cheese it, the cops!

so i'll be in hartford this weekend, giving a (brief) talk at the north american anarchist studies network inaugural conference at the charter oak cultural center, 3:15ish saturday afternoon. i'll give a version of my interpretation of american anarchism as emerging from radical protestantism and embodying an anti-capitalist individualism. here's a handout.

American Anarchism 1830-1850: Quotations

Our surrounding institutions, customs and public opinion call for conformity: they require us to act in masses like herds of cattle: they do not recognize the fact that we think and feel individually and ought to be at liberty to act individually. But this liberty cannot be enjoyed in combinations, masses and connections in which one cannot move without affecting another. Nothing is more common than such remarks as the following. "No two things are alike." "There can be no rules without exceptions" &c. Yet, we are constantly called upon to conform to rules that do not suit our case, to acquiesce in numerous different opinions all at the same moment, and no laws in the world preserve the liberty of the governed to make exceptions to the rules which they are required to obey. To give others the power to construe laws and make exceptions is equivalent to giving them the power to govern without laws. A little observation will disclose an individuality in persons, times, and circumstances which has suggested the idea that one of our most fatal errors has been the laying down rules, laws, and principles without preserving the liberty of each person to apply them according to the individuality of his views, and the circumstances of different cases. In other words, our error, like that of all the world that has gone before us has been, the violation of individual liberty.
Josiah Warren, The Peaceful Revolutionist (1833)

[W]hoever feels unable or unwilling to forgive all manner of injuries, and the worst of enemies, has no right to rank himself among the followers of Christ; the attempt of men to govern themselves by external rules and physical penalties is and ever must be futile; and from the assumption, that man has the right to exercise oppression over his brother, has proceeded every form of injustice and oppression with which the earth has been afflicted. No one who professes to have the spirit of Christ, can consistently sue a man at law for redress of injuries, or thrust any evil-doer in prison, or fill any office in which he would come under obligation to execute penal enactments - or take any part in military service - or acknowledge allegiance to any human government. The governments of this world are all Anti-Christ; they cannot be maintained, except by military power; all their penal enactments being a dead letter without military power to carry them into effect, are virtually written in human blood.
William Lloyd Garrison, Constitution of the New England Non-Resistance Society (1838)

Political action is of one spirit and intent with military. The weapons of both are violence, and the instrumentalities of both, bloodshed and murder. What is government, after which all political action is aiming, but an armed battery? What is its voice, but the report of cannon - its sanctions, but the bayonet and the halter? . . . It is immoral to strike a man a man, or threaten him, or to ask the sheriff to do it for you - or the militia officer, or the governor as such - or the penal law-maker - or the voter. Moral action is addressed to the moral qualities of a moral being - and does not act physically on the body and animal senses. There is nothing reformatory in animal action. A politician is but a man driver, a human teamster. His business is to control men by the whip and the goad. His occupation would be unlawful and inexpedient toward even the cattle.
Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, "Politics," Herald of Freedom (1843)

Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our means, and work together for a time to one end. But whenever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake the direction of him also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him. I may have so much more skill or strength than he, that he cannot express adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the assumption: it must be executed by a practical lie, namely, by force.... The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints.... A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried. We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion, if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions: nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Politics" (1844)

Men are morally responsible for all constitutions, institutions, laws, processes and usages which they have pledged themselves to support, or in which they acquiesce without positive remonstrance and disfellowship. Thus if a political compact, a civil or military league, covenant or constitution, requires, authorizes, provides for or tolerates war, bloodshed, capital punishment, slavery, or any kind of absolute injury, the man who swears, affirms, or otherwise pledges himself to support it, is just as responsible for every act of injury done in conformity thereto, as if he himself personally committed it. The army is his army, the gallows his gallows, the whipping post his whipping post, the prison his prison, the slaveholding his slaveholding. When the constitutional majority declares war, it is his war. All the slaughter, rapine, ravages, robbery are his. There is no escape from this terrible moral responsibility but by a conscientious withdrawal from such government, and an uncompromising protest against its fundamental creed and law.
Adin Ballou, Christian Non-Resistance (1846)

If, for instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that is he who is living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the offices of inferior and brutal ones. hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening?
Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

How can man have the right to dictate law to his equal brother, and kill him if he disobeys? for all human government must fall back on death for execution. Death is personified in every legislature, judge and ruler; the government is but an embodiment of death. No man can be under obligation to do anything because human governments tell him to do it. If they require what is right, we are to do it; not because they require, but because it is right, and not because congress of parliament commands it. . . . As well say, that the only way to make men love us is to hate them, as to say that governments of violence ever did or ever can protect life. They exist by death, and they make of earth a charnel house. The history of all attempts of man to rule over man, to dictate to him a rule of life, and to punish him if he disobeys, demonstrates that an assumption of such power is opposed to nature and to nature's God. They have made earth a scene of blood and carnage.
Henry Clarke Wright, Anthropology or the Science of Man in its Bearing on War and Slavery, by Henry C. Wright (1850)

next tuesday, i'll be lecturing at c.w. post college on long island on "non-resistance, abolitionism, and anarchism: connections in american thought." 3:30 at the hillwood art gallery. here's a handout for it, and i'll post the lecture itself once i polish it up or at least off.

