Peace Philosophy and Public Life: Commitments, Crises, and Concepts for Engaged Thinking 9042038055, 9789042038059

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PEACE PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC LIFE

VIBS Volume 268 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Leonidas Donskis Executive Editor Associate Editors Richard T. Hull G. John M. Abbarno Michael Krausz George Allan Olli Loukola Gerhold K. Becker Mark Letteri Raymond Angelo Belliotti Vincent L. Luizzi Kenneth A. Bryson Hugh P. McDonald C. Stephen Byrum Adrianne McEvoy Robert A. Delfino J.D. Mininger Rem B. Edwards Danielle Poe Malcolm D. Evans Peter A. Redpath Roland Faber Arleen L. F. Salles Andrew Fitz-Gibbon John R. Shook Francesc Forn i Argimon Eddy Souffrant Daniel B. Gallagher Tuija Takala William C. Gay Emil Višňovský Dane R. Gordon Anne Waters J. Everet Green James R. Watson Heta Aleksandra Gylling Matti Häyry John R. Welch Brian G. Henning Thomas Woods Steven V. Hicks a volume in Philosophy of Peace POP Edited by Danielle Poe

PEACE PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC LIFE Commitments, Crises, and Concepts for Engaged Thinking

Edited by Greg Moses and Gail Presbey

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover photo: © Susan Van Haitsma: “We the People: Save Texas Schools rally (Austin, TX, Feb. 23, 2013)”. Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3805-9 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1052-2 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014 Printed in the Netherlands

Philosophy of Peace (POP) Danielle Poe, Editor Other Titles in POP Laurence F. Bove and Laura Duhan Kaplan, eds. From the Eye of the Storm: Regional Conflicts and the Philosophy of Peace. 1995. VIBS 29 Laura Duhan Kaplan and Laurence F. Bove, eds. Philosophical Perspectives on Power and Domination: Theories and Practices. 1997. VIBS 49 HPP (Hennie) Lötter. Injustice, Violence, and Peace: The Case of South Africa. 1997. VIBS 56 Deane Curtin and Robert Litke, eds. Institutional Violence. 1999. VIBS 88 Judith Presler and Sally J. Scholz, eds. Peacemaking: Lessons from the Past, Visions for the Future. 2000. VIBS 105 Alison Bailey and Paula J. Smithka, eds. Community, Diversity, and Difference: Implications for Peace. 2002. VIBS 127 Nancy Nyquist Potter, ed. Putting Peace into Practice: Evaluating Policy on Local and Global Levels. 2004. VIBS 164 John Kultgen and Mary Lenzi, eds. Problems for Democracy. 2006. VIBS 181 David Boersema and Katy Gray Brown, eds. Spiritual and Political Dimensions of Nonviolence and Peace. 2006. VIBS 182 Gail Presbey, ed. Philosophical Perspectives on the “War on Terrorism. 2007. VIBS 188 Danielle Poe and Eddy Souffrant, eds. Parceling the Globe: Explorations in Globalization, Global Behavior, and Peace. 2008. VIBS 194 Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, eds. A New Kind of Containment: “The War on Terror,” Race, and Sexuality. 2009. VIBS 201 Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, ed. Positive Peace. 2010. VIBS 217 Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo. Containing (Un)American Bodies: Race, Sexuality, and Post-9/11 Constructions of Citizenship. 2010. VIBS 219 Rob Gildert and Dennis Rothermel, eds. Remembrance and Reconciliation. 2011. VIBS 225 Danielle Poe, ed. Communities of Peace. 2011. VIBS 229

Dedication To the philosopher-activists of Texas: Susana Almanza, Yannis Banks, Nicole Berland, Gary Bledsoe, Alyssa Burgin, Fran Clark, Thorne Dreyer, Ronnie Dugger, Lamar Hankins, James C. Harrington, Bernice Hecker, Paul Hernandez, Jim Hightower, Charlie Jackson, Robert Jensen, D’Ann Johnson, Bob Libal, Daniel Llanez, Alberto Luera, Glen Maxey, Ramsey Muniz, Willie Nelson, Alan Pogue, Lilia Rosas, Debbie Russell, Hugh Stearns, Gerald Thomason, Rusty Tomlinson, Diane Wilson, Susan Van Haitsma, Danny Yeager, Doug Zachary, the late Manuel Davenport, Ran Moran, raulsalinas, and many, many more who redeem with hope in action the time we share under this big, big sky. G.M. B In memory of Arthur McGovern, S.J., d. May 24, 2000, my teacher, who guided me to choose a career devoted to philosophical study of peace and justice activism, and whose work at University of Detroit Mercy I have humbly attempted to continue since I arrived here in August 2000. His goal was to help the public conceive of and engage in better ways to rid the world of hunger and want. Also in memory of Dean Brackley, S.J., d. 16 October 2011, just a few days before the conference on which this book is based. He modeled the life of a scholar committed to solidarity with the suffering of El Salvador in their pursuit of peace with justice. I express my gratitude for the way in which his life touched my own and countless others. Both of these activist-scholars devoted themselves to research whose goal was to bring about (Fr. Brackley’s words) “a new economic and political order that will better serve the human community.” G. M. P.

CONTENTS EDITORIAL FOREWORD DANIELLE POE

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GUEST FOREWORD DAVID SWANSON

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PREFACE

xvii GAIL PRESBEY

INTRODUCTION

1 GREG MOSES Part One: INTRODUCING PEACE IN PUBLIC LIFE

ONE

How Philosophers Advance Peace in the Public Sphere WILLIAM C. GAY

TWO

Dorothy Day’s Pursuit of Public Peace through Word and Action GAIL M. PRESBEY

THREE

Peace Voice: Getting Peace Professionals to Go Public TOM H. HASTINGS

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17

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Part Two: CURRENT EVENTS AND PEACE THEORY

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FOUR

Anti-Immigration Initiatives and Weil’s Theory of Affliction ANNA J. BROWN

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FIVE

Interrogation, False Confessions, and the Intuitions of Jurors NICK BRAUNE

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SIX

Ignacio Martín-Baró and the 99%: From El Salvador to Occupy ADRIANNE ARON

SEVEN

Pluralism, Identity, and Violence FUAT GÜRSÖZLÜ

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Part Three: PEACE THEORY IN DEPTH

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Violence as the Conflictual Denial of Social Being: A Relational Approach RICHARD T. PETERSON

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On the Nature of Public Life in Plato and Rancière WENDY HAMBLET

135

TEN

Radical Protest and Dialectical Ethics PETER AMATO

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WORKS CITED

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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INDEX

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EDITORIAL FOREWORD The Philosophy of Peace Special Series occupies an important place among philosophical publications. All too often philosophy is known for focusing on thought experiments and imaginary examples to make fine distinctions unrelated to the world around us. The contributors to the books in this series have focused instead on the many challenges facing the world today, especially the pervasive violence in the world. These philosophers know that there is no need to create thought experiments when the world itself is filled with situations that need the carefully trained thinking that philosophers can provide. The commitment to collaboration between philosophers and activists inspires Philosophy and Public Life. The essays included herein make significant contributions to the philosophy of peace applied to public life. The stated mission of the VIBS special series Philosophy of Peace, in conjunction with Concerned Philosophers for Peace, explores socio-political and ethical perspectives on modern warfare, peacemaking, and conflict resolution, including the many forms of domestic and global violence, such as sexism, racism, and classism. In keeping with the spirit of that mission, this volume began with a conference for the Concerned Philosophers for Peace in Austin, Texas, which brought together professional philosophers and activists in order to diagnose the issues of violence in society, to inspire participants through examples of successful non-violent activism, and to recommend paths to further peace. Its unique collaboration between activists and scholars has resulted in a contribution to the literature that will be valuable and of interest to a wide variety of readers ranging from academic scholars and students of the philosophy of peace to community leaders and activists as well as lay readers concerned about the issues discussed. As such, this volume is a rich and unique addition to the Philosophy of Peace Special Series. Danielle Poe Editor, Philosophy of Peace Special Series Value Inquiry Book Series

GUEST FOREWORD This book makes a compelling case that if we are to rid the world of war, we will want to employ not only the usual tools—organization, education, activism, lobbying, nonviolent resistance, art, entertainment, and the creation of alternative structures that lead away from war—but we will also want to employ a healthy dose of philosophizing. By that I do not mean attempting to arrive at extra-human, divine, pure, or objective viewpoints on anything, but rather, attempting to bring into focus how much of our view of things is optional, and to propose preferable options. In these pages, you will likely grasp the utility, not just the curiosity, of reconsidering any number of ways in which we speak and think, including what we mean by “we” when discussing foreign affairs, what we mean by “nationalism,” by “terrorism,” or by “humanitarianism.” Why do we assume that forgiveness has no place in public policy while overlooking those cases in which we unwittingly demand and expect it? We reject arguments from authority as consumers and voters but not—this book suggests—when we listen to law enforcement. Why? Any number of contradictions in our labeling of practices should be examined. Can the prison and war industries really be described as creating jobs? Can we have a corrections institution that corrects nothing, or a counter-terrorism policy that increases terrorism? Are there other approaches to our public life that we haven’t properly considered? Or, rather, given the endless variety of alternative approaches that we have not considered, what provocative proposals can we bring ourselves to invent for consideration? This is why we need philosophers and books like this one. A couple of years ago, science writer John Horgan made a lengthy argument for the possibility of eliminating war from the world. He debunked the claim that war is in our genes, the claim that war is driven by population changes, the claim that a handful of sociopaths inevitably leads a nation to war, the claim that resource scarcity or inequality or stockpiles of weaponry make war unavoidable. After mountains of research, Horgan concluded that war exists only in those societies that accept or celebrate the idea of war. Therefore, we are free to choose to reject the idea of war and with it the practice, as others have done before. Jean Paul Sartre, of course, arrived at this same conclusion without a speck of research. I actually think it is important that we arrive at the conclusion that we can end war without the research. We should not get into the habit of imagining that we must wait for authorities to prove to us that something has been done before before we attempt to do it. Nothing could be more limiting. If we cannot have a world government until someone has demon-

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strated that world governments have existed before, we will never have one, and the idea of having one will strike us as absurd. Maybe it is absurd. Maybe it’s a horrible idea. But we should not write it off as such simply because it has not yet been tried. This is not, of course, to suggest that empirical research is of no value. We could hardly survive or thrive without it. We could not speak intelligently about the world we want to change without it. It is hardly a condemnation of facts and data to deny them the role of limiting our imagination. No research to prove that slavery could be abolished existed prior to its abolition. Yet there was willingness by some to accept what is, after all, obvious: slavery would end if people chose to stop utilizing slavery, if they envisioned and constructed a society that lacked it. People invest great effort in creating wars. They could choose not to do so. Transforming those glaringly obvious observations into a scientific study of whether enough people have rejected war in the past to reject it in the future is both helpful and harmful to the cause. It helps those who need to see that what they want to do has been done before. It hurts the habit we need to develop of imagining innovations. This book in your hands is full of facts, but it is not fact driven. It is imagination driven. In these pages, you will be led to imagine various conceptions of nationalism and country-ism. Is there a benevolent variation on the theme? Is there one with enough good in it to outweigh the harm? Here you will find that material to ponder. Can we imagine nations with anti-terrorism policies? To do so, we will have to stop assuming we already have them. During the Cold War, the “balance of terror” was perfectly respectable. “Shock and awe” is a terrorist argument. Drone aircraft buzzing over villages are unmanned terrorists. What would a non-terrorist anti-terrorist policy look like? We are helped along in our thinking by examples throughout the book of how some remarkable people have proposed paths that have not yet been taken. Dorothy Day proposed a response to Pearl Harbor that included forgiveness of the Japanese. Told that hers was an outrageous expectation, Day pointed out that African Americans were regularly lynched or assaulted in the United States and that their loved ones were expected to forgive. Following 11 September 2001, Shirin Ebadi proposed building schools in Afghanistan named for the victims of the attacks of that day. Such a proposal will still sound crazy to most people when next it is made following some future disaster. But there is little doubt looking back that it would have done far more good than the approach actually taken—the natural, normal, acceptable, mainstream approach of bombing people to punish a crime most of them had never heard of and still have not. When the clearly preferable approach still sounds crazy, that’s a good sign we need to change our perspective.

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The contributors to this volume propose shifts in perspective in several interlocking areas. These include immigration, ethics in economics, problems of consumerism, and wealth and poverty. Should we be tolerant of immigrants or welcome them with gratitude? Should we engage in charity or in solidarity? And what impact would these choices have on our acceptance of so-called “humanitarian” wars? Nick Braune encourages us to think past arguments from authority so far as to radically shift the motivation for police interrogations. Instead of aiming for confessions, interrogators could aim to protect and inform the person being interrogated. If that sounds nonsensical, come back to this foreword after reading the book and maybe it will then seem normal. It is very hard for us to see anything as other than normal, even when it seemed crazy an hour before. But seeing choices, seeing multiple “normals,” is a skill we should practice, because we need to become capable of altering our vision. The majority of people selling illegal drugs in the United States are white, but only people of color “look like” drug dealers to some police officers. Anyone accused of a crime “looks” guilty to many people employed in the criminal justice system. A “war” on drugs that has been used to generate real wars looks justified by those wars. Surely we would not legalize something we fight wars over! Our “corrections” industry is not educating prisoners, but it is educating the rest of us to accept mass incarceration. The prison and war industries are promoted as jobs programs, as life-giving, as pro-peace. But we are perfectly capable of a coherent worldview in which that sort of nonsense sounds like nonsense. We should strive to develop that perspective. Nuclear weapons are sometimes imagined as keeping us safe, but Day and Sartre and Albert Camus responded with appropriate horror immediately upon their creation. It turns out that horror is an appropriate response to all sorts of developments announced as progress or not announced at all. We are filling the skies with killer drones these days and suffering a corresponding deficit of horror. What new horrors await us? This book warns of some of what we can expect: resource crises, climate catastrophe, mass immigration, refugees, and minority societies existing within hostile larger ones. These problems have solutions and means of prevention, and we should be thinking our way through them now. Our politicians are largely ignoring Syrian refugees at the moment in which I write, while supporting violence in Syria for the supposed benefit of Syrians. If we had a better understanding of refugee crises in the world, could they get away with this? We cannot know what all the problems will be. The unknown unknowns await us. But we can know for certain that the unknown knowns—the prod-

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ucts of human thought that some people in places of power choose to avoid awareness of—will dominate many a future Donald Rumsfeld. War is not only the product of the idea of war. It is a product of irrational madness and willful ignorance. It does not hold up on its own terms. The cakewalks are never cakewalks. The liberated are never grateful. The resources slip through the fingers of the plunderers. The bombs persistently fail to generate popular democracies. The freedoms we kill for are inevitably sacrificed to support the killing. David Swanson Charlottesville, Virginia

PREFACE Concerned Philosophers for Peace, as an organization, is filled with philosophers who respond to the social, political, and moral issues of our times. Our November 2011 conference at the Riverside Campus of Austin Community College was held at a time when the Occupy Movement in the United States was in full swing. In fact, Occupy Austin was close to our conference venue. It was populated with young people of high ideals, some of whom attended and presented at our conference. What was the lead-up to this time? Just one year earlier, during November 2010 in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, people gathered to denounce their dictator. Encouraged by the example in Egypt, in February 2011, public school teachers in Wisconsin decided to similarly practice democracy by filling the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, to protect their right to unionize. In May 2011, there was the movement of “Indignados” in Spain, protesting erosion of workers’ rights and high unemployment there. And then, in September 2011, Occupy Wall Street took over Zucotti Park in New York City, ostensibly to protest bank bailouts (funded by taxpayers) and government austerity measures such as cuts to welfare and education. At times like these, we philosophers and fellow travelers from other related fields wanted to raise some philosophical issues relevant to these world happenings. Greg Moses called upon people in our network to come together to reflect upon what would be a way to publically practice a philosophy of peace in our current context. He said in that call: Debates in the United States over public options, public workers, and public spending seem to signify a crisis of doubt over the value of the very meaning of “the public” . . . we invited proposals for papers and panels that address conceptual issues involved with re-thinking peace or peacemaking in relation to a crisis in “public life.” What would be some of those crises of public life? Well, for example, are we committed to being a public, that is, in the Arendtian sense, individuals with diverse opinions who meet in public space to express themselves, and to look for opportunities for concerted action to shape our common world? Or do we think in contrast that happiness lies in the realm of individual goals, and freedom is freedom from the need to meet and appear in public to discuss how we want to live together? This book is filled with contributions from those committed to the former, public life. There is also the conviction that meeting each other, speaking and listening, can lead to mutual understanding and a more peaceful world. Moses noted that the Austin area had deep roots when it came to activism. He mentioned the locally-based but far reaching legacies of Cesar Chavez, J. Leonard Farmer, and Gloria Anzaldua.

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In response, people presented papers—and some submitted papers to us after the conference—having to do with migrants’ rights, prisoners’ rights, identity-based violence, war, government repression and civil war, systemic violence, and psychological violence. Some of the papers outlined alternatives such as communities of peace, recognition and dignity, fairness, ethical behavior, reformed institutions and practices, and clearer concepts. Authors included suggest guidelines for people’s movements, and outline opportunities for philosophers and change-makers of all types to communicate through public media and in public town squares. We are glad to share these analyses and ideas with you. We would like to acknowledge the help of the following people in making this volume a reality. We would like to thank Dean Roy Finkenbine and the College of Liberal Arts and Education, University of Detroit Mercy, for supporting this book project. We would like to thank Dean Lyman Grant and Polly Monear, Senior Administrative Assistants for the Arts and Humanities Division at Austin Community College for supporting the conference. Thank you to William Gay, former series editor, and Danielle Poe, current series editor for the Philosophy of Peace series at Rodopi, for their help. Thank you to David Swanson for writing the foreword. Thank you to Amanda Hiber for proofreading and Elizabeth D. Boepple for line editing and creating the camera-ready copy. Thank you to the following scholars for generously offering assistance and expertise: Steve Best, Joe Betz, Michelle Brady, Michael Brown, Duane Cady, George Caffentzis, R. Paul Churchill, Charles Crittenden, Carlo Filice, Andy Fitzgibbon, Ed Grippe, Ron Hirschbein, Robert Holmes, Jack Kultgen, Joseph Kunkel, John Lango, Court Lewis, Jean-Marie Makang, Tracey Nicholls, Joseph Orosco, Mar Peter-Raoul, Grant Potts, Evan Pritchard, James J. Puglisi, David Ritchie, Dennis Rothermel, Sally Scholz, Dianna Taylor, and Stephanie van Hook. We hope that this volume highlights the best of our profession: philosophical thinking devoted to making our cities, and our world, greater, that is, more self-reflective, moral, humane, and just. Gail Presbey

INTRODUCTION Greg Moses Amid robust and polarized popular debates about the role of public sectors and the value of public life, the works presented in this volume demonstrate that philosophers of peace have made, are making, and will continue to make valuable contributions to practical and theoretical approaches to peace as a primary concern of public life. In the ongoing struggles and arguments over peace and justice, this volume perhaps achieves for the reader a critical sense of peace philosophy as a discipline engaged along a broad front of issues both practical and theoretical in nature. In keeping with the stated objectives of the VIBS Philosophy of Peace series to which this volume gratefully belongs, the reader is here invited to explore “socio-political and ethical perspectives on modern warfare, peacemaking, and conflict resolution, including the many forms of domestic and global violence, such as sexism, racism, and classism.” Furthermore, the company that we keep when working philosophers invite remarks from experienced activists such as Susana Almanza, James Harrington, and Lilia Rosas refreshes our sense of obligation to, and appreciation for, all the grassroots organizers who invigorate our streets with wisdom and courage. Indeed, these three activists, who have drawn inspiration explicitly from the legacy of Cesar Chavez, continue to set standards for peace in public life to which our many words here may aspire. “We the people.” Why do we think about ourselves in such a way? What sustains such commonality? These questions introduce our inquiry into problems of peace when conceived as problems of public life. First, we consider answers given by three experienced grassroots activists, then we turn to consider the multifaceted contributions offered by authors of this collection. For Susana Almanza, an environmental-justice activist from Austin, Texas, we the people live in neighborhoods where “nature kind and human kind” come together to form “one big entity.” As a founding organizer for People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources (PODER), Almanza has practiced methods that empower so-called “powerless” neighborhoods to rise up against “powerful” multinational corporations. She was one of three community organizers to share stories with visiting philosophers at an annual meeting of Concerned Philosophers for Peace (CPP) when we convened for an annual meeting held at the Riverside Campus of Austin Community College in 2011. Speaking to philosophers, students, and community members, Almanza told the story of a grassroots campaign that convinced multinational energy companies to remove a set of huge toxic storage facilities, known as “tank farms,” from an East Austin neighborhood. To gather their voices for the

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struggle, people organized their neighborhood blocks under block captains and their blocks into neighborhood associations. Then they reached out to Texas authorities. Residents of tank-farm neighborhoods shared with authorities plain stories of children who got sick playing in water, and they brought government officials on “toxic tours” to smell for themselves how the air stank like an open gas can. In the end, Almanza told visiting philosophers that billion dollar corporations took down their tank farms. Neighborhoods breathed free, literally, thanks to the power that comes from “we the people” organizing and speaking for ourselves. Another activist to speak was James C. Harrington, founder and director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, headquartered less than a mile from the ACC-Riverside campus. As an attorney who worked closely with Cesar Chavez for eighteen years, Harrington spoke about the importance of neighborhood organization in the impoverished colonias of South Texas. “House meetings were always the bedrock of organizing,” explained Harrington. An organized colonia would have a president, a vice president, and other officers. Where Chavez organized neighborhoods for the United Farm Workers (UFW), he also developed social and legal services. The UFW registered voters until the annual convention of South Texas farm workers became an important stop for candidates. Over time, these patient and persistent efforts won inclusion for farm workers in workers’ compensation, unemployment benefits, and the right to know about toxic ingredients that were being sprayed on their fields. The short-handled hoe was banned, latrine facilities were provided, and farm workers won the right to be provided fresh water. Although Chavez could be a ruthless negotiator and militant tactician, said Harrington, “he was totally dedicated to the tradition of nonviolence.” Humility, dignity, fairness, and voluntary poverty were values that Chavez exemplified, “and the people loved him.” Lilia Rosas was the third Austin activist to speak to the CPP conference. She brought books to sell from Resistencia Bookstore and spoke about her work with the founder of the store, the late poet Raul Salinas. The bookstore was one project that Salinas started under the banner of Red Salmon Arts, a name inspired in turn by his work with fishing rights activists in the American Northwest. As a graduate student, Rosas interned with Salinas and then stayed to work with the bookstore and its projects. Save our Youth (SOY) is one project that works with middle school, high school, and juvenile detention students, providing writing clinics and other organized activities. On the outside wall of Resistencia Books is one of SOY’s projects, a mural created by eleven students from a nearby juvenile detention facility who worked with artistic director Nancy Guevara. The mural at the bookstore was partly a response to the fate of a nearby mural that featured a portrait of Cesar Chavez. When Guevara noticed that the nearby mural had been defaced by a splash of whitewash, she approached the owner of the building to offer

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her services for artistic restoration. But the owner of the defaced mural, says Rosas, had grown so tired of the repeated vandalism that he just pointed across the street and suggested that Guevara could take her talents to the bookstore. In the mural “En Lucha” (In Struggle), the students from the nearby detention center worked with Guevara to express their power for love and liberation against contexts of struggles that are personal and historical. In the new mural at the bookstore, they resurrected the portrait of Chavez that had been defaced. “For some of us, we can’t quite get to peace,” explains Rosas, “because what we are trying to focus on is ending the cycles of violence first that are adversely and continually perpetuated within our communities, amongst ourselves, within ourselves, between ourselves, and then from the outside.” Indeed, getting to peace remains a global challenge, as the history of philosophy will attest. In the first section of papers collected for this volume, our authors explore direct relationships between peace philosophy and public life. As William C. Gay argues in Chapter One, “How Philosophers Advance Peace in the Public Sphere,” philosophers have been persistent voices in the quest to end cycles of violence. Gay shows how Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey were quick to voice concerns over the deployments and destructions of the nuclear weapons. “Unlike political leaders in the following generations,” writes Gay, “these philosophers were able to think globally and had the courage to face the threats—and to speak out publicly, pointedly, and passionately.” In Chapter Two, Gail Presbey presents “Dorothy Day’s Pursuit of Public Peace through Word and Action.” As co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Day was an energetic journalist and activist. Presbey considers Day’s work from the perspective of categories developed by Hannah Arendt, where “self disclosure” creates “in between” moments that become “publicprivate” sites of human transformation. Says Presbey: Day is someone who recognized tensions in the community or lines of hostility drawn, and whether they were lines of racial hostility or communist versus anti-communist, or the well-to-do versus the have-nots, she wanted to cross the chasm between the sides and weave together these human relationships in a way that would support peace and healing, not war and division. Day’s community-supported newspaper spread the idea of alternative values and practices that are life-affirming and peace-seeking. Her public witnesses challenged governmental powers and societal prejudice. Tom H. Hastings makes a plea for ongoing interventions in public debate in Chapter Three, “Peace Voice: Getting Professionals to Go Public.” Hastings writes about his experience coaxing intellectuals to share their opinions in newspaper columns. If there is a long history of academics who have

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spoken up against cycles of violence, that history is matched by a discouraging pattern of retaliation against them from within the academy. Intellectuals who are aware of the need to share a voice for peace also find themselves weighing the costs. Hastings is working to expand the support and reach of peacemaking intellectuals through an opinion distribution service called Peace Voice. In the second section, authors take up contemporary controversies to explore philosophical approaches that would contribute to more peaceful and just resolutions. Immigration is one contemporary issue that opens up opportunities for peacemaking philosophers. In Chapter Four, “Anti-Immigration Initiatives and Weil’s Theory of Affliction,” Anna J. Brown asks us to think about the significance of undocumented immigrants in the United States. As an afflicted population, the undocumented present a temptation for others to turn away, disregard, disparage, and mistreat. But afflictions are conditions that reveal truths of the world. “Instead of inflicting violence and humiliation upon the undocumented or merely ‘passing them by,’” Brown argues, “those who do not find themselves in such circumstances would do well to pay heed to the undocumented, for they are the world’s truth tellers.” Truth telling becomes a contradictory and paradoxical aim when power interrogates the powerless. How reliable are confessions extracted through police interrogations, and how critical are jurors prepared to be when they hear that a confession has been made? These questions are raised by Nick Braune in Chapter Five, “Interrogation, False Confessions, and the Intuitions of Jurors.” Braune discusses the case of a South Texas teen who “confessed” to the killing of a teacher and who was subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Here Braune raises questions about interrogation techniques that deliberately set out to manipulate a person’s relationship to power for the alleged purpose of producing veracity. To provide a critical theory for assessing such techniques, Braune offers the medical model of “informed consent.” The interrogation room and the hospital room share something in common. “The capacity to make healthcare decisions can fluctuate,” writes Braune. “This fluctuation is similar in the case of suspects; their competence could actually shift within a short time.” Liberation psychology is the theme developed by Adrianne Aron in Chapter Six, “Ignacio Martin-Baro and the 99%: From El Salvador to Occupy.” She moves from consideration of El Salvador’s most famous psychologist to reflections on contemporary “Occupy” movements. Under conditions where cycles of violence rage and dominate, what is supposed to count as mental health? As North Americans were often too distracted to notice the inequalities percolating in Central America during the 1980s, Aron argues that we find ourselves equally distracted at home today. “The AFL-CIO reports that today, it would take the average worker at Ford Motor Company fifty-one years to earn what the Ford CEO earns as a base annual salary, not counting the many millions of dollars paid in cash bonuses, stocks, airplanes, and other

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perks.” According to the liberation psychology of Jesuit martyr Martin-Baro, mental health cannot come from adjusting ourselves to such realities. In Chapter Seven, “Pluralism, Identity, and Violence,” Fuat Gursozlu argues that agonistic pluralism is a concept that should guide our analysis of conflict in multicultural contexts. As a launching point, Gursozlu notes remarks by a prominent European leader who argues that assimilation, not multiculturalism, is the more effective path to development. Against this call to erase all conflicts attributable to cultural difference, Gursozlu voices a need to focus on the cultural conflicts that are often necessary to create and sustain a sense of identity. “To respond to the problem of violence toward differences, a version of pluralism that grasps the dynamics of conflict and sources of antagonism in social life is called for,” argues Gursozlu. He centers his critical scholarship here on the agonistic pluralisms of William Connally and Chantal Mouffe. In the third and final section of chapters, authors focus on the conceptual development of key terms used across wide arrays of discussions about peace and justice. For Richard T. Peterson, violence should be conceptualized in ways that trace its effects deep into social relations. In Chapter Eight, “Violence as the Conflictual Denial of Social Being: A Relational Approach,” Peterson argues, “what is specific to the harm of violence is its effect on the quality of social existence.” This trace of violence is what he terms “ontological violence.” Following continental traditions in dialectical phenomenology, Peterson shows how relational, ontological conceptions of violence empower philosophers to disclose levels of violence embedded into systemic relations that render subjects helpless. If philosophers are better equipped to analyze such dynamics, they may also improve their ability to more helpfully theorize liberation. The collectivity of institutional life becomes a topic of reflection for Wendy Hamblet in Chapter Nine, “On the Nature of Public Life in Plato and Ranciere.” At issue for Hamblet is the way that Ranciere constructs the teaching of Plato’s Republic. Whatever might be true of Ranciere’s highly crafted interventions, it is Hamblet here who discloses herself as Plato’s skillful defender. Plato is correct to depict the simple city or poor city as a worthy model of plain justice, argues Hamblet. But Socrates is forced to abandon that model when he adjusts his teaching style to accommodate the ambitions of Plato’s outspoken brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus. As Socrates responds to the demands of the students that are before him, Hamblet argues that the great teacher is correct to place rigorous moral responsibilities upon the sorts of lawmakers that would justly be placed in authority over such students’ lives and livelihoods. In the modern-day wealthy republic, argues Hamblet, higher ethical expectations are properly demanded of lawmakers. Nor do such expectations logically entail diminishing regard for working classes. Finally, in Chapter Ten, Peter Amato addresses “Radical Protest and Dialectical Ethics.” Against fresh memories of wars, rebellions, and economic panics, Amato works on one focal problem: What is the significance of ethics?

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Is ethics nothing more than bourgeois ideology, forever congratulating the world for its refusal to turn upside down? For him, the concept of “morally better” has content that should not be forfeited in the name of revolution. Amato would take up the question raised by G. A. Cohen, who asks, Why Not Socialism? But Amato would be more careful to distinguish between ethos, which is ever in a process of being dialectically overcome, and ethics, which is “forward looking and prescriptive” or dialectically in process of overcoming. The distinction, he argues, has already been taken to the street in the form of the Occupy movement. “Their revolutionary ethos, whose existence stands as a negation in practice to the ethos of late capitalism, engenders and breeds that revolutionary ethics that can and will help them to change the wider world.”

Part One INTRODUCING PEACE IN PUBLIC LIFE

One HOW PHILOSOPHERS ADVANCE PEACE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE William C. Gay 1. Philosophers in the Public Sphere Plato in the Hellenic period and Stoicism in the Hellenistic period engaged public life. Karl Marx, among others, did so in the modern period. The rise of applied philosophy in the twentieth century made this focus prominent. In this regard, the initial philosophical response to the development and use of nuclear weapons in 1945 is an area where engagement with public life was particularly intense and instructive. The pronouncements of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell captivated the attention of the public about how destructive war had become. Others subsequently advanced more diverse and numerous efforts within applied philosophy to engage public life, including efforts to promote peace. Such efforts may represent a revival of the public intellectual found in philosophers such as Camus, Sartre, Dewey, and Russell. Nevertheless, now, as then, many of these philosophical critiques of public policy remain on the periphery. Giving more focus to them may contribute to the sea change that is needed within the public sphere. So far, philosophical responses to nuclear weapons have gone through four phases. The first phase corresponds to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and initial post-war endeavors at international control of atomic energy. The second phase corresponds to the development and testing of the hydrogen bomb by the United States in 1952 and the Soviet Union in 1953, along with the on-going tension between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The third phase began in the 1960s as a result of increasing shifts toward counterforce weapons and war fighting strategies. The fourth phase follows the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and focuses on post-Cold War world problems of nuclear proliferation and, since 11 September 2001, issues relating to terrorism. In this chapter, I am going to focus on the first phase. Camus, Sartre, Russell, and Dewey were quite concerned about the prospect that the world would soon be plagued with, and perhaps destroyed by, atomic war. Each saw his role to be that of a publicist—they all alerted the public, but their responses were also largely outgrowths of their philosophical perspectives. Their role as public intellectuals is one that may again become noteworthy within contemporary applied philosophy.

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WILLIAM C. GAY 2. Camus on the Battle Worth Waging

Camus is a leading twentieth-century existentialist. He was born and educated in Algeria. He moved to Paris in 1940 and became an active member of the resistance movement during the German occupation. By 1942, he had published L’étranger (The stranger) (1942a) and Le mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus). “Neither Victims nor Executioners,” a well-known series of essays published in Combat in November 1946, provides a humane and insightful response to the carnage of World War II by addressing how violence and murder impact those who perpetrate, suffer, and observe violence (1986). Less well known was his prior response, also in Combat, to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In 1957, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. On 8 August 1945, Camus published the first essay on the atomic bomb by a philosopher in Combat (1967, 1988). Hiroshima was bombed on August 6th; the next day, radios and newspapers presented it as good news. This existentialist, who often reflected on questions of absurdity and suicide, writes, that “technological civilization has just reached its final degree of savagery. We will have to choose, in a relatively near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of scientific conquests” (1988, p. 77). For Camus, World War II had been “the most awful destructive rage” in human history. He viewed celebration of the destruction of the atomic bomb as indecent. We had reached a point where “science devotes itself to organized murder.” He lamented this event should be “the subject of much reflection and a good deal of silence.” He closed with these words: Faced with the terrifying perspectives which are opening up to humanity, we can perceive even better that peace is the only battle worth waging. It is no longer a prayer but an order which must rise up from peoples to their governments, the order to choose finally between hell and reason. (Ibid., p. 78) The next day, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Many turned to jubilation over Japan’s surrender on August 12th. His plea, as well as the moans of the many thousands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualties, went largely unnoticed. If our world was already absurd or was at least tottering on the brink of absurdity, and if atomic wars would bring us something very much like hell on earth, then our choice is clear. Camus pleaded with his readers to order their leaders to be reasonable. Nations must learn to treat one another equally and avoid war. While citizens are to issue this order to their governments, they also have another charge: to wage peace. We really do not have a choice: we can wage war or we can wage peace. For Camus, war was no longer worthwhile. Our only proper “battles” are for peace. Camus did not elaborate on his points. He got his message out quickly,

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and he gave voice to a humanitarian concern about the unjustifiability of using atomic bombs even to defeat his enemies. 3. Sartre on the Atomic Bomb and on Our Choice on Survival Soon after Camus’s essay appeared, Sartre spoke. Sartre is one of best-known philosophers of the twentieth century and a major contributor to existentialist and Marxist thought. In October 1945, he published “La Fin De La Guerre” (The End of the War) in Les Temps Modernes (1976). Later, he provided an even broader critique of neo-colonial domination. Much of this later, more systematic view was articulated when, in 1958, he drafted his Critique of Dialectical Reason (2006). Sartre was one of first philosophers to relate the atomic bomb to our existential situation. All along, each of us has the option of suicide. With the atomic bomb, this choice may become collective. Sartre says, “no longer is there a human species. The community which has made itself the guardian of the atomic bomb is above the natural kingdom, since it is responsible for its life and its death” (Champigny, 1981, p. 102). Sartre says, “and all of humanity, if it continues to live, does not do so simply because it is born, but because it will have decided to prolong its life” (Sartre, 1976, p. 69, my translation). All of humanity lives in anguish since “each day at each minute it must choose to live” (ibid., my translation). For Sartre, we cannot escape our responsibility for humanity’s choice. Unless we practice self-deception, we cannot blame any subsequent use of the atomic bomb on the independent and irrational act of a lunatic. In comparing a leader who initiates nuclear war to Hitler, Sartre contends, “for this new Fuhrer, like the first, we would all be responsible” (1976, p. 69). If deterrence fails and we destroy ourselves, this would result from our choice. While some other existentialists show sympathy for the difficulties facing the powerless, Sartre distributes responsibility for the choice of nuclear weapons across humanity. We live in a world stockpiled with nuclear weapons because we have chosen this approach to national security. Sartre urges us all to accept responsibility, to act authentically, and to not allow a “new Fuhrer” to initiate nuclear war. In a democratic society, people have a formal right of choice and thus, in the Sartrean sense, have no excuses. They are responsible for having “a government they deserve” and for its policies. Americans allowed—whether through deliberation or neglect of appropriate reflection—the policies that led to the first use of atomic bombs and further development of nuclear weapons. They ignored the consequences of this action and how these weapons violate the discrimination principle in just war theory. They allowed the Cold War to commence and to reach a point at which the frightening prospect of a thermonuclear war could reduce both capitalism and socialism to ash heaps. Now, in

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the post-Cold War world, with ever increasing proliferation of nuclear weapons, the nations and peoples of the world face the same choice. 4. Russell and the Quest for International Control Bertrand Russell is one of most widely known twentieth-century philosophers. In 1950, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, largely due to his extensive writings in which he strongly advocates humanitarian ideas and freedom of thought. While by this time, he had spoken out several times against atomic weapons, his most dramatic comments did not come until a few years later with “Man’s Peril” (1954) and the “Russell-Einstein Manifesto” (1955)—both written in response to the development of the hydrogen bomb. Despite the personal importance to Russell of his political writings, for analytic philosophers and the general public, he is best known for his contributions to mathematics, logic, and epistemology. Nevertheless, from 1945 until he died in 1970, he made the most persistent and prolific philosophical contributions to the analysis of nuclear weapons. His political efforts are as complex as they are important. The complexity can be understood in terms of the tension between his initial dubious political efforts in dealing with the problem of nuclear weapons and his more general humanistic philosophical views on nuclear weapons expressed in the “Russell-Einstein Manifesto” and continuing through his Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959). Of course, he also sustained his more general critique of war, including his War Crimes in Vietnam (1967). Russell’s political efforts can be roughly divided into those that took place before the development of the hydrogen bomb and those that took place after it. The initial phase—his response to the atomic bomb—also includes two segments. Some of his remarks do not go beyond his call for the international control of fissionable material. In other remarks, he also suggests that threatening the Soviet Union might be appropriate if the Soviet Union did not agree to international control of nuclear weapons. Russell is probably the second major philosopher to respond to the atomic bombings. He published over a dozen items on the atom bomb during the 1940s. “The Bomb and Civilization” was printed in Forward (Glasgow) on 18 August 1945. His initial and persistent view was that the appropriate response to nuclear weapons would be the development of international control. He also believed during this period that if another major war occurred, the United States would win and humanity would survive. However, after the testing of the hydrogen bomb in 1952, Russell changed his view that the United States—or any country—could win a nuclear war and that humanity could survive. This view is expressed most eloquently in his BBC address of 23 December 1954 and published as “Man’s Peril from the Hydrogen Bomb” (1954). This humanistic philosophical view that renounces nuclear weapons was also expressed in the “Russell-Einstein Mani-

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festo” (Russell and Einstein, 1955) that resulted from the communication between Russell and Albert Einstein and led, in 1957, to the formation of the Pugwash Movement that enlisted leading scientists across the world in the effort to eliminate nuclear weapons (Rabinowitch, 1957). Russell’s enlightened view continued through his Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959). Thus, Russell provides an excellent illustration of how, even should we begin with dangerous misunderstandings about politics and weapons, if we are open to a careful and critical assessment of the facts, we can change our view. The time has come for people who still, to this day, hold to some of Russell’s initial naïve misconceptions, to do as he did in 1954: see the light and renounce nuclear weapons. 5. Dewey on the Atom Bomb and Western Dualism John Dewey is among the best-known and most influential American philosophers. His contribution was a pointed illustration of his pragmatic pacifism. In November 1945, he published an essay in The New Leader titled “Dualism and the Split Atom: Science and Morals in the Atomic Age” (1989). Dewey begins his essay stating, “there is an immediate issue and a longtime problem presented by the splitting of the atom and the production of the atomic bomb” (ibid., p. 199). Dewey focused on the irony of the atom bomb. He says, “An instrumentality which was developed as a means of security during the war presents itself in the cold light of the day after as the greatest threat to security that human imagination can encompass” (ibid., p. 199). The debate over the “immediate issue” of the dual prospects of security and destruction continues to this day, while the “longtime problem” that in large measure led to our nuclear dilemma is usually unrecognized, neglected, or mishandled. For a long time, Dewey had been concerned with the social problems that arise as a result of the separation between science and morality. This split is central to a dualism that emerged in ancient Greece, yet whose continued existence partially precipitated the split atom. His position had solidified by 1920, when he first published Reconstruction in Philosophy (1948). Nevertheless, the development of the atomic bomb underscored for Dewey the serious nature of this ancient split. When he wrote a new introduction for the 1948 edition of Reconstruction in Philosophy, he observed, “The destructive use made of the fission of the nucleus of an atom . . . occurred not only in a war but because of the existence of war” (pp. xxiv–xxv). In the final analysis, Dewey’s response goes beyond the call for a humane science and merges with his quest for global peace. Part of Dewey’s goal was to give more scientific and moral control to the masses who labor under conditions in which they are not only “politically disfranchised” and “economically dispossessed and disprivileged,” but also “morally abject” and educationally deficient. At this depth level, his analysis

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merges with the critique of class society. Dewey stresses the manner in which not only are classes themselves the result of the splits initiated by divisions in labor but also the class struggle itself gets caught up in the recourse to force that is characteristic of the endeavor to hold together these unstable social fissures. Class division, like the separation of science and morality, spells insecurity for the masses. Such splits put disproportionate power into the hands of a few. The splitting of social bonds, like the splitting of atomic bombs, is a lethal chemistry. Dewey does not call for mere political emancipation. He notes its limits when he says, “in spite of the abolition of slavery and serfdom by means of political emancipation, the workers of the world have little share in control of the work they perform” (1945, p. 7). He saw that political emancipation is merely formal; while it may be necessary, it is not sufficient for workers to have more control over the work they perform. We need to proceed to transformation of the cultural base where private life continues to manifest these prejudices excluded from the public sphere. Dewey focuses on the masses in giving his alternative to proletarian or mass revolution. It is one that calls on us to share power and responsibility and to overcome long-standing Western dualisms. He says that we need “to carry forward the application of our best scientific procedures and results so that they will operate within, not just outside of and against the moral values and concerns of humanity” (1945, p. 7). For him, the solution to class struggle is not proletarian or mass revolution—that would continue the recourse to force that he deplores. He favors “reconstruction”—a nonviolent, educational process that institutes participatory democracy in all spheres of social activity, thereby integrating the scientific and moral pursuits that have operated in separation for so long and so disastrously. Dewey wants us to learn from the emergence of nuclear weapons that we must bring social change under a form of control that includes mass participation and the integration of scientific and moral concerns. Otherwise, our situation, he laments, “is well-nigh hopeless.” We can continue down the path of violence, including the use of nuclear weapons, or we can pursue the nonviolent transformation of society and non-violent resolution of conflict. 6. Continued Relevance of the Philosophical Luminaries of 1940s These initial philosophical assessments of the atomic bomb demonstrate how profoundly the advent of nuclear weapons has affected the philosophy of war and peace. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not be ignored. Likewise, the post-war failure to control atomic bombs could not be ignored. The wartime use and post-war stockpiling of atomic bombs ushered in a new era in the potential and actual escalation of global violence. Philosophers would continue to debate whether the use or even the possession of nuclear weapons could be justified, but issues of war and peace took on a new

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urgency since human beings had developed instruments of war that raised the specter of species self-annihilation. We have learned several lessons from these philosophical luminaries. Camus was the first in a long line of philosophers who would plead that now, peace is the only battle worth waging. Sartre made clear that all of humanity now lives in anguish because each day, each minute, we must choose to live or choose collective death. Russell was the first of many philosophers to grapple with the meaning of nuclear weapons for East-West relations. Dewey initiated philosophical efforts to situate the development of nuclear weapons within the context of the unfolding of Western metaphysics and, in response to the dualism that finally led to atomic bombs, called for a participatory democracy that would integrate scientific and moral concerns. In each decade of the nuclear age, philosophers have continued to analyze issues of war and peace. Each decade has ushered in new complexities— from the development of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s, to debates about Star Wars in the 1980s, to discussions about the status of United States’ hegemony and problems of nuclear proliferation in the 1990s as well as terrorism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While “terrorism” received a lot of bad press after 9/11, previous US nuclear strategists openly and positively discussed and embraced “nuclear terror,” even calling Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) the “balance of terror.” To a large extent, during this period, terrorism was the idée fixe in many strategic and political circles. Many such points about terrorism have been noted by philosophers in Philosophical Perspectives on the ‘War on Terrorism (Presbey, 2007). Perhaps we are witnessing a new era of the public intellectual with figures such as Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, and, to an extent, Richard Rorty. One of the best illustrations of this return of the public intellectual can be found in Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers (Taylor, 2009), which contains interviews with Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha C. Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, and Judith Butler. Each shows the place of philosophy in everyday life; they engage vital public issues such as race, the environment, disabilities, and non-human animal rights. Butler, West, and Nussbaum also cite issues of violence and war. Also, as is well known, several of the contributors address issues of violence and war much more extensively in other contexts. For example, Zizek has a book on violence (2008) and Butler has a book on war (2010). They, along with West, have spoken out specifically against the Iraq war and United States’ militarism. In these ways, though not as extensively as found in Examined Life, they are continuing the kinds of efforts made by the early philosophical luminaries. Hopes have risen in times of apparent thaws in East-West relations, such as when the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was ratified by the United States, United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union in 1963, or during the period in which Mikhail Gorbachev pursued glasnost and perestroika. Hopes also have fallen

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at times when the prospect that nuclear weapons might again be used seemed serious, such as during the Cuban Missile Crisis and during the pursuit of counterforce strategies, especially in the Ronald Reagan years. These first philosophical reactions provide us with a horizon for thinking more broadly, more critically, and more constructively about Western civilization and the dilemmas for humanity posed by the specter of species extinction. These philosophical luminaries already foresaw that, with the advent of the atomic age, humanity was heading down the path of selfdestruction. Unlike political leaders in the following generations, these philosophers were able to think globally and had the courage to face the threats—and to speak out publicly, pointedly, and passionately.

Two DOROTHY DAY’S PURSUIT OF PUBLIC PEACE THROUGH WORD AND ACTION Gail M. Presbey 1. Introduction Dorothy Day was a lay woman and journalist who, by her teens and during her college years, was an atheist attracted to communism. She converted to Catholicism after giving birth to her daughter, Tamar, which she interpreted as a religious experience. She was torn by how to reconcile her ideals for social justice that she had expressed in a left-wing political context with the seeming apolitical nature of the religion that she had entered. When Peter Maurin, a wandering French peasant, taught her about Catholic Social doctrine expressed in the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum (The New Reality; commonly translated into English as On the Conditions of Labor) (Leo XIII, 1891) and Quadragesimo anno (known in English as On Reconstructing the Social Order) (Pius XI, 1931), Day was heartened. With Maurin, Day founded communities where members lived in simple poverty. Community goals included helping the less fortunate, rallying around political causes to end militarism and war, and helping the marginalized gain their rights. Drawing on the motto of the socialist and anarchist organization, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Maurin explained that they were going to “build the new world in the shell of the old” (Egan, 1999, p. 266). They were also motivated by Petr Kropotkin’s emphasis on mutual aid. They began publishing The Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933, during the height of the Great Depression. Thus began fifty years of using the press to convey the message of their movement in addition to living their philosophy of serving the poor, standing with those were ostracized for their conscientious views, and reaching out in peace and reconciliation toward those the Church or State had labeled as its enemies. Many of Day’s public positions were controversial. During the Spanish Civil War, she did not support General Francisco Franco when most other Catholics did, and during World War II, she supported conscientious objectors who refused to fight. Day also refused to participate in Civil Defense drills during the 1950s in New York as a protest against the nuclear arms race. Instead, she would sit on a public bench in the park to voice her protest by action. During the early 1960s, she visited Cuba and tried to reconcile the Marxist-Leninists and Catholics there. Later, in the 1960s, she lent her support to inter-racial farming communities in the rural South as a step toward

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undoing racism in America. During each of these events, Day took a lot of risks. She faced ostracization, jail time, loss of funds for her movement, and death threats. What kept her going with a cheerful heart? As she explains, her faith sustained her. In taking unpopular stands, not only did Day articulate her views, but she followed them with actions. In each case, she articulated and circulated her message as journalist and publisher, thereby attempting to sway public opinion and encourage others to join her causes. Due to her concern for shaping public opinion, I see her as an example of a thinker and activist dedicated to encouraging public peace. Through a combination of her words (self-expression of her beliefs, values, and commitments) and her actions (consonant with these beliefs), Day shaped public discourse and practiced her goal of lasting, “positive peace,” which in Johan Galtung’s terminology, is based on mutual understanding and respect, not merely on the absence of war. Day’s target audience varied widely, including fellow Catholics, fellow Catholic Workers, Americans, and global citizens. She sometimes focused on challenging her faith community, and at other times focused on political communities. In this chapter, I will focus on how Day constantly engaged the public, asking them to rethink their views and to join her in common action. I will illustrate my thesis using three examples: her role as newspaper founder and journalist, addressing the public through her writings; her protests in public places; and her founding a large associational community, which is both social and public. These three examples intersect and overlap; they are really three facets of Day’s public practice of peace philosophy. 2. Speech and Action in the Public Realm: Theoretical and Historical Context Before expanding on the three concrete ways in which Day engaged the public, I first want to talk about speech, action, and the public realm on a more abstract level. What is the goal of public speech and action? To call upon some of the analysis of Hannah Arendt, we can say that two important aspects of speech are, first, that it reveals the agent, and second, through speech, people reach out to each other and set up relationships. As Arendt describes it, a human act must contain the answer to the question, “Who are you?” Through our acts and speech, we reveal ourselves to our community. Our “who” is revealed in action, and we are visible to those we encounter. It takes courage to speak and act in the world because each action discloses the agent along with the act. We disclose ourselves to people unknown to us. However, although fear can be aroused in revealing oneself, so also can joy. Arendt notes that for the ancient Greeks, action in the polis was propelled by an “urge toward self-disclosure” (1958, pp. 180, 194). As she wrote in her description of Rahel Varnhagen’s salons in Berlin, “the true joy of conversation consisted in being understood” (1974, p. 20).

