourse to the kind of totally lame ad hominem guilt-by-inference “argument” as practiced on the inter-lefts of today establishes you as a philistine, a fortiori, above and beyond your preference for Auden over cummings. Your philistinism is therefore not an epithet but an established fact.
If we think that there's a broad and variegated field of concern for what and how we act called 'ethics', then it seems to me helpful to think of it as a spectrum structured with three questions: How am I to act with regard to myself (the focus of the goals, projects, exempla and admired figures, self-strictures, and the ego ideal); How am I to act with regard to others (the second-person dimension, the realm of 'morality', personal relations); and How am I to act with and part of collectivities (the dimension of political action, with the focal question of 'What are we to do?'). With these distinctions in mind, one might think that part of the sense of confusion and hostility that arises in discussing the college protests has to do with taking points, reflections, qualifications, and criticisms that arise in reflecting on one of these questions and then attempting to apply them directly to answering another of the questions. This seems to lead immediately to denouncing people (young and old) as hypocritical, self-deceived, or self-righteous; and then doorway to Hell opens, over which a sign reads 'Nothing You Do Matters Anyway'.--One thing that seems to me left out of these discussions is the dimension of 'not being able to live with oneself' if one did (or failed to do) X. One might not be able to live with oneself if one (say) abandoned some quixotic project (even though it doesn't matter to anyone else); one may not be able to live with oneself if one (say) lied about Y (even though the lie doesn't harm the person to whom one lies); and one might not able to live with oneself if one failed to protest a contemporary genocide.
This blog made an interesting appearance in my dream last night! (Probably a sign that I'm spending too much time online.)
I surfed on over to see what was happening, and Prof. Wolff (who I hope is doing okay in real life) had once again reached his tolerance limit for the commenters' unwelcome behavior. He had written a new post indicating as much; all I remember about it was Pillette being singled out as an exceptional offender. Also of note: The professor used lots of emojis, a first for the blog as far as I know. And all I remember about the ensuing comments is one small detail, that John Rapko's was so carefully researched as to include a bibliography and endnotes. :)
John Rapko,
Thank you for your reasoned clarification of the issues.
In my case, I'd say it's not that I might not be able to live with myself if I did otherwise, but rather that I couldn't do otherwise. That's the person who I am.
Maybe I could have done otherwise at age 17, but I'm too far along with the path that maybe I chose at age 17 (or maybe I couldn't have chosen otherwise given my genes, my upbringing,
the zeitgeist, my peers, etc.) to do otherwise.
LFC, if you haven't already viewed it, Campos has an apt post on Gaza over at LGM.
Also:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/why-iran-and-israel-stepped-back-brink?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=fatoday&utm_campaign=Why%20Iran%20and%20Israel%20Stepped%20Back%20From%20the%20Brink&utm_content=20240514&utm_term=FA%20Today%20-%20112017
aaall,
I haven't been over to LGM for two or three days, I think. I'll try to get over there later.
Thank goodness for Rapko's substantive comments. We need more of that!!!
Rapko puts his finger on the central issue: how to live with yourself.
To continue to flog the nag that is currently lying in the middle of the street and has been starting to smell for some time now, let’s note that this is question of interiority—it’s a question of *you* learning how best to live with *yourself*. This is a question that used to fall in the realm of therapy, of whatever psycho-religious variant you choose (or is chosen for you).
But politics is—strictly speaking—the realm of *you* learning how best to live with *other people*.
The fact that there is widespread confusion between the two—both IRL (on campus) and here in the liminal world of cyber-pseudo-realtity—is telling.
Perhaps I misunderstood some of you previous points, J.P., but when you state “But politics is—strictly speaking—the realm of *you* learning how best to live with *other people*.” aren’t you intruding a moral point of view?
I take your point about interiority, but maybe you shd. have written “But politics is—strictly speaking—the realm of *you* learning how to engage with *other people*.? [I'm not necessarily accepting this as a definition.]
ONE MORE THING! I’ve been getting a lot of stick for what people think is my cynicism. But I can’t help it if I happen to be, thanks only to the accidents of my upbringing and schooling, to be more clued-in about politics than most.
For example, a schoolboy chum of mine had, as his first job out of school, the position of chief of staff to a senior congressman (so senior, in fact, that this Rep was quicky elected Speaker of the House). How did my friend get such a prestigious job at such a young age?
