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In Voltaire’s Candide, the title character wanders through a life of brutal executions and natural disasters and angry mobs, and yet believes that he lives in the best of all possible worlds. When I think of misguided optimism, I think of those who are disinclined to do anything to change the world or their lives because (a) they believe all things serve some greater good, or (b) they optimistically and passively wait for their god(s), or the people around them, to change their lives for the better. I thus approached Roger Scruton’s book The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope with interest. Perhaps, I hoped, he might skewer the blindly optimistic patriotism espoused by so many Americans, or the distasteful optimism of the Candides and Panglosses of the modern world who fail to acknowledge the horrors around them.

Scruton’s objections to optimism, though, run in a curiously different direction. The optimists he finds most dangerous aren’t those who sit and wait as they contemplate their half-full glasses, but those who believe in quick-fixes to society’s problems. He argues that optimism, unchecked, has led to many of civilization’s failures, and that a dose of pessimism is necessary to dash unfounded hope. The “credit crunch,” for example, he attributes to the “best case fallacy”–the same illusion that prompts gamblers to recklessly risk their money:

Many factors conspired to produce this crisis. But we do not need to look far to discover the best case fallacy at the heart of it. The first stirring can be perceived in the Community Reinvestment Act, signed into law by America’s President Carter in 1977. This requires banks and other lenders to offer mortgages in a way that addresses ‘the credit needs of the communities’ in which they work, and in particular the needs of low-income and minority households. In short, it requires them to set aside the normal reasoning of lenders concerning the security of a debt, and to offer credit as part of social policy and not as a business deal. The reasoning behind the act was an impeccable piece of optimism, beginning from the best case scenario, according to which otherwise disadvantaged groups would be lifted into the realm of home-ownership, so taking their first step towards the American dream. Everyone would benefit from this, and no one more than the banks who had helped their communities to flourish. In the event, of course, the banks who had been pressured into ignoring the demands of prudence, and who had been forbidden by law to consult the worst case scenario, ended with a steadily growing accumulation of bad debts, leading eventually to the ’subprime mortgage crisis’ of 2008.

Others, meanwhile, had begun to trade in these debts. After all, the best case scenario tells us that a mortgage, being secured on a home and therefore on the one thing in which every borrower has the greatest investment, cannot fail to pay interest. And a fixed rate mortgage can be sold at a profit, when interest rates fall below the rate agreed. The worst case scenario–so obvious that nobody bothered to check it out–tells us that, when interest rates fall, money loses its value, and fixed rates become harder to pay. The good debt becomes bad, however much was invested in the home that secures it.

According to Scruton at his most pessimistic, “the argument of [his] book is entirely futile” for the indefatigable optimists among us. I agree that pessimism is entirely necessary. But I think we would not be where we are today if some starry-eyed optimists had not acted on their visions of the future–and I’m talking about issues such as civil rights. Had we allowed things to change organically (glacially), had nobody spoken of their optimistic dreams of a better world, would our schools still be racially segregated by law? Would women have the right to vote? Would Europe still be governed by kings and queens? Changes that once seemed radical have now come to pass. What do you think?

Roger Scruton is Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Beauty and Death-Devoted Heart.

Everybody knows that smoking is bad for you. Yet quitting smoking is a challenging endeavour – insurmountable for some. Even smokers who get the best help available still have a 50% chance of relapsing. Clearly, the more options we have to help with cessation, the better. Recent research suggests that meditation and mindfulness may be beneficial for smokers looking to extinguish the habit.

Mindfulness is a concept stemming from ancient Buddhist philosophy, comprising nonjudgmental attention to present-moment emotions and experiences. Mindfulness and meditation-based practices have shown remarkable benefit for a variety of ailments, from depression to chronic pain. This year, the first randomised, controlled trial of a mindfulness-based smoking cessation program found that it worked better than a standard behavioral paradigm in helping smokers quit and avoid relapse.

Mindfulness seems to be beneficial by helping smokers cope with craving. Cigarette craving can be a powerful motivator, and one of the major reasons for relapse. But mindfulness is effective at helping people cope with strong emotions, such as those experienced with depression, anxiety, and pain. A small handful of studies have examined the relationship between mindfulness, craving, and smoking, and have lent some support to this hypothesis. However, the findings from those studies are inconsistent, and not terribly conclusive.

Wanting to examine this link further, we conducted research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We trained smokers in mindful attention and had them deploy it while looking at smoking-related images, which are known to induce strong craving in smokers. While they did so, we scanned their brains to learn more about what mechanisms might underlie the effects of mindful attention on cigarette craving.

We wanted our training to be quick and easy, so it would mimic what a smoking counselor might really teach her clients. The training took about fifteen minutes, and was based around a simple principle: focus your attention on whatever feelings or sensations arise, and then accept those without judgment. Secondly, we had them rate their craving right after viewing a picture. We didn’t tell them that mindful attention was supposed to make them crave less, so they didn’t have any expectations about what would happen. For all they knew, their craving might increase. Finally, we also included a control condition, where we asked them just to ‘passively view’ pictures—in other words, to view them as they normally would.

Our findings had some interesting implications for mindfulness in general, and for its application to smoking cessation.

First, we found that mindfully attending to smoking images caused people’s self-reported craving to decrease. In other words, when people ‘passively viewed’ a smoking-related image, their craving increased, but if they practiced mindful attention, they craved less. Their cravings weren’t completely eliminated, but were significantly decreased.

Second, we found that mindful attention affected a specific part of the brain, the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC). SgACC is known to be important in regulation of emotions, and it is overactive in depression and other mood disorders. During passive viewing of smoking pictures, when participants were craving, they had increased activation in this region. However, mindful viewing decreased activation in this region back to levels seen for neutral pictures. In addition, we found a decrease in functional connectivity between various brain regions known to underlie the sensation of craving, including insula, premotor cortex, and ventral striatum. This suggests that during mindful attention, the network underlying cigarette craving may not be as strongly coupled.

In addition to the findings themselves, there was one surprising aspect. Prior research suggested that mindful attention was associated with prefrontal cortex—areas involved in cognitive control and skills like attention and working memory. However, we didn’t find activation in that region. This suggests that mindful attention works through a more ‘bottom-up’ mechanism, where instead of directly suppressing craving, you instead mentally disengage from it. This may seem like a fine point, but it suggests that mindful attention works differently from the kinds of cognitive skills we usually teach smokers, which involve things like re-thinking a craving, distracting yourself, or actively suppressing it. Therefore, mindful attention might be a new kind of skill, useful for different people or different situations in which cognitive strategies don’t work as well.

Overall, our work has some implications for how mindfulness relates to cigarette craving. Based on our work, we think mindful attention can be taught relatively quickly, and is effective at decreasing a cigarette craving in the moment—when it’s most important to a smoker. Therefore, we think this approach has clinical usefulness in the real world, and this is part of why it seems to help smokers quit. And finally, since it seems to work in a manner differently from the types of cognitive skills currently taught by counselors, it could represent a new kind of tool to add to the tool-kit. And of course the more tools we have to help people quit, the better.

So if you’re trying to quit, consider learning mindfulness techniques to help you cope when you’re craving. It might be just the tool you need!

Cecilia Westbrook is an MD/PhD student at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Her interests include affective neuroscience, behavioral regulation, and mindfulness. Her paper has been made publicly available by the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN). You can read it in full and for free here.

The “need for public servants who can negotiate . . . moral minefields with wisdom and integrity is more urgent than ever,” says Mary Ann Glendon, author of the new book The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt. “It is hard to resist,” she continues, “the conclusion of the classical philosophers that no polity can afford to neglect the nurture and education of future citizens and statespersons.”

Her book serves as a walk through history, profiling those who both spoke and acted on firm convictions in civic life. Glendon, a professor of law at Harvard and former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, discusses statesmen and scholars with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Citing Max Weber, you note that “the qualities that make a first-rate thinker are not the same as those required for success in statesmanship.” Isn’t that a devastating problem for politics?

MARY ANN GLENDON: Not necessarily. Some of the greatest political achievements in history — the framing of the U.S. Constitution, the Corpus Juris of Justinian, the Napoleonic Codes, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — were the products of the synergy that came from collaboration between statespersons and scholars. Nearly all the scholars and political actors profiled in my book shared the belief that society benefits if political actors keep in touch with the world of ideas and political theorists attend to what is going on in the world around them.

Plato, who tried hard to keep a foot in both worlds, had little use for politicians who never looked beyond the business at hand, or philosophers who kept their heads in the clouds. The former, he said, develop minds that are “narrow and crooked.” As for philosophers, he warned that they need to stay grounded in reality, not only for the sake of philosophy, but in the interest of self-preservation: to assure the maintenance of conditions under which intellectual life can flourish.

LOPEZ: What does Aristotle mean when he indicates that the most choiceworthy callings are politics and philosophy? Are they?

GLENDON: Aristotle held that politics and philosophy were the most choiceworthy vocations for certain kinds of persons — those who are capable of pursuing them, and “most ambitious with respect to virtue.” I take the more capacious view that a person can have more than one vocation, and that all honest vocations can be paths to a virtuous life. Think of parenthood, for example! The challenge is to discern one’s own path toward the perfection of one’s nature, and to follow through on that discernment. Some of the persons profiled in my book (Plato, Locke, Tocqueville, Weber) were surprisingly slow to figure out where their own talents lay.

LOPEZ: You write of scholarship and statesmanship as vocations. Do we view them this way today? Do we raise scholars and statesmen? How do we present such choices positively in our homes and in our public discourse?

GLENDON: When Weber gave his famous lectures on scholarship and statesmanship as vocations nearly a hundred years ago, his use of that term was already heavy with irony. Then, as now, both the academy and government were highly bureaucratized and permeated with careerism. But most people still admire and hope for dedicated public servants, and we still look up to men and women who are passionately devoted to the disinterested quest for knowledge. Are we doing enough as a society to promote the qualities we value in scholars and statespersons? No, but the ideals survive nonetheless.

LOPEZ: You point out that “nearly everyone today engages in political activity, if only as an informed voter, and never before have so many men and women comes to regard lifelong learning as essential to a full and happy existence.” Does that make this book as relevant to the Tea Party as the next president of the United States?

GLENDON: I believe that all sorts of people are curious about how others have struggled with problems similar to their own, and interested in the extent to which they have failed or succeeded. It’s fascinating, for example, to see Cicero constantly wrestling in his private letters with the difficulty of deciding what to do when, as he put it, “apparent right clashes with apparent advantage,” and second-guessing or berating himself later on with the benefit of hindsight. In the book, I tried to bring some of the main figures in Western political thought to life — and to show how they dealt with many of the same dilemmas we face today.

For example: Is politics such a dirty business, or are conditions so unfavorable that one can’t make a difference? What kinds of compromises can one make for the sake of getting and keeping a position from which one might be able to have influence on the course of events? What kinds of compromises can one make for the sake of achieving a higher political goal? When does prudent accommodation become pandering? When does one reach the point at which one concludes, as Plato finally did, that circumstances are so unfavorable that the only reasonable course of action is to “keep quiet and offer up prayers for one’s own welfare and for that of one’s country”?

What any given reader takes away from these stories will depend very much on what he brings with him and what he’s looking for.

LOPEZ: Why do you look to Henry Kissinger to set the scene for the book?

GLENDON: An important point I wished to make in the book concerns a key difference between statespersons and scholars: The latter can deliberate as long as they wish without reaching conclusions, but the former must decide and act (often on imperfect information) and take responsibility for their decisions and actions. I found the elderly Henry Kissinger’s reflections on his experience in both the forum and the tower particularly relevant to that point. They also illustrate the tragic dimension of much political action, and the serious risks and costs that attend so many important decisions, no matter which course of action is chosen.

LOPEZ: Is there an appreciation for the role of the political actor that you hope to get across to the reader; perhaps an appreciation that we don’t always have?

GLENDON: Well, I suppose my respect for that role goes back to my childhood in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts, where the town-meeting form of government was still vibrant, where my father became the first Irish Catholic to be elected chairman of the board of selectmen in our town, and where I had the privilege as a teenager of working for Leonora Leahy, the first woman to be elected to the Pittsfield city council.

In that context, the choice between Aristotle’s and Machiavelli’s vision of politics seemed clear to me — politics is not just about the getting and keeping of power, it’s about free persons ordering their lives together. Later, I encountered the seamier side of politics in various places, but I don’t see any reason to give up on high standards for public service. On that point, I’m with John Paul II — who witnessed government at its worst under National Socialism and Communism, yet insisted that politics can be a virtuous calling — provided one is ready to wage “a full-scale battle and a determination to overcome every temptation, such as the recourse to disloyalty and falsehood; the waste of public funds for the advantage of those with special interests; and the use of ambiguous and illicit means for acquiring, maintaining and increasing power at any cost.”

Continue reading this interview at NRO…

Mary Ann Glendon is Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and is a former United States Ambassador to the Vatican. She is most recently the author of The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt.

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This fall OUP will publish three books by me. They are substantial new works of academic philosophy, on unrelated subjects. How did I manage to produce three books in such a short time when one is usually regarded as quite enough by itself?

In May 2010 I began a period of research leave that would last until the end of the calendar year. My self-appointed task was to finish three books that I had in the works, in various stages of completion. It seemed like a lot to ask, and I doubted my ability to pull off the feat.

As it happens, I had just taken up motorcycling (I have a Harley-Davidson Dyna Wide-Glide) and was due to take a training course in order to obtain my license. The course involved two days in a parking lot in the hot Florida sun beginning at 8 am, so I had to get up much earlier than was my habit (I passed the course). This had a carry-over effect and I woke up very early the next morning, which meant my working day began at around 7 am. I found that I got through quite a bit that day and determined to stick with the new regime, which naturally entailed an early bedtime and a more monkish existence.