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Disclosing ourselves to each other creates the public realm. These encounters with each other create what Arendt calls the “in-between,” the real world of action and speech that goes on between people. This public world is real even though it isn’t comprised of objects, but rather of words, deeds, and relationships. Arendt calls the more intangible aspect of the in-between the “web of human relationships” (1958, pp. 182–183). I suggest that Day was often busy weaving this web of relationships, connecting people to each other to build a positive peace. Looking closely at The Human Condition, we see that Arendt describes an objective and subjective aspect to the “in-between.” The objective aspect consists of matters of the world that are of interest to both parties, which is what brings them together in speech and action. But each encounter has a subjective aspect as well, the disclosure of the self (the “who”) to one another. While the subjective aspect of the in-between is intangible and has no “end products,” it is nevertheless real and important. In fact, wherever human beings live together, they create (or, better, already find themselves in) a web of human relationships that connects and constrains new action. As she explains, since this “already existing web” is so filled with “innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions,” actors rarely achieve their intended purpose. While this is no doubt a frustrating aspect of our actions and relations with each other, the fringe benefit is that this dynamic of interaction makes for good stories—narratives chock-full of heroes—that may find their way into our history books. Of course, to focus on a singular “hero” usually misrepresents actions that are the results of multiple parts of the web (Arendt, 1958, pp. 182–184). According to Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, this non-material aspect of the web of relationships refers to non-material culture, in contrast to the part of the “world” created by “work” and crafting of human hands, built architecture, or works of art. I must clarify that revealing oneself in public regarding political matters is not the same as indiscretion, that is, “uninhibited utterance,” or, saying in public what should remain private (Arendt, 1974, p. 21). Arendt staunchly defended the “sanctity” of the private sphere from the glare of publicity. Any time one draws upon the concepts of “public” and “political” as used by Arendt, there is a danger, because, it is easy to see in some of her writings, especially in The Human Condition, a reliance on Aristotelian ideas and distinctions that contemporary scholars, especially feminists, consider problematic (Honig, 1995). For example, she contrasts the public realm to a private one. In the ancient Greek examples, among others, men were to find their place in the public realm but women and their duties were found in the private sphere of the household. No doubt, the household was larger than our current American nuclear families, encompassing slaves as well as free persons, but nevertheless having as its goal the survival and reproduction of the family, while the public realm had a loftier, intangible goal of practicing public freedom.

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One could not fault many readers for rejecting the continuation of these kinds of distinctions. Thus, to ensure that the relevancy of Arendt’s insights is patent, I refer to her ideas as explored by Seyla Benhabib, who practices thinking “with Arendt against Arendt” (2003, pp. 6, 198), by which she means not just reinterpreting Arendt but actually revising her views. Benhabib draws upon and champions some of Arendt’s ideas at the expense of others that go against her own insights. Benhabib draws on Arendt’s early work, Rahel Varnhagen, to find a different model of public space and appearance in public. Rahel Levin Varnhagen, a single woman, had operated a salon—a kind of public meeting space hosted in private houses—in her garret in Berlin from 1790 until Napoleon’s invasion in 1806. Then, she left Berlin, married Von Varnhagen, and eventually came back to Berlin, re-opening a salon there from 1821 through 1832 (Arendt, 1974, pp. 229–231; Benhabib, 2000, pp. 6–7). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, along with Rahel’s close friend and poet Heinrich Heine, frequented the salons. Rahel and others who appreciated the ideals of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleonic reforms to monarchy engaged in discussion in the salon (Arendt, 1974, pp. 192–194). She and Heine became supporters of Saint-Simonianism, which was a utopian socialist movement that influenced the ideas of Auguste Comte, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. Heine finally left Berlin to go to France after the July revolution there—both he and Rahel saw the revolution as reinforcing the principle of equality and popular sovereignty over hereditary right (ibid., pp. 226–227). Drawing on Deborah Hertz’s work (1988), Benhabib traced the history of salons in France and Germany. She noted that Varnhagen was one of several Jewish women in Berlin able to run salons. Benhabib sees the salons as providing a space for people to see and be seen and heard, both in verbal discussion and in recitals of their writing. The salons in Germany were egalitarian gathering places where people of differing ethnic backgrounds, classes, and religious background could meet each other and exchange ideas. Women such as Varnhagen herself and others who frequented her salon could escape the confines of patriarchal family tradition and be seriously heard. Anyone with talent and good ideas could receive recognition. The “joy of conversation” at the salons was not all, or even mainly, about politics. Yet it often involved a search for “soul friends,” with intimacy or “civic friendship” developing among those who gather for a common public purpose (Benhabib, 2003, pp. xi–xii, 15–17). These salons, Benhabib emphasizes, “contradict the agonal model of the public sphere” and are also important alternative models of the public that are more friendly to and inclusive of women’s participation than the ancient Greek and Aristotlean models (ibid., p. 19). Benhabib sees the salons and Arendt’s study of Varnhagen’s salon as piecing together an important and often neglected part of the history of modernity.

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The salons, undoubtedly private-public hybrids, created and kept alive public debate and exchange of ideas. This idea of public life as a public-private hybrid that is more egalitarian than agonal politics is what comes closest to describing Dorothy Day. Her critics may quickly point out that she eschewed participation in electoral politics and other attempts to influence or shape public policy. So, in some people’s eyes, she was apolitical or at least seemed to follow a conservative agenda of minimizing government. But this would clearly be a misunderstanding of her role and accomplishments. To better understand her relationship with the public, we should examine the parallels between her situation and the salons. Day was a reporter long before she founded her own newspaper. Her earlier and repeated experience of how the written word can reach others and shape their views was the reason she decided to start her own newspaper. She was certainly not alone in this sentiment. The ability to write and publish one’s own thoughts and opinions is a cornerstone of our current concept of free speech, ratified in the First Amendment to the US Constitution (1791). Before further elaborating on examples of Day that illustrate these parallels, however, I turn to the history of advocacy newspapers, using some concrete examples that can be seen as precursors to some of the same aspects of Day’s community and her actions. A writer, while often solitary during the moment of writing, is always trying to reach a larger audience. The idea that a paper would be founded to spread ideas—not just to “neutrally” or “objectively” report the news—is longstanding. It has played an important role in political movements around the world. For instance, James Franklin of Boston published the New England Courant in 1721, which began its political crusades almost immediately. By 1722, Franklin was in jail for publishing criticisms of the colonial government (at which point his brother, Benjamin Franklin, took over the press). When Mohandas Gandhi started the Satyagraha Movement (nonviolent resistance), he also started his newspaper, Indian Opinion. His first commune/ashram, Phoenix Settlement, founded in 1904 near Durban, housed the paper’s printing press. In fact, the printing shed was the first building built; after that came simple wood and corrugated iron houses for dwellings. The ashramites lived together in simple poverty and had the task, in addition to farming, of writing articles, running the press, making copies, and distributing them. A farm and the free labor subsidized the newspaper (Brown, 1989, p. 42). Day’s life and the model of Day’s Catholic Worker community are quite similar to Gandhi’s life and the organizational structure of the ashrams. Judith Brown’s in-depth study of how Gandhi began his public career shows that it was built gradually, and that there was a “gradual merging of Gandhi’s ‘home’ and ‘public’ life” (ibid., p. 41). In his personal household, he rejected material comforts and possessions that would traditionally have come with someone of his class status (as a lawyer and barrister), doing his own chores.

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But that was only the first step. From the individual household came the communal living experiences, first on the small 100 acre Phoenix Farm, and then in a much larger community on the 1000 acre Tolstoy Farm. Judith Brown suggests that through these communities, Gandhi’s private and public life merged. He learned to found and organize political associations, gathering his constituency and recruiting volunteers as support networks (ibid., p. 47). Similarly, Dorothy Day’s newspaper does not spring up as separate or apart from her founding an association. The Catholic Worker community and the authors of the newspaper articles lived together in community and supported the paper, which otherwise brought in little revenue as it was sold to the poor for a penny a copy. Thus, Day’s role as a reporter and newspaper founder cannot be understood apart from her role as founder of an association. As with Gandhi, her founding of an association sprung gradually from changes to her private household until it incorporated many others beyond family with blood ties. 3. Newspaper Founder and Reporter Before I look at the founding of the newspaper, which then gave birth to the Catholic Worker associative community, let me first look at Day’s early journalism career and the background of the IWW (aka Wobblies), which played a significant role in her early assignments as a journalist. From Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, we learn that from the time she was a college student, she longed to be part of a transformation of society. She wanted the world to be open to and supportive of “the lame, the halt and the blind” just as during her childhood, when she was in the San Francisco earthquake, neighbors had come to aid each other (1981, p. 39). Day began to become socially conscious at age fifteen when she read The Day Book, the newspaper for which her brother began working at that time. Aimed at the working class and sold for a penny a copy, The Day Book awakened her to people such as Eugene Debs; this was also where she learned of the IWW for the first time and where she read of the struggles of the labor movement, especially in Chicago (1981, pp. 36–37). As a university student looking for a way forward to such a world, she joined the socialists. At the time, her teachers told her that religion was a crutch for the weak, so she eschewed her religious ties. One of the first things she mentions is joining a club for writers, and one of the first articles she wrote was about her personal experience of going hungry. She had turned down jobs that seemed drudgery, and so she understood her poverty as the price of her nonconformity (ibid., p. 44). She struck up a friendship with Rayna Prohme, a Jewish woman who had been rejected from the sororities at their university due to discrimination against Jews. Day accepted Rayna’s invitation to move in to the Jewish boarding house with her.

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At this time in her life, Day recalls grappling with big questions. Why not avoid social evils in the first place to reduce the need to remedy them? If fathers had good paying jobs (or were supported by disability payments should industry ruin their health), they could support their children (ibid., p. 45). For this reason, she chose a career in journalism, with the goal of exposing injustices and thereby playing a part in changing the world. In writing her autobiography, and looking back at this earlier time in her life, Day noticed that her thoughts were that journalism—influencing others through one’s writings—was the work of men, as was picketing, going to jail, and generally making a mark on the world. She saw men as the revolutionaries, whereas she thought that women were “by nature” materialistic, thinking of the home and children, and caught up with “women’s work” (ibid., p. 60). She wanted to be part of this men’s work, not women’s work. The first newspaper at which Day worked, The Call, was a socialist daily. She described power struggles within it, with the main forces behind them being the AFL, the IWW, the CIO, and the anarchists. She praised the IWW leadership (Bill Haywood, Joe Hill, and others). She recalled that the anarchists, inspired by Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, were too small for her to take seriously at the time. Her first assignment for The Call was to write an article on what it is like to live on five dollars a week—a typical low wage for poor workers at the time. Other newspapers were writing articles like this to send the message that it is not so hard to live frugally (and so the poor shouldn’t complain). To achieve authenticity, Day experimented with her own body—finding a cheap tenement and eating as the poor did (ibid., pp. 52, 53; Miller, 1973, p. 76). Through her journalism, Day wanted to “build up a tremendous indictment against the present system” (ibid., p. 66). I want to take a moment to mention the important early work that the IWW did to protect free speech rights, including the right to assemble, to speak on the streets, and to publish newspapers. In Brave New Neighborhoods, Margaret Kohn pays tribute to this early work. While freedom of speech and the press was enshrined in the Constitution, it took the work and sacrifice of activists to make it a reality. For instance, the government was always willing to curtail speech during times of war, for instance, such as in the Sedition Act of 1798. Early abolitionists suffered when they printed newspapers articles popularizing their cause, such as reporting about Elijah Lovejoy, who was shot by a pro-slavery mob (Kohn, 2004, pp. 23–24). Founded by Bill Haywood in 1905, the IWW was an anarchosyndicalist group. For them, the right to free speech was crucial as a precondition to political and economic change. Consisting of miners, lumberjacks, and agricultural workers who considered the AFL to be a sell-out, they could not afford to rent halls to get out their message. They went street speaking. But in Spokane, Washington, the police and courts did the bidding of businesspersons who complained that such rallies blocked traffic and were a nuisance that

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hurt their businesses. Selective enforcement of nuisance laws was used to silence the IWW. Despite the Supreme Court decision of 1909 upholding the Wobblies’ right to speak on the streets, Spokane law enforcement continued to arrest speakers for other “crimes” such as vagrancy or disorderly conduct. The Wobblies decided to counter by filling the jails. When one speaker was arrested, another would take its place, until there were hundreds in the jails. The police countered by beating people in jail. Kohn notes that in one month, 681 men were brought to the emergency room for injuries sustained by beatings incurred in jails. Nonetheless, the IWW continued, its goal being to bankrupt the city with costs of imprisonment and trials. Finally, in March of 1910, Spokane agreed to honor the IWW’s right to freedom of speech, press, and assembly. Prior to this time, the strong emphasis on the right to free speech that we now see had not yet taken deep root in American culture. This norm was gradually established through actions such as those by the IWW (Kohn, 2004, pp. 28–33). After Day left The Call, she began a job writing for The Masses (“the liberals” as she identified them), which was shut down in November 1917. Soon afterward, Day accompanied a group of suffragists who protested at the White House. They were all arrested and mistreated, and in response, went on a hunger strike (Day, 1981, pp. 72–83; Miller, 1974, pp. 49–50). This was a profound experience for Day. For a while thereafter, Day was a freelance writer. During this time, she moved to Staten Island, had a child, and converted to Catholicism. But she did not know yet how to wed her newfound spirituality with her political convictions. She took a job reporting for Commonweal, her first Catholic publication, covering those on a hunger march to Washington DC, protesting unemployment and eviction from their homes during the Depression. Day felt frustrated that Catholics were not a part of this march for change. She prayed at the National Shrine at Catholic University for guidance. Right after that, as if an answer to her prayer, she met Peter Maurin (Day, 1981, pp. 162–166). Born in France in 1877, Maurin had emigrated to the United States and Canada. He held a personalist philosophy, melding the philosophical ideas of Nikolai Berdyaev with the Catholic papal encyclicals to come up with his own unique ideas, which he then popularized by paraphrasing them into witty “easy essays.” An avid pamphleteer, Maurin would stuff his own pockets with his writings and hand them out to everyone he met (Miller, 1973, pp. 7, 22). After he met Day, he would drop by her house every day for about four months, arriving around 3 p.m., and talking incessantly while she went about the house doing her work, and only leaving when ejected around 10 or 11 p.m. During these visits, he shared with Day his philosophy as well as the influences on his thought (ibid., p. 63). Once Maurin and Day had exchanged ideas and realized that they wanted to start a newspaper that would popularize Catholic social teaching, to be

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distributed on May Day in Union Square in 1933, Day used personal money to finance the first issue, which involved printing 2500 copies. She said her goal was to mitigate class conflict, not stir it up. The first issue was filled with Maurin’s “Easy Essays” and Day’s writings. To help the success of the first issue, after distributing it in Union Square, they mailed copies to prominent Catholics, receiving praise and endorsement from many. Within four months, they were distributing 25,000 copies, and within a few years, distribution reached 150,000 copies. To support the newspaper, Maurin and Day started a house of hospitality to house the volunteers and workers who helped with the paper. It was modeled on the IWW “flophouses,” where they fed everyone mashed potatoes. Day’s apartment was on Fifteenth Street, and at first they expanded into an unused barbershop on the ground floor. Two women moved in to help with the second edition of the paper. Then they expanded into three apartments. Finally, they decided to move into a house at 144 West Charles Street. Always growing in number of residents, the Charles Street house became so crowded they had to eat in shifts. A year later, they moved into the 115 Mott Street house, with 12 rooms for women and 28 rooms for men in addition to the space to work on the paper. While they were Catholic, they used the Wobbly slogan, “to build a new society within the shell of the old” (Day, 1981, pp. 186–190, 196; Miller, 1973, pp. 99, 106–107). The Catholic Worker covered the plight of workers in many fields. Nancy Roberts notes that Day had honed her writing techniques in her earlier work for The Masses, “where literary brilliance had likewise illuminated radical commentary,” and intended to use her skills to communicate her ideas, writing muckraking exposés with “evocative detail” (1988, pp. 121–122). Day also used the paper to share spiritual commentaries, in which she commented on complex theological issues. Her style ranged from sophisticated and theoretical to unpretentious and conversational. She sometimes used “comic understatement” to make her point—and used humor generally in her life to get through difficulties (ibid., pp. 123–125). Immediately after the success of the first issue of The Catholic Worker, Maurin attempted to organize public meetings to discuss the ideas in the paper. At first he rented a hall, the Manhattan Lyceum, which cost ten dollars for eight hours. He put down a three-dollar deposit and then asked for donations to cover the rest of the cost. After holding his events there three times, subsequent events, dubbed “clarification of thought,” were held in the barber shop at Fifteenth Street during the winter of 1933–1934. Professors and distinguished priests came to lead or participate in discussion (Miller, 1973, pp. 67–68). While the Catholic Worker houses had at first been comprised of newspaper volunteer workers, they soon began to double as houses of hospitality that hosted bread lines, precursors of today’s soup kitchens. Since Day’s own flat on Fifteenth Street was not large enough to house all the homeless women who came to her, with the help of two priests from Immaculate Conception

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parish, she found another flat for them. In doing so, her mission to feed and house the poor enlarged from the small intimate circle of family into a social and public one. Including the poor, some of whom decided to live in the community, helped them to quickly outgrow the Charles Street house. The Mott Street house’s bread line (serving cottage cheese, bread, and coffee) started, according to Arthur Sheehan “in an innocuous way,” but by 1937, could include five hundred men (ibid., pp. 99, 108). The Catholic Worker community also joined street protests. When Jews were attacked by Germans in July of 1935, Day, a young student from Marquette University visiting New York, and others from the community joined a protest. Day was horrified by the level of police brutality she witnessed in the break-up of the protest (ibid., p. 102). As Eileen Egan explained, while the extent to which Day lived the example of gospel hospitality to the poor of the city seemed extreme to some, no one could deny that it was in line with the Church’s teaching. But Day’s position on pacifism was controversial. Her insight into scriptures led her to see the connection between her community’s works of mercy and her antiwar stance. In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, when the Catholic Church sided with the insurgents, led by Franco, Day remained neutral, saying that she did not approve of using force. Taking such a position irritated Father Charles E. Coughlin. In July 1937, Coughlin’s Social Justice reported that Bishop Michael J. Gallagher of Detroit was worried that the Catholic Worker position on Spain and Franco was enough to make him wonder “if the thing were not downright Communism, camouflaged with Catholic paint” (ibid., p. 142). In 1940, Day tried to get protection for Catholic conscientious objectors who did not want to serve in World War Two. She suggested that the young men must choose sides, not between nations at war, but between the world’s way and Christ’s way. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Day wrote: We will print the words of Christ who is with us always, even to the end of the world. ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes His sun to rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and unjust.’ We are at war, a declared war, with Japan, Germany, and Italy. But still we can repeat Christ’s words, each day, holding them close in our hearts, each month printing them in the paper. . . . We are still pacifists. Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers. Speaking for many of our conscientious objectors, we will not participate in armed warfare or in making munitions, or by buying government bonds to prosecute the war, or in urging others to these efforts. . . . We will try daily, hourly, to pray for an end to the war. . . . Let us add, that

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unless we combine this prayer with almsgiving, in giving to the least of God’s children, and fasting in order that we may help feed the hungry, and penance in recognition of our share in the guilt, our prayer may become empty words. (1942) Day continued her remarks by reiterating the willingness and duty of Catholic Worker members to tend to the sick and wounded from the war, to raise food to feed people made hungry by the war, and to engage in any other works of mercy needed, but not to aid in the fighting or in manufacture of munitions. In the context of wartime fervor, such a stance seemed clearly unpatriotic and possibly foolish. By then, the Catholic Workers had grown to thirty houses, but some now refused to distribute the newspaper because of Day’s stance on the war (Egan, 1999, p. 274). Some houses closed. Such pressures on her movement, however, did not deter her. Instead, she cooperated with the Brethren and Mennonites, historically peace churches, to run conscientious objector camps for Catholics. But it proved too difficult to keep them operating. While during World War I, there had only been between two and four Catholics achieving conscientious objector status, by World War II, there were 135 (sixty-one sentenced to prison and seventy-five that came through the camps organized by the Friends and other peace churches). She found the work, in a context of scorn and derision, so difficult that, in 1943, she retreated to six months of solitude. By 1945, there were only ten Catholic Worker houses, and circulation for the newspaper dropped from its earlier height of 160,000 to about 30,000. Still, Day continued her pacifist stand. Was Day’s pacifist stand realistic or hopelessly idealistic and out of touch with reality? She is not the first to be derided for imagining a world without war. Arendt saves some of her harshest criticism for Rahel Varnhagen when, during the 1812–1813 war between France and Russia, while Rahel’s husband joined the Russian forces and she was involved in collecting clothing and money for those wounded in war, Rahel imagined a world without war. Arendt chastises Rahel harshly, saying: It is really curious to see her behaving just as abominably as all philanthropic ladies after her time—organizing everything on the slightest pretext, bursting into tears at every benefaction, worshipping all the heroes in every single soldier; and like all such ladies concocting the same infantile pacifist programs, born of overestimation of her own experience and underestimation, in fact ignorance, of all the objective factors that make history. I have such a plan in my heart to call upon all European women to refuse ever to go along with war; and jointly to help all sufferers. . . . Wouldn’t something like that work?” (1974, p. 196) And so also, during a much later war, did critics charge Day with being out of touch with reality when she took the pacifist stand. It is not surprising

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that, in the just war tradition, Catholic clergy and others staunchly dismissed her. Even William Miller, the careful biographer, scarcely conceals his disagreement with her stance. He analyzed The Catholic Worker editorials on pacifism from as early as 1933 up to the outbreak of the war and noted that the organizing of Catholic conscientious objectors started as early as 1936. He opined that the Catholic Worker position emphasizes that wars are fought to protect business’s profits and that if the people refused to fund war for private industrialist and capitalist profit, wars would cease—a view that Miller considered simplistic. When World War II broke out, the paper carried a headline story entitled “We Are to Blame for New War in Europe,” listing the causes of the war as people’s “materialism, their greed, their idolatrous nationalism” (Miller, 1973, p. 161). It claimed that another war had happened because people would not learn the lessons from history. As the war continued, the newspaper suggested that the real motivation for the Allies becoming involved was “British imperialism and American profiteering” (ibid., p. 162). But Miller believed that these causes were beside the point. In his opinion, to bemoan the values and circumstances that gave rise to the war was not helpful now that the war had started. Instead, he believed that nations needed to take swift military action to limit the war and save Jewish people from their fate. He also accused Day of reading history badly (ibid., p. 162). He did, however, note that at a certain point, Day shifted her strategy away from arguments from history, and switched to theological arguments about how God’s love transcends this world and that our goal is to bring the values of heaven to earth (ibid., pp. 166–167). While he mentions that critics (it’s not clear whether he counts himself among them) may not be satisfied with an appeal to otherworldly values as people are dying in the midst of war, it seems clear that he believes “history” could not support the idea of wars becoming obsolete. Some critics of the Catholic Worker movement suggested that refusal to fight in World War II was abdicating responsibility to save the Jews. Day countered by saying that the best response to the suffering of the Jews would be to implement the Bermuda Refugee Conference suggestions for speedy resettlement of them (ibid., p. 182). The Bermuda Conference had been held in April of 1943; representatives of the Allied countries gathered to strategize and consider whether a safe haven for Jewish refugees could be found. While British and American governments insisted that the war was being fought in part to save the Jews, they nevertheless were not willing to offer any safe haven to Jews escaping persecution (PBS, n.d.). Gandhi is also well known for questioning the war rhetoric of the Allies during World War II. He challenged countries that asked their colonies to sacrifice their lives in a war to protect freedom and democracy while keeping millions in those colonies under subjection. Nevertheless, despite the long history of subjection under British rule, after the German invasion of Poland in 1938, Gandhi agreed to give Britain India’s unconditional nonviolent sup-

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port. He also insisted that Jewish lives could be saved through nonviolent action. But his position was voted down by the Indian National Congress Working Committee, which instead said it would voluntarily support Britain in the war effort on the condition that Britain promised India independence at the end of the war. The Viceroy declined to give that promise. This refusal led historian Rajmohan Gandhi (a grandson of Mohandas Gandhi) to note that, while Britain considered itself to be in a “life-and-death struggle,” its claim of being unable to meet the Congress’s reasonable demands was “not honest,” since the Congress’s demands were well known and major steps toward self-rule had already been taken in 1937 (2006, p. 450). British refusal to guarantee independence calls into question their fight for global “freedom and democracy,” although they could fall back on the position that their colonialism was not as bad as Nazi subjugation. Day’s continued commitment to peace in a world wracked with war is often dismissed by others as being out of touch with historical reality and even rationality. Nevertheless, some historians, as well as philosophers and social scientists, insist that the way forward to a world with less, or eventually, no war, while not easy, is not impossible either. It is wrong to think that a careful study of history would dictate war’s necessary continuance; such study could show the way to a nonviolent future (Bartkowski, 2013; Cabrera, 2011; Paige, 2002). Arendt emphasized that human beings are not determined to act in the same ways that they have up to this point. Through freedom, we can bring about new political realities. She coins the term “natality” to emphasize this human capability for newness (1958, pp. 8–11, 176–179). While Day could be accused of trying to willfully bring about a peace for which the world’s institutions are not yet ready, we can imagine her retort might be, “If not now, when?” Her community was doing what it could to make the world ripe for such a transition. 4. Taking to the Streets: Protesting Against Nuclear Weapons A. Protesting Air Raid Drills In the 1950s, Day found herself opposing a different kind of war—the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. Government, in an attempt to ready the civilian population in case of nuclear attack, instituted Civilian Defense Drills. The idea was that people should duck into air raid shelters to save themselves in the event of nuclear attack. For Day, and for Ammon Hennacy, whom she credits with the idea for the protests, this strategy implied that nuclear war was thinkable and survivable. She very much disagreed with this presumption just as she disagreed with building ever bigger weapons of this magnitude and the skewed sense of priorities in funding weapons while the needy went without food and shelter.

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To protest the arms race, Day and her followers refused to obey orders during air raid drills. Following Gandhi’s methods of Satyagraha, they announced their intended refusal to cooperate with the upcoming announced drill. When the alarms sounded, they sat on park benches in front of City Hall, while others scrambled to the shelters. Consequently, she was arrested and jailed. During her trial, a judge accused her of murder for contributing to the theoretical death of three million people in New York City. Before 1955, Day had been arrested five times, each time serving jail sentences from five to thirty days for her actions. Of course, by her actions, Day’s intent was not to leave her own country vulnerable to annihilation by nuclear attack. In court in 1955, she said that the point of the drill was to instill a kind of war psychology, and: The main reason we make our protest, those of us from The Catholic Worker, is to do penance publicly for our sin as Americans for having been the first to make and use the atom bomb. As the priest editor of the Boston Pilot said, “This is an unconfessed sin, and as such not forgiven.” We publicly confess our share in the guilt of our country, and are willing to give up our freedom by this act of civil disobedience. (1957) Without this confession of past sin, how could the country prevent itself from repeating the same moral error, with the same moral flaw of rationalizing the destruction on utilitarian grounds? Over the years, others joined in these protests. By 1959, 2,000 protestors had been arrested for resisting air raid drills. In 1960, the police passed over Day and other Catholic Workers, arresting others instead. By 1961, the drills were discontinued (Egan, 1999, pp. 280–281; Miller, 1973, pp. 283–286). We see how Day’s civil disobedience turns all ideas of fear and safety on their heads. Since nuclear annihilation would be so grave a catastrophe, one should do anything one can to avoid it. The arms manufacturers and war theorists insert themselves at this point, and suggest that the only way to protect oneself is to get more and bigger nuclear weapons. But however many weapons one has, they are never enough to provide security. Thus, in the end, the arms race undermines security. To suggest that one could win or even survive such a war created a false sense of security. Instead, Day insisted, to admit our shared vulnerability with all of humanity would encourage coming to mutual agreements with our enemies to dismantle the weapons. But to step out of that cycle, to protest such taking up of arms, takes courage, not only because of personal risks such as being jailed, but because we are going against the prevailing strategy embraced by our fellow citizens. Day’s civil disobedience is a good example of what Michel Foucault described as the work of an engaged intellectual:

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to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to re-examine rules and institutions and on the basis of this reproblematization . . . to participate in the formation of a political will. (1990, p. 265) An entire industry of providing security through violent technical means was being taken for granted as inevitable and reasonably safe; Day persistently called into question all these presuppositions. Day’s sitting out in the park, refusing to go indoors during an air raid drill, making a statement with her body, is another example of her public expression of peace philosophy. Two different aspects of this action are of interest. The first is the aspect of public apology, to which Day alluded in her 1955 testimony to the court. The other is the aspect of insisting on access to a public space at a time when the military has said that public space, usually accessible, is off-limits. B. Apologizing for Hiroshima and Nagasaki While Day wanted to make a public apology for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US government has yet to make such an apology. Instead, our government rationalizes that it was a necessity to drop those two bombs. Oftentimes, it is the people of a country who want to apologize for the actions of their governments, even when those governments are reticent to apologize officially. A 1991 poll conducted by The New York Times, the Tokyo Broadcasting System, and CBS News found that Japanese and American views of the war and the bombs were quite different: Eighty-three percent of Japanese said that the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war was morally wrong, and 73 percent said that the United States should apologize with only 16 percent of Americans favoring an apology. The proportion of Americans who would favor apologizing for Hiroshima rose to a total of 50 percent if Japan apologized for Pearl Harbor, however. (Weisman, 1991) The CBS News study uncovered dissatisfaction among some people of both countries because neither government had apologized for its actions. (Interestingly, journalist Matthew LaPlant tells us that Lennox Tierney, an aide to US General Douglas MacArthur, said that he had witnessed Japanese Emperor Hirohito attempt to apologize for Pearl Harbor, but Hirohito was rebuffed by MacArthur [2006].) Recently, US President Barack Obama delivered a speech on nonproliferation of nuclear weapons in Prague (5 April 2009) and he planned to visit Japan in November 2010. This led some anti-nuclear activists in Japan

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and abroad to have raised hopes that perhaps he would apologize for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But this was never the plan. To avoid raised expectations, Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka suggested that Obama focus his visit on Tokyo. These details were mentioned in a cable from US Ambassador to Japan, John Roos, to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton dated 9 September 2009. Yabunaka’s cable ended up being one of those posted on the Internet by Wikileaks. However, this cable was misunderstood and willfully misquoted by right wing news media sources. Investors Business Daily commented on the cable, wrongfully attributing to Obama and his administration the desire to apologize. The story was picked up by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News’ Fox and Friends, and other commentators, who castigated Obama for daring to apologize for the bombings and satirized him by calling him “Apologizer in Chief” (Rudman, 2011). With these attitudes regarding refusal to apologize still in place over sixty-five years after the bombing, it becomes clearer how Day’s insistence on making apology as early as 1955 was such a minority position. Significantly, however, Roos finally attended the annual Hiroshima-Nagasaki commemoration during its sixty-fifth anniversary in 2010 (McCurry, 2010). According to just war theory, bombing civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki violated the criteria of discrimination (targeting only combatants). While the Nazis stood trial for war crimes in Nuremberg, the Allies were never asked to stand trial for their war crimes. Trudy Govier’s philosophical analysis of forgiveness and reconciliation, entitled Taking Wrongs Seriously, explains the importance of acknowledgment of wrong and apology. Victims and perpetrators have to live together in the aftermath of conflict. If there is no acknowledgment of wrongdoing, victims feel acutely vulnerable to a similar attack in future. Ability to deny wrongdoing is related to impunity, a precursor of more wrongdoing (2006, p. 59). As Govier explains, calls for acknowledgement are: calls for those responsible for committing such wrongs to recognize and admit having done so, and to articulate or represent that admission in a public forum so that it becomes an enduring part of the public history of the state and society. (Ibid., p. 48) Acknowledgement can be contrasted with denial, but denial can take several forms. While denial is sometimes a form of deception or lying, it is often based, rather, on selective attention, that is, ignoring uncomfortable truths (ibid., p. 49). Sometimes the goal of this deception is self-deception— coming up with a story about ourselves that is more comfortable to us. Ignoring our having seriously wronged others is morally culpable, however, because it helps us to deny our obligations to those who have been harmed (ibid., p. 52).

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In the current example, the fact of the United States having dropped the bomb is not in dispute, but its moral wrongness is. The current American position denies that dropping the bomb was wrong. This shows moral callousness to the Japanese people and makes the world a more dangerous place because a superpower that does not repent for having dropped indiscriminate bombs in the past may decide to drop more bombs in the future. While Day did not begin her air raid protests until 1955, she had repented personally and publicly for dropping the atomic bombs soon after they were dropped. In September 1945, she wrote of her horror at President Harry Truman’s jubilation over the killing of hundreds of thousands of Japanese, as reported by the Herald Tribune. Of the dead so thoroughly obliterated she wrote: It is hoped that they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers, scattered, men, women, and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York in our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton. Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant. We have created. We have created destruction. (1992, pp. 266–67) By November 1945, she was writing: we can only suggest one thing–destroy the two billion dollars’ worth of equipment that was built to make the atomic bomb; destroy all the formulas; put on sackcloth and ashes, weep and repent. (Ibid., p. 270) Many Americans surveyed in 1991 were hesitant to apologize for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (at least 135,000 killed) and Nagasaki (at least 50,000 killed) unless the Japanese first apologized for Pearl Harbor (in which 2,402 American servicemen and possibly up to 100 civilians were killed) (Cleary et al., 2003; USSWestVirginia.org, 2000–2013; McCurrey, 2010). Day had a different response to Pearl Harbor. She suggested that we not respond with “vengeance” to the attack. She always tried to put the attack in perspective. She said that there are many Pearl Harbors every day, both abroad and at home. She referred to a recent event where a Black man was shot and dragged behind a car by a mob and set alight while still alive. Yet many Americans expected that suffering Blacks would rise above aggressive feelings and be pacifists. While she herself preferred nonviolent struggles against injustice, she highlighted the double standards of white Americans who would ask others to forego feelings of resentment and revenge while indulging in those feelings themselves. Day toured southern states during 1943 and recounted the racism and poverty she saw there. In one instance, she witnessed a family of twenty-two people living in two rooms. She heard an account of a white man who had killed seven blacks for “insolent” behavior. She wrote, “Are not these sins

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crying to heaven for vengeance? . . . And how can we do anything but howl over these sins in which we share? . . . We share in the guilt of such cruelty and injustice” (Miller, 1973, p.180). Along the same line of thought, The Catholic Worker quoted a conscientious objector who, when asked what should be done about Pearl Harbor stated, “forget Pearl Harbor,” and went on to list a series of reforms that Americans should undergo, including ending discrimination against Asians (ibid., pp. 181–82). In these examples, Day shows keen understanding of human psychology. As Govier explains, all of us are some mixture of victim and perpetrator in the different roles we play in our lives. No person can be reduced to any particular act they commit during their lifetime. And yet there is a tendency for some to insist on their pure victimhood, seeing their opponents as nothing but perpetrators. These categories can be over-simplifying and reductionistic and may encourage polarized thinking. The emphasis on being nothing but a victim could lead to moral arrogance if the victim focuses on the undeserved harm while ignoring the larger context. Clinging to a feeling of injury and grievance may make it hard to reach out in reconciliation. This insight is not intended to encourage callousness toward victims, but rather to rule out an often unrealistic self-perception that can be counter-productive when it comes to reconciliation (2006, pp. 27–30). In the context described above, Day is talking to Americans who see the United States as an innocent victim attacked out of the blue at Pearl Harbor. Nurturing this sense of victimhood, citizens are primed to attack in retaliation. But Day claimed that the victim is also a perpetrator, complicating the narrative by addressing uncomfortable truths about the country. She pointed to the race and class war within the United States. In this war, many Americans are perpetrators as well as victims. This complicates the American self-identity as innocents and do-gooders. Many Americans want blacks to forego vengeance. Foregoing vengeance is a good thing, but not as a double standard, and not as an excuse for tolerating injustice. A consistent ethic would involve addressing race and class injustice at home while seeking peace abroad. What is the role of apology? No doubt apology has different connotations across cultures. While the word “apology” has several meanings, Govier focuses on the serious moral apology. Such an apology does not seek to justify or excuse one’s actions, but instead clearly admits wrongdoing and accepts moral responsibility for having committed the acts. Apology involves expression of sorrow and promises to not repeat the acts and to make amends. Collective apologies are complex in that the collective has to agree upon the substance of the apology, and then have the apology delivered by a spokesperson. Govier emphasizes that the sincerity of such apologies is based on active follow-up of commitments rather than demonstration of emotion (2006, pp. 68–69, 74–75). Sometimes government officials do not acknowledge or apologize, but individuals do, in a way that can still bring satisfaction to victims. Govier re-

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counts the case of two Serb perpetrators of the Srebrenica massacre confessing before the international tribunal at The Hague. While the official Serb leadership did not confess, and while the perpetrators did not apologize, Emir Suljagic nevertheless felt great relief, saying: “We Bosnian Muslims no longer have to prove we were victims” (Suljagic, 2003, quoted in Govier, 2006, p. 56). C. Public Action: Politics in the Parks The second public aspect of Day’s civil defense drill protests was the aspect of insisting on using public space even during a time of heightened military activity. The park bench in Manhattan where Day staged her protests was just a few blocks away from the current Zuccotti Park (formerly Liberty Plaza), which is recently famous for being the temporary home of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy protestors moved into the park in September 2011. The park is privately owned by Brookfield Office Properties, but is open to the public. It was chosen by the Occupy movement’s Tactical Committee, which had engaged in a series of experiments to see whether occupying a park in southern Manhattan near Wall Street would be possible. After being thrown out of Tompkins Square Park at dusk by police, and after finding Chase Manhattan Plaza barricaded, they found Zuccotti Park to be suitable to their needs as a feasible site (Writers for the 99%, 2012, pp. 12–13). While the New York City Police Department agreed that the park was supposed to be open to the public twenty-four hours a day, they eventually cited concerns for sanitation and worries that the park’s stated recreational purpose was made impossible by the presence of Occupy protestors. The city finally ousted the protestors from the park on 15 November 2011. Protestors have since attempted to re-occupy the park on several occasions, insisting that they have a right to free speech and assembly and that they should not be ejected from the park, which is their civic space. Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a statement that read: “The First Amendment protects speech—it does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space” (Wells and Walker, 2011). Occupy movements have sprung up in other cities across the United States. These are contemporary examples of what Day’s Catholic Worker communities did. People live together in poverty and simplicity, in order to pool their energies to get out a message, criticize the government, and raise issues regarding the environment, homelessness, evictions, racism, war, and other injustices. These protesters have been holding general assemblies where all are heard with respect. In addition to taking over public parks, they have moved into abandoned buildings and invited others to join them there. Occupy Detroit, which began in a city park in October of 2011, was tolerated by Detroit police, who gave them a permit to camp overnight. But the permit expired just before Thanksgiving; occupiers agreed to clear the park just before crowds showed up for the Thanksgiving Parade—in part because

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cold weather was making continued camping difficult. Activists continued to live in community at a donated building at 5900 Michigan Avenue and several houses that are part of the Goldengate Restoration Project, where they rehabilitated abandoned buildings creatively, using recycled materials, such as creating “stained glass effect,” making windows out of cob clay and recycled bottles (Shelley, 2011). As of February 2013, only a small handful of Occupy protestors continue to live in community with the homeless at Goldengate, but their movement is active in protests to prevent foreclosures in the Detroit area. Food at their events is supplied by the IWW “Wobblies” Kitchen, which, according to their website, “[has] been ensuring Occupy Detroit participants are the best fed activists in Detroit” (http://www.occupy-detroit.us). Thus, the connection to IWW values of free speech continues today. Since the time of Day’s protests, the rights of people to access public parks to make political statements have been narrowed by court decisions. Many protestors feel that their rights to free speech are curtailed and denied. Margaret Kohn gives an overview of such legal changes and challenges, noting how much these privately owned, seemingly public spaces (like Zuccotti Park) are changing the landscape in contemporary America. Understandably, many protests want to locate themselves downtown where they will be noticed. But government officials have constructed “free speech zones,” often at a distance from where protestors would prefer to be, and have set up “speech free zones” where shoppers and workers, but not protestors, are allowed. While, in 1957, the US Supreme Court ruled that free speech on campuses contributes to democratic governance, individual campuses have set up “free speech zones” in obscure areas so as not to impede “foot traffic” (Kohn, 2004, pp. 38–41). The 1990 Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Kokinda ruled that since a sidewalk in front of a post office was not a “traditional public forum,” protestors did not have the right to gather there. Likewise, in Lee v. Krishna Consciousness in 1992, courts ruled that airports are not public spaces. Even if governments own airports, the government acts as a proprietor on the premises of an airport, not a lawmaker, and so free speech is not protected there. These cases lead Kohn to ask, in our world today where lifestyles are such that people drive their cars from suburban homes into parking garages, when do Americans ever visit the “traditional public forum” to have their views challenged by new perspectives? An even more recent 2000 Supreme Court case, Hill v. Colorado, upheld a state statute protecting the public from unwanted communication, saying that leaf distributers could not come within eight feet of the public to pass out their leaflets without prior consent—in effect banning leafleting even in public, according to Kohn (2004, pp. 42, 48–52). Gone are the days, it seems, of the pamphleteering Peter Maurin, or Catholic Workers, as Miller describes, “who would thrust the Worker pell-mell into whatever hand would receive it”

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(1973, p. 72). However, the persistence of Occupy movement protestors engaging in acts of civil disobedience is arguably a continuation of practices begun by Day, who sat in City Hall Park when the law and current war ideology said she should be in a bunker. D. Challenging the Catholic Church to Condemn Nuclear Weapons Day not only criticized her government’s use of and support of nuclear weapons as a viable war strategy, she also criticized her Church’s seeming tolerance of a government’s choice to stockpile and threaten to use such weapons. She took an Italian ship to attend Vatican II. While on board, she had a chance to influence thirty-five bishops. After arrival, led by Gandhian Lanza del Vasto (a.k.a. “Shantidas”), Day and eighteen others fasted for ten days. The Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope, often translated into English as The Church in the Modern World) said: Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal condemnation. (Paul VI, § 80) The group wanted nuclear weapons condemned and conscientious objection for Catholics upheld. To a large extent, they got their wishes. Egan reports that Day’s spirits were buoyed by the Vatican’s condemnation of nuclear weapons (1999, pp. 291–294). Commenting in 1965, Day said: It seems to me that those of the hierarchy who opposed . . . this condemnation of nuclear war were leaving out of account Divine Providence, when they thought that without these weapons of destruction we could not face up to the threat of Communism’s taking over the world. 5. Day’s Critique of the Church’s Anti-Communism While Day chose to leave socialistic movements for change, she had much respect for their dedication to just causes and felt that their movements and hers shared much common ground. As a peacemaker, she wanted to build bridges rather than denounce other movements. She rejected staying in a slot in which other members of the Catholic Church would have liked her movement to stay—the alternative to communism that could be considered anti-communism (Miller, 1973, pp. 72–74). Papal encyclicals abounded with criticisms of both capitalism and communism, but in the polarized Cold War United States, immigrant Catholic communities tended to focus only upon the evils of communism. In the spirit of reconciling with one’s political enemies, Day traveled to Cuba as a journalist in 1962, during a time when the Cubans and their form of

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government and economy were considered to be enemies of the United States. Many Catholics who fled Cuba to settle in Florida were big critics of the new Fidel Castro regime. Most Cuban Catholics thought they had a moral duty to try to emigrate and Day’s trip to Cuba was not popular among Catholics generally. While there, she tried to encourage Catholics and Marxists to find a common ground and work together, rather than highlighting their differences. Instead of gathering in homes to discuss their opposition to the revolution, she advocated that Catholics gather to study scripture, theology and social justice. She brought them a copy of Emmanuel Mounier’s Be Not Afraid (1954). Mounier was a personalist philosopher from France who had heavily influenced Peter Maurin. In his book, Mounier argued, “Modern Christianity is dangerously allied to capitalist and bourgeois Liberalism” (1954, p. 170). Mounier believed that getting caught up in scrupulous concern for individual morality was a shortcoming of contemporary Catholic piety. Instead, he emphasized the need for Catholics to be activists, and he re-coined a popular phrase: “The moral revolution will be economic or there will be no revolution. The economic revolution will be moral or nothing” (ibid., p. 115). With such a philosophy, one would think that Catholics in Communist Cuba were well-placed for an experiment in moral revolution. In her writing, Day shared some of the quandaries that she found among Catholics in Cuba. They were unsure whether they should send their children to school if they would learn about Marxism-Leninism there. Day told such families to have faith in God and not to worry that their religious framework could collapse so easily by exposure to an alternative. She also asked them to “find concordances as our own Holy Father has urged, rather than to seek out heresies, to work as far as one could with the revolution” (1962). She followed with a concrete example of where Catholics and Marxist-Leninists could find common ground, which was also an issue on which they could distinguish themselves. She suggested that Catholics could sing all verses of “The Internationale” except the verse that says there is no God or savior. During that verse, they should sit down in protest, but arise and sing along with others all the other verses: There is the singing of the Internationale, for instance, most of the verses of which can be joined in with enthusiasm. “Arise, poor of the world/ On your feet slaves without bread/ and let us shout all together/ All united, Long live the Internationale. 2. Let us remove all shackles/ that tie humanity /let us change the face of the earth. . . . This is a rough translation which a Catholic mother gave me, who said wistfully, “We could well sing the other verses. We ourselves have been ashamed of our position in the face of poverty and ignorance, of not having done more about it.” (Ibid.)

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Day’s outreach to the Cubans in her effort to repair the damage of the Cold War and the tension between her nation and the USSR within the tenets of her Catholic religion is a clear case of attempting to build webs of relationships, where people can speak and be heard, and come to mutual understanding. She did not naively think that it would be easy to make common cause with the communists, but she thought that Catholics had better live out their faith in that way that gives witness to its truth. When authorities in Cuba told her that they believed that the imperialistic, militaristic, and capitalistic US government would not let her share her experiences of Cuba with other groups, she insisted that she would be able to do so. Indeed, she did do so during a long series of speaking engagements at parishes. But she also believed that the oppositional speech of the Cubans who worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in labeling the American government as “imperialistic” was not helpful. She reflected on the need to choose one’s words carefully, “that I will evoke in others what is really there to be evoked--a desire to do what is right, to follow conscience, to love one’s brother and find what there is of God in every man” (1962). 6. Conclusion Dorothy Day reflected on her close calls with death. She had travelled south to Americus, Georgia to be in solidarity with folks at Koinonia Farm. The farm was a racially integrated community and had come under criticism and attack by its neighbors for its practice of racial harmony. Day had volunteered to serve on a night watch to deter vandalism of the property. A car driving by in the middle of the night fired shots at her and another community member, narrowly missing them. About that event she wrote, “It is strange how the fear always comes afterward” (1968). She also spoke of the bravery needed to go into town where shop owners would call them names and ostracize them. How is this and similar fear overcome? Day explains: When you’re with a group, when there’s a whole night of singing, in the churches, on the streets, in the prisons, the very act of singing produces a tremendous courage and all fear evaporates. You can walk on the picket line and though you are conscious of the terrible hostility around you and there is a wrecked building across the way and a whole vacant lot is filled with bricks, handy for a battle, you have this sense of courage. Why? Because you have prayed for it; and because you are with others. (1968) Day is someone who, recognizing tensions in the community or lines of hostility drawn, whether they were lines of racial hostility or communist versus anti-communist or the well-to-do versus the have-nots, wanted to cross the chasm between the sides and weave together these human relationships in

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a way that would support peace and healing, not war and division. She brought people together to listen to each other (in her kitchen, or in a church, or in the park), discuss plans and perspectives, and act together to change our world for the better. When Day died on 29 November 1980, not a single Catholic bishop attended her Requiem Mass. But the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude toward her has changed over time. The Claretian Missionaries began promoting the cause for Day’s canonization in 1983, and she was awarded a Courage of Conscience Award by the Peace Abbey in 1992. In 2000, John Joseph Cardinal O’Conner of New York took the first official steps toward her canonization, and she is thus called “Servant of God, on her way to Beatification which would be the next step in the process” (Anderson, 1997, p. 10). In November 2012, upon the recommendation of Timothy M. Cardinal Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted unanimously to move forward with the canonization process (Sharon Otterman, “In Hero of the Catholic Left, a Conservative Cardinal Sees a Saint,” New York Times, 26 November 2012). We need not believe that Day is a saint or have her canonized as a saint in order for us to take her life’s message seriously. Nevertheless, that the Catholic Church is taking the sainthood process seriously is a good sign. Having her being counted among those that the Church recognizes as saints would reinforce the idea that we should model our lives after Day’s insight and courage, and find our voices as she found hers.

