Category: Justice
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Aamir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate
Satyamev Jayate (“Truth Alone Prevails”) is a brand new but long overdue talk show on Indian TV. Produced, “conceived and created” by Aamir Khan, a rare Bollywood star with a social conscience, it takes a refreshingly candid, data-packed, and emotionally powerful look at a range of social ills that plague Indian society. The first five episodes took on female foeticide, child sexual abuse, dowry, medical malpractice, and honor killings. The format mixes interviews with victims, prevalence estimates, cost to society, expert testimony, and potential solutions. I haven’t seen them all but the one below on female foeticide impressed me greatly (Hindi only). Looks like it’s also ruffling more than a few feathers. I hope it’ll spark more discussion and commentary. All weekly episodes can be found on the show’s YouTube channel.
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What Isn’t For Sale?
Philosopher and Harvard professor Michael Sandel, who I admire and have blogged about before, has a nice article on the limits of markets in which he explores the “price we pay for living in a society where everything is up for sale.”
This is a debate we didn’t have during the era of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it—without ever deciding to do so—we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
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The Caging of America
The rate of incarceration in the U.S. is the highest in the world. The number of prisoners has more than tripled to over 0.7 percent of Americans (2.4 million) in the last 30 years, including over 50,000 in solitary confinement. The “money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.” At the same time, crime in America has fallen sharply during the same period. Are the two related? What sort of ideas inform criminal justice in America? Is the privatizing of prisons the right solution? Adam Gopnik offers some excellent food for thought.
For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States …The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Katherine Boo, a journalist known for her perceptive writing about the poor and the voiceless, has just published a book about the people of the Annawadi slum in Mumbai. It is getting some really great reviews. Here is an excerpt from one by Thrity Umrigar:
And yet, despite such instances of human decency, the residents of Annawadi are not the saintly, noble poor of much fiction. There are no Tiny Tims or Tom Joads here. They cannot afford to be. Living on subsistence wages, beside sewer lakes and mud-cased pigs and goats, standing in line for hours for a trickle of water, facing the daily threat of the imminent razing of the illegal slum, battling their own superstitions and flaws, killing themselves to pay for a substandard education for their children doesn’t leave much time for human kindness.This is not poverty porn. Rather, it is an unflinching, unsentimental portrait of the city’s poor – mean, envious, striving. There is no apotheosis in poverty, Boo reminds us. There is only humiliation and a kind of bewilderment.
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Simon Leys on Liu Xiaobo
In the NYRB, Simon Leys reviews No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems by Liu Xiaobo.
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 brought the name of Liu Xiaobo to the attention of the entire world. Yet well before that, he had already achieved considerable fame within China, as a fearless and clearsighted public intellectual and the author of some seventeen books, including collections of poetry and literary criticism as well as political essays. The Communist authorities unwittingly vouched for the uncompromising accuracy of his comments. They kept arresting him for his views—four times since the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989. Now he is again in jail, since December 2008; though in poor health, he is subjected to an especially severe regime. As Pascal said, “Trust witnesses willing to sacrifice their lives,” and this particular witness happens to be exceptionally well qualified in other ways as well, both by the depth of his information and experience, and by his qualities of intelligence and moral fortitude. … At the Oslo ceremony, an empty chair was substituted for the absent laureate. Within hours, the words “empty chair” were banned from the Internet in China—wherever they occurred, the entire machinery of censorship was automatically set in motion.
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Addendum to My Gita Essay
For many motivated readers, a favorite strategy for deflecting criticism of Krishna’s dubious advice to Arjuna is to argue that, based on the events in the Mahabharata, the justification for the war is absolutely clear (in comments, one person saw it on par with the Allied case against Hitler!). I responded to this point in part 2 of my essay (Part 1, Part 2) but it’s worth drawing attention to it again:Some defend the Gita by saying that the Kauravas’ bad behavior made the war unavoidable and eminently justified. Perhaps, but that’s not the point. The point is about the quality of the arguments Krishna uses to persuade Arjuna to fight. If the best moral justifications for the war purportedly exist outside the Gita, and some of the worst inside it, what have we left? Given all the bad faith reasoning and the starkly instrumental view of human life in the Gita, which many saw through even in ancient times, what makes the Gita a work of wisdom? Why not get the Gita off its exalted pedestal in our minds and let it be an uncelebrated episode in the Mahabharata—an artful plot element in an epic work of literature?
