Ciceronian Review

Poppies Are Red, And So Is The West

An essay by Justin E.H. Smith reminded me of a question I have puzzled over for several years. It is a terminological questions, how to refer to some groups. Smith’s essay is about that in part, although more focused on the substance of what ties the group(s) together. It is about people who want to, and quite often succeed, in imposing moralistic standards on figures in arts, history, politics, and generally in the public sphere. Smith talks in terms that look back to Stalin, in particular, and the recent history of Russia and eastern Europe. He makes comparisons between the present trends in attempts to silence and degrade people who do not meet certain current behavioral and thought standards. In other words, the cancel culture of left and right in the US (and elsewhere).

That experience of censorship and control was directed, more or less, from the center, the governmental center. Stalin and his colleagues heading the state issues directions and orders. The efforts to crush variety in thought and bind expression to a narrow range of approved methods and topics came from the center. Enthusiastically applied, no doubt. My understanding, which is not that of an expert, is that one can describe it as state action even if it is often quite hard to see it has a legal regime. There was law, or anyway, statutes and a constitution, but realistically they had little to do with the goings on. The various police, secret and otherwise, acted on directions from above. I think that is accurate enough for the moment.

I think Mao’s Red Guard and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a better analogy. First, why, and then some reservations. The Cultural Revolution involved mass movements in battle with one another, each grouping imposing its standards on all within their reach. Murder, torture, beatings, indoctrination, humiliation, dispossession, and exile, etc., meted by groups which were more or less self-directed. Faction against faction, Red Guards against Army, etc.

Both sets of experiences are, in fact, distant from the issues in the US. That is a point Smith makes quite directly and eloquently. At its present worse, cancel culture is not murdering people, or dispossessing them of home and property, exiling them to remote regions to struggle for food, sending them to prisons to be worked to death. It is now here only a faint resemblance. One hopes that the faintness will fade, but even as it is it is not the state terror of the USSR or its client states or the terror of the Cultural Revolution. But they share some features -- a rejection of forgiveness or error, imposition of rigid moralistic standards whose violations, however remote, are unforgivable, and intense drive to create a monolithic cultural landscape, contempt for difference or dissent.

How to refer to them? An American Red Guard, a Stalinist tendency?

I wonder if my preference for analogy to the Red Guard is any better? I wonder if these comparisons are so overwrought as to be self-defeating. A point Smith makes, I think, is that whatever the terminology or descriptors, the current status if not in fact much like Stalinism or Cultural Revolution, there is not the blood, murder, not the risks, etc., and it is wrong to pretend or suggest otherwise. That is right. But how to describe or refer to these tendencies?

 

 

Just Say No Nuance

The NYT has an opinion column on the sorts of information consumer genetic testing provides people, focused this time on race.  The point seems to be, according to the title writer at  least, that White Americans will learn that they have African ancestry - the brutal history of racial slavery: "America's Brutal Racial History Is Written All Over Our Genes."  The essay has almost the same point.  Anecdotes about African-Americans meeting the descendants of the slave owners, and some statistics about the prevalence of African genes in White southerners: "About 12 percent of whites from Southern states like South Carolina and Louisiana had 1 percent or more of African ancestry."  And more generally, "close to 4 percent of the company’s customers who identified as white Americans had at least 1 percent African ancestry, consistent with an African ancestor within the last 11 generations or so" (of clients of 23andme).  Written all over our genes is a bit of an overstatement given the numbers provided.  The history is in some genes, but not all over our genes.  There are all those European immigrants who came in the latter 19th century and in the 20th century.  And those immigrating from Central and South America, and from China and Japan, and so on.  This story, and its like, seem framed by an assumption that all that matters involves people east of the Mississippi before the Civil War and their descendants.  To be fair, there are some glancing mentions of the degree of population movements over the centuries, and at least allusion to the shaky foundation of claims about German or Italian written in genes.  I wish there had been more on both.     