Sometimes I would start even earlier and regularly put in two or three hours before breakfast. In order to motivate myself to keep going at this level, I took to describing myself as attempting to perform what I dubbed “the triple”, in analogy with a gymnast’s triple somersault (which has never, I believe, been performed from the floor—I used to be a gymnast). Under the new regime I got through the material at a decent clip, beginning with a rewriting of the first two books, which took me till September, and ending with writing the third one from scratch, finishing in late November. (The books are The Meaning of Disgust, Basic Structures of Reality, and Truth By Analysis).

It wasn’t easy, I can tell you, especially since the books were on quite separate subjects. But it was the motorcycling that put me on the right track and the gymnastic metaphor that kept me going (and having no teaching was essential). I would usually break for tennis around 11am and then resume work afterwards, which prevented me from getting too burned out (I would usually get down to the beach and do some paddle-boarding in the late afternoon, which also helped). You do need your fitness. I wouldn’t want to live like this forever, but to achieve “the triple” it was worth it. Now that the finished products are arriving in the mail I think back on those dawn mornings, and the long hours, and the early evening fatigue, and the feeling of anxious semi-elation that was my constant companion. Triples don’t happen by magic.

Colin McGinn teaches philosophy at the University of Miami, specializing in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. He has taught at Rutgers University, Oxford University, and London University. His three forthcoming books are The Meaning of Disgust, Basic Structures of Reality, and Truth By Analysis.

As thousands continue their march on Wall Street for a fifth straight week, an ancient story has much to tell us about the demands of justice.

The occupation of Wall Street is about a colossal failure of justice.  When justice fails, anger grows into rage.  And rage can tear a community into shreds.  When a few people reap huge rewards they do not deserve, while others get nothing but insults — even though they have worked hard and been loyal to their workplace –- justice has failed.  Bankers carry away huge bonuses, while more and more of the workers who do the heavy lifting are laid off.

Upper-level managers in many industries are allowed to plunder their businesses while loyal employees get the shaft:

Employees were particularly outraged that even as the company fell into bankruptcy, top managers awarded themselves $57.3 million in court-approved bonuses while 4,200 people lost their jobs and the workers who remained went without raises.

An ancient Greek myth captures our moment:  The Greek warrior Ajax has fought hard for nine years for his friends in the Greek army outside Troy.  He was by far the most effective fighter, and he saved many of his friends’ lives in combat.  Now comes the time for a major reward, and who gets it?  Not Ajax.  The reward goes to someone who is cunning and does his fighting with words—a man we know as Ulysses.

Ulysses is the idea man in the army, gifted at argument and strategy.  But Ajax has always done the heavy lifting, the day-to-day work that keeps the wheels turning.  The leaders have been taking advantage of Ajax for years.  Ajax sees at last that management has been playing him for a fool.  He explodes in anger and rage. In the ancient myth he sets out to kill the commanders, but he is foiled by a goddess and later takes his own life.

In our times, a modern Ajax can be just as angry.  He may work slow or sabotage his company in some other way.  If he is really angry, he may do serious damage to his team or to himself.  Management should know how to give the heavy lifters their rewards.  Failure to do so leads to the sort of anger and chaos we are now seeing in the streets.  Justice is the best cure for anger.

Ajax is right to explode when taken for granted and abused.  Management does not have to treat an Ajax so badly. It is true that they must also keep the cunning Ulysses on their side.  If Ulysses is not rewarded, he may go over and work for the Bank of Troy, where his Trojan Horse Investment Vehicle could produce gigantic profits for the other side.

Management can keep the team together, however, if they pay attention to justice.  That calls for leadership.  Leaders show wisdom, and compassion.  Leaders know how to recognize the value of each member of a team and communicate that to all.   Most important, leaders work for the benefit of the team, not to win big rewards for themselves.

Are you an Ajax or a Ulysses?  Are you loyal, hardworking — and shafted by the system?  Or are you cunning, selfish — and making out like a bandit as the economy collapses?  Or are you an Agamemnon, who commands the whole army but looks only to his own rewards?

In our time, too, there is a better way.  We are right to be enraged.  Those in charge — Wall Street, and our elected government leaders — had better show some leadership and pay attention to the demands of justice.  It’s not easy to do that, especially after so much as gone wrong.  But it is never too late to start.

Paul Woodruff teaches philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has held positions for over twenty years as department chair, honors director, and dean. He served in the United States Army as a junior officer, 1969-71. His many books include Reverence, First Democracy, The Necessity of Theater, and The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness, and Rewards.

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Not so long ago Europe was not merely a recurrent theme for philosophy; it was central to the traditional discourse of “philosophy of the history of the world”. Taking in work by such giants as Kant, Hegel, and Husserl, the basic idea was that the history of “Man” can be related as a movement between an original “savage” condition and a final “fully human” condition. This construal of human history was not only European in origin, but also “Eurocentric”. Its centre was the idea that the transition for “Man” in history is a movement towards an end with European humanity at the head.

Few philosophers today take much interest in this old philosophical genre. However, in a number of important texts Jacques Derrida argued that a task remains for us in this area:

At stake is neither contenting oneself with reaffirming a certain history or a certain memory…nor contenting oneself with being opposed to, or opposing denial to, this [history] or memory, but rather trying to displace the fundamental scheme of this problematic by going beyond the old, tiresome, worn-out and wearisome opposition between Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism.

Derrida did not suppose that his own work had said the last (or first) word on such “going beyond”. Indeed, he insisted that “one won’t get there all of a sudden in one try; it will be the effect of a log and slow historical labour”. On the other hand, he did think this was a movement that is, in our time, “under way”.

To get a handle on Derrida’s contribution to this movement, we might take our bearings (and distance) from two other contemporary thinkers who have taken philosophy as central to an understanding of European and world history: Isaiah Berlin and Francis Fukuyama. In the second half of the twentieth century, Berlin explored the possibility of grounding European unity in Europe’s philosophical culture. However, his contribution to philosophy of the history of the world was essentially negative and “pessimistic”: he emphasised “the decline of utopian ideas in the West”, and was writing with a post-War conviction that the classic European discourse of human emancipation and progress was all but dead. At the end of the twentieth century, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama attempted to revive the traditional “optimistic” genre. However, while his fundamental references were to Kant and (especially) Hegel and Marx, his analysis of the spread of democracy “out of its original beachhead in Western Europe” made little impact in academic philosophy.

In important respects, both Berlin and Fukuyama have something important to teach us. Today we are, as the British philosopher David Wiggins puts it, “more resistant than the eighteenth- or nineteenth-centuries knew how to be [to] attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit”. And yet, as Wiggins goes on to note, this does not mean “that we have lost interest in emancipation or progress themselves”. How are we to understand this continuing interest beyond the classic Eurocentric conception? Berlin, Fukuyama and Derrida all appeal here – in divergent ways – to what we might call the universalizable promise of democracy as somehow surviving the decline of utopian ideas.

Berlin more frequently saw post-Kantian interests in philosophy of the history of the world as “a recipe for bloodshed” than it is given to “a moment of illumination”. Fukuyama, on the other hand, was perhaps overly impressed by the moment of illumination. Unable to see how the idea of democracy might belong to an understanding of history as fundamentally open-ended, the “good news” of the end of history announced by Fukuyama was undermined by its ideal as well as its empirical implausibility. But Fukuyama’s failure does not imply that that his concerns should be consigned to the history of ideas. On the contrary, it calls for new chapters in the philosophy of Europe, a new effort to come to terms with Europe’s cultural heritage and identity in our time.

As a self-styled “guardian” of what he called “the uniquely European heritage of an idea of democracy”, Derrida did more, I think, than any thinker in recent years to take credible steps in this laborious movement beyond Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism.  In the absence of a story of world history, the idea of democracy will no longer be thought through in terms of the history-ending realization of the ideal form of social life, nor even in terms of a regulative idea in the Kantian sense. What needs to be secured today, and what Derrida gave us to think, is the idea of democracy as something that entails a more open-ended history of emancipation and progress: of democracy as something that, in its concept, always “remains to be thought and to come”*.

* Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 78.

Simon Glendinning is Reader in European Philosophy in the European Institute, London School of Economics. He is the author of Derrida: A Very Short Introduction.

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In Plato’s Republic, a canonic centerpiece of all Western thought, we first read of the “philosopher king,” a visionary leader who would impressively combine deep learning with effective governance. Today, almost 2400 years later, such leadership is nowhere to be found, either in Washington, or in any other major world capital. Here in the United States, we seemingly remain content with criteria of presidential selection that emphasize anything but cultivated insights or real wisdom. To the contrary, and despite an endless litany of past failures, we still measure our candidates according to their abundantly vague promises, and embarrassingly empty witticisms.

The “Plato problem” exists in all spheres of American electoral politics, not “only” at the level of the presidency. Stubbornly, we the people are willing to reduce all serious political judgments to a crass assortment of  numbing clichés and visceral ideologies.

The story is told of an admiring friend who charms a young mother, “My, that’s a beautiful baby you have there.”  The mother replies, “Oh, that’s nothing — you should see his photograph.”  In this obviously weird colloquy lies a sorely bitter truth.

Routinely, in all politics, we Americans are presented not with authentic individuals, but with choreographed reproductions. Inevitably, to our chagrin, we discover that these carefully touched up images disguise a multitude of virulent pathologies. In a stunning, if unwitting, misunderstanding of Plato’s thought, which explicitly emphasizes the core reality of ideas, most Americans now fully accept this very odd substitution of image for reality.

Everywhere, even in politics, fame can be concocted or synthetic. Typically, in politics, it matters little if a particular candidate has any notably intrinsic worth or genuine promise. What really counts, over time, is simply that the public will be impressed by this aspirant because he or she is suitably recognizable. Again and again, in a plainly perverse tribute to the corollary power of the image-makers, even the most blatant nincompoop has been transformed into a viable candidate.

In American politics, no one any longer expects what Ralph Waldo Emerson had once called “high thinking.” Rather, the celebrity politician draws huge audiences (and donors) although very few would ever expect to hear anything of substance. In our national politics of veneered truths, whenever a candidate’s spoken words seethe with vacant allusions and blatant equivocations, the crowd nods approvingly, and leaps with satisfaction.

It is comforting enough for these audiences to bask in the warmth of someone “famous.” In the absurd theatre of American politics, the key protagonists continue to play their stock parts with contrived zeal and ambition, but also without any true capacity. As for the chorus, we have rehearsed our lines just as well, but we now utter them viscerally, as if by rote. Understandably, our exuberant shouts of approbation lack credibility. After all, they have been reduced to ritual incantations.

The historian Daniel J. Boorstin once wrote knowingly of the “celebrity,” of the person or product that is known for well‑knownness. Offered as a commodity, the object of celebrity triumphs only because the pervasive alchemy of “public relations.” It matters not at all that a public figure may be manifestly without intellect, courage or integrity. This deficiency is literally of no consequence.

Many of our national heroes were once created by commendable achievement. Today, the successful politician is fashioned by a system that is refractory to all wisdom, a system that is sustained by banality, empty chatter, and half knowledge. Now, at a time when leadership incapability could pave the way to bioterrorism, “dirty bombs,” or even outright nuclear attack, our relentless transformations of politics into amusement has become far more than a mere matter of foolishness or bad taste.

When will we learn to look behind the news, to acknowledge that our fragile political world has been constructed upon ashes? The answer: Not until we learn to take ourselves seriously as persons; not until we begin to read and think with sincerity; not until we stop amusing ourselves to death; not until we seek rapport with genuine feeling; and not until we rediscover the dignified grace of real learning.

As Americans, there can never be any primary salvation for us in politics. Largely because of our disfigured criteria of selection, the American president and other elected high officials, Democrat or Republican, can never be expected to lead. This will change only after core personal meanings in America are finally detached from frenetic marketing, and after we recognize that we are held captive within a demeaning world of manufactured promises and empty appearances. Hopefully, of course, it will change before such time, as H.L. Mencken once observed, when a distinctly higher authority, “tired of the farce at last, obliterates the entire race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci.”

Plato’s “philosopher king” may not be a practicable standard for American electoral politics, but it surely can’t hurt to keep such a potentially enviable measure somewhere in mind. At a minimum, such a recollection could remind us of how far we have already strayed.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is Professor of Political Science at Purdue University. He is author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law. Read his previous OUPblog posts here.

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Watch Robin Waterfield explain why reading Plato is important here.

In the videos below Robin Waterfield, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Republic, explains why we should read it, and what makes Plato so interesting.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can watch Robin Waterfield talk about his most recent book, Dividing the Spoils, here.

Robin Waterfield was a lecturer at the universities of Newcastle and St Andrews before moving into publishing, then freelance writing and translation. He has published numerous translations of the Greek classics. He now lives in the far south of Greece on a small olive farm.

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When an offender commits a crime most of us think that the state is justified, and perhaps also required, to punish him or her. But punishment causes offenders a great deal of harm, it costs a lot of money, and it not only harms offenders, it also harms their family and friends. What could possibly justify doing these things?

Here is one answer:

Retributivism: when a person commits a serious wrong, it is good in itself that she suffers. The state ought to make her suffer for this reason.

Many people do get satisfaction in seeing offenders suffer – think of the feeling that you have when the bad guy gets it in the neck at the end of some cowboy film. Some people conclude from this that the suffering of offenders is good. I find it hard to believe that the suffering of offenders is good in itself. Suffering is in general bad. What makes the suffering of offenders good? And even if the suffering of offenders were good, why would we want to spend any significant resources on making them suffer? Haven’t we got better things to do with our money? Even if the suffering of offenders is good, the happiness of do-gooders is surely better. Why not spend all our money on making do-gooders happy?