Three PEACE VOICE: GETTING PROFESSIONALS TO GO PUBLIC Tom H. Hastings 1. Public Peace Intellectuals’ Role in Public Discourse Public peace intellectuals are peace and justice educators, peace academics, or a peace professionals who express themselves publicly in favor of positive peace. By positive peace, for the purposes of this study, I synthesized several definitions of the term: A public peace intellectual illuminates and advocates peace, justice, and environmental protection by peaceable means. Thus, a public peace intellectual (or scholar) would publicly promote peace, justice, or environmental protection by peaceable means, that is, nonviolent conflict management. By “publicly” I mean beyond the classroom and beyond the academic written world, into public commentary, op-ed writing, public speaking, talk radio, television, or leadership or consultant roles to grassroots civil society organizations or movements. 2. Why Care? I assume that, when public peace intellectuals are involved, it is more possible to avoid or shorten wars, prompt and enable public policy change toward justice, and activate an electorate or civil society movement to protect the environment. I argue that a number of obstacles to peace scholars engaging in public peace scholarship exist, and that some policy fixes—personal as well as institutional—could help peace intellectuals develop into public peace intellectuals. The inclusion of the voices of a significant number of public peace intellectuals in our public conversations might change the outcomes of public debates and indeed change history, especially because wars are often based on various sorts of lies (Gan, 2005; Everett, 2008). Peace educators understand that. The participation of peace and justice scholars in mainstream media, in public speaking, and in the leadership of large public organizations, can help win civil rights and protect human rights, save the environment, and prevent, stop, or shorten wars. Is this easy? Is it risk-free? What are the barriers to peace and justice academics in particular? I asked these questions when I felt the absence of peace academics in the national discourse during the October 2002–March 2003 ramp-up to the invasion of Iraq—even as the intellectuals from the neocon ranks were pummeling that conversation in the United States. Indeed,

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while United States’ mainstream media did source non-elites who had opinions against the war in Iraq, they generally waited until the war was going badly to do so, years after the invasion and start of war (Klein, Byerly, and McEachern, 2009). Outside the United States, those neocons had almost no cache from the beginning, and the narrative was clearly overwhelming. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and Saddam is an enemy of Osama bin Laden and no Iraqi participated in the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. In short, it felt to me as though our national discourse had been entirely hijacked and the peace perspective had been kept out. War was the result. 3. What to Do? My response to this problem has been twofold. One, to found a program (PeaceVoice) under the auspices of a peace think tank (the Oregon Peace Institute) expressly for the purpose of getting the voices of peace professionals into the public discourse. Two, to conduct research to determine possible solutions to aspects of this problem. 4. PeaceVoice As someone with a graduate degree in journalism, as an opinion writer, and editor for the previous twenty-two years at that time, I decided to create an op-ed distribution service for public peace scholars, and did so in 2005. PeaceVoice is a permanent program of the Oregon Peace Institute, providing free services to both writers and editors, supported by small grants from an Oregon family foundation. Beginning in 2013, PeaceVoice is now also producing short teaching videos featuring public peace intellectuals and will offer them freely on a PeaceVoice TV, a YouTube channel. This targets the online teaching system and the public at large in an attempt to help educators provide lively and high quality content on a variety of peace-related topics by embedding the video links into their teaching materials for online students. 5. Researching the Impediments Subsequently, I performed some qualitative research using grounded theory methodology focusing on this inquiry into the problems faced by peace professionals as they contemplate becoming public peace and justice scholars. The results surprised me in some ways, affirmed my thinking in others, and can be summarized in this statement of findings: To begin the transformation of a war system to a peace system, it will be helpful to remove impediments and barriers so that peace and justice educators, academics, researchers, and professionals can more readily participate in mainstream media and other public fora, which will allow them to help inform and shape public discourse.

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These impediments can be addressed by academic and media institutions, NGOs, and by individual scholars. Valuing public peace scholarship means promoting it and supporting it, as well as attempting it. What are some of these barriers, according to my participants? First, an explanation of the research methodology: (1) Invitation to participate sent to more than 500 peace and conflict studies professors belonging to the Peace and Justice Studies Association. Seven responses committed to participation in the entire process (multiple confidential interviews). (2) Individual invitations to additional academics. Five more participants committed to participation for a total of twelve respondents. (3) Conducted interviews, transcribed, coded transcripts, asked followup questions, and analyzed data to determine emergent themes and develop grounded theory based on this inductive process. Why grounded theory? Grounded theory was developed to meld the storytelling of historiography with a systemic analysis grounded in those observations and in existing empirically derived theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). It is an approach that works in many disciplines, including some medical research (Omondi, Walingo, Mbagaya, and Othuon, 2012), some Security Studies research (Gagnon, 2011), and in educational research (Grasmick, Davies, and Harbour, 2012). This approach suits the objectives of this study, with its emphasis on a succession and then synthesis of stories of the dozen participants—all academics with experiences and points of view themselves derived from a lifetime of critical thinking.

Figure 1. Literature Review

Rather than construct a hypothesis from intuition and personal experience—since these direct questions have scant history of academic research in

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the literature—it seemed prudent to begin to elicit this information from a diverse set of peace educators. Kate Gerrish notes that the review of germane literature tends to assist in pointing toward a particular research methodology (2011). In this research, the related bodies of literature never synthesized, and so they did not provide a directly applicable theory to test. Indeed, entirely new and unanticipated categories of problem identification and potential solution policy suggestions did emerge from using this methodology. The literature I reviewed includes that of the field of Peace and Conflict Studies, Peace Journalism, Civic Engagement, Public Intellectualism, Media Studies, Peace Education (see Figure 1). 6. Journalism: War or Peace? The fundamental values of mainstream traditional news include a military paradigm focused on counting losses (deaths, material losses, etc.) and using the language of battles. It focuses on advancements and capitulations, and is rooted in an “us-versus-them” system. Peace journalism reports conflict, but it focuses on the transformational nature of it and insists on going beyond reporting the conflict itself to include the idea that opportunities exist, as well. - Judy Buller (2011, p. 252) Mainstream media can be a driver to war or peace, and there is no more vital consideration to those who wish to promote one or the other (Herman and Chomsky, 1988; Cortright, 2006; Lynch, 2008). Peace journalism seeks to promote peaceful outcomes to conflict; war journalism promotes violent conflict in several identifiable ways. Peace journalists source parties and experts who promote peaceful outcomes by actively peaceable means. War journalists source politicians, military, and intellectuals who falsely dichotomize conflict management as violence or inaction. Other distinctions are explained below. Without peace journalism, is peace likely? In many cases, not. I picture this in a way illustrated by Figure 2. The interviews with the twelve participants were instructive. Using the grounded theory methodology meant using an iterative, inductive approach, reading the transcripts as they came in, and evolving toward smarter questioning with subsequent interviews rather than unbendingly sticking to a script. The participants taught me a valuable lesson early: keep the script, twenty questions approved by Human Subjects Review, but begin with two other questions before reverting to the script: (1) What is your definition of a public peace intellectual? (2) How does your life and experience relate to my research question?

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Conflict

Peace journalism (gatekeep sources War journalism (gatekeep sources to to include public peace and justice include military and hawkish academics intellectuals and peace professionals) or public officials)

Peace (is blocked)

War (is logical outcome)

Figure 2. Conflict, journalism, and outcomes.

With most participants, I had few remaining questions from the script, since the first question centered them and the second one opened up their rich personal stories to the connections and points of contact from the first. I coded all transcripts, which was another iterative process involving several more reads of the transcripts. The transcripts were coded according to these six recurring themes: public peace and justice intellectualism, pedagogical implications, professional constraints, policy/movement building, journalism skills, and potential solutions. Each of these themes—five of which went to describing, analyzing, and giving personal experiences in dealing with perceived impediments to public peace and justice intellectualism and one of which focused on potential solutions—emerged as serious for many of the participants. There seemed to be near consensus on some general matters—for example, tenure and promotion considerations were generally problematic at best and nearly a complete deterrent in some cases. There were other themes that generated contrasting views—for example, the approaches to public intellectualism that seem valid and appropriate in the context of both the academy and public education. Some participants, particularly the young ones, were enthusiastic (names have been changed to protect anonymity): “I’d like to write a book, and I’d like to write and publish every day if I could, very much, sign me up.” (laughs) - Sandy, a young peace and justice scholar talking about her desire to get peace points of view into the public conversation. I’ve always been a fan of the Enlightenment, with its notion that knowledge and reason can banish ignorance and superstition, thus lighting the way to a better world. Therefore, I felt it was important to not only reach scholars, but the general public. And I could best do this, I

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TOM H. HASTINGS believed, by teaching (especially at a large public university, attracting a cross-section of the society) and by writing books and articles that the public could and would read. Given the continued existence of ignorance and superstition, even as education has become widespread, this Enlightenment belief might be naïve. But I’m not sure there is any better avenue toward social progress. Also, of course, modern war is so counter-productive and irrational that it’s hard to just sit back and let it destroy the world. - Will, a public peace scholar. What I’m doing is something different, and therefore I think that the role of the public intellectual would be along this line, where the idea or ideas aren’t owned, in fact you actually want them to be widely held, and so I don’t, once to me the ideas are out there, they’re out there, they’re fair game now, and actually to me, I would want to see that those ideas influencing and changing the public discourse. - Ariel, Director of an institute I’ve set up my whole life, you know, to do that. I studied human rights, and I did conflict resolution, and I work for a nonviolent consortium, I write for them, so I feel like, and I teach in the field, and I write, so I, my life is kind of, I’ve already made those choices I think a long time ago, but what I would like to do is set it up somehow so that I can work part-time in the movement. I’m concerned about getting too, I don’t want moss growing on me at the university, and I look at somebody like George Lakey, who has had a foot in both worlds, he teaches at Swarthmore, he’s an accomplished scholar, but that didn’t stop him from keeping his feet on the ground and doing the work, and so something like that, I mean I look to that and I’m thinking in the future I want to figure out how to do that, and that, I don’t know is it easier or harder, I don’t know. - Larry, young peace scholar.

Some respondents might be called curmudgeons. A recurring worry was validity or credibility, something best expressed by Luther, a researcher and an activist quite frustrated by what he regards as lack of passion and courage of the average citizen, and who is not interested in more public peace scholarship, but who acknowledges that at least intellectuals from the past (he specifically referred to the Vietnam War and the public scholars who spoke up then for peace) had more of a chance to say something publicly and be heard than have activists: I think those people had an effect, because they were saying things that had not been said by public figures like themselves before – that the war was wrong and we should get out of it. Plenty of lesser known people had said the same things, but were dismissed as outside agitators. The public took Margaret Mead more seriously than they did Dave Dellinger, for example. - Luther

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For others, lending one’s professional name and stature to direct nonviolent civil society activism is at least at times required or expected. Paul reflected on his activism in the complex context of teaching in a conservative Midwestern community during the height of the Vietnam War—after teaching in a more liberal Midwestern town—and eventually being shut out of tenure consideration but never knowing the precise reason until years later: We had the first demonstration that they ever had on the Purdue university campus, they had a silent vigil for all of those people who had died in Vietnam, and the ROTC was assigned to take pictures of us, so we were in the paper, I was also the faculty sponsor of an SDS group, which was not like the groups that I knew in Ann Arbor, the Tom Haydens and Todd Gitlins and people like that, it was a little bit of a rag tag organization, and they invited an anarchist to speak at the Purdue campus and this anarchist promised that he would not bring a flag, but he did not promise he wouldn’t destroy it, so he ripped up the flag, spit on it, and . . . I thought well maybe that was what was upsetting, and then we…did a study of the power structure in Lafayette Indiana, we did it very professionally, and we didn’t name any people in it, but we did a test of whether it was an elitist or pluralistic power structure. I was asked to debate about Vietnam, and you know I was really pretty young and brass, and I was debating the head of the political science department who warned me not to talk about peace in fuzzy things and made me swear that I wasn’t a communist and then wanted me to talk about Vietnam rather than about peace, but he didn’t have anything to say about Vietnam, so I did then give a talk about Vietnam, and when it ended, I read what I told the audience and him was the Vietcong plans for taking over the South Vietnamese hamlets, and I asked him if that was so bad that America should be losing blood over that, and he said it was absolute tyranny, that we should definitely lose blood over it, and then I told him that what I had read was the US pacification program. - Paul Despite all this public peace and justice intellectual activity, as well as community organizing and direct action, it turned out that Paul was moved out of tenure consideration because he had a letter calling for peace published in The New York Times. He only learned of this many years later. His eventual relocation to a far more accepting university in a culturally tolerant, politically liberal city was his final career shift and he is now an emeritus faculty still engaged as a public peace and justice scholar. It was this data and analysis that sent me back to adjust and expand my literature review to include some examination of tenure issues and academic freedom. Not only were two of the participants in this study victims of such persecution, according to them, but there are historical examples of such claims from the literature, just a few of which are illustrative and here cited:

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TOM H. HASTINGS In 1965, Staughton Lynd, historian at Yale, traveled to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War with a declaration of a people-to-people peace and was denied tenure and blacklisted (Mirra, 2010). For his nonviolent leftist and antiwar teaching, writing and activism, historian Lawrence Wittner was ousted from Vassar College in 1974 (Wittner, 2012). Derrick Bell (1930–2011), the first African American to gain tenure at Harvard, was stripped of his law faculty tenure as a result of his 1990 public stance that Harvard’s law faculty must become more diverse (Schudel, 2011). In 2001, two years after his active role in helping New York University’s Graduate Assistants unionize, Joel Westheimer was denied tenure, despite unanimous recommendation from his department and seven outside faculty, a case that later resulted in federal charges against the university (Westheimer, 2002). In 2007, after his public scholarship criticizing Israel’s human rights violations in occupied Palestine, political scientist Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure by DePaul University (Abraham, 2011).

Authorities removing faculty rarely admit that the reasons for not continuing employment have to do with antiwar positions that could be defended by appeal to freedom of speech. Others, including this author, have survived attempts to remove them from academic institutions for public peace and justice scholarship. These cases of near dismissal are largely undocumented in the literature and are largely anecdotal. Nevertheless, it is possible that the numbers who have survived these unsuccessful attempts are significant. The impacts and effects of these incidents are interesting but unknown and suggest some relevant potential research. Clearly, then, the notion of what defines civic engagement in promotion and tenure formulae is an important one according to participants in this study, and which is discussed to some measure in the literature (Williams, 2002; Williams, Nishishiba, and Morgan, 2002; Hassner, 2003; Zlotkowski and Williams, 2003; Zarefsky, 2011; Grasmick, Davies and Harbour, 2012). Some move beyond a call for tolerance of public scholarship (Roman, 2009) toward a duty to it, noting the paucity of actual readership of peer-reviewed books and journals and the dire need for this information in the public discourse (Wittner, 2011). There is also a strand in the literature examining the challenger stances of public scholarship focusing on race and feminism (Nussbaum, 2003; Schudel, 2011; Seward, 2011). Over time, I have observed that peace groups in the United States tend to be composed of whites, and justice groups are more often composed of a diversity of citizens, and often led by people of color. This generalization has many important exceptions, of course, but it was again borne out by the pub-

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lic scholarship activities of the participants in this study. For example, the one scholar who self-identified as Caribbean African American reported that her ongoing public peace and justice intellectual activity associated primarily with a justice organization, specifically a group that assists unions. She also gave speeches calling for peace within that context, but her work was intentionally situated in workers’ rights, and her process toward that activity involved her entire history as a woman from the Global South. Part of my having relocated to the United States made me question what my contribution was, because while I was in the Caribbean I was pretty much clear that I needed to make it different and improve, the question was if I am in the United States, then what does that contribution look like, what would it be, and who would then be the people I identify as my community or where I want to make the contribution, so over time you know, it didn’t take a lot of time, I think not so much when I was a graduate student, because as a graduate student you have opportunities to join graduate student unions, you know the whole environment is for you to be critical, but being a working person on the outside, I migrated toward contributions that had to do with union organizing, and how workers were faring, and how women in the global economy were faring, and so with time I ended up becoming a board member of the Workers’ Rights board, which is a job projects of Jobs With Justice, a national organization that attempts to negotiate between employers and employees using a lot of moral and ethical approaches about what’s the right thing to do, it’s in a sense to shame employers to do the right thing, so I became one of the board members, and it’s a wide crew of people, you know community people, I happen to be one, I also got involved with the group, a national organization called jubilee USA, about cancelling Third World Debt. - Caribbean African American respondent There is a substantial track record of sociologists, anthropologists, and academics from other disciplines calling for their colleagues’ participation as public intellectuals (Goodson, 1999; Halwani, 2002; Stanley, 2002; Nussbaum, 2003; Gitlin, 2006; Sabloff, 2011; Smith, 2011; Parsi, 2012). There are also naysayers, such as Richard Posner (2003), who argue against public scholarship (often attempting to portray themselves as scholars to the public as they do so, ironically), and others who simply argue that public intellectualism is waning (Jacoby, 1987; McClay, 2002; Rodden, 2007). It is also crucial to differentiate between scholars who engage in public intellectual support for the elite ruling class, those who engage in public scholarship in simple service, and those who take to the field as oppositional challengers to owner and ruling elites (McClaughlin and Townsley, 2011). As I studied these phenomena and conducted this study, my directorship of PeaceVoice continued and I learned to value what one of my students said in my War, Peace and Media class, in response to several students who were

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essentially saying there is no hope for mainstream media, and that the only small glimmers of hope come from alternative media and electronic organizing: “If you don’t like the way you are manipulated by mainstream media, learn to manipulate mainstream media.” That brilliant reversal of hopelessness became my challenge and, to the extent that I have had time and resources to devote to it, I see the realism of that strategy—while continuing to use peace and justice alternative media, email, and social media, of course. Looking at the potentials for reaching the most citizens and voters, it is important to consider both market size—clearly favoring mainstream media—and accessibility, which just as clearly favors alternatives (see Table 1). Media type

Examples

Peace professional access

Size of consuming public of e.g.

Mainstream newspapers

Wall Street Journal/Ajo Copper News

moderate

2 million/2,100

Alternative newspapers

The PeaceWorker

high

20,000

Mainstream magazines

Time/The New Yorker

low

3.3 million/1 million

Alternative magazines

Sojourners/Yes!

high

35,000/55,000

Mainstream radio

NPR

low

26.4 million

Alternative radio

KBOO

high

6,800 members

Network television

Today Show

low

7.6 million

Community access cable television Internet

Portland Public Media

high

small

Blogs/YouTube/social media

high

variable: small to large

Table 1: Media Typology: Select media, availability or access for peace professionals, and the general size of the consuming public for each type of media (New York Job Source, 2011).

Another conceptual prompt to the formulation of the PeaceVoice experiment was taken from the excerpt about media from the Steve York documentary (2001) Bringing Down a Dictator, which showed the story of grassroots non-

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violent activism toppling Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. United States’ political campaign consultants advised the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, the political coalition putting forth Vojislav Koštunica for president, to campaign in every village in the country, which they did, and got a great deal of local press, radio and television that offset their exclusion from state media. That model, with monolithic and major market corporate media substituted for state media in Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia, was compelling to me and has proven workable with PeaceVoice. Every commentary I distribute is printed or published Online in multiple small market mainstream outlets in the United States; occasionally migrating to alternative aggregate “progressive” sites (Truthout, Counterpunch), to foreign markets or to larger midsized United States’ markets (for example, Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin), and rarely even to the mass market publication USA Today. Students have helped me by “crawling” the Internet to seek and compile e-mail addresses for editors. The PeaceVoice editor e-mail database currently exceeds 3,500. This means that, in practice, a busy professor can write, fire, and forget (pardon my peace permutation of the “smart” weapon language). They do not have to worry about the standard frustration of preparing a timely piece of analysis, submitting it to one newspaper, and then waiting for the editorial decision while the piece becomes less newsworthy every day. I do edit (and decline if necessary), which may make some writers unhappy, but these are the considerations upon which I base my editing: (1) Every PeaceVoice piece is promoting positive peace: peace and justice by peaceable means; (2) No PeaceVoice piece has ad hominem attack; (3) Each PeaceVoice piece is fact checked; (4) Each PeaceVoice piece is accessible to mainstream readers. Having done media campaigns for decades in markets that would be considered hostile to positive peace analysis, I have a sense of what is alienating to constituencies that would be considered somewhat conservative or even rightwing, and I avoid that alienation if at all possible. Academics usually miss one or more of these elements, often the accessibility factor, in my experience. I have done several workshops for peace educators, offering basic training in op-ed writing, and in each of them, I ask if anyone has had any peace commentary printed or published online during the October 2002–March 2003 period, when we all knew that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, that he had outlawed al-Qa’ida, or that Osama bin Laden had issued what amounted to his death fatwa on Saddam Hussein. Anecdotally, I can report that we peace educators were rarely public intellectuals in this crucial period, just when we could have been the most in-

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fluential. For many American peace scholars, one public peace op-ed can end a position, result in denied tenure, or even prompt a blacklisting. Of all the issues that respondents identified, the distribution barrier is the primary one addressed by PeaceVoice, along with a minor side activity of providing editing and training/advice to academics as they contemplate translating peace research into understandable succinct analysis for average readers and voters. What more can we do with this nonprofit service? We will soon launch a YouTube PeaceVoiceTV channel featuring short videos with public peace intellectuals. We will continue our op-ed distribution service and hope with all this to make public peace and justice scholarship more achievable by peace professionals and available to citizens. What policy fixes do we need? I condense them into a chart prepared from the research (see Table 2). Problem Lack of journalism writing skills Lack of op-ed distribution Fear of career impact

Time constraints Disciplinary rigidity Academic bias against “popular” writing Opposition to public policy dissent

Solution Trainings Academic institution or civil society organization 1. Academic freedom 2. Promotion and tenure credit for public peace and justice scholarship Academic institutional support Greater understanding of need for interdisciplinary scholarship Approval of demonstrated civic engagement by academic translating research into accessible public information Democracy education stressing role of public challenger intellectuals

Table 2. Public Peace and Justice Intellectual Problems and Possible Solutions, showing a matrix of many of the elements of the emergent grounded theory. Barriers or impediments to public peace and justice scholarship are participantidentified. Solutions are both participant-and researcher-identified.

My hope and intention is to help peace professionals begin to fill the public conversations with the facts and perspectives we already know how to transmit to students. What if we only stop one war every few decades? I think, I hope, we can agree that this would be eminently worth it.

Part Two CURRENT EVENTS AND PEACE THEORY

Four ANTI-IMMIGRATION INITIATIVES AND WEIL’S THEORY OF AFFLICTION Anna J. Brown 1. Introduction Before delving into my main thesis, which concerns United States’ immigration policy, let me make a brief note about my terminology and reasoning behind my choice of terms. In this chapter, the word “undocumented” will be used to describe those immigrants who have crossed the United States’ borders without proper documentation or without going through the process of applying for citizenship. I use the word “undocumented” rather than the term “illegal,” because, unlike our major print, digital, and media news sources, I do not believe that the term “illegal” is either appropriate or neutral. To my mind, the term “illegal” is dehumanizing, reduces the full human being to a particular act, and takes the act of crossing without documentation out of context; for example, could it be possible that a person’s crossing is a matter of survival? When we use the term “illegal” it seems that the story of that particular human being and the story of global political and economic structures that have oppressed and impoverished so many are left untold. French philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil, in her essay, “The Love of God and Affliction,” states straight out, “affliction is ridiculous.” Affliction is ridiculous because it is happenstance; it affects those who have done nothing other than to simply exist but who are crushed under the weight of oppressive social, economic, and political structures. In Weil’s lexicon, “affliction” means a synthetic composition, tri-part in nature, consisting of physical pain, psychological suffering, and social humiliation. Unlike suffering, which can sometimes be a good, the experience of affliction is one of annihilation; it tends to quash its victims. Its force is such that it has the ability to render the paradox of the “living dead.” Affliction “deprives its victims of their personality and makes them into things” (1973, p. 125). In a recent spate of writings on the matter of US immigration policy, Weil’s political thought and her analysis of affliction are utilized to frame and think about the question of immigration. For example, ethicist David E. DeCosse, in his essay, “Immigration: Should the Rules Change?,” cites Weil when he writes “we must come to see the immigrant or refugee ‘as a man or woman, exactly like us, who was one day stamped by a special mark of affliction’” (2005). The work of seeing the afflicted as fully human is both a necessity and a near impossibility for Weil. While it is necessary that we recognize

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the humanity of each person, Weil finds that it is nearly impossible to recognize the humanity in those who are afflicted. Most often, she says, those who are not afflicted “pass quite close to [the afflicted] without realizing it. What man is capable of discerning such souls unless Christ himself looks through his eyes? We only notice that they have a rather strange way of behaving and we censure this behavior” (ibid.). I find Weil’s call to do the “impossible work,” meaning to see those who are afflicted to be like us, quite compelling because for Weil, “the sense of human misery is a precondition of justice and love” (1973, p. 34). I find this particularly so when it comes to undocumented persons, a community of people for whom public humiliation and censure as well as the infliction of state and individual violence are a common occurrence. At the same time, I am equally compelled by the many examples of those undocumented persons and communities who themselves have done the impossible work, which is to say they have risen from the dead. In so doing, they have begun the work of reclaiming their own lives and of reconstructing public space in a way that is humane and life affirming. This chapter will first flesh out Weil’s understanding of affliction and then elucidate how we might better understand the plight of the undocumented by use of Weil’s paradigm of affliction. The point of intersection between Weil’s thought and the experience of the undocumented immigrant is the common ground of a crucifying affliction. This initial work will require a brief detour into what is perhaps Weil’s seminal work, The Need for Roots (1952b), where she explains why the plague of “uprootedness” is a salient feature of modern life. The second part of the chapter begins and ends with the work of two poets, Adrienne Rich and Daniel Berrigan, both of whom wrote of and walked among our society’s most oppressed peoples. I use the work of these poets also because, in the words of the classicist and philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, the language of the poet is “concrete, and it [is] human, and it [is] suffused with feeling” (1988); it keeps us intimate and close to others and does not allow us to lose touch with them. In between the words of these poets, I will write of the manifestations of political, social, and economic hostility towards immigrants, particularly the undocumented. Finally, I write of manifestations of hope—the reclaiming of lives and public space —that are exemplified by the undocumented through their acts of resistance and those in solidarity with them. 2. Weil’s Understanding of Affliction Given my preliminary sketch of the Weilian understanding of affliction understood as an annihilating force that renders the living “dead,” it may seem surprising that Weil also considers affliction to be a “special mark stamped

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upon certain human beings.” For Weil, affliction allows us to read the social world rightly: Fortunate are those in whom the affliction that enters their flesh is the same one that afflicts the world itself in their time. They have the opportunity and function of knowing the truth of the world’s affliction and contemplating its reality. And that is the redemptive function itself. (Weil, 1965, pp. 137–138) “Reading” and “to read the world rightly” have a specific meaning in Weilian lexicon. Weil believes that there is a special kind of vision necessary to bear witness to those who are afflicted, which she calls reading. Much like physical labor, reading is a tool that enables us to make contact with reality and that frees us from the tyranny of the imagination. More importantly, it illuminates the nature of relatedness between the afflicted and the nonafflicted, which, for Weil, is another way of saying the relatedness between ourselves and necessity, one another, and God. Instead of inflicting violence and humiliation upon the undocumented or merely “passing by them,” those who do not find themselves in such circumstances would do well to pay heed to the undocumented, for they are the world’s truth tellers. For example, as we see in the recent documentary film, Harvest of Empire: The Untold Story of Latinos in America, the Latino migrant should compel us to look at “the role that US economic and military interests played in triggering an unprecedented wave of migration that is transforming our nation’s cultural and economic landscape” (Goodman, 2013). And yet, as Weil so often writes when she dwells upon affliction, the ability to pay heed to the afflicted tends to be the preserve of the very few. Writing of this in “The Love of God and Affliction,” she notes: “Except for those whose whole soul is inhabited by Christ, everybody despises the afflicted to some extent, although practically no one is conscious of it.” (Weil, 1965, p. 122). What the world despises, Weil delves into deeply. Scholars of Weil’s thought contend that one of her most original contributions to philosophical reflection on the nature of suffering is her “discovery” of affliction. Of this discovery, Weil suggests as much: “affliction (Malheur), without its equivalent in other languages. We haven’t got all we could out of it” (1973, p. 3). As was evident in her study and experience of physical labor in various factories, it was during this time in her life that the deep suffering associated with affliction pierced her mind and body: I ask questions, but no one says much; finally I understand that this is a convict prison (frantic pace, cut fingers in profusion, no scruples about laying off workers) and that most of the women have worked in it—they

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ANNA J. BROWN had either been thrown out of work . . . or wanted to escape—and are returning with suppressed rage, chafing at their bits. (1956, p. 202)

After the experience of being pierced by a particular of suffering, Weil set out to give an account of it. One of affliction’s most insidious attributes is located in the play of visibility/invisibility. She formulates this play more concretely when she states: “Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated form of death” (1987, p. 118). It creates what is otherwise a logical contradiction; i.e., a “living death” (1957, p. 28). The afflicted may be “visibly” alive but the more dominant power in their lives is death, however a condition “invisible” to the common eye. Affliction’s corrosive powers ingest both the flesh of the human body and the mystery of the human soul; its ruthless consumption leaves “men not living harder lives than others, not placed lower than others [but] another species, a compromise between a man and a corpse” (ibid.). Though Weil’s schema of affliction is tri-part in nature, its element of social humiliation figures most prominently in her writing on affliction. For Weil, “there is not really affliction unless there is social degradation or some fear of it in one form or another” (ibid., p. 119). Social humiliation, however, is most often not recognized, perhaps because society would be implicated in the “deaths” of so many human beings. Of these deaths, often by means of structural injustice and marginalization, Weil claims, “there can scarcely be a greater crime. We all share by our complicity in an almost innumerable quantity of such crimes. If we could only understand it, it should wring tears of blood from us” (1965, p. 36). With regard to matters of affliction and death, we would do well to keep in mind the 368 persons who died in fiscal year 2011 while trying to cross into the United States from Mexico. According to Carolina Moreno, author of “Border Crossing Deaths Are More Common as Illegal Migration Declines,” “human rights organizations attribute the problem to the increased militarization of the US-Mexico border and the absence of government policy addressing the social and economic motivations that prompt migrants to continue to cross, despite the dangers” (Vuolo, 2012). Far from wringing tears of blood, the cries of the afflicted are barely even heard, thus the insidious play, once again, of affliction’s “visibleinvisible” dialectic. The cry of the afflicted, “Why am I being hurt?, is usually met with a brusque indifference for a number of reasons. The root of such indifference is usually social in nature. Moreno offers these reasons: Some think that special circumstances “warrant” the infliction of injustice (for example, during war). There are some who, by temperament, “enjoy” inflicting pain on others. Also, there is often a general “blindness and deafness” when it comes to the cries of those who are hurting. Tragically, it is most common for us to live in close proximity to those who are afflicted without having the slightest inkling that they are living in such a state. In this regard, Weilian

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scholar Eric Springstead points out that it is Weil’s revealing of the “invisibility” of affliction that “makes [her] discussion [of affliction] a discovery as much as an analysis” (1986, p. 31). 3. Uprootedness: The Primary Social Affliction In The Need for Roots, Weil calls our attention to the experience and importance of rootedness while also pointing out that, much to our detriment, uprootedness is the primary social plague of our time. She opens her text with the following reflection: To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of the community, which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. The participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, professions, and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part. (1952b, p. 43) The bulk of The Need for Roots contemplates the question of rootedness: what it means to be rooted, why the nations of the world have become uprooted, and how it might be possible to become rooted. I will draw upon two of the strands of Weil’s concept of rootedness— the nurturing of country and the “new” political virtue of compassion— to elucidate how Weil’s insights might better inform our thinking about the undocumented and the reclamation of public space. For Weil, it is the qualities of “the country,” or “nation,” that must transform the State. In addition, compassion must replace what we have come to know as patriotism. If we are able to cultivate the virtue of compassion within the context of the country, then we will be encouraged to create the fertile ground needed for the growing of roots. With such ground, individuals may strengthen and nourish their roots through “real, active and natural participation.” As I will point to later in this essay, many of our undocumented brothers and sisters, as well as those in solidarity with them, have already begun this important work of engagement and participation. Weil sees the modern day state as a primary incubation site for the plague of uprootedness. For Weil, “State” is understood to mean “human collectivities [that occupy] clearly defined territorial limits” (Weil, 1952b, p. 99). She often employs the word State as opposed to “nation” to emphasize that all parts of the nation, human and otherwise, obey or come under the authority of the State. The nation no longer constitutes a sovereign people but rather those who fall in line with the dictates of the State (ibid., p. 128). For Weil, it is the

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State and money that now constitute the essential bonds of attachment between peoples of the modern age. Weil’s use of the word “country” as opposed to “state” is meant to encourage a rethinking of the very nature of what binds us together as a community. She employs the word “state” as opposed to “nation” or “country” to designate that all parts of the nation and its people obey or come under the authority of the State. Her aim, in The Need for Roots, is to show that bonds of attachment filtered through the State and purchased through money lead to the devastating condition of uprootedness. Rootedness requires that we rethink the very nature of what binds us within community. This rethinking will be difficult within the modern State, which, for Weil, represents nothing other than the congealment of brute force. In contrast to the use and development of brute force, Weil calls out to the (transformed) State to fulfill its highest duty, which is to nourish the good (ibid., p. 165). The site for this work of nurturing is what she refers to as “the country,” (ibid., p. 168), or that collectivity which has not been co-opted by money and power. It is within the country that the bonds of attachment between human beings are those of love. It is a love of one’s particular culture that is able to root one within the country and foster a sense of loyalty to the culture. This loyalty is not that of ideological worship fostered by the State (1956). It is, rather, loyalty on the level of that which one devotes to a vocation. If the vocation of becoming a country is fulfilled, then what we find is a “life-giving agent [and] good root-fixing ground” (ibid., p. 165). Citizens must view the country within which they live as that which serves as a vital medium in their lives. The country must be a means of rootedness, life-giving in all aspects. When we view the country in this way, it reflects, in many respects, what is of value in our lives. At the same time, we must keep in mind that what appears to be central to us, the microcosm of our country, is but one part of the whole of the world. There are parts that are just as central in the lives of those who dwell within them. Weil suggests that when we contemplate how it is that we are both central and marginal at the same time, what may be useful is the consideration of a “perfect piece of music or poem” (1956, p. 12). Within the whole of a piece of music or a poem, each note or stanza retains the integrity of its own particular centrality but only in relation to the integrity of other notes and stanzas. The ability to recognize the centrality of us and of others at the same time is another way of describing what Weil means by the quality of attention. When we are attentive politically, we are able to be attentive to the other in a manner akin to the poet and the object of his poem: The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with the act of love. To know this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself. (Weil, 1952a, p. 108)

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It is often difficult to see “that the other exists as much as I do” (Weil, 1952b, p. 141). This may be particularly the case when our vision is clouded by patriotism, which Weil describes as an idolatrous worship of the self or the ego writ large. With ancient Rome as her starting place, Weil, in her political writings, considers the ways in which the State commits acts of barbarity and cruelty while never failing to sing of its “eternal goodness” (1962, p. 116). Weil objects to the seemingly impenetrable veil of lies and flattery that serves to cover the ways of the State, particularly those of an imperialist bent. How, she wonders, will children come to appreciate and love justice, the consideration and obligation towards others, and limits on ambition and appetite when all that they have learned in school is that they, as citizens of a particular nation, are different in a way that points only towards their own superiority (1952b, p. 139)? What we are educating our young people to be, she claims, is not so much compassionate human beings but ones who are exclusively self-centered and perhaps even xenophobic. If we are to re-conceptualize how we view the greatness of one’s country, what will constitute “greatness”? For Weil, one of the most important qualities of greatness is found in how the poor within the population are viewed and treated (ibid., p. 175). In short, the virtue of compassion, which she calls forth to replace virtue of patriotism, affords the oppressed a “privileged moral position” (ibid.). Her defense of this claim is that the goal of fraternity, one of the primary ends of patriotism, may only be stimulated when those in the lowest ranks are assured that they too will share in the wealth of rootedness that the country has to offer. Only when all people, regardless of their particular characteristics or composition, are able to partake in the vital medium of the country (or “nation”) can we say that patriotism, now transformed into compassion, is truly virtuous. A virtuous patriotism is attentive to the spiritual and material needs of its citizens, and is not orientated toward the aggrandizement of the few. Another defense for the moral privilege of the oppressed is found within compassion’s universal quality. Unlike compassion, the quality most associated with patriotism is the “particular,” and a highly inflated view of the particular at that. Weil points out, “whereas pride in national glory is by its nature exclusive and non-transferable, compassion is by its nature universal” (ibid., p. 174). What we come to appreciate in a universal way is that when we find ourselves cold and hungry, and we are tempted to turn inward out of self-pity, what we must do instead is to turn this gaze outward, toward the other, whether it be toward an individual or an impoverished country. The oppressed are not to occupy a position of moral privilege so that those who are not oppressed may simply marvel at the fact that they do not share such a precarious existence. With this point in mind, Weil suggests, “however beautiful the sound of the cry of woe may be, one cannot wish to hear it again; it is more human to wish to cure the woe” (ibid., p. 54). Given the state’s predisposition not to care for its oppressed peoples, what is re-

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quired is that state leaders be shown that it is in their interest to do so. This can only happen when a substantive part of the population makes such a demand (ibid., p. 64). For Weil, that such a public demand needs to be made is an important justification for the virtue of compassion. It is more likely the case that when we have experienced pain and humiliation, we would like to forget these experiences as soon as possible. It is compassion’s quality of equanimity that gives us the strength to remember, to remain rooted, and to attend to those in need much like we attend to ourselves when we are in a situation of need (ibid., p. 72). When pondering the plight of the undocumented and working for a just and compassionate response to them, we can utilize much from Weil’s insights. For example, we can utilize her discovery and analysis of affliction to better understand the specific nature of the suffering of the undocumented as well as their “invisibility” to the eyes of many in our society. In addition, we may better appreciate the undocumented as the truth-tellers of our society since they are the ones who have been forced to bear the mark of uprootedness, which Weil again and again reminds us is the most salient social plague of our time. Finally, we can learn to pay careful attention to how public space has excluded certain peoples, namely the undocumented, and about how those who have been excluded are working to reclaim their own lives as well as to reconstitute a more humane public space. 4. “Undocumented” Stories of Exclusion and of Reclaiming Public Space I next turn to stories of the exclusion of the undocumented as well as to their life affirming political efforts. I’ll first turn to the poet Adrienne Rich, who, in her poem “And Now,” encourages us to learn how to pay attention, particularly to the treatment of other human beings in our social spaces: And now as you read these poems —you whose eyes and hands I love —you whose words and minds I love— don’t think I was trying to state a case or construct a scenery: I tried to listen to the public voice of our time tried to survey out public space as best I could —tried to remember and stay faithful to details, note precisely how the air moved and where the clock’s hands stood and who was in charge of definitions and who stood by receiving them when the name of compassion

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was changed to the name of guilt when to feel with a human stranger was declared obsolete (Rich, 1995, p. 31). When we listen to the public rendering of the immigrant and of the undocumented, we see how our brothers and sisters are defined. Further, let us learn who is in charge of such definitions and who (or not!) stands by receiving them; and let us learn about what has happened to compassion, to feeling with another human being. It is tempting in our time, a time of devastating political, economic, social, environmental, and spiritual crises, to dwell upon the wreckage, to see only darkness and to lose sight of the light. But I simply will not do that; I refuse to be held hostage in the icy clutches of despair. I will choose to be hopeful and recall where I am rooted, which is to say, in the Christian tradition. That tradition calls us to be, in the words of Father John Dear, “Easter people who live in a Good Friday world” (2012). Thus I will balance my stories of political, economic, and social devastation with those filled with light and with hope. Why must undocumented bodies bear public violence? How do we “read” the undocumented person and determine that his or her body is an acceptable site to vent our political rage? Prior to answering these questions, consider what happened to Anastasio Hernandez Rojas. According to a recent report on Democracy Now, Rojas, a married man, the father of six children, and someone who had previously lived in the United States for twenty-five years, attempted to enter the United States—near San Diego—from Mexico. Rojas was caught, but instead of being detained and deported, he was hogtied, beaten (he suffered five broken ribs, broken teeth, and multiple deep bruises), and “tasered” to death by Border Patrol agents. While he was being beaten, he cried out: “Ayudame, por favor! Ayudame, por favor! (Please, Sirs, help me!)” (Goodman, 2012). For those among us who have sat silently on a parish pew on a Good Friday afternoon, surely Rojas’s pleas for help must seem hauntingly familiar to us: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (John 19:28). United States Border Patrol agents, twelve of whom were involved in the incident, claim that they had to subdue and beat Rojas because he was combative while being taken to the border, though this claim has been contradicted by three eyewitnesses and by the videos of the beating they took on their cell phone video camera. The San Diego Police Department contends that the Border Patrol was well within its right to treat Rojas as they did and the Justice Department will not pursue the investigation further. Upon being asked, by Democracy Now host Amy Goodman, who her husband was, Maria Puga, his wife, responded: “He was a very charismatic man, a very hard worker, a loving husband, and a wonderful father. . . . I want to let them know that my husband was tortured. He was severely beaten. And they’ve destroyed an entire family” (ibid.).

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Why is it that a charismatic man, a hard worker, a loving husband, and a wonderful father is beaten to death by public agents? Given the eyewitness accounts and videos, it wasn’t because Rojas was resisting arrest and deportation. Was it because he was read as an “illegal” and therefore deserving of death? In a 2008 interview, “El Salvador: The Great Migration,” the late Father Dean Brackley reminds us, “in the English language, ‘illegal’ modifies behavior and policy; it does not modify people. When we use it that way we should be aware that we’re using it as a demeaning label.” He goes on further to say: Those who have most undermined the rule of law in the United States are in fact George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzalez, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and their friends who have launched an illegal war, an offensive war which was unjustified . . . . We know that Congress —Democrats, too—has been willing to give a pass to the government on many serious violations of law. . . . Those who speak most loudly against migrants who have crossed the border and have broken the law in that sense are those who are most willing to give a pass to these outrageous violations of much more serious laws. (2008) If we persist in labeling our undocumented brothers and sisters as “illegals,” a term that immigration scholar Aviva Chomsky argues is a social construction and not a scientific fact (2012), then we may expect that our political rage and violence will continue to be inflicted upon the bodies of the undocumented. Is another reading of their lives possible? Turning once again to the work of Dean Brackley, we find that there is and one that is rooted in our Christian faith. In a 2011 address at the Celebration Conference, “The Migrants: A Light to the Nations,” Brackley first looks to the light of Scripture and its interpretation in the more than capable hands of Jesuit scholar and martyr, Ignacio Ellacuria. Ellacuria, reflecting upon Isaiah’s depiction of the suffering servant, reminds us “as much as we appreciate efficiency and technical progress, we do not look for salvation in ever more efficient markets and the latest technical breakthroughs. God brings salvation through people like the servant, through the weak and despised of this world . . . In this way, the new world is replacing the old world” (2011). For Ellacuria, the most destructive characteristic of the “old world,” is the structural division between the wealthy and the poor, which he calls: the most de-humanizing and death-dealing example of sin in the world. . . . it excludes the poor and powerless peoples of the world who were victims of political colonialism in the past and are victims of economic colonization today. (Ibid.)

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Ellacuria’s name for the impoverished and undocumented is not “illegal” but a “crucified peoples, the people in whom God is working salvation in our world” (ibid.). Brackley contends that the poor who make their way from the impoverishment of the South to the wealth of the North are “ambassadors of the crucified people and bearers of life to the peoples of the North. They are not bad news for the North, but good news. They are a light to the nations and an invitation to heal the great gap between the rich and the poor, powerful and powerless. Rather than a threat to national security, they are an invitation to healing and reconciliation which are necessary for genuine security” (ibid.). Prior to the recent passage of the Beason-Hammon Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (HB 56), Alabama’s draconian anti-immigration and nativist law, state Senator Scott Beason warned his fellow Republicans, “if you allow illegal immigration to continue, you will destroy yourself eventually.” Just before taking his seat, he advised his colleagues to “empty the clip and do what has to be done” (Reyes, 2011, p. 30). Just a few states over, in Alamance County, North Carolina, Sheriff Terry Johnson, who boasted that the county’s detention center “bed rentals” to the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brought in close to $400,000 in federal money, claims that the values of immigrants are unlike those of American citizens: Their values are a lot different—their morals—than what we have here. In Mexico, there’s nothing wrong with having sex with a 12 to 13 year old girl . . . they do a lot of drinking down in Mexico. (Berrigan, 2012) Why is it that the undocumented solely bear the burden of being defined as “those who will destroy us?” Who is the “us” who will be destroyed? Why do we fixate upon undocumented people as a destructive force and miss what are truly destructive forces to the human community and to the environment, corporate-led globalization and climate change? Perhaps it is because our media, owned as it is by big business, does not lend itself well to analysis of the workings of the global economy, or perhaps because climate change seems too overwhelming to deal with in our daily lives, or perhaps because it is just too easy to find a scapegoat upon which to lay the blame for the world’s ills. MacArthur Fellow, Carl Safina, in The View from the Lazy Point, describes corporate globalization as the “most fundamental redesign of social, economic, and political arrangements since the Industrial Revolution” (2012). One of the most salient features of this redesign has been the ability of corporations to “sweep real economic power away from governments” (ibid.). He notes that if you listed the hundred wealthiest countries and corporations together, over half are corporations, with Exxon Mobil being richer than 180 countries. Aside from such concentrated power, there is the seemingly ironclad logic of capital accumulation and a fundamentalist worship of growth, both of which are harmful to human communities and to the earth. In 1919, when Henry Ford wished to invest his profits into his company and its work-

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ers, the Michigan Supreme Court, responding to a lawsuit brought against Ford by the Dodge brothers, determined that “corporations are primarily for the benefit of the stockholders and not for the benefit of the employees or the community” (ibid.). The insatiable drive for growth—which had once resulted from technical progress and growing populations—is now, according to Safina, “fueled by continually unearthing new resources and cheaper labor and by raising and fattening new consumers” (ibid.). Compounding the current global political and economic crises, both of which “push” great numbers of people—now migrants—out in an effort to liberate themselves from the crushing realities of impoverishment and oppression, is that of climate change. Christian Parenti, a visiting scholar at the City University of New York Graduate Center, warns that the “current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence. I call this collision of political, economic, and environmental disasters the catastrophic convergence . . . [meaning] problems compound and amplify each other, one expressing itself through another” (2012). Also of concern to Parenti are the ways in which societies will respond to this catastrophic convergence (and this becomes our concern as well since ecological devastation and the search for sustenance will fuel increased migrations of people). Parenti contends that states, like human beings, are haunted by past traumas and compulsively repeat adaptive behavioral patterns, which tend to be “irrational, short sighted, and self-destructive” (ibid.). Hence, we can expect that societies will tend to replicate: Cold War era militarism and the economic pathologies of neoliberal capitalism. Over the past forty years, both of these forces have distorted the state’s relationship to society—removing and undermining the state’s collectivist, regulatory and redistributionist functions while overdeveloping its repressive and military capacities. (Ibid.) Like a modern-day Cassandra, Parenti caps his discussion by excerpting from a Pentagon-commissioned study published in 2003, An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security, whose authors predict the dystopia of a new Dark Ages: Nations with the resources to do so may build virtual fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for themselves. . . . As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters strike due to abrupt climate-change, many countries’ needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression in order to reclaim balance Europe will be struggling internally, large numbers of refugees washing up on its shores and Asia in serious crisis over food and water. Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life. Once again, warfare would define human life (2012).

