Episteme

Are there limits to what's acceptable for debate in a democracy? As I heard Alan Dershowitz discuss his views on torture on NPR this morning, his belief that torture should be legalized insofar as a warrant would need to be issued (or the act formally sanctioned) by the highest echelons of the government (read: the White House). He makes the point that the US government is in a terrible situation because not only does it use torture but it publicly denies that it uses it and denies that it sanctions it. Abu Ghraib wasn't the work of some rogue underlings, he said, but an order from the top. He isn't asking for torture to be condoned but rather for there to be public acknowledgement that no matter, in times of conflict, torture will be used and there should be a legal framework in place to address that.

With all the sham debates going on in Congress right now (as prep for the election) over things like gay marriage and flag burning, a debate on torture might sober up the place or at least make clear to voters exactly where members of Congress stand on something that has stained America's image abroad and ruined America's credibility in many places of the world. But who has the courage to purpose public discourse on such a horrible subject? Maybe this is the failing of democracy. Perhaps discussing how a country based on the principles of equality and universal dignity can engage in such deplorable behavior (this also the same country founded with the belief that blacks were only 3/5 citizens) would uncover too nakedly the seamy underside of humanity. After all, Susan Sontag said the photos are us.

Posted by Dawn at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Stuart Mill takes democracy form the very beginning. In the first chapter of On Liberty, the London-born political theorist looks at why we created democracy in the first place and how it evolved. Basically it's all about the search for liberty. There are different things that can infringe on our liberties - oppression can come from other citizens, but it can also come from the government itself.

Mill says the first governments were meant to protect us from each other. Fellow citizens can become abusive, and this infringes on our liberty. So we needed someone more powerful than the rest to limit the power of these abusive citizens.

But what if the rulers themselves, the protectors, become abusive as well?

This is why we invented rights and constitutional checks: "The aim, therefore, of patriots was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to excercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty."
Rights were seen as inherent rules of respect for every citizen, things like our right to a fair trial and to peacefully protest, although they must have been different back then.

The next step toward liberty, according to Mill, is for citizens to limit the power of their rulers even further, by not only limiting their power to make decisions and their potential to become abusive, but also to decide who rules and when. This is the beginning of democracy:

"A time, however, came, in the progress of human affairs, when men ceased to think it a necessity of nature that their governors should be an independent power, opposed in interest to themselves. It appeared to them much better that the various magistrates of the State should be their tenants or delegates, revocable at their pleasure. In that way alone, it seemed, coud they have complete security that the powers of government would never be abused to their disadvantage."

But it's not all peaches and cream from there. Democracy brings in a whole bunch of problems - tyranny of the majority, bad choices of leaders, and then there's a deeper sort of illness of a democracy where its joints get arthritis and nothing works and everyone needs a bribe to do their job... but I'm not talking about any place in particular...

Posted by Kim at 06:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s easy to live in the US and forget about all the debate and careful planning that went into the construction of the Republic.

The Complete Anti-Federalist, edited by Herbert J. Storing, talks about the contingent of people who didn’t want there to be a federation of states at all, because small states would retain the power of the voice of each person, which would be lost in a large entity. Their goal was to retain as much individual liberty as possible for each person, which they felt could only happen in a small state. While the anti-federalists opposed the formation of the United States at all, their struggle can still be seen in today’s precarious balance between state and federal power. Just think of abortion and gay marriage – lots of people would like to override state laws, which reflect the thinking of that particular region of the country, with federal ones that outlaw both of these things.

“It was thought to have been demonstrated, historically and theoretically, that free, republican governments could extend only over a relatively small territory with a homogenous population… Only a small republic and enjoy a voluntary attachment of the people to the government and a voluntary obedience to the laws. Only a small republic can secure a genuine responsibility of the government to the people to the people. Only a small republic can form the kind of citizens who will maintain republican government. These claims are central are central to the Anti-Federalist position.” (p. 15, TCA)

All these points are well taken, but they really change when you add mass communication into the mix. With radio, television and newspapers, you can keep more people informed of what is going on in a government so that they can exercise their rights when it comes time to vote. This type of information is supposed to be a reflection of both the people and the government, bounced back to both of them to improve communication between the two. That’s pretty much the only way you can have a viable state that is too large to fit everyone, or at least their direct representatives, meaning people who actually know them, into a town hall. But there is of course a big potential for failure in a big state, when you are relying on a third party to communicate between the people and the government. Who controls the third party? How can you be sure that they don’t get taken over by corporate interests, which in the end are far more closely linked to the government than to the people?

