Anarchy is.
We can insist in the “existence” of laws until we’re blue in the face. But the truth is: There are none. There are only traditions, conventions, norms, and prejudices that have been passed down to us by our ancestors.
Our ancestors… who seemed to have been greedy, violent, racist, colonialist, competitive, cookie-monster Patriarchs frightened by their own shadows. Or at least, the loudest and most talky-talk of them were.
This makes me think of Bree Newsome and how she faces three years in prison for:
A. Committing a crime.
B. Heroic acts in the face of national terrorism.
Q: Who or what did she violate?
A: “Federal Property,” I assume. Which is to say: “Our Property,” collectively.
Q: And how did she violate this property?
A: Trespassing (OK) so as to take down a national symbol of racism, hate, violence, and subjugation that commemorates the ongoing, and historical, national “self” constitution wherein one segment of the nation’s citizens systematically attack, oppress, and destroy another segment of this nation’s citizens under the pretense of some essentialist supremacy.
Are we, as a Nation, comfortable with the thought of Bree Newsome being locked in a cage for 3 years after gifting the American people with freedom from the Confederate flag?
And do we really want to lock up one more Black Civil Rights leader? Seriously?!
I really hope not. Because up to this point, it seems like the previous generations have given their offspring really great reasons to hate them. I’d like it if we stopped doing that.
We could even start celebrating Bree Newsome’s courageous living right now. Nationally. While we can still show her how thankful we are. I mean, wouldn’t that be something different?
Oh, stop with the theatrics and melodrama.
Newsome won’t be going to prison, and even if, for some bizarre and stupid reason she does, there’s no way she’d get the three-year maximum sentence for this particular misdemeanor.
She was released shortly after her arrest on a $3,000 bond, which means she had to cough up $300 bucks to walk. And judging by the amount of support money being thrown her way because of the publicity, her act isn’t going to cost her a dime.
What she did was gutsy, but by comparison, she’s light years away from being as gutsy as a Rosa Parks or a Martin Luther King Jr., who lived in a far different and more dangerous South than does Newsome.
For example, people living in Selma back in the early 1960s, where King’s famous march to Montgomery began would not recognize it now. It’s had back-to-back black mayors, and the Jim Crow South is ancient history.
Well, that comment fills me with great relief. Thanks, R. Maheras. Glad to hear risking your life isn’t… *that* risky. And even, if she goes to jail… meh, who cares! Theatrics and melodrama averted. Phew! Here, I thought we might have a real problem with race in America.
But as long as we’re comparing her treatment to other Black Civil Rights leaders, and not white people, all is well. Phew! I’m relieved.
Civil disobedience is still disobedience. When activists break the law to illustrate the poor morality of those laws, they are to be commended. But we should not insulate those activists from the expected consequences of their decisions, lest we too laugh at the rule of law.
I can respect those who invite the displeasure of the state to illustrate their political perspectives, but they make choices as adults to violate the laws to which we all submit. Ms. Newsome can handle the consequences of her actions. She volunteered.
That being said, comparisons to the Jim Crow South lack utility unless we are also willing to examine the low capital investment, high chronic disease rates, and consistent hate crime statistics generated in Southern Black communities. We can’t assert that everything is better now after the end of formal legal segregation to discredit today’s activists, who combat the injustice they find in their country the same way the Movement generation fought the injustice in their midst.
“But we should not insulate those activists from the expected consequences of their decisions, lest we too laugh at the rule of law.”
I don’t know…rule of law isn’t necessarily just, and sometimes it should be laughed at, I’d say. Not sure what the legal options are for Bree, but I’d certainly be quick to acquit her if I were on the jury, rule of law or not.
Hi J. Lamb: Thanks for your comment. I would point to the fact that the law does not apply equally to all people. And when certain classes are literally constituted and created by an unequal application of the law, by increased violence and police monitoring and incarceration rates, I’m not sure a nation can really expect lawfulness. That seems insane to me. So that’s the big rub for me.
That takes me to the notion that Bree Newsome volunteered and can handle it. I struggle to see value in someone having to handle something like this. She risked her life to take that flag down. When people were calling for someone to ‘just take the flag down,’ very thoughtful people were responding: You realize that if someone did ‘just take the flag down’ they’d most likely not survive it, right? Because all of this happened against the backdrop of a massacre, to say nothing of the police (and that’s a hell of an elision).
I imagine she felt obligated. It took a staggering amount of courage. And that flag is a symbol of black slavery, of black men having counted as 3/5 a vote only so as to pad their masters’ votes, and black women counting for nothing. They weren’t considered citizens.
And now, in this enlightened age of ours, 28.5% of black men (just the men) still can’t vote. I know we all know our history, and I don’t mean to be talking High School stuff, but that is also what makes it so surreal. We all know.
I started the post saying “Anarchy is” because ultimately no one can rule if no one obeys. Certain laws are upheld, but other really aren’t!
Or to put this another way, it seems to me, that what must certainly be a distinguishing factor of a democratic society is that citizens assume responsibility for their laws and systems of governance as opposed to laws and systems of governance assuming responsibility for its citizens.
To be honest its hard not to see J. Lamb’s admonition not to “laugh at the rule of law” as being the crux of this debate, and it seems to be a stumbling block in a lot of liberal hand-wringing over Civil Disobedience (not that I think J Lamb is exhibiting that kind of hand wringing in their post.)
I think this post quite plainly brings to mind the philosophical issue with a lot of laws and with law giving, they too often mask wide spread racism, sexism, and denial of personhood behind thin objectivity. Why is there a law in place to defend a flag which challenges the personhood of all but one race of people?
Noah, it’s hard to imagine how a jury could acquit Ms. Newsome, since she scaled the flagpole and removed the Confederate flag in violation of existing statute. Even if people do not support harsh penalties in this case, the idea that she should escape public sanction here proves difficult. We can be a nation of laws or of popular sentiments; it’s hard to do both.
Nix 66: I do not believe that Black Americans can hope to excite their fellow citizens to eliminate injustice and unequal treatment through simple indifference to law and order. Most Blacks, like most people generally, are law-abiding citizens. Even our protests are mostly quiet, non-violent, and genteel, given the stakes. The idea that Americans can’t expect respect for the rule of law from the Black citizens they treat unjustly thinks too little of Black patriotism, frankly. We have a history of sustained, system-affirming public advocacy; America can expect lawfulness from us because we have shown ourselves to be a law-abiding people.
Against this backdrop, Bree Newsome chucks propriety and commits an act of vandalism. Ascribe whatever political significance to this act you’d like, but recognize that that the significance of her act wanes considerably if sheer popular will removes the legal danger her choice demands.
Not to mention that the entire Confederate flag debate after Charleston displayed this nation’s complete fecklessness before the country’s foremost special interest, the gun lobby. We do nothing to remove access to firearms from the deranged and racist, Black people die, and then we argue over symbols? Pathetic. A nation worthy of the respect Black citizens have displayed since before emancipation would make stringent gun control it’s top legislative priority.
Since we are not that nation, Bree Newsome flirts with jail time over a fluttering symbol. Pathetic.
I think jury nullification is a valid and moral option in some circumstances.
Gun politics are rough. But I do think Confederate symbolism matters, and challenging neo-Confederate narratives matter. I don’t think risking jail time to contest them is pathetic.
State action on gun control saves Black lives. State action on the Confederate flag saves White guilt.
