Savaging the Tapestry of the Law

Getting off the bus at Berkeley, my stop is right next to the law building.

I know that is where John Yoo, the torture lawyer, is a professor.

There are over a thousand students and faculty in the law school, who go there all the time.

And everybody knows what John Yoo has done, and that he is in the school there.

So what else would you do but go in?

* * *

Approaching the Berkeley law school, on a massive monumental inscription, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr intones:

When I think thus of the law, I see a princess mightier than she who wrought at Bayeux, eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever-lengthening past — figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life.

Let us put aside for a moment any potential differences with such a hagiographic description of the State and its judicial apparatus.

Let us merely ask: could there be any more beautiful description of precisely that which Yoo’s work has systematically destroyed?

* * *

Entering Boalt Hall, the building housing the school of law, one sees students working hard, lectures in progress, the usual goings-on of an academic paradise.

On bulletin boards are plastered advertisements and posters: for law journals, talks, panels, conferences, classes, and more.

Many of these posters advertise a talk on the obscuranta of the Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution: a debate on “Unenumerated rights”.

Hardly the best-known amendment, and hardly the sexiest topic.

But the moderator of this debate is none other than John Yoo.

So what else could you do but make a note of it?

* * *

The strategy seems clear: a gradual normalisation of academic presence, testing the waters with esoteric scholasticism.

There is no advertisement of the event online: google searches turn up nothing. Clearly attempting to fly under the radar.

From lower to higher profile events, evidently hoping that, step by gradual step, nobody will remember the dictum from Nuremberg:

The prostitution of a judicial system for the accomplishment of criminal ends involves an element of evil to the State which is not found in frank atrocities which do not sully judicial robes.

Even the dedicated activists of Fire John Yoo have nothing of it at their website.

So what else could you do but notify firejohnyoo.org?

* * *

A protest is held, and press conference given, below the mighty words of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Nonviolently, peacefully, even politely, we march into the school.

Some in jumpsuits, some carrying pictures, some wearing ribbons, the procession enters the library.

Have you ever seen police blocking off access in a public library?

* * *

The room is full, explain the officers, looking a little guilty: someone exits the room even as they say it.

Full minus one equals full — the officers of the Law now deny arithmetic and the conservation of matter.

There is no sense to it, but Yoo’s intentional nonsense wrought far worse.

But with the Law’s tapestry so savagely riven, and the architect inside, what could one expect?

* * *

But I looked beyond the Law’s tapestry, here represented by automatons under arms, brute force blocking off publicly owned bookshelves.

And I looked at the students all around studying: we had speeches but we kept it quite quiet in the library.

Almost every one refused to make eye contact. Elsewhere I have seen the secret smile, the secret wink, the secret fist, the secret delight in violation of obedient social norms. Not here.

Should we pity the children — but they are not children! Should we educate them — but they are highly intelligent!

Should we teach them the law in law school? Is it too confusing to differentiate academic debate from criminal behaviour?

There were some students with us, but the silence spoke to me. It whispered of late Weimar Germany.

Do they have too much work? Stress? Debt? Is protest inherently crazy? I felt like a homeless outcst beggar pleading for change.

But I will plead for change, as long as it is necessary.

Why did it take a peripatetic mathematician, on a research visit, on wanderings preoccupied with symplectic geometry, to instigate this?

Jules Verne

Today I went to the Jules Verne museum. Nantes being his home town, the local government has established a museum in his honour. There is also an enormous mechanical elephant, in Verne-ian style. Since the temperature here has finally climbed back above freezing, the elephant was out on the streets today, about 50 people on board, spraying random passers-by with water. This seems like it would be more fun if it were actually hot; apparently, although above zero now does actually feel kind of warm to me, I haven’t quite acclimatised sufficiently.

Verne’s fiction today seems childish, sometimes racist, Orientalist, sometimes nakedly imperialist. Apparently his work has suffered from poor English translations. They are Boy’s Own tales of an era long gone, pioneering antiques of science fiction. But there is still something delightful about it, some untainted childlike optimism about progress, technology, the world, discovery, science, adventure, and the universe.