Maybe No One Was On First

The US Soccer Federation filed its opposition to the Women Player's summary judgment motion earlier this week.  The Women are suing on equal pay claims.  The opposition made a lot of news, none of it good for the USSF.  One of the arguments USSF advances is that the men and women play in different sports, that the men face more hostile audiences and that makes their games materially different from (and, I suppose, more challenging) than games the women play.  (You can find it about page 14-15.) It is a foolish argument I think, but plenty of people have made that point.  The USSF faced a great backlash and the President has now resigned as part of the response.  In his resignation announcement, he stated that he had not fully read the opposition brief before it was filed.  Also, USSF has moved the work in the case to a new law firm.  The case was at Seyfarth Shaw -- the folks who wrote and filed the opposition -- to Latham & Watkins.  The news is all about USSF and not much notice has been taken of the legal practice parts of the story.

There are interesting lessons about litigation practice in the story.  Assume that the USSF President did not read the brief before it was filed. 

Why was that?  Did he just not get to it, i.e., Seyfarth Shaw delivered it to me in plenty of time to read but he had other things he thought he has to do and just did not get to it before the deadline for filing?  (That certainly happens.  I still remember a run-in with inside counsel from 20+ years ago who never responded to drafts and refused to give instructions about what he wanted said at hearings, and then yelled at me when I tried to make things as simple as possible.  He was the guy in charge but seemed to think I should decide what his company would say to an order from the court to produce more documents.) Most who have worked in a law firm are familiar with the fire-drills that arise from someone being late on a draft or a client deciding to take a new direction at the last minute.  It does not sound like that was the case, or, more to the point, it was not the client who went a new direction.

Did no one at Seyfarth Shaw warn him about the provocative arguments they were making?  It is one thing to not advise the client in detail about an argument that the plaintiffs' don't have enough evidence for summary judgment, but something else ( think) not to advise the client to think about an argument that men and women soccer players are in different sports because the men face more people who say mean things about them -- at least when the issue of the case is whether the women are being paid comparably with the men.    

Did no one at Seyfarth Shaw discuss with USSF how the argument would appear in the press?  Did anyone at the firm even think about the question?

At the moment, it looks like the firm did a poor job.  Sometimes clients want idiotic arguments made.  Even so, the lawyers should advise the client about the risks of doing so. 

Sometimes none of the available arguments are likely to sell to the public.  Sometimes the lawyers are limited to arguments that, to be blunt, stink in public.  But it is still the job, and right for the lawyer, to make the arguments.  Maybe that is the case here -- I do not know much about employment law so I am not judging that.  And, I wonder how the oral argument will go.  Will the Latham lawyer adopt and defend the arguments of the brief, in total, or try to dump some off as mistakes of prior counsel. 

Earth Colors

The NYT had a story yesterday about race and sex diversity in the Earth Sciences.  The title: "Earth Sciences Has A Whiteness Problem" with a subheading: "Barely 10 percent of doctoral degrees in the geosciences go to recipients of color. The lack of diversity limits the quality of research, many scientists say."  I thought the last sentence especially interesting.  How would a different demography improve the science or the quality of the science?  Assuming Earth Sciences includes climatology subjects, I thought it might be that more attention to local history would be informative about climate patterns, for example.  I read the article because diversity affecting the quality fo the science would be interesting and not something I would come to on my own.  Actually, I read it twice because there was, literally, nothing in the article supporting the notion that the 'whiteness problem' had or was affecting the quality of the science.  Thinking I might be particularly dense on the topic or blind to it in some way I also read through all 247 comments to see if someone had identified what I missed.  No.  There was nothing about the quality of the science.  The closest was the claim that "earth science classes could be enriched by a greater focus on nonwhite and Indigenous histories and voices, given that 'Indigenous people have a unique connection to the land.'”  It is a surprising claim.  I do not think it has much to do with Earth Science really, and certainly not a showing that the quality of the science is affected.  It is an odd statement on its own.  Indigenous people have a unique connection to the land is pretty far from anything like science.  It is not remotely credible that Indigenous people have a unique connection to the land because it is not remotely credible that Indigenous people all have the same connection to the land, or any reasonably identifiable set of connections to the land.  Even as to people doing the same things with respect to the land, like farming, do not have the same set of connections to the land. Indigenous people does not mean much in this context.  No migrations, apparently, until the White people showed up?  No discussion of class in the article, except the suggestion that all White people are wealthy.  

What is going on at the NYT? 

