Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The Black Bloc: Hedges vs Graeber

 

The Black  Bloc has been in the news a fair bit over the last few years.  They have made appearances at G5 meetings, at the WTO meetings in Seatle, at the NATO meetings in Chicago, and currently they are very much in the news here in Brazil.

The Black Bloc is, strictly speaking, a tactic.  In protests, a horizontally organized group of individuals will wear black and cover their faces, generally move about as a unit and they may engage in some aspects of violence.   In theory this is done to distract the police -- ideally in a way that enables the free movement of the main protest group.  By dressing in black, they allow other protestors to know who they are and to stay away from them if they choose to.

Chris Hedges recently wrote a piece calling the Black Bloc “The Cancer in Occupy”. Hedges, like many others, believes that The Black Bloc is not tactical, but involves “feral” acts of violence, is “adolescent,” scared people away from Occupy, and made it easier for the State to demonize the Occupy movement. 

Meanwhile, David Graeber has responded to Hedges, arguing that Hedges has his facts wrong and that in any case even Gandhi never renounced people who shared his cause -- even when they advocated violence.

Gandhi made it clear that while he was opposed to murder under any circumstances, he also refused to denounce the murderer. This was a man who was trying to do the right thing, to act against an historical injustice, but did it in the wrong way because he was “drunk with a mad idea"… Gandhi remained resolute. It is always morally superior, he insisted, to oppose injustice through non-violent means than through violent means. However, to oppose injustice through violent means is still morally superior to not doing anything to oppose injustice at all.

The news media has been having a go at the Black Bloc’s actions in the teacher protests in Brazil, and even publications like The Raw Story seem to be painting the actions of the Black Bloc as senseless violence.  However, yesterday I was speaking to a teacher here in Rio – a woman in her 50s – who said “no the Black Bloc was protecting us from the police!”  So there is that.

I know some of you have views about this.  Is Hedges right?  Is The Black Bloc the cancer in occupy?  Or is Graeber right.  And what do you think of Graeber’s interpretation of Gandhi here?  Comments are open.

Progress in Philosophy Revisited

Two years ago I took part in panel in a conference on progress in philosophy.  (The contributions of me, Jennifer Nagel  and Dave Chalmers  are still online -- I had a tech fail in recording Pettit’s contribution).  My view was and is that philosophical progress is robust – the growth is Fibonacci (think of a tree branching).  Just speaking from what I’ve seen in areas of philosophy that I am familiar with, the grown and development has been astounding over the last thirty years.

Fibonacci growth is impressive, but is it enough?  The second part of my talk was that it is not nearly enough.

Many people are familiar with Kurzweil’s thesis about the exponential growth in technology leading to a kind of technological singularity.   Singularity happens when you hit the elbow in the exponential curve and the curve effectively shoot straight up (or appears to).  If that is right, then the technological curve is pulling away from the philosophy curve very rapidly and is about to leave it completely behind.  What that means is that our technology is going to leave our critical thinking skills behind.  You may think that is already happening, and I agree: I’m just saying the problem is about to get much worse.

It doesn’t have to get worse.  The only reason that technology grows exponentially is that we keep feeding it resources.  The only reason philosophy doesn’t is that we starve it for resources (we don’t have enough bodies to throw at philosophical problems).  I say we need to seriously think about redistributing resources away from technological development and into philosophy, and allow philosophy departments to grow new programs that focus on new technologies and their development.  Why would anyone do this?  Well, someone needs to make vivid what can go wrong if we don’t.  One idea is that if we don’t understand technology we become alienated from it – a view that I floated yesterday. 

So here are some questions for discussion.  Is philosophy making the kind of progress I believe it is?  Is technology pulling away from us as Kurzweil believes it is?  Is this a problem?  Can we fix it?  If so, how?

Is it Time to Give Frank Ramsey His Due?

David Papineau says yes in a TLS review of a new book on Ramsey (by Ramsey's sister no less).

I'll confess I'm among those who think Ramsey was possibly the greatest philospher of the 20th Century despite having died at 26.  Any Ramsey fans out there want to back me and Papineau up on this?  Anyone want to call BS on that?  Comments are open...

What the Unabomber Got Wrong

Over the past year I have been involved in a couple of panels on Ted Kaczynski (aka, the Unabomber -- a serial killer, currently in a supermax prison, who in the 80s and 90s mailed bombs to persons involved with technology).  Organized by Jeffrey Young of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the panels involved Dan Skrbina of UM Dearborn providing a partial defense of the Unabomber and me offering a criticism.  We’ve done the panel at Rutgers and at SXSW in Austin. 