This is where public debate and grassroots journalism come in. Instead of individual reporters giving their as-objective-as-possible versions of events, you have people expressing themselves on Web pages or blogs, or you have broadcast public forums where regular people who accurately represent a cross-section of the given society are brought together to discuss and debate issues.

So there are a few ideas that I got from reading about the anti-federalists. It’s true that people need to be represented accurately in a just government, but with time mass communication developed to help with that. The media don’t always do their job, though, and may need some tweaks in order to serve their intended purpose - maybe they need more public funding, tighter government regulation, and more idealism in their executive ranks.

Posted by Kim at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's weird to think about Al Gore having a movie. It was weird to see Al Gore in one. Sure it was mostly of him giving his lectures and reflecting on his life and global warming, but with the financial backing of people like liberal environmentalist Laurie David (wife of Larry David. She's the reason why he drives a Prius in "Curb Your Enthusiasm", the best show ever!) it's meant to be more than a mere documentation of Gore's numerous lecture.

In keeping with the theme of democracy, something Gore said has stuck in my mind. He was comparing fuel efficiency standards for various countries to make a point the combating the problem of global warming is possible and the political does exist in places to do it. He showed a chart of the different standards from various countries, the US at the bottom of course. China, in the midst of economic doom and mass migration unseen in history, has already outpaced the US in its standards. China has mandatory mileage of standards of about 35 miles per gallon (if I'm remembering correctly), while the US is somewhere in the high teens. Gore makes the obvious point that the American motor companies (which are going through a major period of transformation) can't sell their cars in China (that oppressive dictatorship!) because they don't meet Chinese standards.

Gore goes on to say, near the conclusion of his film, that Americans need to use their democratic tools to institute change, namely elect officials who will push for higher standards. To me, implicit in his argument is the question is our democracy capable of making those changes? Is living in centralized state like China more effective for making dramatic changes to environmental policy?

Sure, the Soviet Union reeked havoc on the environment, making deserts out of once fertile plains and draining entire lakes to feed the ag fields under forced collectivism, but such dramatic shifts on policy seem most likely under a centralized authority. The Chinese don't elect their leaders, so their leaders can make strict fuel policies without fear of losing the next election or caving to industry interests for the sake of raising enough money for their next re-election campaign. If there's little political will in Washington to take on the issue of global warming and since most the seats members of Congress hold are uncompetitive, can we ever realize change on this one issue? Will it take the United States succumbing to international pressure (the Chinese who own hundreds of billion of dollars of US debt) to make any headway?

Posted by Dawn at 06:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kim and I are taking up the theme of democracy for a few weeks and seeing where we can go with this. With her experiences living in Mexico City and mine pouring through books as a befuddled observer of American politics, we think we can generate some discussion and ideas that will connect what we know with the state of things. That's our hope.

"Peace will arise instead out of the specific nature of democratic legitimacy, and its ability to satisfy the human longing for recognition." So writes Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. As most people educated in the liberal west with an unerring preoccupation with world prosperity, I often wonder if, despite advances in living conditions and general human prosperity, if war, famine, these inequities are inevitable because there's something to the human character that is unalterable.

By recognition, Fukuyama touches on an idea, he argues, has thrived best in liberal democracies. I got into some psychoanalytic stuff recently, so I won't rehash that. But recognition is essentially human dignity through freedom. It is through liberal democracies of the 20th century this has come to fruition. Of course, all societies are beset by racism, homophobia and the like, but legislation like the Civil Rights Act seeks to publicly mitigate that and is a sign of how liberal democracies can, and do, address inherent inequities in society, however imperfectly.

Anyway, I'm nearing the end of the book so ideas are starting to coalesce. Seeing how Kim and I are going to tackle the notion of democracy, I wanted to start (and continue) with this idea presented in Fukuyama's book, "The post-historical world is one in which the desire for comfortable self-preservation has been elevated over the desire to risk one's life in battle for pure prestige, and in which universal and rational recognition has replaced the struggle for domination."

That's the key, essentially, to the end of history, as Fukuyama argues in his book. Has a country been able to reconcile its contradictions while satisfying the need for recognition among its citizens? It is the steady push for economic integration among countries, the bourgeois preoccupation with accumulating wealth internally as opposed to the imperialist pursuit of wealth by force in foreign lands, that has defined the movement toward peace in the west, like the European Union. The EU has fallen short of the political integration of its founders (a United States of Europe) but made great strides in economic unity (the euro, free borders, trade policy), though not all EU members use the euro for nationalist reasons. But the euro remains the most tangible sign of integration among member state who a generation ago were at war.

Fukuyama cautions against believing the nationalist uprisings we are seeing in the Third World will define our age or become a permanent fixture. He writes that these nations are living "in history" unlike nations like the United States and those of Europe that are "post-historical." In historical countries, generating a national identity and a political agenda to validate that are paramount, not necessarily economic integration (like Chavez re-nationalizing many sectors of the Venezuelan economy).