Morales

The coup in Bolivia appeared and receded from the news in quick time, if not double quick time.  A flawed election, but no evidence that the flaws affected the outcome, the appearance of far-right figures taking over the government were not explained in any real way.  What followed was the violent suppression of protests and suppression of MAS, a cabinet stocked with questionable figures from the fringes.  None of the major US papers really made any effort to cover what was happening once Morales was forced out.  The coverage of protests against the coup was extremely skimpy compared to the coverage of the protests against Morales, though in fact the seemed comparable in size and comparable in popular support.  There is a good account in the LRB by Tony Wood.  The NYT did, I think, a particularly poor job.  The stories relied on quotes and descriptions from anti-Morales exiles in Miami, a tactic that is too worn and too encumbered by a miserable past of apologies for right-wing bloodletting.

There are serious questions about the overall direction of MAS in the last years, particularly an over-reliance on extraction for economic development.  But the improved economic and social circumstances of the great portion of the Bolivian people is tough to overcome.  Particularly, I think, given the way the same papers are indulgent toward Xi. 

There are promised elections to come early in the next year.  It remains to be seen if the elections will be anything like fair, or if they will instead be subject to violence and intimidation aimed at MAS. 

Still Nothing

Recall the 2016 election campaigns?  Recall the leaks from the NY FBI office about the investigation of Secretary Clinton's private server and email practices?  Recall that the FBI Office of the Inspector General was investigating those leaks?  Wondering when we will get a report about those activities, where the leaks came from, whether laws or regulations were violated in the leaking?  No need.  The investigation by Inspector General Horowitz is still going on. One might see this as an IG failing to avoid politics, one might see it as the usual inability of police agencies to properly investigate internal mischief or misconduct, one might see it as the IG wanting to stay employed.  It should not take 4 or 5 years to complete this investigation. 

We already have, a few years now, the results of the investigation into Clinton's handling of email and her private server.  No crimes involved.  And certainly bad judgment and bad advice.  (One aspect that has always bothered me is the absence of a serious response to destruction of emails, private or not.  No one got so much as a day's pay docked for that.) 

The failure of the FBI to police itself to any reasonable degree is part of a more general problem of failures of supervision of police and prosecutors.  

1619

The NYT is running a series of essays connected with the the broad history of slavery and racism in the US.  (Slavery here and in all the articles I have read so far is black slavery.  Nothing about the enslavement of Indians or of Mexicans.  That is understandable and is legitimate  The latter are less significant because involving far fewer numbers and not sinking as deeply into the social structures.)  All of the essays so fr have been interesting.  They are all well-written, and well-illustrated.  It is best to keep in mind they are magazine pieces, pieces for the NYT Magazine.  It is an important point.  NYT Magazine pieces are really forms of entertainment.  They are not scholarship, and they are not usually efforts to write accurate popularizations of science or history.  I dwell on this point for a reason.  I have read three of the essays and the introduction, and expect to read the rest shortly.  They all share a common feature -- they are quite misleading and inaccurate, and also interesting and potentially informative.  Democracy did not start in the US with the Civil Rights Movement.  The Movement certainly broadened the US democracy, enlivened it and improved it, projects still underway.  But women voting involved more people, by percentage if not numbers.  The disappearance of property limits on voting rights was pretty important.  As a democracy, the labor rise of the late 19 and 20th centuries had a large impact.  So the essay overstates its case, or at least states it in a way that is not really accurate.  I am not sure that is a bad thing.  The overall series seems aimed at being a kind of tonic for what the editors think is a giant and pernicious gap in the knowledge or awareness of the nation, or the White portion anyway.  Or, perhaps it is just intended as a kind of mirroring of the way the history of the country is seen by some significant portion of Whites.  Consider the essay on the history of slavery, which has a title "A Brief History of Slavery That You Didn't Learn in School" (the essay is here).  Nice title.  It is true that I did not know all of the names and individual stories included in the essay.  But it is not materially different from the history of slavery I learned in high school.  The two are pretty close, virtually identical on all the key points.  I suppose I went to unusual high schools -- both were public schools in pretty solidly middle class places.  The colonial conquest of West Africa, exploitation of resources, extraction of human beings as slaves, the ongoing resistance and rebellion of slaves in the US, the role of slavery in the economic and political power of the South, the fundamental contractions of the political order and political rhetoric, was all there.  I get that it is just a title, designed to lure one into reading.  That is fine, indeed the right way to title the essays.  Of course, the level of historical knowledge in the US is quite low, and so I would expect the piece will be quite new for many people.  The factual defects in the article on slavery and capitalism has been discussed elsewhere. Lubet's critique is much more focused on inaccuracy and ideology, and valid.  As some of the comments on the essay on medicine point out, it is error to think that ethnicity and the rough classifications of race are irrelevant to medical treatment.  There are different rates of kinds of cancer and different risks that go with different ethnicities. And some of the listed myths are not even myths because no one in medical school is taught anything of the sort.  On the other hand, there are differences in pain treatment and other health outcomes and diagnoses that look to be the result of racist thinking.  I don't think that makes the essay a failure.  I think that one should also think about what the overall aims are for the set of essays.  But maybe I have too low a standard for magazine articles.    