You may be shocked—SHOCKED—to learn that my pal’s dad put him in the position, so that my pal could keep an eye on his father’s pet congressman … much as a farmer might make his son keep an eye on an eager-to-please donkey who was nevertheless liable to wander off on the farm and fuck things up.
THAT, boys and girls, sots and ascetics, fair and foul, is how politics WORKS. It is NOT a matter of crawling into tents and tearfully exhorting the powers that be to “do the right thing”.
This isn't just an academic debate.
(Warning: The linked video is highly disturbing.)
https://twitter.com/briebriejoy/status/1790810695275024771
It's a curious theory of politics which holds that tearful exhortations can't affect the situation in Gaza, but they can affect the likelihood that Trump becomes president again. An asymmetry begging for an explanation
Don't those kids know that they're not even engaging in politics! Politics is about power!
Don't those kids know they're basically electing Trump! They're making Biden look bad!
Moreover, this isn't a contingent feature of this case, rather it follows directly as a conceptual truth from the nature of politics
We need a whole lot more anecdotes, J.P., and even a great many of them might not necessarily lead to a defensible theory of politics.
As to being "more clued-in" than most about politics, should I call you a vain cynic? Or is one factor determinative of the other?
I would ask you, you two, for your “theory” of politics, but (like LBJ) I can tell the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad.
And the effect of all this on the election is not a “theory”, it’s an observable fact. Not only do Netanyahu and co. not care what is shouted out by a bunch of gender studies majors, they are observant enough to have noticed that the more bombs they drop the more the blame falls on the Dems, thanks in no small part to “lefty” entertainers like Brianna Joy Gray.
The Whole Sick Right Wing Crew is laughing (Har-de-har-har-har!) with glee over this state of affairs. I’m laughing over it myself, but that’s only because I have a pitch-black sense of humor.
In fact, it occurred to me that the whole Gaza Encampment thing might just be a right-wing put-up job, in line with my (maybe paranoid, maybe not) theory that today’s identitarian “left” was cooked up in a secret Koch Brothers lab located somewhere underneath Greenpoint. But then I decided that the Right has no need to put that much effort in. All they need do is wait for the other side to step on its own dick yet again.
Anyway. I know that nothing … neither reasoned argument, nor vituperation, nor mockery, nor irony, nor vulgarity, nor satire, nor poetry, nor comedy … has ever changed anybody’s mind, so go ahead and vote for Jill Stein. I know that’s what you’re going to do anyway.
Not that anyone asked, but I voted "uncommitted" yesterday in the Dem primary in the state where I live, and in Nov. am voting for Biden because -- to borrow a phrase used by Margaret Thatcher in a different context -- there is no (real) alternative, and Trump 2.0 would be a disaster of likely gargantuan proportions.
As for the student protests, I suspect their effect on the election will be negligible. The media are covering them, but there is no polling evidence I'm aware of that shows any really substantial part of the electorate is going to vote on this issue. It likely will cost Biden votes in Michigan, a swing state with a fairly substantial Muslim-American population, and it will affect a smallish (in the scheme of things) number of votes elsewhere and among other groups (esp young voters), but that's about it. Not enough, I think, to have a major impact.
Pillette,
I've participated in this blog since the 2016 election and as far as I recall, no regular participant in this blog has ever supported Jill Stein or any third party candidate.
Professor Wolff has endorsed the Democratic candidate in all previous elections too.
Now you claim that you're such a brilliant political genius, but you should have learned by now that you don't insult, belittle and slander people if you want to win them over to your side.
If you keep on insulting, belittling and slandering people, one of us might be so turned off by your pretentious and vain mainstream liberal bullshit, that we might, out of spite, end up voting for Jill Stein or not vote at all.
I bet that you'd secretly like that because then you can mock us for being so politically
naive and for enabling Trump's triumph.
So everybody who votes in U.S. elections, vote for Joe Biden. Better than Trump.
As a p.s. to my comment above, I shd have added that Biden does have some real accomplishments. Now his campaign has to get in gear and "sell" them.
Actually my state is so Democratic in presidential elections that I could write in John Pillette for president -- or anyone else -- or vote for Stein or West or whoever and it wouldn't matter for Electoral College purposes. But I'm voting for Biden partly bc the popular vote total matters in terms of optics if nothing else.
