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The Folly of Political Violence

Fresno Bee, November 6, 2022

Political violence does not work. And yet some people think it does. Some political violence is the result of delusional people on a rampage. But many sane people still believe in its efficacy.

Consider the appalling case of the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in San Francisco. The attacker wanted to send a political message. But he ended up in jail. The real message here is that violence is wrong, and a danger to our democracy.

Or consider any of a long list of examples. The riots of Jan. 6 failed to achieve their objective of overturning the 2020 election. The attacks of 9/11 failed to drive the U.S. out of the Middle East. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. failed to stop the Civil Rights movement.

We could look back further. Lincoln’s assassination failed to stop the abolition of slavery or keep the North from winning the war. And even further back, the assassination of Julius Caesar failed to stop Rome from becoming an empire. The killing of Jesus of Nazareth did not stop Christianity from becoming one of the world’s largest religions. And killing Socrates did not stop philosophy.

I’ve simplified things here, quite a bit. There is often no single motive behind political violence. And sometimes the motive is lost in madness and mystery. We don’t really know why Oswald killed Kennedy, which is why conspiracy theories linger. Surely some of those who murdered Caesar were playing power games. And Socrates was killed by Athenians seeking a scapegoat after losing a war.

But the bottom line is that killing an individual does not stop a movement, a system or an idea. Violence does not change people’s minds about truth, justice, or morality. Minds are changed through education and argument. Substantial changes in law and politics require negotiation and compromise, as well dialogue and deliberation.

The focal point of political violence is on the moment and the act. It is “spectacular,” as I explained in more detail in a book I wrote about nonviolence. Violence attracts our attention. It is an explosive and unexpected outburst that disrupts things. Violent acts provoke responses. But the response rarely unfolds as the attacker wants it to. The attacker controls the moment. But the system and society control the response.

The feverish imagination of violence is episodic and individualistic. The assassin imagines that if he kills person X, everything will change. But that is a misunderstanding of how life and politics work. The daily grind of political life is not spectacular. It does not occur in explosive moments and exciting episodes. Rather, it involves the boring work of persuasion and coalition building.

Ideas, laws, and movements are larger than persons. If person X is eliminated, there will be Y and Z who are committed to the same ideas. And if X is murdered, her followers will be angry and even more committed to the cause.

We forget this because we’ve been taught a version of history that focuses on the biographies of great men and women. We blame Nazism on Hitler, for example. But if Hitler had been killed, the Nazi party would not have crumbled overnight.

The history of Christianity provides an interesting example. The leaders of the Christian movement were murdered by the Romans. Jesus was crucified, as was Peter. And Paul was beheaded. Many martyrs were killed after them. But the movement continued to grow.

Things are more complicated in the case of wars and revolutions. But again, these things rarely work out as planned. The 20-year war in Afghanistan reminds us of that. Violence and war are unpredictable. And it is ideas and systems that matter.

The American revolution is often held up as a paradigm of effective violence. But was it the violence that mattered — or the ideas that were fought for? And would those ideas have endured even if the revolution had failed?

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” Human problems need humane solutions. Violence operates in the realm of animal power and physical force. It is subhuman and inarticulate. And it usually makes things worse.

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Pondering ghosts and spirits at Halloween

Fresno Bee, Oct. 30, 2022

Halloween is a haunting time. This is the spooky moment when ghosts appear. But ghosts and spirits are always with us, especially for those who grieve and mourn.

Students occasionally ask me if I believe in ghosts. And they have shared their ghost stories with me. I recall getting a chill from a story told by an older woman who said she often saw her dead husband in the room where he used to practice music.

Philosophers have often wrestled with ghosts. As Socrates was preparing for his death, he told a ghost story. He explained that “polluted souls” are unwilling to move on to the next world. These restless shadows haunt graveyards, too in love with their bodies to leave them in the grave.

Most scholars think Socrates was making a point about enlightenment. Virtue and wisdom should teach us to accept death so we can avoid becoming unquiet ghosts. At any rate, this ancient tale reminds us that ghosts have long haunted human experience.

But do ghosts really exist? Well, the seer of ghosts has clearly experienced something. They are not lying. But what is it that they see?

One possible explanation is that ghosts are figments of the mind. For those who grieve, the dead are strangely present. Our dead remain with us. They wait on the edge of consciousness. And then something triggers their appearance — a smell, a song or a familiar place.

Most ghostly apparitions are probably products of memory and imagination. These ghosts don’t conjure themselves. We bring them to life. They are after-images of the dead, which linger with us so long as memory endures.

I heard a talk recently by a philosopher who recounted her mother’s decline into dementia. Her mother’s world was inhabited by hallucinations — spirits, she called them. The philosopher suggested that ordinary reality is only a small step away from the hallucinatory. Could it be that the “reality” we inhabit is actually a hallucination? Our experience is a projection of the mind and an interpretation of the stimuli it receives.