Here is another answer:

Consequentialism: imposing suffering on offenders is bad in itself. But making them suffer does more good than harm. It does good by deterring people from committing more crimes. Were we not to punish offenders there would be a great deal of crime, and that would cause a great deal of harm.

Few could deny that deterring crime is good. Few could deny that the criminal justice system is successful in deterring crime, in the sense that were it not to exist at all there would be a great deal more crime. But the Consequentialist View seems to imply that it is always permissible to harm a person if doing so serves a greater good. This is hard to believe. Suppose that we could reduce the crime rate significantly by punishing some innocent people. Some people deny that it is possible to do this over the long run. But even if it were possible, many of us would nevertheless think that it is wrong to do so. The obvious reason is that it is not always permissible to harm a person for the sake of a greater good. People typically have a right not to be harmed, even if harming them will serve a greater good.

Here is a third view, one that I think more attractive:

The Duty View: it is permissible to impose punishment on offenders because of the duties that offenders incur as a result of their wrongdoing. These duties include the duty to recognise that what they have done is wrong and the duty to protect the victim and others from future offending. 

This view grounds the justification of punishment in what offenders owe to the victim and to others as a result of wrongdoing.

Unlike the Retributivist View, the Duty View is not committed to the idea that the suffering of offenders is good in itself. It rather holds that offenders must accept having burdens imposed on them, even these burdens are bad, in virtue of having done something wrong. For example, suppose that I have seriously assaulted you. I could now protect you from a further assault that you might suffer at the hands of someone else. It is plausible that I have a duty to do this. I can’t undo my own assault, but I could protect you from another assault. And I ought to do so. Furthermore, I ought to do so even if doing so involves taking on a heavy burden. It is not good in itself that I take on this burden. But I am required to do so for your sake. And, in accepting this, I ought to recognise that what I did was wrong.

The state is permitted to impose heavy burdens on offenders to protect the victims and others because offenders would be required to impose those burdens on themselves to protect the victims and others. On this view, punishment is justified in virtue of its deterrence effects. The state punishes in order to protect citizens from future offending. But it is permitted to do this not simply because doing so does more good than harm, as the Consequentialist View holds, but because offenders have a duty to protect citizens from wrongdoing.

The duty view is attractive for a number of reasons. First, it provides a natural explanation why it is wrong to punish innocent people. As innocent people do not have to bear heavy burdens in order to protect each other from crime, it would be wrong to punish them. Secondly, it can explain why punishment must be proportionate. The greater the wrong that a person has committed the more powerful the duty that she has to protect others from wrongdoing. Chopping a person’s hands off for committing theft is wrong because a person who has committed theft does not have a duty to protect other people from theft at the cost of her hands. She would have satisfied her duty at some lesser cost to herself. Thirdly, the view can explain why we think that something is amiss when offenders do not suffer – they will typically not have carried out the duty they owe to others. And it can explain this without appealing to the barbaric idea that the suffering of offenders is in itself good.

The Duty View is more humane than The Retributivist View and respects rights more effectively than The Consequentialist View. Don’t we have every reason to prefer it?

Victor Tadros is Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Warwick. Prior to his appointment at Warwick he held positions at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He has written on criminal responsibility, criminal offences, criminal trials, the presumption of innocence, just war theory, and various aspects of moral and political philosophy. His latest book is The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundation of Criminal Law.

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“The crowd is untruth.” –Soren Kierkegaard

Sometimes, seeing requires distance. Now, suffocating daily in political and economic rants from both the Right and the Left, we Americans must promptly confront a critical need to look beyond the historical moment, to seek both meaning and truth behind the news. There, suitably distant from the endlessly adrenalized jumble of current fears and concerns, we could finally understand the timeless struggle of individual against mass, of the beleaguered singular person against the “crowd.”

The crowd, recognized the great Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, any crowd, is “untruth.” Whatever side one takes in the current American culture wars, there is assuredly never any palpable reward for “rugged individualism.” Rather, contrary to the stock reassurances of our high school and university history textbooks, this nation routinely smiles upon visceral conformance and cliché, while disapproving, and even crushing, any dint of critical questioning, or any hint of independent thought.

Our most insidious enemy is an unphilosophical spirit that knows nothing, and seeks to know nothing, of truth. Now, facing an unprecedented and staggering economic crisis, we Americans still feel most comfortable when we can chant in chorus. “We’re number one; we’re number one,” we shout reflexively, even as our capacity to project global power withers visibly, and even as the stark national separation of rich and poor has come to mimic the most depressed and downtrodden nations on earth.

Always uncomfortable with intellect or real learning (in contrast to vocational or “practical” training), America is utterly bored or annoyed with difficult concepts and complex ideas. After all, it is much easier to fashion our personal judgments and opinions on the basis of a pre-formed political discourse.

Now, Americans are sharply polarized not only by race, ethnicity and class, but also by inclination to consider serious thought. For most of this broken country, shallow entertainments remain the only expected (and affordable) compensation for a shallow life of tedious obligation and meaningless work. This huge portion of the populace, kept distant from any true personal growth by every imaginable social and economic obstacle, desperately seeks some residual compensations in silly slogans, status-bearing affiliations, and, of course, the manifestly empty witticisms of politics.

As Americans, we must soon understand that no nation can ever be “first” that does not hold the individual sacred. At one time in our collective history, after Emerson and Thoreau, a spirit of personal accomplishment did earn high marks in this land. Young people, especially, strove to rise interestingly, not as the embarrassingly obedient servants of crude power and raw commerce, but as distinctly proud owners of a unique and personal Self.

Alas, today, this Self lives in lines of traffic and on the cell phone. Whether we Americans would prefer to become more secular, or more reverent, to grant government more authority over our lives, or less, a willing submission to multitudes has become our unifying national religion.

Such crowd-like sentiments have a long and diversified planetary history. We are, to be fair, hardly the first people to surrender to crowds.

The contemporary crowd-man or woman is, in fact, a primitive and universal being, one who has “slipped back,” in the words of the great Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, “through the wings, on to the age-old stage of civilization.”

This grotesque stage is littered with the corpses of dead civilizations. Left-wing or Right-wing, tea-party or no-party, college educated or high school graduates, the crowd indiscriminately defiles all that is most gracious and still-promising in American society. Charles Dickens, during his first visit to America, had already observed in 1842: “I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be dealt by this country in the failure of its example to the earth.”

To our credit, we Americans have successfully maintained our political freedom from traditional political tyranny and oppression, but we have also cravenly surrendered our corollary liberty to become authentic persons. Openly deploring a life of meaning and sincerity, we stubbornly confuse wealth with success, and blurt out rhythmic chants of patriotic celebration even as our cheerless democracy vanishes into meaninglessness and wider suffering.

Whatever its origin, there is an identifiable reason behind this carefully synchronized delirium. Such babble seeks to protect us all from a terrifying and unbearable loneliness. In the end, however, it is a contrived and inevitably lethal solution.

The courageous American who still seeks escape from the crowd, who opts heroically for disciplined individual thought over effortless conformance, must feel deeply alone. “The most radical division,” asserted José Ortega y Gasset in 1930, “is that which splits humanity…. those who make great demands on themselves…and those who demand nothing special of themselves…” In 1965, the Jewish philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, offered an almost identical argument. Lamenting, “The emancipated man is yet to emerge,” Heschel then asked each one to inquire: “What is expected of me? What is demanded of me?”

It is time for camouflage and concealment in the pitiful American crowd to yield to what Heschel had called “being-challenged-in-the-world.” Individuals who dare to read books for more than transient entertainment, and who are willing to risk social and material disapproval in exchange for exiting the crowd, offer America its only real and lasting hope. To be sure, these rare souls can seldom be found in politics, in universities, in corporate boardrooms, or anywhere on radio, television or in the movies. Always, their critical inner strength lies not in elegant oratory, in catchy phrases, or in large accumulations of personal wealth, but in the considerably more ample powers of genuineness, reason and thought.

Not even the flimsiest ghost of intellectual originality still haunts our public discussions of politics and economics. Now that our self-deceiving citizenry has lost all sense of awe in the world, this American public not only avoids authenticity, it positively loathes it. Indeed, in a nation that has lost all regard for even the Western literary canon, our American crowds shamelessly seek comfort and fraternity in a common and conveniently shared illiteracy.

The division of American society into few and mass represents a useful separation of those who are imitators from those who would initiate real understanding. “The mass,” said Jose Ortega y Gasset, “crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select.” Today, in deference to this mass, the intellectually un-ambitious American not only wallows lazily in nonsensical political and cultural phrases, he or she also dutifully applauds a manifestly shallow ethos of personal surrender and social mediocrity.

By definition, the mass, or crowd, can never become few. Yet, some individual members of the mass can make the difficult transformation. Those who are already part of the few must announce and maintain their determined stance. “One must become accustomed to living on mountains,” says Nietzsche, “to seeing the wretched ephemeral chatter of politics and national egotism beneath one.”

Aware that they comprise a core barrier to America’s spiritual, cultural, intellectual and political disintegration, these resolute opponents of the crowd will knowingly refuse to chant in chorus. Ultimately, they will remind us of something very important: Individually and collectively, staying the lonely course of self-actualization and self-renewal–a course of consciousness rather than delusion–is the only honest and purposeful option for our imperiled country.

Today, unhindered in their misguided work, our national cheerleaders in all walks of life draw feverishly upon the sovereignty of the unqualified crowd. This mass depends for its very breath of life on the relentless withering of personal dignity, and on the continued servitude of any independent consciousness. Oddly, still unaware of this parasitism, we the people are passively converted into fuel to feed the omnivorous machine of “democracy,” a system of governance in which the American citizenry is certainly permitted to speak and interact freely, but which is now also an undisguised and anti-human plutocracy.

The crowd is untruth.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is Professor of International Law at Purdue University. He is author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law. Read his previous OUPblog posts here.

For further reading, we recommend Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs by Soren Kierkegaard.
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By Louis René Beres

Theory is a net. Only those who cast will catch.

In an important work of contemporary philosophy and social science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn articulates the vital idea of “paradigm.”  By this idea, which has obvious parallels in the arts, Kuhn refers to certain examples of scientific practice that provide theoretical models for further inquiry: Ptolemaic or Copernican astronomy; Aristotelian dynamics; Newtonian mechanics, and so on.  At any given moment in history, we learn, the prevailing paradigm within a given discipline defines the basic contours of all subsequent investigation.

The transformations of these paradigms, transformations that are occasioned by the essential opposition of new “facts” and empirical findings to the prevailing dominant orthodoxy, are “scientific revolutions.” The transition from one paradigm to another represents the core dynamic in which science is able to progress.

As an intrinsically important (but generally under-recognized) area of political science, strategic studies are no exception.  In the fashion of all other fields of inquiry, this very old area of scholarship can progress only to the extent that new paradigms routinely arise to “excavate” a consistently transforming consciousness of war and peace.  Ironically, however, the emergence of such indispensable new paradigms has been remarkably scant in recent years, creating a genuine ossification of strategic studies. This condition is already precipitating assorted negative intellectual and policy consequences.

What is to be done? I propose to argue here that the benefits of Kuhn’s useful concept of paradigm could be enhanced by pertinent reference to the world of art. In this world, creative “advance” is achieved via ongoing and persistent challenges to dominant orthodoxies, what Kuhn would call the dynamic of “paradigm shifts.”  Significantly, in the world of art, these entirely revolutionary transformations of prevailing epistemologies [i] are spawned by an always emergent avant-garde, by a critical “vanguard” for the new.

This is exactly what we need in strategic studies today.  Now, we lack altogether the idea and the presence of an avant-garde.  As a result, the field continues to be dominated by aging and increasingly irrelevant paradigms; hence, by static models of military thinking that are often incapable of shaping any purposeful military policies. More specifically, the absence of avant-garde thinking has had determinable consequences for our problematic strategic policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

One of the major “beat” [ii] poets of the 1950s titled a poem, “This Is Not a Poem.” [iii] In so doing, he sought, through irony and paradox, to confront and eventually to alter the prevailing norms of poetry.  It is in the constant and continuing tension between orthodoxy and avant-garde that art advances.

This is also true of academic disciplines.  Yet, in the genre with which we are presently concerned, the sub-field of political science that we call strategic studies, we are witnessing nary a new challenge to the now-sanctified mainstream still defined by Clausewitz, Sun-Tzu, Brodie, Schelling, Liddell-Hart, etc.

What is to be done?  Let me offer an example from the world of art.  To recognize the origins of modern art, a contemporary expression of which was contained in the “beat” movement, we must look at the revolutionary romanticism of Blake and the revolutionary classicism of David.  So, too, must we consider the historical idealism of Delacroix (to Cezanne always “le grand maître“); the realism of Courbet and Manet; the expressionism of Van Gogh and Munch; the symbolism of Emile Bernard and Gaugin. All of these precede and even predetermine the specifically modern movements of Fauvism, Cubism, Constructivism and Surrealism.

Let us look more closely at Surrealism.  In June 1936, the International Surrealist Exhibition broke over London, electrifying the dry intellectual atmosphere, and stirring sluggish minds and sluggish brushes to unaccustomed wonder, enchantment and redefinition.  Of course, the Exhibition also stirred derision, but this can assuredly be a most positive and productive emotion as well.

Surrealist art was intended to shock the viewer into a different and new kind of awareness.  The paintings of Dali and Magritte, the frottages of Max Ernst, Picabia’s mechanistic pictures, and the abstract sculpture of Jean Arp – all were timely expressions of revolt against a dull and timeworn orthodoxy.  All were expressions of a much-needed avant-garde.

