On HU
Featured Archive Post: Jacob Canfield on Johnny Ryan, Benajamin Marra, and lazy thinking in comics criticism.
Piyali Bhattacharya with a short review of Bea Ridgway’s River of No Return.
I celebrate the glorious alienation of Chicago juke.
I explain why Shelby Lynne is not death metal.
Ng Suat Tong looks at Dan Clowes’ short story “Justin Damiano,” about critics and criticism.
Alex Buchet continues his pre-history of the superhero, with a focus on sci-fi from Verne to Vril.
I talk about Kazuo Umezu’s Butterfly Grave and how weak mothers eat their young.
Chris Gavaler on his mother’s superpowers and her aging.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I interviewed Stanley Hauerwas about intervention in Syria.
At Reason I review a love letter to an Afghan warlord.
At Splice Today I talk about
— how the Internet hates you, and what to do about it.
— Dungeons and Dragons and the rule of nerds.
Other Links
Robert Reece on black men’s bodies and the white female gaze.
Elizabeth Sampat on why the guys who do Penny Arcade need a swift kick in the shins.
Noah, I would love to hear a bit about what you found appealing in the Reece article. I found its aggressive paternalism and sexism to be both insulting and insultingly bad. Argument about systemic racism often becomes argument through pure assertion, but rarely at this level about what “we” do and what “they” do. Theory as phallus, laying claim to a bunch of “pussies.”
Hey Peter. I was interested in the discussion of the ways in which it was possible for white women to rape men during slavery. I also think he’s right that in gendered interactions, white women can have power advantages over black men in various ways.
I think calling white women in integrated couples is…well, I don’t think that’s helpful or accurate, I guess. It seems like you’re assuming the men in those situations have no agency, for one thing, and sort of assuming that people of different races can’t love each other, which I don’t agree with.
So…I thought some aspects were interesting, but didn’t necessarily agree with all of it.
I can’t help but wonder what the world would be like had Christianity began by literally living morally by pacifism.
Hauerwas manages to talk around in circles and not say much. If, say, a dictator drops nerve gas on his people, but that doesn’t directly affect another country, say, the US, should the latter always do nothing? That’s kind of the thing I’d like to hear him say something about. Instead, he simply stops at the definitely rational and true point that dropping gas doesn’t kill people any more than various other forms of weaponry. Again, should no one do anything to stop the immoral killing of mass quantities of people somewhere else in the world? The man has an empty moral philosophy as far as I can tell. It offers nothing.
It only offers nothing if you believe that war is the basepoint for morality, and that only action can be moral.
Hauerwas is trying to offer a position from which to criticize that. He’s pretty ensconced in the just war position, which would say (for example) that you shouldn’t got to war unless you have a reasonable chance of reducing harm, or unless you’re attacked. So, no, going to war to stop someone from gassing their people probably isn’t a good idea, because war in almost all cases is going to increase the number of deaths.
In the case of Syria, there’s not even a pretense that we’re going to reduce deaths, or that we’re going to remove Assad.
I think his point that individual choices about intervention are meaningless in a country that has basically been preparing and preparing for war for 50 years is pretty important as well.
Evidently, he’s as practically minded as every other objection to attacking Syria: there’s no real desire to make any significant change there, so what’s the point? All of which pretty much belies his point about the “American difference.” We constantly get objections to whichever war we’ve had that goes something like “not another X.” I’m not sure how this makes Hauerwas a pacifist, since he, like most Americans, believes that war should produce something better than not going to war, not that nonviolence is the moral way and violence is the immoral way.
This is hardly seeing war as the basis for morality. I would agree that many people make a large amount of money by producing weapons, so that does influence when our representatives, media and public get behind a war (are more willing to believe it will produce more good, than less).
I’m afraid I don’t see what you’re trying to say here, Charles.
Hauerwas’ objections to war aren’t mainly practical, as he says. He does tend to believe that war has no practical purpose, and that violence ends up in a worse place than non-violence. I don’t really get why those things are contradictory.
You see war as the basis of morality because you systematically refuse to give any theoretical weight to any nonviolent outcome, solution, or premise. That’s fairly typical of the way these discussions tend to go, as far as I can tell.
As far as I can tell, nonviolence here is effectively not much more than letting other people be violent without consequence. That’s a funny view of nonviolence.
And the reasoning Hauerwas gives in that interview for not bombing Syria is very standard and run-of-the-mill — not that it’s wrong, just not particularly related to his more theoretical positions. I believe he’s giving what Dennett calls a deepity.
