Harvard University Press Blog

Market-Based Disaster Justice

The devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy has shone floodlights on the workings of disaster relief—which many see as one of government’s core functions—as well as on Mitt Romney’s previously-stated desire to defund FEMA and privatize its functions. With less than a week to go before the American presidential election, it’s important to imagine what market-based disaster protection and relief would look like. Below, in a brief excerpt from Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World, Rob Verchick explains why such an approach would never appropriately address the inequalities that disasters always exacerbate.

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According to the market-based approach, hazard protection should be allocated the same way other goods and services are allocated in the marketplace. Protection should follow explicit or implicit market signals. The current resurgence in America of the market-based approach might accurately be said to have begun when President Ronald Reagan proclaimed in his first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”

Reagan’s approach to market solutions is grounded in an intellectual movement called neoliberalism, a revived form of traditional liberalism that champions free markets and individual liberty in an economy gone global. As geographer David Harvey puts it, “[n]eoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.” Some may believe that neoliberalism as a guiding principle is waning in the Obama administration. This is not entirely so. While it is true that President Obama and, perhaps, the public have embraced a more optimistic view of government and its role in American life, current economic forces will ensure that American law and international law continue to follow a market approach to solving big problems. Thus the goal, from a disaster justice perspective, is not to reverse the market approach (as it can’t be done) but to make space within the neoliberal framework for a vocabulary of justice. In this area, the Obama administration may prove a helpful ally.

From the neoliberal model, three relevant corollaries follow. First, neoliberal policy seeks the efficient allocation of resources. “Efficient,” here means optimizing aggregate social welfare in a context of limited political and material resources. “Efficient” does not always mean “fair,” and for this reason free-market ideology is sometimes described as “amoral.” Second, free markets are much better at allocating resources than are governments or other organized institutions. This is what Reagan meant by “Government is the problem.” Third, neoliberalism promotes an ethic—some would say “virtue”—of self-sufficiency and the stoic acceptance of unfortunate consequences. Individuals are expected to assume the risk of participating in the market, and to adapt quickly to changing landscapes. “Instances of inequality and glaring social injustice,” in this view, “are morally acceptable, at least to the degree in which they could be seen as the result of freely made decisions.” Indeed, as neoliberal philosopher Robert Nozick has argued, efforts to redistribute wealth in order to rehabilitate economic losers creates its own injustice by treating affluent individuals as a “means” to enhance the “ends” of those who are less affluent.

The Anarchist Odyssey of Sasha and Emma

Paul Avrich, a leading historian of anarchism, collected stories about Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman for decades. When he died in 2006, he left his unfinished manuscript on the pair in the hands of his daughter, Karen Avrich. Below, she describes Berkman and Goldman, and the story she and her father tell in Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman.

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Q: Your father, Paul Avrich, wrote extensively on the history of the anarchist movement in both Russia and the U.S. How and when did he first become fascinated with the story of Sasha Berkman and Emma Goldman?

My father once said, “I’ve always wanted, even as a scholar, to write about individuals and understand what was on their minds.” Indeed, throughout Paul Avrich’s career, compelling characters animated his work. He first developed an interest in Russia as a student, and was attracted to the radical underpinnings of the country’s history. In 1960, while a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, he traveled to Moscow and Leningrad when Soviet libraries were opened to Western students. As a professor, he devoted his early books to Russian anarchism, which he thought was perhaps the purest, most uncompromising political philosophy.

In the 1970s, my father became acquainted with a number of American anarchists whose youths were spent in the thick of the action, from the meeting halls on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the utopian colonies on Puget Sound. Many went on to lead more conventional lives as academics, scientists, artists, and lawyers, yet they nevertheless retained the dangerous sparkle of the true revolutionary. My father was enchanted by their electrifying tales and audacious spirits, and interviewed them extensively. They all were brimming with stories about the brave, brilliant Alexander Berkman.