And there is the related movement known as Dada. [iv] More than anything else, Dada represented a revolt against existing art by artists. [v] Even today, Dada stands outrageously for an exaggerated individualism, for universal doubt, and for an appropriately aggressive iconoclasm.  Debunking the prevailing canons of reason, taste and hierarchy, of order and of discipline, of an artistic inspiration controlled by rationality, Dada emphasized the arbitrary, the power of chance, of the unconscious, of the primitive.  Always, Dada delighted in the shock effect of its new-paradigm blasphemies among those who were “right thinking” artists. [vi]

This brings us back to strategic studies.  Like art, our particular genre cannot progress without an ever-present and ever-emergent avant-garde.  Indeed, this requirement was not always neglected by the field.  For the transition in paradigm from war histories to war studies, we need only consider the seminal works of Marshal de Saxe, Chevalier de Folard, Guibert, Count Raimondo Montecuccoli, Henry Lloyd and Frederick the Great.  We may also consider the reactions to and reformations of those principles contained in Thucydides and, later, in manuals on warfare such as Maurice’s Strategicon, Leo VI’s Tactica and even Machiavelli’s The Art of War.  From Vegetius’s De Re Militari to Baron De Jomini’s The Art of War, from Helmuth von Moltke to Giulio Douhet’s Command of the Air, a strategic avant-garde is evident in our field that countered the rigor mortis of academicism with the sheer vitality of creative intellect and art.

We are at a very different stage today.  While benefiting from the crucial paradigm-challenges offered by Andre Beaufre and Alfred Thayer Mahan, by Col. Trevor Dupuy and Thomas Schelling, we are now operating (and operationalizing) in a deep intellectual “rut.”  Generally mimicking the prevailing paradigm, rather than challenging it in any imaginative or systematic way, those who toil in the vineyards of strategic studies are often less and less able to make productive policy recommendations. In consequence, our strategic policies are too often less than optimal.

Many of the principal assumptions associated with current strategic studies need to be challenged by a new intellectual vanguard, by an eager avant-garde. One such assumption is the core idea of rationality in strategic calculations.  Insofar as the functioning of nuclear deterrence is entirely contingent upon this assumption, the field tends to look away from circumstances in which rationality might not operate.  As a result, strategic studies do little if anything to prepare national policy-makers for confrontations with enemy states or state proxies whose leaders do not conform to the pertinent rules of rational decision-making. [vii]

Another problematic assumption of strategic studies concerns the generally alleged immutability of human nature.  Regarding behavioral factors as fixed and non-variable in strategic calculations, the discipline of strategic studies focuses entirely, and therefore narrowly, on manipulations of force structures, power balances, governments and other institutions in world affairs.  Here it would be sobering to reconsider the observation of the late-eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant:  “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be built.” [viii] Newly aware those structural manipulations in strategic studies are always epiphenomenal; ignoring the root causes of war in favor of their symptomatic expressions, scholars and policy-makers could craft from this paradigm-challenge a far more adaptive, and hence more promising, field.

Still another needed paradigm-shift in strategic studies concerns the requirement of what I shall call a “strategic dialectic.” [ix] Presently, our field of study is thoroughly static, rather than dynamic.  Instead of reasoning toward conclusions by asking and answering questions, it generally offers little more than reportorial summaries of relative force structures and inventories of weapons systems. Not surprisingly, this absence of dialectical reasoning [x] has prevented the development of a highly-predictive system of theory, the very kind of system that should always be the primary element of strategic studies.

We require an avant garde to advance a distinctly dialectical series of strategic thoughts, where each thought presents a complication that moves inquiry onward to the very next thought.  Contained in this strategic dialectic is an obligation to continue thinking, an obligation that can never be fulfilled altogether (because of what is traditionally called the “infinite regress problem”), but that must still be attempted, always, as fully, and as competently, as possible.  Without such an attempt, strategic studies will continue to focus narrowly upon discrete moments in time, on “still photos” rather than on “moving pictures,” or, to switch metaphors, on what pathologists would call “frozen sections,” rather than on actual pathogenesis.

But first there will need to be courage, the very sort of courage that allows any individual to accept serious professional risks.  “Whenever the new Muses present themselves,” says Ortega y Gasset, “the masses bristle.” [xi] Those who would now challenge mainstream strategic studies as an essential avant-garde will, like their counterparts in the world of art, need to endure some palpable measures of ridicule and opprobrium.  Will they be ready?

In leveling their intellectual challenges against a stultifying orthodoxy, the challengers will have to confront the “experts,” and they will have to take care not to become “experts” themselves.  The problem, in strategic studies as well as in a great many other fields, is that the expert has now replaced the thinker (largely because society always pays for the expert and not for the thinker), and the expert is usually incapable of serious strategic analysis.  Oriented to the “wisdom” of television sound-bites, and not to the exhausting discipline of long and lonely intellectual work, the expert largely remains what Ortega identified in 1932, “a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.”  Indeed, continues Ortega, the expert symbolizes, and to a great extent even constitutes, “…the actual domination of the masses. Furthermore, he affords the clearest, most striking example of how the civilization of the last century, abandoned to its own devices, has brought about the rebirth of primitivism and barbarism.” [xii]

There are, of course, many other areas of strategic studies wherein avant-garde challenges must be mounted.  One of these areas concerns the need for intellectual creativity, especially in regard to the formation of concepts and to the fashioning of promising hypotheses.  Another, concerns the long-forgotten rules of science, the obligation to begin every inquiry with a sound hypothesis, and to examine this hypothesis according to apt forms of deductive elaboration, and also by correct sensitivity to apt modes of inference.  Still another area concerns the idea of system; a once-fashionable notion that now needs to be revived both in reference to each individual state, and to the entire “Westphalian” world arena within which these particular states necessarily interact.

Like the artist who revolts against existing conventions in order to create new conventions more consistent with an emerging consciousness, the strategist must cease to accept all prevailing orthodoxy as valid and timeless.  It is in the dialectical opposition between conventions, and in their eventual synthesis, that art evolves, and evolves with originality.  Similarly, it is in the dialectical opposition between orthodoxy and avant-garde that strategic studies can now find serious answers to its most vital military questions.

The ever-present polarities in art occasion a rhythmic alternation of styles, creating unresolved dialectical contradictions, and ultimately new forms and genres.  The polarity in strategic studies that I have been arguing for here, a polarity spawned by the steady “vanguard” of change and transformation discoverable in art, could become the vital starting point for new paradigms of human survival. In the final analysis, nothing could possibly be more important.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is Professor of International Law at Purdue University. He is author of many books and articles dealing with all aspects of strategic studies. In Israel, Professor Beres was Chair of Project Daniel.

NOTES

[ii].            The term “beat” is associated with the new aesthetic that emerged in America after World War II.  Shared by an entire generation of young writers and visual artists, this movement centered around three writers: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.  These three, functioning as an avant-garde, formed a potent new “paradigm” that offered a distinct alternative to the complacent conformity of Cold War America and its correspondingly mainstream art world.  Admiring the action painters of the New York School such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, the beat artists moved even further away from traditional figurative representation in their work, choosing instead to substitute a notion of process and performance in which bodily rhythms and primal emotions were acted out on canvas. In the end, what Ginsberg had suggested in a letter to Kerouac in 1951 – that they would become what he called “the nucleus of a totally new historically important American tradition” – did indeed come to pass.

[iii].            This title was drawn, perhaps, from a paradigm-busting painting by Rene Magritte, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe.”)

[iv].            The movement called Dada was formed by three principals at the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich in 1916:  Tristan Tzara (born Sami Rosenstock in 1896 in Moinesti, Rumania); Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck.

[v].            Defining Dada in his essay, “Picasso and Poetry,” Tristan Tzara called it:  “…the abolition of all art for the benefit of a sort of poetic function, spontaneous expression of individuality.”  Moreover, in terms of our present interest in paradigm-shifts and the necessary avant-garde, expressionism – with its distrust of reason, its hostility to bourgeois industrial society, its cultivation of the absurd and its rejection of representational art – prefigured Dada.

[vi].            The Dada poetic epic of 1925-30, “Approximate Man,” revolted against bourgeois commonplaces and polite art.

[vii].            The strategist should be reminded of M. Unamuno’s instructive remark about Hegel: “Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the real is rational: but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon irrationalities.”

[viii].            The original German is: “Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht its, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden.”

[ix].            The term “dialectic” originates from the Greek expression for the art of conversation.  Today a common meaning is that dialectic is a method of seeking truth via correct reasoning.  From the standpoint of our concerns, the following operations may be identified as essential but nonexclusive components of a strategic dialectic: (1) A method of refutation by examining logical consequences; (2) A method of division or repeated logical analysis of genera into species; (3) Logical reasoning using premises that are probable or generally accepted; (4) Formal logic; and (5) The logical development of thought through thesis and antithesis to a synthesis of these opposites.

[x].            Dialectic likely originated in the Fifth Century B.C.E., as Zeno, author of the PARADOXES, was recognized by Aristotle as its inventor.  In the middle dialogues of Plato, dialectic emerges as the supreme form of philosophic/analytic method.  In one of these dialogues, Plato describes the dialectician as someone who knows how to ask and how to answer questions.  This is what I am recommending here for strategic studies and for the rise of a pertinent avant garde.  We need, in this all-important discipline, to know how to ask and how to answer questions.  This knowledge must precede mere compilations of facts, figures and power balances.

[xi].            See: Jose Ortega y Gasset, THE DEHUMANIZATION OF ART AND OTHER ESSAYS ON ART, CULTURE, AND LITERATURE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), p. 7.

[xii].            See: Jose Ortega y Gasset, THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES (1932), Chapter 12: “The Barbarism of `Specialisation.’”  Also interesting on the limitations of “experts” and “specialists” are Jacques Barzun, THE HOUSE OF INTELLECT (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959) and MADMEN AND SPECIALISTS, a play by the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka (New York: Hill and Wang, 1971).

By Louis René Beres

Here on earth, tragedy and disappointment seemingly afflict every life that is consecrated to serious thought. This is especially true in matters of world politics where every self-styled blogger is now an “expert” and where any careful search for deeper meanings is bound to fall upon deaf ears. Nonetheless, if we wish to better understand war, terror and genocide, we must finally be willing to search beyond the endlessly clichéd babble of politicians, professors and pundits.

How, then, shall we survive,  both as a civilization, and also as a species? This is not, by any means, a silly question. Rather, although almost never addressed meaningfully, it remains the question of supreme importance and urgency.

To venture purposefully toward an answer, we must acknowledge that the outer worlds of politics and statecraft are inevitably a reflection of our innermost private selves. More precisely, it is only within the opaque mysteries of individual human mortality –  mysteries focused on the timeless and universal preoccupation with personal power over death – that we can ultimately discover the core truths of our collective survival.

These truths will be sobering. The standard assumption that we shall obviously endure as a species is simply not supported by science. Virtually every species (more than ninety-nine percent, to be more exact) that once walked or crawled on this increasingly-broken planet has already become extinct. The dinosaurs, once absolute rulers of the earth, have left us only their crushed bones as mementoes.

Nor should we draw any reasonable hope from myriad private and collective human accomplishments. From an evolutionary perspective, intellect and intelligence are plainly overrated. The bacteria, who lack both, have been around a great deal longer than we have. Their future survival, too, is plainly more secure.

Though gleefully unacknowledged, especially in schools and universities, there remains a palpably yawning gap between humankind’s technical understandings, and its passions. Cruelty, undimmed and undiminished, continues to wear a distinctly human face.

More than we care to admit, education and enlightenment have too-little  bearing on the human prospect. Surely, we understand, steadily expanding technologies of mega-destruction have done nothing to make us more responsible stewards of the earth. Instead, with an utterly unhindered arrogance, entire nations and peoples continue to revel in every conceivable form of barbarism and extermination.

Exeunt omnes?

What, exactly, is wrong with us? Somehow, shameless human bloodletting persists even while the most predatory of other animals manage to live together in less murderous habitats. There is also endless  killing among these “lower” animals, but it is mostly survival driven. Almost never is it aimlessly destructive, wanton, or merely gratuitous.

Paradoxically, some essential truths remain both evident and well hidden. As a species, whether openly or quietly, we too-often take a conspicuous delight in the pain and suffering of others. In German, my own first language (I am Swiss born),  there is even a precise name for it. Scholars and writers call it “Schadenfreude.”

What sort of species can tolerate or venerate such a hideous source of pleasure? And to what extent, if any, is this venal quality related to our steadily-diminishing prospects for survival?

“Our unconscious,” wrote Freud, “does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal.”  What we ordinarily describe as heroism may in some cases be no more than denial. Still, an expanded acceptance of personal mortality may represent the very last best chance we have to endure.

Acceptance can come from personal encounters with death. All things move in the midst of death, but what does it really feel like to “almost die?”  What can we learn from experiencing “near death” (no one can “experience” death itself), and then emerging, whole, to “live again?”

Can we learn something here that might benefit the wider human community,  something that could even move us beyond Schadenfreude?

Death “happens” to us all,  but our potentially meaningful awareness of this expectation is regularly blunted by delusion. To forthrightly acknowledge that we may all be mere flesh and blood creatures of biology is evidently more than most humans can bear.  “Normally,” there is even a peculiar embarrassment felt by the living in the presence of the dead and dying. It is as if death and dying were reserved only for others, as if it were an “affliction” that can never possibly darken our own eternal lives.

That we typically cling to promises of redemption and immortality is not, by itself, a species-survival issue. It only becomes an existential problem, one that we customarily call war, terrorism or genocide, when these assorted promises are forcibly limited to certain segments of humanity, but are then simultaneously and violently denied to other “unworthy” segments.

In the end, all national and international politics are epiphenomenal, a symptomatic reflection of underlying and compelling private needs. The most pressing of these needs is undoubtedly an avoidance of personal death.

Generally, it is not for us to choose when to die.  Our words, our faces, and our countenance will sometime lie well beyond any considerations of conscious choice. But, we can still choose to recognize our shared common fate, and our outright interdependence. Such an incomparably powerful and private recognition could even carry with it an equally potent collective promise.