Wrt a theory of politics I meant nothing more—nor less—than an account of how politics works, including the role it plays in societies, that consists in something more substantial than an assertion of the sort, ‘I’m a genius. I know how it works. And you’re all a bunch of simpletons.’
Besides that, s.w. is surely right, that it isn’t a good idea to go around trying to insult people to agree with you, though I’ll admit it seems to have worked for Trump—but there it only worked to drag/force the outliers and would-be other ‘leaders’ into his camp (in other words, he had sufficient support to dragoon those he insulted into aligning with him). But that will not work here for obvious reasons. So go on being trumpian, J.P. Maybe it’s you who are the right-wing put-up job???
Well, “Anonymous”, being polite doesn’t work; being funny doesn’t work; being vulgar doesn’t work; so being out-and-out rude is the last thing to try, and just as I figured, that doesn’t work either.
And it doesn’t take any kind of “genius” to simply observe a relevant fact and then reason from there. E.g., noting that the Speaker of the House (who is in charge of the body that actually controls U.S.-Israel relations) is some rich man’s donkey. Given this FACT, (1) using the impressive-sounding phrase “the Biden-Netanyahu Coalition” (thanks, Brianna Joy Gray!) is a grossly misleading falsehood, and maybe (2) appeals to “morality” are not going to work with the House of Representatives.
But this requires that you know who is elected to the House and how. And no one (for fear of being labeled “right wing”) has even considered the fact that the Kids Today, and especially the Activist Ivy League Kids of Today cannot give an account of how politics works in the real world because they have literally no experience, and their political nous is derived strictly from their high school civics textbooks.
But grown adults, because they see themselves on what passes for a “left” automatically defer to these ignoramuses. Just as they defer to Greta Thunberg …!
Hume, in his History of England, pauses somewhere to treat this phenomenon, which has occurred a number of times in English (and later in Anglo-American) history, and always among the desperate peasantry. They will spontaneously decide that some child has become the vessel for divine wisdom and they will follow his or her every word (which, under the law of probability is correct at least 50% of the time). Deference to the Kids’ Activist-ism is merely the modern manifestation of that social process.
(And BTW, the word for men who hide their identities is “chickenshit”. In the UK there’s a good reason for it, but not over here in bravery’s home. So here’s a pro tip: grow a pair and use your real name … or grow at least one and use a consistent pseudonym.)
“[A]s J. Maynard Smith showed at about the same time (1964), selfish individuals . . . could subvert altruistic groups, no matter how these altruistic goups emerged . . . Start with a group of altruists, regardless of how they may have emerged, and introduce an egoist to the group. Over time the egoist will traduce the co-operators, and because the egoist’s strategy advances it at the expense of the others, over the long haul the egoist and its offspring will reproduce at greater rates, and eventually swamp the altruists in the group.” [Alexander Rosenberg, “Altruism: Theoretical Contexts,” in Keller and Lloyd, eds., Keywords in Evolutionary Biology Harvard U.P., 1992)
Pillette,
I don't recall you being polite, as you claim.
You tried to be funny and when not all of us appreciated your sense of humor, that provoked your immense vanity into attack mode and you began to be insulting and rude.
Actually, there are several long-time regular commenters on this blog (I will not name them)
who share your mainstream liberal views on politics and no one has any problems with them.
They are accepted as participants in this conversation.
s.w.
I hope you're not including with Pillette's "mainstream"! Like Bernie Sanders, I'm a New Deal/Great Society liberal, decidedly to the left, say, of Bill Clinton.
I know--Bernie calls himself a socialist. But it seems to me that a socialist who doesn't advocate government ownership of the means of production (and Bernie says that he does not) isn't really a socialist.
While I'm on the subject, can a socialist on the blog tell me how socialism could actually work without becoming totalitarian? It seems to me that that has pretty much been the result wherever it was tried.
MY immense vanity …! Well, if you want to look at it that way, Mr. Modesty. You’re just a modest little fellow who somehow ran for and was elected to the position of Hall Monitor / Chief of Tone Police / Municipal Dog Killer / Postal Inspector … and all without the rest of us getting our ballots in the mail or even knowing that an election had been called! NICE TRICK.