Sasha’s comrades equally admired his famous friend, the charismatic and formidable Emma Goldman. Emma achieved renown (and notoriety) as a leading radical activist while Sasha was locked away in prison, but their friendship sustained, and they remained the closest of companions their whole lives. Comrades later told my father about that unbreakable bond and deep love, a love that infuses Sasha and Emma from beginning to end.

Q: What was it like taking over this project after your father passed away?

When my father became ill, it was clear he would not be able to complete the book. I began working on the manuscript at my father’s request several months before his death. In that first difficult year, as I sorted through his notes and interviews, I was conscious of his voice and style, the strength of his professional legacy. Yet as I was drawn further into the story of Sasha and Emma and grew to understand them as people, their voices also guided my work. I read their published essays and private letters, studied their memoirs and journals, and learned about their comrades. I now realize that some of the older ladies and gentlemen who visited our home when I was a child, to whom I served tea sandwiches, lent their firsthand insights to Sasha and Emma. One wizened fellow, who brought me a box of fancy Belgian chocolates when I was five, fought alongside Emma Goldman in the Spanish Civil War.

As Paul Avrich’s daughter, anarchism was a component of my life, but one that remained on the periphery of my personal experience. As I worked on Sasha and Emma, the anarchists in the book became as vital to me as they were to my father—fascinating and complicated, estimable yet censurable, hugely influential but often overlooked. I am thrilled that this story of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman will be told, and I feel honored to have experienced my father’s life work in this manner.

In Which Lady Spambots Tweet of John Rawls

Those anime-avatarred spambots are hitting the books again, spending this week brushing up on political philosophy. We are honored to play any small part in their continuing education.

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Athletic Beauty, Divinely-Infused

In celebration of the Olympic games, we offer the following excerpt from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In Praise of Athletic Beauty, a thoroughly charming meditation on our love affair with athletes and their pursuit of excellence.

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If you take a car from Athens to the Isthmus of Corinth, and then drive across the winding mountain roads of the Peloponnese Peninsula to the distant village of Olympia, some thirty miles inland from the Ionian Sea, you will soon begin to feel what a commitment it was to walk or travel on horseback to the ancient Olympic games. Yet hundreds of athletes and tens of thousands of spectators, protected by an Olympics truce, made the journey every four years, over the span of a millennium or more—from 776 BC to 394 AD (the conventionally accepted dates of the ancient Olympic games). As you try to imagine this bodily effort, for which there is simply no equivalent in the modern world, you may begin to wonder what the specific attraction of those five days spent at Zeus’ most famous sanctuary could have been.

One answer, a modern answer but valid nevertheless, comes when you arrive at this shady green valley, where the Kladeos and Alpheios rivers join under lush foliage, a place so different from the arid stony landscape through which you have traveled, with growing impatience, during several hours. For ancient guests who had walked for days and even weeks, this contrast upon arrival must have triggered intense feelings of sensual pleasure and relief. Unlike modern tourists, who have the luxury of returning to their air-conditioned hotel rooms for the night, the crowds in ancient Olympia (all men, except for the priestess of Demeter and her maidens) endured narrow quarters, a shortage of water, and blistering heat. And yet their lives held nothing more glorious or more desirable than being precisely there, in that place, to watch athletes compete.

Olympia was just one of the traditional places, along with Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea, where free men from the various Greek states and colonies came together for panhellenic games, but it was the oldest and most charismatic site. So outstanding was Olympia’s fame that the four-year rhythm of its games became the most widely accepted measure for marking time in ancient Greece. Each Olympiad (four-year period) was named for the winner in the first athletic event of the five-day competition. Unlike the spectators (and also the artists, musicians, and orators who came to showcase their talents on the margins of sporting events), athletes spent at least a month before the games at Elis, thirty-five miles from Olympia, where they trained to reach the peak of physical conditioning.