We can choose both, but a just country should prioritize the former over the latter.
I absolutely agree about gun control, J. Lamb.
And I’m not saying what Black people should do. I’ve no position and it wasn’t my intent to write this for any specific class of American. Not at all. My own lack of respect for the law comes from a completely different place, admittedly.
With that said, I don’t think the people arguing for keeping the Confederate flag in place see it as a symbol of white guilt. I think they see it as a symbol of white supremacy and pride. And I think such symbols have real very effects.
Also, if a great number of the citizens do feel that she did the country a service, I don’t see why we should be locking her up. We shouldn’t be punishing someone now for something we declare a holiday for later. Particularly if we can see that we’ve a history of doing this.
As a young man, I climbed countless flagpoles, gutters on multi-story buildings, telephone poles, light poles, fire escape ladders, trees of every shape and size, fences, brick walls, box cars — you name it. So excuse me if someone climbing a flag pole does not impress.
Now, if she had done this exact same thing in Mississippi in 1962, it would be a totally different story. That WOULD have been risking her life, because the locals would have probably killed her. Not so today. The only thing she has to worry about is which talk show to do next.
Nix 66’s assertion that we are actually anarchic both dismisses the existence of non-corporeal things and denies how much rule of law, however flawed, has significantly helped disadvantaged people. You think what we have now is bad? It would be much worse if we didn’t have civil rights laws. Which is why defending them is important.
Newsome’s act was a wonderful act of defiance, and jury nullification or prosecutorial discretion mitigating a conviction or sentence would be good (although, pace J. Lamb’s comment, perhaps undermining the impact of her protest). However, laws shouldn’t be written with some kind of good intention excuse clause. Our legal system is already clogged with bad laws aimed at dealing with exceptional cases. Laws for sex offenders, in particular, are a disaster because populist emotions overruled solid legal reasoning after well-publicized (but unusual) cases.
The problem with her conviction, in so much as there is one, is not that she is being arrested for a property crime. It’s that the Confederate flag still flew over a state capital. And now it doesn’t. Which seems pretty small potatoes, again pace J. Lamb, given that we have the same gun laws, the same segregation, and the same lack of mental health services, as we did before the massacre.
London Crockett: The existence of non-corporeal things? Do you mean ideology or….? I’m sorry, I’m not certain that I follow.
As for the rule of law helping the disadvantaged: What disadvantaged them in the first place?
R. Maheras: Congratulations on your history of climbing! I would think context matters in the climb, and I’d remind you, again, of the backdrop to the action: police violence, hashtag after hashtag commemorating one more dead, a massacre, church burnings.
But if you’d like an A+ climber ribbon… Sure, why not!
It’s too bad Bree Newsome was born too late for the history books. I mean, our public education system hasn’t even updated those since what… 1977?
I mean all non-physical things. Law derives from everything you listed, but it is also a thing. It is not only physically manifested on paper, but in the minds of the broader society, just like any other cultural artifact. It is as real as sexism and racism. If you want to dismiss it non-existent, you must logically dismiss every other cultural thing—all that isn’t manifested entirely physically (to be nit-picky, even physical things are largely cultural). You can think it sucks, but it is real.
What disadvantaged people the first place? That depends on the person and the disadvantage, but look at places where the rule of law is weak and you’ll never find less abuse. While historical progression towards the good is largely in the mind of the observer, there has been a progression towards significantly less violence towards others as rule of law (and food security) increased. Laws in America have moved unevenly but consistently towards greater inclusion and more protection of the disadvantaged.
We tend to forget the improvements and focus on the failings, which is part of making progress. But it can lead us to dismiss what has been successful in the past. I suspect a large part of the right-wing refusal to admit to climate change lies in the amazing success of the EPA and associated laws. People no longer remember (or were born after) the horrible pollution that drove bilateral passage of our environmental laws.
Civil rights laws have also been hugely successful in a number of important ways. They also have all sorts of failures, and have often been defeated by segregation. But we shouldn’t forget how vital those laws have been in making what progress we have made. Nor how important law has been in general compared to places without it.
OK, I understand your meaning, London Crockett.
For me, it seems like sexism and racism are *more* real than the law because, I confess, I’ve actually never seen the law work in the face of such systemic oppression. Have you? I am not being snarky. Happy arguments do make me happy.
I understand the argument that slowly, very slowly, inch by inch, the distribution of goods and rights is becoming more equitable within this country. But is it really? Or is it merely that the forms of oppression have changed? I can’t really see how the US can consider a group enfranchised when 28.5% can’t vote and have records. That seems like a massive disadvantage, and that’s setting quotidian racism (within the populace) aside.
I see that there are now new laws which promise to protect historically disenfranchised classes. But I’m not sure that I believe these laws can be relied upon or invoked by these disenfranchised classes.
And a right only exists to the extent that you can exercise that right. Otherwise, it’s an empty promise used to further silence and oppress. Because it’s one thing to tell someone they’re equal and it’s a whole other thing to actually treat them as an equal and afford them the same rights and opportunities as a traditionally dominant class.
So this goes back to the law being applied unequally.
I hear the promises. I see the rules. I just don’t see them being delivered upon.
As for parts of the world where the rule of law is weak, I think there may be other international laws/relations at play, which quash any notion of local law. But I’m not an expert. And I’m open.
PS — I’m not dismissing the law as nonexistent. I’m saying that citizens are responsible for the laws that they tolerate and uphold. Laws are real because they have real consequences, no doubt. But they do only seem to have consequences for *some* people, which inclines me to see them as part of the problem.
“State action on gun control saves Black lives. State action on the Confederate flag saves White guilt. ”
Dylann Root killed people with a gun because he was inspired by neo-Confederate ideology. If people’s brains have something to do with violence, then symbols do as well.
I’m all for gun control. But dealing with the symbols and ideology of racism matters as well, I’d argue.
Hey Nix 66, I’m not making any claims that the law inherently leads to better distribution of resources! The law sometimes goes that way and sometimes not. Nor that laws are equally applied. I would have to have some really serious denial going to think that in the face of the evidence that has been very publicly accumulating in the past few years (and hardly secret before that). However, laws are remarkably effective at increasing health, reducing violence, and creating most of the things that make our lives rewarding. Places that have a lot of people and no laws tend heavily towards despotic rule, and despots do not typically treat minorities well, except when they themselves are a minority.
The rise of the rule of law has accompanied (and likely is somewhat causal) of less violence—compared to people in hunter-gather societies, ancient societies, and even recently past societies, most of the contemporary world is significantly less violent. In the middle ages, the chances that you died from murder was something like 50%. Want to talk about minorities? Before race-based slavery, you had non-race-based slavery, extremely brutal punishment for crimes which the disempowered only had a slight chance of being guilty of, control and suppression of women’s sexuality and individuality via things like witch trials, not to mention frequent mass suppression of other religions and races. The specifics vary, but most large civilizations (perhaps all) did those things to horrible extents. (See Pinkerton’s The Better Angels of Our Nature for the decline in violence. I credit food stability as much as law, but law and property rights are often related to food stability.)
Certainly, you could argue that the rise of law lead to European states that could project power successfully into Africa and multiply the existing slave trade, creating the holocaust of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. That’s certainly possible. As far as justice goes, maybe that nets out as a loss for law. But I suspect there is no way to make a real determination about how much law is to blame there—it’s more a statement of your general faith in law or lack thereof than one of the reality of the historical circumstances. (Sorry for the convoluted sentences.)