However, the case for “just war” is not at all clear in the Mahabharata. It’s debatable—and not black and white—which is exactly what makes the Mahabharata great. For starters, the standard rules of succession were inadequate for the situation at hand: Dhritarashtra is blind, so his younger brother, Pandu, is made the king. But then Pandu lands a curse and retreats to the forest with his two wives, leaving Dhritarashtra to rule instead. Yudhisthira is the oldest son in the family but he and the other four Pandavas are not really fathered by Pandu (due to his curse), rather Pandu’s two wives find some “divine” lovers in the forest (!), raising questions about the royal Kuru lineage of the Pandavas. Nor did Pandu rule anytime during Yudhisthira’s life. So as the first son of the long reigning and elder brother Dhritarashtra—who in his heart wants his son to be the king—doesn’t Duryodhana, a warrior as skilled as any and an able administrator, have a claim to succession as well? I mean a reasonable case can be made, right?
Category: Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, Fiction & Poetry, Justice, Philosophy, Politics, Religion -
The Bhagavad Gita Revisited – Part 2
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core. This is part two of a two-part critique (Part 1 is the appetizer with the Gita’s historical and literary context. This is the main course with the textual critique).
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The Bhagavad Gita, less than one percent of the sprawling Mahabharata, contains 700 verses in 18 chapters. It opens with Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield, right before the start of the Great War. Turning to his friend and charioteer, Arjuna cries out,Category: Books & Authors, Culture, Fiction & Poetry, History, Justice, Philosophy, Politics, Religion -
Graeber on the Origins of Money
David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, explains how money came about in human societies and how different the facts are from conventional accounts of it in economic textbooks (that money arose as the natural next stage of the barter system).
Let me begin by filling in some background on the current state of scholarly debate on this question, explain my own position, and show what an actual debate might have been like. First, the history:1) Adam Smith first proposed in ‘The Wealth of Nations’ that as soon as a division of labor appeared in human society, some specializing in hunting, for instance, others making arrowheads, people would begin swapping goods with one another (6 arrowheads for a beaver pelt, for instance.) This habit, though, would logically lead to a problem economists have since dubbed the ‘double coincidence of wants’ problem—for exchange to be possible, both sides have to have something the other is willing to accept in trade. This was assumed to eventually lead to the people stockpiling items deemed likely to be generally desirable, which would thus become ever more desirable for that reason, and eventually, become money. Barter thus gave birth to money, and money, eventually, to credit.
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On Change in India
An excerpt from Siddhartha Deb’s portrait of contemporary India, The Beautiful and the Damned.
The highway out of Hyderabad towards Kothur village was still being worked on, with new overpasses and exits being constructed next to the lanes that were open to traffic. Vijay and I were halfway to our destination when we saw the man appear, standing in the middle of the road and waving us down. We were traveling fast, moving much too quickly to understand immediately what the man’s appearance meant. A few days earlier, on this same road, we had been stopped by two police constables. Assigned to guard duty at another point on the highway and left to fend for their own transportation, all the men had wanted was a lift. But the figure in front of us now was not in uniform, and his objective was far less clear, although I had the impression that he was part of the knotted confusion of people and cars that had sprung up suddenly on the smooth thread of the highway. Vijay brought his tiny car to a halt, and the man loomed up in front of the windscreen, a dark, stocky figure dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. He put his right hand down on the bonnet of our car. In his left hand, he held an automatic pistol, its barrel pointing up at an acute angle.
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Sørensen on World Order
An insightful talk by Georg Sørensen on the world order today, where he considers four dimensions: (a) war and peace, (b) global economy, (c) institutions and governance, and (d) global environment. Sørensen is distinguished professor of international politics and economics in Denmark and has written fifteen books “on international relations and development issues. His research areas include society and politics, international community, democracy and development, prospects for a liberal world order, transformations of the state and its effects on international relations.” If you like this, check out another recent talk by him on Democracy and Democratization.
In his new book, A Liberal World Order in Crisis, Sørensen quotes me in his final chapter (from my essay, Being Liberal in a Plural World).
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Growth is Not Development
Here is a great article by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen on growth vs. development—how the two can feed each other but not in any automatic way, not without the right planning and investment—and why India, despite good economic growth has fared abysmally on human development when compared to other similar nations, especially in South Asia. Must read.