The five days of the Olympic festival were organized as a complex sequence of athletic events and religious rituals (though we miss the specific appeal of Olympia if we insist too much on the distinction between the two). The first day was dedicated to heralds, musicians, and athletic competitions for adolescents. The second day featured horse races, chariot races (including chariots drawn by mules), and, in the U-shaped 200-yard-long stadion, the core event—the pentathlon, consisting of a foot race, long jump, discus, javelin, and wrestling. All stadion races that were not part of the pentathlon took place on the third day. The fourth day was devoted to wrestling, boxing, and the pankration (a very aggressive, almost sadistic type of wrestling or kick boxing), mostly taking place at the palestra, a rectangular court surrounded by arcades. Back at the stadion finally, spectators could enjoy the hoplite run, a middle distance race for men in full armor.

Athletes in the panhellenic games performed naked, and since nakedness only became a condition several centuries after this athletic tradition began, we know that performing naked was a cultural rule, not a symptom of an archaic state of society. Before competitions, athletes would spread oil all over their skin, and some historians have explained this practice as a competitive strategy, especially for the wrestling contest, or as a performance enhancement. I am not convinced that strategic advantage was the most important reason, however. The oil made the naked bodies of athletes glisten with reflected sunlight, and this very palpable aura set them apart from ordinary men.

Closing the Civic Empowerment Gap

Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind is a landmark call for the remaking of civic education in America’s schools. In presenting her challenge to the status quo, Levinson documents a number of organizations that demonstrate the progress to be wrung from her prescriptions. We invited friend of the Press and incoming Harvard Graduate School of Education student Jessica Gerhardstein Gingold to describe her experience as a youth council director with Chicago’s Mikva Challenge, one of the programs that Levinson highlights.

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In No Citizen Left Behind Meira Levinson puts some fire into the often dull argument that the United States needs to get serious about civic education, calling for reform for a system that today largely excludes poor and minority students from democratic participation. She begins the book by describing the experience of teaching on 9/11, and shares a remarkable story about her middle school students predicting the Iraq War. Despite their evident understanding, though, she laments that what she calls a “civic empowerment gap” made it unlikely that her students would become participants in the course charted that day:

Whether my students were misguided or prescient, whether their life experiences blinded or exposed them to the true character of our political leaders, there is ample evidence that they are unlikely to become active participants in American civic and political life. As a result, they are unlikely to influence civic and political deliberation or decision-making. This is because there is a profound civic empowerment gap—as large and as disturbing as the reading and math achievement gaps that have received significant national attention in recent years—between ethnoracial minority, naturalized, and especially poor citizens, on the one hand, and White, native-born, and especially middle-class and wealthy citizens, on the other.

Levinson explores the causes of and potential solutions to this gap through many lenses. As a political philosopher, she considers the political, sociological and historical context of the United States and of our education system, closely examining the meanings of citizenship and democracy. She asks hard questions about how we teach civics in a diverse country where our ethnoracial identities invariably dictate our experiences of citizenship. She grapples with how these theories trickle down into practice by sharing personal stories from her years of inner-city teaching. In addressing these questions and others, she doesn’t fantasize about an unreachable Shangri-La of civic education. Instead, she clearly outlines the qualities of her gold standard curriculum, Action Civics, and highlights schools and organizations that have begun to actualize it.

Action Civics is designed to create “an engaged citizenry capable of effective participation in the political process, in their communities, and in the larger society.” It is founded on the principle that young people have authentic civic experiences that matter and that should be part of their civic educational experiences. “I recommend a constructivist approach that helps students construct their own empowering means of engaging in this work,” Levinson writes, “rather than telling them how to do it. As important as it is for students to learn to take multiple perspectives, educators, too, need to be open to students’ diverse perspectives and experiences.” One of the founding organizations of the National Action Civics Collaborative (NACC) is Mikva Challenge, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to create the next generation of civic leaders. Mikva Challenge is one of many organizations that Levinson highlights in her book, and, having been a member of its staff for over two years, I personally witnessed the efficacy of her prescriptions for closing the civic empowerment gap.