Vis-a-vis the oppression by other means argument, I think that’s also hard to tease out. As I said about the EPA, we tend to forget past successes, and most of us didn’t experience pre-civil right America. Certainly mass incarceration is…well, any word I use feels trivial in the face of the reality. But I’m not yet convinced that very many black people would be better off in 1940s America than today. There’s also the question of the many African Americans who have thrived in America since–and because of—-civil rights. Do we dismiss them as insignificant in the face of the many blacks who have not thrived? Is there anything desirable about forced segregation—bathrooms, drinking fountains, schools, restaurants, bars, etc.? As much as their political capital and life choices (self-segregation by surburbanization) create racist outcomes, I suspect if a black person were to walk into 99% of all-white congregations in America, they would be welcome. Is that not progress?
Civil rights is an unfinished project, in urgent need of national (and local—especially local) attention. But to convince me law is the problem, you’ll need to find an example where lawlessness has been beneficial in a broad way.
“The rise of the rule of law has accompanied (and likely is somewhat causal) of less violence—compared to people in hunter-gather societies, ancient societies, and even recently past societies, most of the contemporary world is significantly less violent.”
That’s Stephen Pinker’s argument. I’m really not convinced by the hunter-gatherer argument. There are small-scale societies that are relatively peaceful, I think.
Here’s an article about hunter-gatherer violence. Looks like it’s a very contentious issue without a firm consensus, best as I can tell.
First, a smidge of philosophy. Then I’ll write a second part addressing London’s specific points and reasoning. So if this does nothing for anyone whatsoever, fear not!
Kant argued that any possibility of Law is contingent upon the threat of violence. Do this, or else. He used La Fontaine’s The Wolf and the Lamb as a jumping point, the moral of which is:
“Might is right: the verdict goes to the strong. / To prove the point won’t take me very long” (trans. James Michie, Viking, 1979)
Kant’s assessment of the fable was that a law is good only to the extent that it is backed by force.
I find this extra interesting, personally… that he used this fable to make that argument. Because, to apply this to the fable, the law would then be: thou shalt not muddy beverages or speak ill of others or, for that matter, permit one’s siblings to speak ill of others. However, this is not the structure of the parable itself. These laws do not exist in isolation on the horizon that is before the encounter but rather follow the one after the other, *as the encounter itself,* in an anticipatory attempt on the part of the aggressor to explain and give meaning to the violence which is to come. That’s to say: the Lamb is not penalized because he is guilty, but rather he is guilty because he is penalized. The law is then the mask of reason worn by violence. Its function, its ruse of rationality, its “reason,” is to designate its lambs as other, to create, prime and position its victims.
Now, consider all the recent internet memes showing young black men with their hands up — labelled “Thugs” — and white rednecks with confederate flags and guns — labelled “Patriots.”
One other interesting tidbit: the Marquis de Sade was vehemently against the death penalty because the State could neither love nor hate, so why should it kill?
We tend to consider crimes of passion much more heinous than state sanctioned violence. But I damn well think that might be a ruse of reason.
Be back on a tick to address London’s reasoning and points specifically, but I wanted to throw this out there cuz I think it’s interesting…
So I lied. I should have included this quote above, too. It’s from Rousseau’s 4th Chapter of “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”:
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
If Pinker is wrong about hunter-gatherers, I don’t think it undermines the larger point. Small groups have a very different dynamic than ones where direct consensus can’t be built. They’re sufficiently different from large societies that we couldn’t model ours on one, even if it was an Eden-like perfect society. The change in violence in large civilizations over time makes the case of dramatically diminishing violence as societies become more urban and structured (aka, law-focused).
Well…it might be an argument for moving towards smaller scale societies rather than nation states. Which obviously isn’t likely to happen…
Large scale states governed by laws seem to cut down on certain kinds of violence. They’ve also sort of made it possible for us to blow up the earth, and of course there’s the first half of the twentieth century…and the international slave trade, which wouldn’t have been possible without large scale imperial nations.
The earth is definitely unusually peaceful now. Does that mean we’ll move towards more and more peace and law. Maybe, I guess. Or maybe not; future’s hard to predict.
I think a problem with Pinker’s argument is it only takes one Cuban Missle Crisis style apocalypse to change the math a bit. It’s not clear that the end state of our civilization is peaceful utopia rather than kabooom.
“Does that mean we’ll move towards more and more peace and law. Maybe, I guess. Or maybe not; future’s hard to predict.”
I definitely agree. It’s super hard to tease out causality from history.
Pinker’s data shows that despite all the wars, the first half of the 20th century was less violent than the preceding years, interestingly.
There’s certainly a compelling school of thought about having more local governance, but in my experience (which I don’t have data on), that just allows worse discrimination of outsiders. I don’t think it’s really a viable alternative to large government with all of the many flaws involved. SPLC posted a op-ed/article on Politico (I think) about how the South skewed American democracy towards negative exceptionalism. We’d be like Canada, if Southern states didn’t have a vote. I think that argument overstates the divide in racism between the north and south, but it does get at the smaller states argument. If the Confederacy had won and the US shattered into five or six different nations, does anyone think African Americans (or African Confederates) would be better off now?
Hi London, A few things…
“laws are remarkably effective at increasing health, reducing violence, and creating most of the things that make our lives rewarding.”
I’m not sure that’s law so much as technology. And laws prevent technology from being equitably distributed. Two examples come to mind: 1) the high rate of infant mortality for black babies in the US and 2) Gore preventing AIDS medication to be exported at cost . The latter was actually first covered in Mother Jones while he was still VP, before everything was online. But that example really hit me as a younger person, and it is a great example of why I’d say “anarchy is” as opposed to “should be,” which is where you and I might be missing each other. Gore’s actions were in violation of International law, in support of corporate interests. And yet!
“Places that have a lot of people and no laws tend heavily towards despotic rule, and despots do not typically treat minorities well, except when they themselves are a minority.”
I’d argue that in some of these countries, this is a consequence of the history of colonialism. In other countries, I’d argue that there are, in fact, a great many laws, more than the US, I would imagine.
You trace non-race-based slavery, suppression of women, etc. But none of this was extra-legal.
I suppose it’s a question of whose laws applied to whom. Unfortunately, US History is a bunch of rich, white, Protestant men passing laws for everybody else. That doesn’t seem even remotely democratic to me. And for all the gains made as pertains to civil liberties, certain people’s rights are upheld and others still are not.
Finally, I’m a bit confused by your attribution of black civil rights gains being made by legislators. To my mind, they were made by law breakers, not law makers.
Of course, you could point to a case like Brown v. Board of Education, but I would urge you to consider what an insane amount of courage was demanded from that busload of black kids, the violence they endured. I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures. It looks like pure, unadulterated hell. The frothing hate directed at them… The police and press were there; no one was killed. But I wouldn’t say those kids were “protected.” But the white kids were. And no white kid was held accountable for their behavior that day, I imagine.
All civil rights struggles demand that the most oppressed stand up to their oppressor. That often times means breaking laws, as laws are one means by which people are oppressed. And if not by way of the law, then by way of unequal application of the law, or by simply refusing to uphold a law. With the latter scenario I always think of rape as a go-to example. It’s illegal. But is it?