Much as we  like to please ourselves with various qualitative presumptions of hierarchy and differentiation, we humans are all pretty much the same. This is already clear to scientists and physicians. Our most important similarity, and the one least subject to contrary argument, is that we all die.

Whatever our divergent views on what  happens to us after death, the basic mortality that we share can represent the very last best chance we have to coexist and survive.

There is one more core observation. We can still care for one another as humans, but only after we have first acknowledged that the judgment of a common fate will not be waived by any harms that are inflicted deliberately upon the “unworthy.” In essence, modern war, terror and genocide are often authentic expressions of religious sacrifice, and may therefore actually represent desperate human hopes of overcoming private mortality through the killing of “outsiders.”

In the end, only a dual awareness of our common human destination, which is death, and of the associated futility of “sacrifice,” can offer real medicine against an otherwise incessant war of all against all. Only a person who can feel deeply within himself or herself the unalterable fate and sufferings of a broader humanity will ever be able to embrace genuine compassion, and thus reject destructive spasms of collective violence.

There can be no private conquests of death through war, terror or genocide.  Never. To survive as a species, therefore, a uniquely courageous and worldwide embrace of mortality, empathy and caring will be indispensable.

Just how to make such a redemptive embrace possible and practicable should now become the single most urgent question before us all.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is Professor of International Law at Purdue University. He is currently examining unexplored connections between human death fears and world politics. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II, he is the author of ten books, and several hundred articles, on international relations and international law.

For further reading, we recommend Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict, and Terrorism by Ervin Staub.

By David Fisher

There has been much recent debate about whether the 2003 Iraq War was legal, with both Tony Blair and his Attorney General summoned before the Chilcot enquiry to give evidence on this. But a more fundamental question is whether the war was moral.

On this question the Chilcot enquiry has been silent, perhaps reflecting a more general scepticism in society about whether moral questions can have objective answers. But there is a way of thinking going back to Aquinas, Aristotle and beyond that insists that there are rationally based ways to answer moral questions.

A key contribution to this is furnished by the just war tradition. This sets a number of tests which have to be met if a war is to be just. It has to be undertaken: for a just cause, with right intention, with competent authority, as a last resort, and the harm judged likely to result should not outweigh the good achieved, taking into account the probability of success; while in its conduct the principles of proportion and non-combatant immunity have to met; and the war end in a just peace.

This may appear over-prescriptive: erecting so many hurdles that war would become impossible. But the just war tradition recognises that wars can be just and may sometimes be necessary. What the tradition insists on are two fundamental requirements, as simple as they are rationally compelling: is there a just cause and will the harm likely to be caused by military action outweigh the good to be achieved by that cause? In other words, is war likely to bring about more good than harm?

So how does the Iraq War fare against these criteria?

Different reasons were adduced at different times for the war. But the declared grounds common to both the US and UK Governments was to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, so enforcing UN Security Council Resolutions.

We now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. But even that startling disclosure by the Iraq Survey Group would not necessarily invalidate the coalition’s disarmament objective as just cause if there had been strong grounds for believing that Saddam had such weapons.

The problem is that the evidence for such weapons was ‘sporadic and patchy’ in the words of the official Butler report. The Governments’ claim that they were acting on behalf of the UN was also weakened by the lack of substantial international support for military operations, evidenced by the reluctance of the Security Council explicitly to endorse such action through a second resolution. This, in turn, reflected concern that military action was not being undertaken as a last resort: that Saddam should have been given more time to convince the inspectors he had abandoned WMD.  Doubt over whether each of these just war conditions was met did not amount to a knock-down argument against war. But the doubts taken together mutually reinforced each other and so strengthened concern that there was not a sufficient just cause. 

It is, moreover, the single most serious charge against those who planned the Iraq War that they massively under-estimated the harm that would be likely to be caused by military action. Coalition leaders could not reasonably be expected to have forecast the precise casualty levels that would follow military action. But the coalition leaders can be criticised for failing to give sufficient consideration to what would be the effects of regime change and for not formulating robust plans promptly to re-establish civil governance in its wake and ensure a peaceful transition to democracy. They thus acted with a degree of recklessness. Just as they had undertaken worst case assessments of Saddam’s WMD capability, so they had undertaken best case assessments of what would happen after the regime had been changed.

The Iraq War was, like most wars, fought from a mixture of motives. But the concerns over WMD proliferation were genuinely held, however shaky may have been their foundation. The tragedy of the Iraq conflict is that those responsible were trying to make the world a better and safer place and were supported by military forces that have, on the whole, exhibited remarkable restraint and courage. But, as the just war doctrine – forged from painful experience over the centuries – teaches, noble aspirations are not enough.

The war failed fully to meet any of the just war criteria. This gives grounds for concern. The charge against the Iraq War is not, however, that it fell somewhat short of a number of conditions. But rather that such individual failures, when taken together, mutually reinforced each other, so building up cumulatively to support the conclusion that the war was undertaken without sufficient just cause and without adequate planning to ensure a just outcome. It thus failed the two key tests that have to be met before a war can be justly undertaken, designed to ensure that military action is only initiated if more good than harm is likely to result.

Our political leaders may have had noble objectives. But moral fervour is not enough to ensure right decisions are taken. Moral reasoning needs to be guided by the judicious exercise of practical wisdom, which political leaders are required to exercise in its highest form, called by Aquinas statesmanship. It was such statesmanship that was signally lacking in the decision to embark on military action in 2003.

David Fisher is a Visiting Senior Fellow at King’s College, London, where he completed a PhD in War Studies. He has served in senior positions in the Ministry of Defence, Foreign Office, and Cabinet Office, including Defence Advisor to the Prime Minister in the Cabinet Office and the UK Defence Counsellor to NATO. He is the author of Morality and War: Can War be Just in the Twenty-First Century?.

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By Simon Blackburn

 
David Hume was born three hundred years ago, on 26^th April 1711.  He lived most of his life in Edinburgh, with only a few improbable interludes: one as tutor to a lunatic, one assisting in a comic-operatic military adventure, and one somewhat more successfully as Embassy Secretary, being a lion in the literary salons of Paris. Apart from these his life was devoted to philosophy, history, literature, and conversation. He is the greatest, and the best-loved, of British philosophers, as well as the emblem and presiding genius of the great flowering of arts and letters that took place in the Edinburgh of the eighteenth century—the Scottish Enlightenment. As with all philosophers, his reputation has gone through peaks and troughs, but today it probably stands higher than it ever has.

This may be surprising. Movements in twentieth-century philosophy were not, on the whole, kind to Hume. Analytical philosophy, initiated by Moore and Russell, took logic to be its scalpel and the careful dissection of language to be its principal task, yet Hume was neither a logician nor primarily interested in language. His empiricism, indeed, had echoes in the later work of the logical positivists. But he was widely regarded as having driven empiricism into a sceptical grave. Russell, for example, could assert in his History of Western Philosophy, that Hume ‘developed to its logical conclusion the empirical philosophy of Locke and Berkeley, and by making it self-consistent, made it incredible’, and this was a widely-held view. On the Continent it has usually been assumed that Hume was simply a curtain-raiser to Kant, who allegedly instructed us how to avoid his sorry descent into scepticism, on the grounds that any world in which we could find ourselves must have a nice regular structure, discernible by the light of reason alone.

There is unquestionably a skeptical side to Hume’s philosophy. But there is another side as well, that is responsible for its current standing. Hume is indeed sceptical about the power of reason to determine what we believe. But he is not sceptical, for example, about whether the sun will rise tomorrow. He just has the calm understanding that our confidence in uniformities in nature, such as this one, is not the result of logic or of any exercise of pure rationality. It is just the way our minds happen to work—as indeed, do those of other animals.

Similarly when it comes to understanding the springs of action, Hume again dethrones reason, arguing that nothing that reason could discover would motivate us without engaging an inclination or ‘passion’. He entirely overturns the Platonic model of the soul in which reason is the charioteer, controlling and steering the unruly horses of desire. ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’. We can correct mistakes about the world in which we act, and choose more efficient means to gain our ends. We may even be able to persuade ourselves and each other to alter our courses, for better or worse. But we can only do this by mobilizing other considerations we care about. These concerns, or in other words the directions of our desires, are themselves a bare gift of nature, again. Hume excelled in adding detail to this: his account of the evolution of what he called the ‘artificial’ virtues—respect for such things as reciprocity, institutions of justice, social conventions, law or government—is the grandfather of all later decision-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches to the evolution of cooperation. But it took over two centuries before this would be recognized. Only recently has Hume’s naturalism become the gold standard for everyone at the cutting edge of contemporary investigation, whether in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, or neurophysiology.

A purely natural or observational approach to human nature may seem to exclude any critical interest in distinguishing good movements of the mind from bad ones. Hume is apparently in no position to separate rational sheep from irrational goats, since reason has so little to say about anything. Yet he retained plenty of critical edge. The famous essay ‘On Miracles’, for instance, is a classic demolition of the idea that human testimonies ever make it likely that people have walked on the water or risen from the dead, and a pioneering account of the cognitive dysfunctions underlying our willingness to believe in such things. ‘Examine the religious principles that have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick mens’ dreams.’

Naturally this attitude did not endear him to religious hardliners, and in the 1750s he was in danger of being excommunicated at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (‘they intend to give me over to Satan, which they think they have the power of doing’). Bigots like Samuel Johnson and gossips like Boswell found it hard to believe that an infidel could be as good a man as Hume was known to be, nor at the end of his life that he could face death with such calm.

Adam Smith said of Hume that ‘Upon the whole I have always considered him, both in his life-time and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit.’ And if, as Aristotle thought, our well-being can be affected by events after our death, his legions of later admirers must continue to contribute mightily to it.

Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Previously he was Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and from 1969 to 1990 he was a Fellow and Tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford. He has authored many books, including the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, but his most recent is Practical Tortoise Raising and Other Philosophical Essays.

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By Joshua Knobe

Imagine that tomorrow’s newspaper comes with a surprising headline: ‘Scientists Discover that Human Behavior is Entirely Determined.’ Reading through the article, you learn more about precisely what this determinism entails. It turns out that everything you do – every behavior, thought and decision – is completely caused by prior events, which are in turn caused by earlier events… and so forth, stretching back in a long chain all the way to the beginning of the universe.

A discovery like this one would naturally bring up a difficult philosophical question. If your actions are completely determined, can you ever be morally responsible for anything you do? This question has been a perennial source of debate in philosophy, with some philosophers saying yes, others saying no, and millennia of discussion that leave us no closer to a resolution.

As a recent New York Times article explains, experimental philosophers have been seeking to locate the source of this conundrum in the nature of the human mind. The key suggestion is that the sense of puzzlement we feel in response to this issue arises from a conflict between two different psychological processes. Our capacity for abstract, theoretical reasoning tells us: ‘Well, if you think about it rationally, no one can be responsible for an act that is completely determined.’ But our capacity for immediate emotional responses gives us just the opposite answer: ‘Wait! No matter how determined people might be, they just have to be responsible for the terrible things they do…’

To put this hypothesis to the test, the philosopher Shaun Nichols and I conducted a simple experiment. All participants were asked to imagine a completely deterministic universe (‘Universe A’). Then different participants were given different questions that encouraged different modes of thought. Some were given a question that encouraged more abstract theoretical reasoning:

In Universe A, is it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for their actions?

Meanwhile, other participants were given a question that encouraged a more emotional response:

In Universe A, a man named Bill has become attracted to his secretary, and he decides that the only way to be with her is to kill his wife and three children. He knows that it is impossible to escape from his house in the event of a fire. Before he leaves on a business trip, he sets up a device in his basement that burns down the house and kills his family.

Is Bill fully morally responsible for killing his wife and children?

The results showed a striking difference between the two conditions. Participants in the abstract reasoning condition overwhelmingly answered that no one could ever be morally responsible for anything in Universe A. But participants in the more emotional condition had a very different reaction. Even though Bill was described as living in Universe A, they said that he was fully morally responsible for what he had done. (Clearly, this involves a kind of contradiction: it can’t be that no one in Universe A is morally responsible for anything but, at the same time, this one man in Universe A actually is morally responsible for killing his family.)

Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that experiments like this one can somehow solve the problem of free will all by themselves. Still, it does appear that a close look at the empirical data can afford us a certain kind of insight. The results help us to get at the roots of our sense that there is a puzzle here and, thereby, to open up new avenues of inquiry that might not otherwise have been possible.

Joshua Knobe is an experimental philosopher affiliated both with the Program in Cognitive Science and the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. He is editor with Shaun Nichols of Experimental Philosophy. Watch a video introduction featuring the comedian Eugene Mirman here.

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By Anthony Scioli

Recently Japan’s 77 year old Emperor Akihito implored his people “not to abandon hope”.  This may have struck some Westerners as odd since Japan is an Eastern country largely dominated by Buddhism and Shinto, faith traditions that many associate with mindfulness, acceptance and renunciation rather than hope for the future, transformation, or worldly pursuits.  In fact, it is not uncommon to find Westerners who believe that “hope” does not even exist in the East.  For many American intellectuals, particularly psychologists, hope is associated with the pursuit of specific, concrete goals.  Surely the emperor did not have this kind of hope in mind when he made his appeal?

Hope is not an exclusively western, Judeo-Christian virtue.  There are words for hope in Apache (ndahondii) and Swahili (matumaini) as well as Persian (omid), to name just a few examples.  The largest lab within the International Space Station is called “Kibou”, which means “hope” in Japanese.  But what is hope?  Is it one thing or many things?  What can we learn about hope from the Japanese experience?  In turn, what can the Japanese learn from “hope”?   Can these lessons be combined to form a better psycho-social-spiritual disaster kit?

The kanji for hope

What can we learn about hope from the Japanese?