Budgets, Ethics, and Social Darwinism

In a speech widely considered to be his first blow in the general election campaign against likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney, President Obama last week denounced the budget proposal put forth by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan. Whereas Romney has described Ryan’s budget as “marvelous,” Obama made his own opinion of the budget clear:

Disguised as [a] deficit reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It’s nothing but thinly-veiled Social Darwinism. It’s antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who's willing to work for it— a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that's built to last—education and training; research and development—it’s a prescription for decline.

Those comments have been a hot topic on the news shows, with Ryan himself weighing in to describe Obama’s remarks as a “verbal tantrum” more petulant than presidential. “He’s trying to use this kind of rhetoric to distort away from his failed record,” Ryan told NBC.

Yet, writing at the NYT blog The Stone, philosopher Philip Kitcher notes that while the common conception of “Social Darwinism” actually has little to do with the ideas of Charles Darwin, the term as generally understood does, in fact, apply to this Republican budget proposal. He outlines the concept’s meaning:

The heart of social Darwinism is a pair of theses: first, people have intrinsic abilities and talents (and, correspondingly, intrinsic weaknesses), which will be expressed in their actions and achievements, independently of the social, economic and cultural environments in which they develop; second, intensifying competition enables the most talented to develop their potential to the full, and thereby to provide resources for a society that make life better for all. It is not entirely implausible to think that doctrines like these stand behind a vast swath of Republican proposals, including the recent budget, with its emphasis on providing greater economic benefits to the rich, transferring the burden to the middle-classes and poor, and especially in its proposals for reducing public services. Fuzzier versions of the theses have pervaded Republican rhetoric for the past decade (and even longer).

There are very good reasons to think both theses are false. Especially in the case of the Republican dynasties of our day, the Bushes and the Romneys, success has been facilitated by all kinds of social structures, by educational opportunities and legal restrictions, that were in place prior to and independently of their personal efforts or achievements. For those born into environments in which silver spoons rarely appear—Barack Obama, for instance—the contributions of the social environment are even more apparent. Without enormous support, access to inspiring teachers and skillful doctors, the backing of self-sacrificing relatives and a broader community, and without a fair bit of luck, the vast majority of people, not only in the United States but throughout the world, would never achieve the things of which they are, in principle, capable. In short, Horatio Alger needs lots of help, and a large thrust of contemporary Republican policy is dedicated to making sure he doesn’t get it.

Second, even if rigorous competition enables the talented — or, better, the lucky — to realize their goals, it is completely unwarranted to suppose that their accomplishments will translate into any increased benefit for the overwhelming majority of those who are less fortunate. The strenuous struggle social Darwinism envisages might select for something, but the most likely traits are a tendency to take whatever steps are necessary to achieve a foreseeable end, a sharp focus on narrowly individual goals and a corresponding disregard for others. We might reasonably expect that a world run on social Darwinist lines would generate a cadre of plutocrats, each resolutely concerned to establish a dynasty and to secure his favored branch of industry against future competition. In practical terms it would almost certainly yield a world in which the gap between rich and poor was even larger than it is now.

The End of the Luzin Affair

One of the hopes of any book publisher, especially a University Press, is that its books will have an impact out in the world. And there’s no single metric for that. Sometimes books find a wide audience, sometimes they revolutionize a discipline, sometimes they win awards, or sometimes they become mainstays of college courses. At HUP we’re fortunate to have grown familiar with our books having these kinds of impact, but we recently learned of a real-world effect that’s almost certainly the first of its kind for an HUP publication: a large Russian bureaucracy has officially changed its position in large part because of an HUP book.

The presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences has passed a resolution clearing the name of the mathematician Nikolai Luzin, whom it had condemned in the 1930s because of his ideological views. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, authors of Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity, have received word from the Academy that their book played a large part in the discussions that led to the passing of this resolution.

Naming Infinity, which we described on publication in 2009 as “an exciting mathematical mystery tour,” is about the founding of set theory, and a conflict between French and Russian mathematicians over the nature of infinity. The debate centered on the relation between math and mysticism, and we’ll take a stab at an explanation, though surely an oversimplified one.