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In “America Is Hard to Find,” Berrigan intersperses lines of hope, holiness, and wholeness amidst lines that well describe the bleak realities of modern-day America. To cite just one stanza: But listen brothers and sisters this disk floats downward a flying saucer in the macadam back yard where one paradise tree a hardy weed sends up its signal flare (spring!) Fly it! Turn it on! Become . . . (1998, pp. 143–144) I often turn to this line, and particularly its command to “turn it on and become” when I read through the dismal scenarios conjured by Pentagon scribes. I also look for examples of human beings who, despite all of the bad news, live the Good News, or, as Berrigan often encourages, to give our due to the slight edge of life. One such example is found in forty-two women whom religious Sr. Mary McCauley names “the Rosa Parkses of our broken immigration system” in her Celebration Conference keynote address, “The Pottsville Raid: What Mother Church Can Do?” (2011). By referring to the immigrant women who resisted the harsh measure imposed upon the immigrants who worked at the Pottsville factory, McCauley is not conflating or confusing the Civil Rights Movement with the immigration movement. She means that these women stand in the tradition of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott in refusing to give ground to an oppressive act, and that they represented a social movement that is beginning to flourish. In the early morning hours of 12 May 2008, armed ICE agents, in concert with State Patrol and federal officers, flying helicopters, raided the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse and meat packing plant in Pottsville, Iowa. By the raid’s end, over 400 people, 290 of whom were from Guatemala, were arrested. Three hundred of these folks were convicted of document fraud, identity theft, and use of false social security numbers. Most of them spent five months in prison and were then deported, leaving behind husbands, wives, and children. While in prison, these men and women—upon whose labor we depend for affordable consumer goods and upon whose countries we have historically imposed a colonial relationship—were called “rats,” were kicked and beaten, and were shackled and strip searched. The forty-two women who had been arrested were released from prison to care for their children, though they were released only upon the condition that they would wear a GPS tracking device on their ankles. At first, these women would only wear pants so that no one would see the tracking devices. The Sunday following the raid, the parish community of Saint Brigid’s Church, which had welcomed the families of those arrested by providing food, shelter, and legal advice, organized a solidarity march and prayer circle. The women “rolled their slacks up, stood tall, and carried signs that read: ‘We are not criminals . . . We came to work . . . We came to feed our families . . . We

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are mothers’” (ibid.). Like the seedling of Berrigan’s paradise tree, the courage of these women truly signals spring and sends a shaft of light in this, the new Dark Age. According to a recent issue of Mother Jones magazine, state legislatures have passed 164 anti-immigration measures in the past two years. In its analysis of the origins of these measures, it notes the following coalition of forces: anti-immigrant think tanks such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform; grassroots organizations such as Numbers USA; the legal architect Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas; GOP legislators’ groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC); and financial beneficiaries from anti-immigrant legislation such as the private-prison industry (Reyes, 2012, p. 30). In a side-by-side comparison of Arizona SB 1070 and Alabama HB 56, Paul Reyes gives a sense of just what these laws mean for undocumented immigrants, immigrants, and those in solidarity with them: (1) both laws criminalize living in the United States without documentation, whereas under federal law, this is a civil violation; (2) both laws allow law enforcement to act upon reasonable suspicion during routine traffic stops and arrests until residency status can be confirmed through ICE; (3) both laws effectively ban corporal works of mercy: SB 1070 penalizes anyone who knowingly employs, harbors, transports (for example, giving a co-worker a ride), and HB 56 penalizes anyone who rents to an undocumented person; (4) SB 1070 prevents undocumented persons from receiving state or local public services (interpreted by some officials to include water), and HB 56 bans the undocumented from enrolling in public colleges and from seeking or soliciting work, and requires all businesses and agencies to use the E-verify system, a federal database used to determine the legal status of new hires; (5) HB 56 requires the Department of Education to accurately measure and assess the population of students who are undocumented, which could undermine the Supreme Court’s 1982 Plyler v. Doe ruling that guarantees education to all students regardless of their immigration status (ibid.). Harsh measures such as the ones articulated in Arizona SB 1070 are an effort of “white nativists [who] are determined to scapegoat immigrants for the state’s deep fiscal crisis (Arizona is about $3.8 billion in the red) despite the fact that every reputable study shows that immigrants—documented or not—are a net gain a state’s economy” (Olson quoted in ibid., p. 28). Joel Olson looks at how immigrants are caught within the sordid dynamics of what he calls the “nutty nativism” of Arizona: “it is the outer shell of an intensive effort by elites to ‘reduce government’ through deep cuts in public education, Medicaid, welfare, and the universities while actually expanding the power of the state through border militarization and turning police officers, teachers, principals, nurses, and doctors into immigration agents” (2011). In an effort to pinpoint how this reductive/expansive political sleight of hand works, Olson writes:

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The plan: First, blame the recession on “illegals” and public school teachers—but not Wall Street barons. Second, use the fiscal crisis in state budgets to justify deep cuts in public services as a “necessary measure.” Third, tell the public, “Everyone must make sacrifices.” Fourth, (and in direct contradiction to #3), cut business taxes deeply in order to “spur investment.” Fifth, use the predictable loss of tax revenue to justify more extensive cuts in public services, which justifies further tax breaks for the rich, which . . . well, you see the pattern. In other countries this process would be led by the World Bank and would be called “structural adjustment.” Here it comes from whites of modest means at Tea Party rallies underwritten by the Koch brothers. The whole thing looks particularly absurd in Arizona because our politicians are more obnoxious than elsewhere, but it’s a nationwide affliction. (Ibid.) Amidst all of the bad news, Olson does offer some news that is good. He writes of a march on the Arizona State Capitol by undocumented activists, protesting what Olson claimed would have made SB 1070 “an act of charity.” Included among the potential measures were a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship and a requirement that every public official of society check immigration status before services, such as medical emergency services, would be rendered. After debate the next day, all five measures were defeated. Though the legislators refused to credit protestors, claiming instead that the “bills would be bad for business and a distraction to the budget crisis,” Olson contented that the voices of the young people had been heard. He notes that for the first time in recent immigration legislation debates, the Arizona media began to “discuss how anti-immigrant laws are affecting Arizona’s youth and how nativist legislation is connected to budget cuts. Many are starting to openly wonder how such bills and laws will affect Arizona’s future.” For Olson, Arizona’s youth “are struggling for a new future, one in which they and their families are free to live, to love, and to work wherever they please” (ibid.). As of June of 2013, the Supreme Court decision to strike down four of SB 1070’s key provisions is one step toward the kind of future envisioned by the young people of whom Olson speaks. Still, we must be vigilant, especially since comprehensive immigration reform legislation, notwithstanding an early bipartisan push, is languishing in the hands of our representatives. In conclusion, I ask readers to remember most especially the stories of hope that are intertwined with what is surely a dark night for our immigrant brothers and sisters, and particularly for the undocumented, as well as for each of us. It is imperative for each of us to transform “living-death” of the undocumented immigrant and face this situation with a wisdom-based clarity. We must be attentive and compassionate to the afflicted immigrants and join in their effort to root themselves in our communities, as Simone Weil would have it. We must take to heart, as Dean Brackley commends, that the immi-

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grant is the bearer of good news; we must recognize and stand tall with immigrants, such as the women of Pottsville; and, we must continue to march and to sing, despite all odds, as the youth of Arizona did. In short, we must remember and hold these stories within our hearts. I am reminded of the importance of “story-telling” by Daniel Berrigan’s opening passage of Beside the Sea of Glass: The Song of the Lamb: He tells so many stories. Indeed, if the love of God and one another is the heart of things, then he told his parables, his tales, in season and out, to bring love home to us in ways that mere commands never could—its warmth, horizons, discipline, its many faces. He seemed to know, far beyond our twilight capacity, that when the mind is won or the will engaged, we (all that is in us, all that we might be) are by no means won. What indeed of the heart? He never ceases asking. What indeed? (1978, pp. 14–15)

Five INTERROGATION, FALSE CONFESSIONS, AND THE INTUITIONS OF JURORS Nick Braune 1. Introduction This chapter is occasioned by a high profile court case in Brownsville, Texas, in which the jury found a teenager guilty of murder, greatly because they believed the testimony of an officer who had interrogated the youth several days after the incident. Although the lawyer for the youth said that it was a case of a police-induced false confession, the jurors sided with the officer and prosecutor. The jury’s verdict was not really surprising. Studies suggest that most jurors currently believe police-induced false confessions to be unlikely occurrences, and this paper will offer two reasons for that. However, the intuitions of potential jurors on this issue do not seem to be deeply rooted or strongly felt. Given these assumptions, this paper proposes that the thinking and intuitions of potential jurors can be improved: they can quickly learn to be more hesitant and wary concerning statements made during police interrogations. False confessions do happen. To educate potential jurors on this issue, showing why current interrogation practice may well induce some innocent suspects to make disastrous assertions, this chapter will conclude by suggesting a clear, useful, teaching tool—the generally intuitive, easy to handle, “informed consent” standard borrowed from the medical field. (A medical professional is expected to speak calmly and to provide patients time to think, so that questions can be formulated and any complications and options can be understood before signing a consent form.) After potential jurors understand this informed consent model, they can contrast it to the method typically used in interrogation—where the officer accuses and “corners” the suspect into making a confession by employing various tricks of the trade. Delineating this simple but powerful contrast will be the concluding task of the chapter. Essentially, this chapter deals with how to explain something important to future jurors; it is not an applied ethics paper arguing that current police practices of interrogation are unethical. That they are unethical is taken as a given here. 2. The Teenager in Brownsville and the Jury Francisco Dominguez, a Hispanic youth, was tried as an adult and given twenty years in prison for killing his high school drama teacher, a man prominent in

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cultural circles in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The prosecutor refused to see Dominguez (who was sixteen years old at the time of the incident) as a victim, even though there was evidence that his teacher had been manipulating him. The teacher had invited Dominguez and other male students several times to his home to do odd jobs and, according to Dominguez’s attorney, to pose shirtless for photos to show off muscles. The attorney stressed that this created an inappropriate, sexually charged environment, where the teacher was “grooming” the youth for future sexual favors. Some evidence also showed that Dominguez was psychologically vulnerable, possibly eager for attention from a father figure teacher. (Of course, considering his immaturity, it might also be worthwhile asking whether Dominguez should have been tried as an adult in the first place.) When I interviewed Dominguez’s attorney, he explained how startling it was when the state aggressively prosecuted his client and refused to give any credence to the youth’s side of the story, which was that he had stabbed the teacher (who outweighed Dominguez by one hundred pounds) in self-defense during a sexual assault. According to the attorney, the youth struggled, stabbed the teacher, and then kept stabbing in an unexpected rage. After the incident, struck with the fact that he (a Mexican-American youth in a heavilypoliced Texas/Mexico border city) had just killed a prominent “Anglo” teacher, Dominguez grabbed the teacher’s wallet and car keys, and fled. Although the prosecutor seems to have wanted to see only one side of the incident—and it is no doubt tempting for prosecutors to present a no-hesitation “tough on crime” image in high-publicity cases—it is somewhat puzzling that the jury also discounted Dominguez’s side of the story. One would think that some of the twelve jurors would find reasonable doubt about the prosecutor’s case, given the fact that school district policies generally would frown on teachers bringing students to their homes to pose for photos and given the assertion by the defense that the teacher had a history of improprieties. What doomed the sixteen-year-old in the eyes of the jury? Probably this: On his first night after being transferred to an adult facility from a juvenile facility, Dominguez was interrogated by a Texas Ranger. Dominguez not only confessed to killing the teacher, which was never contested, but confessed to killing the teacher in order to steal the teacher’s money and car! By confessing to killing the teacher in the context of felony theft in the state of Texas, the youth automatically opened himself up to a serious murder charge. The “mental element” and motivation for the killing, which jurors must assess, were greatly established by the confession to the Ranger. (Even though Texas previously executed people for crimes they committed as youth, the United States Supreme Court had recently forbidden that practice. But life in Texas prisons beckoned Dominguez.) No lawyer was present at the 10:00 p.m. interrogation at the jail, which took over two hours, and it was not videotaped. However, it is clear that Dominguez did tell the Ranger at one point that he had killed the high school

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teacher as a tragic consequence of a planned crime. Moreover, the youth signed a statement affirming that he was not coerced. But afterward, he retracted the confession despite being unable to explain well why he had originally confessed the way he did to the Ranger—the jury surely noted this. The prosecutor characterized Dominguez as a criminally inclined individual who killed a caring teacher. The defense claimed that Dominguez was a vulnerable youth visiting the teacher’s home with the same innocent purposes as in his past visits, until the teacher attacked him. The verdict indicated that the defense had not raised any reasonable doubt in the minds of those twelve jurors. Could it be that the jurors’ critical abilities to judge other aspects of the case were blunted once they heard that the sixteen-year-old Hispanic youth had confessed to a trained interrogator? 3. False Confessions as Counter-Intuitive to Potential Jurors A 2009 article by one of the leading researchers on confessions, attorney and psychologist Richard Leo from the University of San Francisco Law School, studied attitudes of jurors and potential jurors. Leo‘s research found that even though considerable evidence exists demonstrating that false confessions occur and why they occur, jurors still believe that “false confessions are both counter-intuitive and unlikely, even in response to psychologically coercive interrogation techniques” (p. 381). Although they assume confessions by the innocent are very rare, potential jurors apparently do realize that psychologically manipulative interrogation can cleverly induce the guilty to confess. (It is common fare in television police-procedural dramas to see various psychological tricks used, like lying to the suspect about the evidence the police have, thereby convincing the subject that resistance is futile. When the suspect confesses, the case is over and the glamorous television police exchange knowing glances and relax their shoulders.) Although jurors clearly realize that skill and trickery is used in interrogations—interrogation is not simply an interview, gathering factual information— and although jurors realize that these interrogation techniques do work well on guilty people, they still have remarkable difficulty seeing how these effective techniques generate false confessions. However, those jurors may be shocked to find that in studies of post-conviction exonerations, “police-induced confessions were evident in between 15 and 25 percent of those cases, making it one of the likely leading causes of wrongful convictions” (ibid., p. 382). Spurred by the Dominguez case and by Leo‘s research on prospective jurors, I conducted an informal survey of my community college students. (I claim no social science validity for this study and simply intended the questionnaire as a “discussion starter” with the students. I did not intend to confirm or disconfirm Leo‘s important research, which still seems flawless to me.) I presented students with a two-paragraph “story” based on the Dominguez case, including a number of details: the stabbing, the taking of pictures

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of male high-school youth with their shirts off, etc. The story mentioned that the youth confessed to a Texas Ranger that he had murdered the teacher in the course of a robbery but that he had later retracted the confession. The questionnaire also mentioned the suspect’s explanation that he had become “confused” during the interrogation and that he had not intended to rob the teacher. I then asked the students to pretend they were jurors, to examine the various facts in the story, and to write down two or three questions that they would hope could be answered by the end of the trial. In response to the questionnaire, many students wanted more information on the background of the teacher and on matters relating to the crime scene, but only one in five requested more information about the confession to the Ranger. Although the “story” itself was only two paragraphs long, four out of five of the students apparently did not see as important the teenager’s comment that he had become “confused” during the interrogation by the Texas Ranger. The students were lacking what I considered to be a minimally acceptable suspicion of the effects of current interrogation techniques, particularly when those techniques are used on certain vulnerable populations like ethnic minorities and youth. The majority of the students seemed to assume that the confession to the Ranger represented the truth and that the youth was “changing his line” later to escape punishment. However—and this is the most significant point—after only a brief discussion of the issue in terms of power relationships, the age differences between the youth and the Ranger, and a little discussion about the stressful nature of interrogations, the students with whom I discussed this were surprised at how quickly potential jurors (like themselves) accept confessions without question. Students themselves began to raise concerns about the vulnerability and suggestibility of youth, and about how young people are raised to respect and fear the law and police. Students were also interested to learn that in Britain, public intuitions about the reliability of confessions, for historical reasons, may be somewhat different than in the United States and that the common interrogation technique used in the United States is not used as frequently in England and is not even allowed to be used on teenagers (Kassin, 2010, p. 13). 4. Two Reasons False Confessions Seem Counterintuitive There are at least two reasons why potential jurors show so little suspicion of police-induced confessions. The primary reason, which deserves some elaboration, is this: the public is greatly unaware of the psychological power of the almost standardized process of interrogation used in this country. Before this new method was perfected, police interrogation up through the 1950s often involved the infamous “third degree,” including extreme, prolonged, sensory discomfort, bright lights in the face, denial of food and sleep, and terror: threats and physical violence (particularly to minorities). But this was greatly

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disappearing by the 1960s when the Supreme Court made its famous Miranda ruling: anyone detained has a right not to answer the interrogator and can end the session at will. Beginning in the 1960s, police needed a different method of interrogation—here entered the apparently “non-coercive” techniques. For example, John E. Reid and Associates, which offers certification in the Reid Technique®, has trained 300,000 investigators in its methods since its founding, and indeed, its influence has been immense (http://www.reid.com). Note: because Reid's “scientific” approach has been so influential over decades and there is a broad range of practices influenced by, or imitating, Reid's techniques, when I make general references to current interrogation practices, I am not referring specifically to practices Reid and Associates teaches, certifies, or endorses. Emily Horowitz, professor of sociology and criminal justice at St. Francis University in New York, explains why interrogation techniques are so important: The US is heavily invested in a criminal justice system that would be paralyzed without confessions. Ninety-two percent of felony convictions are obtained by plea-bargains or confessions. That is a far higher rate than in other countries. Italy for instance is 8 percent, and Norway doesn’t allow plea bargaining at all. (2008, p. 4) Current interrogation practices are easy to understand and use, and are successful—the obvious reasons for their ubiquity. At a certain point, which the interrogator is trained to ascertain, the normal fact-gathering questioning period shifts into an accusatory process. In a stark, spare interrogation room, the interrogator begins interrupting and cutting off denials or statements of innocence: “Don’t give me that junk . . .” The interrogator builds up tension by presenting what any logic student could identify as fallacies of “complex question” (Did you tell anyone in your family that you injured Maria?) and “false dichotomy” (Well, if you say you didn’t injure the child’s shoulder, you must be saying your wife did?). The difficulty in withstanding the questioning while being interrogated is intensified by several factors: a more aggressive (insistent) posture on the part of the questioner, perhaps a raising of the voice, and, very importantly at certain points, the use of lies. Even though the situation is set up so that the suspect is told constantly to tell the truth, the interrogator can lie about how much evidence exists against the suspect, causing the suspect to feel trapped. In Criminal Interrogations and Confessions, interrogators are also taught methods of “minimizing the moral seriousness of the offense,” for instance, by telling the suspect that the crime was understandable under the circumstances or that it was greatly the fault of someone else, perhaps even the fault of the victim. The text even shows how to induce the suspect to turn to the

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interrogator for emotional support and how to use that advantage (Inbau and Reid, 1967, pp. 40–59). Horowitz summarizes the tone of much police interrogation by quoting one of the various interrogation manuals. Because the manual she studies “recommends that the interrogator physically crowd up next to the suspect and insist that he or she is guilty, cutting off any bodily or verbal protestations of innocence,” she questions its non-coerciveness. Look at these four statements she finds in one manual: The interrogator should “rely on an oppressive atmosphere of dogged persistence . . . leaving the subject no prospect of surcease.” The interrogator “must dominate the subject and overwhelm him.” A suggestion should be made that “only confession will bring interrogation to an end.” Then the interrogator can “induce the subject to talk without resorting to duress or coercion.” (2008, p. 3) Certainly, such interrogators do not resort to physically beating suspects, but does that mean that the confession was induced with no duress and coercion? Current interrogation techniques undeniably have utilitarian value, inducing a good number of offenders to confess, but they are arguably psychologically coercive and, sadly, can lead innocent people to confess. Another reason the standard practice is morally reprehensible is that it especially takes advantage of the weak: According to a raft of social science and psychology research done over the past two decades, techniques like these are especially likely to produce false confessions when used on juveniles, the mentally ill, the poorly schooled, immigrants, and those with impaired cognition (Horowitz, 2008, p. 4). But potential jurors do not understand the usual practices of interrogation, let alone the “raft of social science and psychology research” that would lead to questioning those practices. Hence, when jurors are told that a prior confession is now being retracted, they probably assume that the confession represented the truth and the retraction is a ploy to avoid the consequences. The first reason jurors find false confessions to be counterintuitive is that they do not realize that the police are using a fairly standardized interrogation technique, a technique with tested and considerably refined coercive power. Interrogators are not simply “fishing” and luckily reeling in a culprit. But there is a second reason jurors are credulous concerning confessions: they confuse what Christian Meissner calls “voluntary” false confessions with “coerced-compliant” false confessions (2003, p. 54).

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It is common knowledge that some people run up to police stations after any high-profile crime—Meissner reminds us of the kidnapping of Lindbergh’s baby in the 1930s—with tearful but false confessions, termed “voluntary false confessions” (ibid.). Those people have some need to confess to something or perhaps desperately need attention. But potential jurors know that those cases are egregious by nature, almost humorous, and they safely presume that the police would not be seriously charging those kinds of people. Because they know that people who voluntarily burn themselves on stoves or who publicly accuse themselves of crimes they did not commit are so rare, jurors falsely presume that coerced-compliant false confessions must also be rare. If jurors reflected more on the nearly standardized techniques used by police and why the techniques work, coerced-compliant false confessions would not seem so counterintuitive. False confessions do “make sense” in certain ways. Suspects may figure that they are not going to be able to convince interrogators and others of their innocence, and consequently they begin to act and speak in such a way as to attract leniency (Meissner, 2003, pp. 54–56). Alternatively, they may confess because they believe their action will protect or make it easier on someone else, or they may confess to choose the instrumental gain of ending a session they consider too stressful to handle, “getting this session over with” at any cost. Although potential jurors may initially have trouble understanding this sort of decision, they may come to realize that many people have what Horowitz calls a sense of “dependency and abjection” internalized even before they are interrogated. Some people just cannot fight accusations well, a fact of particular concern to Horowitz (ibid., pp. 2–3). Potential jurors, after some reflection, may easily recognize this problem that Horowitz identifies. Jurors might realize that they have everyday acquaintances who are generally normal (would not intentionally burn themselves on a stove or run to the police to make a voluntary confession that they kidnapped Lindbergh’s baby) but still seem to readily fault themselves whenever something goes wrong. A good number have a hard time correcting negative statements about themselves or their work; they may constantly (sometimes humorously) describe how they “always” make mistakes and misunderstand things, and rarely say anything good about themselves. If jurors were informed about the widely practiced techniques and paused to consider this matter, and if they were helped to distinguish “voluntary” false confessions from the “coercedcompliant” confessions where suspects are angrily accused, they might not find false confessions so counterintuitive. In fact, the jurors might picture some everyday acquaintances having a hard time holding up at the police station. 5. The Informed Consent Model as Heuristic Here is a discussion proposal for ethicists and others. Given that potential jurors currently find coerced-compliant false confessions to be counterintui-

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tive, it would be beneficial to have a baseline ethical model with which they could easily critique police interrogation practices. This model can be explained easily and most potential jurors should find it quite intuitive. The model being suggested here requires only the basic awareness of rights and justice as an adequate starting point. Although no magic model will convince every potential juror that false confessions are plausible in our current system, the informed consent standard advocated widely in current medical ethics literature should prove to be generally useful when used by ethicists, defense lawyers, and social justice activists who want to shape how potential jurors see the conduct and power relationships in interrogation rooms. Will understanding the informed consent model really benefit potential jurors when analyzing confessions? At first glance, it seems like a tenuous comparison: the obligation of a medical professional to fully inform a patient seems different from the obligation of a police officer talking to a suspect. What could be learned about one by studying the other? Someone might object that the primary obligation of the police officer is to protect society in general and not the person with whom the officer is currently talking, the person suspected of committing a crime. Does not that differ widely from the obligation of the doctor to the patient, a person asking for professional help? Granted, differences exist, but three important similarities can be identified between the two situations that can be helpful for ethicists and others who will be addressing potential jurors. The first similarity should be obvious: the medical patient and the interrogated suspect are both human beings. Even the guilty are human beings and accordingly must be treated with dignity. True, a doctor may understandably feel irritated and may believe patients to be misinformed or a danger to themselves, and the police may understandably feel irritated and believe some suspects are guilty and are dangers to others. Society, however, should promulgate ethical standards and practices protecting “irritating” patients and suspects alike. The second similarity is also obvious. When patients are talking to doctors about kidney treatments or breast cancer treatments, about limb amputations, about experimental drugs, they are not discussing trivial, momentary, matters. When suspects are being “interviewed” and are asked to give up their right to have an attorney present and are urged to “tell the truth” about crimes that may have been committed, those suspects are also facing decisions which are not trivial, which may have a major impact on their futures—a ruined reputation, a conviction and prison. Thus both patients and suspects are facing important decisions that could drastically affect their lives. The serious consequences involved must heighten our ethical awareness and standards. A barber knows that if a client prefers a certain length of sideburns, the barber should try to comply even though the barber may not agree that the sideburn length enhances the client’s appearance. However, the barber’s obligation to obtain full consent about the client’s sideburns is not as strong as the obliga-

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tion that doctors owe to patients and police owe to suspects, where more serious consequences are at stake. Last, it is important to remember that intuitions (as general social expectations) on matters such as medical practice and police practice are not written in stone. They may change over time and, sometimes, must change. When potential jurors are being told about the qualities of informed consent in medical practice that will be discussed at the conclusion of this section, they should be reminded that one hundred years ago, medical paternalism (“the doctor knows best” mentality) was rife and that “informed consent” was not honored as it is today. It was “common sense” at that time that doctors should be able to lie to their patients, hide scary prognoses, and offer placebos “for the patient’s own good.” But today, our society’s prevailing standards for the doctor/patient relationship have changed significantly, although, of course, too much paternalism still lingers. An excellent new medical ethics textbook, Medical Ethics and Humanities, identifies a 1914 court case as a turning point. Judge Benjamin Cardozo—the namesake, interestingly, for the Cardozo Law School, which has done so much for the Innocence Project and its fight against false confessions—was the first American judge known to enforce a patient’s right to give voluntary consent to medical intervention (Paola and Walker, 2010, p. 181). Cardozo heard the case of Mary E. Schloendorff against her doctor. Despite the fact that Schloendorff had only agreed to go under anesthesia to determine whether her diagnosed fibroid tumor was malignant, while she was unconscious, the doctor decided to remove the fibroid tumor because he thought it would be best for her. He disregarded her clearly stated desire to be consulted on any decision involving surgery. Cardozo, in Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital, decided in the patient’s favor: Every human being of adult years and sound mind has the right to determine what shall be done with his own body; and a surgeon who performs an operation without his patient’s consent commits an assault, for which he is liable in damages, except in cases of emergency where the patient is unconscious, and where it is necessary to operate before consent can be obtained. (Ibid., p. 182) This decision was remarkable at the time and, along with later decisions and a greater awareness of “patients’ rights,” it has brought about significant changes in medical culture and institutions as well as changes in popular intuitions on the matter. Medical Ethics and Humanities identifies two social phenomena that brought about the current change in consciousness: the court cases following Cardozo’s decision and the exposure of grossly “notorious research” carried out in the name of medicine, for example, the Nazi doctors’ experiments, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments in the United States, and other similar cases

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(ibid., p. 183). The “doctor knows best” culture of acquiescence to the wishes of doctors and hospitals has greatly changed, and there is now massive literature on, and alertness and vigilance concerning, patients’ right to informed consent. Although certainly not every medical professional complies with the standards, better standards are at least recognized now, and they rest on a far higher bar than before 1914. Today, doctors and hospitals know that current jurors may well decide against them in contested cases. Our intuitions do change and it would surely be advisable to remind potential jurors how our intuitions have evolved for the better concerning informed consent medical ethics. Is it not also possible that our intuitions about matters of criminal justice in the United States can change—despite CSI New York, The Closer, and other television police procedural dramas that glamorize tricky interrogations? The medical practice standard of informed consent has now evolved to a level where it can instruct other areas of social interaction, including the criminal justice system. Medical Ethics and Humanities presents four elements of informed consent—disclosure, understanding, voluntariness, and competence—that I propose would be readily intuitive to prospective jurors weighing evidence about confessions: (1) Medical ethics presumes that disclosure of important information is necessary for facilitating informed consent (ibid., p. 190). For example, patients have the right to know from the start if a certain prescribed medicine may cause impotence as a side effect, or if a certain surgery may cause nerve damage and tremors, or if further surgeries may be needed months later. By analogy, the suspect speaking to police is owed some similar right to disclosure. Waiving one’s right to a lawyer might sound sensible when the police officer is doing the initial interview stage of interrogation, asking someone’s name and address, but the suspect needs to be told clearly that another stage in the discussion is upcoming. The process may shift suddenly and unpredictably from an “interview” about the facts to an aggressive patterned interrogation, where part of the planned procedure will be to cut off any denials of guilt: “Cut the crap . . . I’m not listening to that.” According to the Kassin study on false confessions, four out of five people in the interview room waive their rights to a lawyer (2010, p. 7). Had it been properly disclosed to them that forty-five minutes later, their assertions of innocence would be shouted down and that the police were planning ahead of time how to spot moments of personal weakness during the interrogation process, they might not have waived those rights. (2) Medical ethics presumes that understanding is important. “Related to the concept of disclosure, but even more important is the concept of understanding. Health care professionals and researchers need to ensure the existence of an atmosphere that encourages patients and subjects to

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ask questions and clarify ambiguous information” (Paola, 2010, p. 191). A consent form is only a part of a process in current medical practice, not something the medical professional is targeting the patient to sign. But in a police interrogation, what is the atmosphere being created? Is it aimed at understanding? Interrogation is practiced in a bare room, with no comforting pictures, no plants on the table. The physical atmosphere alone is designed to corner the suspect into signing a statement. In medical ethics, it is a commonplace to recognize that the readability level of the consent forms is a concern, particularly for people who are facing stressful decisions. Therefore, patients must be able to discuss important matters with family and friends to better understand the issues and implications. But the police usually make sure the person interrogated has no support system available to help them understand what is happening in the confusing process. Quite contrary to the confident understanding that the medical profession’s informed consent is meant to establish, criminal interrogation aims at creating a feeling of abandonment and does nothing to ensure understanding. (3) Informed consent requires voluntariness: non-manipulated, noncoercive decision making to respect the patient’s autonomy (ibid., p. 191). (It is worth noting that the textbook refers to voluntary consent as the first principle of the Nuremburg Code’s approach to experimentation in medical matters.) The Kassin study challenges the police practice of lying to suspects. (“We now have found one of your fingerprints in the dead woman’s apartment.” Or, “You failed the polygraph test.”) The prevarications of interrogators can have a completely disorienting effect on a suspect’s decision-making capacity, thus thwarting voluntariness. Giving false information to innocent people (who had naively waived the right to an attorney because they believed “the truth will set you free” and who now find themselves in an emotionally charged, confrontational situation) can sometimes make them experience a feeling of trapped doom and despair. This despair severely affects the voluntariness of their statements to the interrogator. The Kassin study found that more than a hundred years of psychological research has shown that persons’ visual perception can be altered by feeding them false information. Researchers can make someone see strangers as taller than they actually are by giving distorted information ahead of time. Overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrates that presenting misinformation to individuals can “alter people’s visual perceptions, beliefs, motivations, emotions, attitudes, memories, self-assessments and even certain physiological outcomes as seen in studies of the placebo effect.” Kassin explains, “scientific evidence for the malleability of people’s perceptions, decisions and behavior when confronted with misinformation is broad and pervasive” (2010, pp. 27–28). While informed consent in the medical profession prioritizes the responsibility to tell the truth to the person who is making a decision, thereby per-

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mitting a voluntary response, the technique used in the interrogation room is different: How many people are in prison—even on death row—today because it is an accepted practice for authorities to lie to suspects? (4) According to medical ethics models, informed consent requires competence to make decisions on the part of the person giving consent. This concept is stressed to alert professionals that general blanket competence does not guarantee momentary decisional capacity. The capacity to make healthcare decisions can fluctuate. This fluctuation is similar in the case of suspects; their competence could actually shift within a short time. On one occasion, a Texas attorney asked me to analyze an interrogation transcript. It was clear to me that, at the beginning of the interrogation, the police carefully asked a sixteen year old, who was being accused of assaulting a very young child, several important questions to establish competence. (Did the youth understand what an “attorney” is? Did he know what it means to have “a right to remain silent”? Could he express these ideas in his own words?) The police were carefully and solicitously explaining the concepts flowing from the Miranda decision, and then they asked the youth to initial a statement that he understood his rights. (I properly continue to refer to the suspect as a “youth,” even though the prosecutor had decided to try him as an adult.) But after the conversation moved on, maybe a half hour later, into the accusatory phase of the interrogation, the youth was reduced to asking, “Hey, how come you’re getting so rowdy?” But that seemed to be the extent of the youth’s ability to stand up to the officer. After the officer said he was not getting rowdy but that he was simply demanding the truth, and after the officer implied that a member of the youth’s family was ready to testify against him, the youth caved, completely forgetting his right to remain silent. Was the suspect generally competent? Yes, he was, but did he have the necessary decisional capacity at the important moment he needed it, when he was accused? (Incidentally, some question remains whether the youth may not only have incompetently confessed to the interrogator but falsely confessed.) One researcher examining the decisional capacity of interrogated suspects notes that there are some people who have a clear deficit in the social skill of assertiveness. They simply have trouble saying “no” to others, asking for help, or providing corrective feedback. Although they may be legally competent to understand their rights as patiently explained at the beginning of an interrogation, they would have trouble “asking for an attorney, denying commission of the crime, and telling the police officer that one is innocent when the police officer is insisting on one’s guilt” (Redlich, 2004, p. 20). Competence is an itinerant quality: a person who is competent to proceed with the formal conversation with the police in a calm earlier phase of interrogation might be quite incompetent (unable to remember, understand, or employ one’s right to stop the discussion) during the angry, accusatory phase.

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6. Conclusion: There is Hope On the one hand, when looking at America’s criminal justice system, things surely look dreary. Only one in twenty people in the world lives in the United States, but one in every five prisoners in the world is in the United States. It has the world’s steepest rate of incarceration. Each of the 7.3 million people in America who are now under police supervision (locked up, on probation, or on parole), including Francisco Dominguez, at one time stood before a judge in a country dedicated to the rule of law, fairness, transparency, and due process. All of those 7.3 million had a right not to testify against themselves. However, over 90 percent of that 7.3 million have plea bargained or confessed to crimes. A growing number of organizations and individuals in the United States, coming from several different political vantage points, are challenging the bloated leviathan that philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm called the “penal state.” In an early essay that he wrote in Weimar Germany, but which is still fruitful for “critical criminology” today, Fromm sees the huge and determined penal state assuming an “educator” role. However, he says the criminal justice system is not educating the criminal to behave better next time but rather is educating the great mass of individuals to revert to a desired childlike submissiveness to power (2000, p. 125). Americans may well decide, upon future reflection, that they have tolerated a frightening submissiveness by letting the criminal justice system be so overwhelmingly reliant on confessions, where citizens are pressured by the state to speak, and sign statements, against themselves. Although potential jurors today do not seem to be sufficiently concerned about America’s reliance on confessions, their intuitions can change. This chapter has boldly attempted to offer a proposal that may help the process: explaining to prospective jurors the evolved informed consent standards of the medical field may give those prospective jurors a basis on which to judge standard police practices. Defense attorneys may even find it beneficial to directly address jurors with this informed consent analogy during the jury selection process, during opening arguments, or even during summary arguments. Peace and justice activists also may want to use this heuristic in organizing efforts with the wider population. Those organizations and any individuals working for reform of the criminal justice system know their task is daunting, and so they particularly need to be reminded often that popular intuitions do change, and this chapter should end on that note. For example, America saw deep-seated attitudes (general intuitions) about Jim Crow practices begin to change quickly during the 1960s. As well, general attitudes toward cigarette smoking have changed rather rapidly. Americans’ attitude toward medical paternalism changed perhaps more slowly, but has definitely changed. On criminal justice matters, there is surely more alertness among potential jurors today to the inaccuracy of “posi-

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tive eyewitness identification” than there was in the late 1950s when the famous film Twelve Angry Men (Rose, 1957) was produced. Consequently, perhaps in a few years, America’s intuitions on confessions can also change. Two decades ago, worried about several miscarriages of justice, the British consciously moved to halt any growing dependence on interrogation and police-induced confessions (Kassin, 2010, p. 25). America should surely be able to follow that path.

Six IGNACIO MARTÍN-BARÓ AND THE 99%: FROM EL SALVADOR TO OCCUPY Adrianne Aron In the mid-1980s, as part of a human rights delegation to Central America, I was provided with a briefing packet on El Salvador, where the civil war that raged through the country had already claimed 60,000 lives. Delegates’ packets were full of information on the conditions at the root of that war: the wildly disproportionate distribution of wealth, the impossibility of getting an education if you were poor, the lack of sanitation and lack of access to healthcare, the conditions that gave a man in El Salvador a life expectancy of fifty-one years at a time when the average man in the United States was living past seventy. Virtually all the wealth of the country that wasn’t controlled by multinational corporations was in the hands of fourteen of the richest families. The statistics put numbers behind the life experiences I was learning about at home, where I was interviewing Salvadoran refugees who had never learned to read, who had gone through long periods in their childhood when all they had to eat was tortillas with salt. Some were twelve or thirteen years old before they got their first pair of shoes. All of them were fleeing for their lives to escape from forced recruitment by the army or murder by paramilitary death squads. As a psychologist, I was documenting their trauma for use in their petitions for political asylum. The army’s strategy at that time, developed in collaboration with American advisors and funded with $1 million a day from Washington, was to wipe out every single threat to the status quo, by any means necessary. The US policy was so well defined that its replication in Iraq came to be known as “The Salvador Option” (Fuller, 2005). The government ruled by terror, with state-sponsored torture and massacres, illegal detentions, rape, assassinations and kidnappings; the burning of villages and crops. Dissent was completely outlawed. Anyone who stood up for justice and human rights was labeled as subversive, and, in the context of the terrorist state’s institutionalized lie, was subversive, for, as psychologist Ignacio MartínBaró observed at the time, those who unmasked the “Official Story” subverted the order of the established lie (1990, p. 87). If you were caught carrying a Bible or attending the funeral of a slain catechist, you were at risk of being detained and tortured. If you belonged to the national student organization, you would be put on a kill list. The refugees I was seeing were telling me “to be young in

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El Salvador is a crime.” They told me about signs plastered on buildings that read, “Be a patriot, kill a priest.” That connection between doing what is good for your country and getting rid of the priests—by which was meant the clergy who embraced liberation thought and, most critically, the Jesuits—had been forged in 1980, in a Reagan administration position paper known as the Santa Fe Document. This paper, which was to go through several revisions over the years, spelled out the need for United States’ policy in Central America to counter the Preferential Option for the Poor—because it was “critical of productive capitalism” and therefore contrary to American interests. Nobody had to twist the arm of the government of El Salvador to look after Uncle Sam’s needs. As Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton put it, “the President of the United States is more the President of my country than the President of my country” (1969). Ignacio Martín-Baró was a Jesuit and he was chair of the psychology department at the University of Central America (UCA), where he also served as Vice-Rector. In my information packet was an article he’d written, titled “War and Mental Health” (1994b). I would later find out that he was El Salvador’s most prominent psychologist, and that he was very well known throughout Central and South America. But I had never heard of him. That kind of embarrassing gap in my education and training had by then lost its shock value. Some years before, I’d been amazed to learn that the heroic scientist who discovered the cause of yellow fever was not the American Walter Reed, as I’d been taught, but a Cuban doctor named Carlos Finlay. Growing up in the Midwest, I’d learned all about the explorers and settlers in the Great Lakes region, but was never taught that the founder of Chicago, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, was from Haiti, the world’s first slave-free republic. I was already out of college before I understood that people from places where the population is dark-skinned or poor tend to go invisible when history is being written. Martín-Baró’s essay on war and mental health put words to ideas to which I had subscribed for a long time, though I’d never systematized them or understood them as part of a coherent whole. He explained, for instance, that we generally define mental health as signifying an absence of psychological disorders. However, this is an absurdly constricted definition that essentially puts mental health in a straitjacket and encourages us to think of it in individual terms, and only individual terms. As he put it: Anyone who doesn’t suffer paralyzing anxiety attacks, who can go about his or her daily work without hallucinating dangers or imagining conspiracies, who attends to the demands of family life without mistreating his or her children or submitting to the mind-numbing tyranny of alcohol, would be considered healthy and normal. (1994b, p. 108) When we accept this as our working definition, mental health problems affect only a small segment of the population—those people who have some per-

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sonal shortcoming that prevents them from making a successful adaptation to their environment. In other words, conventional psychology understands mental illness as an abnormal reaction to a normal situation. But something is missing in this definition, Martín-Baró argues. It leaves out history—the fact that human life takes within the framework of relationships, historical relationships. So, it may be that a psychological disorder is an abnormal reaction to a normal situation, but it may also happen to be a normal reaction to an abnormal situation (ibid., p. 111; emphasis added). Back in California, psychological evaluations of Salvadorans fleeing the repression showed a clear correspondence between their symptoms and the persecution they had suffered. Submitted to Immigration Court, these evaluations provided critical evidence for the political asylum claims of people who often had no other proof of who they were or what had happened to them. (They had come across borders without papers; when your name is on a government hit list, how do you get a passport?) I understood their trauma. Something was wrong with them, not because there was some weakness in their constitutions, but because something was drastically wrong with the world from which they had come. For the delegation, I had brought a big stack of articles and clinical resources that I knew would be useful to mental health workers attending to traumatized people in El Salvador. But, I knew there would be a problem in getting the materials to the people who needed them. Most psychologists who were working on behalf of the oppressed had been forced underground. They were in hiding. Most who were attending to the rich—a group comprising most of the psychologists in the country, as was the case in my own country—were not people I cared to meet or whom I could trust to put these materials to good use. The author of “War and Mental Health” was someone I knew I had to find. I found Martín-Baró at the UCA, where he and his colleagues were educating students in liberation thought, at great risk, in between bombs exploding in the Jesuit house and death threats coming over the phone. All their teaching and research, and even their morning prayers and evening parties, were carried out on a precarious perch two millimeters this side of catastrophe. They had inserted themselves deep into the reality being lived by the great majority of the Salvadoran people, although as natives of Spain and members of an international religious order, they could have escaped from all that violence by taking positions in another country, a safe country. Until the US-trained assassins of the Salvadoran army forced them from their beds on 16 November 1989 and murdered them in cold blood, they courageously stayed in their adopted country, working with their adopted fellow citizens. They did not do this out of charity. They, and brave Jesuits like Dean Brackley and Charlie Bierne, who left their comfortable posts in New York and California to replace them after the massacre, were acting in solidarity.

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The difference matters. Charity asks, “How can I help these poor people?” Solidarity asks, “How can I work together with these people in our common struggle for justice?” And liberation psychology asks, “How can we use our psychological skills and knowledge on behalf of peace, and justice, and human dignity?” Without realizing it at the time, I was a liberation psychologist. I gave my stack of materials to Martín-Baró and he saw to it that they were delivered to the right places, where they’d be of use to the 99 percent who were the victims of El Salvador’s oppressive social structures—or, more accurately, 99 point-something. A few years before the war broke out, the journal Estudios Centroamericanos (ECA) had reported that in the Salvadoran countryside, 98 percent of the houses were without toilets. Half of them lacked potable water; more than half of the residents were unemployed. Sixtyfive percent of them were illiterate and those who owned land were earning the equivalent of $0.87 USD per day from their land, while the big landholders each had daily incomes of as much as $6,197 USD. These figures were furnished by Ignacio Ellacuría, ECA’s editor, who was the Rector at the UCA. He concluded his 1976 report saying, “Let us hope that we can begin to firmly take the first steps to prevent this sick country from exploding” (1991). The explosion, of course, occurred, and Ellacuría, Martín-Baró, and four other Jesuits at the UCA who tried to prevent the civil war, were assassinated while trying to broker a negotiated settlement of it. Ironically, as lawyers of the Center for Justice and Accountability point out, “the massacre, which engendered an outpouring of outrage from across the globe, ended up catalyzing a political settlement to the conict” (Bernabeau and Blum, 2012, p. 96). In the United States, people had a general awareness of the tremendous disparities in wealth in countries like El Salvador, that allow a tiny minority of fabulously wealthy people to live in outrageous luxury while the vast majority of the population becomes increasingly impoverished. But those awful unemployment and literacy statistics we had seen in occasional magazine articles applied to places like El Salvador, or Haiti, not to the United States. That seemed obvious because, in fact, most of those North American men who were living past seventy had it pretty good. Education and real wages—two solid indices of prosperity—had been rising in the United States throughout the twentieth century, in a trend that many people expected to go on forever. If people up north had looked really closely, of course, they’d have seen how that wonderful money tree up north got watered—by the sweat of the people in places like El Salvador and Haiti. But North Americans were too busy at the mall to bother with a close look. They were going so fast in their big cars that they also missed a couple of important road signs that were pointing away from the optimism of the American dream toward the same kind of inequality they had always associated with them, the people of the Third World.

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There’s probably a name for that in Driver Education—when you miss what is right in front of your eyes because you are only using peripheral vision and the rearview mirror. In psychology, we call it “denial.” The rearview mirror could pick up 1915, when the big pie of national income in the United States was sliced in such a way as to give 18 percent of the wealth to the richest 1 percent of the population. Well, it was a big pie, and this was a very rich country, so the 99 percent sharing 82 percent of the nation’s wealth were not doing so badly. By 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while he was organizing against poverty in America, the slice of the pie for the 99 percent had shrunk to about 70 percent of the nation’s wealth—a smaller chunk, but it was still a big pie and it was growing. But then the money started to shift. Between 1973 and 2000, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, while the income of 90 percent of the population fell by 7 percent (Domhoff, 2012). More telling, the super-rich—the CEOs who by 1980 were making 42 times what the average worker was making—by 2005 were earning in a single day before lunch what the minimum-wage worker had to work an entire year to earn. Though the size of the pie was getting bigger, the increase was all going to the diners at the head of the table. The AFL-CIO reports that today, it would take the average worker at Ford Motor Company fifty-one years to earn what the Ford CEO earns as a base annual salary, not counting the many millions of dollars paid in cash bonuses, stocks, airplanes, and other perks. Still, the denial persisted. A 2010 study by Mike Norton and Dan Ariely, cited by G. William Domhoff in “Power in America: Wealth, Income, and Power” (2012) found that regardless of gender, age, income level, or party affiliation, Americans have little understanding of how concentrated wealth is in the United States. People surveyed by Norton and Ariely estimated that the poorest 20 percent of the population held between 8 and 10 percent of the country’s wealth. Several academic economists in the survey guessed it was about 2 percent, a figure that was still drastically inflated, by a factor of seven. The bottom 20 percent of the population, in fact, holds a mere 0.3 percent of the wealth in the United States. The year of the Norton and Ariely survey marked a milestone, according to Jeffrey Brainard, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2010). In 2010, for the first time, the hundred most expensive colleges—charging $50,000 or more for tuition, fees, room, and board—were joined for the first time by a public institution, the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley). “A sticker price of $50,000 is more than twice the annual income for a family of four living at the poverty line,” Brainard pointed out (ibid.). Larry Abramson, asking on NPR, “Why is College so Expensive?,” reported that Berkeley’s tuition in the 1970s was about $700 per year, and at the time of his report, it was $15,000 per year—a 2,000 percent increase (2011). A student at UC Berkeley, demonstrating against the Regents of the University

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of California, reported on Pacifica Radio News (18 July 2012) that during her four-year matriculation, tuition increased by 134 percent. As the cost of higher education leaped by hundreds of percentage points, houses by the millions started reverting to the banks in foreclosures, and the cost of living went up but the number of jobs did not, people started to notice. An unprecedented number of families needed food stamps. More children were living below the poverty line than ever before. Wall Street corporations, “too big to fail,” got bailed out—with tax money the middle class paid from their reduced incomes. “THEY got bailed out, WE got sold out,” says one of the popular slogans of the Occupy Movement. “Whose streets? OUR streets!” people yelled as they marched to shut the banks and reclaim the commons. In Central America, the perspective of liberation theology had helped people to see that gross disparities in wealth are not ordered by a God wishing them to go hungry so that the rich can live extravagantly; hunger was never on God’s agenda. Those disparities are not there by divine order, liberation theology taught; rather, they are caused by an unjust human-made system that violates the very concept of justice that religion embraces. From that principle, Martín-Baró developed a liberation psychology, teaching that when the oppressed majority of the people try to adjust to a morally corrupt system, it leads not to good mental health, but to its antithesis: to feeling demoralized, depressed, alienated, and hopeless. When people organize to resist the corruption, however, as Martín-Baró observed happening in El Salvador, the effort to bring a just order to human society can have a salutary, energizing effect. Energized and optimistic, people grew hopeful about the future; they provided each other with healthy support and mutual assistance. In Jayaque, the rural community where he was the parish priest, a young woman gang-raped by government soldiers dared to appear on television to denounce the perpetrators. With her stood a group of older men from her village, in solidarity. For Martín-Baró, such acts of courage and mutual support exemplified the impressive virtues of the Salvadoran people. In light of that kind of expression of a quest for justice, we should not be surprised that the Chileans’ cry of resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship, EL PUEBLO UNIDO JAMAS SERA VENCIDO, found its way up to the people of El Salvador. Nor should it surprise us that it found its way north to Madison, Wisconsin, and New York City, and Seattle, and Detroit, and big and little places all over the United States as, THE PEOPLE UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED. Bruce Levine, a liberation psychologist in Ohio, describes the Occupy Movement as tapping into a supply of energy that is present and available for oppressed and exploited people everywhere. We discover it, he says: when we come out of denial that we are a subjugated people. We discover just how energizing it can be to delegitimize oppressive institutions and authorities. And when these oppressive authorities react violently to

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peaceful resistance, their violence validates their illegitimacy—and provides us with even more energy. (Levine, 2011, emphasis in original) It is that energy, I think, that forges the connection between what the Salvadoran people have for so long been struggling to achieve and what their neighbors in the Occupy Movement have proclaimed as goals worth striving for in life. In Occupy’s horizontally structured general assemblies, everybody has a voice—the committed, the crazies, the inexperienced and the veteran activists, the person who has been working for decades for peace and justice and the Johnny-come-lately who just walked onto the scene. This is a new model for organizing human relationships, where it is not what you own that counts, but what you want your social existence to look like. It rejects the idolatry of consumerism and embraces the appreciation of simple pleasures such as music, an organic apple, a hike through old-growth forest. It’s participatory, egalitarian, and full of surprises and innovation. When the authorities denied one of the Occupy sites sound equipment, the human microphone was born. I stand up and make a statement, and you repeat it, so my words echo through the crowd not as a one-way line of communication, but as a thought that is processed through each and every person present. This “mic check” may resemble Call and Response, but it’s different. It’s a collective call, proclaiming a collective truth. THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE, the Occupiers shout, and that really is what democracy looks like! Another favorite slogan captures it in colors: DEMOCRACY IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT. A complacency that we might not have realized existed had taken over our lives and even the lives of those who had strong objections to the way our world was ordered. It was similar, I think, to what Primo Levi and his young friends were experiencing before the Gestapo put an end to their glib discussions. World War II was in progress, the world was in flames. Levi and his friends all proclaimed themselves to be enemies of fascism, “But actually,” he reflected, “Fascism had had its effect on us, as on almost all Italians, alienating us and making us superficial, passive, and cynical” (1984, p. 128). I think that same kind of superficiality, passivity, and cynicism had been present in the United States for a long time. There was no widespread outcry, for instance, when, after the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island, the American president told us to put duct tape on our windows. Instead, there was a run on duct tape. When another president told us, shortly after 9-11, that we should go shopping, people took out their credit cards. Even when torture became legal and the Bill of Rights began peeling off the Constitution, to say nothing of unprovoked wars of aggression and destructive interventions, the cries of the people were limited and sporadic. The Occupy Movement has turned on a mic check to transmit those cries—for justice, for equality, for a decent and unpolluted life. With the Occupy Movement, for the first time

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ever, a questioning of the idol of capitalism has become part of the mainstream American conversation. Martín-Baró wrote: We must work hard to find theoretical models and methods of intervention that allow us, as a community and as individuals, to break with the culture of our vitiated social relations and put other, more humanizing, relationships in their place. (1994b, p. 120) Hierarchy, patriarchy, racism, sexism, classism, have no quarrel with a plantation owner earning before lunch in one day what the worker on the place earns with a year’s labor. They may have no quarrel with an alienated existence that resorts to duct tape, shopping, and antidepressants to get through the day and allow an adjustment to something called “a normal life.” But I do, and I suspect many of my readers do, too. The martyred Jesuits of the UCA and the heroic teachers such as Brackley who came after them subscribed to the tenets of liberation theology that held that God is a God of Life and the primordial task of the Christian is to promote life. The opposite of faith in God, they declared, is not atheism, but idolatry—belief in false gods, gods which produce death. What a Christian must search for are all those historical conditions that give life to people. In Latin America, Martín-Baró wrote: this search for life demands a first step of liberating the structures—the social structures first, and next the personal ones—that maintain a situation of sin; that is, of the mortal oppression of the majority of the people. (1994a, p. 26) He called it “the majority of the people.” Nowadays we call it “the 99 percent.” Dalton wrote a poem about it, referring to the 60 percent. I say, let us not quibble over what to call it. Let us instead get busy with those “first steps” that Ellacuría and Martín-Baró said we have to take, toward liberation.