Radical American Reformers of the Nineteenth Century (a Selection)

Adin Ballou (1803-1890), advocate of non-resistance and founder of the Hopedale utopian community in Massachusetts. Author of the influential text Christian Non-Resistance, consulted by Tolstoy and Gandhi.

Maria Weston Chapman (1806-1885), abolitionist and editor of the journal The Non-Resistant, collaborator of Garrison.

Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880), eminent author, abolitionist, feminist, advocate of Indian rights. Editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, which she left in a dispute about the use of force against slavery. Co-author of Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

David Low Dodge (1774-1852), dry goods merchant in Hartford Connecticut. Christian pacifist author and founder of the first interdenominational peace society.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Unitarian minister, transcendentalist, and radical individualist author, lecturer, and saint. His essay "New England Reformers" is an affectionate and wry portrait of the kind of folks listed here, as well as some even wackier.

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), leader of the radical wing of American abolitionism and publisher of The Liberator. Advocate of a variety of radical reforms, including pacifism, anarchism, anti-racism, and feminism.

Sarah (1792-1873) and Angelina Grimké  (1805-1879), suffragists, feminists, abolitionists, Quakers, and pacifists, originally from South Carolina. Among the first American women to give public lectures and to serve as officers of mixed-gender societies.

Samuel J. May (1797-1871) Unitarian, educational reformer, abolitionist, advocate of women's right, and collector of anti-slavery literature. His collection of anti-slavery writings was donated to the Cornell library and is available online: http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/mayantislavery/

Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), Quaker minister, pacifist, and abolitionist. Often described as the first American feminist. Fought for equal pay at the Quaker school where she taught in around 1810. With Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others met at the first American feminist gathering at Seneca Falls, NY in 1848.

John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886), credited with converting Garrison to anti-statism; advocate of a variety of reforms; founder of the Oneida utopian community in New York, which practiced "plural marriage." Author of American Socialisms, definitive history of 19th century American utopias.

Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (1794-1846), radical abolitionist and anti-statist, publisher of the New Hampshire abolitionist paper Herald of Freedom, subject of essays by Thoreau and Whittier.
crispinsartwell.com/rogershome.htm

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), nature writer, transcendentalist, abolitionist, and anti-statist. His essay on civil disobedience is a classic of non-violent resistance, anti-slavery, individualist, and anti-war thought.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)(okay not American), novelist, Christian pacifist, and anarchist. Corresponded with Ballou on the subject of non-resistance. In works such as The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy repudiated violence and hence the state. Extremely influential on subsequent developments in non-violent resistance, including Gandhi and King.

Josiah Warren (1798-1874), radical individualist and utopian projector. Often described as the first American anarchist. Founder of "Time Stores" - centers of cooperative economies - in a variety of locations, and the communities of Utopia, Ohio and Modern Times (Brentwood) on Long Island. crispinsartwell.com/josiahwarren.htm

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), poet, Quaker abolitionist, temperance advocate, and radical pacifist. Endorsed political action to abolish slavery. Associate of Garrison, with whom he later broke, and author of Justice and Expediency.

John Woolman (1720-1770)(okay, not 19th century), early Quaker pacifist, abolitionist, and advocate of Indian rights. Author of the spiritual classic The Journal of John Woolman. Traveled through the South, attempting to persuade masters to free their slaves.

handout from my philosophy of religion class, also on the handouts page.

Basic Arguments for God's Existence

Each of these basic strategies supports numerous formulations, and there are other strategies as well.

The Ontological Argument (Anselm, e.g.)
The term 'God' refers to the greatest possible being.
A being which exists is greater than a being which does not exist.
Therefore, God exists.

(The ontological argument is a priori, deductive, and has the advantage not only of proving (if it proves anything) that God is morally perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, and so on.)

The Cosmological Argument (Aquinas etc)
Version (a): First Cause
Every motion, event, or object must have a cause.
There cannot be a temporally infinite chain of causation.
Therefore, there must be a first cause that is not itself caused by anything else ("and this all people call God.")