The inability to see nonviolence as anything other than an allowance of violence is the privileging of violence that I’m talking about. Any response to violence that isn’t violence is automatically null, or “not much more than.”
He gives various reasons. Most of them are from a just war perspective, a tradition that he respects and thinks about, though not one he entirely agrees with.
And, again, I could be wrong, but I don’t actually often hear folks pointing out that the issue is less this particular intervention than a general long term ideological and economic investment in military solutions. That’s an insight very much related to Hauerwas’ philosophy, which is about how peace isn’t a choice so much as a community and a faith.
Exactly what’s the peaceful solution you’re offering when someone drops a bunch of nerve gas on his own people? That’s the part that I’m missing.
And I’m missing the part where you explain what the violent solution is. Do we automatically take over every country where there’s an atrocity? Do you think that would reduce the violence on the planet? Or what?
Why are situations which have no good solution, violent or otherwise, supposed to be some sort of refutation of pacifism, but not a refutation of violence?
No matter how long many countries have been democratic, they served as no model for the Assad family’s approach to running a country. The Assads simply haven’t given a shit. Thus, a nonviolent approach to overturning rulers hasn’t worked there. He still did what he did.
I think it’s practically impossible to stop or curtail every atrocity in the world and, as I said, Hauerwas presented the most recent practical reasons for not bombing Syria. It’s the isolated utopian bullshit that I see as useless, and evidently so do the both of you, since you fall back on the likely practical results of applying violence in the world.
Nonviolence is not an option in Syria, since the violence has already happened. We either don’t do anything about the violence, e.g., we “live cooperatively in a manner that does not need to resort to violence” with Assad’s way of treating his people (that is, the violence isn’t affecting us, so who cares, since we can come away with clean souls), or we talk about a way of responding, and whether our response will result in a situation that’s better or worse than what’s going on now.
There’s nothing utopian about Hauerwas’ pacifism. He doesn’t think it’ll end violence everywhere, and never says he does.
I like the double bind you’ve set up. If you engage pragmatically, you’re a hypocrite; if you don’t, you’re a utopian. The only honorable way to be, apparently, is to assume that violence is the best option, and then sorrowfully discuss pragmatic barriers if you have to. You’re ideal world is one in which the US in fact invades everyone and controls everything, right? There are pragmatic objections to doing that, but if you could, you’d have the US army governing the world, it sounds like.
I don’t really find that vision either comforting or compelling. But lots of people do, I guess.
Part of Hauerwas’ argument is trying to get folks to realize that lots of stuff is out of our control. It isn’t that you come away with clean souls; nobody’s souls are clean. It’s that you need to stop believing that you can cleanse your souls through violence.
Violence isn’t necessarily the best option — that’s not what I’m saying. It’s that deciding not commit some act of violence isn’t the same thing as what you call “nonviolence” or I call utopian pacifism. By the dictates of reality, the world we live, the fact that there has always been and always will be assholes, violence is a necessary contingency, no matter how much pacifists want to pretend otherwise.
“You’re ideal world is one in which the US in fact invades everyone and controls everything, right?”
No, I quite often agree that we shouldn’t interfere with the internal struggles of other nations, I just don’t pretend to be a pacifist to excuse what’s really a depressing alternative that reduces to realpolitik considerations. Nor am I utopian minded enough to pretend any pacifism could exist without violence to support it.
I agree with Hauerwas practically minded argument that the US can’t control all the problems of the world, so shouldn’t try … to control all of them, that is. I don’t agree that this automatically means we shouldn’t do shit about every atrocity to come in the future. Maybe he thinks we should violently interfere sometimes, too, but I haven’t much nuance as to when we should and when we shouldn’t. If I remember right, he’s even opposed to the American Civil War (not in the sense of it was horrible, but in the sense that the violence wasn’t necessary).
“haven’t seen much nuance”
He’s opposed to the argument that violent is necessary, which gives it a kind of transcendent epistomological weight.
I’m not convinced from your arguments that you see violence as an unfortunate necessity, rather than as a truth that confers legitimacy. Sneering at nonviolence while touting the tragic necessity of violence tends to undermine any call for nonviolence. That’s why the pacifist witness is valuable; because without it humans who want to use violence as a tool tend to slip quickly into letting violence use them.
I was sneering at nonviolence being seen as a moral necessity, not nonviolence. If one can solve a problem without violence — and that solution doesn’t involve more violence, just elsewhere — then that’s the moral way to go.