As he says:

Il y a là une poésie grandiose, uné poesie qui n’est plus humaine seulement, mais planétaire, interplanétaire, si j’ose ainsi parler

(There is there a grandiose poetry, a poetry no longer only human, but planetary, interplanetary, if I dare say it.)

We no longer have literature to provide us with such dreams. Post-modern art in general abhors progress and optimism. Science has become too hard. Physics is buried under tomes of string theory machinations that may well turn out to become nonsense. It takes near a lifetime to reach the frontiers of mathematical understanding. Politically we have all the theory we need to liberate ourselves, and a century of history to ruin our dreams. Economically we are richer than ever, but stressed and unhappy as never before. Technologically we could create a paradise but instead we have killer robot drones, militarization of everything, total state surveillance, and criminalization of sharing information. Ecologically we know how to save ourselves but plough relentlessly toward distruction, like “yeast in a barrel, feeding and farting until they are poisoned by their own waste”. It is an absurdity, a disaster. Maybe less so in France! But the point remains. The power of literature is awesome. It is not being used to its social potential. Where is a Jules Verne of today?

Requiem for Howard Zinn

The recent death of Howard Zinn is a tragedy, and leaves a great loss — a vacuum, even — amongst those who work towards peace and a better world.

But to say this is not enough. It is not enough to applaud his  pioneering intellectual work in history and historiography. It is not enough to praise his courage, intellectual and physical, against both vicious establishment academics and menacing police batons. It is not enough to admire his modesty, humour, good nature and kindness. It is not enough to celebrate his virtue while living deeply among the worst moral filth of the world — namely, those destroyers of worlds whose legacy is whitewashed and handed down to children and to future generations as heroes with great names like Reagan, Clinton, Shultz, Rice, and Bush.

In short, it is not enough to say that Zinn was a great man for the obvious reasons. More is required. Zinn was a great man, but he was a great man of a special type. He was a great man of the type that plants the seeds for the renewal of the world. I do not mean this only in a philosophical or quasi-spiritual sense. I mean it in a concrete institutional sense.

Zinn waded through the most obscene filth on an everyday basis, both  as a professional historian and an activist for social justice. True, Zinn was not at a campus like present-day Stanford, where the mass murderers were actually physically present; but he wrote about it, talked about it, unceasingly for decades; he lived within it. He was a friend to Daniel Ellsberg and Daniel Berrigan, people whose proximity to that filth, and action in the face of it, led them to face the full force of the repressive State. He worked tirelessly within this cesspool — all the obscenities and mendacity of great power, the jackboots with the fallout of a nuclear winter, the unerring brutality which killed and still kills the hope of the world.

Great power, in destroying these brief glimpses of humanity — and especially the US State since it rose to great power status, in which it is now alone — has not only killed hope, not only crushed it with military might, ensnared it with political might, and enslaved it with financial might. It has also erased it from memory: it has erased from the memory of humanity the crushing of its hope; it has erased from the memory of humanity, indeed, the radical formulation of hope itself. It has removed from collective consciousness not only the memory of the great struggles that it mercilessly slaughtered, but the memory of struggle itself, per se. Collective memory then lives in an anaemic, amnesiac twilight, bereft of the history of its soul, a soul artificially transplanted with sanitized fairytales, distracted by superficial overconsumption and lobotomised entertainment, and led into obsession with self, wealth, popularity and vanity. Collective memory is even, perhaps, bereft of the very notion of its social soul in itself, and the solidaristic impulses only clinch insofar as the fire spontaneously erupts, or catches across hermetically sealed boundaries.

The project of power in the contemporary era — or perhaps better, the processes of powerful institutions which dominate the evolution of the contemporary world — operate by various means: diplomatic, power-political, propaganda-journalistic, economic-structural, military-terrorist-barbaric. One merely runs through a list of the less powerful nations of the world — and several of the more powerful ones — to observe a litany of destruction in the last 60 years: Italy, Greece, the Philippines, Indonesia, Guatemala, Iran, El Salvador, Honduras, the Congo, Palestine, Brazil, East Timor, Guyana, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Ghana, Haiti… there are many nations on planet Earth, and few are immune. The books all testify to the facts, which are not in dispute. The yoke of indebted economic restructuring, the bullets fired into demonstrations, the rivers of blood, the mainstream-media articles celebrating the death of hope and the rise of tyranny, the establishment-academic tracts explaining the higher worth of the State’s noble purpose — these are all real enough and are not confined to the past. But one only needs examine one’s own memory, education, and knowledge, and that of others, to notice how much of this is ever discussed, can ever be discussed. Usually, the answer is zero.