Finally, I don’t think *anyone* would be better off in the 1940s. I hope that’s obvious. But I do think you may be failing to see that current laws only benefit some at the expense of others, and that there really isn’t any “reason” or “right” for this, save “might” and violence.
Hi Nix,
Those are all valid points.
In the case of technology vs. law, I don’t think you can disentangle them. It’s actually a problem with any analysis of the impact of law because law is so deeply embedded in society once society grows beyond a fairly small population point. Historically, we know that the blossoming of technology happened in societies that had strong rule of law, particularly as the rule of law became greater. This was true in China, in Mongol kingdoms, and the Europe. Technological progress happens in places where there are strong state institutions. I can’t think of any exceptions. Maybe Noah can pull up something like the hunter-gatherer article showing a society that depended on clan-bonds instead of legal institutions, yet developed some great agricultural innovation.
Your statement about none of the abuses I talked about in earlier history being illegal does raise a good question, but not necessarily the one you’ve asked: what would a large society without rule of law look like? The examples we have are failed states or despotic rule (which are often the same, but not always). I’m unaware of any society that got rid of law without collapsing (or rather, collapsed and as a consequence, had no rule of law). Colonialism might explain Somalia (although, I’m somewhat skeptical—it feels a little too in sync with ideology when the reality feels much more messy), but it doesn’t explain per-colonial collapsed states.
Your Gore comment suggests that you think in order for law to be non-anarchical, it must be applied without criminality. Gore breaking the law, to me, means we have imperfect institutions and laws are not divinely enforced. It’s not the same thing as having no laws. Laws are, so far as I can tell, largely biased towards the status quo, reflect the prejudices of the population, unjust, unequally applied,… and necessary.
I just don’t see any evidence that non-law, or dramatically reduced law, would make anybody’s life better. It’s a de facto libertarian argument, in which human nature somehow rescues us from the evils of institutions. But the evils of institutions are reflections of human nature. Getting rid of the institutions only frees the people who most abuse power to abuse more.
It’s worth noting that when rule of law begins to break down, people who have a vote or say in their society always push for more rule of law. I suspect, other than food security, rule of law is the most important thing a government can deliver to its citizens. Where America is failing is not due to too much law, but too little for some segments of our population.
______
Just as a side note, because it has too much potential to derail the conversation on law as an institution, when you talk about the non-enforcement of rape laws, what do you see as a solution? Getting rid of them? Reducing the standard of evidence from “beyond a reasonable doubt”? More enforcement? Prosecutors bringing charges even when they think they’ll lose? I’m not trying to trivialize what you’re saying—rape can devastate lives, all the way til the end, and the legal system not only has historically engaged in victim-blaming, but struggles to find the proper blend between justice and aiding the victim (two not necessarily congruent goals). However, when I think about it, I can’t think of any answers that would make the problem significantly better (beyond society changing how it talks about sex, the messages it gives boys about sex, etc.).
Hey London, A quick hit before I answer the other stuff in a day or two. Why is Gore breaking International law, and costing who knows how many people their lives, in front of the entire world, for corporate profit (!) an “imperfect institution,” whereas homeless people loitering are law breakers. We live in a society that doesn’t let certain people sleep and use restrooms. And we’re so habituated to it we don’t even see it. And by “it” I mean how deeply uncivilized such behavior is. Meanwhile, Gore gets to prevent vitally necessary medication from entering South Africa and the consequence of that is what? An ACT UP protest? An article in MoJo? And some shit in The Guardian of all places when he finally runs for POTUS. Ho, ho, ho. I see.
If a law is to be applicable to anyone, it must be applicable to everyone — except in certain instances wherein there is a legitimate claim for a law to be waived. And these exist. I’ve got no problem obeying (some) laws pending they apply to everyone. But, and this hits on the rape aside, you can’t expect me to obey a law (like respecting the bodily sovereignty of another) when that law only prevents me from action, but doesn’t actually protect me from the actions of others.
So, back on topic — Does the US have laws that equally impact black and white populations. Nope!
If we want to hold Bree Newsome accountable for her actions, we must surely hold those with more power than her accountable for theirs… like trigger-happy cops and citizens who like to carry guns, just for an easy starters.
PS — I don’t think there’s any way for a nation-state to be anarchic. But we are also talking of at least three different “anarchy”s and I’d like to parse those out… in the next couple days. :)
Jimmy Johnson’s piece today speaks to the issue of law and racism too, I think.
Hey Nix,
I need to just induldge in a quick answer also. I don’t disagree with you about the need for more equality in enforcement (although equality in enforcement carries other dangers, on the individual, rather than societal level). But I think the problem lies in specific laws and enforcement practices instead of the institution itself. Law and law enforcement are human institutions, full of flaws. We can’t have unbiased laws because we are inescapably biased. People are very poor thinkers, when it comes down to it. But the institution of law is hugely important both for making society function (e.g., basic things such as water service and roadway behavior need to be fairly uniform and codified) and for limiting the (abuse of) power by the empowered.
We may not have gotten to civil rights laws without people breaking laws in protest, but they took those risks because they knew the law offered the best chance to limit their suffering and changing the future.
I’ll look forward to your three degrees of anarchy. :)
Nix — Kant also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions.
From what I know about Newsome and the civil rights movement, which I lived through, including the riots after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — in a mixed, then black neighborhood, I might add — my take is that you’ve aggrandized her “risk” to ridiculous proportions compared to her counterparts in the past.
In short, according to Kant, your assertion is a theoretical illusion.
If, hypothetically, I was governor of South Carolina, I would have sent a couple of state troopers -or whomever appropriate under my chain of command- out the day of the murders to take that thing down – and taken responsibility for the illegal act.
(If I was in her place, it’s hardly the first time I’d have been heard from on the issue of the state officially flying the Racist Banner, for that matter.)
The need for law and order, however, is a thing, and I’m with J. Lamb on this one, if I read him correctly. It’s probably needful to arrest Ms. Newsome for her civil disobedience -or there’s no end to it, ever, with keeping order on the capitol grounds- but if charges are quickly dropped, I’d say justice is served on all levels – and pragmatic concerns seen to appropriately, to boot.
R. Maheras: I was actually critiquing Kant, so invoking him as an authority doesn’t do much for me. I don’t really worship, fwiw. But with that said…
Noah: I really loved Jimmy Johnson’s post. And I’d say the structure (I don’t know what to call it; it’s like a psychological trick or ruse) that he describes in these lines:
“For this to work without souring an audience that largely believes it isn’t racist or, at least, not about prisons and crime, Black criminality must be understood as a matter of fact rather than as a matter of racial caste formation. Or, in other words, Black folk must be understood as criminals rather than mass incarceration being understood as the criminalization of Black people.”
Is very similar to what I was trying to describe by way of La Fontaine/Kant in my comment here:
“These laws do not exist in isolation on the horizon that is before the encounter but rather follow the one after the other, *as the encounter itself,* in an anticipatory attempt on the part of the aggressor to explain and give meaning to the violence which is to come. That’s to say: the Lamb is not penalized because he is guilty, but rather he is guilty because he is penalized. The law is then the mask of reason worn by [sovereign] violence. Its function, its ruse of rationality, its “reason,” is to designate its lambs as other, to create, prime and position its victims.”