Mathematicians deal in geometric perfection (like perfectly round circles and perfectly straight lines), but such things can’t actually be found in the natural, physical world. The same is also true of numbers, in that they must consist of perfectly equal units (speaking purely in mathematical terms, you cannot count two oranges if the two oranges you count are not exactly, perfectly similar). Okay, so if the objects studied by mathematicians don’t exist in this world then they must exist in another transcendent realm, one where perfection is possible. Or so said mathematicians.

The problem, though, was the question of how mathematicians gained knowledge of the objects in this other transcendent realm, or how anyone’s physical brain could grasp a non-physical reality. Now, you can basically get around this problem by using your imagination and a little common sense (you’ve experienced an orange, and you can pretend that the two you’re counting are identical). But the concept of infinity throws a roadblock on that shortcut, because we have no physical experience of the infinite. We cannot encounter a full infinity in the natural world. And, given the trouble conceptualizing a single infinity, wrapping one’s mind around the thought of an infinity of infinities, which calculus logically required, was nearly impossible. It presented such a complication that Aristotle actually banned infinity from Greek thought, but modern applied mathematics really couldn’t do without.

For French mathematicians, who were as advanced as any but still very much Descartes’ intellectual descendants, a phenomenon couldn’t be understood if it couldn’t be stated clearly. They resisted fuzziness, shunned metaphysics as theology. Not so for a group of Russian mathematicians who happened to be influenced by a heretical religious sect that practiced “Name Worshipping.” They believed that they could achieve union with the divine by chanting the name of God over and over; they believed, in other words, that Name Worshipping could connect them to another, transcendent realm. Just the sort of portal the concept of infinity seemingly required. So this sect of Russian mathematicians, Nikolai Luzin among them, “named” infinity. And this is one of the central arguments of Graham and Kantor’s book: that a religious heresy in the eyes of the Russian Orthodox Church (Name Worshipping), was actually instrumental in helping the birth of a new field of modern mathematics.

Aesthetic Education, for the Ethical Impulse

As we were preparing to publish Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, a memo from the book’s editor served for many of us as an introduction to this important new work. Revisiting that memo now, it’s a wonder that its movie-trailer quality had previously escaped our notice:

In a world where there are so many forces conspiring to shatter any person’s sense of having a self, the deconstruction that Spivak once championed is problem, not solution. The solution lies right where great theorists who dominated the field twenty years ago denied it lay, in teaching literature as a means of causing people to realize that they have souls.

It’s not often that we’re able to imagine our memos in voiceover, but that bit conjures a dark and dramatic film, the epic story of the last great hope for a global dystopia.

We shouldn’t make light, of course, for the world described in that memo is our own, and its depredations have inspired a radical reorientation in Gayatri Spivak’s thinking. This book, presenting essays from throughout her career in newly revised form, conveys Spivak’s renewed sense of the importance of teaching literature as “training for the ethical impulse.” As the excerpted memo above indicates, globalization now ensures that our lives are characterized by the uncertainty that Jacques Derrida, Spivak, her teacher Paul de Man, and other post-structuralists once upended the study of literature to help us see. In the twenty-first century, encountering the limits of theory, Spivak now asks: “How is it possible to reconcile what I learn in the field with what I teach for a living?”

This book is an attempt at such reconciliation. As the conditions of the world have changed, Spivak has over the last two decades increasingly recognized the critical importance of training in the humanities. With our increasing technological interconnections leading paradoxically to our increasing physical and emotional isolation, Spivak argues, literature and the humanities can help citizens of the world retain a sense of one another as humans. While recognizing the ways in which technology conspires against us, though, she is emphatically not a technophobe. Rather, she holds that in order to reap the benefits of new technologies we must simultaneously reimmerse ourselves in the practice of aesthetic education as developed in 18th and 19th century Europe.

