Duncan Kennedy, Peter Gabel and Critical Legal Studies.

Tous les livres en anglais de Juan Galis-Menendez http://www.amazon.fr./exec/obidos/ASIN/141160413X/qid=1148694498/sr=1-19/ref=sr_1_0_19/171-539... (I hoped to write that someday.) 

Accompanying this essay is a photo of Peter Gabel and Duncan Kennedy (Kennedy is the guy in the helmet), shortly after they were ejected from a recent American Bar Association (ABA) forum entitled, "Preserving Decorum in Law." The images in this blog are always under attack, as are all of my writings. The picture meant to accompany this essay may be blocked at any time.

I am one of those people who continues to find law -- both doctrine and theory -- intellectually fascinating. Although I regard much of it as fiction, like the various strategies in chess playing. I read more jurisprudence and Constitutional theory now than I ever did as a law student or practitioner. I am now an impoverished writer and (for a small fee) a lecturer. I also do weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. I will speak for forty minutes on corruption in New Jersey at the drop of a fee.

The United States is not in a "revolutionary situation," to put it in Marxist terms, and the American "problematic" is so unique and complex that it would take volumes even to clarify the issues for non-Americans or for interested people in the U.S. who lack some formal legal education. The "action" in American political discourse and the only real possibilities for meaningful ideological or transformative theoretical discourse is in legal settings. (See Professor Kennedy's famous talk at the Gramsci Institute.)

America's public intellectual life (is there such a thing?), meaning the only place to get into fundamental political or philosophical controversies that are defining of the society, is found in the legal world and, maybe, in academia. American academics are mostly irrelevant to practical politics. Paradoxically, it is that legal world which now deflates and sanitizes all such conversations by reducing them to familiar juridical controversies. Perhaps all of American academia is pretty irrelevant to the workings of real power in the society.

Law school is a kind of intellectual Disneyworld. Legal academia is fifty or a hundred years behind in debates on substantive philosophical or political issues now being played out on the world stage. Someone like, say, "Antonio Negri" will be unknown to the average law professor or attorney. Legal culture is narrow and insular, an accessory to the bar and judiciary. Mostly, legal scholars follow and do not lead.

Kennedy and Gabel are two brilliant guys. They're law professors, who are deeply political and wise about the struggle for social justice and need for reform, but also (in a European way) philosophically and theoretically adept, while being engaged, publicly, in the eternal effort to "comprehend our time in thought." (Hegel)

Kennedy is a combination of Foucault and John Cleese; while Gabel is Thomas Merton or Martin Buber and Paul Ricoeur, all rolled into one. Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a genius law professor and philosopher, who merits separate treatment. Others in the movement include Mark Tushnet, Robert M. Gordon, Mark Kelman, Elizabeth Mensch, and many more. I am probably forgetting many "Crits," who will be pissed off because of this and refuse to communicate with me. Morton ("Mort the Tort") Horowitz is must reading on the "transformations" of American law. Drucilla Cornell is also in a separate category, again, as a major political and legal philosopher. I read a lot of Richard Delgado's work years ago. I am not sure whether Delgado is best classified as a "Crit" or more into Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is a dark-skinned cousin of the movement.

I wrote Tushnet a letter once saying I wanted to "join" CLS. He said, basically, "O.K." There are no dues and you don't get a merit badge or anything. You're just kind of in it. I have no idea whether I have now been kicked out. Actually, I don't think that's possible. CLS is like the Mafia: once you're in it, it's forever. Scholars in the movement, to paraphrase Woody Allen, are "like pigeons or Catholics, they marry for life." No matter how much trouble you're in it can only be a plus in CLS. It cannot be confirmed whether CLS people have been transported to Guantanamo, Cuba. If this happens, however, many of them will be quite pleased with the outcome.

I would not be surprised by either an assassination attempt or a frame-up of some kind as a response to some of my comments from the boys in Jersey -- if they are still acting in character, that is -- since these are the typical responses from such people to the kind of criticisms that I have published here. I am serious about this. Yet I am not planning to change what I write. As they used to say in the sixties, "power to the people." By the way, there's a lot more coming.

I cannot even begin to do justice to Gabel's and Kennedy's thoughts within the constraints of a short Internet essay. I will limit myself here to saying something about what CLS is (or was?) -- it will always be present tense for me! -- and to mentioning some of the people you should read as a law or graduate student with a transformative political vocation. If you are serious about revolutionary legal work, there may be a price to pay. You are always much better off going to work for a corporate firm and making lots of money, except that the psychological cost of such a trade off may be even more lethal.

