It's So Old It's New

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had an interesting column yesterday about how we might be forced to adjust to higher gasoline prices. For those of us who live in older, densely populated urban areas that have a mixture of housing, retail business, public transportation, and recreational areas all within walking distance, it's interesting to find that a neighborhood designed over a hundred years ago might be better adapted to meet the challenges of the coming years than the sprawling exurbs burgeoning up until quite recently.

Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further

It's been a while since I've posted to this blog! I'd like to finish my thoughts on Enlightenment Contested soon. In the meantime, here's a video I've been enjoying lately: Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint singing Toussaint's song Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further. Enjoy!

Enlightenment Contested, Part II -- Contra MacIntyre

I'm continuing my way through Jonathan Israel's latest book, Enlightenment Contested. As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the things I have appreciated about Israel's work is his willingness to engage in polemics with scholars who have opposed the Enlightenment project. In this post I'd like to focus on one of those scholars, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.

Academic critics of the Enlightenment in recent years can generally be divided into a left camp, which has built off of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, and a right camp, which has drawn on the work of Aristotle. The left camp has worked under such labels as deconstruction, postmodernism, and poststructuralism, while members the right camp have been known as communitarians or neo-aristotelians. There is no particular logic to this division -- Nietzsche was no man of the left, and Aristotle of course predates any such political distinctions. My own guess is that Nietzsche's anti-Christian pronouncements may give him a kind of a leftist veneer, whereas the long connection between Aristotle and the Catholic Church might make him appealing to conservatives.

MacIntyre appears to have begun his career as something of a leftist. His first book, published in 1953, attempts to draw comparisons between Christianity and Marxism. However, by the time he wrote After Virtue, MacIntyre had become something of a Road Warrior-style dystopian. I know this sounds dramatic, but a passage from the end of his book should confirm my characterization:

If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the borders; they have already been governing us for some time.

Of course, MacIntyre was not alone in 1981 thinking about apocalypse. I remember watching a Saturday-morning television program in the late 70's, Ark II, which featured a group of scientists, along with their pet monkey, traveling in a souped-up motorhome through apocalyptic landscape, bringing the light of science to those they met. But bringing enlightenment and scientific understanding to a benighted world is not what MacIntyre has in mind to do in After Virtue. The key word in the above quotation is "local forms of community." There is something appealing about this image, in an odd sort of way. Less like Ark II and more like the clan in Road Warrior, who huddle together in their refinery/fortress and use flame throwers to defend against marauders, we must grab at ideas that will help us to support each other in small communities as the world crumbles around us. Well, perhaps I exaggerate when I call this vision appealing. Romantic, perhaps.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here. What does MacIntyre mean when he talks about local forms of community, and why is this his answer to the collapse of civilization as we know it? This is where we get into MacIntyre's critique of the Enlightenment. MacIntyre rejects entirely any notion of ideas that are universally applicable. While an idea may be shown to be true or false within the context of its own tradition, there is no there is no way to adjudicate between the truth claims of rival traditions. MacIntyre reaches for local forms of community not because it's in some way better than a universal conception of human society, but because it's the only game in town.

While he strongly implies that this is true for the natural sciences (take, for example, when he speaks of Newton's laws of physics, which, according to MacIntyre, merely "purport to be universal in scope"), MacIntyre's real focus in this book is on those ideas which govern human action. For Enlightenment thinkers, pre-emininent among such ideas was that of human equality. Not surprisingly, then, MacIntyre spends a great deal of time attacking the notion that humans can be be discussed in any general way without specifying the specific circumstances of the persons under discussion. Paraphrasing Aristotle approvingly, MacIntyre notes that "to be a man is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and purpose: member of a family, citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God. It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that 'man' ceases to be a functional concept." In other words, it simply makes no sense to talk about a human without reference to the roles he or she inhabits. A person is not a human being but a worker, minority, a woman, a criminal, a plutocrat, and so on.

So getting back to the Enlightenment again, where does that leave some of its central ideas? Most of us in the United States were schooled in Enlightenment ideas when we learned about the Declaration of Independence. In case your memory is a bit rusty, here's an episode of School House Rock to remind you. Thomas Jefferson and company argued concisely, beginning with the "self-evident" truth of human equality, and then famously asserting several rights, including those of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," that flow from that first truth. MacIntyre is just as swift in his dismissal of these ideas. He begins by noting somewhat wryly that the idea of general human rights did not find expression before 1400, but then he cuts to the chase:

From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were.And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.