And so, the project of power has a foundation below all this. Structurally, the project of power is deeper than the instant death of proxy armies and killer robots; deeper than the grinding servitude of structural adjustment and the receiving end of “free trade”; deeper than the stenographic emollient that journalists pour upon the festering wounds of the present; deeper even than the subservience of approved academic truth that rises above the need for mere fact. Below it all is an historical project: to rewrite history. Nay better, it is an historiographic project: to rewrite what history is and how it is told, so that much of it is not told.

Of course, as with all institutional analysis, I do not say that any of this is deliberate or consciously willed by any individual person, though indeed sometimes it may be. (One need only read the diaries of CIA agents!) I say this is the outcome of the operation of systems of power. I say this is how the world has worked, and still works.

And so it is in this sense that the project of people’s history, of  unearthing the histories of struggle, of retelling the stories long forgotten by dominant classes and power structures — Howard Zinn’s project — goes to the foundation of the world. It is indeed planting the seeds for the renewal of the world, in a concrete sense. It is nothing less than an attempt for humanity to remember its own soul: its heroics, its mischief, its rebellion, its intransigence towards oppression, its occasional triumphs, and above all, its relentless tragedies. For we are not there yet: the present is merely the unfinished business of history.

* * *

Time evolves, and societies also. Different times require different  kinds of action, and people to carry them out. In various epochs of history, the most effective, most complete, most transformative person of that age would have had vastly different characteristics, traits, and values.

No doubt, in each age, the transformative woman or man must be an intellectual, although not necessarily one with a formal education: one who thinks, one who thinks critically, and one whose own mind is independent enough to hold beliefs against the current — not only as against the vicious undertow of reactionaries and conservatives of every age; not only as against the crashing waves of fomentation and the swirling eddies of the minutiae of the present; but also as against the entire prevailing currents of the time. It must be an intellect strong enough to turn those currents in the direction of progress.

To turn those currents — to be the transformative woman or man, to be complete — requires more than mere thought, discourse, and debate; there must also be some form of action. At certain times in history, perhaps, the most effective agent of social progress would have been a street fighter; in other times and places, a national leader; in other times and places again, a guerilla; and in others again, a leader of nonviolent civil disobedience. It is not for no reason that the person whom Sartre called “the most complete human being of our age” was Che. Whatever one thinks of his judgment, in the present day, in the post-industrial West at least, violence against State military and para-military power is instant death, morally, politically, strategically, tactically, institutionally, and biologically. Nonviolence is the easiest conclusion of the historic present.

But the character of the present, at least in the post-industrial West, combines with this axiom of nonviolence to demand more of its transformative agents than ever before in
history. It demands nonviolence in the face of injustice, provocation, inequality, avoidable death, justificatory doctrinal apparatus and oncoming catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. It demands optimism of the will in the face of a rational assessment of near-certain disaster. It demands knowledge and accuracy as against an a corporate and State propaganda apparatus which will ignore, and an academic establishment which will defame, debunk and ridicule the slightest of mistakes, even non-mistakes. It demands courage and hope as against a prevailing culture of apathy, materialism, and doom. And, in the age of the miniscule attention span, infantile popularity contests, and global disillusionment with vision for the future, it requires wit, humour, and panache.

The complete human being today has laid upon them all these demands. They are nigh impossible. The human being who can carry them out is infinitesimally rare.

Not everyone need carry out all these demands completely. Nor would I say that everyone needs to carry them out in order for the world to emerge from its present state of crisis with humanity intact.

But there must be people of this calibre, or all is lost.

Howard Zinn was one such person. He was a complete human being of our age.

Self-determination and Afghanistan

Self-determination is a central principle of international law.