In my view the the "Unabomber manifesto" is a smorgasbord of critical reasoning fails, and you could use it in a critical reasoning course if you wanted to task introductory students with finding basic fallacies in a written work (see my slides here).  But I also have a positive thesis which is related to my interest in hacking, but which so far as I know is not advocated by anyone I know in the philosophy of technology.

 The Unabomber believes that any post-hunter-gatherer technology is alienating and dehumanizing.  But I believe that like bees and beavers and spiders and birds we are technological creatures.  In my view, alienation comes not from technology (any more than a beaver can be alienated from its dam or a bird from its nest) but rather comes out when technology is “jailed” and we can’t tear apart the object and see what makes it tick.  So it isn’t technology that alienates us, but corporate control of technology – for example Apple, when it makes it difficult for us to reprogram our iPhones.

This is the point where hacking becomes important.  Hacking is fundamentally about our having the right and responsibility to open up the technologies of our everyday lives, learn how they work, repurpose those technologies.

Before I start reinventing wheels here, does anyone know of people in the philosophy of technology who have articulated such a view?  Beyond that, any comments and criticism?

Meet Skelly, the Latest Trophy in the War on “Terror”

Skelly and his friend Juss

The U.S. Government keeps claiming “wins” in the “war against terror,” but who are these alleged terrorists?  In the case of the Cleveland 4, it seems the FBI used a career criminal to manipulate a groups of indigent kids into a “terrorist plot” against a bridge.  One of them, Joshua “Skelly” Stafford, was an impoverished developmentally impaired kid who did not take place in the planning of the event and it’s not clear he understood why he was in the car on the way to the bridge on the day in question, other than that he was promised a free meal and cigarettes. 

A sane government might provide food, shelter, and psychological assistance for a kid like Skelly, but instead our government chose to coerce him and his equally indigent friends into being “terror trophies” – pawns that could be used to at once scare the public into thinking we have a terrorist threat within and at the same time to offer evidence of “success” in their fake war on fake terror.

 As Vivien Lesnik Weisman reports in the Huffington Post, Skelly’s story and the fact that he was sentenced to 10 years in prison is an indictment of our security state.  As she puts it, it is symptomatic of the failure of the rule of law.  

Outsider Philosophers

The art world has a phenomenon known as outsider artists -- artists who don't emerge via what Arthur Danto has called the art world (art schools, galleries etc.) but seemingly come in from the outside.  This inevitably leads to debates about who is really an outsider, whether they remain outsiders or get absorbed into the art world, and of course just how much recognition they should get.  Is there a similar phenomenon of outsider philosophers?

In the photos above I've given some examples to spur discussion.  Is Angela Davis (top) really an outsider?  (She studied under Marcuse and has held philosophy positions; perhaps she is an insider?).  Is Timothy Leary (bottom right) a philosopher?  He described himself as America's MVP -- most valuable philosopher.  And would Lucy Parsons (bottom left) even consider herself a philosopher?  Well, I know some Chicago anarchists that would, and the Chicago police once described her as more dangerous that a thousand rioters, so there's that.

So are there outsider philosophers?  Who are they?  Are they worth reading?  Are they worth reading qua philosophers?  Discuss.

Weev’s Letter from Prison

As some of you know I’ve recently been concerned with Surveillance State’s war on hacktivists.   What does the State have against hacktivists?  Well as Chris Hedges has said, the State can’t abide hacktivists because “they have the tools to expose how rotten Empire is… and it is completely rotten.”  Hedges might have added that hacktivists also have the tools to *embarrass* the Surveillance State and its corporate partners.  Andrew Auenheimer (a.k.a. weev) is one such hacktivist, recently sentenced to 41 months in jail for embarrassing AT&T.

More specifically weev and a friend wrote a script that harvested the email addresses of 114,000 iPad users from web pages that AT&T had left unprotected on the public Internet.  Then, weev and his friend passed the email addresses on to the online magazine Gawker, presumably so as to embarrass AT&T for its shoddy security.  The prosecution charged weev with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) – a law forged in 1984 that says you cannot use a computer system for reasons not intended by the owners.  It seems AT&T didn’t intend for people to visit these public web pages.  (This is the same law that was used to persecute Aaron Swartz and eventually drive him to suicide).  

Some months ago, I published an op/ed in the New York Times Weekly Review in which I argued that weev and others like him were the gadflies of our age.  Weev had a copy of the op/ed, which he rather enjoyed, but in a letter to his lawyer Tor Ekeland he reports that it has now been seized by the prison guards -- it would seem in violation of the law.  I’ve decided to share the letter here because it touches on some philosophical themes. Below the fold is a text version of Weev's letter.