The economic forces of globalization (not something Fukuyama overtly mentions in his book) will prevail and pull the Third World into the post-historical realm, albeit slowly. But I know there are many people who say such pulls of globalization are what will destroy these countries by keeping them subordinate to the economic desires of the developed world. I share these concerns and don't agree with Thomas Friedman's assertion that globalization is making the world flat. I don't know if what will put the Third World beyond history is purely economic.

But it is true that liberal democracies have ushered in peace and prosperity not known before. I also agree with Fukuyama's statement that the UN has failed because its membership includes nations that aren't democracies and don't share the same values. What I think is a danger, and will continue to be, is the hubris of nations like the United States, which speaks loudly the values of common human decency but acts selectively on those ideals. Why Iraq and not Rwanda or Darfar? Simply for oil? How does technology and the media fit into this? What about the various types of democracy?

Posted by Dawn at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why does she have to die?
Why does Strindberg reveal both her and her lover to have millions of contradictions, to be attracted to one another and repulsed at the same time, so that the only relationship they can have is sexual?
Why is Julie so fascinated with desceding from the tower of privilege into which she was born?
It becomes so clear that she had no idea what she was getting into. The craziest scene is when they are about to flee together and her lover starts screaming at her when she brings her pet bird in a cage and tells her she has to kill it. That's when the whole thing gets serious, when she realizes that by trying to cross class boundaries she is playing with fire. The only reason she felt courageous enough to do it was because of her n aivete, and the rest of the servants in the house only think worse of her for halfheartedly trying to mingle their ranks while maintaining her air of superiority.

A friend of mine said that in Mexico, people from different classes have sex, but they don't have relationships. He said that it's dangerous, that people judge you, that the income differences are so extreme that it's ridiculous to think that people from different backgrounds could have a truthful, productive relationship. After we talked I had a bad dream about going to the supermarket with my wealthy friend and having him disappear when we had to pay, saying he'd be right back. But Miss Julie keeps coming back into my mind, the social darwinism, the frustration and mutual agression she gets into with her lover in the face of an inflexible society.

Posted by Kim at 06:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why does archeology have to be on display behind the glass windows of a museum?
Why do I go to the Museum of Archeology in Mexico City with a friend and find out that she likes the area where modern cultures are on display, where the models have bodies and faces like hers instead of the tall skinny manequins she sees in stores, but she says she doesn't know why? Why does she insult indigenous culture as "naco," yet wants to look at it inside of a prestigious institution?
Let this be the place where I say that I've had it with the self-hatred of Mexicans who aren't white like Europeans, with the idea that indigenous culture is interesting to learn about, as long as your ancestors weren't Maya or Nahuatl or Aztec or whatever.

Tonight I was thinking about all this stuff because I'm starting to see the racism enter into my daily experience. It wasn't affecting me before because I have white skin, but when I started to interact more with people from here, making friends, I started to see what's going on. You can go to the museum of archeology but you can't have a real friendship with someone who is dark-skinned because they are "naco," poor, indigenous. You can buy an archeology magazine but all it is is advertising for tourism for rich white people, not a place to value the ancestry of the majority of the people in this country. It's not as if the U.S. is perfect, it's not as if people don't think about class and color, but at least some cities are refuges from this type of BS and at least there is an attempt to be open and idealistically color-blind. I feel like I'm living in the Jim Crow south and I don't see a way out, I don't see a refuge of idealism anywhere nearby.

Posted by Kim at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like most people who work for a living (Paris Hilton can be forgiven, that bitch), I think often about work. What does it mean to work and why must work be done at a desk? Of course, not all work is done at a desk -- maybe the best work doesn't need a desk -- but I need a desk to hold my papers and remind me of the many more desks I will encounter as I toil in my formidable years to create, well, create something at a desk, no less (maybe I'll write the history of the desk).

Author Enrique Vila-Matas' riff on Melville'sBartleby in Bartleby & Co. is by far one of the most prosaic and funny takes on working life (Office Space excepted), or just working. This is one of my favorite passages:

"I am full of doubts. The only thing I am suddenly now sure of is that I must change my name and call myself AlmostWatt. Oh, I don't know how important it is that I say this or something else. Saying is inventing. Be it false or certain. We invent nothing, we think we are inventing when in fact all we are doing is stammering out the lesson, the remains of some homework learnt and forgotten, life without tears, just as we weep over it. And to hell with it."

How many times I have stared idly at the flickering computer screen and thought that? What am I working for?