It is true that hope is partly about goals and mastery.  However, while academic psychologists have tended to conceptualize hope in terms of goal expectancies and narrow-focused probability estimates, the hopes of the common man or woman tend to be more transcendent, more global, and value-laden.  A hope is not a wish.  Unlike optimism, hope is not ego-centered but collaborative, rooted in empowerment and focused on a higher plane of success.   Ironically, the well-known “secondary” or “indirect” control processes (sometimes called “soft power” in business circles) favored in the East are more line with the nature of hopeful mastery than academic psychology’s goal-centered view of hope.   In Japan, the story of the “Fukushima Fifty” has provided a good example of collaborative mastery oriented around a higher goal.  These are the fifty employees of the damaged Fukushima nuclear power company that agreed to continue in the effort to stabilize the plant despite the inevitable exposure to toxic levels of radiation.

Hope is about attachment.  In fact, attachments are probably the most important wellspring for the development of hope. However, if you peruse mainstream psychology, you will find little on hope and attachment.  The one exception is Erik Erikson who believed that trust was the root of basic hopefulness.   The philosopher Gabriel Marcel agreed with Erikson but added openness to the attachment portion of the hope equation. Again, it is curious that this dimension of hope is brought into bolder relief through contact with Japan, albeit a collectivist society, but one not typically associated with this presumably “Christian virtue”.

During a crisis, levels of civility, trust, and openness can quickly plummet.  This is unfortunate because these attachment-related aspects of hope can function as literal life-savers during an earthquake, flood, or other major disaster.   In Japan, we have seen the value of a cohesive, tight-knit culture in the way the young and the capable have assisted the old and the vulnerable, the manner in which locals have reached out to assist foreigners, and the willingness to restrict personal use of limited resources to benefit the group as a whole.

Hope is also about survival.  For too long psychology approached human nature as if it was only rooted in the survival instinct.  Now with the advent of “positive psychology”, the field seems to have forgotten that hope for survival remains fundamental.  Paradigms come and go, but humankind is still made of vulnerable flesh and blood as well as large frontal lobes that anticipate danger and foresee death.  To be direct, this means that the current focus on growth, feed-forward loops, happiness, etc. must continue to be balanced with an appreciation of the self-regulatory struggles that dominate the everyday experience of millions who must weather strife and trauma.   Hopeful survival is linked to self-regulation through salvation beliefs and perceived options.   The Japanese are masters of self-restraint and many observers have noted the relatively lack of mass panic, and their continued acceptance and orderliness in the face of food, water, and energy shortages.

Long accustomed to working in “confined spaces” and negotiating life in the face of obstacles, it is not surprising that when fuel was limited and it became difficult to reach elderly survivors, members of the Japanese Red Cross Society resorted to bicycles.  A second example of Japanese flexibility is evidenced in their adoption of multiple faith traditions, predominately Buddhism and Shinto. But for some, there is also a bit of Confucianism added to the mix, and even elements of Christianity.

Hope is indeed spiritual. Again, you will find little spirituality in the academic psychology of hope.  But for most people, today, yesterday, and undoubtedly tomorrow, hope tends to go hand in hand with faith.  This faith often includes a large component of religious belief but can include faith in oneself, others, various institutions, nature, or technology.  However, what makes it effectively “spiritual” is not the source or domain but the depth of belief.  In modern parlance, it must be intrinsic to the self.   The spirituality of the Japanese has been a great help to them during this crisis precisely because their faith traditions (i.e., belief in the group, one’s ancestors, or various deities) are so strongly embedded in their culture, and are not, as is the case for many westerners, composed of layers of experience that are above, and apart from, everyday life.

What can the Japanese learn from hope?

Mastery.  The Japanese Proverb, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down”, reinforces the collectivist, self-sacrificing ethic that can make it difficult to cultivate inspiration through heroic role models. This is not a time to ignore heroes or minimize individual acts of courage, creativity or commitment.  The faceless Fukushima fifty ought to be recognized in a more public fashion. I understand the risks and possible stigma that might come with making public their names, particularly in light of what happened with the “hibakusha” during WWII.  Nevertheless, the benefits will outweigh the costs, in terms of providing both young and old with concrete role models. Fifty heroes with fifty stories will produce a far richer yield of hopeful mastery to inspire the Japanese people than a nameless cohort.

Attachment. While strong in horizontal trust, the Japanese must be careful not to repeat the sins of WWII, when after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those exposed to radiation became known as the “hibakusha”, the feared, the isolated and the abandoned. Perhaps even more important for Japan, we know that groups and organizations function best when there is a high level of vertical trust that binds leaders and followers.   Historians have contrasted the success of the Roman legions (marvels of planned vertical cohesiveness) with the failures of the Confederacy during American Civil War (weak vertical cohesion).  The longer the Japanese must go before they begin to see improvements, and the more people hear the government issue reports that do not square with their actual experience, the more difficult it will be to sustain that vertical trust.

Survival. Junko Ooigawa, whose husband continued to work at the Fukushima plant, was featured in an MSNBC report. She lamented, “I cannot imagine the future at this moment.”  For the Japanese, grounded in Buddhism and Shinto, being mindful of the present moment should not pose a problem.  But coping in the here and now without recourse to the past for guidance is like venturing into the wilderness without a roadmap or compass. Japan has survived many crises, most notably, the WWII atomic bombings that killed more than 250,000 and ruined the lives of countless others who suffered radiation poisoning.  The old who have lived through these and other disasters can teach the young how to reclaim the vision of a better future, and restore the belief that the sun will again rise in the East.  In this regard, Japan is fortunate, having the largest percentage of elderly in the world, at nearly 23 percent.  Emperor Akihito was a particularly appropriate elder spokesman. He was eleven when the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the leader of Japan was none other than Hirohito, Akihito’s father.

Spirituality.  The spiritual dimensions of hope can include feelings of empowerment, connection, and liberation as well as the belief in a benign universe and a sense of symbolic immortality. A significant number of Japanese rely on their Shinto beliefs to deal with major life events while utilizing their Buddhist beliefs to process death and the “after-life”.  In the present moment, they might do well to capitalize on both of these traditions.   Buddhism is best for seeking liberation and sustaining faith in a universe that is fair, if not caring.  Shinto is better equipped to address the needs of those seeking empowerment and connection as well as offering a portal to a more eternal continuum.

Anthony Scioli, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Keene State College. He is author of Hope in the Age of Anxiety and The Power of Hope.  His website is www.gainhope.com

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In the two-part podcast below, Das talks with none other than the brilliant Kamla Bhatt.

The Satyam Scandal, dubbed as the largest corporate scandal in India prompted Mr. Das to ask how could this be? What induced this moral failure on the part of a well-known Indian entrepreneur? He turned to the Mahabharata, the old Indian epic and wondered if this “dark and epic” tale could provide answers to his question about moral failure in business, government and human beings? He had spent time at the University of Chicago learning Sanskrit and reading the Mahabharata.

The result is his latest book “The Difficulty of Being Good: On The Subtle Art of Dharma.” In it Mr. Das writes that the Indian epic “is unique in engaging with the world of politics.” What is more the epic is “suspicious of ideology.”

“The Mahabharata is about our incomplete lives, about good people acting badly, about how difficult it is to be good in this world,” writes Mr. Das. Can the ancient Indian epic help us understand the moral failure of governance and financial disasters of the 21st century?

Kamla Bhatt is the host and producer of The Kamla Show, an internet radio show where listeners can find stories about the new and emerging India and the global Indian community. Bhatt is a pioneer of the internet radio format in India, but started her media career during the dotcom boom in the mid-1990s in Silicon Valley. Through her work  in Silicon Valley’s tech companies Kamla gained an insider’s perspective into the startup culture, and continues to write and broadcast about technology, politics, economics, and more.

To give you just a taste of how far-reaching her talents and interests are, I’ve also chosen to feature the below (unrelated) video, in which she chats with internet legend Chris Pirillo at CES.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch more videos from Kamla Bhatt.

By Dave Edmonds and Nigel Warburton

Doctors have long been able to heal the body: now scientists are developing radical ways of altering the mind. Governments must determine what practices to permit – and for this they need rational arguments to draw relevant distinctions. Time to call on the philosophers…?

You can’t find your children. You’ve gone to a busy park, there are lots of people around, evening has set in, and you’re in a terrible panic. Wouldn’t it be great if your kids were fluorescent green? That would make it far easier to keep tabs on them.

A decade ago scientists created a rabbit, Alba, which glowed in the dark. One day scientists could do the same for humans. Science is advancing faster than morality can keep up. Scientists have developed, or in the near future will develop, products and techniques that could alter us in fundamental ways.

First, and most familiar, are physical enhancements to approve our appearance or our physical capabilities. We’ve become blasé about chin tucks, and breast implants, and Botox. Athletes use science (often illegally) to improve their performance (steroids and the like).

Second, there are mood altering drugs: Prozac, for example. These can be helpful in calming us down, or picking us up.

Third, there are a variety of cognitive enhancements. Those of us who can’t start the day without a coffee, well-understand that some chemicals can improve concentration or alertness. There’s been a trend among college students, particularly in the US, to take drugs like Ritalin or Adderall: these allow them to spend more time revising for exams, or writing essays. Is that cheating? Scientists have already genetically altered mice to improve their memory: it may not be long before they can do this to humans – boosting our ability to remember long strings of numbers, or pick up a foreign language. Wouldn’t that be great?

Fourth, and most intriguing of all, there are so-called moral enhancements. We’re discovering exactly what chemicals are involved when we decide to trust another person: thus, we can alter how much one person trusts another with the hormone oxytocin. Just imagine what the implications would be if we could disperse oxytocin through air-conditioning systems.

There are risks in legalizing some of these enhancements, but also costs in prohibiting them – for many of these enhancements may make life happier and more fulfilling. But there are other issues at stake: there are very real concerns that these new options will result in growing inequality, between those who can afford to take them and those who can’t.

Philosophers of different stripes are on different sides of this issue. Some like Julian Savulescu are keen that we use scientific breakthroughs to enhance our lives; others such as Michael Sandel are wary of the drive to achieve perfection. He thinks that, for example, the use of genetic enhancements to create superb athletes, even if legalised, would be bad for humanity; it would take away from what he calls the ‘gifted’ nature of our capabilities and is a kind of hubris.

Certainly many of these new advances often elicit a ‘yuk’ reaction from non-scientists – a sense of disgust when we see, say, a human-shaped ear on the back of a mouse. Professor Savulescu believes we shouldn’t put too much stress on these ‘yuk’ reactions. He says it’s important to go one step beyond just acknowledging our feelings and ask: ‘Are there are any good reasons for or against that course of action’?”

With mind-boggling scientific breakthroughs hitting the headlines on a weekly basis, we need to tackle the subject of boundaries: what should and shouldn’t be permitted. This, of course, is a matter for society as a whole. But philosophers, in particular, are scrambling behind the scientists – and they need to catch up.

David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service, and is the author (with John Eidinow) of  Wittgenstein’s Poker, Bobby Fischer Goes to War, and Rousseau’s Dog. He is currently a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and a Contributing Editor for Prospect Magazine.

Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University and author of bestselling books Philosophy: The Basics and Philosophy: The Classics. He also recently wrote Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction. He regularly teaches courses on aesthetics at Tate Modern and writes a monthly column ‘Everyday Philosophy’ for Prospect Magazine. He runs several blogs including Virtual Philosopher and Art and Allusion.

They are co-authors of Philosophy Bites, which is based on their highly successful series of podcasts. This article is reposted with permission from the BBC Focus Magazine/Oxford University Press microsite.

By Robin Le Poidevin

Do we really need agnosticism nowadays? The inventor of the name ‘agnosticism’, the Victorian evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley, certainly found it useful to have a word describing his lack of certainty when he was surrounded by those who seemed to have no such doubt. But then he lived in a period of transition. Science, and in particular biology, appeared to undermine old certainties. On the one hand, churchmen were promoting the importance of unshakeable faith. On the other, there were philosophers advocating a materialist and anti-religious outlook. Huxley felt he couldn’t identify with either side. If the Gnostics were those who claimed to have access to a special route to religious knowledge, then Huxley would be an a-gnostic, one who does not profess to know. But perhaps agnosticism served only as a temporary stopping point en route to a more satisfactory position, a stepping stone from faith to atheism.

For Richard Dawkins, a scientist, writer and today’s perhaps most vocal atheist, we have already crossed that river. It was perhaps reasonable to be an agnostic in Huxley’s time, when it was not yet clear how science could answer some of the awkward questions posed by believers: How, if there is no divine designer, could intelligence have developed? What is the source of our moral conscience? Why was the universe so congenial to the emergence of life? Now we have some detailed answers, the idea of God is de trop. And so too is agnosticism, apparently.

What is Dawkins’ thinking here? First, the agnostic’s point that we can’t know whether or not God does not exist, is not a very interesting one. There are lots of things we don’t know for sure. We don’t know that Mars isn’t populated by fairies. Of course, we are not remotely inclined to believe that it is, but still we don’t have conclusive proof. Nevertheless, we don’t describe ourselves as agnostics about Martian fairies. Similarly, atheists can admit that they don’t have conclusive proof of God’s non-existence.

Second, not having conclusive proof does not make God’s existence just as probable as his non-existence. Moving from ‘not certain’ to ‘50/50 chance either way’ is what we might call the agnostic fallacy.

Third, a necessary feature of God makes his existence highly improbable, namely his complexity. Of course, the world itself is complex – unimaginably so – but then science has an explanation of this complexity in terms of a series of gradual evolutionary steps from simpler states. In contrast there is no evolutionary account of God’s complexity: his nature is supposed to be eternal. And that there should just exist such complexity, with no explanation, is highly improbable.