Is India doing marvellously well, or is it failing terribly? Depending on whom you speak to, you could pick up either of those answers with some frequency. One story, very popular among a minority but a large enough group—of Indians who are doing very well (and among the media that cater largely to them)—runs something like this. “After decades of mediocrity and stagnation under ‘Nehruvian socialism’, the Indian economy achieved a spectacular take-off during the last two decades. This take-off, which led to unprecedented improvements in income per head, was driven largely by market initiatives. It involves a significant increase in inequality, but this is a common phenomenon in periods of rapid growth. With enough time, the benefits of fast economic growth will surely reach even the poorest people, and we are firmly on the way to that.” Despite the conceptual confusion involved in bestowing the term ‘socialism’ to a collectivity of grossly statist policies of ‘Licence raj’ and neglect of the state’s responsibilities for school education and healthcare, the story just told has much plausibility, within its confined domain.But looking at contemporary India from another angle, one could equally tell the following—more critical and more censorious—story: “The progress of living standards for common people, as opposed to a favoured minority, has been dreadfully slow—so slow that India’s social indicators are still abysmal.” For instance, according to World Bank data, only five countries outside Africa (Afghanistan, Bhutan, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Yemen) have a lower “youth female literacy rate” than India (World Development Indicators 2011, online). To take some other examples, only four countries (Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Myanmar and Pakistan) do worse than India in child mortality rate; only three have lower levels of “access to improved sanitation” (Bolivia, Cambodia and Haiti); and none (anywhere—not even in Africa) have a higher proportion of underweight children. Almost any composite index of these and related indicators of health, education and nutrition would place India very close to the bottom in a ranking of all countries outside Africa.
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Satz on the Limits of Markets
I attended a lecture yesterday by Debra Satz, Stanford Professor of Ethics in Society. It was titled “Why Shouldn’t Everything be for Sale?” Satz began by acknowledging that free markets, in general, promote greater efficiency and freedom of exchange than other systems. But markets do a lot more, and there is considerable debate over what limits should exist on markets and their intrusion into certain areas of life. Even many diehard libertarians have qualms about letting the market dictate some transactions, such as those involving child labor, organ trade, surrogate motherhood, life saving medicines, weapons trade, narcotic drugs, or exporting toxic waste to poor nations.
Why do people have these qualms? What moral intuitions might be behind our discomfort in letting the market govern such exchanges? And how might we devise social policy for such markets, knowing that prohibition at times can produce pathological side effects (e.g., banning child labor can increase child prostitution)? In her most recent book, Why some things should not be for sale, Satz tackles such questions. In her lecture, she presented four parameters that can make certain market-based transactions deeply problematic to us:
(a) The weak agency of a party, for instance, due to a significant lack of autonomy or knowledge (e.g., child labor, subprime lending, and organ trade; Satz cited a survey in which 75 percent of the kidney donors in Tamil Nadu—in the so-called “kidney belt”—did not even know how many kidneys they had left).
(b) The vulnerability and inequality of a party (e.g., prostitution, surrogacy, and organ trade).
(c) The likelihood of extreme individual harm to a party (e.g., surrogacy, drugs, and weapons trade).
(d) The likelihood of extreme societal harm (e.g., child labor and weapons trade). -
India’s Silent War
From Imran Garda of Al Jazeera comes this rare, insightful, and truly heartrending report on the plight of the Adivasis. “A 40-year long civil war has been raging in the jungles of central and eastern India. It is one of the world’s largest armed conflicts but it remains largely ignored outside of India. Caught in the crossfire of it are the Adivasis, who are believed to be India’s earliest inhabitants. A loose collection of tribes … about 84 million of these indigenous people, which is about eight per cent of the country’s population. … The uprising by Maoist fighters and its brutal suppression by the Indian government, has claimed more than 10,000 lives since 1980, and displaced 12 million people.” But numbers do not reveal the larger tragedy, stories like this do, which we hardly ever find in the Indian media. (Via Usha.)
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Miss Representation
Go see the very well put together documentary film, Miss Representation, which explores “the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls.” While not in theaters (yet?), click on the movie website to locate a screening near you (trailer below).
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Alan Wolfe on Political Evil
Michael Ignatieff reviews Alan Wolfe’s Political Evil: What it is and how to combat it.