Seven PLURALISM, IDENTITY, AND VIOLENCE Fuat Gürsözlü 1. Introduction There is much discussion today about the conflicts originating from clashing differences. Although democratic theorists describe violence that results from these clashes as one of the most serious challenges democracies face today on a global scale, the literature on democratic politics does not pay enough attention to its theorization. A common characteristic of contemporary political theory is the recognition of diversity, pluralism, and cultural difference as a fact while seeking to build ideal theories that reconcile deep disagreements and thereby overcome conflict. The promise is a harmonious society from which fundamental conflicts and societal antagonism have been eliminated. Yet, violence grounded in the antagonism of differences haunts social life as is very evident from growing resentment and violence toward minorities and cultural differences in several countries. We urgently need an analysis of pluralism and conflict that could account for how diverse differences take on an antagonistic and violent form since responding to the problem of violence in part requires understanding of its sources and dynamics. This need is most evident in some political leaders’ recent emphasis on the crisis of multiculturalism. Consider, for instance, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s remarks that multiculturalism understood as different people living happily side-by-side has failed and that the onus is on the immigrants to integrate into society (BBC, 2010). Merkel not only fails to recognize the conflictual nature of pluralistic democratic societies, but by asserting that it is the immigrants who should do more to integrate into the German society, she contributes to the growing resentment toward foreigners in her country. She first declares the failure of an already impossible project—differences living side-by-side harmoniously without conflict—and then places the blame for the failure of this project on the immigrants. In this relation, it is the different—the immigrants with different cultures and traditions—who are expected to embrace the most prevalent identity in the country-local language, values, and ways of life. When different identities resist being assimilated, they are perceived as being disrespectful since they challenge the precedence of the local identity. Put differently, by this view, immigrants are responsible for undermining the harmony of the society. Although Merkel’s goal is to secure peaceful coexistence, her unrealistic expectation of harmonious society and understanding of pluralism

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intensify already existing conflicts rather than prevent collisions between contending identities. Political projects and ideals that are not based on an accurate understanding of pluralism and conflict are unable to respond to the problem of violence. To respond to the problem of violence toward differences, a version of pluralism that grasps the dynamics of conflict and sources of antagonism in social life is called for. I argue that agonistic understanding of pluralism provides this much needed theoretical framework to grasp the full implications of pluralism and to make sense of the violent dynamic of identity/difference. Unfortunately, the proponents of agonistic pluralism either say too little or offer recipes that are too idealistic to address the problem whose sources they describe so well. 2. Violence toward Differences Simmering nationalistic, ethnic, religious, sexual, economic, moral, and linguistic tensions mark all societies in different ways. Such tensions are like time bombs waiting to explode, and they do explode very often. While some of these clashes take place in the spaces of institutional politics, the majority of them occur in the spaces of everyday life—in the streets, at the supermarkets, at cafés or restaurants, at parks, at schools, at workplaces, at local gatherings. Violence not only takes place in different spaces, but it also takes different forms and means of expression. Consider, for instance, Juventus (an Italian soccer club) fans’ racist chanting, “there are no black Italians” (Christenson, 2009) during a soccer game in Torino or the Iranian president’s remark, “there are no homosexuals in Iran—not one” (Cooper, 2007). These instances of verbal violence are the result of an antagonistic attitude that negates the very existence of the other while aiming to create a social world where the other is rendered invisible. By negating others’ existence and denigrating their way of life, they cause emotional and psychological harm. Violence toward differences sometimes takes the form of discriminatory legislation. In Switzerland, a ban on building new minarets—prayer towers— on mosques has been accepted by a clear majority of the voters as a result of a referendum in 2009. Despite the Swiss government’s opposition, the ban is now part of the Swiss constitution, which supposedly guarantees the religious freedom of all Swiss citizens. The declared aim of the ban on construction of new minarets is to counter fundamentalist tendencies. The political campaign was marked with hostility against Islam and the immigrants in Switzerland. A member of the Swiss parliament stated that minarets were a symbol of Islamists’ will to take power and establish a religious order. The anti-minaret posters used in the campaign were highly controversial. They have been criticized for inciting hatred and one of the posters has been banned as racist by the city of Basel. Finally, the hostile tone of the campaign has triggered vandalism. Before the referendum, a group threw stones and a pot of paint at the main mosque in Geneva. The symbolic meaning of the ban and the depth of the

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anxiety about Islam is better grasped when one reads that of the 150 mosques and prayer rooms in Switzerland, only four have minarets, and only two more were in planning before the issue became a national one (Cumming-Bruce and Erlanger, 2009). The Swiss ban on building minarets illustrates the complexity of violence toward differences. The aim of the political campaign is to deny a religious minority its basic rights by defining the minority as a threat to the traditional identity of the country. It is an indication of power relations that marginalize a legitimate religious minority. The political posters contribute to the hostile tone of the political campaign by inciting hatred and conveying the idea that the members of the Muslim community should not feel at home in the country. Vandalism follows violent speech. The act of deliberately damaging one’s property is a form of intimidation that threatens one’s ability to live peacefully in a society. When the property that has been damaged is a place of worship, the target is the religious group and its way of life. The political process ends with legal discrimination—the ban that prohibits the construction of new minarets on mosques. Discriminatory legislation that denies the rights of a legitimate minority—the same rights enjoyed by the majority—characterizes the minority’s religion, culture, or way of life as unworthy of public respect. It rejects the culture and religion of the minority and excludes it from the register of cultural recognition. The negative stigmatization created by the discriminatory law in turn fosters an inhospitable culture for the members of the minority. The various instances of the political campaign reveal the multiple facets of violence—verbal, physical, and legal—and remind one of the different forms violence toward differences could take. Several other incidents can be cited that illustrate the severity of the problem of violence toward differences. In December 2010, a group of Japanese demonstrators gathered in front of an elementary school for ethnic Koreans and used “bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies” (Fackler, 2012). Sometimes physical violence erupts spontaneously. Consider the attack of a spontaneously formed group of three hundred “concerned citizens” on peaceful protestors in Turkey while the protestors had been handing out leaflets to protest the condition of the Kurdish minority in the country (Milliyet, 2007). Physical violence may also be the result of an organized attack. The violent attacks of far-right groups on the Roma immigrants in the northern Czech town of Litvinov (BBC, 2008) and the attacks of anti-gay groups on Gay Pride marches in Israel (Haaretz, 2007), and Serbia (BBC, 2010a) show the consequences of the intensification of ethnic, sexual, cultural, and nationalist conflicts. Some political leaders have attempted to mobilize such sentiments against differences by offering projects that inevitably intensify existing conflict. Merkel’s claims that multiculturalism has “utterly failed” and the immigrants should work harder at immersing themselves into German society is

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just one example among many recent attempts. While trying to respond to the growing anti-immigration sentiment in Germany, Merkel advanced her own position on how identity/different relationships should be played out. She stated, “in the beginning of the 60s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country.” For Merkel, more than three million Turks and other immigrants living in Germany have never been one of “us” even after several decades; they are still aliens or Gastarbeiter (foreign or guest workers) in her country. She continued, “we kidded ourselves a while, we said: ‘They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone,’ but this isn’t reality” (BBC, 2010). The issue Merkel seems to recognize is that excluding and marginalizing the first generation of immigrants is different from rejecting the later generations since the passports of the later generation immigrants say that they are Germans. It is not clear what the immigrants should embrace to belong. But, since they carry German passports, they are part of the “us,” at least on paper. The later generations grow up in two worlds and their identity is a site of struggle. They are bilingual and they embrace some values of the prevalent culture, yet they are still foreigners as they are from a different culture and still cling to some of its values and traditions. While the immigrants are changing slowly over time and becoming more and more part of the German culture, they are also changing the meaning of what it means to be a German. The realization of the effects of differences on identity seems to be one of the reasons why political leaders have emphasized the crisis of multiculturalism. A growing number of world leaders, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, Australia’s former Prime Minister John Howard, and France’s former President Nicholas Sarkozy, joined Merkel’s views on the failure of multiculturalism. Sarkozy’s remarks neatly describe the underlying problem: “We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him” (The Telegraph, 2011). What underlies Sarkozy’s reaction is the challenge of increasing immigration and globalization to the “identity” of his country. The growing fear that immigration would erode the values and identity of the country, which has led the Swiss to approve a discriminatory law, is again at work here. Merkel tries to secure her country’s identity—its historical culture, traditions, language, and dominant ways of life—by calling for assimilation of differences and putting the onus on the immigrants to integrate into the society. The problem is that when differences resist pressures to conform and attempt to survive in their own “ghettoes,” protecting themselves from the transformative pressures of the dominant culture, resentment toward them increases since they are responsible for failing to comply with local traditions and culture. Unfortunately, the political projects based on this perspective are more likely to alienate the “locals” from the immigrants and the immigrants

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from the prevalent culture while eliminating the middle ground between assimilation and aloofness. Those who have expected immigrants to fully integrate are now beginning to recognize that immigrants challenge and change the dominant culture and historical traditions. The identity of the country is always a site of contestation and struggle—a never ending project. This is a process that leaves no identity or culture untouched. At issue here is the antagonistic and violent form this struggle could take. Merkel and the other leaders do not recognize that their attempts to maintain and secure the historical identity of their country by prioritizing it over difference inevitably constitutes a relation in which the difference is perceived as the “other,” which threatens the existence of the identity. Failing to grasp different forms of violence in the name of various forms of identity, and thus prioritizing identity over difference, is more likely to intensify conflict than to promote a culture that could contain conflict and prevent it from taking an antagonistic form. 3. Permanence of Conflict and Antagonism One promising strand in contemporary political theory responds to the urgent need to provide an account of pluralism and conflict that allows for the theorization of violence toward differences. Agonistic accounts of pluralism, by grasping the dynamics of identity/difference, offer promising insights about how it is possible to come to terms with the full implications of pluralism in late modernity, and thus to respond to the ever existing possibility of antagonism and violence in social life. Agonistic pluralism, as the name indicates, is first of all an account of modern pluralism that provides a theoretical framework for understanding the nature of modern democratic societies and political relations. The proponents of agonistic pluralism share an understanding of democracy as a regime that concerns the symbolic organization of social relations. The specificity of this regime lies in its centering on pluralism that refers to the end of the substantive idea of good life. For contemporary agonists, modern democratic polity is a stage of dynamic and unending struggle among contending identities and hegemonic projects over issues such as justice, inclusion, recognition, and, in general, struggle over the character, condition, and terms of the polity. That is why contemporary agonists conceive of modern democratic polity as an agon or struggle—a term ancient Greeks used to describe contest. Unlike the ancient Greek understanding of the agon that refers to a heroic contest between individuals for personal glory, contemporary agonistic democrats’ understanding of the agon refers to the struggle between collective identities where the aim is incessant contestation of relations of power, oppression, marginalization, exclusion, and violence (Kalyvas, 2009). One of the central assumptions of agonistic pluralism is that conflict and power have a central role in social and political life and are permanent fea-

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tures of it. This assumption is based on the idea that all social and cultural identities are relational. According to the proponents of agonistic pluralism, identity is not a pre-constituted entity that exists in isolation. Since identity is relational and dynamic, agonistic struggle is constitutive of social relations (Wenman, 2003). Agonistic democrats celebrate this dynamic social plurality and the conflict it embodies. For the agonists, ineradicability of conflict in social and political life is not a sign of imperfection, but an expression of a healthy democratic life. What is at stake is the perpetuation of the agon as the medium through which hegemonic principles, opinions, identities, values, and norms can be contested, exclusions can be problematized, and difference and diversity can be expressed. That is why agonistic democrats share a commitment to the creative potential of conflict in social and political life. However, struggles between social identities do not always take peaceful forms. The problem is that, at times, conflict among differences intensifies and leads to antagonism. Especially when identities perceive differences as threats to their own existence, reaction to those differences could take a violent form. Thus, agonistic democrats suggest, dealing with pluralism requires acknowledging not only the ineradicability of conflict, but possible antagonism that modern pluralism entails. The proponents of agonistic democracy acknowledge that claims to collective identity are an indispensable part of every stable way of life and that every individual needs an identity. As William Connolly indicates, identity is what makes us what we are and how we appear to others. It is the stuff that makes sense of our choices, wants, or consent. Our identity, Connolly writes, “is what we are and the basis from which we proceed. In that sense, life without identity, even if it would be possible, is undesirable” (1991, p. 64). Yet, this indispensable aspect of human life is always slippery, insecure, and dependent on the differences through which it specifies itself since there is no natural or intrinsic identity. Once we reject the modern notion of identity as pre-given, and recognize that every identity is constructed as a difference, it becomes possible to account for the permanence of conflict and ever present possibility of antagonism in social and political life. As Chantal Mouffe points out, if identity is relational, its being cannot be conceived as pure “presence” or “objectivity,” but has to be thought in terms of “contingency.” Put differently, “the affirmation of a difference is the precondition for the existence of any identity, i.e., the perception of an ‘other’ that will constitute its ‘exterior’” (1997, p. 26). This understanding of identity explains why the relation between identity/difference, which is a relation usually constructed on the basis of a hierarchy, can set the ground for the emergence of antagonism. As Mouffe points out, every creation of a collective identity—a creation of a “we”—signifies the drawing of a frontier and an exclusion, which introduces the designation of a “them.” The “we-they” relation is volatile and the creation of an “us” always takes place on a terrain that is marked by power relations, diversity

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and conflict. At issue here is the ever present possibility that “this we/they relation can become antagonistic” (2005, p.16). When the “other” is perceived as a threat to the existence of “we,” the “they” is perceived as an enemy, that is, in certain conditions identity/relation “can turn into a relation of friend/enemy” (ibid.). For Mouffe, what has happened in the case of the disintegration of Yugoslavia is an example of the antagonistic form that a “we/they” relation took. She describes the transformation of relations in the former Yugoslavia into a violent confrontation as a function of a “they” who were perceived as a threat to the identity of an “us” and thus as a menace to its existence. To use a different example, in Austria, Jörg Haider, after taking control of the right-wing Freedom Party in 1986, transformed it into a coalition of resistance by constructing: [a] frontier between a “we” of all good Austrians, hard workers and defenders of national values and a “they” composed of the parties in power, the trade unions, bureaucrats, foreigners, left-wing intellectuals and artists. (Ibid., 67) Mouffe argues that antagonisms can be triggered by any kind of “we/them” relations—religious, ethnic, economic, and many others. As such, antagonism can never be eliminated from politics. The political understood as antagonism “belongs to our ontological condition” (ibid., p. 16). Mouffe’s theory accounts for the permanence of conflict and potential antagonism that exist in every society. Any form of we/they relation can become the locus of an antagonism and take the form of friend/enemy grouping. However, Mouffe does not say much about how the identity/difference relationship comes to take an antagonistic form. It is important to grasp the dynamics of this transformation since the “we/them” distinction does not have to take an antagonistic form. This relation can always take a more constructive, or at least a less destructive, form. Connolly’s agonistic democracy provides a framework within which to make sense of the transformation of difference into otherness and the violent dynamic of identity/difference. For Connolly, while every identity needs a series of differences through which it specifies itself, differences can and do threaten the sense of self-certainty of identity. Without “difference,” identity cannot exist as distinct and solid. However, identity is contingent. To eliminate their incompleteness, insufficiency, or arbitrariness, to fix themselves into a form such that they appear as if they are self-sufficient and intrinsically true identities expressing the true order of things, identities tend to congeal into hard doctrines of truth and falsity, self and otherness, good and evil, rational and irrational, common sense and absurdity, normal and abnormal and so on (1991).

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As Connolly points out, struggles to fix an identity introduce the possibility of negating or marginalizing the forms of difference that have been defined as the “other,” since the only complete redemption for an identity is possible through the violent conversion of difference into otherness. He underlines that the drive to convert difference into otherness is not triggered merely by the actions of the other that “might take to injure or defeat the true identity,” but also “by the very visibility of its mode of being as other” (ibid., p. 66). In such instances, the simple existence of the difference incites the drive to convert the difference into otherness. The stronger the drive to a wholeness of identity as that of the unified nation, the integrated community, the normal individual and so on, the stronger the drive to convert differences into modes of otherness (1995a). One important aspect of Connolly’s theory of pluralism is his account of “politics of becoming,” As Connolly puts it, The politics of becoming occurs when a culturally marked constituency suffering under its negative constitution in an established institutional matrix strives to reconfigure itself by moving the cultural constellation of identity/difference then in place. (1999, p. 51) New constituencies that seek to challenge and modify the existing cultural terrain do not usually generate something positive when they disturb “the established code of obligation, goodness, identity, justice, right, or legitimacy” (2005, p. 122). To secure their existential condition, established identities direct their discomfort and resentment to the others who can be held responsible for their suffering. Within this process, the “other” is constructed as the enemy who holds all the negativity that one aims to eliminate. As such, Connolly sees a correlation between “pluralization” and “fundamentalization”: a relation based on the idea that each drive to pluralization is countered by a fundamentalism that reacts to the drive to pluralization in: a series of bellicose responses. The most virulent emanate from fundamentalisms that demand reinstatement of a unified faith, race, reason, gender duality, normal sexuality, nation and/or territory that never was secure. (1995a, p. xii) In Connolly’s view, the drive to wholeness becomes most destructive when agents believe that the identities they embody are “the best available copy of a true model and place that model above the threshold of legitimate interrogation in politics” (1999, p. 141). The existence of identities that deviate from the “true copy” induces resentment since it signifies the lack of a final model of identity. The quest for wholeness, then, leads to the consolidation of identities and suspicion, resentment and hostility toward other identities.

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For Connolly, the paradoxical relation of identity/difference resides in the fact that human beings need personal and collective identities: but the multiple drives to stamp truth upon those identities function to convert differences into otherness, and otherness into scapegoats created and maintained to secure the appearance of a true identity. (1991, p. 67). As Connolly argues, this paradox constitutes one of the fundamental sources of antagonism in social and political life. However, he suggests, this paradox is not an “iron” one, where there is no possibility of movement or possibility of taming its effects. He rightly points out that what is important is how the relation between identity/difference is negotiated. Today, the paradox of identity/difference haunts social and political life. Violence toward differences is very common as individuals and groups consider the existing differences and the emergence of new identities as threats to their own existence and way of life. Agonistic pluralism proposes a framework that allows for understanding the dynamic struggle between identity and difference and how this relation takes on a violent form while reminding us of the permanence of conflict and ever present possibility of antagonism. Based on their account of pluralism and conflict, agonistic democrats describe the central task of democratic politics as how to respond to the “resentful and violent” dynamics of identity/difference and secure peaceful pluralism. 4. The Limits of Agonistic Democracy An agonistic account of pluralism provides the most accurate framework within which to understand one of the fundamental sources of antagonism in social life in late modernity. As Bonnie Honig neatly explains: To take difference—and not just identity—seriously in democratic theory is to affirm the inescapability of conflict and the ineradicability of resistance to the political and moral project of ordering subjects, institutions, and values. Moreover, it requires that we recast the task of democratic theory, and move it beyond that of simply orchestrating multiple and conflicting group needs and toward a new responsiveness to that first tasks’s propensity to involve democratic cultures and institutions in violent and resentful dynamics of identity/difference. It is to give up on the dream of a place called home, a place free of power, conflict, and struggle, a place—an identity, a form of life, a group vision—unmarked or unriven by difference and untouched by the power brought to bear upon it by identities that strive to ground themselves in its place. (1996, p. 258) Given the inevitable conflict and struggle between differences, it is essential that we consider the conditions of possibility of a peaceful pluralism.

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Once one gives up the dream of perfect harmony in social relations and of a society of fully reconciled differences, it becomes possible to focus on developing strategies to negotiate identity/difference and contain antagonism. Agonistic democracy offers itself as a solution to the problem of how to respond to the resentful and violent dynamic of identity/difference and how to transform antagonism, a struggle between enemies, to a relation of constructive agonism, a struggle between adversaries (Mouffe, 2000). The two main versions of agonistic democracy propose two different projects to secure peaceful coexistence. Mouffe’s version focuses on political integration and establishing a common identity that binds multiple differences that coexist in the same territory. Her liberal-democratic community is held together by a common political identity shaped by the rules of civil intercourse informed by tolerance. Conflicting parties must be bound with a “commonality” to prevent a possible “we/they” relationship from taking an antagonistic form. In this relation, the opponent should not be seen as an enemy, who must be destroyed, but as an “adversary,” whose ideas “we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question” (ibid., p. 102). As Mouffe notes, the category of the adversary is best expressed by the real meaning of liberal democratic tolerance that implies treating those who defend ideas and values one opposes as legitimate opponents. The rules of civil intercourse that inform the commonality “prescribe norms of conduct to be subscribed to in seeking self-chosen satisfactions and in performing selfchosen actions” and set the requirement for belonging to the political community (1993, p. 67). That is why, for Mouffe, the constitution of “we” compatible with a pluralist democracy is the main task of democratic politics. As such, she identifies the central question of democratic politics as domesticating the potential antagonism inherent in human relations by transforming it into agonism thereby constructing a commonality, a “we” while determining a “them,” that is compatible with democratic values. To foster democratic values, Mouffe proposes different techniques such as the mobilization of passions around democratic designs (Mouffe, 2000). She believes that when political outlets are provided for the expression of dissent and passions, citizens will identify with forms of identities that will be compatible with liberal democratic values. That is why, she argues, “one of the keys to the thesis of agonistic pluralism is that, far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence” (2005, p. 25). When functional enough political outlets are provided for the expression of dissent and passions, what will result are democratic identities that do not construct opponents as enemies. As such, Mouffe argues, a “vibrant clash of political positions and an open conflict of interests” is what a healthy democratic process calls for (2000, p. 103). One significant problem with Mouffe’s approach is prioritization of a politics of incessant confrontation as a response to the problem of antago-

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nism. Mouffe seems to rule out the possibility that agonistic confrontation could very well lead to the intensification of conflict toward violence. This does not mean that a clash of differences and open acknowledgment of contradiction between values, beliefs, and ways of life cannot defuse tensions and lead to the cultivation of wide tolerance and even to strong commitment to understanding the other. Yet, if identities are asserted the way Mouffe envisions them, exchange is more likely to freeze identities than transform them, which is generally accompanied by dogmatism and resentment. In the case of her example of the former Yugoslavia, Mouffe does not seem to consider the possibility that the problem might be too much provocation on all sides, rather than simply failing to recognize that every identity is complex, relational, and already implicates a multiplicity of different allegiances that sometimes conflict with one another. Mouffe’s prioritization of a politics of agonistic confrontation requires an ethos without which there is high risk of violence. Without this ethos that could encourage a principled engagement and dialogue with differences, the collisions in the public life are more likely to take an expressive form that inevitably leads to an “us/them” grouping. Despite her emphasis on the significance of a democratic ethos required to support peaceful democratic pluralism, the tolerance-based democratic ethos she proposes is too weak to sustain a pluralistic regime. The idea of “letting others be” creates a power relation that inevitably produces a hierarchy between the tolerating and the tolerated. The problem is that the attitude of benevolence implied by tolerance could easily lead to a decision to not put up with difference when the difference challenges the fundamentals of identity. In that case, the tolerant attitude could very well take a more defensive form that negates the difference by converting it into otherness. Put differently, at times, even the tolerant could make an exception for the difference that challenges the core of their identity. As such, a tolerancebased democratic ethos is too weak to support a culture that is open to radical contestation and collision of identities. Connolly’s version of agonistic democracy seems to be aware of the insufficiency of Mouffe’s response to the possible problems that could result from the open contestation of views and collision of identities in political life. This is why he criticizes Mouffe by pointing out that her theory needs a “positive ethos of democracy” (1995c, p. 130). To respond to the violent dynamics of identity/difference, Connolly proposes agonistic democracy as the means to foster and perpetuate an ethos of engagement. He describes agonistic politics as a practice “that affirms the indispensability of identity to life, disturbs the dogmatization of identity” while cultivating care for the diversity of being (1991, p. x). Connolly, like Mouffe, believes that when political spaces for the expression of identity and difference are secured, the experience of democracy and experience of contingency foster each other. The important point is that

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this democratic experience should be supported by a democratic ethos embodying a culture of genealogy whose task is to problematize established standards of evaluation and identity. In this version, agonistic democracy involves opening up political spaces where anyone can “engage fundamental riddles of existence through participation in a public politics that periodically disturbs and denaturalizes” consensual ideals of political engagements, aspirations, and settled identities (ibid., p. 201). So, for Connolly, the virtue of a robust agonistic democracy seems to reside in the idea that by contesting settled identities and disrupting established conventions within the space of democratic politics, a more robust affirmation of interdependence of identity/difference may come about. As Connolly is very well aware, the attempts to denaturalize and disturb identities “can intensify the reactive demand to redogmatize conventional identities” (1991, p. 211). Thus, the intensification of the relational aspect of identity/difference and the contingency of existence may constitute a danger to peaceful coexistence and agonistic democracy itself. To respond to this problem, he proposes a new modus vivendi centering on an ethos of engagement that shapes the relationships between multiple constituencies on the same territory. He argues that there is no need for a universal “‘we’ (a nation, a community, a singular practice of rationality, and so on) or one anchor” to set democratic struggle, debate, and settlement (1995a, p. xx). In such a society, multiple interdependent constituencies infused by a general ethos of engagement foster democratic governance of a population. Connolly’s democratic ethos is based on two political virtues: “critical responsiveness” and “agonistic respect.” Cultivation of critical responsiveness involves a positive “active work on our current identities in order to modify the terms of relation between us and them” (1999, p. 63). The idea is to be critically responsive, that is, to suspend the existing codes of judgment to interpret the new identity, or movement, and to open up a reserve of judgment not entirely marked by the already existing ethico-political standards of judgment. To be sure, the idea is not to welcome all the demands of new constituencies, but to suspend the existing codes of judgment to interpret the new movement. Critical responsiveness serves to open up a new cultural space “through which the other might consolidate itself into something that is unafflicted by negative cultural markings” (1995a, p. xvii). So, for Connolly, critically responding to a new movement in the politics of becoming requires “at once to work tactically on gut feelings already sedimented into you, to readdress refined concepts previously brought to these issues, and to work on the circuits through which the former connect to the latter” (2005, p. 126). This hard work is supplemented by “subvirtues” to engender critical responsiveness such as: cultivation of creativity, close attunement to new circumstances, preliminary receptivity of negotiation, and a readiness to explore how some el-

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ement in received standards might be in need of selective recomposition . . . (Ibid., p. 127) Agonistic respect is defined as “a social relation of respect for the opponent against whom you define yourself even while you resist its imperatives and strive to delimit its spaces of hegemony” (Connolly, 1994, p. 181). As Connolly envisions it, agonistic respect is based on recognition of the contestability of our own fundamentals that requires us to come to terms positively with the fact that our identity, faith, moral belief, or philosophy may appear profoundly contestable to others endorsing different sensibilities. Unlike the politics of becoming, this social relationship takes place between constituencies who “have already attained a place on the register of cultural recognition—that is, on the register of being” (ibid., p. 381). As such, agonistic respect may bind opponents together in a partial, contingent, and a positive way—in a way Friedrich Nietzsche calls the spiritualization of enmity—by developing a commonality based on “experience of the problematic each pursues most fervently” (ibid., p. 382). A fundamental problem with Connolly’s ethos of engagement is that cultivating agonistic respect whose task is to subdue the resentment that flows from the recognition of the contestability of one’s identity is not an easy task. For Connolly, the acceptance of contestability, and thus our artfully working on ourselves to adjust ourselves to this new condition is a modest shift (1999, p. 147). This approach,, however, is deeply problematic because it does not take seriously identity itself. As Benjamin Barber points out, “a contestable faith is obviously an oxymoron—to have faith is to believe that what one believes is not contestable” (2007, p. 4). As long as fundamentals of different sorts exist—of religion, nation, race, sex, and value systems that make up the core of one’s identity—there will always be differences that are deemed threatening to identity. When others contest the core aspects of one’s identity, the respectful attitude that is necessary to contain latent antagonism usually disappears. So, the issue here is not to create light identities with minimal core, but to cultivate the habits that would contain antagonism before it takes a violent form. Connolly’s normative response to the problem of identity/difference prescribes a thoroughly liberalized society in which selves internalize the political virtues required to sustain that culture of contestation. Even when one endorses agonistic respect and critical responsiveness and argues for their desirability, there is one simple question that needs to be answered: Is the widespread dissemination of an ethos of engagement a realistic possibility? To respond to the resentful and violent dynamic of identity/difference, Connolly endorses an agonistic politics based on contestation and confrontation. To respond to the risks of agonistic politics, he imagines a culture in which the unavoidable conflict “between controversial views of the good life, ceases to be a problem” (Villa, 1999, p. 121). In fact, as Dana Villa points

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out, Connolly’s approach resolves the fundamental conflicts in a society by imagining a society “in which no individual’s or group’s ‘fundamental metaphysical position’ is fundamental in the sense that it is a truth that stands in irreconcilable conflict with other ultimate values” (ibid., p. 121). In that ideal society, the paradoxical relation of identity/difference is negotiated in such a way that no identity strives for closure and reassurance while being constantly challenged by the existence of differences. In this culture, people are thankful to the others who show the contestability of what is most fundamental to them through constant challenge, for their self-understanding depends on the other. Moreover, through “work on the self,” not only do we learn to appreciate and affirm without resentment those who contest the fundamental faith they honor most, but we also learn to welcome those new identities, demands, and movements that challenge those fundamentals. Identities do not rely on the old codes to judge the newly emerging movements; they use their creativity to come up with something new that will probably enable them to welcome the newcomers. Finally, in this culture of unencumbered selves, there is no more resentment, since, as it appears, the human condition is not marred by pain, injury, losses, sickness, and death. In other words, the individuals “overcome” themselves in such a way that human beings do not resent the transiency, suffering, and uncertainty of redemption that define the human condition. Simply put, Villa rightly concludes, “this is presuming a lot” (ibid.). While responding to the problem of identity/difference and violence toward differences, Connolly could not resist the temptation to develop a response that attempts to overcome conflict and antagonism, and thus solves the problem of violence toward differences once and for all. This is rather surprising since one of the essential aspects of agonistic account of pluralism is the ineradicability of conflict and antagonism in social life. 5. Conclusion Today, the crisis of democracy is deepening as a result of increasing clashes between identities and violence toward differences. To be sure, this does not mean the end of pluralism or multiculturalism as declared by Merkel and other world leaders. But it means that the attempts to deal with plurality, diversity, and cultural differences are bound to fail unless they grasp the nature of modern pluralism and the dynamics of identity/difference. Coming to terms with the full implications of pluralism requires recognizing the inevitable conflict and the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations. Once we recognize that there is no pluralism without conflict and ever possible antagonism, it becomes possible to consider the existential dimension of peaceful cohabitation and a democratic culture. Without an accurate understanding of the nature of modern pluralism and democracy, it is not possible to contribute to the promotion of a demo-

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cratic culture that fosters peaceful negotiation of conflict among differences. Merkel and the other leaders have failed to recognize the dynamic character of social plurality and how identity/difference takes on a violent form. Thus, their understanding of and approaches to pluralism only strain already conflictual relations. When political leaders privilege identity over difference and expect cultural differences to internalize the hegemonic values, norms, and ways of life without any resistance and negotiation, they create unrealistic expectations while marginalizing and excluding differences. In this struggle, the hegemonic identity is presented as the norm while the differences are the ones who deviate from the norm and who are unwilling to cooperate. As a result, the cultural differences are perceived as a threat to the existence of the local identity. The defensive attitude produced by this form of identity/difference ignores the contribution of different cultures, ethnic groups, and religions to the making of the identity of the nation and that what it means to be a German, or French, or British has always been changing. This attitude reifies the identity by drawing its boundaries sharply and thus naturalizes it, which, in turn, excludes differences permanently. As such, it contributes to the transformation of differences into others thereby exacerbating the already existing conflicts in social and political life. What late-modern life marked with increasing immigration and globalization brings is the inescapability of the “intensive entanglement of everyone with everyone else” (Connolly, 1991, p. 188). This means that there are always interaction, negotiation, and struggle that take place in the spaces of everyday life. The problem is that these everyday encounters and inevitable confrontation between identities do not always foster a culture where identities live together peacefully and interact respectfully. Yet, the inevitable encounter with a plurality of voices could very well lead to the creation of identities that could accommodate differences and promote a culture within which “we” learn from “them” and “they” learn from “us.” This is the mark of an identity that is not defensive and is ready to negotiate peacefully while recognizing the possibility that this negotiation could alter one’s identity. This is an identity that does not fear those who are different, and remains committed to peaceful cohabitation. Increasing resentment and violence toward minorities and differences brings to the fore the importance of peaceful cohabitation. Peaceful cohabitation implies that for peaceful diversity, differences should develop and share a habit—certain ways of acting, feeling, and thinking—that governs human interaction. Agonistic democrats describe this habit as the democratic ethos that needs to be cultivated to sustain peaceful pluralism. Indeed, I believe that they are quite right to point out the significance of a democratic public ethos for a pluralistic peaceful democratic society. However, despite their accurate analysis of modern pluralism and political relations that brings to the fore the problem of antagonism in social life and the paradox of identity/difference, agonists fail to propose a satisfactory democratic ethos to respond to the problem; they either say little or offer idealistic recipes.

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Democratic pluralism requires a thin and realistic ethos to foster peaceful negotiation of identity/difference and to contain societal antagonism: an ethos neither for devils nor angels, but for ordinary human beings committed to democratic pluralism. What is promising is that this ethos is already present in the countless daily interactions among ordinary human beings all around the world. Despite the dynamics that intensify social tensions and conflict, people of differing cultures, religions, ethnicities, and nationalities find ways to extend an understanding to the other and negotiate their disagreements peacefully. What needs to be done is to theorize this ethos that is part of the everyday experiences of peacefully interacting subjects.

Part Three PEACE THEORY IN DEPTH

Eight VIOLENCE AS THE CONFLICTUAL DENIAL OF SOCIAL BEING: A RELATIONAL APPROACH Richard T. Peterson 1. Introduction The theme of peace and public life invites reflection on the many ways peace can be an objective of public activity. Philosophers and activists concerned with this theme have long recognized that peace cannot be exclusively a matter of eliminating violence, even though movements have often accepted negative designations of their activity, for example, as anti-war movements and anti-nuclear weapons movements. Similar language is also found when the issues are not so much about state violence as about conflicts within society, for example, campaigns that address violence against women, police violence against minorities, or violence in schools. Indeed, although the term “nonviolence” covers all of these concerns as well as the important question of processes of political transformation, the relevant goals and commitments are by no means simple matters of eliminating violence, as if this could be achieved without changing anything else in social life. The idea that peace is a matter of positive institutional transformation is common to thinkers as diverse as Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant. Great nonviolence leaders and thinkers like Mohandas (aka Mahatma) Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. agree on this point and go further in exploring the positive changes within individuals and political movements if nonviolent change is to be possible and effective. Despite this general consensus, there has been no corresponding shared understanding of the ideas of peace or nonviolence themselves. Perhaps this is more a matter of these ideas being undeveloped than of there being clear lines of disagreement. Indeed, it is a striking fact about modern social and political reflection, whether in philosophy or the social sciences, that both the theme of violence and that of nonviolence have been, for the most part, neglected. The rise of peace studies as a research and educational focus is an important challenge to this neglect, but these efforts remain institutionally marginal despite their valuable work. The neglect of these topics seems less a denial of their importance than a matter of seeing them as absorbed in other themes, for example, the problem of a just society or moral action in practical philosophy, or the problem of institutional formation or social stability in

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social science. This may reflect a general assumption about violence itself, namely, that it is itself primarily privative (purely destructive) or that it is in some sense not social, that is, it is rooted in pre-social natural conditions whose transformation and supersession is achieved through proper social formation. This is a plausible assumption, since violence is indeed socially destructive in many respects. Despite its occasional role in the formation of persons as social beings, violence usually harms or limits social existence in one way or another. But this fact shows neither that its origins are external to society nor that it lacks functions besides its destructive ones. Indeed, the frequent intertwining of violence with various kinds of power suggests that violence can also play a formative role in what may still be problematic forms of social existence. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that violence has, for the most part, arisen with the development of human society, and that it is specifically modern society that has cultivated the most complex and cruel forms of violence (1992). According to Rousseau, emergent violence has in large part been a function of inequality organized through property relations. Although his view treats violence as social and as historically variable, it need not posit a distant golden age of society before violence. Neither need it project the possibility of an entirely pacified society in the future. From such a perspective, while the different forms of violence we encounter may have biological preconditions, the form and effects of such violence are matters of historical forms of social existence. Thus, they are the proper and necessary objects of social theory and social science. In this chapter, I will be working on some of the philosophical issues that bear on the conceptual underpinnings of such theorization. With this task in mind, it is sobering to recall Rousseau’s dismissive account of the relation between philosophers and violence. He portrays two reactions: either philosophers find ways to ignore violence, or they distort violence and otherwise offer misleading ways to think about it. Indeed, Rousseau’s indictment extends to modern intellectuals more generally and would presumably apply today to a wide array of social and natural scientists, engineers, journalists, teachers, professionals, and media experts, along with academic philosophers. To be sure, it is one thing to accuse intellectuals of underestimating the importance of violence or otherwise not making it a priority, and something else to claim that intellectuals both actively distort social understandings of violence or otherwise assist in the actual workings of violence. The question of how best to understand the role of intellectuals (including philosophers) in the workings of contemporary violence only adds to the already complicated questions about conceptualizing violence itself. Rousseau’s charge against philosophers does not claim that violence depends on their complicity, or that intellectuals play a constitutive role in violence. But more recent accounts do make this stronger claim insofar as they see forms of knowledge figuring within violence or see intellectuals as functionaries within violent systems of power.

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Michel Foucault’s notions of disciplinary knowledge power, biopower, and the related methodological resolve to view politics as “war by other means” introduce this idea without sustaining an explicit account of the specific role of violence in these processes (1990; 1995; 2003). How we think about the relation of intellectuals to violence no doubt depends on how we conceive of violence itself as well as where we see violence functioning in society. While these themes are too sweeping for me to address them systematically in this chapter, my aim is to arrive at a way of thinking about intellectual complicity in violence. In working toward this goal, the greater part of my discussion will focus on different ways of thinking about violence itself. I will move from what seem to be the most obvious and widespread ways of discussing violence through progressively more theoretical conceptions. Doing so provides a way of deepening the respects in which we explore the insight that violence is a matter of historically evolving social being. The three positions I will review are violence as a particular action (“direct violence”), violence as the byproduct of institutional dynamics (institutional violence (sometimes termed “structural violence”), and violence as a function of the dominant organizational features of a society (“systemic violence”). While I am drawing on what I take to be important alternatives in the current literature, my schema is not so much a survey as a way of organizing these themes around important dilemmas. So we are moving toward a more systematic perspective on violence, allowing for limitations on what systematic thinking can accomplish in this respect. Such are the aims of what I take to be a critical theory approach to contemporary violence. 2. Direct Violence It is not obvious where to begin when thinking about violence, since the nature and range of relevant phenomena are very much matters of debate. By starting with violence as an intentional action, sometimes referred to as direct violence, we can begin with what are incontestable cases of violence, though we may also want to include actions that, for some thinkers, are violent only in an extended and debatable sense of the term. We will turn to such cases in the next section, when discussing the idea of institutional violence. But with actions like those of warfare, terrorism, or individual cases of murder or armed coercion, we move within the boundaries of the most general prevailing understandings of what counts as violence. In addition, while threats to engage in direct violence may not obviously be matters of violence themselves, I will follow theorists like Johan Galtung (1999) and include these as violent acts. Similarly, there has been disagreement on whether psychologically menacing or hate speech should count as violence, but I will include these in my list of cases of violent actions or direct violence. We will need a concept

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of violence that indicates why all of these should count as examples. I will treat these all as instances of what I will call direct violence, that is, violence that takes place in an action whose agent intends to harm someone else. Some writers make the controversial claim that certain kinds of illegality should also be counted as instances of violence (Coady, 2007). It is not only conservatives who are ready to characterize political movements who break the law as violent, though this seems paradoxical when such criticism is lodged against such nonviolent challenges to unjust institutions as sit-ins at racially segregated lunch counters or strikes carried out for union recognition. Conservative critics are not always impressed by the avoidance of directly physical force, since the issue for them may have to do with violence as an action against the legal order as such. Some radical thinkers seem to agree, as when, for example, Georges Sorel equates the proletarian general strike with violence, or when Walter Benjamin takes up this idea in his reflections on a politics that puts the system of laws as such into question (Sorel, 1999). Bringing illegal or even anti-legal action into the discussion points us to the effects or harms that result from violence rather than the intentions that guide it. For the most part, however, discussions of violence (except those emerging from concerns with specific oppressions) take the harm that figures in violence for granted. Generally, this harm is taken to be a matter of physical and perhaps psychological suffering, injury, or death. Rather than go further into the question of the harm proper to violence at this point in the discussion, I want to underline what might be called the empiricist disposition that makes reflection on the consequences of violence unnecessary. This readiness to proceed from immediate appearances operates not just in thinking about the effects of violence, but also in characterizing the nature of violent actions themselves. Many philosophical discussions of violence proceed from what are assumed to be obvious facts of social experience. For example, in discussions of what counts as violence, controversial cases are frequently tested by their similarity to what are taken to be selfevident cases. This takes the form of linguistic arguments as well, with appeals to popular usage for deciding what is to count as violence. But proceeding from conventional understandings can both block an adequate reconstruction of the complexities of violence and misleadingly limit our sense of the actual scope of violence, as when theorists resist the idea of institutional violence, a theme to which we will turn below. My point is not so much that what are taken to be obvious cases are, in fact, controversial, but rather that they do not provide us with a clear conceptual understanding of violence. Indeed, I will argue that some of the commonplaces about violence are misleading. My working assumption is that a philosophical discussion of violence must be consistently theoretical in the sense of developing concepts that are part of a coherently conceived account that requires support from historical experience, but assumes that all experience is open to critical scrutiny. Since I will be arguing that we need to think

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of all violence in social and theoretical terms, I want to underline these cautions against “empiricism” at the outset. Doing so can be supported by the now familiar philosophical claim that behind empiricist appeals to experience may lurk unacknowledged metaphysical commitments (Derrida, 2010). Challenging empiricism can be a step in developing conceptual means to avoid dubious metaphysical presuppositions. In the discussion of direct violence, a case in point is the appeal to intention that figures in attempts to specify what distinguishes violent action. Some writers seem to take for granted that the intent to harm is the defining feature of such violence. Thinking along these lines has the advantage of distinguishing violent acts from natural events and from social accidents. To speak of a storm as violent, then, is to engage in metaphor, while to avoid speaking of an accident as violent is to sustain the respects in which use of the notion has an inherently critical force. If someone did not intend a harm, perhaps even tried to avoid harm, then we do not typically accuse that person of violence, at least unless we also assert the existence of an unconscious desire or otherwise veiled intent. One advantage of defining violence in terms of intent is that it allows us to establish responsibility for at least some socially caused harms. Such fixing of responsibility figures centrally in our legal practices and in the development of moral understandings where issues of violence arise. But, as legal theorists and moralists themselves acknowledge, there can be something arbitrary in fixing blame, since the agency of an individual or group can be compromised, and indeed, is shaped, by many factors and conditions. A metaphysical model of the subject as capable of evaluating choices and adopting intentions can come to grief when confronted by empirical and historical conditions of action. Physiological, psychological, and social relations can mitigate aspects of responsibility in different ways. Some observers have argued that the process of violence can have disabling effects even on the agents of violence themselves (Fanon, 2005; Scarry, 1987; Weil and Bespaloff, 2005). While none of this warrants abandoning the importance of issues of intention and responsibility in thinking about violence, such considerations should make us hesitate to rely on a specific idea of intention for locating what is specific about violence. In terms of the discussion so far, these models may be misleading insofar as they are insufficiently critical of the standard metaphysical model of the intending agent: even the “realist” reconstruction of action presupposes a fully conscious and rational choice among alternatives, including when the choice is made on strategic or instrumental grounds. In two contexts where these models have been used most freely, their standing on empirical, not to mention metaphysical, grounds has come in for much criticism. The model of the economically rational individual and that of the strategically rational state often fail to reconstruct the actual behavior of individuals in market competition or political leaders within international conflict. While

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such idealizations may be useful for different analytical purposes, they can also be profoundly misleading when thinking about violence (Polanyi, 2001). In addition to these mainly negative considerations about received conceptual idealizations, I want to add another aspect of the problem that will move us toward a more consistently social conception of violence. Thinking of violent action as the strategic (or instrumental) choice made by a subject not only idealizes the side of agency, but also implicitly treats violence as an instrument that is, in principle, independent of the agent (and of the victim as well). My point here is not about the instruments that are used in violence, but about the process of violence itself. It is one thing to treat a weapon as an instrument, but something very different to treat an instance of violence in which the weapon figures as an instrument. When we do that, we separate the violence from the make-up of the agent. This is a distinction I want to contest. In what I have been calling the empiricist (and implicitly metaphysical) model of direct violence, the agent is treated as prior to violence and may either choose or refuse violence depending on various considerations, some of them perhaps instrumental or strategic in character. Here, there is a kind of reifying or substantializing of the agent and of the violence (for example, as rational subject and instrument). This is, I am arguing, a misleading representation of the social process of violence. I want to urge instead that we think of violence with a more complexly relational conception than this provides. While it is plausible to treat the action and the subject as playing a constitutive role in violence, these are roles within pre-existing relations that frequently are already matters of violence in important respects. For example, the soldier firing on an enemy encampment acts within a strategic relation that presupposes ongoing violent conflict, perhaps publically articulated in a declaration of war. The soldier’s relation to the enemy is already a matter of violence prior to the new action, and what is constituted by that action is not only a new relation of harm to the opponent, but also a sustaining of the ongoing relation of violence. Within this context, the act is not so much a reasoned choice to employ violent means as it is the sustaining of an ongoing practice in which a host of violent acts figure within a larger violently conflictual relation among large numbers of people. The agent here is not a person who chooses to be violent, but a soldier who is already institutionally constituted as an agent of violence. The same might be said for police, professional criminals, terrorists, or even for the racist whose participation in direct violence may be more a matter of accepting routine cruelty than engaging in it directly. On this conception, violence is, indeed, not so much an instrument as part of a process in which individual actions, using specific instruments, are contributing moments. The more or less reflective or spontaneous nature of the individual act does not change the interconnectedness of the elements of this process. Thinking along these lines means that we see the action as contributing to, and emerging within, a relational process for which it is misleading either

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to speak of the agent as prior to and independent of violence, or to see the violence simply as an instrument external to the agent. While we have begun this part of the argument by noting reasons to avoid a metaphysically and atomistically conceived agent, we now see that the general philosophical, social, and psychological reasons for this are supplemented by what we infer from closer attention to violence grasped as a relational process. This approach may lead us to resist implicit assumptions that treat direct violence as a matter of isolated action. As we place it within ongoing relations, typically articulated into social institutions, we see that the constitutive role of the action extends beyond immediate outcomes to the continuity (or modification, as the case may be) of ongoing relations. This implication should not be particularly surprising, since virtually all social action has some reflexive impact on continuing relations or social processes. An act may conform to and encourage ongoing expectations and habits, or it may disrupt or modify them, and may do so in ways that are noticed or ignored, that become controversial or seem reasonable, and so on. Viewing actions as including this contribution to the ongoing pattern of relations and practices does not seem particularly controversial, but it takes us beyond the empiricism of common sense ideas about what makes up a specific act of violence. What I am calling a relational approach, then, provides an organizing framework that is an alternative to the metaphysical notions that I have claimed arise with the empiricist relation to common sense found in much recent philosophical discussion of violence. In following this approach, I mean to be drawing on the way G. W. F. Hegel makes his conceptual break from the main schools of the pre-Kantian modern philosophy. Thinking relationally changes our sense of the usual point of departure for discussing violence, namely actions of direct violence, for which an intent to harm is presumed to be a necessary condition of our speaking of violence. I’ve suggested that a background assumption of such an emphasis is that moral and legal understandings of violence assume a corresponding responsibility on the part of the agent. Shifting to a relational approach does not imply surrendering concern with intention and responsibility, but now the social terms of understanding lead to a political perspective on violence insofar as politics addresses issues that arise from ongoing practices and institutions. This relational approach introduces a more complex sense of the functions of agency insofar as it sees the violent act as figuring in the sustaining or modifying of ongoing practices and relations, and not just as intending or causing a specific outcome. The individual as understood by this approach is a social being whose individual actions emerge and have their effects within social relations. Earlier I introduced this relational approach to violence by drawing a contrast with an instrumental conception. Thinking in this social way makes us distinguish the instrumental character of the implements of violent action from violence itself, which is thoroughly relational. Arguing in this way does not ignore that agents themselves often reason instrumentally, but it does im-