That’s a very plausible line of thought. The conclusion is that, unless you think you have overwhelming evidence for God, the rational thing is to be an atheist. But it rests on a questionable assumption. There is still room for an interesting form of agnosticism. Take a look at the third point above: that God must be complex, and so improbable. It is a part of traditional theology that God is in fact simple. Dawkins finds this incredible: how can something responsible for the creation of the world, and who has perfect knowledge of it, be less complex than that creation? There are, however, different kinds of complexity. A language is complex in one sense, in that it contains a virtually limitless range of possible expressions. But those expressions are generated from a finite number of letters, and a finite number of rules concerning the construction of sentences. A language may be complex in its variety but (relatively) simple with respect to the components and principles that give rise to that complexity. When the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz opined that God had created ‘the best of all possible worlds’, his view was mercilessly lampooned in Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide. ‘Best’ here, however, does not mean most agreeable, but rather where the greatest variety is produced by the simplest laws. And indeed it is a requirement on scientific explanation that it not involve needless complexity. Elegant simplicity is the ideal.

Perhaps God is like that: his understanding and capacities may be infinitely complex, but the underlying nature that gives rise to that complexity may be relatively simple. If so, then it isn’t a given that the probability of such a being is enormously improbable. And if God is not clearly improbable, then atheism is not the default position. Rather, agnosticism is. If, before we start to look at the evidence, the hypothesis that God exists is initially no less probable than the hypothesis that he doesn’t, that neither atheism nor theism has a head start, so speak, then we should keep an open mind, rather than be atheists until presented by overwhelming evidence for God.

So what is the point of agnosticism? That it stands for open-mindedness, for a willingness to consider conflicting perspectives, for tolerance and humanity. It may even be the basis for a religious life.

Robin Le Poidevin is Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Leeds. His latest book is Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, which sets the philosophical case for agnosticism and explores it as a historical and cultural phenomenon.

By Jeremy Taylor

On Friday, 20th August, I joined the panel for a Great Debate entitled “Are We Masters Of Our Own Destiny?” at the University of Newcastle, organized as part of the Green Phoenix Festival, 2010. My fellow panelists were science writer Rita Carter, most famous for her books on neuroscience: The Brain Book and Mapping The Mind, and local philosopher David Large. The debate was chaired by Caspar Hewett. As we suspected, this pitted two biology-oriented commentators against a more conventional philosopher who answered the question in the affirmative because he believed we can control our own destiny in the sense that Joyce could write his masterpiece Ulysses and Wittgenstein formulate his idiosyncratic theories. The nature of Joyce-ness, Ulysses-ness, Wittgenstein-ness, and the product of the mind and skill of great artists – Rembrandt-ness if you like – transcended “mere” functional explanations of what the mind is. He took umbrage with psychology which, he claimed, pretends its functional explanation of how the mind works is the explanation. It isn’t.

Rita Carter saw things very much from the bottom up rather than the top down. The mind is made up (literally!) by myriads of tiny, unconscious neuro-chemical events in our brains. She therefore believed free will is an illusion deeply wired into the brain as a set of mechanisms which automatically create the sense of self and agency to make it feel as though we decide what our acts will be – that we are responsible for them – rather than merely responding to stimuli.

I agreed strongly with Rita by suggesting that – like the illusion of free will – a large school of modern neuroscientists believe that our moral behaviour is produced not by moral reasoning but by input of extremely simple neurochemical data from our sense organs and receptors which is turned into moral intuitions in our brains by processes of which we are oblivious – the intuition simply pops into our heads. We then apply moral reasoning to our intuitions in a post-hoc sense in order to justify these instinctive beliefs. I agreed with one prominent such neuroscientist who claims that the conscious mind is like the mahout on an elephant. The elephant is the other 99% of what is going on in our minds – things that are unconscious and automatic. If free will and morality are the unconscious products of the way our brains work, thought a number of members of the audience, what, then, is the advantage to us of the illusion that we are in control? Carter argued that without the illusion that we are responsible for our own actions, and that we are therefore accountable for them, no society could possibly function; while I argued that the illusion of moral responsibility is a social phenomenon which evolved as a sort of social glue holding human groups together by commonly agreed norms and principles “outsiders” do not share. In that sense it is similar to the evolution of theory of mind – by which we explain other peoples’ actions by inferring to ourselves the hidden states of mind – their wants, beliefs and knowledge – that must be guiding them. If a teacher could have no inkling that he owned a state of knowledge his pupil lacked, and could not learn unless that knowledge was efficiently transferred from one brain to another, no culture could thrive and be built upon.

How can unconscious process explain the more spiritual side of our nature, thought others. What is the nature of love – affairs of the heart? Near-death experiences? Phantom limbs? The experience of strong emotions like love, I argued, are similar to the experience we have of the presence of a hand after amputation. Both are registered and processed unconsciously in the brain. We do not physically feel love in our hearts though our hearts may send raw autonomic data to our brains, along with data from our eyes, ears, nose and gut, to form the basis of our feelings. Large was not convinced. “I cannot approach the love of my life”, he exclaimed, “And tell her ‘I love you with all my…..brain!’, it just wouldn’t work!”

What were the limits to science in a full explanation of human agency, wondered others. Reductionism can never provide the answer. Large agreed. The creation of a great work of art on canvas is invulnerable to dissection by the scientific method. Science, in attempting a reductionist explanation, was forever throwing babies out with bath-water. There must be explanations at other levels. But what other explanations? What other levels? What other heuristics? For Carter, however, science was the only game in town. What else could any other form of enquiry be based on, if not science and the scientific method, she asked. Neither is science pathologically reductionist, I argued. We no longer have to explain how the machine works by examining one single cog. Psychologists are Skinnerians no longer. Modern technologies like brain-scanning allow them to view phenomena like the mind-brain in multi-dimensional, dynamic terms.

Perhaps, said Large, tongue firmly in cheek, it is scientists who are the masters of our destiny, after all? I responded that we might have an invidious choice in trying to master our destiny: Reduce our civilization to the level which corresponds to the complexity faced by our stone-age intuitive moral minds scores of thousands of years ago – as some primitive philosophers have argued – or behave more like scientists (and philosophers!) by training our pre-frontal cortices – the most recent evolved additions to our brains – to squeeze out as much moral reasoning as possible – over-riding our intuitive inclinations. Only then can we stand a chance of a rational, unbiased approach to facing the extremely complex problems standing between us and any secure future. Hunter-gatherers or geeks?

Carter shuddered at either possibility. Ultimately, she said, there is great humility to be gained from the understanding that much of what we take for granted in terms of will and reasoning is actually the invisible and unknowable activity of trillions of molecules in our brains responding to the laws of nature in much the same way as rain-drops falling through the atmosphere.

Jeremy Taylor has been a popular science television producer since 1973, and has made a number of programmes informed by evolutionary theory, including two with Richard Dawkins. His latest book is Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human, out now in paperback. You can read his previous OUPblog post here.

Sticking with the podcast theme, David Edmonds interviewed Nigel Warburton about the book and the podcast, as well as what it’s like to speak to all of these fantastic philosophers. You can hear the interview in the below podcast.

[See post to listen to audio]

We will also be running a very exciting Twitter competition in conjunction with Waterstone’s around the time of the book’s UK publication, 12 August. Keep an eye on Waterstone’s Twitter feed for further details.

David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service, and is the author (with John Eidinow) of Wittgenstein’s Poker , Bobby Fischer Goes to War, and Rousseau’s Dog. He is currently a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and a Contributing Editor for Prospect Magazine.

Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University and author of bestselling books Philosophy: The Basics and Philosophy: The Classics. He also recently wrote Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction. He regularly teaches courses on aesthetics at Tate Modern and writes a monthly column ‘Everyday Philosophy’ for Prospect Magazine. He runs several blogs including Virtual Philosopher and Art and Allusion.

Today marks the would-be 404th birthday of prolific Dutch painter/etcher Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, who was born in Leiden in 1606, and passed away in Amsterdam on October 4, 1669.

Cynthia Freeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston. Her most recent book is Portraits and Persons, and in the excerpt below, she considers Rembrandt’s many self-portraits, and speculates as to why he was so attracted to this art form.

Rembrandt was a particularly prolific self-portrait artist. Susan Fegley Osmond informs us that,

he depicted himself in approximately forty to fifty extant paintings, about thirty-two etchings, and seven drawings. It is an output unique in history; most artists produce only a handful of self-portraits, if that. And why Rembrandt did this is one of the great mysteries of art history.

There are numerous speculations about Rembrandt’s preoccupation with self-portraiture. “From youth to old age, Rembrandt scrutinized himself before the mirror, painting, etching, and drawing his changing physique and physiognomy as well as the varying psychological states that reflected the fluctuating fortunes of his life.”

A first concern that seems evident in these works, as with the previous artists I discussed, is Rembrandt’s social status and his identity as a gentleman. This concern shows up in his elegant garb, cloaks, hats, armor, and even in the poses in some of the images. Along with this is a concern with his artistic status and success.

Another conjectures about at least some of the images is that they are studies for paintings. Rembrandt used himself because he was a cheap, readily available model when he was planning certain sorts of composite history paintings or biblical portraits. This might account for the self-portraits showing extreme facial expressions, ones for instance where he is laughing or fearful. But these may also have been examples of a  genre called “tronies” which were popular at the time and had a good market.

At a deeper level, we can sense that Rembrandt is seeking to formulate and reveal a conception of his own psychological identity, the unique person that he was. This fits with the view expressed by Arthur Wheelock Jr., who notes:

[Rembrandt] was a singularly complex individual, who from an early age seems to have fostered the image that he was different from other men, and that neither his talent nore his success depended upon others or upon the good fortune that came his way.

Wheelock later comments,

Rembrandt’s earliest self-portraits are of particular interest because they demonstrate that the myth of Rembrandt as isolated genius did not first emerge in the Romantic era…but was fostered and developed by the artist himself.

Along these lines, art historians compare Rembrandt to more recent artists who have used the self-portrait as a form of experimenting with self-formation by trying on various identities (Rembrandt as the Andy Warhol of the seventeenth century!).

Like Cézanne more than two centuries later, Rembrandt employed the self-portrait as part of an effort to fashion the self, a self that took on multiple forms as the Dutch master progressed from youth to old age.

Apparently, the identity of the artist-patriot seemed most agreeable to the youthful Rembrandt. As he matured, however, armor, patriotism and all of the glamorous associations of war would lose their general appeal, and other identities would more powerfully attract his unsettled self.

Beginning in 1629, Rembrandt embarked on a new trajectory and began to fashion different identities in independent self-portraits. It was as if he was searching for a fit–a persona that would best alight with his propensities at the time.

His appeal is perhaps to be found in his ability to paint “between the lines” to give the viewer the tools to see through the every self-images he constructs. Thus when he poses one sees the artifice, and when he reveals one is smitten with the sincerity of the disclosure…

A fourth and final hypothesis that may apply to some if not all of the self-portraits is that they represent a psychological journey in which Rembrandt shows increasing concern about mortality and aging. Thus his latest portraits appeal in particular, and make a striking contrast with the rather boastful earlier images, because of their apparent honest, even almost brutal, self-scrutiny. Platzman concurs:

Most noteworthy for the history of the genre was Rembrandt’s journey from thee narcissistic self-absorption of his youthful portrayals to the vulnerable self-admission of his late confrontations with his person. In fact, Rembrandt’s ability to communicate across the centuries is undoubtedly due to the perceived honesty of his self-examination.

To sum up, there are four possibly competing, possibly compatible explanations or analyses of the prolific self-portraiture Rembrandt engaged in throughout his life. First, he was advancing a view of himself as a successful gentleman, at the same time as he was acquiring commissions, forming a successful studio, setting up a vast household in Amsterdam, etc. Second, he was both working on, and at the same time more or less arguing for, his status as a successful artist. Third, he was trying on different versions of himself to see which would fit best. And fourth, he was exploring his countenance as a way of facing and coming to terms with his own aging and mortality, impelled no doubt by the losses he had faced of both wives and of his beloved young son Titus.

The Rembrandt oeuvre might seem to fit fairly well with the narrative theory of the self, since on several of these hypotheses we could say that his self-portraits, taken as a body, constitute a sort of self-narrative. Thus it is not surprising to find that a position saying something just along these lines has been articulated. Osmond puts it this way:

No artist has left a loftier or more penetrating personal testament than Rembrandt van Rijn. In more than 90 portraits of himself that date from the outset of his career in the 1620s to the year of his death in 1669, he created an autobiography in art that is the equal of the finest ever produced in literature even of the intimately analytical Confessions of St. Augustine.

Osmond is making the proposal that a series of self-portraits done over a lifetime amounts to an autobiography. Of course, this is qualified since the phrase referring to Rembrandt’s “an autobiography in art” is compared to St. Augustine’s autobiography in literature. But just what is the difference? Is there one? Surely if Rembrandt had left us with an actual autobiography it would not be likely either to be preferred to or regarded as somehow more authentic or revealing than his sequential self-portraits. In fact the self-narration view does not actually equate the sort of narrative that constitutes a self with an autobiography. I would put the difference by saying that the one (narrative self-constitution) is done prospectively as an ongoing process and the other retrospectively. The self that is constituted by living out a narrative must reflect and assess on a pre-existing whole in order to produce an autobiography.