We recently spoke with Spivak about An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

 

Michael Dummett (1925-2011)

Influential British philosopher Sir Michael Dummett died at 86 in the last days of 2011. Over the years we’ve been the publisher of many of Dummett’s books, including his classic studies of the 19th-century German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes the importance of Dummett’s work on Frege:

Dummett has argued that analytical philosophy is based on Frege’s insight that the correct way to study thought is to study language. He holds that Frege advocated a realist semantic theory. According to such a theory every sentence (and thus every thought we are capable of expressing) is determinately true or false, even though we may not have any means of discovering which it is.

Perhaps Dummett’s own most significant work was the development of “anti-realism,” a way of thinking that took issue with Frege’s realist theory. From The Guardian’s obituary of Dummett:

Dummett believed that Frege made certain assumptions concerning truth and falsehood that could be called into question. Frege allowed for the possibility of a thought that was neither true nor false. An example would be the thought that Father Christmas smokes. Given that there is no such person as Father Christmas, then neither is there anything to make this thought true or false. But Frege was not in the least reluctant to admit that a thought could be true or false without our having any way of telling which. An example might be the thought that Plato would have enjoyed smoking. This is what caused Dummett to pause.

He did not see how we could understand a sentence without having some way of manifesting our understanding. And he did not see how we could manifest this without being able to tell whether the thought expressed was true or false. So the assumption that a given thought could be true or false even though we had no way of telling which – an assumption that Dummett called "realism" concerning the thought – was immediately problematical.

In another of his influential works, Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Dummett sought to help bridge the divide between analytic and Continental philosophy by revisiting the moment when the traditions diverged. Simon Critchley quotes the following passage from Origins in a recent appreciation:

I do not mean to pretend that one should pretend that philosophy in the two traditions is basically the same; obviously that would be ridiculous. We can re-establish communication only by going back to the point of divergence. It’s no use now shouting across the gulf. It is obvious that philosophers will never reach agreement. It is a pity, however, if they can no longer talk to one another or understand one another. It is difficult to achieve such understanding, because if you think people are on the wrong track, you may have no great desire to talk with them or to take the trouble to criticize their views. But we have reached a point at which it is as if we’re working in different subjects.

At the NYT Opinionator, you can read reflections on Dummett from over two dozen fellow philosophers, including Timothy Williamson, Dorothy Edgington, and Hilary Putnam, who notes of Dummett that he “cared about ideas, he cared about people, he cared about society, and he rightly connected caring about any one of the three and caring about the other two.”

"Can you have work and love in a damaged world?"

The duo behind the Thinking Aloud video archive recently interviewed George Kateb about the possibilities of living a good life in our damaged world. Kateb, one of the most respected and influential political theorists of the past several decades, is the author, most recently, of Human Dignity, a secular defense of a concept that has received little true scrutiny.

We encourage you to watch the full video of his interview, available at The Stone. Here, though, is a bit of what Kateb had to say about how to live:

The point is to live one’s life, whether or not you think the world is damaged. To live a life. But, never, never to think that you can lead a good life. Never, never to think that you can lead the good life.

I think of two things that help to define a tolerable life that people need and are right to need and want. And they are the two that Freud comes up with: work and love.

Can you have work and love in a damaged world? Yes, you can, but not with an easy conscience. Why not an easy conscience? Because it’s never justified. There’s always too much damage in the world for you to think that the world exists for your work and your love.

We are oblivious, and can’t help but be to some extent oblivious. We would die from the impact of true knowledge of the amount of suffering existing just around us at any given moment in time. This is a lesson taught powerfully by George Eliot in Middlemarch. We’d die if we could hear the heartbeat of a squirrel. We would die from the roar at the other end of silence.

So how does one live against a backdrop of nothingness? What does one do about the pathologies that seem to make life less worth living, rather than more worth living?

Once you’re determined to do something, the obligation is to do your best. Should you assume an obligation to do something? I think one should. It’s not the same thing for everybody, though. But, to sort of struggle against pathology on the one hand, and the temptation of destructive nihilism, on the other hand, it’s enough to keep you going… fill up a life.