Sandra Bland

The case of Sandra Bland, who was pulled over by police and died in jail under unclear circumstances, folds into the backdrop of depressing familiarity which includes mass shootings, mass incarceration, and mass emiseration. 

But, for me in this case, I am answering the calls to "say her name" and to repeat that "black lives matter". I think it is important because we are living in a context in which the latter pronouncement is considered too divisive.  

It's too divisive for a white socialist who will safely never be president. It's too divisive for a mainstream Democrat who really, really needs black votes. It's too divisive for the president of the United States, who is African American, and never needs to run for anything again.

I also feel it's important to illustrate a failing of humanism, a particular named death for which it does not seem to have the right concepts for special recognition.

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith said that a basic problem of moral feeling was that in his gut he would sooner doom many strangers than he would to lose own finger.

Since he grounds his ethics in just such kinds of moral intuition, his work, and that of the broader Scottish Enlightenment, is based on trying to adjust the conscience toward what Hume called the "general beneficence".

Such a resolution is colorless and abstract, but it was the first morality to address the problem of moral strangers as modern people would recognize the problem.

Here and now that great tradition is failing, irrespective of whether you believe it always has been a failure.

I have often felt uneasy about the relish critics of the left take in eviscerating the liberal tradition when they have nothing to offer but barer and barer abstractions and poetic gestures.

But in this case, I have to answer to them for my guiding my conscience for something that can't comport itself to say with basic decency and dignity that black lives matter. 

An Open Letter to T. Alison Swift

Dear Ms. Swift,

I'm sure you hear this all the time, but pop music really is a lot like the academy. Both professions are having difficult, long-delayed, discussions about voice, representation, and appropriation.

That said, I realize we do not have similar standing in our respective fields. In my world, you would be a Judith Butler or Wendy Doniger. While I in yours would be the assistant to they guy Bon Jovi throws his latte at. 

However, in imperial China, at least in theory, the humblest scholar could address the throne as his privilege and duty. In the Islamic world to this day, the practice of counsel (naṣīḥa) can let the boffins advise the sultan where their learning gives them purview.

In that spirit, I'd like to make two remarks about your responses to Nicki Minaj yesterday. To recap for our readers:

She was upset about her snub for an award from MTV and said that such awards invariably go to artists who celebrate a very specific type of feminine appearance and sexuality.

You took offense, repeating your dictum that women should not tear down women. You said Ms. Minaj should take up her grievance with one of the men who was nominated.

She replied saying that she wasn't referring to you, but that you ought to say something critical about beauty and body given your unchallenged standing. 

Here, is what got to most of us: you then offered that she was welcome to join you on any stage you graced. Oy.

My two remarks concern 1) a different response you could have made and 2) what might be helpful to do in the future. 

First, you could have not addressed her tweet at all.

To illustrate, I would guess that you are not interested in Jon Hamm or John Legend's use of the term "feminist" because feminism today is not concerned with what well-meaning men say or don't say; it is about women's voices, full stop. A politics concerned with men's opinions or judgments would be... something else.

Similarly, a good way to show your respect for Ms. Minaj would have been to give her the space to speak-to not in other words, make it about you-to not make it about what situation you think she should be addressing rather than the one she is. Remember Patricia Arquette?

My second suggestion is what to do next. Recently, scholars have started talking about the homogeneous look and sound of panels of experts at academic conferences. Too often, an audience is presented a row of three or four white men.

While certainly not limited to the obscure world of research scholarship, there is a broader point to be made about recognition and desert, about who has a voice.

Some in our largely white and disproportionately male world have agreed that if we are presented such a forum that only involves people who look like us, we won't go.

Maybe white men of the left should make a public point of this; maybe we should be good allies and not try to grab attention. I don't know. But, the people who thought of this convinced me. If I'm asked to be on one of those panels or books, non serviam.

Obviously, that does not pertain to you in this specific case; the "Video of the Year" nominees include Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar. But I think you recognize in your tweets that Ms. Minaj has a point.

Given that you are probably running out of shelf-space for these accolades, it might make a meaningful impact if you declined a hypothetical invite like that or just retweeted an observation you can see has a point, even if it is not precisely your point.

That does it for my thoughts here. They represent things I have considered in the course of my work, in which your work has been a life-sustaining diversion.

I hope you have a chance to get out of the city this year. That New York summer is infernal; come back to see us in Chicago.