Cynthia Freeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston, Texas.  Her new book, Portraits and Persons, shows that portraits have served two fundamental functions throughout the ages.  Firstly, they preserve identity, bringing us closer to loved ones who are either absent or dear.  And secondly, they tell us something about the subject being portrayed: not just external things, but also the subject’s emotions and inner state.  In the excerpt below Freeland analyzes self-portraits, specifically the work of Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo (1907-54) is another artist particularly known for creating an extended series of studies of herself in her art. There are 55 self-portraits among the total of 143 of her known paintings. We can notice many of the same concerns in her work as those addressed by the previous artists: social status, artistic success, identification of a core self with key psychological traits, and concerns about mortality. There are, however, a few additional factors that arise in Kahlo’s work. For one thing, she is notably concerned with issues of national and ethnic identity. Kahlo is also concerned with her status as a women and with her troubled partnership and marriage with her teacher and fellow artist Diego Rivera. Kahlo’s concerns about mortality were intensified by her childhood polio and by the bus accident that left her damaged and in need of multiple operations. Her wounded and suffering body became a persistent theme in Kahlo’s work. Ironically, perhaps, the concern with mortality does not seem to be much reflected here by paintings that show self ageing. Frida’s face looks remarkably the same across her works (unlike the faces of Rembrandt of Cézanne.)  She is always recognizable with her coal black hair, uni-brow, and intense dark gaze, even when she pictures herself as an infant suckling at her nurse’s breast!

Kahlo’s paintings, like those of the previous artists, show an awareness of art history and reflect linkages with predecessors she admired, often those from the Spanish tradition or from distinguished Italian portrait artists.  For example, in her Self-Portrait with a Velvet Dress (1926), she alludes through both the red dress and the slender elegant fingers both to Botticelli and Bronzino.

Many of Kahlo’s works feature the wounded self/damaged body, which is specifically a female body.  She is shown dealing with the pain and loss of miscarriage and infertility in Henry Ford Hospital, and with pain stemming from both physical and emotional wounds in paintings such as Broken Column, and Wounded Deer.  Despite the female identification Kahlo can also play upon and invoke identification with male saints: with St Sebastian (in Wounded Deer), and with Christ (in Broken Column).

Kahlo’s repeated experiments in the self-portraits with clothing and accessories such as jewelry, native plants, and animals, shows a preoccupation with defining and embracing her ethnic heritage (European German-Jewish, Mexican, Indian).  Writing about Kahlo’s works, Sharyn R. Udall remarks, ‘She is trying on identities, both personal and artistic: from the melancholy aristocrat of her first self-portrait, she seems to be testing an image that speaks of her mixed Euro-American and Indian heritage.  She is also concerned with political and national issues about the distinctive identity of Mexico as it emerges from colonialism into independence, and in particular with its identity vis-à-vis its northern neighbor, the United States.  She resists comparisons that rank the two countries by showing th progressive, industrial, wealthy northern country as superior to its poor and ‘primitive’ southern neighbor.  Her own allegiance is clear.

Frida’s mestiza-self, as embodied Mexican nation, is an active, fertile, female agent with a self-generated subjectivity and self-defined sexuality, which challenges the post-revolutionary constructions of the conquered and raped fatherland.

To sum up, then, for Kahlo as for the previous artists, self-portraiture involves reflection on personal and artistic issues.  Her work manifests a greater concern as well with gender, ethnic, political, and social issues.  Kahlo, working at the time of the Surrealists, can also employ more vivid visual symbolism, frequently using flags, indigenous symbols like the sun, moon, or hummingbird, animal metaphors, etc.

Claims have been made for Kahlo, as for Rembrandt and Cézanne, about the self-constituting nature of serial self-portraiture.  One of the novelties of these claims is that instead of making up a kind of autobiography or life narrative, Kahlos work amounts to, as it were, a film in which she is the star:

By starring in her self-portraits (as opposed to a film), Frida very methodically (frame by frame) builds a repertoire of imaged-I’s (or Imaged bodies) within which she offers us a small window onto her world, a kind of case-study methodology.

Interestingly, in Kahlo’s case her self-portraits are not the sole source from the artist about her life, since she also kept a diary which as been published (both in the original Spanish and in English translation).  This returns us to the questions that arose before for Rembrandt and Cézanne.  One question is how an artist’s diary relates to an autobiography, and how each genre relates in turn to the self-narrative (if such it is indeed) in their work over a lifetime.  I believe a diary is a distinct kind of self-narrative from either an autobiography or a series of self-portraits, and it is doubtful that proponents of the narrative self-constitution view really have in mind that the narrating self is writing something like a diary.  Complicating things even more is Kahlo’s case is the extensively illustrated nature of the diary, which at times contains sketches for paintings in their own right.  If there are three competing ‘external’ narratives of Kahlo’s life, then which would be the correct one to refer to in trying to access her own self-narrative?  Or is that something altogether different?  As stated before, here too I find it implausible to identify the self-constituting narrative (if it exists) with any of these three public ones.  I feel the same reluctance in these cases as I would in identifying the artist’s own narrative with even the best, most complete and authoritative biography.

Debra Satz is Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University.  Her new book, Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets, is a critical look at the commodity exchanges that strike us as most problematic.  What considerations, she asks, ought to guide the debates about such markets?  She offers a broader and more nuanced view of markets – one that goes beyond the usual discussions of efficiency and distributional equality – to show how particular markets shape our culture, foster or thwart human development, and support or undermine structures of power.  In the excerpt below, from the chapter on women’s reproductive labor, Satz begins to tackle the questions involved in pregnancy contracts.

Sometimes what critics of pregnancy contracts have in mind is not the effect of such contracts on the relationship between reproductive labor and a woman’s sense of self, but their effect on her views (and ours) of the mother-fetus and mother-child bond. On this view, what is wrong with commodifying reproductive labor is that it corrupts motherhood, the relationships between mothers and their offspring. Further, it leads to a view of children as fungible objects.

Mothers and Fetuses

Critics of contract pregnancy contend that the relationship between a mother and a fetus is not simply a biochemical relationship or a matter of contingent physical connection. They also point out that the relationship between a mother and a fetus is different from that between a worker and her material product. The long months of pregnancy and the experience of childbirth are part of forming a relationship with the child-to-be. Elizabeth Anderson makes an argument along these lines. She suggests that the commodification of reproductive labor makes pregnancy an alienated form of labor for the women who perform it; selling her reproductive labor alienates a woman from her “normal” and justified emotions. Rather than viewing pregnancy as an evolving relationship with a child-to-be, contract pregnancy reinforces a vision of the pregnant woman as a mere “home” or an “environment.” The sale of reproductive labor thus distorts the nature of the bond between mother and the developing fetus by misrepresenting the nature of a woman’s reproductive labor as a commodity. What should we make of this argument?

Surely there is truth in the claim that pregnancy contracts may reinforce a vision of women as baby machines or mere wombs. Various court rulings with respect to contract pregnancy have tended to acknowledge women’s contribution to reproduction only insofar as it is identical to men’s; in terms of the donation of genetic material. The gestational labor involved in reproduction is explicitly ignored in such rulings. Thus Mary Beth Whitehead won back her parental rights in the “Baby M” case because the New Jersey Supreme Court acknowledged her genetic contribution; the fact that she was the gestational mother was not decisive.

However…the concern about the discounting of women’s reproductive labor is posed in terms of a principle of equality. By treating women’s reproductive contribution as identical to men’s when it is not, women are not in fact being treated equally. But those who conceptualize the problem with pregnancy contracts in terms of the degradation of the mother-fetus relationship rather than in terms of the equality of men and women tend to interpret the social practice of pregnancy in terms of a maternal “instinct,” a sacrosanct bonding that takes place between a mother and her child-to-be. However, not all women bond with their fetuses. Some women abort them.

Indeed there is a dilemma for those who wish to use the mother-fetus bond to condemn pregnancy contracts while endorsing a woman’s right to choose an abortion. They must hold it acceptable to abort a fetus but not to sell it. Although the Warnock Report takes no stand on the issue of abortion, it uses present abortion law as a term of reference in considering contract pregnancy. Because abortion is currently legal in England, the Report’s position has this paradoxical consequence: one can kill a fetus, but one cannot contract to sell it. One possible response to this objection would be to claim that women do not bond with their fetuses in the first trimester. But the fact remains that some women never bond with their fetuses; some women even fail to bond with their babies after they deliver them.

Are we really sure that we know which emotions pregnancy “normally” involves? Whereas married women are portrayed as nurturing and altruistic, society has historically stigmatized the unwed mother as selfish, neurotic, and unconcerned with the welfare of her child. Until quite recently social pressure was directed at unwed mothers to surrender their children after birth. Thus married women who gave up their children were seen as “abnormal” and unfeeling, and unwed mothers who failed to surrender their children were seen as selfish. Assumptions of “normal” maternal bonding may reinforce traditional views of the family and a women’s proper role within it.

Integrative Body-Mind-Spirit Social Work: An Empirically Based Approach to Assessment and Treatment, is the first book to strongly connect Western therapy with Eastern philosophy and practices, while also providing a comprehensive practice agenda for social work and mental health professionals.  The authors argue that integrative body-mind-spirit social work is indeed a practical therapeutic approach in bringing about tangible changes in clients.  In the excerpt below we look at just one technique and one patient, Rebecca.The authors are highly regarded researchers from both Asia and America.  Mo Yee Lee is a Professor in the College of Social Work at The Ohio State University.  Siu-man Ng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration and the Associate Director of the Centre on Behavioral Health at the University of Hong Kong.  Pamela Pui Yu Leung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at the University of Hong Kong.  Cecilia Lai Wan Chan is a Professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration, the Director of the Centre on Behavioral Health, the Associate Director of the HKJC Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong.

Rebecca was a lady in her thirties.  When she first came to the therapist’s office, she talked with a soft and weak voice and seemed afraid of looking directly at the therapist.  She did not clearly express what she wanted.  She gave the therapist the impression that she was a timid, little girl instead of a woman in her late thirties.  After building rapport, she shared with the therapist that she was thinking about changing careers but was not certain about what she could do.  She hoped the therapist could help her develop self-confidence so that she could take charge of her life.

In the first few sessions, the therapist helped Rebecca to explore and clarify what she wanted.  She wanted to make some changes in her life, but she was afraid of the uncertainty that would go with the change.  She realized that she was stuck because she was used to staying with the familiar and not taking risks.  Rebecca also discovered that she had made herself psychologically dependent on others, her father in particular.  This dependence had developed into a pattern so that she always relied on others to make decisions for her.  Though there was an inner voice calling her to meet a new challenge and attempt a new job, she dared not, as her father did not support the idea.

During the fifth session, the therapist revisited the treatment goal with Rebecca and tried to help her to make a choice for herself regarding her pattern of being dependent on others.  The therapist said, “You told me that your goal is to take charge of your life.  Now you realize that you have developed a pattern of being dependent on others.  What are you going to do with this pattern? Do you want to keep it, or change it?”  Rebeca promptly responded that she did not want to keep the old pattern, but having been used to relying on others for so many years, she felt uncertain of what she could do if she was on her own.  She said, “I have not yet figured out how to make a change.  In my conscious mind, I am aware that I choose to stay with the familiar, to stay in the comfort zone.  I tend to rely on others.  However, the current pattern is most comfortable to me.  I don’t know how I can survive without relying on others’ support.”

It came to the therapist’s mind that utilizing the conscious mind alone would not help Rebecca in moving further ahead.  The therapist decided to intervene using the experiential approach, utilizing not only the mind but also the body.  The therapist said, “Having heard what you have just said, I have developed a picture in my mind.  Would you like me to share it with you?”  With Rebecca’s consent, the therapist created the picture by putting a hula hoop on the floor around her to represent her comfort zone.  Rebecca was asked to kneel down.  The therapist then put many cushions around the hula hoop so that Rebecca was surrounded and protected by the cushions.  When asked by the therapist how well the scenario created represented her current psychological state, Rebecca said, “Yes.  I was just hiding myself like this.  It was quite safe.”  The therapist went on asking Rebecca how her body felt in such a position.

She said, “Actually it’s not very comfortable.  People may not be able to see me…I am very small…I don’t want to be like this.”

“So what do you want?” asked the therapist.

After thinking for a while, Rebecca said, still in a weak voice, “I want to stand up.”

The therapist said to her, “How can you do that?  As long as you continue to stay in your comfort zone and relying on others, you cannot stand on your own feet.”

Rebecca said, in a louder voice, “I really don’t want to be like this.  I want to stand up.  I have to rely on myself.”  At that moment, Rebecca stood up.  She had made a new choice.  The therapist continued to utilize both the body and the mind to consolidate the change: “If you were to rely on yourself and take charge of your life, how would you be different?  What would your whole body be like?…Take a deep breath.  You may close your eyes.  Try to get in touch with your life force…(Rebecca closed her eyes and focused on her breathing.)  What would your posture and body position be like?…If you wish, allow yourself to move.  Allow yourself to stand anywhere, in any position that you think fits…Make yourself comfortable, assume a posture in which you feel you are grounded and firm…Allow your body to use its own way to express yourself…Give yourself permission, give yourself freedom, be in whatever way fits you…”  Moving her hands, body, and feet slowly, Rebecca finally stepped out of the hula hoop and stood upright.  She took a deep breath and smiled.

When Rebecca opened her eyes, the therapist asked her what she experienced in the exercise.  She said in a calm voice that she had set herself free.  She said that she had made a choice to stand up and not to be dependent on others.  When asked about the meaning of standing up, Rebecca said, “Standing up means that I am competent.  It means that I have internal strength and resources.”  The therapist then asked Rebecca to list the strengths and resources she found in herself…

…The therapist asked, “What is your body like when you are taking charge of and connecting with yourself?”

Standing straight yet relaxed, Rebecca took a deep breath and said, “I stand up firm and feel grounded.  I believe I can lead my life in ways I desire.”…She also said that, at that moment, she realized that she was no longer the dependent little girl.  She was in touch with her mature and independent self.  When asked what she meant by “be her own self,” Rebecca said, “I am Rebecca.  I have many gifted talents.  I am competent, I am curious, I am loveable.  I appreciate myself.”

…

When Rebecca returned home that evening, she talked to her father about her plan of changing careers.  In the next session, she reported that she no longer felt afraid of her father when she expressed herself.  She believed that she had been transformed.