In the case of Afghan self-determination it’s probably also useful to point out that there is a sizeable Afghan peace movement, very courageous and principled, which the antiwar movement in the US should support. Malalai Joya, one of the leaders of this movement, has to be one of the bravest women in the world, confronting warlords, living under constant death threats, but continually speaking out against war and occupation. If Afghan self-determination is to mean anything, it must include voices like hers.

If the US government is to have any policy inside Afghanistan, it should include measures to (legally!) strengthen the position of those like Joya, rather than undermine them by propping up the Afghan “government” and escalating violence. The US decision to escalate seems to have come after much deliberation as to which type of bombing, which type of killing, which military tactics will serve US interests. the deliberations seems to have included all possible voices except those who advocate withdrawal and de-escalation, including the Afghan peace movement, the majority of the US population, and (I understand) most of the Afghan population. Obama’s escalation has come precisely without considering the position of the Afghan peace movement, which is for an escalation in hospitals, schools, economic assistance, and aid.

That is, the decision to escalate is only possible because the US debate entirely excludes the voices of those on the receiving end of the policy; vastly increased levels of violence and military operations,  now similar to the height of the Soviet occupation, are only possible on the condition that self-determination be excluded as an axiom of US foreign policy, just as it is included as an axiom of international law.

Overpopulation controversies

A response to this article about overpopulation. Here follow some comments.

1. The author is racist, white separatist, ultra-anti-immigration, and heavily involved with the extreme right.

I do not use these terms lightly.

She is tied to the far-right and white-supremacist “Council of Conservative Citizens”. It’s a hate group, which has promulgated ideas of racial superiority, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and so on. In 1998 there was a big scandal that a lot of Republican party politicians in the southern US had close ties to the group. They are denounced by the mainstream right wing in the US, which in my view is extremist and radically regressive enough.

Substantial ties remain to Republican politicians. There is a good summary by the Southern Poverty Law Center here. See also here.

She is also tied to “The Occidental Quarterly”, which describes itself as “devoted to the ethnic, racial, and cultural heritage that forms the foundation of Western Civilization”. The journal is anti-immigration — except from Western nations! — and isolationist. It’s also anti-Semitic: the “Anti-Defamation League”, a Jewish organisation, has an article about it at
http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/Occidental_Observer.htm . The Anti-Defamation League itself is often quite despicable — they denounce and make life hell not only for anti-Semites, which is fine by me, but also people who criticises policies of the state of Israel, thereby protecting policies of brutal occupation and repression in occupied Palestine. But their evidence regarding this publication seems clear.

Well, a single person is not a far-right hate group or an anti-Semitic journal. But she is on the editorial advisory board of the “Citizens Informer”, their quarterly newspaper. And she is also on the editorial advisory board of “The Occidental Quarterly”. She’s on the national advisory board of the anti-immigrant group “Protect Arizona Now”. So she is hardly on the margins of these groups or an unwitting participant. She’s a willing and knowing part of all this. In fact within the anti-immigration movement she is seen as “the grand dame”.

In her own words: “I owe it to my own and others’ grandchildren to work to maintain the environmental, cultural, and social integrity of the United States, and to hold the federal government accountable for their constitutionally-mandated duty to protect this nation from invasion.” Immigration apparently endangers the nation and threatens its cultural integrity. And she denies being a white supremacist but freely describes herself as “white separatist”. See here.

So, she holds despicable views. Of course, being personally despicable and holding extreme racist and proto-fascist opinions does not disqualify you from talking about anything. She does have a PhD apparently. But this may well be relevant in evaluating what she has to say.

2. The immigration and aid stuff seems to come out of nowhere.

But it is now clear, knowing her background.

Sure, “foreign aid” and “immigration” are in the title, and the purpose of the article seems to be suggesting some government policies. But the immediate motivation for the article seems very different, at least the way it’s written: overpopulation. It’s perfectly legitimate to have a concern with overpopulation, although the author’s motivations may well be a particularly racist form of overpopulation. With this concern, we then try to understand what makes fertility rates vary, which is also perfectly legitimate. We argue that it isn’t so much prosperity/education/health/etc, again perfectly legitimately. We argue that sharp economic changes may make a difference, still legitimate. I will get to this fairly reasonable stuff in a minute.