Art critics aren’t blind, music critics aren’t deaf, so why would you think that having no sense of humor entitles you to judge funny? Maybe YOU should be a little more modest yourself, at least where this subject is concerned.
Moreover, my views on politics are not “mainstream liberal”. As I assumed would be apparent from my prose style, I am an anarchist (338th bomb-throwing division). The world we live in requires me to vote in a certain (totes lame and mainstream) kind of way, but electoral politics is not “politics”.
Allow me to address the terms “vanity” and “egotism” … and various other mean words that are supposed by the user to have an immediate and magical effect on the target, just like the effect that the pitcher of water had on Margaret Hamilton in “The Wizard of Oz”.
What is behind this habit?
A seeming requirement for membership in today’s pseudo-left is to adopt a sort of neo-Calvinist posture of self-abnegation: I’m a wretched nobody, I’m a modest little fellow, and so on. But how is this posture not deeply phony, a product of ressentiment, and merely a way for the jealously resentful but deeply repressed to attack those whom he can see are enjoying themselves? He feels that they are
getting out of hand, are acting too big for their britches, and so on? How is it not a product of self-hatred turned outward: I wish I could be him, but alas I cannot be.
David Palmeter,
I don't see why socialism need become totalitarian (actually, I believe that most political scientists would consider Cuba to be authoritarian, not totalitarian, so too with the Soviet Union post Stalin) or authoritarian.
All socialist societies (except Allende's Chile, which I will come to in a moment) have been the result of violent revolutions or imposed from above by a foreign power, e. g. East Germany, the Warsaw Pact countries, etc..
The revolutionary violence, led by a small but determined political vanguard, Lenin's Bolcheviks or Fidel's guerrilleros, tends to lead to a society where the same group, fearing attacks from counter-revolutionaries (which was a real threat) rules in an authoritarian manner.
So for democratic socialism, a necessary condition seems to be that socialists are elected by a democratic process.
Allende was elected democratically in a three candidate race with 37% of the vote, that being a plurality and congress then ratified him, it being the custom in Chilean democracy to ratify the most voted candidate.
However, many political scientist, observing what happened during the Allende years, note that in order to carry out radical social change, you need an immense majority of popular support, not just an arithmetic plurality. In the 1973 congressional elections, Allende's coalition got 44% of the vote.
Allende had firm support among the poor and working class, but he never won over the middle class, not to mention the rich. He needed to reassure the middle class that democratic socialism did not threaten their way of life and he never managed to do to that.
The coup came in 1973 and of course the coup was backed by Nixon and carried out by the Chilean military, but the Chilean military would not have acted without the tacit support of much of the middle class and of the centrist parties which represented them politically.
Lesson: for democratic socialism to work. You need to win elections and to win hearts and minds.
John, since you say you’re an anarchist, I don’t understand some of your positions. I’m not trying to needle you when I say that. I just don’t get it. How can you, as an anarchist, be so outraged that some people—including, by the way, a couple of Israeli academics whose letter appears in today’s print edition of the NYT who praise American students for doing so—are expressing their outrage at what’s going down in Gaza? It seems to be because you believe these expressions will injure Biden’s electoral chances and aid Trump’s. (Have I got you wrong on this?) But how is this an anarchist position? Surely an anarchist would at least be raising the question, which of them would do more to strengthen or weaken the state? And isn’t there a case to be made that Trump—and Hamas?—have done more to weaken the American state, with negative fallout for other states around the world, than Biden/Obama/name your Democrat has done or likely will do?
I also don’t understand why you say you’re “required” to vote. Voting certainly isn’t required in the US or most other countries I know of—I can only think of Australia. And if patterns are followed, I expect the non-voters will outnumber those who vote for either of the two main candidates this November—I’d even venture that the proportion of the eligible adults who choose not to vote in November will be quite a bit greater than last time around. But none of them will face any punishment for that.
Please, no bombs of any sort. Thanks.
I haven't been insulted yet. What's taking so long?
Whenever I hear Calvinism mentioned, even of the “neo” sort, I reach for my Burns:
http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Poems_Songs/holy_willie.htm
Last time I checked, there was no anarchist party, with a platform with positions that party members are obliged to take. I’m using “Anarchy” in the original sense of the word, an-archon, that is: without + ruler. Think of Diogenes, in his barrel, surrounded by his canine companions, telling Alexander to get the hell out of his light.