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ply that their practical understanding of their actions is not adequate for purposes of theoretical reflection. Also, though theoreticians may sometimes treat instances of violence in functional terms, that does not warrant conceiving such violence, say, military action, simply as an instrument external to the make-up of the agents in question. However agents view the violence in which they participate, and however much violent acts serve social functions, we must conceptualize violence as a constitutive part of the relational complex that organizes the relevant social process. This relational conception of direct violence points us to another feature of violence that is often underplayed in accounts that emphasize the subjectivity of the agent. This is the fact that violence is always a matter of conflict. Here it is not just a matter of the violent act pitting one agent against another, but includes the social relations in which the act takes place. This becomes evident from identifying the relations that are constitutive of the violence, for example, those of soldiers in warfare, or of police in relation to law-breakers, or lynch mobs and victims of racial violence. With these examples in mind, we may even think that identifying the nature of different conflicts is fundamental to grasping the process of violence itself. This puts the model of the intending agent in a richer context, since not only is the violent act a relation to a victim, but it is typically (especially in the kinds of social violence that interest us most) a relation that has some kind of mutuality. That is to say, the conflict goes in both (or multiple) directions, and the act of the agent figures within a process in which the victim may well be an agent of violence as well, at least in the sense of resisting the aims and methods of the person carrying out the immediate act of violence. Even the passive individual victim stands in a broader pattern of social relations marked by conflict of one kind or another. Emphasizing the conflictual character of violence adds to our social rather than empiricist, or metaphysical, approach. It may also help us think differently about the harm caused by violence. Often this is identified with the physical and psychological damage that the violent act inflicts. Without questioning the importance of the suffering imposed by violence, we should also consider the place such experiential aspects of violence have within the relational process that unfolds through violence as a sustained process. One might note here the distinction often implicitly drawn between the harm caused by violence and what is at stake in a violent conflict. When the harms are equated with the destruction and suffering experienced by victims, these harms can be distinguished from questions of strategic interests, or even questions of justice or injustice. Thinking along such lines has the disadvantage of once again treating violence instrumentally, as the means required to achieve the goal that is defined independent of the violence itself. Doing so then disconnects violent actions from the relations they sustain in ongoing conflictual relations and from continuity with subsequent violence that functions within that ongoing conflict; for example, that of the occupying army

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that has prevailed in an invasion or of the criminal gang that has destroyed a rival group. I noted earlier that most recent philosophical discussions do not delve very deeply into the effects of violence, assuming that the harm caused by violence is a matter of suffering, injury, or death—in other words, impact on the physical or psychological condition of persons. If one resists stopping at this conception of the effect of violence, it is not to disregard suffering or to ignore that these contribute to the reasons violence is almost universally condemned. Rather, it is to suggest that there are other things to be said about the harms that result from violence once we have begun to think of violence itself in relational terms. We need to go beyond subjective suffering to integrate violence in social theory and to articulate what is at stake for politics in challenging violence. Here, the point is to attend to ways that violence shapes social roles and conditions within conflict. Victims are not only harmed subjectively, but also socially, in their position, practical potential, and other features proper to institutional and practical participation. Thinking relationally allows us to avoid treating these results as external to violence, as they may seem to be when we treat violence as an instrument or think of the harms it causes in exclusively subjective terms. For example, we should see the subordination of an enemy army as included in the violent relation between the armies. In such respects, violence shapes social existence and it persists within the conflictual relations that characterize social existence. While only violence of certain kinds results in death, all violence has a murderous character insofar as it undermines the being of individuals in some way. In murder, the victims are reduced to objects, cut off from further social opportunities to define themselves or to actively affect others. In violence that falls short of murder, the destruction is less complete, but it has the same quality of undermining the prospects for the self to evolve and for the person to engage with others on her own terms. Here, we may think of Fanon’s account of the effects of colonial violence on its agents as well as its victims (2005, pp. 181–233). The theorization of violence as a matter of social relations allows us to bring into closer connection what is at stake in violence and the harms it causes. My thesis is that we should consider this harm in terms of the relevant social relations themselves, at least when they are grasped as a historical disposition of social existence. According to my thesis, then, the harm proper to violence is not the suffering it causes, at least insofar as such pain and injury can also result from other sources than violence. Rather, what is specific to the harm of violence is its effect on the quality of social existence. With the language of “social existence” and “social being” in mind, we can speak of this as an ontological conception of violence. The term “ontology” does not allude to some variation of Heideggerian concerns with the meaning of being. But speaking in ontological terms does imply that violence affects not just the experience and relations in which per-

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sons stand, but also the quality of their agency as persons. The link between my emphasis on social relations and the language of ontology is the assumption that social being is itself relational. Following the Hegelian tradition, I take human social being to rest on distinctive kinds of reciprocity among persons. Hegel’s theme of recognition remains a key point of reference, as reflected in recent debates over Axel Honneth’s development of that idea (cf. Hegel, 1979; Honneth, 1996). My use of the idea of social relations as involving reciprocity among agents will remain fairly general and draws implicitly as well on Jürgen Habermas’s development of this theme in his communication theory (1985). Doing so allows us to sustain a notion of reciprocity that involves the possibility of the kind of discursive reorganization of social conflict that we often associate with challenges to violence. Drawing on recognition and communication theory for thinking about social being, then, allows us to include within our ontological notion of violence the idea of harm to the agency of persons. Violence is a relation shaped through activity (hence, a distinctively human social process). But it is one that undercuts in some way the potential reciprocity proper to social relations anchored in mutual recognition. This is perhaps most obvious when direct violence cuts off discursive appeal to others in favor of imposing an outcome through strategic application of the instruments of violence. It is telling that violence is articulated in strategic and instrumental terms, since the relational modification it undertakes is one that has withdrawn from an appeal to the other regarded as an agent, as deserving of the recognition and respect accorded to an interlocutor, however antagonistic the existing relation may be. Noting this is not to retreat from my earlier argument that violence is, in fact, relational and not instrumental, since my point here has to do with the practical stance of the agent of violence, not with the actual structure of the social process in which violence is enacted. Although we rightly condemn violence on moral, ethical, and legal grounds, not least because of the suffering it causes, we should also note that, in certain respects, resort to violence is a withdrawal from ethical action and from ethical relations. Without going very far into the issues that this claim raises, we can note ways in which violence is more than a violation of norms. In relation to existing forms of social existence, violent action denies the applicability of norms in favor of a process that imposes relations in ways not governed by norms involving shared agreement or recognition. This point is not refuted by the many respects in which wars and other kinds of violence involve some normative, even legal, aspects. The fact that there have been conventions restricting certain practices and encouraging others only serves to emphasize attempts to limit and contain the extent to which war making departs from normative constraints altogether. This aspect of violence may be most dramatically evident in the specific act of direct violence, the bombing of an enemy outpost, even the firing of a

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warning shot. But my relational emphasis has also underlined the respects in which such actions figure within patterns that shape and sustain relations. Even the relatively unstable or evolving quality of military violence (within an ongoing campaign, with its successes and failures), in contrast, say, to police violence (as defending relatively fixed institutional arrangements), involves the establishment of a pattern of relations that persists beyond individual acts. Insofar as these relations are matters of violence, they represent a specific kind of social being, one in which the potential reciprocity of human social relations as matters of normatively organized recognition relations is blocked, distorted, or otherwise diminished. Thinking of violence in ontological terms, then, includes noting how violence establishes a distinctive kind of social being, one in which the reciprocity specific to human sociality is limited and jeopardized. In its functions of sustaining and reproducing social relations, violence establishes a pattern that sets limits to normatively regulated reciprocity. In moments of change, violence may reduce or otherwise reorder the constraints on reciprocity, though it may contribute to an opening up of new kinds of reciprocity as well. If this is so, then at least some of the issues about violent versus nonviolent approaches to social change can be cast in terms of the conditions and potential for opening up possible reciprocity and mutual recognition within different social contexts. This is a theme to which I will return briefly toward the end of this chapter. Let me close this part of the discussion by noting one apparent implication of the ontological approach to violence. Violence as construed here is not so much a violation of a specific ethical or moral norm as it is at odds with normative regulation of relations and activity as such. By the same token, one might conclude that overcoming violence is not so much a matter of honoring a specific norm or achieving an ethical ideal as it is of bringing certain relations into the orbit of normative regulation. In most contexts, this point may not be practically significant, but it does bear on how we think of the specific value of nonviolence, as well as the specific normative offence of violence. Some authors, including the influential peace theorist Johan Galtung, seem to equate violence with injustice or some important part of injustice. But the ontological conception suggests that this is misleading at best. By constraining social existence so as to exclude the reciprocity that might be governed by norms, violence resists the application of normative judgment altogether. The point is not that we should not condemn all or most violence, but that we are confronting a phenomenon that is not susceptible to or governed by normative appeals (Peterson, 2012). Earlier, we approached this theme by referring to the harm caused by violent action as well as to what is at stake in the resort to, or challenge against, violence. While condemnations of violence rightly cite the suffering it causes, we may now see that most significant lasting harm is to the agency that is constituted by the social relations in which violence operates. This can

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be measured in different ways, including by the destructive impact on capabilities, power, autonomy, self-development, and membership in community. All of these can be grasped in different ethical or normative frameworks, but they are also a matter of the constitutive function of social relations understood as historically variable forms of reciprocity that bear on the recognition and development of these various aspects of agency. The defeated soldier, the terrorized member of a minority, and the intimidated spouse all experience a constrained existence that is both the effect of, and what is at stake in, ongoing violence. By the same token, challenging violence means seeking different terms of social existence, those in which normative understandings have an increased relevance. The ontological concept of violence, then, emphasizes aspects of violence that operate on the formative level of social being that establishes the terms in which normative understandings and debates have their place. The harm and stakes of violence are a matter of the mutual relations that shape human beings as social beings in a particular historical world. Though, in speaking of the diminution of, or harm to, social being, I have stressed the destructive aspect of violence, we need to keep in view the constructive or constitutive side of violence as well. Establishing a new oppression through violence, as in the example of enslavement, is shaping a new kind of social being. As Hegel’s famous “Lordship/Bondage” dialectic indicates, we can even see this as an emergent condition leading into a social form that is in some sense a step beyond anything previously available. So certain kinds of violence may be constructive in this double sense, perhaps even expanding aspects of agency for some persons. Nonetheless, one may still emphasize the preponderantly destructive side of violence, since it is primarily in this form that we face its threat today. In closing this part of the discussion, let me suggest that it casts some light on the issue I noted early in the chapter of whether illegality as such should be regarded as a matter of violence. Doing so gains plausibility from our now seeing violence as including action on social relations and institutions. In this respect, we are also now seeing that a relational approach avoids the empiricist neglect of issues about the effects or harms of violence. Now we see these as having something to do with social relations as well as with suffering, injury, and death. Nonetheless, connecting the notions of illegality and violence requires more discussion of the intersection of certain kinds of legal structures and social being. Following the conception of violence I have been developing, we can treat law in ontological terms as well, that is, as contributing to a kind of social being that enables and sustains certain kinds of recognition, reciprocity, and discursive interaction. If one follows the idea that the “rule of law” supersedes social relations in which certain violent practices, for example, revenge killings, are eliminated in favor of legally encoded procedures of judgment and punishment, then we might agree that violence is at issue when the legal

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order is violated. In this historical perspective, the rule of law results from political achievements that largely eliminate some kinds of direct violence by instituting legal processes. Particular normative codes and procedures may differ, but a certain kind of social being is thereby achieved: one in which the conditions and quality of certain kinds of conflict have been transformed. My point is not to try to resolve such matters here, but to indicate some implications of thinking ontologically about violence. In considering these questions, one can also note that the legal order itself harbors violence, not least in the apparatus of enforcement of the laws that otherwise have diminished earlier violent practices, but which may also sustain unjust conditions. Breaking the law can sometimes be a challenge to such violence, as in cases of politically articulated civil disobedience. Thinkers like Sorel or György Lukács view revolutionary violence as a more sweeping challenge to systematic exploitation encoded in the modern private property system. They raise the possibility that illegality introduces a kind of violence that is necessary for replacing ongoing social violence as enforced and encoded in the legal system as such. My point here is to note that, in all these cases, we see aspects of the ontological functioning of violence and the fact that a politics of violence or nonviolence includes an implicit orientation to questions of social existence. Noting this provides a useful transition to the idea that, in addition to direct violence, an account of violence needs to address its institutional forms. 3. Institutional Violence In addressing direct violence, I deferred exploring what are often viewed as extensions of the idea of violence to cover other cases of social harm. Sometimes labeled institutional violence, these phenomena have also been characterized by Johan Galtung as structural violence (1999, pp. 40–43). In contrast to cases of direct violence, institutional or structural violence does not typically involve intent to harm, yet real harm is done to individuals by the normal workings of social institutions, for example, the harm to residents of the areas around factories that discharge dangerous fumes into the air as a result of their normal production processes. When such harms are avoidable, and especially when the agents in a position to stop them from happening nonetheless fail to do so, critics sometimes speak of violence. Though there may be no intent that a particular victim be harmed, the acceptance of the institutional process that will likely cause such harm may justify speaking of violence in the structural or institutional sense. It is to those for whom the empirical touchstone in speaking of violence is the act that intends harm that the notion of institutional violence seems to be an ill-advised “extension” of the term (Coady, 2007, pp. 25–27). Sometimes, such critics seem to be resisting what they take to be the resort to rhetorical polemic when charges of violence are made regarding institutional harms. This

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criticism assumes a clear distinction between direct violence by responsible agents and the unintended destructiveness that occurs through institutions. One can respond by noting that the absence of intent to harm often does not relieve agents of responsibility for the harms that result from their actions. If an agent has relevant knowledge and capability to see that harms do not occur, then we sometimes attribute to the agent some degree of responsibility. If the owners and managers of a factory that pollutes its neighborhood know that this is taking place, then they bear responsibility for the outcome, regardless of whether they intended the harm. In this example, we assume management has the means to avert or significantly reduce these harms, although perhaps at a cost it prefers not to pay. Under such circumstances, one can make the moral and perhaps (depending on relevant statutes), the legal argument that the relevant owners or managers are culpable for the harms that occur, even if they never intended them. If describing the kind of harms I am discussing as matters of violence depends on the presence of responsible agency, then we may be justified to speak of institutional or structural violence. There is a culpability of agents, though the harms result from their following the rules of the institution in which they work, and these are not fashioned for the purpose of imposing those harms. This is not to deny that extent and degree of responsibility may be difficult to establish in any given case or that it may be difficult to decide whether responsibility can be fairly imputed in some instances. But such difficulties hold when thinking about direct violence as well, so they do not strengthen the objection to the idea of institutional or structural violence. Here, we are concerned with harms that result from the workings of institutions in ways that are not captured by speaking of accidents. Indeed, speaking of violence is a way of attributing responsibility for harms that might, say, in the workplace, be written off as accidental when, in fact, they were both predictable and avoidable. Speaking of violence seems appropriate when the management of a factory has decided to forego safety measures that would prevent a predictable rate of injuries to workers. Management may not know precisely who will be harmed and may have no desire that these harms occur, but they do have some responsibility for these outcomes because they were in a position to forestall them and chose not to do so. Here, violence is institutional in the sense that it results from decisions that sustain the objectives or follow the rules of an institution. In this kind of argument, the focus is often on the harms events have caused and on the respects in which these harms come to be seen as contingent, avoidable, and socially caused outcomes. For example, in the aftermath of the flooding of New Orleans triggered by Hurricane Katrina, it became clear that the damage and hardships that resulted had been predicted and were avoidable. But these harms were not avoided because of political and economic policies that sustain the conflictual social relations of economic and

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racial inequality (Squires and Hartman, 2006). In such a setting, the claim of institutional or structural violence raises political questions. A critic of the idea of institutional violence could accept the argument regarding responsibility and yet deny that it is appropriate in such cases to speak of violence. It is one thing to establish culpability for not having prevented a harm, and another to speak of violence. The problem with this objection is that it does not address the involvement agents have in the production of harms when our speaking of violence is warranted. Here it is not simply a matter of failing to stop others from acting, but rather of participating in actions that produce avoidable harms, regardless of whether these harms are desired. In this context, intent to harm is a less salient factor than engagement in conflict that ensures that harms will follow. Here we can return to an emphasis on the conflictual social relations in which the regular occurrence of harms is a part. As we saw earlier, the intent to harm in cases of direct violence needs to be understood relationally as part of the conflict in which agents are opposed to one another. We cannot separate the intent of the soldier to harm an enemy from the antagonistic relation in which the action is situated and which frames the terms in which the soldier thinks and responds. Indeed, a soldier may not have intent to harm anyone, despite carrying out duties and orders as a soldier in combat. Similarly, a factory manager may not want to harm anyone when enforcing policies that surely will cause harm. What is less decisive than the moment of explicit intent is the agent’s involvement in a conflictual practice that has the impact on social being that we have associated with violence. Whatever the precise intentions of the agent, the decisive point is that the agent is involved in a practice that undercuts the social existence of others as part of a conflict underway. In both direct and institutional violence, the significance and role of the subjective stance of the agent is inseparable from the relations and practices in which it functions. For thinking about the similarities between direct and institutional violence in this regard, Judith Butler’s use of the idea of framing is helpful (2010). The soldier frames the enemy as a threat to be destroyed, as a life properly put in jeopardy. In actual warfare, violence extends beyond combatants and, while civilian populations are sometimes conscious targets of direct violence, they frequently fall victim to what is instructively described as “collateral damage.” Here there is no intent to harm, but one rarely finds the suggestion that those harmed are not victims of violence. Indeed, the suggestion that these harms are accidental byproducts of violence that would not have occurred were there no enemy soldiers present misses a key feature of these contexts. The likelihood of civilian injury and death is known well in advance and accepted as an unavoidable consequence of warfare, as is the likelihood of unintended injury to fellow soldiers. The framing proper to contemporary warfare includes the acceptability of the loss of life even by those who are not the intended target of violence.

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Much the same holds in cases of industrial accidents, consumer injuries, environmental harms, and economic hardship. Here, agents frame relevant populations as acceptably vulnerable to the harms that some will predictably suffer. In these, as well as the military cases, the absence of intent to harm specific individuals should not obscure the fact that the relevant framing that organizes action treats those likely to be harmed as acceptable potential victims of harm. Even if an agent whose decisions set harmful dynamics in motion feels no antagonism toward those who are thus put at risk, the relation in which this takes place is itself an antagonistic one. If this argument is sound, then the idea of institutional violence— contrary to the assumption of many of its critics—does not involve an extension of the idea of violence that is appropriate to contexts of direct violence. Neither concept—direct or institutional—is of a more basic or pure violence, even if direct violence is the experiential point of reference that is the typical starting point for reflection on violence. We can press this point further by noting that our use of the framing idea in both contexts provides us with a way of elaborating on the claim that violence involves recognition relations. To frame the civilian victim of collateral damage or the victim of institutional violence as appropriately at risk, as particularly precarious, to use Butler’s term, is to provide a certain kind of recognition in a relation that is by no means symmetrical. The reality of, or consequences for, social being is that the being of the victim is more tenuous, the agency more attenuated, than that of the agent. The kind of decision that goes into unleashing violence signals that no particular reciprocity is sought, since the victim falls prey to objective forces unleashed by the weapon or the institutional policy (for example, regarding safety measures at work, environmental protection, or market conditions). 4. Systemic Violence Most debates about how to conceptualize violence are motivated by the same practical goal—to challenge ongoing social violence. They all encounter a stubborn persistence of patterns of the different kinds of violence we have been discussing. One may point to psychological or institutional compulsions behind such violence, but this risks drifting into an objectivist determinism that ignores how reflection and resistance can sometimes result in genuine reductions of violence. Or, one may invoke conceptions of rationality to explain this persistence, for example, by describing such violence as functional for institutions or reasonable for agents. But doing so is unsatisfactory because it ignores the respects in which such violence is also often selfdestructive or self-defeating. Indeed, such accounts ignore the diversity of possible functions and reasons that could appeal to the relevant agents. Dilemmas about agency persist. Although naturalizing explanations of violence

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are problematic, frequent recourse to them does reflect the difficulty of significantly reducing the occurrence of violence. The ontological approach I have been offering here provides a different way of thinking about this persistence of violence, one that is specific to the organization of social being rather than a matter of psychology, instinctual drives, institutional functions, or rational choices. This is not to say that these other considerations are irrelevant to violent events. But their contribution must be set into a historical account of a relationally conceived and conflictual social existence. Explaining this claim will allow us to return to our initial reference to the relation of intellectuals, and, in particular, philosophers, to contemporary violence. I suggest that thinking of the social organization of violence as systemic helps us grasp the persistence of violence, especially as we experience it today. Speaking of violence as systemic does not introduce a new kind of violence, but points to a characteristic of much direct and institutional violence. To speak of violence as systemic is to say that it is prompted or made possible by contingent patterns of existing social relations. It provides a way of talking about what one may have in mind when commentators wonder whether recurring deadly violence in schools tells us something about the larger society, or why so much entertainment takes the form of violence, or why citizens are disposed to support military interventions in other parts of the world. One may think that there is something deep seated at work in such violence. Speaking of systemic violence does not need to imply that violent events are inevitable, but it suggests that certain patterns of violence are in some way embedded in the society’s characteristic relations, indeed within the general pattern of existing violence itself. Speaking in logical terms has already involved us in a sense of how individual events or acts of violence figure in ongoing patterns of violence. Many cases of direct violence, say those of the soldier, the criminal, the police, the abusive spouse, or the racist organization, should, on this view, be seen as figuring in patterns proper to specific social relations, practices, and institutions. In such cases, individual acts both reiterate a pattern and contribute to its persistence. Similarly, instances of institutional violence are rarely isolated matters, since such events both express and contribute to the continuing practices of the institutions involved. The ontological conception allows us to move to a more general level of analysis and to speak of such violence as being systemic. To think of an act or event as figuring in violence that is systemic is to treat it as a result not just of a specific practice or institution, but of a larger pattern of violence proper to a society. In particular, it is to treat it as made more likely by the patterns of blocked and injured reciprocities that characterize social existence. In these settings, new violence is not only more likely, but also assumes the appearance of an objective force beyond human control.

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Insofar as this is a causal thesis, it has less to do with conditions that force or produce social outcomes than with a disposition of existing agency and institutional arrangements that results in violent events and helpless responses to them. As I revise this chapter for publication, the news media report on the latest mass killing in America, an unspeakably distressing slaughter of children and teachers in a Connecticut school. As more details of the event become known, the familiar pattern of explanations along with horrified incomprehension unfolds. To speak of such violence as systemic is not to suggest that it is beyond meaningful practical response. It is, however, to suggest that this violence emerges in a tangle of other contexts of violence, and that this tangle itself imposes limits to social understanding and practical capability that are inseparable from the blockages to social reciprocity that characterize violence as such. Since a violent world is one of blocked understandings, distorted mutuality, and compromised agency, it is not surprising that it is susceptible to new outbreaks of harms to social beings. The philosophical claim that I am making here is that such a world defies knowledge as well as practical regulation. In these respects, it is a world that is objectively irrational, since it undermines both theoretical and practical insight. To develop this claim, we need to note that speaking of systemic violence in the present sense is not a matter of saying that society is a system or that violence is a product of some part of society that operates systematically. The idea of systemic violence is neither a version of systems theory nor an attempt to evoke “the system” as an allusion to some social machinery that regularly imposes violence. By “systemic,” I mean something more indeterminate, namely, a kind of operation that results from the somewhat disorganized, even chaotic, combination of conflictual relations and incommensurable understandings and commitments that constitute the complex of violent practices and relations that proceed within ongoing social experience. In resisting the idea of a unified system, one can note that even those features of our world that have characteristics of systems (for example, the market economy and the bureaucratic state) are by no means self-contained coherent complexes. In part, this is because they, along with other spheres of social life, intersect and overlap with one another, and in part it is because they are characterized by ongoing practical problems that defy stable solutions. For us, the telling point is that, in this and other respects, the economy and state are traversed by conflictual relations and practices shaped by violence, a condition that introduces an inherent instability. Here, I am assuming an abiding violence associated with deep inequalities, racism, gender oppression, environmental destruction, and global strife. With this assumption in mind, we can argue that although such institutional contexts as the state or economy may in some ways approximate the coherence of a system, their actuality clashes with this intellectual ideal. Not only

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do such contexts lack the completeness of a systematic process, their conflictual features exclude any uniformity or consistency of constitutive norms or understandings. Within the economic domain, for example, despite the uniformity of the language of commodities, the nature of needs, practical aspirations, and life strategies are characterized by fundamental differences that exclude the idea of a unifying code or rationality. The lives of the poor, the racially excluded, cultural minorities, and so on create a complex of discursive contexts and practices that do not reduce to a common denominator. This consideration can be extended once we think about the multiplicity of life contexts that individuals traverse and the differential rationalities and understandings that attach to different spheres of life. I have been arguing that the institutional complexes we confront lack the coherence, stability, and consistency of articulation to count as systems in ways that correspond to such popular models as the computer, the biological organism, or the abstract bureaucracy as conceptualized by Max Weber. Needless to say, they also lack the kind of systematic organization projected by Hegel in philosophy’s greatest attempt to think of the modern world as a system. Rather than living in a world in which there is an objective drive toward rational unification, we confront a mix of incompatible demands and dynamics, a proliferation of interpretive perspectives and categories, a multiplicity of social processes that confront us with their quasi-independent dynamics. To say that violence is systemic, then, is neither to say that it results from one or more systems nor to say that it can be understood by systematic theory. It is to point to how violent events—whether in the senses of direct or institutional violence—often figure within a complex of social dynamics in which the individual already experiences violence as denied, distorted, or otherwise unsatisfactory forms of reciprocity or recognition, and instead must respond to multiple imperatives over which discursive challenge or mediation is not possible. We can point to domestic violence in contexts of unemployment, racism, uncertainty of family structures, and patterns of gender inequality, or fundamentalist terrorism in a context of past colonialism, authoritarian regimes, blockages of secular reform initiatives, and so on. To speak of violence as systemic is not to deny agency, but to characterize agents as finding themselves within complexes of relations that impose burdens, block options, constrain the imagination, and channel motivation. In the contemporary setting, this is characterized by a particular incoherence—in the intersection of clashing codes, the existence of actual conflict, and the questionable power open to the reflective agent. In the age of mass media culture, this is a symbolically overloaded violence, a combination of too much and too little reflection, too much imposed interpretation, and too little space for sustained independent articulation of aims and practical options. This idea of systemic violence views violent events as emerging within complexes that are already violent in the ontological sense I have been pre-

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senting. By depicting the violent act as itself a response to a complex that is in certain respects incoherent, I mean to treat this violence in such respects as also irrational. To say this is not to ignore that such violence may fit into some strategic or functional scheme, but to say that it cannot be reconstructed as a coherent response to the complex of conditions facing the agent. For example, while a war of occupation may overthrow a troublesome dictator, the imperial power then unleashes sectarian conflict, which creates a crisis in international law, exacerbates economic crisis tendencies, and undermines international cooperation on regional conflicts. All of this makes further violence more likely. What is strategically rational in some respects is selfdefeating and irrational in others. This is a point about the theoretical reconstruction of systemic violence as well. The theorist confronts patterns that make sense from one institutional perspective (for example, the strategic thinking of the military), but not from another (for example, the fiscal considerations of the state budget, the religious perspectives of the occupied country, or the legal and moral considerations bearing on civilian populations). Reasonable military strategies may be disastrous from a political standpoint, and self-defeating from an ecological perspective. The violence of the agent may both reinforce one interest and destroy another; it may follow one plan and undermine others. Intellectual schemes that, in the realist vein, emphasize state interests typically oversimplify the problem of political rationality in a world in which there are multiple and conflicting institutional requirements and perspectives. Thus, it does not seem too much to say that, precisely as we trace the violent event back to its differentiated social context, we find that it is impossible to provide a stable account. We should understand this as inherent in the subject matter (systemic violence), not an intellectual deficiency of method or theory. By the same token, although this analysis stresses a complexity and incoherence that seems to make the recurrence of violence more likely, if it introduces a mix of incommensurable factors, it may also allow for an unperceived fragility of certain kinds of violence. The block to insight can work both ways. As a result, intellectuals may be unprepared for significant ruptures in the continuity of violence, as seems to have happened in Tunisia and Egypt in the “Arab Spring.” I introduced the idea of systemic violence as a way of thinking about the dynamics that make violence a persistent part of social life. The claim that systemic violence introduces a distinctive pattern of irrationality into theoretical as well as practical life returns us to the problem of intellectuals with which we began this paper’s discussion. In turning to one respect in which philosophers in particular have been implicated in violence, I now hope to draw further on the ontological understanding of violence and to examine how this bears on philosophy’s historical attempt to explore the interrelations of reason and the world.

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5. Philosophers and Violence In developing the idea of systemic violence, I have suggested some ways that the issue of violence bears on traditional philosophical themes of knowledge and reason. These themes will figure again in my attempt here to discuss more directly how philosophers have been implicated in violence. For this purpose, I will draw on a growing literature on the place of racism in the philosophies of Kant and Martin Heidegger. My aim here is the limited one of showing that certain positions of these thinkers can be placed within the kind of social ontology I have been arguing is fruitful for thinking about violence. So we will not be concerned with claims about whether Kant’s and Heidegger’s philosophical work as a whole is shaped by racism or whether their personal conduct was racist. Rather, I will focus only on certain aspects of their work viewed both as theory and as social action, where I take this to include contributions to the discursive frameworks in which social understandings evolve. The relation of these thinkers to racism is germane here because racism not only mobilizes violence, but is itself directly a matter of violence in the ontological sense I have been discussing. This is the case when an individual or group withholds or diminishes recognition of another individual or group and views them as inherently inferior based on race. Racism excludes or diminishes the reciprocity of social relations and refuses a mutuality organized by shared norms. Although racism is by no means the only way asymmetrical reciprocity is structured in society, it is a particularly significant one in the modern world. Only after philosophers began to take racism seriously as a theoretical topic did the racial dimension of work in the modern Western philosophical tradition become an important theme of criticism (Boxill, 2001; Babbitt and Campbell, 1999; Bernasconi, 2001). Kant and Heidegger are particularly significant objects of such criticism in part because of their great influence as thinkers, but also because of the roles they played at pivotal moments in the history of philosophical reflection on racially loaded themes. It does not seem an exaggeration to say that their more well-known concerns with rationality, understanding, and human possibility were connected with their claims about racialized identifications and corresponding capabilities. For both thinkers, racial identification is, in an important way, a matter of the site of their activity as persons and as thinkers. In the context of their discussions bearing on racial themes, they explicitly consider their place as Europeans in a certain historical context. At the same time, their relation to such racially loaded identification is very different and reflects differences in their philosophical projects. Despite the philosophical innovations Kant introduces, he sustains the traditional stance of the theorist, and his most important contributions to racial thought consist of texts that have only recently attracted much scholarly attention. They provide an evolutionary account of the rise of irreversible

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racial differences that includes contrasts in fundamental capabilities among racial groups, placing Europeans at the top of a racial hierarchy (Eze, 2008; Valls, 2005). In doing so, he considers David Hume’s question about the differences between Europeans and other human beings in a way that amounts to an assertion of their shared position within a racialized world. In this respect, his work contains a performative dimension as asserting an identity with practical implications, for example, regarding the legitimacy of colonial force. In Heidegger, the philosopher’s treatment of self-relation and identity is much closer to his most influential theoretical work, Being and Time (1962). For him, the existential assertion of the individual and of the group assumes a historical priority over the discursively normed preoccupations pursued by Kant under the banner of Enlightenment. Although his account of human being rejects biological categorization, Heidegger’s assertion of a völkisch (a people’s) identification in the struggle with other groups converges historically with overtly racist thought and practice (Faye, 2011). Rejecting Enlightenment ideals as fostering a kind of alienation, Heidegger casts a non- or even irrationalist relation to particularistic identification as the stance illuminated by philosophical insight. The assertion of a collective authenticity in the face of a conformist and nihilist modernity provides at once a response to the joint failure of traditional philosophy and modern institutions. Though in very different historical circumstances, both thinkers are concerned with scientific and technical reason and its bearing on the prospects of the modern world. Committed to Enlightenment as a process through which all persons might one day think for themselves, Kant espouses a universalism that he later argues will make a world without war a genuine possibility, thus, seemingly retreating from his racializing views. Heidegger’s more militarist stance coincides with a skeptical view of the promise of science and technology and, indeed, subordinates the claims of discursive reason to those of collective identity assertion, at least to the extent that this provides an opening to the problem of being. To say that these thinkers are implicated in racism is to argue that they contribute to the misrecognition relations that characterize and sustain racism. Insofar as Kant develops a biological conception, and Heidegger asserts a kind of existential necessity, they both articulate racializing identifications in ways that defy discursive justification or modification, thus placing it beyond the regulation of common norms. Their readiness to see action formulated in terms of these identities to be backed up by military force confirms this linkage of racialized thinking to violence. But this only adds to a violence already inherent in the misrecognition relations asserted by racialized identity itself. The theme of racism in Kant and Heidegger, then, has a performative dimension: both thinkers adopt a racist position more by embracing racist identities than by making racist theoretical claims. If racism is properly viewed as a kind of violence, then this part of their work can itself be viewed as violent insofar as it asserts racist identities. Is there any reason to connect

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this part of their work with the neglect I have already asserted regarding systemic violence in the worlds they confront? Doing so would follow a familiar way of thinking about racism as a response to unsolved institutional dilemmas and social conflicts. The irrationality I have associated with systemic violence perhaps has echoes in the extent to which these philosophers frame racialized identities that are beyond the reach of discursive rational reflection. For Heidegger, this is central to his ontological project with its break with modern epistemology. For Kant, the naturalized racial identity illustrates his wider inability to square what he takes to be the results of theoretical reason (in this case illustrated by his speculative evolutionary account of the rise of races) and the (universalistic) demands of practical reason. To this we can add the observation that, insofar as it is a matter of identity, Kant’s race concept goes beyond biology into social and political self-understanding in ways that his own philosophy cannot develop as a rational process. With that in mind, it bears noting that identity is not just a matter of detached theoretical interest for either thinker, but represents a shift from a strictly contemplative stance for philosophy as it positions the thinker—as thinker—in a particular position within history and contemporary social relations. By affirming and even asserting racializing identities, these thinkers contribute to the social articulation of recognition relations—relations that are violent in their blocking of reciprocity. Through the situated identities they assume, philosophers performatively assert a social relation as well as provide theoretical arguments for the value of adopting the identities themselves. In ideas of biological process developed by Kant, or ontological dilemmas framed by Heidegger, they depict a historical context marked by a certain kind of necessity and by practical options that project a future constrained by racial difference and antagonism. That their theories are highly abstract and removed from popular discussion and understanding does not remove them from the dynamics of racial violence, though their contribution operates on the most abstract levels of discursive reflection. The heightening of reflexivity within the disorganized and confusing contexts of modern social practices makes their contributions important, since they thereby indirectly contribute to a host of other specialized discourses that in turn play diverse mediating roles in society. If we read Kant and Heidegger as I have here, we see how at least part of their philosophical work contributes to racism, and, thus, to the relational character of violence as I have conceptualized it in this paper. Indeed, we can go further and argue that their philosophical racism positions their work within modern systemic violence and the irrationalities with which it is associated. If we view their work as responding to a world characterized by systemic violence, then the gaps in their interpretation of this world are instructive about the problematic racializing in which they engage. They do not grasp the extent to which their reflections on identity themes figures in a world of vio-

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lent conflict that extends to the terms of social understanding and practical engagement. Nor do they see that their contribution to social identities figures in a pre-existing framework of blocked and exclusionary recognitions or that their discourse figures in the elaboration of the corresponding frameworks of violence. From the standpoint of a philosophical engagement with the problem of violence, the work of these philosophers fails to confront the problem of modernity adequately because it fails to connect the problems of knowledge and reason as these intersect with the evolving conflictual complex of social relations. Such a critical conception of the role of philosophers is not new, insofar as it continues the kind of critique of philosophical practice already initiated by Rousseau and Karl Marx. But, by emphasizing the role of violence in the structure of the world to which philosophers respond, it may add something new to our conception of the kind of roles played by philosophers who are insufficiently reflective about their own activity as intellectuals. With the idea of systemic violence, we discussed respects in which the violence that is at work in our world affects the understanding and practice of rationality itself. My claim included the idea that the knowability of our world is diminished by systemic violence. This casts a very different light on the theme of the limits of reason than is found in the critical philosophy or its Heideggerian alternative. If we accept something like this thesis, then Kant’s racialization of social hierarchies at odds with Enlightenment universalism is both a matter of philosophy’s complicity with violence and a theoretical failure to grasp the historical extent of the blocks to a more rational society. The problem of violence thus assumes importance for the Kantian question of unifying theoretical and practical reason. If violence figures in the construction of a world that resists theoretical knowledge and defies practical reason, then not only is the world resistant to morality, but it also projects social appearances that may mislead the theorist. When Kant adopts the biological reification of race, he falls prey to a kind of social empiricism. The equation of historical differences (for example, cultural differences between Africans and Europeans) with biologically encoded ranking of inherent rational abilities allows Kant to sidestep the violation of universal norms by European colonialism (something he resists in other contexts). If the involvement of philosophers in racism illustrates complicity with violence, it is, of course, only part of the story. Kant, in particular, remains an important figure in the history of challenges to political violence, and his work continues to provide resources for those who challenge violence as well as the oppressions with which it is typically associated. But the case of racism may have distinctive value for thinking about the problem with which we began, namely, the relation of philosophers to peace. If the ontological notion of violence I have offered here is sound, then racism offers a kind of paradigm of the kind of distorted sociality that must be the challenge to any critique of violence.

Nine ON THE NATURE OF PUBLIC LIFE IN PLATO AND RANCIÈRE Wendy Hamblet In The Republic, Plato has Socrates construct two models of cities. The intent of the multiple political constructions is to witness “in large letters” how justice and injustice occur in communal life, but this intent has a deeper motivation, since the cities model on the large scale the causes and effects of justice on the micro-level—in the individual soul. However, in the nine books that follow, justice may be shown to arise in souls and cities. Plato tells us up front precisely what justice is, an admission that brings extreme urgency to the ensuing discussion: justice is the “definitively” human excellence (335c), the specific purpose or work of the human soul and the virtue that defines its possessor as human (353e). Thus, the unjust risk not only their happiness and their soul’s equilibrium; they also risk ontological demotion. Injustice separates people from their full humanity. Few would argue against the models of justice mapped out in The Republic as applied to personal dynamics. Most people would agree that the good life is more achievable when the three parts of the human soul, the appetites, the passions, and the rational element, are in harmony and reason takes the lead. But it is not so clearly indisputable that this model, applied to cities, offers the same convincing picture of justice for each element of the citizen body. Do the cities guarantee a fair and balanced distribution of benefits among the distinct human components of the state? Jacques Rancière, French philosopher at the University of Paris 8 and student of Louis Althusser, accuses Plato of just this violation of democratic justice. He argues that Plato employs various ruses to cheat the working class of its rightful part in the “common good” of the cities, manipulating the conditions of labor to keep the “inferior-natured” working class out of power and their political voice silenced. He charges that the shoemaker, the weaver, and the farmer get the short end of the political stick: The absolute simplicity of artisans, their absolute lack of leisure, and the endless process of perfecting their trade must be postulated to exorcize the Promethean threat: not that workers would become, or seek to become, gods, but that they would set in motion a city of productive work that is at the same time a city of absolute artifice, a city producing its discourses as its tools—in a word, a democracy or, what comes down to

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Let us revisit The Republic to see how the various classes fare with regard to their access to essential elements of the good life that, for Plato, defines human flourishing. The Republic offers not one, but two models of just cities and often only the second, admittedly inferior, city is interpreted as “ideal,” rather than as the more accurate translation of city in idea. The first city Socrates constructs envisions a number of essential workers gathering “as partners and helpers” for the express purpose of putting their work “at the disposition of all in common” (369e). The farmer, house-builder, weaver, and shoemaker each specialize in their specific crafts—“one man, one art”; each, “exempt from others’ tasks, does one thing according to nature and at the crucial moment” (370c). The mention from the outset of a favorable season for work and matching nature to tasks raises Rancière’s suspicions. That work be done at the “crucial moment” and in accord with nature makes good sense in the case of farming. The seeds need to be planted at just the right time, crops harvested when they are at the peak of ripeness. Homes too need to be built before winter sets in, and roofed before the rains. But the urgency for time management and consonance with nature is not as immediately evident as Socrates suggests in the case of the shoemaker. Since shoemaking is much less complex an art than house building, the caveat to stick to one’s own seems to needlessly restrict the shoemakers’ leisure. Carpenters, smiths, and other artisans are then added to the partnership to fashion the other workers’ tools. But thereafter, the quality of human additive degenerates. In a scantily disguised attack upon the new-moneyed merchants of the budding democracy of his day, Socrates describes the merchants whom he adds to his imaginary city as “weak-bodied persons, unfit for labor.” Given the general Greek conviction of the unity of the virtues, we may assume Socrates to be saying that the men assigned to the marketplace to exchange goods for money are both simple-minded and morally weak. It is hardly surprising that the merchants are swiftly joined by throngs of seafarers hanging about the docks and, no doubt, looking for mischief. The construction completed, Plato describes in shining detail the public life of citizens in this city. Socrates holds forth: First let us consider what manner of life men so provided for will lead. Won’t they make bread, wine, clothing and shoes? And when they have built houses, they will work in the summer, for the most part naked and without shoes, and in the winter adequately clothed and shod. For food they will prepare barley meal and wheat flour; they will cook it and knead it. Setting out noble loaves of barley and wheat on some reeds or clean leaves, they will stretch out on rushes strewn with yew and myrtle

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and feast themselves and their children. Afterwards they will drink wine and crowned with wreathes, sing of the gods. So they will have sweet intercourse with one another and not produce children beyond their means, keeping [watch] against poverty or war. (372ab) The deciding feature that determines the city’s peaceful, bucolic existence is posited from the outset—citizens’ needs are amply provided. No one is stockpiling extras and all are sharing freely in the goods that each citizen makes. Nothing is withheld from the common table for private enjoyment. Simplicity, prudence, generosity, and artistic specialization are the marks of the simple city-dwellers, who live out their days in peace and health, and then pass down their amiable lifestyle faithfully to their children. An idyllic scene this seems. But are things really so perfect in the simple city? Rancière is suspicious: Why does Plato take such pains to keep the skilled workers at a distance from marketplace, posting merchants in their stead to preclude the need for skilled workers to be loitering about the city, leaving their fields and their crafts unattended? Perhaps Plato worries that these simple folks might see pretty things in the market that they cannot afford. Perhaps they might hang about street corners complaining about their lot and inciting revolution among their fellow workers. Worse, heaven help the city if the workers should make it to the assembly where they might interfere in politics! But Plato does not hint at the slightest wrong in this pleasant scene of simple communal sharing, except perhaps in Socrates’s closing warning to the happy flock to keep watch against poverty or war. The community exemplifies a just, humane, social world, a healthy balance that excludes opportunity for social dis-ease. Socrates confirms our impression: this is the “healthy city” and the “true” (373b). Plato’s two brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon, are scandalized by this simple city. They challenge Socrates’s bucolic description by declaring his healthy community a “city of pigs”; the fare is too spartan for their sophisticated tastes. Simple folk may be happy with loaves and wine and singing for the gods, but they want more and more. Having determined how cities ought to be organized, Socrates grants the concession to reality and proceeds toward a second construction. If a fevered and swollen city is what the boys want, then a luxurious city “gorged with a bulky mass of things” will now be drafted (373b). The second city, Socrates concedes, may better serve their purpose of examining justice, by granting better opportunity to distinguish the ways that “justice and injustice naturally grow in cities” (372e). So, what additional components are added to the second city to usher in the injustice that will bring justice into greater relief ? Couches, tables, and other furniture, relishes, perfumes, incense, courtesans, and cakes—“all sorts of them” (373a). The simple vegetarian diet is abandoned (373c) as swine is

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added to the menu. Swift on the heels of these “fatted beasts,” the doctors immediately appear. The two evils against which Socrates cautioned— poverty and war—are not readily apparent in the second city, but their seeds are sown from the start: as the people gain in luxuries, their increasing acquisitiveness and covetousness are evidenced in the boundaries drawn to mark the land and the army that arises to protect the swelling assets. Here, the warriors of the state are ushered into existence, and with them, the philosopher-auxiliaries, with the precise charge to oversee the education of the state watchdogs. The earlier city had little need for formal education; we may assume that it involved apprenticeship in the technical arts and lessons in traditional wisdom, learned at the father’s knee and in communal feasts. But in the second city, Plato makes explicit the reason for the more rigorous education of the guardians: those who love war are dangerous characters. Music and gymnastics are critical to the education of warriors because their savage natures must be soothed and their aggressive urges channeled to avoid the city’s primary threat: the guard-dogs might turn upon their friends. Philosophers are added to the second city precisely to address this threat. The best among the guardian ranks are made auxiliaries, overseeing the education of the rest. They are also charged with a second critical task: to manage the truth and lies (the political myths) that keep the social classes in their places. These places are explained to the populace as “natural,” but Plato’s admission that the myth is a lie witnesses the truth that “natural kinds” do not correspond with birth lines. This is quite a radical claim in a society where birth lines are assigned such great significance. The Greeks often traced their lineage back to gods and heroes. Socrates traced his heritage to Daedalus (Euthyphro, 11b), and the aristocratic code of honor is pinned to ancestral obligations down princely lines of descent. The second city’s lie of the metals in citizen souls uses “nature” the way we speak of “character,” something intrinsic to the individual and not merely some common genetic core. Indeed, if genetics could be counted upon to deliver up character in reliable batches, there would be no need for the second critical task assigned the philosopher-auxiliaries, which is to keep a rigorous watch over the children to be certain that the social place assigned by birth matches the character evidenced in their actions. For Plato, the concern is very real: under no circumstance should a citizen of philosophical nature, though born the son of a cobbler, be left to making shoes. Under the same restraint, the prudent working person must never be left to defend the city or to rule it in place of the philosopher-kings. The guard dogs become necessary because the citizens of the second city have greater material temptations thrown in their path than they can handle given their natural apportionment of prudence (sophrosune); the workers must have loitered too long in the marketplace and become dazzled by its superfluous trappings. Armies and politicians join the second city, not be-

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cause every good city needs philosophers and warriors—they were unnecessary in the healthy city—or because these functions are the only satisfying vocations for people of “higher natures.” Rather, philosophers and warriors —with their peculiar arts of music, gymnastics, and philosophy—are added to the second city as antidotes to its unhealthy excesses. So, if we are to accept Plato’s imagery, armies and arid intellectuals are no more essential to cities than music, gymnastics, and philosophy are essential aspects of the good life. Indeed, arid philosophizing is banned when Socrates asserts that philosophers in the city must not be permitted to do what they do today, refusing to go down into the cave and serve their cities (Republic, 7.519). If my reading (that philosophy for its own sake is banned) is accurate, then shifting our analogy back to the micro-level of the human soul, temperance (sophrosune) alone, without heartfelt courage or heady reason, must be adequate to moral and eudemonic flourishing in the single soul. Or, as Rancière contends, is the simple city’s sole virtue merely a ruse that limits the working class to narrow, frugal, unmusical, unphilosophical, apolitical existence? At first glance, one may be inclined to agree. Since the model writ large extrapolates from a single multifaceted soul to a state full of whole human beings, The Republic’s tripartite model seems to diminish each social class to a one-third share in holistic fulfillment. If we consider the city along the homological model (Lincoln, 1986), the worker-producers’ identification with the groin and the stomach hardly measures up to the “higher” functions of the guardians and philosophers, located in the head and heart. Moreover, since the formally educated classes of the state are the only ones afforded the leisure time that is the condicio sine qua non of philosophy as well as of state leadership, one might conclude that Plato, like the subtly abusive husband, employs the ruse of “care” to keep the “weaker natures” safely “in their places.” For Rancière, all is not well in the simple city where workers quietly go about their work and mind their own business (1995, p. 11). He says that an “outrageous” definition is critical to the illusion that the city is ideal. In the simple city, the “demos” is “the whole of the people,” since everyone is working and no one has special status as a warrior or a king, whereas in the second model, the demos is comprised only of the poor working class, “the party of those who have no part” (ibid.). The poor workers, confined to their fields and their workshops, cannot show up in the assembly so they enjoy no political voice. Here, the crafty French philosopher pulls off a cunning sleight of hand, sliding his discourse from the simple city to the fevered and swollen city. Not being from the right class of people—the dedicated, formally educated thinkers—the poor working class cannot enter political discourse, run for office, or elect members of their own class to represent their interests. They are never really consulted, never really counted. The working classes never really count.