But then we turn to aid and immigration, and the standard drops
through the floor.

The argument seems to be that foreign aid increases fertility, because it provides a sense of economic opportunity that encourages more child-bearing. That is a hypothesis, and an extremely surprising one: one hardly expects people in the poorest nations to base their family planning decisions, if they are decisions at all, on the existence or levels of foreign grants or loans. Nor would one think that the existence of emigration would affect family planning decisions, although maybe it is marginally more plausible. Either way, one would think there are many more immediate concerns. They are strange directions to take after what looks like a legitimate analysis of fertility rates. Given the author’s racist views, perhaps they are more explicable. But, nonetheless, these are hypotheses. They require some evidence to support them. So let’s consider the evidence given in turn.

(a) The argument regarding foreign aid.

How do we begin this argument? With a religious statement: “giving is a tenet of [US] foreign policy”, the secular US religion that the US is the greatest, most glorious, most generous nation in the world. I’m sure this would come as a surprise to the victims of bombing, repression, terrorism, and murderous governments supported by the US. Moreover as regards foreign aid per capita, US spending is very low among developed nations.

After religion, we turn to ideology and unsupported supposition on behalf of the developing world: luckily most aid is now in the form of loans, so that the developing world does not think we are for fools, devious, or infinitely rich. The use of aid to support murderous regimes, for geopolitical machinations, to entrap poor nations in debt obligations, to support repressive militaries and paramilitaries, and to create demand for domestic constituencies, of course go unsaid. The only point is the religion, and the ideology — we are too good for ourselves; but we shouldn’t give to them, lucky we lend.

Well, this material is ridiculous but content-free. We then adduce material that worldwide foreign aid runs to the billions, even to the level where it is $20 per capita in Africa. (I’m not sure about what the timeframe is and can’t find her source.) How does this aid affect fertility? Which countries receive more foreign aid, which less, and how do their fertility rates correlate? No evidence is given, whatsoever.

The only argument given is that “Such transfers of wealth cannot but perpetuate trust in one-world rhetoric–a belief that the community of nations can be relied upon to help, just like family. A sense of security grows… Efforts to plan for one’s own future do not thrive in this climate”. That the world consists of one planet is clearly a horrid communist plot, and obviously, feeling good about their place in a humane world free of borders, inequality and material scarcity, people in the developing world, where those properties of the world are most obvious, multiply like rabbits.

That this is seriously considered an argument — and the only argument — for the proposition that foreign aid increases fertility, speaks for itself. It beggars belief.

But it gets better. We have an argument for the converse — that the absence of foreign aid decreases fertility. Two examples are cited: Mao’s China and the Burmese junta. Clearly paradigm control cases. There could not be any other factors present, clearly; no, any difference must be attributed to the absence of foreign aid, which is clearly the defining characteristic of China and Myanmar.

As for China, somehow the absence of foreign aid as a causative factor dwarfs government repression and mandatory regulation o
f childbirth; or perhaps the absence of foreign aid was what caused the one child policy? The author’s precise reasoning is unclear, but no matter. As for Myanmar, despite the lack of information and uncertainty among professional demographers, the author claims simply to understand everything: “But it is not unclear”. Even if she is right that the cause was “lack of resources” (which seems to be her previous argument), it is not at all clear what effect foreign aid had on those resources.

So, this is astonishingly bad, and the evidence for this hypothesis is basically zero. Given the lack of evidence, one wonders why the author even wrote it. But her racist political views make it clear. One should also take note that the are also perfectly consistent with believing that the recipients of aid, usually not white, are lesser human beings; this is her view in any case.

(b) The argument regarding immigration

Thankfully, regarding immigration the author is more honest: she admits there is no evidence for the proposition. Studies are needed! She has a hypothesis, and is speculating. However, lack of an argument will not stop her arguing that to stop people multiplying we must both impoverish them and shut the door on migration.