The law does not exist before the encounter. The law is invoked as the encounter, itself. Or to put it bluntly, the American slave trade didn’t start because Black people broke any White people laws (as if they could). They were taken and laws were then invented to explain that. Similarly, certain classes will be accused of “looking guilty” no matter what the hell they’re doing; and we won’t really lock up certain people, no matter what they do. There is an un-prisonable class. We note that they break laws and then we say it’s just a shame and the world is an imperfect place. But what can we do? Too bad.
Law, in the way I’m using it, is much more about who you can penalize and who you cannot. And keep in mind, “certain things” only happen to “certain people.”
London: Before 3 anarchy-s (which could be quite short, due to this)… I think my lack of faith and incredulity in the face of the law is because we actually don’t operate off of it at all. We use law to cover over and excuse something else. We invoke it only when it suits “us,” a dominant, collective identity that is assumed to represent everyone, like whenever people say “the American Taxpayer” as if that’s someone, and they know them. I’d say our cultural narratives/assumptions and what we have been led to believe is possible/conceivable and is not possible/conceivable within the world dictates who/what we believe in instances concerning law-breaking and guilt/innocence. And that’s *before* any evidence.
I actually saw it a lot both grading papers and reading lit criticism. What people won’t see or will see in a text often has nothing whatsoever to do with the what the text actually said. I have countless examples. It’s actually a bit frightening.
I think we’re like kids who believe in Santa Claus because the alternative is that your parents have duped you… which would be unthinkable.
But with regards to communally agreed upon guidelines for civic conduct, clean water, means of travel, equitable/rational dispersal of resources (not cuz I’m nice, but because making a pile in one place creates a gap in another), etc. Oh, yes. I’m for that. But I’m not sure that’s the same thing.
Finally, Nation-States: I don’t like them. I have no great solution as to how we might dismantle them. And the larger they are territorially, the scarier they seem to me. How could there ever be a universal application of law over such vast territory? It’s like I almost think the law is a scam… or anarchy already. (that later)
This is rather amazing. Either there’s some passage by Immanuel Kant that I’m unaware of, and that Google is powerless to find (if that is in fact that case, I abjectly apologize in advance for what follows), or this is what’s happened:
1. Nix66 read the first paragraph of Jacques Derrida’s Rogues (Vouyons)*.
2. Nix66 misunderstood Derrida’s reference to Kant, who (unless, to reiterate, there’s something I’ve missed) never wrote anything about La Fontaine’s fable. (The speculation about what La Fontaine’s “fabulous morality” might “teach” us is all Derrida. When Derrida refers to Kant’s “interpretation,” he means Kant’s interpretation of law, not of La Fontaine.)
3. Nix66 then decided, with that as their foundation, that they were now qualified to “critique” what they call “Kant.”
‘And the larger they [nation states] are territorially, the scarier they seem to me. How could there ever be a universal application of law over such vast territory?’ I suspect that the vaguely articulated horror in these sentences goes deeper in Nix66 than anything about racial injustice, per se. (Basically, I think, a horror of generalization, since it denies that they’re as infinitely essentially special as they like to think they are; which in practice means essentially better than at least some people – though they almost certainly wouldn’t put it that way – because nobody, or at least hardly anybody, sincerely thinks of themselves as the very worst person in the world.)
* Available here: https://ces260jh.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/derrida-rogues-two-essays-on-reason.pdf
Damn it: Voyous, not “Vouyons.” Sorry!
Nix uses she/her pronouns.
“I suspect that the vaguely articulated horror in these sentences goes deeper in Nix66 than anything about racial injustice, per se. (Basically, I think, a horror of generalization, since it denies that they’re as infinitely essentially special as they like to think they are.”
That seems unnecessarily aggressive. There are plenty of reasons to worry about nation states and the law, and those worries can certainly be congruent with concerns for marginalized populations. No real need for half-assed psychologizing…
Thank you for supplying the correct pronouns.
It was unnecessarily aggressive. I apologize for the language but not the content.
There are plenty of reasons to worry about everything, but some prioritized worries are more suspicious than others, and anyway, in the text I quoted, Nix66 didn’t just say she was worried about the nation state.
There is nothing half-assed about my psychologizing.
“There is nothing half-assed about my psychologizing.”
We can agree to disagree. Maybe compromise on three-quarters-assed?
@ R. Maheras
‘For example, people living in Selma back in the early 1960s, where King’s famous march to Montgomery began would not recognize it now.’
This is true, but you seem to think it’s true in a good way, when in fact it’s true in a horrible way: http://www.salon.com/2015/03/15/americas_third_world_the_marchers_have_gone_but_selma_is_still_mired_in_poverty/
Graham Clarke: You are absolutely right. It was from Derrida’s “Rogues.” So Kant never said this?
I don’t think I misread the text. I worked on it intensively, albeit just on that text. I can quote the passage — which is in the intro — so again, you are right there.
Let me know if that invalidates my speech entirely. It was not my intention to misrepresent or twist Kant, and I am really sorry for that if I just did.
PS — By “invalidate my speech entirely” I mean that I don’t see the point in continuing to communicate if I’m just an irrationally frightened special snowflake girl who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Which I have heard before. And I can shut up. And that’s OK.
But I was citing a paper I worked on and presented on quite a bit, publicly, so I wasn’t trying to be sloppy or lazy.
But yeah, that’s definitely the text I was referring to.
fwiw, I don’t think making a mistake (if you made one) invalidates your points (or anyone’s points.) Even Kant made mistakes, would be my guess…
Kant never said anything that can be summarized as: “Kant’s assessment of the fable was that a law is good only to the extent that it is backed by force.”
It would indeed be absurd to use La Fontaine’s fable to illustrate that “law is good only to the extent that it is backed with force” – but Kant never said anything about La Fontaine’s fable, period.
So that part of your earlier comment, at least, would certainly seem to be invalidated.
Kant did say that law – more precisely: “Recht,” that is, roughly, “right” (noun, not adjective) in the legal sense – and “authorization to use coercion” are the same thing.* But Kant would have considered absurd the suggestion that what the wolf does in La Fontaine’s fable is “right.” (To begin, he would have pointed out that you can’t describe as “external constraint that can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with universal laws” a situation where one party – the wolf – changes the rules whenever he wants to.)
You seem to be assuming that Kant agreed with Derrida that law is arbitrary – which he didn’t – except that he thought this was a good thing. If you happen to want a major philosopher who did take roughly that position, he does in fact exist, and his name is Joseph de Maistre.
As for not wanting to be sloppy or lazy – well, I don’t know what else to call it when you attribute a position to Kant, when in fact you’re (incorrectly) paraphrasing an attribution by somebody else, and you’ve evidently never bothered to track down the original text.
* https://books.google.at/books?id=GcEmAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT46
OK. I stand corrected. Kant never said anything of the kind. My apologies. It wasn’t my intent to mislead anyone or make false claims.
Derrida’s phrasing is: “This second interpretation was, for example, Kant’s, and it did not necessarily represent the point of view of the the wolf. Nor, for that matter, that of lamb.”
I accept the accusation of laziness here. Fwiw, I was in a circumstance in which I assumed that such an error would be caught and corrected. That was obviously a mistake and that doesn’t excuse my error.
Sorry.
Well, my apologies for not saying all of the above much more politely. And it’s probably a safe bet that I make that error vastly more often than you’ve made an error of attribution.
“Even Kant made mistakes”
Kant’s entire philosophy is one mistake after another.