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Then, sliding again from The Republic to ancient Athens and into the modern world, Rancière charges: censuses by experts, funded by plutocrats, identify what the “people” need, and then chart the consequent direction of state policy and law to keep the lowly workers constantly and busily at work. Rancière disinters a founding ruse from the ground of Western political thought: the first democracy in Athens, like The Republic’s second city and like modern democracies, rests on a grounding lie that the state is composed of three equal parts. These parts are the three classes with three distinct natures, each with its specific good (axia). The best natures (aristoi) have their excellence (arête); the wealthy few (oligoi) have their fortunes (ploutos); and the others (the demos), have their empty good, the freedom of the people (eleutheria). After Solon abolished debt slavery, and the rich were henceforth forbidden to seize the bodies of the poor who defaulted on their debts, the elusive value (axia) of the “demos” arose—the freedom of the poor people. Politics begins with a major wrong: the gap created by the empty freedom of the people between the arithmetical order [the useful order of production and exchange] and the geometrical order [the just proportionality of the cosmos]. (Rancière, 1995, p. 19) Rancière highlights a crack in the foundation of Western democratic politics. Without a free voice in politics and a fair share in societal goods, the poor are but unfettered slaves. But the illusion of their freedom is critical to their enslavement and their disenfranchisement. It is precisely the discourse of democratic freedom that masks the people’s abjection, concealing the economic and political realities that confine the poor workers to their bondage. As Athens is launching the first democratic ship of state that will establish the model for future Western political forms, Plato launches the first philosophical model of a just state, the simple city composed entirely of workers. It is precisely in this ship of state that Rancière locates the founding injustice, charging that Plato chains the poor below deck, so that they will be unable to interfere in politics. Is the simple city’s design intended to keep the workers from the communal discourse that inspires revolutions and culminates in political activity? Rancière thinks so, but I disagree. There is no formal politics in the simple city; no inclusions, no exclusions. The simple villagers already realize the natural politics captured in Confucius’s aphorism: the good son is already the good politician. If politics is the art of shepherding (or parenting) the community such that people are rendered good (as it is presented in Apology, Crito, and Statesman), then The Republic’s simple city has already achieved, by structural design, what politics aspires to achieve by lobbying, governing, and lawmaking. In this city, no politicians exist for the same reason that no philosophers or armies exist: the people have already been counted; they have been abundantly accounted for; they all count because they count others as counting. The people’s natural

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justice—their rational, courageous, temperate judiciousness—fulfills their souls’ destiny in happiness, just as it realizes holistic communal flourishing. I believe it is a mistake to read in this dialogue that “simple natures” are inferior. Simplicity is a mark of excellence in the Ancient Greek value system. The simple, modest, hardworking person, whose primary virtue is prudence, is the best sort of citizen, because prudence is a much broader virtue than we often appreciate. As confirmed in the Statesman and the Timaeus, the simple worker shares the virtue of the statesman and the divine demiurge: the virtue of heavenly measure. The simple villagers are well-rounded whole souls with natures that mirror the heavens, stable and unwavering. The dangerous characters that need philosophers to keep them in line have the inferior qualities of unpredictability and volatility. This is why the passionate, warloving natures pose the greatest threat to the city and require careful and constant monitoring, special education, and removal from the city’s material temptations. Savage natures cannot, without strict oversight, be trusted even with friends. On Plato’s terms in this dialogue, politics enters human life as gratuitously as music and philosophy. It becomes necessary in response to the injustices of poverty and war, which fragment communities and tear souls apart. When moderate people limit their appetites and share the common feast with their neighbors, they are naturally rational, naturally courageous, and naturally just. They may also be naturally philosophical and naturally musical—as these arise as readily from wonder and joy as they do from suffering and tragedy. Recall the idyllic scene of the simple villagers, feasting on their noble loaves and drinking their homemade wine. Who does not enjoy music at such moments and jump up to dance, or lie back on the grassy hilltop and wonder at the beauty of the heavens? When Plato pictures the villagers on their feasting days, they are singing of the gods and enjoying “sweet intercourse with each other.” The village feast is the very model of ideal human dwelling, the doing of politics in the being of justice, because justice is no more a clumsy composite of disparate aspects of life than the just soul is a clumsy composite of soul-fragments. The best souls, like the healthiest communities, are integrally bonded together in the optimally happy life. The simple villagers have overcome the division and accomplished what Plato will later in the dialogue tell us is the soul’s truest nature—single, not composite. Just as Plato tells us in the final book of The Republic, in the story of the sea god Glaucus, whose true beauty is eclipsed and fragmented by his struggles in the briny deep (10.611d), people become disfigured by the environments they occupy, and communities become fragmented by the evils of hunger and struggle, poverty and war. But the fragmentation is merely illusory in the soul as in the state (10.611d). When communities get their justice right, they are one and whole, and wisely, passionately, musically, philosophically, prudently integrated.

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Rancière effaces the beautiful integrity of the worker when he conflates the eudaimonic partners of the simple holistic city with the money-handling classes of the disfigured city, fevered and swollen and unhealthy, which must employ music, philosophy, and gymnastics to compel the peaceful integrity that arose naturally in the simple city. However, Rancière’s concerns that the working class has limited access to the essential elements of the good life are not strictly arid intellectual concerns, mere philosophical criticisms addressed to an ancient thinker with antidemocratic leanings. Plato’s antidemocratic politics is merely a convenient philosophical occasion for Rancière to challenge antidemocratic politics per se and to underscore injustices in modern democracies. His criticisms comprise valid challenges to modern democracies, whose inequalities and extravagant excesses mirror Plato’s second fragmented city, rather than the healthy, integrated, simple state. The ruse that underpins political injustice is not the noble simplicity of the healthy city, but the ignoble excesses of the fevered and swollen city, which Rancière, along with many scholars, misinterprets as ideal, ignoring Socrates’s warnings that the city gorged with goods would necessarily veer away from health and toward the twin evils of poverty and war. Rancière’s genius resides in his insight that in the modern era, as in the ancient world, mendacious definitions and faulty headcounts undergird democratic politics. When people do not have enough to eat and they cannot leave their fields for fear their children will starve, they can hardly be said to enjoy freedom or a fair share in the common good. In modern states, as in ancient Athens, the poor may enjoy the right to vote, but the candidates are usually members of the rich elite. Thus, many poor folk will not bother to leave their jobs (if they have them) or their homes (if they have not yet been foreclosed) to cast their ballots, because their political options do not alter their reality at the bottom of the social heap. The poor in every nation suffer now as they have always suffered. But their agonies drive them into self-medications, violence, crime, and prison, but rarely into music, politics, or philosophy. Indeed, as The Republic’s devolving spiral of political forms in Book XIII reveals, all people, as all forms of governments, are morally degraded by economic and political struggle. The peculiar vulnerability of the poor working classes is their susceptibility to silver-tongued demagogues. When simple, uneducated populations believe that times are so desperate that “only a god can save us now,” they can come to see in any monster what Martin Heidegger fleetingly saw in Adolf Hitler. Simple folks are rarely dangerous, but they can follow those dangerous dogs of war, noble liars, and crafty manipulators of truth. Rancière advocates for a new democratic politics understood as the work of a community of citizens as they renegotiate the distribution of the common good (2006, p. 97). Starting over, they must abandon the crumbling shores of faulty political theory and wade back into the troubled seas of democratic difference, creating a new politics “governed by the judicious use of its own

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ungovernability” (ibid., p. 95). Politics in the new democracy sets a course through the choppy waters of discord itself. Rancière describes the journey: Politics is not a function of the fact that it is useful to assemble, nor of the fact that assemblies are held for the sake of the good management of common business. It is a function of the fact that a wrong exists, an injustice that needs to be addressed. (Ibid., p. 97) He is concerned to lure the poor working class from the fields of eternal labor and political apathy and to awaken the goods-numbed middle class from the spell of the marketplace. We will all meet in the assembly and get an accurate count this time; we will engage in dialogue to redraft our polities and redress the imbalances before the dam of global grievances breaks out in bloody revolution. Rancière’s siren song is alluring, but does his ideal politics simply describe another idyllic city that, like Plato admits at the close of Book IX, cannot really be achieved on earth? Like The Republic’s models, Rancière’s new democracy is a good prototype for decent, moderate people to keep in mind as they navigate the stormy seas of global politics. But at seven billion people and counting, the reality of universal dialogue is as unattainable as any Platonic Form. Authentic democracy is unattainable, but it is important to ask whether it ought it to be realized. Rancière himself strikes the warning: someone is ultimately raised up on the waves of every turbulent political sea. Someone will be invited into the ship of state and welcomed to the helm. The craftiest will croon the seductive melodies that flatter the people’s ears. When the poor working class is hungry and ignorant, it is highly vulnerable to siren songs and may welcome any monstrous titan to the helm. Sirens may be gods but they are also monsters, as the seafaring Greeks knew well. Every genocide testifies to the ease with which ordinary people can be swayed by the seductive rhetoric of a demagogue. Every ethnic cleansing evidences the ease with which common people are seduced to cruelty and murder (Aly, 2005). It takes a tyrant to devise a plan for world domination. It takes the common people, Plato’s demos, to carry it out. This sad reality suggests that the task for souls and cities is to render people uncommon—to render people just, to help them fulfill their humanity. For this task, extraordinary, exemplary, political leaders are far more important than the universal political participation that Rancière extols. I am with Plato: the problem of politics is not so much how to get to a functioning absolute democracy, but how to get to a meritocracy of skilled and principled leaders. These exemplary leaders are, by definition, rare, but they will be easy to identify among the common people. They are those who model the noble simplicity of a global distributive justice in times of greatest temptation, in this age of fevered consumerism and powerful corporate lobbies. These exemplary leaders are not from any certain class, schooled in any specific disci-

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pline, or experienced in some special techne, but they will have a noble, underappreciated virtue that is the mark of all demiurges, great statesmen, and whole-souled human beings: they will forego love of wealth for a noble moderate simplicity of character. Rancière’s political plan leaves to chance who will rise on the burgeoning seas of popular discontent and make their way to power, but too much is at stake in every state, and in the globalizing community, to leave the fate of justice to a politics of chance.

Ten RADICAL PROTEST AND DIALECTICAL ETHICS Peter Amato 1. Introduction The first decade of the twenty-first century has been characterized by widespread political tumult. This includes the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the Second Iraq War, the continuing War in Afghanistan, the unfolding events related to the Arab Spring revolutions, the Occupy Movement, the Indignados in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere, and the worst rioting in decades in countries across Europe in the wake of the near collapse of the global financial system. These have outflanked traditional parties and given rise to a new urgency and new possibilities for thought and practice about radical social and political change including their moral and ethical dimensions. The relationship of radical protest to morality and ethics has long been a complicated issue for radical thinkers and activists broadly across nonreligious radical left circles, and particularly among non-academics and Marxists (Gottlieb, 2002, pp. 37–41; Martin, 2008, pp. 33–75). On one hand, ethics has often been seen by activists and radicals as too ingrained in the status quo to be of much use in addressing deep social pathologies. Although my concern here is not solely Marxist thinkers and activists, Marxism has been closely identified with suspicion and disparagement of ethical ideas and impulses in politics from the time of its origins. It has also exercised one of the strongest influences on the tenor of twentieth-century radical politics and thought in this regard (Heller, 1981; Wilde, 1998; Singer, 1999). Ethics is seen as authoritative and ideological, as bound up with regimes of social power, hindering creativity and initiative at best and inimical to freedom and revolution at worst. This attitude is most clearly associated with economism and technological determinism, both versions of Marxism. But it can also be seen in those non-Marxist anarchist tendencies regarding ethical and moral claims as fictions created by social authority, which are inimical to human freedom and choice (Marshall, 2008). Contemporary post-anarchism, which attempts to define an amoral radical approach to politics from the standpoint of poststructuralist postmodernism, reduces moral concepts and claims to the status of “empty signifiers” (Newman, 2004). However, ethics can also be seen as the ground of practically all fundamental social criticism. Historically, it is almost inevitably in the form of

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moral and ethical injunctions of some sort that the struggles and demands of political movements have crystallized. Some of the world’s most dramatic and effective movements for fundamental political change have been driven by persons or organizations whose motivations and ideals were explicitly cast in ethical and often religious terms (Gottlieb, 2006). In my view, radical politics in the twentieth century has characteristically strained under the burden of the paradox just sketched, choosing to marginalize and personalize the moral and ethical dimensions of radical struggle when it should instead be engaging, broadening, and generalizing them. I believe that the left broadly needs to develop a new vocabulary and new ways of thinking about our lives and struggles in moral terms. It can and should embrace the challenge posed to moral and ethical dialogue in the context of politics. This is preferable to continued attempts to provide a compelling picture of a more desirable human future without daring to admit what many of us believe anyway—that a radically different world is not only possible but would be morally better than this one in ways that can and should be reasonably argued. The left should learn, and to some extent, recently has been learning, ways to recognize the moral dimensions of its struggle, and to re-institute moral argument as an effective and powerful mode of revolutionary activism (Seager and Selinger, 2011). What is the status of ethics for the radical transformation of society? Although, in the history of Western radical thought and activism, this question has often been posed in relation to Marxism, and while Karl Marx’s thinking poses the problem of the relationship of ethics to socialism quite sharply, it is by no means only a problem for Marxism. To the extent that ethical ideas are regarded as historically enmeshed and entangled with society, they are to some extent both its products and its guiding aims. Because ethics provides us with our basic vocabulary for social assessment and protest, its relationship to radical thought and activism is one of enduring complexity and urgency. Although some would say it is one of Marx’s great accomplishments to have rendered this problem moot by putting socialism on a “scientific” basis, I think this would be wrong. Even if he had seemed to make ethics disappear as a serious concern for revolutionaries, Marx did not resolve the problem of how ethical ideas inform and contribute to social protest and revolution. In many ways, the relationship of ethics to revolution became more puzzling and obscure as a result of the Marxist influence on radical thought and activism rather than less. Despite numerous and blunt attempts by Marxists to banish ethical thinking and language from among those seeking a better world, it has nevertheless stuck around. Regardless of what Marx did or did not do to resolve it, the problem of ethics and revolution has persisted among those within and outside Marxism, for whom it has always seemed obvious that there is a difference between capitalism’s badness and its wrongness. Capitalism is merely bad if we dis-

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like or regret its consequences even under the interpretation that it is destined to collapse of its own weight. This idea is completely compatible with a kind of left-stoic attitude that the unraveling of capitalism is inevitable and essentially a matter of time and structural-historical forces. To say that that capitalism is wrong recognizes a moral dimension that refuses this inevitability and makes of stoicism complicity. Although it seems absurd to consider radical politics as simply not having moral dimensions, it has never been clear what the moral dimensions and implications of radical politics are, how we should think about them, and what such determinations mean for practice. The present tumultuous times will require radical activists and philosophers to address themselves directly to these issues. In the new political landscape, the principal actors are not merely comrades or citoyens, but Indignados and occupants—not morallyemptied possessors of rights fulfilling procedural roles in a system of blind justice, but morally-situated and presently real objectors to and transgressors of the status quo. I suggest that thinking carefully and critically about ethics, both on the theoretical and practical or “applied” levels, will be required for thinkers and activists to move beyond some of the dogmatism and obstacles that have tended to short circuit radical protest and politics in the past. In what follows, my main interest is to recommend a renewal of discussion among radicals of the ethical dimensions of political practice toward a dialogue about what it means to recognize that our choices and the way we think about them determine who we are and what kind of world we end up with. In the first part of this chapter, I consider G. A. Cohen’s critique of liberalism’s counterproductive “defense” of justice and equality. Cohen is notable for having refused to accept that an amoral or anti-moral Marxism could provide a compelling account or a solid basis for radical political activity. I think he was right in seeing this, but wrong in reading Marxism as inevitably or irretrievably anti-moral. I argue that Cohen’s rejection of Rawlsian liberalism as an ethically superior alternative to Marxism fails to appropriate something essential from Marx’s materialism, which could make a wider retrieval of the ethical dimensions of radical political activism possible. This can be seen in Cohen’s failure to carefully distinguish ethics from ethos, which leaves him with a notion of ethics that is insufficiently grounded in practice— both that of the status quo and that of protest. Although it appears that Cohen’s early critique of Marx and late critique of John Rawls reflect separate phases of his concerns and approach, I present them here as flip-sides of an approach to socialism rooted in a narrow view of ethics lacking sociological and historical nuance. After developing a sketch of an alternative theoretical approach, I then consider some of the inherent limitations of applied ethics and conclude with some considerations related to the development of a dialectical ethics indebted to some of the insights of Marx.

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Although Cohen’s work covers a range of substantive philosophical issues, seeking the rational grounds for ethical claims and specifically for egalitarian and just institutions, consistently motivated him over the course of his career. But underlying this nexus of normative and meta-ethical issues were always very practical political concerns. As he writes of his debate with Rawls regarding Rawls’s infamous “difference principle”: while I could see that it might be sensible for all concerned to offer unequalizing incentives to the more productive when the condition of the worst off would be improved as a result, I could not see why that would make the resulting inequality just, as opposed to sensible. (Cohen, 2008, p. xv) It is one thing to tolerate a lesser evil as the cost of eliminating a greater one. But it is something else entirely to absolve the lesser of its evilness. Characterizing and developing the implications of an ethical case for socialism stoked the fires of Cohen’s imagination to the end of his life, even long after Marx had ceased to. Indeed, as Ellen Meiksins Wood notes, it is little wonder that Cohen left Marx behind in order to seek the ethical grounds for socialism in view of the fact that the technological determinist Marx of Cohen’s classic Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence had very little to say about it (2010). In a sense, Cohen’s approach to situating ethics in relation to socialist transformation is the mirror image of Marx’s rejection of it. I see Cohen’s critique of Rawls evincing a kind of ethical idealism despite the fundamentally practical orientation of Cohen’s writing and his wellknown skeptical attitude. By “ethical idealism,” I refer to the particular mistake of thinking about ethics only in terms of the shared values, principles, and ideals of a people that motivate their conduct, while losing sight of the reflective and critical dimensions ethics necessarily involves. This happens to Cohen, I maintain, in part as the result of his tendency to confuse ethics with what he calls “ethos.” But these terms are useful because they have separate meanings. Ethics refers to a set of ideas that are held reflectively at some distance from actions, as an approach to conduct mediated by language and some degree of conscious awareness. It is prescriptive. An ethos is a heuristic produced by the observation of behavior, which represents actions as if guided by a coherent standard or set of standards. Thus, ethos is descriptive and counterfactual. “Ethics” means roughly, how people believe or, when asked, say they should act. “Ethos” refers to whether they act as if they believe (Mautner, 1997, pp. 180–182). The distinction between ethos and ethics is one implicitly recognized but routinely glossed over in moral and ethical philosophy. Ethos has always been seen as prior to ethics both logically and chronologically, but even in

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Aristotle, they are related dialectically. Aristotle shows us how the problematic of socialized habit and reason drives the Nicomachean Ethics: It is central to Aristotle’s thought that virtue is the practice of character, not the rules, guidelines, or principles on which practitioners of practical wisdom (phronemos) deliberate and act. And yet, it is in the context of the life of the citystate (polis) that practical judgment emerges. Only in this context can that character possibly be judged, famously, after the fact, not before. In historical terms, this Aristotelian problematic of practical activity in context of one’s community notoriously gave way to the abstracted, principled attitude of alienated modern ethics, concerned as it is with the rational determination of the will by the individual conceived as a self moving through the world independent of the community. Gilbert R. Fischer tells us that rather than the dialectical problematic mediated in practical wisdom (phronesis), modern ethics more correctly conceives itself as “moral philosophy” (1971, pp. 262–263). Fischer is helpful in tracing the terminological forgetting this involves, a forgetting in the modern usage of “ethics” and “morals” of the problematic, complex and dialectical relationship of the will to its ground understood as its ethos and mores, from which it arises and with which it must necessarily struggle: The fact that the word ethics is derived from ethos suggests a much richer conception [than that of Modern “Ethics” or “Moral” Philosophy]. Originally referring to the haunts of wild animals, the word comes to refer also to the abodes of men, thence to custom, usage, or habit, and, in the plural to the disposition, temper, or character. Not the abstracted action, but the concrete way of living is suggested by the word. (Ibid., p. 262) Fischer concludes that the distinction between ethos and ethics is lost as a result of the “narrowing characteristic of philosophical terms in general, for example, logos to logic, ratio to reasoning, or physis to physics,” etc. While Cohen does not directly define “ethics,” he consistently associates “the ethical” with that which pertains directly to principles, values, and motivations designed to accomplish justice, freedom, and equality (2008, pp. 188– 198). By contrast, he defines the “ethos” of a society as “the set of sentiments and attitudes in virtue of which its normal practices and informal pressures are what they are” (ibid., p. 144). So, “ethics” is the term that should be to refer to ideas associated with the guidance of conduct in prescribed ways that encompasses choice and contains the moment of reflection and the possibility of criticism. “Ethos” is the term for the ideas associated with or inferred from normal practices and behavior whose motivations are unavailable to us or moot. Mishandling this distinction by either conflating or confusing the terms misrepresents the complexity of ethical experience and results in making the critical grounds of ethics disappear, regardless whether this is done in the

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idealist way I attribute to Cohen or the materialist way that has been ascribed to Marx. The tension in Cohen’s thinking about ethics and ethos appears even before he gets into the argument with John Rawls, in his opening comments, where he refers to a well-known passage from Marx’s 1843 article “On the Jewish Question” (1997, p. 241). In the passage, Cohen tells us, Marx expresses his view that “human emancipation” will be “complete only when the actual individual man . . . has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that social force is no longer separated from him as a political power” (2008, p. 1). Marx here expresses what Cohen takes to be the principal difference between the Rawls’s liberalism and what Cohen calls the “nonliberal socialist/anarchist conviction,” which he presumes to share with Marx—that emancipation cannot be imposed upon civil society by the state, but must be reflected in the practices and institutions of everyday life and relationships, if it is real. Cohen writes of this passage that, in re-reading it, he came to realize that his critique of Rawls was, “in effect, an attempt to deliver some of the content of Marx’s pregnant statement” (ibid.). Again, Cohen is committed to the idea that this content was stillborn as far as its author himself was concerned—a conclusion with which I will both agree and disagree below. For now, it is worth noting that Cohen sees Marx as at least having inspired a useful question pertinent to ethics and that he interprets that question as one that involves the distinction between ethos and ethics, which he will invoke in his own arguments repeatedly against Rawls: The Marx-inspired question is whether a society without an ethos in daily life that is informed by a broadly egalitarian principle for that reason fails to provide distributive justice. To that question, Rawls, being a liberal, says no: here is the deep dividing line between us. (Ibid., p. 2, emphasis added) What Cohen seems to mean by this is that what separates him and Marx from Rawls is that they would both answer in this manner: yes, a society that is not, in practice, broadly egalitarian is not a just society even if it has laws and arrangements implemented by the state to mitigate or counteract inegalitarian and unjust social forces. The real test of whether or not human beings are emancipated—both free and equal—lies in the structure of their everyday relations in social life and not in the structure of the ideals, values, principles, and laws that inform and motivate them and their institutions. This holds true even when those institutions have the increase of equality and freedom for all citizens as their goals. There is nothing objectionable about the substance of Cohen’s agreement with Marx here, as far as it goes, except that it is an occasion where the collapse of the distinction between ethos and ethics has the effect of hiding the role ethical critique might play in the accomplishment of social progress.

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The substance of their agreement lies in the notion that human emancipation is a function of how people live, not of their principles and laws. Fair enough. But Cohen also knows that Marx thinks this means that the question of human emancipation is independent of ethics, while Cohen, by contrast, wants to use the idea of “an ethos . . . uninformed by a broadly egalitarian principle” (ibid., p. 254) as a basis to criticize Rawls’s pretense of bringing justice about. Cohen’s critique is an ethical one insofar as it seeks to correct Rawls’s model in terms of what he will call its properly “governing” ethical ideal, as well as its philosophical consistency. The great irony covered over by his agreement with Marx is that Marx will say the separation of state and society is part of why ethics does not matter while Cohen will use it as a basis to show Rawls that it does. Cohen’s complaint is not that ethics should be abandoned as a concern of the state, regardless of how we view the state to be comprised. He argues more that Rawls’s state fails to govern with the appropriately ethical conceptions of justice and equality than that ethical concepts such as justice and equality should be set aside as empty unworkable ideals. Cohen wants them to be rescued, not abandoned (ibid., pp. 85–86, 254). The first part of Rescuing Justice and Equality involves Cohen in a number of frontal assaults on the Rawlsian system as well as some lessmomentous side battles and the usual skirmishes. One of the main pillars Cohen attacks is Rawls’s famous and central “incentives argument.” This is the argument that inequalities that arise as the result of implementing his two principles of justice are ethically justified to the extent that they encourage the better-off to maintain high productivity, benefitting those who are worseoff (2008, p. 29). Cohen argues at length that even if incentives do actually mitigate suffering, this does not mean that they are a feature of a society that is just. The reason it cannot be considered just is that: society is a non-community, in which relations . . . are construed as strategic, with people taking one another into account as so many opportunities for and obstacles to gain, rather than as fellow citizens by whom they can be asked to justify the way they live. (Ibid., p. 15) In Cohen’s arguments against Rawls, as is often the case in Cohen’s work, it is not always clear when a sharply drawn distinction or criticism is offered mainly on grounds that would matter to some larger issues at stake in the discussion, or if the point is really about the consistency of his opponent’s case. Regardless of how we might sort this out with respect to his critique of Rawls’s difference principle and the related incentives argument, Cohen’s conceptualizations of human ethical circumstance and agency become just as stilted and simplistic as his collapsed idea of “ethos”: Whether or not the difference principle is correct, [it] does not justify incentive-based inequality as a feature of a just society, on Rawls’s own

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PETER AMATO understanding of a just society, according to which it is a society whose citizens believe in and live by the principles that make the society just . . . A society that is just within the terms of the difference principle . . . requires not only just coercive rules, but also an ethos of justice that informs individual choices. Citizens do not qualify as fully committed to the difference principle unless that principle influences not only their voting behavior but also some of their behavior within the structure that their vote creates. (Ibid., pp. 15–16)

Here, Cohen puts emphases on the contrasting terms “rules” and “ethos” in order to make it clear that, again, it is not enough for the state to have ethical principles on its side in executing the legislative apparatus associated with the social technology of the Rawlsian state. It must also be the case that an ethos that is separate from the state apparatus “informs individual choices.” It should be clear here that Cohen is straining to talk about ethics without talking about ethics. An ethos cannot “inform choices” because the concept is only useful as a contrast with values, principles, ideas, and rules that inform choices prescriptively the way ethics does. Cohen cannot keep these things separate, even when he clearly sees that he should. So, when he seems to be talking about what people actually do, he never gets behind his own conception of something they believe they should be doing. Although Cohen repeatedly insists that he thinks “ethos matters,” he does so while smuggling into his concept of ethos what should be kept on the side of the ethical (ibid., pp. 70, 128–129, 132–133, 144). In reality, he insists that Rawls’s ethical position isn’t ethical enough. But there are no grounds upon which to draw the distinction between lived life under capitalist relations and an ethical consciousness that is independent yet in the midst of an epochal challenge to its own social and cultural reality. This is exactly where a socialist ethical consciousness would have to exist. But instead of seeing this, Cohen undermines the effectiveness and relevance of his ethical critique by contaminating his concept of ethos with mystical forms of agency and phantom causal powers (ibid., pp. 70, 128–129, 133). This results in making the reverse of the materialist reduction of ethics to the uncritical and empty ideological reflection of the status quo. However, although Cohen’s is the opposite move, idealistic reduction has the same effect of making ethics uncritical, disengaged, and politically powerless. From Cohen’s position, ethics entirely swallows up the real grounds of lived experience and retreats to the ever-receding ideal status he grants it as a “governing ideal” that will never be fully instantiated until and unless this is somehow magically accomplished: in believing that justice must be so crafted as to be bottom-line feasible, [the Rawlsians] believe that it is possible to achieve justice, and I am not

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so sanguine. It follows from my position that justice is an unachievable (although a nevertheless governing) ideal. (Ibid., p. 254) The implications of this difficulty in Cohen’s account are even clearer in his, Why Not Socialism? (2009), where he focuses on the question of a world beyond capitalism rather than a meta-ethical critique of Rawls. Cohen argues here that most people actually just behave like socialists when it comes to camping trips or smaller scale mutual endeavors. Cohen observes that on intimate levels, an ethos of egalitarianism and community tends to flourish unreflectively among people. He opines that the desirability of socialism on a broader level, as a prescription, is clear and would be endorsed by most people if given the chance. But the case for the feasibility of socialism for the mass society level is not as clear, according to Cohen, because serious questions exist concerning what the social technology of socialism would look like (ibid., p. 53). The term “social technology” refers to the institutional and economic practices that would foster the conditions required by justice under socialism. He concludes that while socialism is feasible in principle, a compelling and detailed picture of its social technology cannot be provided. A question this account raises immediately is whether what Cohen calls the social technology stands in the place that Rawls’s “basic structure” and the apparatus of social justice legislation would have stood. In other words, it may be that the only real difference between Rawls’s liberal government and Cohen’s socialist one is that Cohen’s is ethically consistent while Rawls’s is not. That is, Rawls’s system isn’t only unable to bring about justice, freedom, and equality, but it is also inconsistent in that it violates its own ethical principles. Cohen’s socialism, such as it is, is merely unable to bring about justice, freedom, and equality. More precisely, Cohen is unable to tell us how an ethical-legal system could possibly do what the ethics of socialism would aim to have it do—namely create the conditions for justice, freedom, and equality and maintain them in the midst of their not already fully and completely maintaining themselves. Small groups of closely knit people do seem to prefer cooperation. But this seems like a description of what we normally observe, not an ethical prescription of any sort. That something like socialism can be done on a small scale is simply deducible from the fact that it is. Cohen’s campers give us a description that fits wherever families and friends cooperate to accomplish shared goals. A description like this one might give us some basis to prescriptively conclude that “people who are families and friends should cooperate to accomplish shared goals.” Nonetheless, it is problematic at best to use it to produce a prescription on the larger level, which is, after all, defined by the condition that people are not linked already as families or friends who share common goals. What the campers argument most clearly suggests from the standpoint of a less-than-idealistic position is that there are likely to be sociological, his-

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torical, personal, and cultural dimensions involved in the rich texture of human ethical experience. In particular, we must often invoke culture if we are to account consistently for both the values and principles we act as if we hold (ethos), in relation to the values and principles we do hold (ethics). That kind of inquiry would take us into the careful study of the personal and social relations and activities that make up what Marx called a “mode of life,” and its complex mediation through language and practices (Marx, 1845, pt. 1, § A). There are good philosophical, sociological, and political reasons to distinguish ethics and ethos carefully. If the persons in an organized group routinely behave toward one another in a particular way that we can describe, this tells us something about what is going on in their society quite independent of how they may themselves be thinking. The description is useful because it is independent of the participants’ self-descriptions. An account of their ethos tells us nothing about the goals, ideals, aspirations, or desires recognized by the participants themselves. An ethos is a set of ideas developed outside and after the human actions that it characterizes. It represents the ideas that outsiders ascribe or attribute to others—or to themselves considered as others retroactively—in teasing out the implicit or imminent values and goals from the behaviors considered and observed as such. Ethics is not the same thing. Ethics does not describe ex post facto what can be generalized from the observation of the normal practices of a group by an outsider. Ethics is the set of standards or values that guide conduct in a manner acknowledged by a group internally and reflectively. In this respect, ethics is forward looking and prescriptive while ethos is backward looking and descriptive. Ethics involves an inherently critical dimension along with the potential for abuse by those in power. Ethos reflects what we end up implicated in, not primarily as a result of our own choices and decisions, and perhaps largely in conflict against. The distinction between ethos and ethics grasps something basic about human conduct, namely, that persons often act on the basis of ends that are, in principle, impossible to discern or deduce from their observed activities. Consequently, it is possible that persons’ self-descriptions can vary greatly from what they are actually observed to be doing. The distinction makes it easier to identify gaps where they exist between the ethical ideas of a people and what the same people actually do. To conflate ethos and ethics, or to equivocate in their use, greatly complicates attempts at ethical criticism, especially when it is conceived of with reference to actual situations. Most importantly from the standpoint of the question about ethics and socialism, to equivocate in the way Cohen does makes his skeptical and idealistic conclusions inevitable. If the ethics we adopt as socialists does not at some time substantially conflict with the ethos of our society, then it is not clear what the point of ethics is, and especially the widespread intuition that challenging capitalism is the right thing to do, and a risky business.

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One of the larger issues that Cohen overlooks is that the argument for socialism, at least since Marx, has not turned on the desirability of something that, compared to all that we are enjoying under the bounty of capitalism, we might prefer to what we have now if the prospects for it are good. The point of socialism, since Marx, is that the prospects of capitalism are horrendous. Indeed, global political and economic developments are outstripping arguments such as Cohen’s that we have examined here, and many others in other places, in establishing, along with a chill down the neck, what even many years of study and polemical discussions could not have in principle. That is that capitalism is really a lot more likely to go out with a bang than a whimper. Its prospects that may have existed for steering social and political development at a slower, more peaceful, and sure pace may be irretrievably lost. The current increasingly volatile period of capital’s retrenchment, which had not long ago seemed to many as the moment of its triumph, does daily look more like a burial. In other words, the relevance of ethics to socialism lies not in some measurement of abstractions made from a place outside history, but in the increasingly urgent decisions we all face as capitalism collapses of its own weight and we are faced with the tasks of building something out of its ruins. When we consider Cohen’s arguments in relation to this in many ways less idealistic picture of a society in transition, it appears obvious that the ethos of capitalism has to exist in conflict with the ethical beliefs and ideas of those who are inspired to resist and oppose its normalcy. The ideas or the “ethics” of capitalists, such as they are, do not matter in contrast with how the capitalist system of relations on many subtle, and some obvious, levels forces people to live. Cohen acts as if ethical struggle could be meaningful in and of itself—as ethical, because he does not recognize that for an ethical struggle to mean anything, it must fight against a social reality and concrete practices rather than other ideas. To fight against capital is to fight against the practices and institutions associated with the all-consuming market, whose existence and functioning amounts effectively to the black hole of capitalism’s ethos. But to struggle against these practices means to consciously choose guiding principles and standards that contradict and undermine them. Ethical struggle against capital is not a fight against persons or groups with bad ideas about what guiding standards and values society should adopt. It is a fight for a world we can believe in and defend reasonably on ethical grounds. Marx saw that it could not be a struggle of ethics against ethics, but a struggle against a way of life whose ethos would be ethically indefensible. In the final analysis, according to Cohen, Rawls’s “fundamental error” was to mistake what he earlier called the “sensible” for the “just.” What is missing from his liberalism is a broader ethical vision that doesn’t merely make a virtue—namely, justice—out of what he takes to be the necessity of compromise with the unquestioned reality of capitalism (2008, p. 195).

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The problem with this account is that there simply isn’t any way to adopt a broad ethical vision of socialism from a standpoint outside of the ethos of capitalism that we currently inhabit. Indeed, those who choose to challenge capitalism by refusing—to the extent possible—to partake of that way of living, who refuse to behave in the ways it tends to reproduce in us, carry out exactly what Cohen asks for here. They adopt a set of guiding principles—an ethics—that is the only one that could really oppose and challenge capitalism as a functioning system or “mode of life.” But, crucially, this does not mean that those who resist capitalism bring the kingdom of heaven down to earth in the midst of capitalism or ascend somehow out of it. The ethos of capitalism has to contradict the ethics of socialism—there is no other way to get there from here. Rather than scoring a coup against Rawls, the way Cohen argues elucidates how detached his own philosophical approach is from considering the real conditions of conflict and sites of contestation in actual circumstances that mark any sensible view of the transition from capitalism to socialism. This is where Marx can be helpful. 3. Re-Appropriating Marx Marx’s contributions to ethics have been understandably underappreciated. He pointedly denied that he had any interest in being a philosopher or in generating anything that could be called an “ethical philosophy.” Regardless, this has been held in constant tension with the unmistakable ways Marx’s writings are informed by and inspire a deep concern about the effects of social systems and historical choices on the hopes and aspirations of individuals, and in particular, the needless suffering and misery necessitated by capitalism. Marx’s work takes a stance in opposing the ethos of capitalism on grounds that should properly be considered “ethical” in the sense indicated earlier in this chapter. Nevertheless, Marx famously criticizes ethics as an ideological support for class rule. Ethical concepts and categories are largely missing from his remarks on human nature and history, where we would most expect to find them, and play no explicit role in his political conclusions. He often is broadly dismissive of the political use of ethical criticism as a distraction from more urgent and effective political organization and action. However, when we follow Marx’s wider suggestions about thought and practice, this paradox may lessen. Any philosophical perspective indebted to Marxism must take the principle of the dialectical unity of theory and practice as a core idea interwoven with all Marx’s ideas about human nature, society, and history. This principle of the dialectical unity of theory and practice, according to which neither can be understood in isolation from the other, is commonly recognized as a basic ingredient of Marxism. What is not commonly recognized is how this principle functions in relation to the ethical dimensions of Marx’s analysis and critique of capitalism.

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My critique of Cohen in the earlier part of this chapter diagnosed a problem emerging from the lack of dialectical relation between ethics as he thought of it and ethos as he used that term. Marx, as noted, makes a similar mistake, although in the opposite direction. But the unity of theory and practice provides a basis to bring ethics and ethos back into relation. A dialectical ethics rooted in Marx’s overall philosophical outlook, but moving beyond anything Marx developed himself, would rely firmly on the dialectical relationship between ethos and ethics, between careful description and reflective critical prescription. Marx’s 1938 Theses on Feuerbach provides a particularly clear expression of how the principle of the dialectical unity of theory and practice may be understood as a meta-ethical principle. In the Theses, he regards the “chief defect of all previous materialism” as its failure to include human activity as objectively determining its own conditions and the realities of social life (1998, p. 569). This defect left prior materialism with the same detached and disengaged contemplative stance toward truth that is characteristic of bourgeois science and ethics. For Marx, the production of knowledge is engaged with and affected by what it knows. This is what he means by declaring that Feuerbach “does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary,’ of ‘practical-critical’ activity” (ibid., p. 572). What prior materialisms called progress or “the changing of circumstances or self-change” had to depend on abstractions hovering above society outside of history. The materialism of Feuerbach tended to entrench the alienated condition of humanity in this way by keeping theory separate from practice and expecting the former to dictate to the latter. But “educators” are not informed from Heaven, or from “theory,” but out of the very same circumstances they would seek to change. Previous philosophers have either denied or not understood the implications of this unity of theory and practice. To deny it and believe oneself a mere interpreter of the world—as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel did— would be to deny thought any effects, even those implicit in the theory of ideology. But the denial of effectiveness is itself the main way “mere philosophy” has its effect. Bourgeois science detaches and removes itself from the world but goes on transforming it according to the designs of capital. Ethics turns away from the world to deal in abstractions whose effect is to discipline and disarm its opposition. When theory and practice are dialectically united, it is impossible not to recognize that interpreting the world also changes it. The question then becomes how, not whether, we are affecting the world by our interpretations. To think about it this way, the mistake of the philosophers who have “only interpreted the world in various ways” (ibid., p. 571), cannot have been to have had no effect, even if this is what they would have preferred. Because the effect of their interpretations was to provide ideological support for alienation

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and exploitation when criticism was required, they bear responsibility for these evils. By falsely regarding themselves and their work as irresponsible and value-free, philosophers have helped rationalize the status quo and undermine criticism of it. Their ethical failure lies in their blindness to the connections between their work and the hopes and aspirations of others and to the suffering and misery caused by the perpetuation of capital, which they have assisted. But this must cut both ways. If philosophers are culpable for supporting the status quo, then this means they could have had a different effect: they could have weakened it. In other words, both the philosophers Marx criticizes and Marx himself are missing something about ethics and philosophy, here— that they contain inherently reflective and critical dimensions that are possible to use as tools of opposition against capitalism. Marx has left out a level here—ethics is more than the mere reflection of ethos, since ethos is just a summary of the pattern of practices in life under existing relations rather than the things people think or the beliefs they hold reflectively about those practices and relations. He has collapsed ethics into ethos instead of attempting to discern the complex dialectical relationships that give rise to ethical experience. A clear lesson to take away from a fresh re-reading of Theses is the way Marx demands a theory of interpretation here that he would never provide. In his time, hermeneutics was dominated by debates among neo-Kantian and romanticist authors beginning to work outward from the experience of reading and interpreting sacred texts in the context of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s attempt to develop a general theory of interpretation. Marx would have been ahead of his time were he to have seen the need in the 1840s to pass beyond the limited, subject-centered hermeneutics of his intellectual milieu. Nevertheless, Paul Ricoeur famously connected Friedrich Nietzsche, Marx, and Sigmund Freud as the early masters of the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” which was central to the salient themes of much of twentieth century philosophy and intellectual culture (1970). An attitude rather than a theory, the hermeneutics of suspicion names an approach to experience and knowledge that refuses to take them on face value and expects that what seems simple or innocuous hides something deeper, more complex and potentially nefarious or dangerous. Understanding is won by a process that requires the hidden to be uncovered and decoded through work that may involve distrust and subversion. The hermeneutics of tradition involves the idea that understanding stems from careful, close listening, and is founded on a kind of trust or connection that allows dialogue to proceed. But while Ricoeur’s characterization recognizes a truth about the power of Marxism, it also obscures crucially important aspects that fall outside the hermeneutics of suspicion, including the ethical aspects of social experience and social change. In order to hear what Marx has to suggest on these subjects, I recommend we also bring Marx into relation with philosophers on the

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other side of Ricoeur’s dichotomy, the hermeneutics of tradition, most notably associated with philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ricoeur, himself, and thinkers inspired and influenced by the legacies of Hegel and Martin Heidegger. Setting aside the designation of Marx as “Master of Suspicion” alongside Nietzsche and Freud, we can better hear what he has to say about the concept of “tradition.” Perhaps most obviously, Marx requires us to reinterpret the concept of tradition as a site of conflict that makes us choose and act. There is no monolithic history, but many histories, no monolithic tradition, but many traditions. There is no single “ethos” that captures the complexity of human practical experience in society, but many possible ways to understand, interpret, and designate what we see in ourselves and others “from the outside.” Marx begins to be heard on many topics related to ethics by bringing him into this discussion. Gadamer, the philosopher most often associated with the hermeneutics of tradition, is a helpful guide here. For him, tradition cannot be the simple repetition of the past or ideas from the past. Listening carefully to tradition while facing our world results in creating something new. In fact, it is through appropriating such traditions as exist that anything new can occur. But each appropriation changes the traditions as well as us. Truth is the ongoing history of understanding, which occurs within the horizon of historically located traditions. The sum total of these horizons reflects our finite, historical situation. But there is no ladder we can climb that will give us a view of the next horizon before we have reached it, and so there is no standing for a concept of totality, whether conceived of ontologically or in terms of knowing. Gadamer’s idea of “effective history” is essentially the idea that stems from this conception of historicity: that all the resources that pertain to the tasks of understanding occur within the ambit of a definite history. Our consciousness of effective history is our awareness that aspects of life reflect material and social conditions that we can affect but which have been organized independent of us: Effective historical consciousness . . . is [a term] meant to imply that we are fully aware of the constitutive prejudices of our understanding. Of course, we cannot really know all of our prejudices because we are never in a position to reach an exhaustive knowledge of ourselves and to be completely transparent to ourselves. On the other hand, this circumstance, that prejudices are constitutive for understanding in no way means that the approach to a text is an arbitrary decision of the thinker or scholar involved. For these prejudices are nothing other than our rootedness in a tradition. (2000, p. 47)

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Effective history is actually the world or, to use the Marxist phrase, the mode of life, in which our reality is disclosed, constituted by our taking up of traditions that cannot be merely repeated or blindly re-instituted. For Gadamer, “a tradition exists only in becoming other than it is” (1986, p. 288). In turn, bringing Marx into relation with the hermeneutics of tradition will require us to re-interpret the meaning and scope of Marxist “suspicion” as well. Gadamer can be helpful here, too. For him, ethical experience involves a dialogical activity that acknowledges and expresses our existence as beings who are radically historical, free, and self-making (1982). Following this hint, it might be that Marxist suspicion was never simply an activity of subverting, detaching, uprooting, disorienting but also always a re-rooting, reconnecting, and reorienting of attention and energy toward a community and the conditions of life in society, or what Marx calls throughout the Theses our “social humanity.” Something like this kind of re-rooting and reorientation toward the lived practical world of human individual and social experience would be vastly different from the meager ways traditional ethical theories have been reconnected to the world of practice after having been implicitly removed from it. Today, applied ethics is mainly considered to be the study, analysis, and discussion of moral problems as they emerge in practical activities, including professional life, scientific research, business, and the law (Hedgecoe, 2004). In this sense, applied ethics involves applying both principles and norms that derive outside these fields and the rules and codes of conduct that pertain to specific professional and scientific fields. It often goes unnoticed in the use of the label “applied ethics” that ethics does not relate to it in the same way that “applied science” and “applied math” relate to their general disciplinary domains. It is clear what it means to think about physics and mathematics as having what are called “pure” and “applied” fields. The use of the word “applied” to modify “science” and “math” indicates the study of these subjects in a practical way aimed at concrete solutions rather than the development of theory or the resolution of issues that stem from this pursuit. Physics and math are sciences of abstractions that apply a priori to innumerable circumstances in practice. By contrast, ethics need not, and probably should not, be seen as an analogous “science” of abstractions. The adequacy of any ethical theory to moral situations like those we face in life is a matter for complex judgment and interpretation. Whether the principles and concepts identified in any particular theory apply is always part of what is to be determined in the judgment of the theory’s adequacy alongside others. In other words, the belief that a field of applied ethics can exist analogously to applied mathematics or science secretly answers a controversial question in ethical philosophy (or in meta-ethics) in a way that the existence of applied mathematics or science does not.

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The idea that it is possible to consider ethics as applied or not in the way suggested by the term makes it possible to imagine an “ethics” unhindered by life and relevance to human circumstances. To this extent, the idea of an applied ethics carries with it a prejudgment that ethics can be studied coherently and legitimately in a way that is independent of judgments about social arrangements and circumstances. This attitude is not only based on a disanalogy, but it upholds an old idea that the philosophical study called “ethics” is, as such, not actually engaged with human social life, even though that is presumably its subject matter and reason for being. So it is possible for very knowledgeable people to preoccupy themselves with ethics while standing by and condoning insufferable and inhumane conditions in which they, themselves, are implicated. According to this idea of ethics, there can be experts about conduct whose conduct is irrelevant to their expertise. A famous critique of the nature and misuse of applied ethics by John Ladd is closely related to the disanalogy underlying the idea. For him, “the whole notion of an organized, professional ethics is an absurdity—intellectual and moral,” a kind of category mistake (1991, p. 130). He criticizes the notion that a professional ethical code is anything other than an attempt to legislate conduct in the perceived best interests of a profession. When successful, such codes discourage judgment and the exercise of freedom inherent to moral conduct and merely defer questions about the rightness or wrongness of the rules, principles, or codes they take for granted and invoke. But what practitioners of a profession need in order to be ethical cannot, in principle, come from taking codes or principles for granted. So, if what applied ethics does is show how codes, rules, or principles that are taken as applicable a priori can be “used in a practical way” to solve sets of familiar local problems or case studies, then it may be applied. But, Ladd concludes, that certainly is not ethics. One part of re-conceiving ethics in a dialectical way would be to reject the analogy of ethics discussed above, and with it, the rhetoric of applied and non-applied ethics. Ethical theories cannot be considered as mere abstractions disconnected from life and history. Ethics must always be thought of as already applied in a different and more fundamental sense than has been common in the discourse of ethical philosophy. How many aspects of lived experience can be directly related to the ramifications and repercussions of the choices we make in our everyday lives? How many ripples of reverberation exist between myself and uncounted others whose life prospects and happiness will be affected directly or indirectly by decisions about what to eat, where to live, how to travel, and how to spend my time? A dialectical ethics would start from the idea that what is risked in conduct was never a theoretical principle but always ourselves and the world. It would have us re-conceive ethics as an open-ended dialogical activity in which the truth is pursued in an ongoing, self-critical, and incomplete way

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rather than, as it often has in the past been regarded, as a system for resolving problems or making decisions by discovering their correct solutions. In a dialectical conception, the most serious ethical questions would be existential and political rather than epistemological or transcendental. From this kind of perspective, it may someday, sooner than we think, become possible to imagine a broadening challenge to the status quo united and reenergized around a moral center committed to action guided by the ideals it seeks to realize in the better world it is building—a world of peace, equality, diversity, democracy, and compassion. On a dialectical conception, the problem of being ethical would not pose itself as a desire or a quest for purity in the midst of moral complexity and risk. We do not begin by blindly rejecting or embracing as inevitable any particular forms of political expression or programs but by acting in good faith toward the betterment of our current conditions and allowing a new range of practical possibilities to emerge in doing so. In some ways, the Occupy Movement has shown what is at stake in developing forms of activism that are more self-consciously and deliberately ethical than has been common among radicals. It has already demonstrated the possibility of a different way of thinking and acting together than any other that this generation was shown in the ethos of its parents’ society, that it can emerge in its midst and that it can be sustained in a variety of ways, despite numerous challenges and obstacles. Thomas Seager and Evan Selinger report that the ethos of their student occupants was markedly different from the ethos they had previously observed among students or inferred from responses to survey questions (2011). Their revolutionary ethos, whose existence stands as a negation in practice to the ethos of late capitalism, engenders and breeds that revolutionary ethics that can and will help them to change the wider world. At its best, the Occupy Movement has raised the prospect of creating a broad-based democratic society through revolutionary organizations and activities that are as broad-based and democratic as possible. So far, this is most clearly expressed in the thought that the goal of democratic equality should be bound up with the prospect of engaging in dialogue and discussion about local and national goals and priorities. We hope that in the progress of this movement and in the progress of humanity, we can move toward a point at which ethical impulses no longer appear to be incidental to our discussions about political goals, strategies, and tactics. Further, we hope that our public life will become constituted by ongoing, open-ended, good faith conversation about what is good, what we think our lives should be like, and how we can bring about the kinds of changes we need.