Which brings me to this funny essay in The Atlantic about business management. It's about more than business management, it's about how philosophers are better suited to manage business, in some ways, than MBA's because they understand the human dilemma. The philosophy the author writes of is 19th century German philosophy, Hegel, et al. But when the author, Matthew Stewart, poses this one question, it made me ponder my attitude towards work: "...how much of a worker's sense of identity and well-being does a business have a right to harness for its purposes?"

What leads Stewart to ask this questions is something that made me re-think my notion of work. On a subconscious level, I think I always understood, but it was jarring, to say the least, to have this statement laid out before me in black ink"

"All of that humanity - was anyone in my old firm told you - was just a more subtle form of bureaucratic control. It was a way of harnessing the workers' sense of identity and well-being to the goals of the organization, an effort to get each worker to participate in an ever more refined form of her own enslavement."

If you were to ask me, Do you believe in your work? Do you believe in what you are paid to do? I would say yes. But I never saw it as participating in my own enslavement. Bartleby knew that, though. To any request from his boss, he would simply reply, I would prefer not to. It was confounding for his boss, who hardly knew what to do with Bartleby. Of course, in the end, Bartleby dies. I always hoped he would leave his job and hit the high seas or open a book store, or something, but he dies from enslavement. I don't think work will kill me but now I wonder if subverts our freewill or if it's through work, we realize our true freewill.

Posted by Dawn at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I remember Susan Sontag's essay for The New York Times magazine about the photos taken at Abu Ghraib and what those photos signified about our society. Her ultimate conclusion: The photos are us. With the advent of cameras every where on every gadget we can purchase and carry with us (I think of them as appendages), what do we sacrifice? What do we give away? What do we surrender? How has the ability to document every part of our lives and disseminate that information with relative ease via the Internet, do to our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of each other? What I remember thinking after reading Sontag's essay was how despite our ability to utilize technology to achieve a deeper, fuller understanding of ourselves and the world, the photos taken at Abu Ghraib signify exactly the opposite: They are grotesque acknowledgement of our ignorance, cowardice and brutality propagated through the same technology that's supposed to save us. Technology, it seems, hasn't lessened these tendencies but instead allows to us indulge them (I'm remembering the excitement of students in some of my college classes watching the beheading of Nicholas Burg online, in class).

That's what I've always felt the Internet was meant to correct in a way by allowing individuals access to limitless information and ideas. But, naively, I failed to realize that's also part of the problem because how do you vet all that information, a lot of gained without much context to it? And the Internet, paradoxically, allows us to narrow our exposure it ideas by aggregating information that sustains our existing interests (like Google News, which you can set to provide with headlines of stories that fall into pre-selected categories), not expands them, by allowing us to customize the hell out of everything. Whatever you may think about newspapers or printed publications at all, at least you are confronted with a variety of stories and information you can't help but notice (though the choice is yours whether to read them or not).

I wonder if what we are sacrificing is serendipity and surprise for pre-screened, pre-selected everything tailored to fit our lifestyles and world view, not necessarily to change them.

So the camera. After seeing The Devil and Daniel Johnston just the other night (I love stories about madness / genius -- does one have to suffer to create great art?), I was completely taken aback by what that guy recorded and when conversations were recorded. Johnston, mentally unstable and highly creative, would record fights with his mother (who called him "unprofitable servant") and his diaries. When he was wandering around New York in a madness induced the fit, the members of Sonic Youth set out looking for him and they found him, somewhere in New Jersey, someone actually recording their conversation with him! What I did find unsatisfying about the documentary was that it didn't answer this basic question? Why was everything in this guy's life captured on cassette tape or on video tape? Where did this impulse come from?

Writing in The Believer, Lisa Levy makes this conjecture about Sontag's essay on photography (and the actually essay of the same name) and Abu Ghraib, "(Sontag) discusses how the camera has infiltrated corners of private life heretofore unknown to others; not only in these war atrocities but those at home ... It cannot be lost on her that this is the logical end of the Warholian line, webcams recording the most mundane aspects of existence, all these breeding what she calls a 'culture of shamelessness...'"

Not that I think the documentary was shameless, far from it. The substance of Johnston’s life is so different from most everyone else's that it does merit documenting. All of us live lives of contradiction, chaos, moments of happiness and profound sadness, but what deserves hours of endless documentation? What merits distribution across the Internet? I guess in some ways I'm contradicting myself but having this blog, writing my own ideas for dispersal, but I doubt that recording our most mundane details, as Levy says, in a way Sontag considered shameless, will actually yield much more than credence to the argument that technoloization of everything breeds alienation and disconnects us from any sense of private space or private life.

Posted by Dawn at 08:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)