A friend in Italy used to say: "He who has bread has no teeth, but he who has teeth, has no bread." I have opted for teeth in middle age and no bread -- in every sense. (See "Is New Jersey Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz unethical or only incompetent?" Sadly, the answer to that question, from my perspective, is probably "a little of both.")

CLS is an attempt to theorize our moment and predicament in American law, with an eye to reform and transformation in our thinking about what law is or how to go about doing law. The word "Critical" comes from the tradition of Continental Critical theory, which is Kantian (Kant's philosophy is called "Critical" theory because it begins with an effort to be clear about the contributions of the human mind to the world it seeks to understand).

CLS is also Hegelian-Marxist, looking to uncover "false consciousness," suspicious of power's omnipresence by way of ideology (Foucault, Gramsci), with a social meliorative vocation (Brandeis, Brennan, Marshall), borrowing from American Legal Realism (Holmes, Cardozo) and social sciences, also fancy literary theory (Derrida, Fish), and philosophy (Rorty, Putnam, West).

I will not provide a list of reading materials. If you really want to get into this legal theory, it helps to have a solid grounding in politics and philosophy. Many lawyers and judges -- including quite a few products of elite schools -- simply lack the education to understand this scholarship and lots of other things too. The fact that weird persons, like me, are sometimes a lot better read on these subjects (and sometimes even know more law) is an unforgivable offense and a further source for the establishment's hostility towards me. I like that. ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "New Jersey's Political and Judicial Whores" then "New Jersey's Legal System is a Whore House.")

Law schools and the legal world create and preserve a kind of ideology that limits the style of arguments that can be made or that will be taken seriously in courtrooms, especially in appellate courts. One result of this ideology is to limit the terms of controversies to the confines of "safe" legal doctrine. This is accomplished through the use of a bundle of rhetorical devices amenable to all sorts of purposes, so as to water down dissent and limit rebellion by way of soothing compromises that always preserve the status quo. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

The insistence on "decorum" and "respect" for tribunals, for example, is politically pacifying, conservative, deflationary. When going to court "dress for a rich man's funeral." When I was told this by an older lawyer, he never explained that the funeral was my own. Now I may wear a nice suit, Brooks Brothers tie, English shirt and black Converse high top sneakers, while sporting an earring, to a fancy lecture. None of this precludes me from being polite, when politeness is called for, or (when appropriate) being just the opposite of polite. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?")

There is a cost in freedom that comes with a legal life. This is one of those aspects of the law school "deal" that are not mentioned, along with the political reasons for this grim reality. You must become a certain sort of safe person, a "docile subject," to be a successful lawyer in America. This has political significance. It also carries a psychological price tag. Make sure that you can afford to pay that price before you embark on such a life. Do you really want to wear those golden handcuffs? Some do; some think they do; and some know pretty quickly that they won't put up with such a life. ("Neil M. Cohen, Esq. and Conduct Unbecoming to the Legislature in New Jersey" and "Is Paul M. Bergrin, Esq. an Ethical New Jersey Lawyer?" as well as "Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?")

Almost always these soothing compromises favor the powerful. But there are times when the system can be confronted with its own professed values and principles against the realities of violations of those principles and rules, so as to be shamed into doing the right thing. At least, I hope so. This is what I am trying to do, which may explain all of the harassments and obstructions directed at this blog or me. I support both the ACLU and National Lawyer's Guild. What is disturbing to New Jersey in this situation is being shown incontrovertible proof of the lie that is the Garden State's legal system. ("New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" and "New Jersey's Child Sex Industry.")

You can quote rhetoric or dicta from judicial opinions about due process of law and avoidance of torture as "cruel and unusual punishment," then ask an appellate court in New Jersey to explain secret tortures and cover-ups, unofficial decision-making, graft, corruption or logical non-sequiturs in light of that rhetoric. I do not believe that there is such a thing as "therapeutic" theft and rape. I cannot accept that imbecility adds to the gravitas and bearing of a judge. Strangely enough, I object to being raped and stolen from by frauds who label me "unethical." ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "John McGill, Esq., the OAE, and N.J.'s Corruption.")

The naive hope is that one or two judges will have a modicum of intellectual honesty or integrity left, so as to admit that "mistakes were made." True, it is a small hope. All we "little people" have is such small hopes. They keep us going. The reason they keep us going is that we also have one another. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" and "Richard Posner on Voluntary Action and Criminal Responsibility.")

For me, the anger that bubbles over and explodes in acts of violence or destruction (while understandable) is never the answer. It means that you have become what you despise. Judges and other legal functionaries are often unaware of the non-violent violence they do to people's lives through their imbecilities, notably in adopting behaviorist forms of torture-therapy as make-believe solutions to family legal issues and troubles. In fact, family court is often about getting files off judges' desks and getting rid of things and people, which is what really happens in too many courtrooms. "Hey, look at me! I disposed of more cases than any other judge today!"