By her own argument, fertility is caused by improving economic condition; yet, at least the sort of migration she is thinking of, economic migration from Latin America to the US, one would think, is caused by bad or deteriorating economic conditions. It is a contradiction; perhaps she can twist her way out of it somehow, but she makes no attempt and appears not to realise it.

She has some tables, apparently, of immigration and fertility rate data, but I can’t see them. Apparently in “high-immigration countries” the fertility rates are declining, although she says they are “slow to decline”. I don’t know if such a correlation exists between immigration and fertility from what she says, but even if such a correlation appears, there is no reason to believe it to be causative.

One can imagine that a cause of grinding poverty could lead to both child-bearing (to bring in income for the family, contra her hypothesis) and economic migration (to escape grinding poverty). There are a lot of figures about the scale of undocumented migration to the US. This has almost no bearing on fertility. Perhaps the only, again unsubstantiated, statements are that: overpopulation is a “push factor” for migration; and communities in Latin America dependent on remittances may rationally calculate they should have more children to risk death and deportation crossing the Arizona desert. But again, despite sounding incredible, no evidence is given, and other factors like poverty and unemployment go unmentioned, which are the obvious ones.

Again, it is worth pointing out that, however flimsy the argument, this provides an excuse for racist anti-immigration policies: policies the author supports, on explicitly racist grounds.

3. Some of it is reasonable, and surprising

Before she gets to the anti-aid and anti-immigration business, she seems to cite facts and evidence that do appear surprising, about the “demographic transition”. The essay is therefore an interesting example of how racist ideology can distort an otherwise seemingly intelligent mind.

The examples of East Africa, Egypt, Sudan, Brazil, Ireland, India, France, and others, are interesting. Surely “mainstream” demographers have considered them as well. These do seem to be counterexamples to the proposition, perhaps a mainstream one — I’m not an expert in the field — that rising wealth leads to lower fertility. Of course they do not contradict that wealthy nations today have low fertility rates, but they have important implications.

On the other hand, again these are only correlations. I am not an expert on these examples. I’m not sure how they fit into the global context.  I would want to see other work and explanations, by other studies. She does mention education, health, contraception, but does not consider other potential factors: women’s rights, role in the workplace, etc.

This stuff is interesting. The racism aside, this gives nuance to the picture of how people have babies. Humans are complicated. They make decisions for all sorts of reasons.

But this article is disappointing because it following all this it becomes so atrociously bad, and probably motivated at least partly by the author’s racism.

The slipperiness of language

I am taking a French class here since my French is so terrible. I can write French fine, thanks to google translate, and also read French fine… thanks also to google translate. (Reading or writing without an internet connection is another matter!)

For speaking French, when I know the word for what I want to say, fine also, but I don’t know the words for what I want to say about 50% of the time. This is probably worse than for most people, since I always like to express things using big words and convoluted grammar. And so I end up most of the time playing the game of expressing my stupid comments with the words I do know. But in the 50% of cases where I know how to say what I mean, people seem to understand me fine.

As for listening to other people speaking French, this is still unbelievably bad. I felt like I improved in the first week here; I can pretty well pick out the sentence structure. And maybe I can understand like 2/3 of the words in any given sentence. Just not the important ones. For any sentence of any reasonable length I’m totally lost by the end of it. Some people seem to be able to get by on this level of understanding, but this requires some intuition about humans. Not so for mathematicians.

It’s a bit different to what I thought, living with a foreign language. It’s not like incomprehension all the time, it’s not totally a matter of aimless staring of incomprehension — though I do, actually, stare aimlessly without comprehending, all the time. (It’s so terrible disappointing people, because I look like i should speak the language, I am white, male, grown-up, in an office, at a university, etc.) It’s more like, you have a vague gist of what people are talking about, you know the general concepts they are talking about, but you cannot be sure of anything at all that anybody said.

French is full of too many false cognates, too many slight variations, too many words which sound the same, too many 1- or 2-syllable words, too many non-pronounced letters. It’s a slippery, slimy, thing… maybe I understood, maybe I didn’t, what exactly did you mean by that, and I know that there is no way for you to express it more precisely without switching to english. For a mathematician especially this is extremely frustrating.

Oh well, this will improve.