BTW, I had always assumed that, deep deep down, most everybody else was like me in that they felt a visceral need to reject authority. Alas, I now have come to realize that a whole lot of people have an insatiable desire to be ruled.
Anyway, why would being an anarchist of this sort entail an indifference to Trump or Biden as president? I’m not a STUPID anarchist. Anarchists are obliged to live in the same world as everybody else, with lawnmowers, mortgages, clogged sinks, and so on and on.
And just as anarchists can sit in their comfy chairs and watch the TV (again, just like everyone else) and be driven mad by the poor quality of what’s provided (like the latest Patricia Highsmith adaptation … Don’t get me STARTED on that!) they can observe politics and be driven into a frothing rage by the stupidity and sheer incompetence on display. If you paid to watch the US Open and instead got a bunch of 6 year olds trying to play whiffle ball, you’d be pissed off as well.
In the same vein, nobody is required to vote, but I choose to do so, and boycotting the 2024 election because you can’t be bothered to learn the first thing about the political structure of this country is the height of stupidity (see: Rage, Frothing, supra).
(Lengyel, sorry about that, go fuck yourself!)
Pillette,
I don't understand why not voting would be stupid on your view. Whether any individual votes or not won't have an effect on the outcome of the election. The election will be determined by some thousands of votes in a few counties in swing states. The vast majority of the 10s of millions of votes to be cast will contribute exactly 0 to determining the outcome. So how is it stupid to sit at home on election day?
I could come up with some moral arguments for why you shouldn't do that, but I know you won't want to hear anything about the moral duties of individuals.
"...political nous is derived strictly from their high school civics textbooks."
I don't believe civics is much of a thing these days. Also there is this:
https://www.youtube.com/c/TheFederalistSociety/about%C2%A0
and this:
https://www.prageru.com/series/street-smarts
NYT (its magazine section) has published the first part of a three-part series billed as a discussion/investigation of how right-wing extremists took over the Israeli state. I just glanced through the first part and bookmarked for later perusal. N.b.: It's *long* and appears to be thoroughly researched/reported.
LFC, et al., don't overlook the Comments attached to that long article. They're quite interesting, many of them challenging the NYT along the lines of 'where have you been and what have you not been attending to all these many years,' and a few wondering how the awful Bret What'shisname might respond.
John, thanks for clarifying that you didn't really mean to say that you're required to vote, but that you choose to vote. I'd still have thought an anarchist, not wishing to be ruled, might have taken the line, "I won't do anything to encourage the bastards," as the ultimate guide on how to engage with politicians. As to Diogenes, Raymond Geuss has an interesting short essay, "Shamelessness and the public world," in which he explores what it might mean to offend (in Diogenes case, by engaging in public masturbation).
I suppose this last brings me back, in a way, to what some see to be the NYT's shamelessness.
s. wallerstein,
I previously voted for Jill Stein, and as things are looking, I will likely vote for her again.
Regardless, I will never vote for biden & Harris.
John Pillette,
People in the US who say things that are compatible with the Empire's agenda (the "compatible left") have no need to worry about masking their identities.
j.w.,
The reporters on that NYT 3-part piece write that they've been working on it for years -- since 2016, if I recall correctly. (I don't know whether that would affect one's assessment of the NYT's alleged shamelessness in allegedly not covering these developments thoroughly enough before.) Much of the piece appears to be very historically oriented anyway, the sort of thing that a magazine piece would do (as opposed to something in the news pages). Btw would it be uncharitable of me to wonder whether the commenters on that article had all taken the time to actually read it?
Eric,
You will be cast into the lowest circle of hell for voting for Stein.
One of my oldest friends lives in California, carefully checked the polls to be sure that Biden would win in California, then voted for Jill Stein. It all depends on which state you live in.
I'd rather have a beer with Jill Stein than with Biden or Hillary Clinton, would happily vote for Jill Stein for city council or for congress, but given the possibility that Trump could be re-elected, I'd say vote for Biden.
Biden isn't so great, but Trump is a lot worse.
LFC, some of them are saying that many people have known what's been happening for a lot longer than eight years. And it would definitely be uncharitable--unless of course you have actual evidence to the contrary--to wonder whether the commenters had read it.
Post a Comment