It doesn't take much in the way of subtle analysis to see something disturbing in MacIntyre's argument. His reference to witches and unicorns is nothing more than a cheap rhetorical ploy, in which a bully tries to foist the failings of his own position onto his opponent. The systematic attack on magical beliefs was unquestionably one of the central (and well-documented) tasks of Enlightenment thinkers, but here MacIntyre attempts to clothe himself in the dress of those victorious thinkers even as he attacks their central ideas. But back to his argument; a paragraph later he lets the other shoe drop. He argues that there is no basis to assert these rights because "we know that there are no self-evident truths."

This exposition has taken longer than I thought it would, and I haven't even gotten back to Israel's critique! I plan on continuing with a follow-up post soon.

Enlightenment Contested

For the New Year I've begun reading historian Jonathan Israel's latest book, Enlightenment Contested. The work is a follow-up to his earlier study, Radical Enlightenment, which I read a few years ago. I'm quite excited to work through this book. Israel has grand intentions here; he plans on writing, in three volumes (of which this is the first), a comprehensive interpretation of the Enlightenment, the first since Peter Gay's The Enlightenment, written in 1966.

Building on his work in Radical Enlightenment, Israel argues that there were in fact two Enlightenments, a Moderate Enlightenment and a Radical Enlightenment. The former was championed by names that have been most commonly associated with the Enlightenment: Locke, Voltaire, Newton, Leibniz. Israel argues that this moderate Enlightenment was in continuous conflict with the more underground and suppressed but ultimately more coherent and significant Radical Enlightenment, whose leading light was the Dutch Philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Early on Israel notes the difference between these two movements:

The philosophes labelled in this work 'radical' were those who, prior to 1752--marking the end date of this present volume--openly opposed not just tyranny, intolerance, credulity, superstition, and ecclesiastical sway, like all men of the Enlightenment, but also the moderate mainstream Enlightenment of Locke, Newton, and Voltaire, rebelling so to speak from the 'left.' That is they broadly denied all miracles and revelations and rejected physico-theology, Lockean empiricism, and providential Deism along with monarchy, (in most cases) aristocracy, and all social, racial, and sexual hierarchy.(43)

One thing that distinguishes Israel's newest work from Radical Enlightenment is his willingness to outline the contemporary significance of his scholarship and to engage in polemics against his opponents, those scholars who belittle the achievements and enduring significance of the Enlightenment. Here I quote from the preface:

does it really matter how we interpret the Enlightenment? Surely, it does. For while it have been fashionable in recent years, above all (but not only) in the Postmodernist camp, to disdain the Enlightenment as biased, facile, self-deluded, over-optimistic, Eurocentric, imperialistic, and ultimately destructive, there are sound, even rather urgent, reasons for rejecting such notions as profoundly misconceived and insisting, on the contrary, that the Enlightenment has been and remains by far the most positive factor shaping contemporary reality and those strands of 'modernity' anyone wishing to live in accord with reason would want to support and contribute to.(v)

I'm about 1/4 of the way through the book now. As with Radical Enlightenment, Israel has done his homework. He has plunged into the primary material and done exemplary work in placing texts in context, and discussing not just the works but how they were debated by various factions. Israel has set out explicitly to write in a modern form of the "history of ideas" style rather than in what he would consider the voguish style of social historians. I'll report back later on the meat of his text.

A Germantown Document

Photographer and Germantown resident Jason Francisco has recently begun posting photos from one of his newest projects, A Germantown Document. Please take a look. I've felt for a number of years that Germantown's story has not been adequately explored, given the richness of its history and its contributions to the development of the Republic. As Francisco notes in his introductory essay, "Germantown has actively participated in the struggle to define and maintain American ideals from generation to generation." I see this photographic essay as an important step towards recording Germantown's past and present.