Photons hit our eyes and sound waves tickle our ears. These stimuli are woven together by the brain, which produces an image of the world. That image can be disturbed by other stimuli throbbing through our minds — memories, fear, hopes, and dreams.

Usually, consciousness takes charge of this process, keeping us focused on a stable set of images and appearances. But when consciousness relaxes its grip, things get weird.

This can happen in dementia. It can occur when we drink alcohol or use other drugs. Anxiety and exhaustion can disturb consciousness. And spooky shadows can appear at midnight in October graveyards, when the leaves rustle in the autumn wind.

But do ghosts exist? I suppose that depends on what we mean by existence.

Someone I love died recently. She’s been with me in my thoughts. She “exists” in a sense. Grief does strange things to our experience of reality, time and self. Grief is the presence of an absence. It is a distressing emptiness. That emptiness has a reality of its own. It afflicts us. But we also hate to let it go because it is the place our loved one used to be.

We tend to think that existence is material. Rocks and steel exist. But what about thoughts and dreams and memories? Those things are real, aren’t they?

One of the most famous lines from “Hamlet,” occurs after Hamlet has just seen a ghost. He says, “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” The poet is suggesting that life, experience, and existence are more complex and mysterious than we know.

There is more to life than our bodies. There are memories, dreams and ideas. There is also literature, philosophy and religion. These things free the soul from the body. They allow our minds to wander. They introduce us to ghostly presences such as Hamlet and Socrates. These “people” are, after all, creations of art and literature.

Thinking is an uncanny game of ghosts. Memory and art are conjuring acts that put us in touch with spirits. We might even say that to be human is to be haunted.

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War crimes in Ukraine: pacifists should support war crimes tribunals

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A United Nations commission investigating the Ukraine-Russian War issued a report this week concluding that Russian forces have committed the “vast majority” of war crimes in the conflict. But it also found two cases in which Ukrainian forces committed war crimes.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine counts as the first criminal act. And then there were indiscriminate bombings, torture, summary executions, and sexual violence. The cases in which Ukrainian forces were implicated involved the abuse of Russian prisoners of war. This is not to say that a kind of “you too” argument would minimize Russian atrocities. But war is messy. And it is usually difficult to sort out good guys and bad guys.  

Most wars involve war crimes. American forces have committed war crimes, with the events of My Lai (in Vietnam) and Abu Ghraib (in Iraq) showing up in lists of war crimes. Even peace-keeping forces (the UN’s blue-helmeted soldiers) have engaged in criminal acts, including notorious cases of sexual violence and exploitation.

Pacifists might conclude that war is wrong because it seems to beget this kind of lawlessness and atrocity. The War Resisters International (WRI) was founded in 1921 with the declaration that war is a crime against humanity. But until war is finally abolished, it is wise to call for better prosecution for war crimes and for more education, training, and understanding of the rules of war.

Is war criminal?

Pacifists will sometimes claim, like the WRI does, that war itself is criminal. Pope Francis stated in his new book, Against War, “War is madness, war is a monster, war is a cancer that feeds on itself, engulfing everything! What’s more, war is a sacrilege.” But we often fail to see that. The Dalai Lama once explained that’s because we take it for granted that war is legal. He said, “Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed.”

In making this kind of claim, however, the pacifist may be unable to distinguish between better and worse wars. Is there a difference, for example, between aggressive war and defensive war? A blanket rejection of war seems to ignore that difference. The moral framework of the just war tradition helps clarify matters. War crimes can be understood as violations of the just war theory. That theory says that it is wrong to deliberately target noncombatants and that torture and rape are not legitimate weapons of war.

But a number of critics have pointed out that modern war typically violates the moral prohibitions of the just war theory. Hannah Arendt said, “by the end of the Second World War everybody knew that technical developments in the instruments of violence had made the adoption of ‘criminal’ warfare inevitable.” She was referring to the mechanized killing of modern warfare and the criminality of bombing civilian population centers. I have contributed to this kind of critique in The Just War Myth, where I concluded that actual wars don’t live up to the standards of the just war theory.

Prosecuting war crimes

When crimes are committed, we must identify and punish them, if we can. There is an important difference between a state that prosecutes war crimes committed by its own soldiers and a state that orders those crimes or excuses them. A critic of war may point out that it is rare for war crimes to be prosecuted from within. War crimes are often a matter of “victor’s justice,” with the victors setting up tribunals to punish the vanquished.

And yet, it is worth noting that the U.S. did punish the soldiers involved in My Lai and Abu Ghraib, even if those punishments were modest and contentious. The U.S. might do better in this regard. But politics makes this difficult. One interesting study showed that Americans tend to forgive war crimes when they are committed by the “good guys.” We are confused about what it means to “support the troops” and we’ve politicized the idea. This might explain why former-President Donald Trump pardoned a Navy SEAL who had been convicted of war crimes in Iraq. But we support the troops by expecting them to behave morally, and providing training and guidance that supports good behavior.