Version (b): from the principle of sufficient reason
For every event and object, there is in principle an adequate reason or explanation.
This is true not only of each specific thing and event but of the whole series or array.
Therefore there must be something in terms of which the whole universe or causal sequence can be explained (say, "the will of God")

(The cosmological argument is a posteriori in the sense that it supposes (from experience) that there things, events, and so on. But it is usually framed deductively.)

The Teleological Argument or The Argument from Design
The universe displays such elements of physical or moral order or purpose that it would be irrational to believe that it was the result of chance rather than intentional design.
This is often framed as an argument from analogy: say we found a watch on the beach; we'd conclude it was the result of someone's purposeful design and manufacture. How much more elaborate and beautiful etc is the world!

(The teleological argument is a posteriori and inductive or abductive.)

Definitions
a priori knowledge is knowledge that is not based on sensory (empirical) observation. Examples include principles of mathematics and logic.
a posteriori knowledge is emprical knowledge, knowledge based on sensory experience.
deductive arguments are arguments in which it is supposed that if the premises are true, the conclusion cannot be rationally denied. E.g. All men are mortal. Fred is a man. Therefore, Fred is mortal.
inductive arguments rest on enumerating observations. For example, all the crows we have observed are black. Therefore, the next crow we observe will be black. Though the premise lends probability to the conclusion, the premise(s) could be true and the conclusion false.

abductive arguments are arguments from analogy, concluding from the fact that two items are similar in certain respects, they are similar in other respects. For example, since rats are like people (in some respects), if a substance cures cancer in rats, it is likely to cure cancer in people.

here's a handout from my republicanism course (also on the handouts page). i'd be interested in responses on this one.

---------

Classical and Modern Political Terms

It is unfortunate that all these words are used in multiple senses (though such is language), but it is important to get as clear as possible.

democracy (classical conception, through the 18th century): rule by the people, majority, poor, or even the mob, usually used in a negative sense, as something to be avoided. In the Athenian democracy, legislative and judicial functions were directly discharged by the citizenry.

democracy (modern): usually refers to a representative system of government, resting on the will of the people or the majority, but filtering it through representative bodies (also incorporates the classical liberal conception of individual rights and the republican conception of the rule of law; also the idea of a written constitution).

classical liberalism: rests on the concept of individual (natural or inherent) rights, and limits state authority to the protection of individual rights or the principle of "non-interference." Associated with free-market capitalism. A similar position is now called libertarianism. Locke, Smith, Mill.

(modern) liberalism: more or less the program of the Democratic Party, for example: welfare state and aggressive government programs in education, redistribution of wealth, regulation of business. Also internationalism. (Uncomfortably) combines a continuing tradition of rights with considerable social engineering, and also possibly with a notion of group rights or identity politics of race, gender, sexuality, and so on.

classical or civic republicanism: emphasizes the public participation of citizens as central to their identity and liberty, unity and virtue of the political unit (polis). Not primarily based on individual rights. "Mixed government" with monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements. Aristotle, Adams.

(modern) republicanism: the ideology of the Republican Party, (uncomfortably) combining traditionalism - including religious values derived from Protestant Christianity, nationalism, and romantic militarism - with classical liberal elements of free market capitalism (a "pro-business" orientation), individual rights, and small government.

conservatism: properly, emphasis on tradition and traditional values as a guide to current action, now identified with the combination of elements characteristic of the Republican Party.

left and right: a current technique for dividing up the political spectrum. the left/right dichotomy does not do a good job of characterizing political ideologies before about 1900. For example, the most radical American political figures of the early nineteenth century (abolitionists, feminists, and so on) were for the most part evangelical Christians. Comes into vogue when Marxist communism is termed "far left," fascism "far right." Makes some kind of sense in the current ideological division between modern liberalism and modern conservativism.

--------------

I might remark on those "uncomfortably"s: I do think that modern liberalism and conservativism are fundamentally incoherent. This is understandable given their status as representing more or less half each of the American political spectrum: they are, for one thing, complicated coalitions. Also they are historical, not, as it were, philosophical. They both appeal to aspects of the American founding. And they have both been mutated by the signal political development of the last century and a half: the inexorable continuous growth of the state. So that even if both appeal fundamentally to freedom and liberty, both enthusiastically wield the state in order to achieve a laundry list of objectives: social control according to religious values, for example; or justice conceived as economic equality. Both avail themselves of the state in order to shape a citizenry amenable to their values, which themselves in each case are semi-coherent congeries.

one of the hardest things to convey to people is what constitutes a plausible definition. so here's  a handout i've been using in one form or another for years. also on the handouts page.

The Task of Definition

There are various sorts of definition, such as stipulative definition, which simply assigns a certain meaning to a word or sign, as in the meanings of mathematical terms.