Evil is a moral problem for everyone, difficult to acknowledge in ourselves, hard to understand in others, and difficult to defeat without committing lesser evils. Liberals—I count myself as one—have a special problem with evil, connected to our particular form of self-regard. Liberals like to believe we are tolerant, but evil, by definition, cannot be tolerated. We believe that politics ought to be deliberative, but we can’t deliberate with evil. We think compromise can be honorable, but there are no honorable compromises with evil. We think politics ought to be governed by reason, but evildoers, while they may reason, are not reasonable. Alan Wolfe, a distinguished and prolific professor of political science at Boston College, and author of more than 20 books, including The Future of Liberalism, has written a dispassionate guide to these quandaries in Political Evil. He distinguishes between evil in general and political evil in particular, and argues that we should think politically about evil because the evil that we can actually do something about is a form of politics and can be defeated only if understood as such.
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Herodotus, the Iliad, and 9/11
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
Homer’s Iliad is the story of an epic war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The apparent cause of the war was the ‘abduction’ of Helen by Paris—Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta; Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy. Menelaus, his pride wounded, called on other Greek kings bound to him by an oath. Joining forces, they set sail and laid siege to the coastal city of Troy in Asia Minor. Mostly an account of the last days of the war, the Iliad teems with intrigue, character, and incident.Herodotus, the 5th century BCE historian regarded as the father of history, lived more than three hundred years after the Iliad was written. He is justly famous for preferring rational—rather than mythical and supernatural—explanations for human events; to understand his past he looked to the actions, character, and motivations of men. Among the more charming passages of Histories is his take on the Trojan War. In his day and age, the Iliad was considered a true account of Greek ancestry and it was obligatory for every Greek schoolboy to read it. Cultivated Greek gents were expected to recite colorful stretches from it.
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Should You Kill the Fat Man?
Are you familiar with the famous “trolley problem” in ethics? If you’re not (and even if you are), start with this introductory exercise. This thought experiment is a great way of spending a few minutes to probe some of your fundamental moral intuitions. Don’t worry, there aren’t any right or wrong answers here.Assuming you are now familiar with the “trolley problem”, read this discussion on it by Terrance Tomkow and his take on why most people consider it OK to pull the lever that kills one (rather than letting five people die) but do not consider it OK to push the fat man onto the tracks to achieve the same goal. Read Tomkow’s progressively complex scenarios and see if you find his explanation plausible.
Finally, in Philosophy Now, read Phil Badger’s engaging piece on the topic, and his own attempt at finding “a plausible account of morality which takes into consideration both the sense that we have to weigh the consequences of our actions and also the sense that, nonetheless, there are moments when consequences are secondary to higher principles”.
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On Equality vs. Growth
What should a country emphasize more: a more equitable income distribution or macroeconomic growth? Most people tend to assume that the two are opposed to each other. Research however reveals a very different picture. Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry explain why.
In his influential 1975 book Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, Arthur Okun argued that pursuing equality can reduce efficiency (the total output produced with given resources). The late Yale University and Brookings Institution economist said that not only can more equal distribution of incomes reduce incentives to work and invest, but the efforts to redistribute—through such mechanisms as the tax code and minimum wages—can themselves be costly. Okun likened these mechanisms to a “leaky bucket.” Some of the resources transferred from rich to poor “will simply disappear in transit, so the poor will not receive all the money that is taken from the rich”—the result of administrative costs and disincentives to work for both those who pay taxes and those who receive transfers.Do societies inevitably face an invidious choice between efficient production and equitable wealth and income distribution? Are social justice and social product at war with one another?
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How Terrorists Are Made
Anthropologist Scott Atran, compelling as usual, talks to Robert Wright about what creates terrorists, the subject matter of his book a year ago, Talking to the Enemy (via 3QD). Additionally, here is an audio interview (click on Listen near the top), and another video interview.
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9/11 and the Cycle of Revenge
Last week a flood of articles commemorated the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Not surprisingly, I was nauseated by all the self-love and self-absorption on display—including among American liberals, most of whom seem to me Americans first before they are liberals. I have just found a viewpoint that’s close to my own take on 9/11 and its aftermath. It is by Simon Critchley. I only wish he had developed it further!
I’ve never understood the proverbial wisdom that revenge is a dish best served cold. Some seem to like it hot. Better is the Chinese proverb, attributed to Confucius, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Osama bin Laden’s grave was watery, but the other still appears empty. Is it intended for us?Revenge is the desire to repay an injury or a wrong by inflicting harm, often the violent sort. If you hit me, I will hit you back. Furthermore, by the logic of revenge, I am right to hit you back. The initial wrong justifies the act of revenge. But does that wrong really make it right for me to hit back? Once we act out of revenge, don’t we become mired in a cycle of violence and counterviolence with no apparent end? Such is arguably our current predicament.