It also helps that international commissions and institutions like the International Criminal Court (ICC) have been established. But these remain weak so long as major players like the United States and Russia are not subject to their jurisdiction. The U.S. has never formally joined the treaty that authorized the ICC. And under Trump, the U.S. even imposed sanctions against ICC officials who were investigating war crimes in Afghanistan. President Joe Biden revoked that policy. But the U.S. and Russia continue to exist outside the jurisdiction of the ICC.

Pacifists should support war crimes tribunals

Critics will rightly complain that this lack of an effective international tribunal leaves powerful nations free to commit war crimes with impunity. One important way forward, then, is to support institutions like the ICC.

We also ought to avoid oversimplifying the critique of war. Some wars and warriors are better (or worse) than others. This is also true of crime. Some crimes are worse than others. And some criminals are worse than others. And while the goal of eliminating war is a noble ideal, we still benefit when war crimes are prosecuted and punished. 

There is a kind of simplicity in stating that all war is criminal. But the world is not that simple. And declaring that all war is criminal can create confusion when trying to prosecute war crimes.

War crimes occur in every war. We should support the work of identifying and prosecuting them. And we should encourage states and militaries to be more vigilant about their own misconduct, to stop excusing war crimes, and to take responsibility for their own misdeeds.

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Secular vegetarianism and the Montreal Declaration on animal exploitation

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I signed the Montreal Declaration on Animal Exploitation, along with nearly 500 other philosophers. The signatories include such notables as Peter Singer, the Princeton philosopher well known for his work on “animal liberation.” Secular thinkers should embrace this Declaration and the idea of secular vegetarianism.

The Montreal Declaration condemns animal exploitation that inflicts “unnecessary violence and harm” onto nonhuman animals. It imagines “transforming numerous institutions fundamentally.” Broad social change will not occur overnight. But we can stop eating meat.

We are all animals

If it is wrong to inflict unnecessary harm on animals, then you should become a vegan or a vegetarian. If meat is not necessary and meat-production causes harm, then you ought not eat meat. Behind this simple syllogism, there are complicated questions.

One question is which animals and how much suffering? Wild salmon and free range dairy cows may be different from factory farmed chicken or pork. Vegans, lacto-ovo vegetarians, and pescatarians continue to argue about these details.

But they generally agree that meat eating is not necessary. This is a counter-cultural claim. Western religious traditions typically hold that nonhuman animals are inferior to human beings and exist for our use. God gave Adam dominion over the animals. And animal sacrifice was once viewed as pleasing to the gods.

These ideas make little sense in a secular age. The theory of evolution teaches us that we are animals too. Humans and nonhumans share a common neurophysiology. We also share a similar experience with other social animals. Human beings suffer when cut, burned, beaten, and killed. And we suffer when separated from the herd, isolated, and confined.

What is necessary?

The vegetarian argument holds that harm done to nonhuman animals is not necessary. But what do we mean by necessary? It is fairly easy to establish that meat is not necessary for human health. A diet heavy in meat is not healthy. And vegetarians can live long and healthy lives.

But words like “necessity” and “health” are complicated. There are layers of meaning here embedded in culture, customs, and social practices. Health is not merely a physiological concept; it also contains cultural elements.

For a bull fighter, killing the bull is “necessary.” And one might argue that meat eating is “necessary” given a certain form of life. Meat eating was thought to be a “healthy” part of American and European diets for a long time. Think about the role of hot dogs and steaks in American culture. In Germany, beer and sausage go hand in hand. And in Greece, lamb is often on the menu.

The vegetarian argument calls these norms into question. It asks us to rethink forms of life and cultures that are oriented around meat. This is why the vegetarian argument often strikes a fundamental nerve. If you argue that meat eating (or bullfighting) is not necessary, you seem to call a person’s entire way of life into question.

There is a parallel here with arguments about religion. Religious believers typically react strongly to atheists who argue that religious belief is mistaken. For the believer, the critique of religion is not just an exercise in logic. Rather, it is a matter of fundamental existential import. Atheists who suggest that belief in God is not necessary will be perceived as attacking the very foundation of the believer’s form of life.

Sectarian vegetarianism

This is why atheists and vegetarians should tread lightly. And maybe we can find common ground. Vegetarianism has often been pluralistic, drawing on multiple sources in religion and in secular thought.

Gandhi provides a famous example of an eclectic and pluralistic approach. His vegetarianism was influenced by Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. But Gandhi explains, in his autobiography, that he also learned a lot from the Vegetarian Society of England. Even before Gandhi visited England, Christians and humanists in Europe and America were embracing plant-based diets.