Still love the game,

Tim

Diplomatic Responses

I am a disappointment at parties.

In situations where I have to meet new people, especially non-academics, I will say that I study the modern Middle East. Often, I'll then be asked for my views on any number of contemporary geopolitical questions.

I usually don't have much of anything to offer. "Diplomacy-security-development" is not an idiom I'm very proficient using.

Now I know and respect people who wholly discredit this idiom as epistemologically vacant and politically suspect, but I can't plead that high-brow excuse.

I just don't know the ins and outs as I should, and I don't understand the work of the premises of individually-motivated rule-bound gamesmanship.

So with that disclaimer, let me pose a dangerous, naïve question: just what is the problem with negotiating a weapons-prohibition deal with Iran such as was announced today?

I want to run through 1) the main points of the deal, 2) the main objections I hear to our accepting them, and 3) my answers to these as a half-literate outsider to political science, international studies, and so on. On all of these, I invite your correction.

1) seems simple enough. The deal says Iran shall not take its metal-enriching programs further than it would need to have nuclear power. In exchange, the Western powers will drop their various economic punishments and prohibitions against the regime.

2) We cannot trust Iran as a negotiating partner because

a) the Islamic Republic is (somewhat of) a theocracy that could empower a fanatical elite indifferent to the suffering caused in a nuclear conflict, against which our democratic system is a safeguard.

b) "Death to America" has been a brand slogan for the regime in Tehran, and we should not be on speaking terms with people who maintain such a brand. They also maintain any number of heinous discourses against Israel, and Jews in general, that are if not promoted by at least associated with the state.

c) Iran has a poor human-rights record, and we should not reward violators of basic political decencies with recognition and inclusion if we can avoid it.

3) Within bigger pictures in modern history, I do not see the world or the US as less safe recognizing Iran or letting it determine its own sources for electricity. Furthermore, we can't make a political philosophy case against them without being completely inconsistent.

a) First and foremost, the US is the only country ever to use atomic weapons, and we did it as a secular democracy, against a civilian population, and against the advice of large parts of the security establishment.

I realize this basic point is a non-starter for many of my readers, so I will continue this section only addressed to basics of national interest, narrowly defined. 

In that, US-aligned, nuclear-armed Pakistan is much closer to state-failure than Iran, and militants there are at least equally callous toward inflicting suffering. And, anyway, why should we worry only about the evils of religious fundamentalisms?

We reached out to nuclear-armed China at the height of the Cultural Revolution, one of the most lethal episodes in world history, when control of the military and the security services were very much in question. We dealt with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union's atheist fundamentalism not through isolation but inclusion. We did this even in the Cuban crisis, when we actually did face a nuclear conflict of a level Iran is nowhere near capable of.

b) In keeping with this, we must note that when Iranian preachers and artists call for death to the US and to Americans, nothing has happens. Yet, in the US when neoconservatives and their liberal allies called for "regime change" on Iran's borders, the region descended into total chaos.

How can we hold the Iran's discourses (again, compare propaganda from China and the USSR) against it given the disproportions in effects of discourses in our two locations?

On the specific point of anti-Semitism, is not Islamophobia rampant in our political establishment? Are not Crusader themes a major element of our security discourses? Do not the regimes of Western Europe contain major racist and even para-fascist elements we are always explaining away as merely working-class resentment? 

We assume that cooler heads and geopolitical realities will moderate these influences. This assumption is highly questionable, but what makes Iran less susceptible to this moderation than anybody else?

Anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are never acceptable, but do we imagine that isolation and punishment of a entire country will lessen their appeal? And do Zionists imagine these evils do not exist in other countries just because the US is allied with them?

c) Lastly, given that we have long-term alliances with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, given that we are deeply engaged with China and Russia, and given the ongoing reexamination of "the human question" itself in the face of violence and dispossession here at home, human rights gives us no special case against a country like Iran.

More to the point, how would any human rights, under whatever understanding, flourish in a country shut out from the internationalisms that have developed them?

I understand diplomacy is complicated, and I should not expect complete consistency in the geopolitical processes. I am sure there is plenty of information I do not have.

I do not mean the above questions rhetorically, and welcome contrary responses. By asking them, however, I am saying I do not think our special animus against Iran makes sense even within the narrow, cynical, and contested discourses of stability-freedom in which we have maintained it.