But we are more concerned with defining terms that are in use in ordinary language, but about the meaning of which we are puzzled or which is controversial. This would include all the major terms in philosophy of art, such as ‘art,’ ‘work of art,’ ‘beauty,’ ‘expression,’ and the like.

The task of definition in such cases is to capture the meaning (as best one can) that is actually associated with the term in everyday usage,  that allows us to use the term successfully in communication. Thus, in part, the task of definition could be conceived to be empirical: we find out, for example, to what sorts of items competent speakers of the language apply the term in question.

One starts with the set of items in question (the things commonly called works of art, for example) and then tries to show what is common and peculiar to them all: in this case what all and only the works the works of art have in common. Then the term is adequately defined.

Another way to state this is that an adequate definition of a term ‘x’ provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct application of the term. You could think of necessary conditions for something to count as an x as properties that all x’s have in common; sufficient conditions for something to count as an x are properties that only x’s have in common. Or again, an adequate definition of ‘x’ states the properties that all and only x’s possess.

The way to test or refute a proposed definition, hence, is by counter-example. There are two sorts of counter-example:
(1) an item which the definition counts as an x, but which is not an x.
(2) an item which the definition does not count as an x, but which is an x.

For example, let’s say we define “work of art’ as any object that expresses emotion. Now I’m expressing emotion when I’m yelling at my kids, but that’s not (usually) a work of art. That is, the definition counts yelling as a work of art, but yelling is not a work of art. That is, the definition does not provide sufficient conditions for the correct application of the term.
On the other hand, consider a canvas by Mondrian or a sculpture by Donald Judd: plausibly, these are quite inexpressive or unemotional works. That is, the definition does not count them as works of art, but they are. That is, the definition does not provide necessary conditions for the correct application of the term.

Strictly speaking, a single counter-example of either kind is enough to refute a definition or to show it to be inadequate.

 

from my pomo class, spring 2008. also on the handout page.

Postmodern Lexicon

deconstruction: the strategy of textual interpretation advocated by Jacques Derrida and followed by Paul de Man, Jonathan Culler and countless others. It focuses on showing what the text omits or represses: how it collapses in on itself or displays its own contingency etc. It was far more popular in literature than in philosophy departments in the English-speaking academy.

differance: Derrida's mysterious misspelling of 'difference.' The notion derives from Saussure's insight that language is a system of differences. "Now, how am I to speak of the a of differance? It is clear that it cannot be exposed. . . . if differance is (I also cross out the is) what makes the presentation of being-present possible, it never presents itself as such. . . Any exposition would expose it to disappearing as a disappearance." You can say that again! Only, don't.

genealogy: a history of concepts or truths, coined by Nietzsche in his book Genealogy of Morals, which showed how Western moral notions emerged from resentment toward the healthy and powerful. The greatest practitioner of genealogy was Foucault, who developed genealogies of madness, sexuality, and crime, among others

hermeneutics: the study of textual interpretation. 'Hermeneutics' at one time was used mainly with regard to Biblical interpretation (especially the 19th-century work of Schleiermacher). It has also come to indicate a kind of mellow pomo or post-Heidegger philosophy associated with Hans-Georg Gadamer that took textual interpretation as a model for how we experience the world as a whole.

meta-narrative: a narrative is a story, more or less. In Lyotard's influential treatment of post-modernism, a meta-narrative is a big story used to organize history or culture as a whole, as in the inevitable march of freedom or the story of class struggle ending in utopia etc. That's bad and over, in case you're wondering.

Other: the apparently empty category that defines the positive category by exclusion: woman, the primitive, etc. You suck. But your other is cool! 'Other' is also a verb.

semiotics or semiology: the study of signs, especially linguistic signs. Probably coined by C.S. Peirce, but associated by post-modernism with the linguistics of Saussure.

simulacrum: an item that is a simulation or model of another, as a picture, for example. The plural is simulacra. In the thought of Baudrillard, the post-modern era is the era of the "precession of simulacra" in which all originals have disappeared and we live in an infinite circulation of signs without originals.

structuralism: an approach to the human sciences that focuses on intra-cultural conceptual systems rather than on, say, sheer adaptation of organism to environment etc. The approach is especially associated with the anthropology of Levi-Strauss, and focuses on such things as the structure of kinship and linguistic systems. The philosophy especially of Derrida and Foucault came to be called post-structuralism: it was influenced by structuralism, but took its insights in radical directions, often exposing the contradictions or tensions in these systems, or "deconstructing" them.

sub-altern: oppressed or subordinated, in virtue of one's membership in or assignment to a group.