Lincoln and Habeas Corpus

In my previous post on James McPherson's latest book, This Mighty Scourge, I mentioned that the work touched on several issues of major contemporary significance. One of those issues, the suspension of habeas corpus rights, has been in the news at least twice in the last week. First, on June 7 the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007. This bill, introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, attempts to restore Habeas Corpus rights stripped by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. I'll quote here from Leahy's statement introducing the legislation:

"The administration has made it clear that they intend to use every expansive
definition and unchecked power given to them by the new law. 
Last month's Justice Department brief made clear that any of our legal
immigrants could be held indefinitely without recourse in court. Earlier in
November, the Justice Department went to court to say that detainees who
had been held in secret CIA prisons could not even meet with lawyers
because they might tell their lawyers about the cruel interrogation techniques
used against them. In other words, if our Government tortures somebody,
that person loses his right to a lawyer because he might tell the lawyer about
having been tortured. A law professor was quoted as saying about the
government's position in that case: ``Kafka-esque doesn't do it justice. This is
`Alice in Wonderland.' '' We are not talking about nightmare scenarios here.
We are talking about today's reality.

  We have eliminated basic legal and human rights for the 12 million lawful
permanent residents who live and work among us, to say nothing of the
millions of other legal immigrants and visitors who we welcome to our
shores each year. We have removed the check that our legal system provides
against the Government arbitrarily detaining people for life without charge,
and we may well have made many of our remaining limits against torture
and cruel and inhuman treatment obsolete because they are unenforceable.
We have removed the mechanism the Constitution provides to check
Government overreaching and lawlessness."

In the judicial branch, meanwhile, judges in the Fourth Circuit of the U. S. Court of Appeals on June 11 granted habeas corpus relief to Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who has been held in detention by the Bush Administration since December 12, 2000. In a stinging rebuke to the Bush Administrations claims, Judge Diana Gribbon Motz articulated a vigorous defence of habeas corpus rights as central to the liberties enshrined in the Constitution. Here's a link to the full decision. I've quoted some of the conclusion, omitting most notes:

"We do not question the President’s war-time authority over enemy combatants; but absent suspension of the writ of habeas corpus or declaration of martial law, the Constitution simply does not provide the President the power to exercise military authority over civilians within the United States. . . . The President cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention. Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them “enemy combatants.”

A “well-established purpose of the Founders” was “to keep the military strictly within its proper sphere, subordinate to civil authority” In the Declaration of Independence our forefathers lodged the complaint that the King of Great Britain had “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power” and objected that the King had “depriv[ed] us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.” A resolute conviction that civilian authority should govern the military animated the framing of the Constitution. As Alexander Hamilton, no foe of Executive power, observed, the President’s Commander-in-Chief powers “amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces.” “That military powers of the Commander in Chief were not to supersede representative government of internal affairs seems obvious from the Constitution and from elementary American history.” For this reason, the Supreme Court rejected the President’s claim to “inherent power” to use the military even to seize property within the United States, despite the Government’s argument that the refusal would “endanger the well-being and safety of the Nation.”

. . .

The President has cautioned us that “[t]he war on terror we fight today is a generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others.” Unlike detention for the duration of a traditional armed conflict between nations, detention for the length of a “war on terror” has no bounds. Justice O’Connor observed in Hamdi that “[i]f the practical circumstances of a given conflict are entirely unlike those of the conflicts that informed the development of the law of war,” the understanding that combatants can be detained “for the duration of the relevant conflict” “may unravel.” If the indefinite military detention of an actual combatant in this new type of conflict might cause the thread of our understandings to “unravel,” the indefinite military detention of a civilian like al-Marri would shred those understandings apart.

In an address to Congress at the outset of the Civil War, President Lincoln defended his emergency suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to protect Union troops moving to defend the Capital. Lincoln famously asked: “[A]re all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” The authority the President seeks here turns Lincoln’s formulation on its head. For the President does not acknowledge that the extraordinary power he seeks would result in the suspension of even one law and he does not contend that this power should be limited to dire emergencies that threaten the nation. Rather, he maintains that the authority to order the military to seize and detain certain civilians is an inherent power of the Presidency, which he and his successors may exercise as they please.

To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the President calls them “enemy combatants,” would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution -- and the country. For a court to uphold a claim to such extraordinary power would do more than render lifeless the Suspension Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the rights to criminal process in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments; it would effectively undermine all of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. It is that power -- were a court to recognize it – that could lead all our laws “to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces.” We refuse to recognize a claim to power that would so alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic."