FWIW, Kant also thought (apparently) that it was okay to kill bastards, that masturbation seemed like a worse vice than murder, etc. http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/kant-on-killing-bastards-on.html
(Disclaimer: I haven’t read the Metaphysics of Morals, where those passages come from)
Worse crime than murdering oneself according to that article. But thanks for the link – humorously educational.
@ Jones
‘Kant’s entire philosophy is one mistake after another… I haven’t read the Metaphysics of Morals…’
This is either very good (perhaps too subtle) intentional satire on the fatuously pretentious ignorance of today’s college graduating (can’t exactly call them educated) class, or depressingly typical unintentional satire.
I’d go on, but a better writer than I am already has, so I’ll now defer to him:
American academics have a habit of skipping to the slur with disconcerting speed, as I found out a couple of years ago when I mentioned my love for Wallace Stevens’ poetry to a Film professor. She winced, then said, “Wasn’t he a racist?”
She didn’t really know or care whether Stevens was a racist. As I realized later, that wince meant that she hadn’t read Stevens, didn’t want to be shown up and so had simply reached for the nearest available non sequitur. The notion that Stevens might be a racist AND a great poet, just as Dworkin might be a fat loon AND a crucial figure in feminist intellectual history, is simply beyond our Beige compatriots.
The habit has sifted so far down it’s affected the dialogue of disaster films, as I noticed while watching a bunch of unconvincingly attractive pseudo-nerds try to survive the fastest Ice Age ever in the Day After Tomorrow. There’s a great scene where a male and female nerd, stranded in the NYC Public Library, are arguing about whether to burn Beyond Good and Evil for warmth. The guy says, “Nietzsche was the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century!” The woman replies, “Nietzsche was a chauvinist who was in love with his sister!” It gave me a nightmare vision of what Lite Beer Super Bowl ads will be like in a few years, after everybody and their dog has been to grad school.
In the mating rituals of healthy people — that is, people who aren’t like Andrea Dworkin— these stylized collisions about ideology, usually personified by clashes about an historical figure, are usually no more than flirtation. That’s literally true in Day After Tomorrow; in the last scene of the movie, the male and female nerd are holding hands in the rescue helicopter, their Nietzsche dispute remembered, if at all, as the first scene of a third-hand screwball comedy they’re using as their romance template.
http://exiledonline.com/exterminate-the-men-honoring-andrea-dworkin-a-feminist-who-meant-it-and-paid/
It was (mostly) a joke, Graham, and an excuse to link to Schwitzgebel’s post. I haven’t read the Metaphysics of Morals, but I have read the Groundwork, Prolegomena, the first Critique and various other bits and pieces — enough that the views Schwitzgebel ascribes to him sound like the sort of thing Kant would write. Go Hume or Go Home is my motto (not really).
But if you want to discuss my education level, please let’s do. I graduated with First Class Honours and University Medal from Sydney, got 1st, 3rd and 4th year prize in philosophy while I was there, got a perfect GRE, went to Rutgers (it was #1 leiter-ranked when I started, at least), and finished off with a Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship.
Just sayin’.
(Also — the solution to that dilemma in The Day After Tomorrow? Don’t burn Nietzsche, burn the guy who calls him the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century)
Hey Nix,
Your comment on your students misreading speaks to a much larger reality that is stating to get teased out by research into decision making, memory, and cognitive biases, which happens to be my main intellectual interest of the past year or two. If you’re not familiar with the research, its very interesting…and a little bit (maybe even a lot) frightening. Our brains are poor at thinking in complex ways. We can do stunning analytical work, as shown in countless scientific and technological endeavors, but when it comes to social interactions we’re passionate about, we’re utter crap. Yet, when it comes to our own personal philosophies, theories, and understanding of the world, we assume everybody else is suffering from biases, not us. (I can be more specific here, but I don’t want to go too far off topic.)
Which means that all of our systems are influenced more by biases than facts, because we are inescapably biased as well. So nation states and the institution of the law are full of problems. It doesn’t mean that they are the source of those problems, nor that replacing them is more likely to create a better world.
In the end, I suspect this enjoyable discussion cannot be resolved because our understanding of the law and nation-states reflect our cognitive biases more than reality. Just as your students could not get past what they wanted/needed the texts to read, we will assert our wants and needs onto the facts. All of critical theory is pretty much bullshit: it’s not that any given observation is wrong, but it is completely outside the analysis our brains do well. The most brilliant social theorists can’t move past the inability to test their theories. We have data and facts, but most of our thinking about them involves assumptions and untestable theories to hold it together. We assume we are right, but the people who disagree with us also assume they are right. Neither pro- nor opponent can create a test or proof to determine the factuality of an assertion, so we’re left fighting with jabs against the armor of personal biases. (Research so far suggests that knowing more about a topic insulates you from the truth more than it reveals it, incidentally, when dealing with subjects we’re invested in. Karl Rove’s inability to accept Obama’s win in 2012 being the most hilarious example.)
Which leads me to what may be the more classically conservative position—without a proposed alternative, the Santa Claus is the idea that a paradise awaits us if only we can get rid of those pesky laws and create non-states. You’ve argued well enough to make me pause and consider that my ideas about law as a vital ingredient might be wrong, but if you’re correct, I can’t get past my biases to see it.
I’m still looking forward to whatever thoughts you have on anarchy.
Some random other thoughts and reactions:
Re: your comment that “the law does not exist before the encounter,” strikes me as—I’m sorry—but the worst kind of critical theory bullshit. It is definitely true that the laws were changed as mass slavery reached the new world to accommodate it, but in the modern context, the law precedes the encounter. You’re confusing implementation with procedure. You might think the two don’t matter, but we have ample counter-evidence. Places with different laws have different outcomes. To prove your assertion, you need to show some evidence that regardless of the law, the outcome is always the same. You’re a smart and thoughtful thinker, but that feels it comes from an unexamined cynicism instead of analysis. Maybe we’re talking past each other on this kind of point because we’re making radically different assumptions about something.
Re: “How could there ever be a universal application of law over such vast territory?” I have precisely the opposite fear. I hate federalism because I don’t like the way rights can be effectively nullified by reactionary states. Small nations don’t have good records for serving their citizens well. We can hold up the Scandinavian nations as ideals and even recognize that part of the reason they are able to create this more ideal forms of governance is their small size and relative homogeneity, but looking at small nations as a whole does not give one faith them. It seems unlikely that the U.S. minus the Confederate states would be a more egalitarian, more minority-friendly state (more Canadian), but without the rest of the U.S., the Confederate states would be a much worse place for its minorities and women. Is that really the compromise we want?
@ Jones
‘But if you want to discuss my education level, please let’s do. I graduated with First Class Honours and University Medal from Sydney, got 1st, 3rd and 4th year prize in philosophy while I was there, got a perfect GRE, went to Rutgers (it was #1 leiter-ranked when I started, at least), and finished off with a Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship.’
That’s your credentials. You seem to have missed the point of the remark you’re replying to.
‘(Also — the solution to that dilemma in The Day After Tomorrow? Don’t burn Nietzsche, burn the guy who calls him the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century)’
And of course this little piece of Babbitry is also “(mostly) a joke” – in this case the general anti-intellectualism is perhaps tinged with some Analytic-trained hostility to a more important tradition – except that doesn’t matter, because jokes are what people use to say what they believe most strongly, but don’t have the courage to seriously defend. And when enough people tell the same joke, it has the same effect as all of them saying the same thing seriously, without anybody having to take responsibility.