"In my ... years of experience in the practice of law," Alan Dershowitz writes, "I have been more disappointed by judges than by any other participants in the criminal justice system." I concur. ("Steven J. Schaeffer and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Maurice J. Gallipoli and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" as well as "New Jersey Superior Court Judge is a Child Molester.")

Mediocrity -- or even outright stupidity -- on the part of judges is lethal to any chance for justice in an American courtroom. (N.J.'s all-time moronic judge, Ms. Tolentino, is a case in point.)

With the politicizing of the bench in recent years, the judiciary in many states is saturated with political bag men and male/female "whores" of the power structure. If a lawyer were to say this in a courtroom -- however true it may be -- he or she might be sanctioned for a lack of decorum or breaching "ethics" rules that forbid "unseemly" criticisms of courts. Also forbidden are seemly criticisms of unseemly courts.

Yes, there are also exceptions. There are many fine judges scattered throughout the system. The people who would sanction and silence such an outspoken attorney, by the way, are the same persons entrusted with defending the First Amendment that guarantees absolute freedom of political expression. Go figure. For New Jersey judges and political whores to speak to me of "ethics" borders on the surreal. ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!" then "New Jersey's Politically Connected Lawyers on the Tit.")

I think it is "unseemly" that racial minorities are ten times more likely to be convicted of offenses on the basis of the sort of evidence that will result in acquittals for white persons charged with the same offenses. It is unseemly that minorities will receive more harsh sentences if (or when) they are convicted. I think it is also unseemly that New Jersey's agents of legal ethics enforcement are among the least ethical attorneys around, but get away with what they do through intimidation or corruption. I wonder why so many OAE lawyers have so much cash in their pockets? ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics.")

I think that it is obscene that we have a death penalty, but even more obscene that it is applied overwhelmingly to minority group members, especially African-Americans. See http://www.freemumia.com/ I urge you to read Justices Brennan and Marshall on the un-Constitutionality of death as punishment, in the now rejected decision in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). (I always capitalize when referring to the U.S. Constitution.)

Incidentally, I could not care less about the latest "Blue Book" rules. When I attended law school, the Blue Book citator was a small "fit-in-your pocket" item. Now it looks like the King James Bible. DSM VIII?

A minority person on the bench -- whose primary function is to legitimate oppression -- may know all of this, at some level, but he or she will never say it. Right, Jose? We won't discuss how you guys became judges. American legal debates constitute a hall of mirrors where what is said is a symbol-structure or patois that only points to what everyone knows is really going on, yet cannot be said publicly. ("Anthony Suarez Goes On Trial.")

Meanwhile, we have the greatest Constitution in the world and a body of case law interpreting it, sitting in books on the shelves that are systematically ignored by (secret?) courts choosing to look the other way when faced with glaring violations of law and, thus, complicit in hideous human rights violations, perhaps in exchange for a little sex on the side. Right, Ms. Poritz? What will it take for Paula Dow to send me that letter? Need a stamp, Paula?

I am not surprised that much of the rest of the world is wondering what happened to the American legal system. Me too. It was here one minute, gone the next. This may be an excellent moment to insert more "errors" in this text or for N.J.'s "walking turds" (OAE) to engage in further protected cybercrime. That foul stench on the Turnpike is the aroma that hovers over Trenton's government lawyers. ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Another Mafia Sweep in New Jersey and Anne Milgram, Esq. is Clueless.")

Anne, we know you're a dyke and want to protect your "gal-pals," but some of them will have to go prison if they continue to commit crimes -- like rape and theft. (Again: "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "Jennifer Velez is a 'Dyke Magnet!'" and "Marilyn Straus Was Right!")

Among the great theoretical insights from CLS is an appreciation of the complexity and ambiguity found in "paradoxes" (First Amendment versus legal ethics?) woven into the very fabric of our jurisprudence -- paradoxes hindering our quest for a just social order, together with efforts to "open up" legality to the values and spiritual claims essential to doctrinal and interpretive construction in the discourse of postmodernist American law. To paraphrase Duncan Kennedy, "we find ourselves implicated in the very evils that we wish to see transformed." (Again: "Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics" and "Mafia Influence in New Jersey Courts and Politics.")

As an example and small taste of the "diagnostic" aspect of CLS work, I will quote Professor Kennedy's statement of the "fundamental contradiction" or paradox of sociability; as a taste of the "aspirational" or "therapeutic" component of the CLS stance, I will mention Peter Gabel's "Opening Statement" in his brilliant, highly recommended book, The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning.