On Hannah Arendt and "the Banality of Evil"

 

This year is the 50^th Anniversary of the trial of Adolph Eichmann.  The anniversary has led to a number of museum exhibitions, but also to a reexamination of Hannah Arendt’s famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem – the book in which she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.”

Arendt was of course recently the subject of a major feature film, and with the release of the film there was an essay in the New York Times by Roger Berkowitz. I have to say I found Berkowitz’s essay hard to buy: His claim was that Eichmann was banal in that he was a “true believer” – and sorry but I don’t see how there is anything banal about a true believer.  Then again, I'm no expert (more on this below).

My interest in this topic stems from the fact that I recently used Arendt’s thesis about the banality of evil to frame a NYT Stone article about whistleblowers. In it I argued that whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden are exceptional because they rejected their bureaucratic responsibilities when they saw they were participating in systemic evil – they were acting as Eichmann (and many others) did not and to this day do not.

Meanwhile in an response published on the website of the Hannah Arendt Center, Berkowitz argued that Arendt would have taken exception to Snowden because he did not, as it were, face the music after he blew the whistle.  To illustrate, Berkowitz draws on the following example discussed by Arendt (I quote at length).

For Arendt, great civil disobedients from Socrates to Thoreau play important and essential roles in the political realm. What is more, Arendt fully defends Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers. It seems, therefore, that it is appropriate to enlist her in support of the modern day whistleblowers.

There is, however, a problem with this reading. Socrates, Thoreau, and Ellsberg all gave themselves up to the law and allowed themselves to be judged by and within the legal system. In this regard, they differ markedly from Snowden, Manning and others who have sought to remain anonymous or to flee legal judgment. For Arendt, this difference is meaningful.

Consider the case of Shalom Schwartzbard, which Arendt addresses in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Schwartzbard was a Jew who assassinated the leader of Ukranian pogroms in the streets of Paris. Schwartzbard stood where he took his revenge, waited for the police, admitted his act of revenge, and put himself on trial. He claimed to have acted justly at a time when the legal system was refusing to do justice. And a French jury acquitted him.

For Arendt, the Schwartzbard case stands for an essential principle of justice: that to break the law and act justly, one must then bring oneself back into the law. She writes:

He who takes the law into his own hands will render a service to justice only if he is willing to transform the situation in such a way that the law can again operate and his act can, at least posthumously, be validated.

Now I’m certainly no expert on Arendt (I won’t even claim I’m competent on Arendt), so I wonder if I might crowdsource this topic.  What exactly did Arendt mean by “the banality of evil,” and is it really the case that she would say a whistleblower should simply turn herself in after the deed?  Really?  But as I say; I don’t know.  I’m asking.

Comments are are moderated.  Signed comments are preferred.  I'll see if Roger Berkowitz can join us.

How to Write a Philosophy Paper

UWO's Angela Mendelovici uses Prezi to show how it should be done, here!

Moshe Marvit: The Use of Adjunct Faculty is Destroying the Academy

Labor and Civil Rights Attorney Moshe Marvit in an interview in Dissent, here.  A sample:

They’re also destroying the academy. Because as this happens, more and more students are going to ask, “why would I get a PhD? You want me to have a PhD to teach your students, yet why would I do that? Because it seems to me if I get a PhD, I’m going to end up making poverty wages. I can do that now without a PhD. I’ll go to Starbucks and do it.”

They’re destroying their own system, and they’re going to wake up and realize that students and parents have decided that there’s no use for the university anymore.

(I've opened comments.  Be interesting! --PL)

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

 

Has Brian Leiter lost his marbles?  Well here is some evidence that he has:  He’s asked me to be guest blogger for this week and he says … and now I quote … “You could write about Wikileaks, Snowden, the guy in Dallas, privacy/snooping stuff; or your philosophy of cyberspace stuff; or your dynamical lexicon stuff; or anything else more or less loosely of a philosophical nature.”  He sold me with “loosely of a philosophical nature.”  In other words:  I can write about anything I want!

So this week should be fun.  I’m hoping we can have some discussions about philosophers as public intellectuals, outsider philosophers, philosophers breaking bad (by using their skills on behalf of the surveillance state), anarchism, trolls, and who knows what else?  There are over 9000 things to talk about, including mudkips!  Plus we’ll try to keep up with hirings and firings and relevant issues in the academy. 

It took Brian years to build this forum.  This week we find out if that can all be destroyed in seven days.  Stay tuned!

-- Peter Ludlow (aka Urizenus Sklar)

Dept. of Philosophy, Northwestern University

https://sites.google.com/site/peterjludlow/

Northwestern's Peter Ludlow to be guest-blogging the week of October 14

God helps us all!  But, really, it should be good.  I may have a few items too, but Peter and his avatar will be the main attractions.