@ London Crockett
‘I have precisely the opposite fear. I hate federalism because I don’t like the way rights can be effectively nullified by reactionary states.’
Yup.
Side note: I think there’s very good reason to believe that the United States would be a more liberal place without the former Confederacy. (Though dear God, let’s hope not like the Canadians, who tend toward the bad parts of Bismarckian technocracy as well as the good ones; and everybody looks compared to our treatment of black people, but ask the Quèbécois – especially those who can remember before the 1970s – and the First Nations how minority friendly they are.) (This should not be taken as saying we’d be better off without the former Confederacy: Besides the injustice to the black and poor white southerners, who didn’t ask to be ruled by a barbaric oligarchy, we’d have less influence in the world, and suffer from having such a dysfunctional country on our border.)
(And that’s assuming the rest of the union didn’t simply disintegrate after the precedent of secession was set.)
* “everybody looks compared to our treatment of black people” should have been “everybody looks good compared to our treatment of black people.”
Oy vey, Graham.
Sorry if I understood the point of you saying ‘the fatuously pretentious ignorance of today’s college graduating (can’t exactly call them educated) class’. I took the point to be ‘the fatuously pretentious ignorance of today’s college graduating (can’t exactly call them educated) class’ — i.e. that that described me (on the basis of my joke). I also take it that you now look at my two comments here and see them as evidence of not-exactly-educated, ignorant anti-intellectualism, in which case, well, God bless your interpretive creativity, sir.
FWIW, I quite like, actually, a large chunk of Nietzsche’s philosophy — the nihilism, the deflationism, the psychologism, the anti-metaphysics, his overall project of debunking whole areas of philosophy — and especially the Genealogy of Morals, which I see as an important precursor to the recent tradition of empirical moral and religious psychology. I agree with (e.g.) Phillipa Foot, Brian Leiter and Dan Dennett that the Anglo-American tradition has a lot to learn from him.
I’ve also found his prose style, incidentally, unreadable ever since my fatuously pretentious adolescence, which is the only age, really, to read him. I did at least read every single book he ever published (except for the apocryphal My Sister and I). But, then, an anti-intellectual Babbitt would say that, wouldn’t they?
On the other hand, I make no apologies for sincerely, literally thinking we should burn Jake Gyllenhaal for fuel, especially if we ever find ourselves trapped in the New York Library, menaced by a quasi-animate cold snap. There, I finally had the courage to defend that view and stop joking about it. Like, what was up with that Prince of Persia movie?
Sorry, nix and Noah, for hijacking the thread. I’ll let this last comment speak for itself and then shut up…at least until I’m insulted again. In other words, I’ll see you guys again in another couple of comments. (Seriously, though, I’ll try to shut up now).
Graham wrote: “This is true, but you seem to think it’s true in a good way, when in fact it’s true in a horrible way”
You ignore my point to Nix. Nix seems to think that Newsome’s act was as courageous as similar acts by civil rights activists in the 1960s. My point is that such an assertion is nonsense, given the conditions in the South circa 1962 compared to conditions there today.
Selma’s problems are no different than problems in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee or elsewhere: Too many Democrats, and not enough Republicans, in the governing body.
Democrats — more specifically liberals — believe they are always right on every issue, and they routinely justify everything they do by touting “We are on the right side of history.” The problem is, liberals are NOT always right. No one is. And they also tend to be lousy administrators because they simply can’t say no to special interest groups. The reason for this is they tend to govern using their emotions, rather than an objective reality. Of course, Republicans, and specifically conservatives, have the opposite problem, and they tend to come across as uncaring and aloof.
And while one can occasionally get a conservative to grudgingly admit they are wrong, getting a liberal to admit they are wrong is damn near impossible.
My hometown of Chicago is a perfect example. Despite the obscene murder rate for the past 40 years or so, and despite the fact that blacks on the west and south sides are far worse off now than they were BEFORE the Civil Rights Act of 1964, no Chicago liberal I know of has ever publicly come forth and said, “This (or that) policy of ours was wrong. We screwed up.” What happens is they blame everything else but their own failed policies. Obama, who comes from that Chicago political mold, does the same thing. He lectures and blames, never taking responsibility for anything.
Democrats can, and do, like to say “The Republicans do it too.” Yet that’s nothing more than an extension of the blame game.
This is why I can’t stand partisan politics, and why I so strongly support the creation of an Independent Party, Pragmatic Party, or whatever. In the interim, I will continue to split my ticket. I think in most cases, a pluralistic government, if they can avoid gridlock, will do the right things AND make the hard choices.
@ Jones
‘Sorry if I understood the point of you saying ‘the fatuously pretentious ignorance of today’s college graduating (can’t exactly call them educated) class’. I took the point to be ‘the fatuously pretentious ignorance of today’s college graduating (can’t exactly call them educated) class’ — i.e. that that described me (on the basis of my joke).’
I was describing you, and you still don’t seem to have realized the problem in responding to my assertion – that today’s college graduates are not necessarily well educated – with a list of the places you graduated from, plus grades and prizes.
@ R. Maheras
That’s a whole lot of words with which to say “I’m a libertarian.”
What could I do to be better educated, Graham?
Serious question.
I guess you could read The Metaphysics of Morals.
Seriously, I don’t know how educated you are, so I can’t answer the question. Let’s say you’re superbly educated and your opining like a callow undergraduate is just an affectation – that’s not good either. On which note, I previously missed this:
‘…ever since my fatuously pretentious adolescence, which is the only age, really, to read him [Nietzsche]. But, then, an anti-intellectual Babbitt would say that, wouldn’t they?’
Yes, that is exactly what an anti-intellectual Babbitt would say.
Sorry, forgot to put an ellipsis in the middle there.
Okay, Graham, well now you’re making me feel really shitty about myself and the meaninglessness of my academic achievements and qualifications, so, mission accomplished. I’ll actually shut up now and go and be depressed offline, and, no, I’m not joking about any of that.
Thanks for the good times!
I’m pretty sure you’re joking about all of that, but if not, I’m sincerely sorry for causing you distress.
It’s not clear to me how I might have managed to do it. It isn’t as though I’ve proven, or could prove, under these circumstances, that your scholarly achievements are anything less than superlative.
Russ, thanks for stepping in to provide a demonstration of London’s point about cognitive biases.
Well, that got uglier than a typical HU discussion.
Graham, Jones responded to your assertions that he’s uneducated by mentioning at length relevant opinions and readings in philosophy. You responded by just reasserting that he’s an ignoramous. You do this all the time. It’s like a bizarre fandom of one; no one is qualified to offer opinions unless they happen to have your particular list of interests and readings.
You know what’s anti-intellectual? Sneering at everyone who’s got a different perspective because you’re so sure you’ve got nothing to learn from anyone. Seriously, you’ve apologized a couple of times here for being a jerk, which is cool, but it would really create much less painful comments threads if you could start out maybe assuming that other people might have something worthwhile to say.
And sneering at people for making light jokes because that makes them insufficiently serious..that’s really an incredibly crappy thing to do. People use humor for all sorts of reasons, among other things to try not to turn a conversation about Kant into some sort of referendum on someone’s soul. Refusing to get a joke doesn’t mean you have a superior intellect; it just means you have no sense of humor and/or are being a prat. You have a lot of interesting things to say, but I really wish you could find some way to say them without being such an aggressive jerk. It’s just not necessary.