As Motz's decision indicates, Lincoln's wartime actions are on the minds of many people besides McPherson. As Motz notes, what is so dramatically different between Bush's and Lincoln's actions is that Bush asserts that the suspension of habeas corpus rights is a prerogative inherent to the Executive Branch, rather than a deviation from established law and constitutional guarantees justified only under the most extreme circumstances.

In both of these statements, it becomes clear that the authors sense something momentous is underway in our nation. The right to habeas corpus, which in Anglo-American jurisprudence dates back to the Magna Carta, is so fundamental that any abridgment of the that right threatens to undermine all the others. Most of our legal rights are based on the ability to have ready access to law courts that are independent of the executive branch. If you cannot access the courts, many of the other rights enumerated in the first ten amendments to the constitution (freedom of speech, the right to a speedy trial, due process, protections against unreasonable search and seizure, the right to a jury trial, protections against cruel and unusual punishment) seem to simply evaporate.

This Mighty Scourge

My introduction to the American Civil War was in eighth grade history class. Battle history lectures were the specialty of my middle school history department. History classes throughout seventh and eighth grade were punctuated by by lectures on significant battles of western history, including Thermopylae, Crecy, and Bunker Hill. All this culminated at the end of eighth grade with a month or two of lectures on significant battles of the Civil War given by our teacher, Mr. Peterson, complete with multiple blackboards providing battlefield diagrams and little blocks to represent troop movements. The detail and passion our teacher brought to these lessons was remarkable. Clearly this was a labor of love.

Two things about these lectures stand out to me today. First, we were never tested on this material. It was one of the rare times in my formal education when I was asked to simply absorb material for its own sake with no threat of evaluation attached. Second, the lectures were all presented from an explicitly pro-Southern perspective. Our teacher romanticized the Confederate Lost Cause and taught us to identify with the valor and bravery of Robert E. Lee, J.E.B Stuart, and "Stonewall" Jackson. Given that this was at a school in northern Illinois, where annual Memorial Day parades always ended with ceremonies around a memorial to local soldiers who fought for the Union armies, such an approach was hardly what one might have expected.

In the past few years I have renewed my interest in the Civil War mostly through reading the works of historian James McPherson. McPherson is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning work Battle Cry of Freedom, considered by many to be the best single-volume Civil War history now available. Although it goes on for over 800 pages, Battle Cry of Freedom is highly readable and engaging, even for a general audience. This is one of McPherson's great strengths: his ability to write serious scholarship that is nonetheless accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike. Reading his work has given me a greater appreciation for Lincoln and the struggles of the Union armies, an appreciation that I ironically didn't receive while being educated in the public schools of the self-proclaimed "Land of Lincoln!"

Just a few days ago I read McPherson's most recent book, This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. The title of the work comes from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. As with so much of Lincoln’s writing, the passage is both eloquent and profound:

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood draw with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’

Throughout his writing on the Civil War, McPherson has developed a single thesis, that the Civil War was in fact what he calls the Second American Revolution and that, contrary to the claims of many Southerners, the central struggle of that revolution was not over states rights or sectional interests but rather over the question of whether a republican form of government, that "last best hope of Earth" that Lincoln held so dear, could survive in a world even in the nineteenth century dominated by empires, kingdoms, and petty principalities, and whether such a republic could bring itself to uphold in practice its highest ideal, the belief that "all men are created equal."

This Mighty Scourge is not a single narrative but a collection of essays, many of which were written for The New York Review of Books. Although the essays are all focused on questions related to the Civil War, they touch on many issues of burning contemporary national importance, including the role of the president as commander in chief during times of war, the suspension of habeas corpus rights, the relationship of the country's intellectual, political, and economic elites to the war effort, and arguments for states' rights.

I'll try in the next few weeks to comment on some of these ideas in McPherson's book because I believe they demonstrate a basic sense that I've been feeling with more and more urgency in recent years, namely that we as Americans must thoroughly immerse ourselves in an understanding of our past struggles if we are going to begin to see our way through our current difficulties. In the meantime, I'm including a link here to a lecture given by McPherson on This Mighty Scourge. Enjoy!