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McLaughlin, Niel, and Eleanor Townsley. (2011) “Contexts of Cultural Diffusion: A Case Study of ‘Public Intellectual’ Debates in English Canada,” Canadian Review of Sociology, 48:4, pp. 341–368. Mirra, Carl. (2010) “Peace Profile: Staughton Lynd and Nonviolent Direct Action,” Peace Review, 22:1, pp. 82–88. Nussbaum, Martha C. (2003) “Public Philosophy and International Feminism.” In Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman, The Public Intellectual, pp. 201–233. Omondi, D. O., M. K. Walingo, G. M. Mbagaya, and L. A. Othuon. (2012) “Predicting Dietary Practice Behavior among Type 2 Diabetics Using the Theory of Planned Behavior and Mixed Methods Design,” International Journal of Biological and Life Sciences, 8:2, pp. 117–125. Parsi, Kayhan. (2012) “The Political Satirist as Public Intellectual: The Case of Jon Stewart,” American Journal of Bioethics, 11:12, pp. 3–6. Posner, Richard A. (2003) Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. 2nd edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Rodden, John. (2007) “Dictatorship of the Professoriat?” Human Rights Review, 8:4, pp. 369–388. Roman, Leslie G. (2009) “The Unruly Solon: Unfasten Your Seatbelts, Take No Prisoners, Make No Apologies!,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 22:1, pp. 1–16. Sabloff, Jeremy A. (2011) “Where Have You Gone, Margaret Mead? Anthropology and Public Intellectuals,” American Anthropologist, 113:3, pp. 408–416. Schudel, Matt. (2011) “Derrick A. Bell, Legal Scholar Who Developed Theories on Race, Dies at 80,” Washington Post (8 October). Accessed 19 March 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/derrick-a-bell-legal-scho larwho-developed-theories-on-race-dies-at-80/2011/10/06/gIQA7kdBWL_ story.html. Smith, Gavin. (2011) “Guest Editorial: Pretending We Do Not Know What Everyone Knows We Know,” Dialectical Anthropology, 35:1 (March), pp. 1–6. Stanley, Mary B. (2002) “Proles, Entrepreneurs, or Public Scholars?,” American Behavioral Scientist, 45:7, pp. 1170–1179. New York Job Source. (2011) Magazine Publishers of America Top 100 magazines based on circulation. Accessed 19 March 2013. http://nyjobsource.com/mag azines.html. Westheimer, Joel. (2002) “Tenure Denied,” Social Text, 20:4, p. 47. Williams, Dilafruz. (2002) “Political Engagement and Service Learning: A Gandhian Perspective,” Encounter, 15:2, pp. 6–13. ———, Craig Shinn, Masami Nishishiba, and Douglas Morgan. (2002) “Toward an Understanding of Civic Capacity: An Anatomy of Community Issues that Matter to Students,” Journal of Public Affairs, 1:6, pp. 241–263. Wittner, Lawrence S. (2012) Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Zarefsky, David. (2011) “The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement,” Rhetoric Review, 30:4, pp. 426–429. Zlotkowski, Edward, and Dilafruz Williams. (2003) “The Faculty Role in Civic Engagement,” Peer Review, 5:3, pp. 9–11.

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Four: Anti-Immigration Initiatives and Weil’s Theory of Affliction Anna J. Brown Berrigan, Daniel. (1998) “America is Hard to Find.” In And the Risen Bread: Selected Poems: 1957–1997. Edited by John Dear. New York. Fordham. ———. (1978) Beside the Sea of Glass: The Song of the Lamb. New York: Seabury. Berrigan, Frida. (2012) “Lady Liberty (and Friends) Jailed in North Carolina.” Waging Nonviolence. Accessed 27 April 2012. http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/04/ladyliberty-and-friends-jailed-in-North-Carolina. Brackley, Dean. (2008) “El Salvador: The Great Migration.” Signs of the Times. 20 October. Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www.sicsal-usa.org/2008/10/el-salvadorthe-great-migration/. ———. (2011) “The Migrants: A Light to the Nations.” Celebration Publications. (January). Accessed 14 August 2013. http://celebrationpublications.org/light-to-thenations. Chomsky, Aviva. (2012) “US Immigration’s ‘Culture of Cruelty’ Stretches from Arizona to Massachusetts.” Huffington Post. (13 February). Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aviva-chomsky/us-immigrations-cruelty-border _b_1263495.html. Dear, John. (2012) “Make Hope Active in Your Life.” National Catholic Reporter. (24 April). Accessed 14 August 2013. http://ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/makehope-active-your-life. DeCosse, David E. (2005) “Immigration: Should the Rules Change?,” Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University. Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/ethicsoutlook/2005/immigration-rules.html. Goodman, Amy. (2012) “Death on the Border: Shocking Video Shows Mexican Immigrant Beaten and Tased by Border Patrol Agents.” Democracy Now. (24 April). Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/24/death_on_the_bor der_shocking_video. ———. (2013) “Harvest of Empire: The Untold Story of Latinos in America,” synopsis. Accessed 14August 2013. http://www.harvestofempiremovie.com/the_film/ synopsis/. McCauley, Mary. (2011) “The Postville Raid: What Mother Church Can Do?” Celebration Publications. (12–14 January). Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www. celebrationpublications.org/sites/default/files/conference_presentations/Mary% 20McCauley_The%20Postville%20Raid.pdf. Nussbaum, Martha C. (1988) “Bill Moyers’ World of Ideas: Martha Nussbaum,” transcript. Bill Moyers Journal. Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/ journal/archives/nussbaumwoi_flash.html. Olson, Joel. (2011) “Youth Movements Confront Legislated Intolerance.” New Clear Vision (31 March). Accessed 27 March 2013. http://www.newclearvision.com/ 2011/03/21/arizonas-two-futures/#more-385. Parenti, Christian. (2012) “Planning for the Apocalypse,” Adbusters (11 February). Accessed 27 March 2013. http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/100/post-crash-fas cism.html. Reyes, Paul. (2012) “Help Not Wanted,” Mother Jones (March–April), pp. 24–30, 70–71.

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Rich, Adrienne. (1995) “And Now.” In Dark Fields of the Republic, pp. 31–32. New York: W.W. Norton. Safina, Carl. (2012) “Occupy Corporations.” Adbusters, 20:2 (18 February). Accessed 27 March 2013. http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/100/occupied-economy.html. Springstead, Eric. (1986) Simone Weil and the Suffering of Love. Cambridge: Cowley. Weil, Simone. (1987) Formative Writings, 1924–1941. Translated by Dorothy Tuck McFarland and Willhelmina Van Ness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. (1952a) Gravity and Grace. Translated by Arthur Willis. New York: Putnam. ———. (1952b) The Need for Roots. Translated by Arthur Willis. New York: Putnam. ———. (1957) Imitations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks. Translated by E.C. Geisbuhler. London: Routledge. ———. (1956) The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Vol. 1. Translated by Arthur Willis. New York: Putnam. ———. (1965) Seventy Letters. Translated by Richard Rees. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. (1973) Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Crauford. New York: Harper and Row. Vuolo, Mike. (2012) “From ‘Wetbacks’ to ‘Illegals’ to ‘Undocumented’ to …?.” Slate (13 November). Accessed 27 March 2013. http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/ lexicon_valley/2012/11/illegal_vs_undocumented_the_debate_over_immigration_ language_on_lexicon.html.

Five: Interrogation, False Confessions, and the Intuitions of Jurors Nick Braune Fromm, Erich. (2000) “The State as Educator: On the Psychology of Criminal Justice,” pp. 123–128. In Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the Punitive Society. Translated by Heinz D. Osterle and Kevin Anderson. Edited by Kevin Anderson and Richard Quinney. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Horowitz, Emily. (2008) “Untrue Confessions: How People Tell Cops They’re Guilty Even When They Aren’t,” CounterPunch, 15:13 (July), pp. 1–4. Inbau, Fred E., and John E. Reid. (1967) Criminal Interrogation and Confessions. Baltimore, Md.: The Williams and Wilkins Company. Kassin, Saul M., et al. (2010) “Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendations,” Law and Human Behavior, 34:1 (February), pp. 3–38. Leo, Richard A., and Brittany Liu. (2009) “What Do Potential Jurors Know about Police Interrogation Techniques and False Confessions?,” Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 27, pp. 381–399. Meissner, Christian A., and Melissa B. Russano. (2003) “The Psychology of Interrogations and False Confessions: Research and Recommendations,” The Canadian Journal of Police & Security Services, 1:1 (March), pp. 53–60. Paola, Frederick Adolf, Robert Walker, and Lois LaCivita Nixon. (2010) Medical Ethics and Humanities. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett Publishers. Redlich, Allison D. (2004) “Law and Psychiatry: Mental Illness, Police Interrogations, and the Potential for False Confessions,” Psychiatric Services, 55:1 (January), pp. 19–21. Accessed 02 February 2013. http://ps.psychiatryonline. org/data/ Journals/PSS/3606/19.pdf.

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Rose, Reginald. (1957) Twelve Angry Men. Directed by Sidney Lumet. United Artists.

Six: Ignacio Martin-Baró and the 99 Percent Adrianne Aron Abramson, Larry. (2011) “Why is College So Expensive?,” All Things Considered (19 October ). Accessed 2 February 2013. http://www.npr.org/2011/10/19/141505 658/why-is-college-so-expensive. Bernabeu, Almudena, and Carolyn Patty Blum. (2012) “The Road to Spain: The Jesuit Massacre and the Struggle against Impunity in El Salvador,” Peace and Conict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 18:1, pp. 76–97. Brainard, Jeffrey. (2010) “A Public University Joins the Expanding $50K Club of College Prices,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (31 October). Accessed 2 February 2013. http://chronicle.com/article/A-Public-University-Joins-the/125207/. Dalton, Roque. (1969) “O.E.A.” In Taberna y Otros Lugares [Taverns and Other Places]. Havana: Casa de las Américas. Accessed 2 February 2013. http://www.literatura. us/roque/taberna.html. Domhoff, G. William. (2012) “Wealth, Income, and Power.” Who Rules America? Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html. Ellacuría, Ignacio. (1991) “The Historicization of the Concept of Property.” In Towards a Society that Serves Its People: The Intellectual Contribution of El Salvador’s Murdered Jesuits. Edited by John J. Hassett and Hugh Lacey, pp. 105–137. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Fuller, Max (2005) “For Iraq, ‘The Salvador Option’ Becomes a Reality,” Centre for Research on Globalisation (2 June). Accessed 2 February 2013. http:// global research.ca/articles/FUL506A.html. Larkin, Bruce D. (1988) Vital Interests: The Soviet Issue in U.S. Central American Policy. Boulder, Colo: L. Rienner. Levi, Primo. (1984) The Periodic Table. New York: Schocken. Levine, Bruce E. (2011) “How the Occupy Movement Helped Americans Move beyond Denial and Depression to Action,” Alternet, (5 December). Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www.alternet.org/story/153269/how_the_occupy_movement_helped_ americans_move_beyond_denial_and_depression_to_action. Martín-Baró, Ignacio. (1990) “Political Violence and War.” In Companions of Jesus: The Jesuit Martyrs of El Salvador. Edited by Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría, and others, pp. 76–97. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis. ———. (1994a) “Toward a Liberation Psychology.” In Writings for a Liberation Psychology, pp. 17–32. ———. (1994b) “War and Mental Health.” In Writings for a Liberation Psychology, pp. 108–121. ———. (1994c) Writings for a Liberation Psychology. Edited by Adrianne Aron and Shawn Corne. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Mishel, Lawrence. (2006) “CEO-Minimum Wage Ratio Soars,” Economic Policy Institute. Accessed 2 February 2013. www.epi.org/publication/webfeatures_ snapshots_20060627/

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Seven: Pluralism, Identity, and Violence Fuat Gürsözlü Barber, Benjamin. (2007) “William Connolly, Pluralism,” Ethics, 117:4, pp. 747–754. BBC. (2010) “Merkel Says German Multicultural Society Has Failed,” BBC World News Report. Accessed 01 March 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe11559451. ———. (1997) “Decision, Deliberation and Democratic Ethos,” Philosophy Today, 41:1, pp. 24–30. ———. (2005) On the Political. London: Verso. Christenson, Marcus. (2009) “Juventus May Face Punishment for Fans’ Racist Chanting,” The Guardian. Accessed 01 March 2013. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ football/2009/dec/20/juventus-face-punishment-racist-chanting. Connolly, William. (1990) Political Theory and Modernity. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. ———. (1991) Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. ———. (1994) “Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault,” Political Theory, 21 (August), pp. 365–389. ———. (1995a) The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (1995b) Pluralism. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press. ———. (1995c) “Twilight of the Idols,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 21:3 (May), pp. 127–138. ———. (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (2005) Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press. Cooper, Helene. (2007) “Ahmadinejad, at Columbia, Parries and Puzzles,” The New York Times. (25 September). Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2007/09/25/world/middleeast/25iran.html?_r=0. Cumming-Bruce, Nick, and Steven Erlanger. (2009) “Swiss Ban Building Minarets on Mosques,” The New York Times. (29 November). Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/world/europe/30swiss.html?emc=eta1. Fackler, Martin. (2010) “New Dissent in Japan is Loudly Anti-Foreign,” The New York Times. (28 August). Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/ 08/29/world/asia/29japan.html?emc=eta1. Honig, Bonnie. (1996) “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home.” In Democracy and Difference: Contesting Boundaries of the Political. Edited by Seyla Benhabib, pp. 257–277. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Kalyvas, Andreas. (2009) “The Democratic Narcissus: The Agonism of the Ancients Compared to that of the (Post)Moderns,” pp. 15–42. In Law and Agonistic Politics. Edited by Andrew Schaap. Farnham, England:Ashgate. Mouffe, Chantal. (1993) The Return of the Political. London: Verso. ———. (1997) “Decision, Deliberation and Democratic Ethos,” Philosophy Today, 41:1, pp. 24–30. ______. (2000) The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. ———. (2005) On the Political. London: Verso. Milliyet. (2007) “Bildiri datan gruba linç giriimi,” [Attempted Lynching of a Group Handing Out Political Leaflets] Milliyet News Report. (28 November). http://www.milliyet.com.tr.

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The Telegraph. (2011) “Nicholas Sarkozy Joins David Cameron and Angela Merkel’s View that Multiculturalism Has Failed,” The Telegraph (11 February). Accessed 01 March 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/ europe/france/8317497/Nicolas-Sarkozy-declares-multiculturalism-had failed.html. Villa, Dana. (1999) Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Wenman, Mark. (2003) “Agonistic Pluralism and Three Archetypal Forms of Politics,” Contemporary Political Theory, 2:2, pp. 165–186.

Part III Peace Theory in Depth Eight: Violence as the Conflictual Denial of Social Being Richard T. Peterson Babbitt, Susan, and Sue Campbell, eds. (1999) Racism and Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Benjamin, Walter. (2004) Selected Writings. Volume 1: 1913–1926. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bernasconi, Robert. (2001) Race. New York: Blackwell. Boxill, Bernard, ed. (2001) Race and Racism. New York: Oxford University Press. Butler, Judith. (2010) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso. Coady, C. A. J. (2007) Morality and Political Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. (2010) Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Translated by Leonard Lawlor. Chicago, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed. (2008) Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Fanon, Frantz. (2005) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Galtung, Johan. (1999) “Cultural Violence.” In Violence and Its Alternatives: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Edited by Manfred B. Steger and Nancy S. Lind, pp. 39– 53. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Faye, Emmanuel. (2011) Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935. Translated by Michael B. Smith. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Foucault, Michel. (1990) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage. ———. (1995) Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. ———. (2003) “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975– 1976. New York: Picador. Habermas, Jürgen. (1985) The Theory of Communicative Action. 2 Vols. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1979) Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. M. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. (1962) Being and Time. New York: Harper.

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Honneth, Axel. (1996) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Peterson, Richard T. (2012) “Is Nonviolence a Distinctive Ethical Idea?,” Radical Philosophy Review, 15:1, pp. 7–31. Polanyi, Karl. (2001) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 2nd edition. Boston: Beacon Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1992) Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett. Scarry, Elaine. (1987) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Sorel, Georges. (1999) Reflections on Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Squires, Gregory, and Chester Hartman, eds. (2006) There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Katrina. New York: Routledge. Valls, Andrew, ed. (2005) Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Weil, Simone, and Rachel Bespaloff. (2005) War and the Iliad. New York: New York Review Books.

Nine: On the Nature of Public Life in Plato and Rancière Wendy Hamblet Aly, Götz Hayday. Hitler’s Beneficiaries. New York: Holt. Lincoln, Bruce. (1986) Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Rancière, Jacques. (1995) Disagreement: Philosophy and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (2006) Hatred of Democracy. New York: Verso. ———. (2007) On the Shores of Politics. New York: Verso.

Ten: Radical Protest and Dialectical Ethics Peter Amato Cohen, G. A. (2008) Rescuing Justice and Equality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. (2009) Why Not Socialism? Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Fischer, Gilbert R. (1971) “Search for Ethics,” Ethics, 81:3, pp. 260–270. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1982) Reason in the Age of Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ———. (1986) Truth and Method. New York: Crossroad. ———. (2000) The Beginning of Philosophy. New York: Continuum. Gottlieb, Roger. (2002) Joining Hands: Politics and Religion Together for Social Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Westview Press. Hedgecoe, Adam. (2004) “Critical Bioethics: Beyond the Social Scientific Critique of Applied Ethics,” Bioethics, 18:2, pp. 120–143. Heller, Agnes. (1981) “The Legacy of Marxist Ethics Today,” Praxis International, no. 4, pp. 346–364.

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Ladd, J. (1991) “The Quest for a Code of Professional Ethics: An Intellectual and Moral Confusion.” In Ethical Issues in Engineering. Edited by Deborah G. Johnson, pp. 130–136. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Martin, Bill. (2008) Ethical Marxism. Chicago, Ill.: Open Court. Marshall, Peter. (2008) Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: Harper/Perennial. Marx, Karl. (1845) The German Ideology. Accessed 3 February 2013. http://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/. ———. (1975) “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State.” In Marx: Early Writings. Edited by Quintin Hoare, 57–198. New York: Vintage. ———. (1997) “On the Jewish Question.” In The Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society. Edited by Loyd David Easton and Kurt H. Guddatt, pp. 216– 248. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett. ———, and Friedrich Engels. (1998) The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Amherst, N.Y., Prometheus. Mautner, Thomas. (1998) “Ethics”; “Ethos.” In The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, pp. 180–182. New York: Penguin. Newman, Saul. (2004) Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought: New Theories of the Political. New York: Routledge. Ricoeur, Paul. (1970) Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Seager, Thomas, and Evan Selinger. (2011) “Kids Today: Occupy Wall Street Is Part of a Major Shift in Ethical Behavior among Young People. Slate. (8 November). Accessed 14 August 2013. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_ tense/2011/11/occupy_wall_street_is_a_symptom_of_a_shift_in_ethical_outlook _among_young_people_.html. Singer, Peter. (1999) A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Wilde, Lawrence. (1998) Ethical Marxism and Its Radical Critics. London: Macmillan. Wood, E. M. (2010) “Happy Campers: A Review of Why Not Socialism? by G. A. Cohen,” London Review of Books, 32:2 (28 January), pp. 26–27.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS PETER AMATO is Teaching Professor of Philosophy and Director of Programs in Philosophy at Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His research interests include philosophical hermeneutics, Marxism, and the philosophy of technology. Amato has been affiliated with the Radical Philosophy Association and the Marxism and Philosophy Association for several years. ADRIANNE ARON practices psychology in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a clinical focus on human rights and psychological trauma. As co-editor, chief translator, and author of the introductions, she contributed to the first English language collection of essays by Ignacio Martín-Baró, Writings for a Liberation Psychology (1994). She also translated and penned the Introduction to Cadmus Editions’ 2009 publication of Mario Benedetti’s play, Pedro and the Captain, a dramatic dialogue between a torturer and his victim. A long-time advocate for peace and justice, Aron is a member of the English language network of liberation psychologists (www.libpsy.org). She is also an awardwinning fiction writer. NICK BRAUNE is Associate Professor of Philosophy at South Texas College, McAllen, Texas. He is actively involved with several peace and justice issues in the Rio Grande Valley. Braune’s first academic interest is applied ethics, with particular emphasis on critique of the criminal justice system. He has made several presentations on the injustice of the current criminal justice system and has spoken at several philosophy conferences on the subject as well. His other academic interest is the philosophy of Erich Fromm, with particular focus on Fromm’s socialist humanist writings of the 1960s. One of Braune’s essays on Fromm appeared in Radical Philosophy Review in 2009, and two have appeared in the newsletter, Fromm Forum, published in Germany. ANNA J. BROWN is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Social Justice program at Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City, New Jersey. Brown founded the Dr. Martin Luther King-Kairos Social Justice House at the University. Most recently, she co-edited and contributed to Faith, Resistance, and the Future: Daniel Berrigan’s Challenge to Catholic Social Thought (with James L. Marsh, 2012). In 2010, Brown was awarded the Dorothy Day Peacemaker of the Year award from Pax Christi New Jersey. WILLIAM C. GAY is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is past editor of Concerned Philosophers for Peace Newsletter (1987–2002) and past editor (20002–2012) of CPP’s Special Se-

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ries on “Philosophy of Peace” (Rodopi, VIBS). He is past President and past Executive Director of Concerned Philosophers for Peace. With T. A. Alekseeva, he is coauthor of Capitalism with a Human Face: The Quest for a Middle Road in Russian Politics (1996), and coeditor of On the Eve of the 21st Century: Perspectives of Russian and American Philosophers (1994) and Democracy and the Quest for Justice: Russian and American Perspectives (2004). With Michael Pearson, he is coauthor of The Nuclear Arms Race (1987). With I. I. Mazour and A. N. Chumakov, he is coeditor of Global Studies Encyclopedia (2003). He has also published articles and book chapters on peace, justice, and nonviolence from the perspectives of philosophy of language and political philosophy. FUAT GÜRSÖZLÜ is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, Maryland. His recent research focuses on violence, political action, and democracy, more specifically on the possibilities for peaceful political practice given the conflictual nature of democratic societies. He is currently writing a book, tentatively entitled Ethos of Democratic Engagement. TOM H. HASTINGS is full-time faculty for the graduate program in Conflict Resolution at Portland State University and part-time faculty in the Portland Community College Peace and Conflict certificate program. He is on the Governing Council of the International Peace Research Association, past cochair and current board member of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, currently serves on the board of the Oregon Peace Institute (OPI) and on the Academic Advisory Board of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. Hastings is also director of PeaceVoice, a program operating under the auspices of OPI. He has written several books and many articles about nonviolence and other peace and conflict topics. He is a former Plowshares resister, a founding member of two Catholic Worker communities, and currently lives in Whitefeather Peace House. WENDY C. HAMBLET is a Canadian philosopher currently serving as a Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, North Carolina. Her research focuses upon the problems of peaceful engagement within and among human communities, especially for communities that have suffered histories of radical victimization. She has published numerous books on violence: The Sacred Monstrous: A Reflection on Violence in Human Communities (2005); Savage Constructions: A Theory of Rebounding Violence in Africa (2008); The Lesser Good (2008); Punishment and Shame (2011); and Daemon in the Sanctuary (2013). Her papers are widely published in professional journals, including The Monist, Prima

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Philosophia, Existentia, Appraisal, Philosophical Writings, and Ethica. Hamblet is an alumnus of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and she is a co-founding Executive Board member of TRANSCEND-USA, the US chapter of the Transcend Network of Peace Activist Scholars (Netherlands). She serves in the capacity of Executive Director of the Concerned Philosophers For Peace and is also the Director of the International Center for Organizational Excellence, a consulting firm that offers professional development in Organizational Ethics, Corrections Reform, Youth Anti-Violence, and Conflict Transformation, in the international community. GREG MOSES has been teaching philosophy since 1988, and currently teaches ethics at several campuses in Central Texas. He is author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr and the Philosophy of Nonviolence (1998) and has published several articles and chapters about King, with an emphasis on the context of African American intellectual influences. Lately, Moses has been working on the peace and justice scholarship of J. Leonard Farmer Sr., especially considering how the work may have affected King’s conception of a radical Jesus. Recent chapters by Moses may be found in Philosophic Values and World Citizenship, edited by Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Leonard Harris (2010); and in The Liberatory Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr, edited by Robert Birt (2012). As an active member of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, Moses has served as newsletter editor, webmaster, and liaison to the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association. RICHARD PETERSON is currently Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University in Lansing, Michigan, where he has served as Chair of the Philosophy Department and Director of Peace and Justice Studies. He has written about social approaches to knowledge and rationality, conceptions of race and racism, differential forms of violence, and the promise of a human rights ethic. His main publications are Democratic Philosophy and the Politics of Knowledge (1996) and articles on Marx, Foucault, race, multiculturalism, human rights, and various aspects of violence. He is currently working on a book manuscript about conceptions of violence and nonviolence and a project on philosophical aspects of media. GAIL M. PRESBEY is currently Professor of Philosophy at University of Detroit Mercy. Her areas of expertise are social and political philosophy as well as philosophy of nonviolence and cross-cultural philosophy. She has done research in Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, and India, having received two J. William Fulbright grants. Her most recent edited work is Philosophical Perspectives on the ‘War on Terrorism’ (2007). She co-edited The Philosophical Quest: A Cross-Cultural Reader (with Karsten J. Struhl and Richard Olsen,

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1995 and 2000), and edited Thought and Practice in African Philosophy (2002). Presbey has also authored over fifty journal articles and book chapters, with some articles translated into German, French, Italian, and Spanish. Presbey has been Executive Director and then President of Concerned Philosophers for Peace (2002–2010). Currently, Presbey serves on the Board of Directors of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and the Advisory Board of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking. DAVID SWANSON holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has been a journalist, activist, organizer, educator, and agitator. He was press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and spent three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. He helped plan the nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC in 2011. Currently, Swanson works as Campaign Coordinator for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org and is the host of Talk Nation Radio. In addition, Swanson blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org. He also works on the communications committee of Veterans for Peace, of which he is an associate (non-veteran) member, and is Secretary of Peace in the Green Shadow Cabinet. Swanson’s publications include War Is A Lie (2010), When the World Outlawed War (2011), and The Military Industrial Complex at 50 (2012).

INDEX abolitionists, 23 An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario (Pentagon), 66 action, 115 activism, 145, 147 illegal aliens’, 62 peace, 47, 48 political, 50, 51 affliction, 55–58, 62 agents, intending, 115 Agriprocessors raid, 67 alienation, 132 Almanza, Susana, 1, 2 Althusser, Louis, 135 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), 68 anarch(ism)(y): anarchist conviction, 150 contemporary post-, 145 apology, 31, 32 culture-dependent connotations, 34 applied (the term), 160 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 15 Arendt, Hannah, 18, 20, 27, 29 The Human Condition, 19 Ariely, Dan, 89 Arizona SB 1070, 56, 69 arms race protests, 30 atom bomb, 10–13. See also nuclear weapons bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 14, 31 post-war stockpiling, 14 Barber, Benjamin, 105 Beason-Hammon Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (HB 56), 65, 68 behavior, ideal vs. actual, 115 Bell, Derrick, 48 Benhabib, Seyla, 20 Be Not Afraid (Mounier), 38 Bermuda Refugee Conference, 28 Berrigan, Daniel, 56, 65 “America Is Hard to Find,” 67 Beside the Sea of Glass, 69 Bierne, Charlie, 87 blacklisting, academic, 52

“Border Crossing Deaths Are More Common as Illegal Migration Declines” (Moreno), 58 Brackley, Dean, 64, 65, 69, 87, 92 Brave New Neighborhoods (Kohn), 23 Bringing Down a Dictator (York), 50 Bush, George W., 64 Butler, Judith, 15 The Call, 23, 24 Cameron, David, 96 campers (Cohen’s concept), 153 Camus, Albert, 9–11, 15 capitalism, 154, 158, 162 Cohen’s vision of world beyond, 153 ethos of, 156 retrenchment of capital, 155 Castro, Fidel, 38 Catholicism, Day’s, 17, 24, 25, 38–40 The Catholic Worker, 17, 25, 26, 30, 34, 37 editorials on pacifism, 28 Catholic Worker movement, 22, 27, 28 Center for Justice and Accountability, 88 Central America, 85, 86, 90 Chavez, Cesar, 1–3 Cheney, Dick, 64 choice, 115 Chomsky, Aviva, 64 Chomsky, Noam, 15 Christianity, 38 city, Plato’s just, 135–140, 142 citizens’ sense of superiority, 61 class: division, 14 discrimination, 142 c. rule, 156 Clinton, Hilary, 32 Cohen, G. A., 147–150, 152, 154–157 Rescuing Justice and Equality, 151 Why Not Socialism?, 153 Cold War, 9, 11, 29, 38, 39 militarism during, 66 Commonweal, 24 communication theory, 120 community, 153, 160 compassion, 59, 61–63

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complacency in US, 91, 92 Comte, Auguste, 20 Conference of Catholic Bishops, 40 confession to crime, 76 false, 73 coerced-compliant, 76, 77 police-induced, 71 Kassin report, 80, 81 presumption of truth of in, 74 conflict, 115, 116, 118–120, 123, 125, 129, 130, 134 c. management, 41, 44 racial, 133 Connolly, William, 98–101, 103–107 Conscientious Objectors, 26 Criminal Interrogations and Confessions (Inbau and Reid), 75 criminal justice system in America, 83 cultural tension, 94, 96 Dalton, Roque, 86, 92 Davis, Angela, 15 Day, Dorothy, 17–19, 21, 23–40 The Long Loneliness, 22 The Day Book, 22 DeCosse, David, 55 del Vasto, Lanza (Shantidas), 37 democracy, 135, 136, 140, 143 agonistic, 98, 99, 102–104 in Plato’s city, 140 pluralist, 102 Rancière’s proposal for politics in, 143 responsibility in, 11 d. values, 102 Democratic Opposition of Serbia, 51 demos, 139, 140, 143 denial, 89 determinism, technological, 145 Dewey, John, 9, 14, 15 “Dualism and the Split Atom,” 13 Reconstruction in Philosophy, 13 difference: vs. otherness, 100 violence from clashing cultural, 93 discourse before Iraq war, public, 41 discriminatory legislation, 94, 95 dissent in El Salvador, 85 diversity, 93, 98, 103, 106, 107 dogmatism in radical protests, 147

Domhoff, William, 89 Dominguez murder trial, 71–73, 83 dualism, Western, 13 East-West relations, 15 economi(cs)(sm), 145 e. crises, 66 e. dispartity in US, 88, 89 egalitarianism, 153 Egan, Eileen, 17, 26, 27, 30, 37 Einstein, Albert, 13 Ellacuria, Ignacio, 64, 65 El Salvador, 86, 90 civil war in, 85 psychololgical problems linked to oppression, 87 US awareness of poverty in, 88 Ellacuría, Ignacio, 88, 92 emancipation, 14, 150 empathy, 61 empiricism vis-à-vis violence, 115, 116 engagement, ethos of, 103–105 Enlightenment, Kant’s treatment of, 132 equality, 149, 150, 153, 162 defended by liberals, 147 incentives argument regarding, 151 ethics: applied, 147, 160, 161 vs. ethos, 148, 149, 154, 158 dialectical, 147, 157, 161, 162 materialist vs. idealist reduction of, 152 of radical protest, 145 socialist e. consciousness, 152 ethos, 147, 148, 150, 151, 155, 157, 159, 162 egalitarian, 153 of capitalism, 156 of engagement, 103–105 vs. ethics, 149, 154, 158 vs. rules, 152 Examined Life (Taylor), 15 exonerations, post-conviction, 73 fascism, 91 Federation for American Immigration Reform, 68 Finkelstein, Norman, 48 Finlay, Carlos, 86 Fischer, Gilbert R., 149

Index Foucault, Michel, 113 Franklin, Benjamin, 21 freedom, 145, 149, 150, 153 academic, 48 inherent in moral conduct, 161 public, 19 French Revolution, 20 Freud, Sigmund, 158, 159 friend/enemy relations, 99 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 159, 160 Gandhi, Mohandas (Mahatma), 21, 22, 28–30, 111 Gandhi, Rajmohan, 29 Gaudium et Spes (Paul VI), 37 genocide, 143 German society, 93, 95, 96, 107 Gerrish, Kate, 44 ghettoes, 96 glasnost, 15 globalization, corporate, 65 Gonzalez, Alberto, 64 good, common, 135, 142 Goodman, Amy, 63 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 15 Govier, Trudy, 32, 34 grounded theory, 42–44, 52 Habermas, Jürgen, 120 Haider, Jörg, 99 Hardt, Michael, 15 harm, 114–126 harmony in social relations, 102 Harrington, James C., 2 “Harvest of Empire” (Goodman), 57 Haywood, Bill, 23 Hegel, G. W. F., 117, 120, 122, 129, 157, 159 Heidegger, Martin, 131, 133 Being and Time, 132 Heine, Heinrich, 20 Hennacy, Ammon, 29 hermeneutics, 158–160 Hertz, Deborah, 20 Hill v. Colorado, 36 Hirohito, 31 Hiroshima, 9, 10, 14, 31–33 histor(icity)(y) , 146, 155, 156, 157, 159– 161 Hobbes, Thomas, 111

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Honig, Bonnie, 101 Honneth, Alex, 120 Horowitz, Emily, 75, 76 human social being, 120 Hume, David, 132 Hussein, Saddam, 51 idealism, ethical, 148 identi(fication)(ty), 94–100, 108 effort to secure existential condition, 100 fundamentals of, 105 i./difference, 98, 101, 102, 104–107 Heidegger’s treatment of, 132 problematization of standards of, 103 racializing, 132 illegal aliens, 55, 64, 65. See also immigra(nts)(tion), undocumented immigra(nts)(tion), 93–96 expected to conform to dominant culture, 97 undocumented, 55, 59, 68, 69; see also illegal aliens acts of resistance, 56 labeled as illegals, 64 Latino, 57 political activism, 62 rage toward, 63 seen as destructive force, 65 US i. policy, 55, 68 imperialism,. British, 28 in-between (Arendt’s concept), 19 incentives argument, 151 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 17, 22–25, 36 Supreme Court decision of 1909, 24 informed consent,: interrogations and, 77, 78 competence, 82 disclosure, 80 voluntariness, 81 interrogations, 71, 72, 75, 78, 80–82, 84 common techniques in US, 74 potential jurors’ understanding of, 76 trickery strategies in, 73 Iraq war media coverage, 41 journalism (peace vs. war), 44 judgment, standards of, 104

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jurors, 71, 73, 76, 78, 80, 83 justice, 44, 51, 144, 153 causes and effects on micro-level, 135 in Chile, 90 defended by liberals, 147 demographics of j. groups, 48 in El Salvador, 85 ethical conceptions of, 151 Plato’s definition, 135 political injustice, 142 Rawlsian, 151 just war theory, 11, 32 Kant, Immanuel, 111, 131–134 Kassin study, 80, 81 King Jr., Martin Luther, 111 Kobach, Kris, 68 Kohn, Margaret, 23, 24, 36, 37 Koštunica, Vojislav, 51 Kropotkin, Petr, 17, 23 Ladd, John, 161 LaPlant, Matthew, 31 Lee v. Krishna Consciousness, 36 Leo, Richard, 73 Levi, Primo, 91 Levine, Bruce, 90 liberalism, 38, 147, 155 Rawlsian, 147, 150 liberation, 86, 87 l. psychology, 88 l. theology, 90, 92 Limbaugh, Rush, 32 Lindbergh baby kidnapping, 77 Lovejoy, Elijah, 23 Lynd, Staughton, 48 MacArthur, Douglas, 31 majority of the people, 90, 92 marginalization, 95 Marx, Karl, 9, 20, 134, 146–148, 150, 151, 154–156 Theses on Feuerbach, 157, 158, 160 Marxism, 145, 146, 156, 158. See also economism anti-, 147 common ground with Catholics, 38 masses, 14 Dewey’s goal to give scientific and moral control to, 13

The Masses, 24, 25 Martín-Baró, Ignacio, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92 “War and Mental Health,” 86 materialism, 147, 157 Maurin, Peter, 17, 24, 25, 37, 38 McCauley, Mary, 67 media, 43 alternative, 50 driver to peace or war, 44 mainstream, 41, 42, 50 markets hostile to positive peace, 51 Serbian state, 51 medical ethics, 80, 81 Medical Ethics and Humanities (Paola and Walker), 79, 80 mental health problems, 86 meritocracy, 143 Merkel, Angela, 93, 95–97, 106, 107 “The Migrants: A Light to the Nations,” 64 militarism, Cold War, 66 Mill, John Stuart, 20 Miller, William, 28, 37 Milosevic, Slobodan, 51 minarets, Swiss ban on, 94, 95 minorities, 95 morality of radical protest, 145, 149, 161 Mott Street house, 25, 26 Mouffe, Chantal, 98, 99, 102, 103 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), 15 Nagasaki, 9, 10, 14, 31–33 New England Courant (Franklin), 21 news reporting, 2 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 149 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 105, 158, 159 nonviolence, 111, 121, 123 Norton, Mike, 89 nuclear weapons, 9, 11–16 Catholic Church position, 37 Catholic Workers’ protest against, 17, 37 philosophical responses to, 9 Numbers USA, 68 Nussbaum, Martha C., 15, 56 Obama, Barack, 32 Occupy Movement, 36, 90, 91, 145, 162 First Amendment debate about, 35 Olson, Joel, 68, 69 ontology, social, 131

Index oppress(ed)(ion), 55, 56, 61 Oregon Peace Institute, 42 pacifism, Catholic Workers’, 28 Parenti, Christian, 66 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 15 patriotism, 59, 61 peace, 1, 3–5, 121, 134 p. intellectualism, 41, 43, 47 negative, 111 philosophical analysis of, 15 positive, 18, 19 in public life, 9, 111 PeaceVoice, 42, 49–52 Pearl Harbor, 26, 31, 33, 34 People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources (PODER), 1 perception, altered by false information, 81 perestroika, 15 perpetrators, 32, 34, 35 Philosophical Perspectives on the ‘War on Terrorism (Presbey), 15 philosophy: ethical/moral, 148, 149, 156, 160, 161 in everyday life, 15 rise in twentieth century, 9 Pinochet dictatorship, 90 Plato, 9, 137, 138 Apology, 140 Crito, 140 Republic, 135, 136, 139, 140–143 Statesman, 140, 141 Platonic Forms, 143 pluralism: agonistic, 5, 93, 94, 97, 102, 106 Connolly’s theory of, 100 peaceful/democratic, 101, 103, 107, 108 Pointe du Sable, Jean Baptiste, 86 polarized thinking, 34 political (Arendt’s conception of), 19 politics, 143 agonistic, 103 p. of becoming, 100, 104, 105 democratic, 140, 142 electoral, 21 Marxism as basis for p. activity, 147 radical, 145–147 in Republic, 140, 142

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Western p. thought, 140 Posner, Richard, 49 power, 113 p. relations, 103 private sphere, 19 profiteering, American, 28 Prohme, Rayna, 22 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 23 public: Arendt’s conception of, 19 life, 9, 111 meeting space, 20; see also salons opinion, Day’s efforts to sway, 18 practice of peace philosophy, 1, 18 policy, 21 realm, 18–20 peace and justice scholarship, 41, 43, 46, 48, 49, 52 self-disclosure, 18, 19 space, 20, 31, 35, 36, 56, 59, 62 Quadragesimo anno (Pius XI), 17 rac(e)(ializing)(ism), 128, 129, 131, 132 Kant’s concept of, 133 radicals, 145, 147, 162 Rancière, Jacques, 135–137, 139, 140, 142–144 Rawls, John, 147, 148, 150–153, 155, 156 reciprocity, 120–122, 126, 128, 129, 133 asymmetrical, 131 recognition theory, 120 reconciliation, 38 Reid technique, 75, 76, 82 Rerum novarum (Leo XIII), 17 Resistencia Bookstore, 2 respect, agonistic, 105 responsibility, mitigating factors in, 115 Reyes, Paul, 65, 68 Rich, Adrienne, 56, 62, 63 Ricoeur, Paul, 158, 159 Rojas, Anastasio Hernandez, 63, 64 Ronell, Avital, 15 Roos, John, 32 rootedness, 56, 59, 62 country as means of, 60 Rorty, Richard, 15 Rosas, Lilia, 2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 112, 134

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rules vs. ethos, 152 Rumsfeld, Donald, 64 Russell, Bertrand, 9, 15 Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, 12, 13 “Man’s Peril from the Hydrogen Bomb,” 12 “The Bomb and Civilization,” 12 Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 12 Safina, Carl, 66 The View from the Lazy Point, 65 Saint-Simonianism, 20 salons, 18, 20, 21 Santa Fe Document, 86 Sarkozy, Nicholas, 96 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9, 11, 15 Satyagraha Movement, 21 Save our Youth (SOY), 2 Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital, 79 Seager, Thomas, 146, 162 Sedition Act of 1798, 23 self-relation, Heidegger’s treatment, 132 Selinger, Evan, 146, 162 Serbian state media, 51 Shantidas. See del Vasto, Lanza Sheehan, Arthur, 26 Singer, Peter, 15 socialism, 147, 148, 154–156 relationship of ethics to, 146 social technology of, 153 social relations, 115, 117–122, 124, 125, 127, 131, 133, 134 society, 149, 150–152, 154–157, 159, 160, 162 feasibility of socialism in, 153 radical transformation of, 146 Socrates, 135–139, 142 solidarity, 87, 90 Sorel, Georges, 114, 123 Spanish Civil War, 17 Catholic Church position in, 26 state: separation of society and, 151 tripartite s. in Plato’s democracy, 140 Weil’s conception of, 59–61, 67, 69 Stoicism, 9 Suljagic, Emir, 35 Taking Wrongs Seriously (Govier), 32

Tea Party rallies, 69 technology, social, 152, 153 tenure denial based on activism, 45, 47 terrorism, 9, 15 9/11 attacks, 42 major events since 2000, 145 Texas Civil Rights Project, 2 Tierney, Lennox, 31 Tolstoy, Leo, 22, 23 Truman, Harry, 33 truth, 159 United Farm Workers (UFW), 2 universalism, Kant’s proposal for, 132 U.S. v. Kokinda, 36 US-Mexico border, 58 us/them relations, 104 values: ancient Greek, 141 democratic, 102 Varnhagen, Rahel, 18, 20, 27 victimhood, 34 Villa, Dana, 105, 106 violence, 93–95, 97, 103, 106, 107, 112, 121, 131, 132 agents of may also be victims, 34, 118 cycles of, 3, 4 toward differences, 101 direct, 113, 114, 116–118, 120, 123– 127 effects of/harms from, 114, 119 harm vs. interests in, 118 illegality counted as, 114 institutional (structural), 113, 114, 116, 123, 125–127, 129 instrumental, 116, 120 intent as defining feature, 115 irrationality of, 133 morality of, 120 ontological analysis of, 119, 122, 123, 127, 129, 130, 134 questioning v. in name of security, 31 racism and, 131 relational approach to, 111, 116–119 Rousseau on, 112 social/theoretical analysis of, 115 systemic, 113, 127, 128, 130, 133, 134

Index war: based on lies, 41 philosophical analysis of, 15 “We Are to Blame for New War in Europe” (n. a.), 28 Weil, Simone, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62, 69 “The Love of God and Affliction,” 57 The Need for Roots, 56, 59, 60 West, Cornel, 15 Westheimer, Joel, 48

we/they relationships, 99, 102 wisdom, practical, 149 Wittner, Lawrence, 48 World War II, 17, 27, 28 xenophobia, 61 Yabunaka, Mitoji, 32 Yabunaka cable, 32 Zizek, Slavoj, 15

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VIBS The Value Inquiry Book Series is co-sponsored by: Adler School of Professional Psychology American Indian Philosophy Association American Maritain Association American Society for Value Inquiry Association for Process Philosophy of Education Canadian Society for Philosophical Practice Center for Bioethics, University of Turku Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Central European Pragmatist Forum Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University Centre for Cultural Research, Aarhus University Centre for Professional Ethics, University of Central Lancashire Centre for the Study of Philosophy and Religion, University College of Cape Breton Centro de Estudos em Filosofia Americana, Brazil College of Education and Allied Professions, Bowling Green State University College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology Concerned Philosophers for Peace Conference of Philosophical Societies Department of Moral and Social Philosophy, University of Helsinki Gannon University Gilson Society Haitian Studies Association Ikeda University Institute of Philosophy of the High Council of Scientific Research, Spain International Academy of Philosophy of the Principality of Liechtenstein International Association of Bioethics International Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Value Inquiry International Society for Universal Dialogue Natural Law Society Philosophical Society of Finland Philosophy Born of Struggle Association Philosophy Seminar, University of Mainz Pragmatism Archive at The Oklahoma State University R.S. Hartman Institute for Formal and Applied Axiology Research Institute, Lakeridge Health Corporation Russian Philosophical Society Society for Existential Analysis Society for Iberian and Latin-American Thought Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust Unit for Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Autonomous University of Barcelona Whitehead Research Project Yves R. Simon Institute

Titles Published Volumes 1 - 232 see www.rodopi.nl 233. Amihud Gilead, The Privacy of the Psychical. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 234. Paul Kriese and Randall E. Osborne, Editors, Social Justice, Poverty and Race: Normative and Empirical Points of View. A volume in Studies in Jurisprudence 235. Hakam H. Al-Shawi, Reconstructing Subjects: A Philosophical Critique of Psychotherapy. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 236. Maurice Hauriou, Tradition in Social Science. Translation from French with an Introduction by Christopher Berry Gray. A volume in Studies in Jurisprudence 237. Camila Loew, The Memory of Pain: Women’s Testimonies of the Holocaust.. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 238. Stefano Franchi and Francesco Bianchini, Editors, The Search for a Theory of Cognition: Early Mechanisms and New Ideas. A volume in Cognitive Science 239. Michael H. Mitias, Friendship: A Central Moral Value. A volume in Ethical Theory and Practice 240. John Ryder and Radim Šíp, Editors, Identity and Social Transformation, Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Five. A volume in Central European Value Studies 241. William Sweet and Hendrik Hart, Responses to the Enlightenment: An Exchange on Foundations, Faith, and Community. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 242. Leonidas Donskis and J.D. Mininger, Editors, Politics Otherwise: Shakespeare as Social and Political Critique. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 243. Hugh P. McDonald, Speculative Evaluations: Essays on a Pluralistic Universe. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values.

244. Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Małecki, Editors, Shusterman’s Pragmatism: Between Literature and Somaesthetics. A volume in Central European Value Studies 245. Harry Lesser, Editor, Justice for Older People, A volume in Values in Bioethics 246. John G. McGraw, Personality Disorders and States of Aloneness (Intimacy and Aloneness: A Multi-Volume Study in Philosophical Psychology, Volume Two), A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 247. André Mineau, SS Thinking and the Holocaust. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 248. Yuval Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 249. Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Love as a Guide to Morals. A volume in Ethical Theory and Practice 250. Ronny Miron, Karl Jaspers: From Selfhood to Being. A volume in Studies in Existentialism 251. Necip Fikri Alican, Rethinking Plato: A Cartesian Quest for the Real Plato. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 252. Leonidas Donskis, Editor, Yet Another Europe after 1984: Rethinking Milan Kundera and the Idea of Central Europe. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 253. Michael Candelaria, The Revolt of Unreason: Miguel de Unamuno and Antonio Caso on the Crisis of Modernity. A volume in Philosophy in Spain 254. Paul Richard Blum, Giordano Bruno: An Introduction. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 255. Raja Halwani, Carol V. A. Quinn, and Andy Wible, Editors, Queer Philosophy: Presentations of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy, 1998-2008. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies

256. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Shakespeare and Philosophy: Lust, Love, and Law. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 257. Jim Kanaris, Editor, Polyphonic Thinking and the Divine. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 258. Michael Krausz, Oneness and the Displacement of Self: Dialogues on Self-Realization. A volume in Interpretation and Translation 259. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Jesus or Nietzsche: How Should We Live Our Lives? A volume in Ethical Theory and Practice 260. Giorgio A. Pinton, The Conspiracy of the Prince of Macchia & G. B. Vico. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 261. Mechthild E. Nagel and Anthony J. Nocella II, Editors, The End of Prisons: Reflections from the Decarceration Movement. A volume in Social Philosophy 262. Dorota Koczanowicz, Leszek Koczanowicz, and David Schauffler, Editors, Discussing Modernity: A Dialogue with Martin Jay. A volume in Central European Value Studies 263. Pekka Mäkelä and Cynthia Townley, Editors, Trust: Analytic and Applied Perspectives. A volume in Nordic Value Studies 264. Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, Beyond Aesthetics and Politics: Philosophical and Axiological Studies on the Avant-Garde, Pragmatism, and Postmodernism. A volume in Central European Value Studies 265. David C. Bellusci, Amor Dei in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 266. Vasil Gluchman, Editor, Morality: Reasoning on Different Approaches. A volume in Ethical Theory and Practice 267. Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn, Editors, Narrative Ethics. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 268. Greg Moses and Gail Presbey, Editors, Peace Philosophy and Public Life: Commitments, Crises, and Concepts for Engaged Thinking. A volume in Philosophy of Peace