“Russ, thanks for stepping in to provide a demonstration of London’s point about cognitive biases.” This is where HU needs a like button. Or maybe a Ha! button. Definitely a Ha! button.
@ Noah
‘it would really create much less painful comments threads if you could start out maybe assuming that other people might have something worthwhile to say.’
I would never assume otherwise.
‘Refusing to get a joke doesn’t mean you have a superior intellect’
Unless it’s a joke about something you think is very important (say, race).
OK. So I see that Noah just addressed Graham, but he did so as I was finishing a comment to him, myself.
I won’t be repeating this, holding any sort of grudge or bitterness, and I don’t think gang-ups are good for anyone. But this is co-arisal as opposed to a pile-on, and I do want to comment on this.
Graham Clark: Why *do* you attack specific people? Why *do* you personalize? Why *do* you think you have greater psychological insight into everyone on this thread than they do? And why do you think being an overly-aggressive, self-aggrandized, bombastic, know-it-all screaming ninny of a dick-measurer is somehow less of a sin than an error of attribution which is easily caught, corrected, explained, and accounted for *without* theatrics?
It’s super weird to me that you apologize for being overly aggressive and then continue doing it. So you apologize again. That not a “whoops.” That’s a pattern.
I know that I can get overly exuberant and carried away. What about you?
You aren’t any fun to interact with, Graham, and no one owes you an explanation of their existence.
These exchanges should be fruitful and fun, as heated and intense as they get, and even should get. Because why argue unless you have a stake?
And as far as blaming younger generations for what you perceive to be their lack of “real” education, whose fault is that? Your position is psychotic, self-cannibalizing (from the perspective of the species), hubristic, asinine, and depressingly cliche. The children are always to blame for the old people’s messes. Riiiiighhht. Kids today! (yawn)
I have all sorts of things I could ponder or explain or try to figure out on this thread through dialogue with others. From London’s overly-confident diss of critical theory, further consideration of the law (which is definitely still possible despite my slip-up), where these cognitive biases come from, why I as a white woman would be personally invested in ending white supremacy, to even your accusation that I consider myself special and thereby fear the large nation-state… That accusation: Maybe, actually. And maybe there’s an argument for trying to deal with people as unique entities instead of discreet generalities.
But I no longer feel inclined to do that at all. Why would I? Why would anyone? Life’s too short. Honestly, when I look at this thread I just hear “I Hate Danger” by Bikini Kill. And that’s not a rational argument; that’s definitely a bias/old association with certain forms of engaging and a silly song from my youth about entitled, aggressive men… but that is how I feel, and even if it doesn’t matter to you, it most certainly matters to me.
Anyway, two things I actually do want to say to…
JONES: 1) Every time I see your email address I chuckle. Laughter matters a lot to me.
2) Everyone: look at this awesome, fun, cheeky article Jones wrote a long time ago!
You’re right, Graham. My thanks were facetious.
Non-facetious thanks to Noah. Sincere apologies (again) to Nix for derailing the thread for another of her posts, and also to the internet for breaking its first rule (viz. don’t get upset by anything on the internet).
Oh, Nix, I hardly know you and you wound me so: “Overly-confident”in that sea of qualifications? :p
I’m sad to see you exit the conversation. Perhaps next go-around.
@ Nix 66
– Not that it matters, but I’m blaming my generation (turned 30 last week). Or rather, half blaming our elders for badly serving us, and half blaming my peers for accepting what we got.
– I submit that you’re now using more abusive language than I ever did.
Response to the rest of your comment in a moment.
London: Ha! Not trying to wound you. Promise. And lord knows, I was over confident in the Kant attribution. But honestly, you’re being really confident here. Next time. :)
Graham: Nope. I think your abuse is just to be expected. And for the moment at least, I’ve stopped listening to you.
Jones: No apology necessary. And not for any other post, either. I enjoyed reading the link on Kant’s errors. And as an aside, I’ve heard rumors that Hegel wrote a defense of Astrology. That’s just hearsay, though, which I really am too tired/lazy to Google at the moment. Still, I always find stuff like this interesting.
Graham, yes racist jokes are often racist. Jokes about Kant are fucking jokes about Kant. Even if you’re a massive fan of Kant and such jokes wound you deeply, I would plead with you to try, if possible, to suck it up.
@ Nix 66
Uh huh. Sure. (“…self-aggrandized, bombastic, know-it-all screaming ninny of a dick-measurer…”)
Wow. You need me to spot you a box of Kleenex, Graham? Seriously, buck up.
@ Noah
Right. So racism matters to you, and Kant – and the philosophical tradition of which Kant is a major part – comparatively, doesn’t.
@ Nix 66 (continued)
– ‘why do you think being… overly-aggressive… is somehow less of a sin than an error of attribution which is easily caught, corrected, explained’
I didn’t say it was, but since you ask: Unlike you, I haven’t mislead anybody.
– ‘Why *do* you think you have greater psychological insight into everyone on this thread than they do?’
Probably for the same reason that you, in your previous article for this blog, thought you had greater psychological insight into Laura Kipnis than she does – there’s your answer for why I personalize, too – and why critics in general think they have greater psychological insight into artists than the artists do.
Nothing wrong with dishing that out, but don’t then complain when it’s your turn to take it.
– ‘It’s super weird to me that you apologize for being overly aggressive and then continue doing it. So you apologize again. That not a “whoops.” That’s a pattern.’
Sure, it’s a pattern. That doesn’t mean I’m not right.
Graham, I care about philosophy quite a bit. I don’t think making jokes about Kant contributes to a pattern of marginalization and institutional violence, no. Nor do I think that an offhand comment and a link in a comments thread is good grounds for throwing a tantrum and impugning someone’s intelligence, or claiming they’re part of the decline of Western civilization.
Seriously, what the hell are you doing? You’ve admitted multiple times that you are being an asshole. Okay. Then *stop being an asshole*. Just cut it out. It can’t possibly be that hard. Just give your interlocutors the modicum of the benefit of the doubt.
Graham wrote: “That’s a whole lot of words with which to say “I’m a libertarian.”
So say you. I’ve never voted for a Libertarian. They’ve got ideas as silly as those of Republicans or Democrats. Gotta find a label don’t you?
Liberals call me “conservative” and conservatives call me “liberal.” In a relative sense, often both are right. But the fervent members of either side do not apparently understand (or refuse to acknowledge) political relativity. If someone disagrees with them, they slap on an pejorative opposite label for the simple reason it makes them feel better about their own extreme views.
For example, in the area of Women’s rights, I agree with every single tenet I know of except one: unrestricted abortion at any phase of a pregnancy. The reason is simple: science dictates that at some point, a fetus is viable human being, and at that point, an abortion is not simply the removal of tissue. It is murder. But a died-in-the-wool liberal will never concede that fact, and will argue that a women’s choice at any stage of a pregnancy is sacrosanct — trumping the rights of the unborn. Yet, because I disagree with that extreme viewpoint, my liberal friends or acquaintances label me “conservative.”
It’s all relative.
Okay…I think I’m going to shut this down at least for the moment. A discussion about abortion is not something I want to have happen here at the moment.