Zombie Justice

Assuming postmortem interests, I think there may be questions of postmortem justice.  Recognition and memorials are a resource or good that seem open to or subject to distribution.  Decisions are made about who gets memorials and that looks like something that has some element of justice to it.  If we are choosing, then are we responding to claims of desert?  Is it just whim?  Aesthetics?  Interests are being met and some are not, so that choice, even if structural, would implicate the views of justice in distribution.  So we have duties of justice towards the dead.  That should not be stranger than duties to future generations.  At least the dead are more or less specific; at least they were in fact persons, actual, and not still possible people. 

Do the dead have an interest in their remains, or in where their remains remain?  If I had a better sense of what would ground a postmortem interest I might venture a guess.  But this is new to me, and as is obvious, a bit puzzling.  On the other hand, is it so hard to swallow if future people have interests (now, not then)? 

 

Do the Dead Deserve?

I read some work by an acquaintance on memorials based on the thought that the dead have an interest in memorials, so we create memorials for the dead and not for us (or maybe it is a kind of ordering).  I found the papers very interesting, but I had difficulty getting around my strong predisposition to think that the dead can have no interests.  Their interests go with them, i.e., no person no interests.  I know that plenty of people have different beliefs on the subject, that the dead continue to have interests postmortem, a morto can be made better or worse off in virtue of furthering or realizing some interests.  So when child achieves great something after the death of parent, parent is better off than otherwise.  We have interests (while living) that extend beyond our own lives, interests int he welfare of relatives, of projects, and so on.  Those interests persist while we do not.  Assume so for a moment (which I find difficult).  Would that be enough to explain memorials or be enough to warrant any particular conduct by those not yet dead?  Some thoughts that suggest there is more to be done on the idea.  If interests persist, don't more or less all people have the same kinds of postmortem interests?  Or anyway a very large portion of human beings.  For example, an interest in being remembered, in having some evidence of their past presence.  Yet hardly anyone does have such memorial -- virtually everyone is obliterated by time.  Of the millions who lived within the scope of Rome's republic and then empire, how many have any memorial?  What a small number.  And then all the many millions utterly lost by the genocides in the Americas.  And so on.  No one seems interested in memorials to the unknown dead of medieval Taormina.  Memorials to the unknown dead do exist -- the unknown soldier memorials, and proposed memorials to the victims of totalitarianisms.  So the creation of memorials -- anyway public memorials -- seems to require something more than the interests of the dead to sort out what memorials are made.  I think that is an important issue for the project.  I wonder if the dead do any real work at all in the explanation.  There are other interesting implications from according the dead interests: how to describe the better and worse states, do they have interests in accurate memories of their lives when that would undermine or destroy some other postmortem interests.  When do the dead deserve to be forgotten? 

The Very Long Term

Not often a book review shocks.

From the June 24 issue of a Peter Thoneman review in the TLS:

Perhaps the most impressive chapter in Imperialism, Power, and Identity (and one which ought to be read anyone with even a passing interest in the Roman world) is an extended study of the ROman copper mines in the Jordanian desert north of Petra.  This was one of the larges mining and smelting operations in the Roman world, infamous for the horrific treatment of Christians condemned to hard labour.  The smelting process demanded huge quantities of charcoal, and the vast human and animal workforce needed food and fodder.  As a result, the surrounding landscape was farmed and grazed far beyond its normal carrying capacity, resulting in the permanent  desertification of the region.  Simultaneously, the smelting process generated such intense heavy-metal pollution that the landscape is still today dangerously toxic, with alarming consequences for the local Bedouin population.

Yikes,  Cf. Chernobyl.