One significant example in the United States is John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg’s advocacy of plant-based food was influenced by Seventh Day Adventism. Yes, corn flakes had a vegetarian and sectarian birth. And in pursuit of plant-based protein, Kellogg invented peanut butter.

Kellogg wrote a primer on vegetarianism in 1899, in which he chronicled religious views of meat eating and abstention from meat. He explained, “the ethical argument against flesh eating is found in the fact that lower animals are, in common with man, sentient creatures.” Kellogg put this in theological terms, stating that God is “actually present, living and working in every created thing.” He concluded, “the slaughter of animals of any sort for mere pleasure ought to be prohibited by law.”

Secular vegetarianism

The vegetarian argument has evolved in a more secular direction. The Montreal Declaration is not focused on theology. It reflects secular, moral philosophy. And my sense is that secular thinkers are becoming more sympathetic to the vegetarian argument. Indeed, there is a growing number of vegetarian atheists and humanists. One recent survey shows that there is a substantial demographic overlap between atheism and vegetarianism.

This makes sense given the fact that a substantial critique of our misuse of animals depends upon a critique of the anthropocentrism of the Biblical worldview. Atheists and humanists are less likely to conform to outmoded social norms. And nonreligious people seem to understand the evolutionary argument mentioned above, which puts humans and nonhumans in the same predicament.

If this is the only world we’ve got and suffering is not redeemed in another world, then it is incumbent upon us to reduce suffering here and now—for ourselves, for other humans, and for our fellow animals.

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Religious Liberty, Modesty, and The Morality Police

Fresno Bee, October 2, 2022

Morality is not external conformity. Let’s keep this in mind when thinking about recent protests in Iran against the “morality police.” Those protests broke out in response to the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who died after being detained by the morality police for wearing her hijab (a head covering) too loosely.

For Americans of the present generation, the notion of the morality police is hard to fathom. How strange that anyone cares whether women cover their hair.

Of course, societies have often attempted to control women’s lives, bodies, and sexuality. A hundred years ago in the United States, swimsuit police tried to prevent women from showing too much skin at the beach.

We’ve come a long way. Thanks to the secular principles found in the First Amendment, we are free to wear what we want. There is no morality police here because we view fashion as a form of free expression.

There are limits, of course. Schoolchildren are not free to wear pornographic or offensive T-shirts. Nudity is prohibited. And in a recent case out of Everett, Washington, the courts upheld a law prohibiting baristas at the Bikini Hut coffee shop from dressing like strippers. The Ninth Circuit Court drew a line at “pasties and a G-string” with your coffee.

But beyond those limits, our secular system holds that fashion, sex, and sexuality are private matters, not subject to policing. This is the result of a long struggle against a more restrictive worldview. And some Americans might prefer a return to modesty and conformity. Until recently, school districts prohibited girls from wearing tight leggings or yoga pants — including here in Clovis, which only changed its policy this year.

So, let’s not take the struggle for liberty and privacy for granted. It’s only been about 20 years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned laws against sodomy, in Lawrence v. Texas. It’s only been seven years since Obergefell v. Hodges gave same sex couples the right to marry. And challenges remain. The court has called the idea of a “right to privacy” into question with the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year.

Behind these legal issues is a basic argument about the importance of liberty. This is related to a claim about the futility and absurdity of trying to police fashion, sex, and modesty.

Americans pledge allegiance to the idea of a country founded on the idea of liberty and justice for all. Liberty means that you can wear a hijab or a bikini. The choice is up to you.

And if I don’t like your choice, I can choose not to look. We forget this important point with regard to modesty. Rather than worrying about women flaunting their bodies, why don’t we insist that men stop ogling them?

There is no doubt that state power can dominate people. But police power does not actually create modesty or virtue. It is futile to use police power to enforce external conformity to norms of fashion, virtue, and modesty.

Clothing and hairstyles have nothing to do with the content of your character. It’s what’s inside your head and your heart that counts, not what you wear on the outside. That’s why the idea of fashion police is absurd. It is a meaningless exercise in enforcing conformity that is only skin deep.

Morality is simply not the kind of thing that results from the application of external force. The way to make people moral is to educate them, not to beat them into compliance. External force is useful for animals. We fence them in and leash them. But that’s not how you treat human beings.

Arresting people for what they wear (or don’t wear) also breeds discontent and further nonconformity. Women protested against the swimsuit police in the United States a hundred years ago. They are pushing the limit in the case of bikini baristas. And in Iran, women are burning their hijabs.

To force human beings to conform to some standard of modesty is degrading and ineffective. Secular systems of law respect our freedom to decide for ourselves about what we believe about modesty and how we adorn our bodies. This approach is respectful of our humanity, our rationality and our liberty.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article266575386.html#storylink=cpy