What is the "fundamental Contradiction"?

Here is an initial statement of the fundamental contradiction: Most participants in American legal culture believe that the goal of individual freedom is at the same time dependent on and incompatible with the communal coercive action that is necessary to achieve it. Others (family, friends, bureaucrats, cultural figures, the state) are necessary if we are to become persons at all -- they provide us [with] the stuff of our selves and protect us in crucial ways against destruction. Even when we seem to ourselves to be most alone, others are with us, incorporated in us through processes of language, cognition and feeling that are, simply as a matter of biology, collective aspects of our individuality. Moreover, we are not always alone. We sometimes experience fusion with others, in groups of two or even two million, [Sartre's "totalization"] and it is a good rather than a bad experience.   But at the same time that it forms and protects us, the universe of others (family, friendship, bureaucracy, culture, the state) threatens us with annihilation and urges upon us forms of fusion that are quite plainly bad rather than good. A friend can reduce me to misery with a single look. Numerous conformities, large and small abandonments of self to others, are the price of what freedom we experience in society. And the price is a high one. Through our existence as members of collectives, we impose on others and have imposed on us hierarchical structures of power, welfare and access to enlightenment that are illegitimate, whether based on birth into a particular social class or on the accident of genetic endowment.

The kicker is that the abolition of these illegitimate structures, the fashioning of an unalienated collective existence, appears to imply such a massive increase of collective control over our lives that it would defeat its purpose.

That's the predicament that we are in, boys and girls. Now here is where we want to go in order to get out of this predicament so as to "become the persons we are" (Nietzsche), in community:

The politics of meaning insists that people's collective longings for love, caring, meaning, and connection to a spiritual/ethical community larger than the self are as fundamental as the need for food and shelter in the purely physical or economic realm. We wholeheartedly support the struggle for economic justice and security, but we insist that people are fundamentally motivated by more than sheer physical survival, that we are social beings who long to be confirmed [or just to be SEEN and RECOGNIZED as human!] by others and to give to others, to emerge from our painful isolation and fully recognize one another in an experience of relationship that Martin Buber called "I and Thou." In Michael Lerner's formulation, each of us deserves to be recognized as created in the image of God, understood not as a supernatural being but as the ethical force [love] in the universe of which we are each a unique manifestation. And each of us deserves to live in a social world in which fostering the spirit of empathy, affirmation, and compassion that accompanies such a recognition would be the very centerpiece of public life.

Josiah Royce and The Spirit of Modern Philosophy.

I am told that my book is available on the German on-line bookseller's site: http://www.buch.de/buch/06058/725_paul_ricoeur_and_the_hermeneutics_of_freedom.html and http://shopping.msn.com/results/shp/?catid=3027,page=9 Your friends will be impressed if you quote from this thought-provoking work, which (despite my best efforts) has not been banned in Boston.

Like several other essays, this one has been altered by hackers. I will do my best to make corrections. Do not allow such people to discourage you from reading this work.

Josiah Royce is one of the great philosophers of America's "Golden Age" at Harvard. His colleagues included William James and George Santayana, whose dissertation he supervised. To my continuing annoyance, Royce insisted that Santayana write about Lotze, with whom Royce studied in Germany, rather than allowing Santayana to focus on Schopenhauer's aesthetics. Today we might have a book-length treatment of Schopenhauer's theory of art by the young Santayana (something that would be fascinating). By the way, the influence of the great German misanthrope on Santayana can be seen in the latter's first book, The Sense of Beauty. Instead, we have a dissertation by Santayana -- who is a much better philosopher than his forgettable subject -- about the epistemology of Herman Lotze. (See my essay "Arthur Shopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")

Santayana's revenge is his sharp critique of Royce's metaphysics in Character and Opinion in the United States. People don't realize the subtext of Santayana's bitter review of Royce: "This guy made me write 300 pages about Herman Lotze." The old Spanish saying is accurate: "Revenge is a dish best eaten cold."

Royce's philosophy was a form of voluntaristic idealism, solidly based on German nineteenth century thought. Royce was also sympathetic to pragmatism, more as derived from the writings of C.S. Peirce ("I call it pragmaticism!" Peirce reminds us) than from William James.

Royce argued against James all the time. Although James won the historical battle, since his views were more compatible with an emerging commerical power, Royce represents an important aspect of America's philosophical mind -- an idealistic and romantic aspect, which is closer to my heart -- and one which should not be neglected. Royce provides a philosophical articulation of American hopefulness and future-orientation. Incidentally, Peirce's essay "Evolutionary Love" is a masterpiece to be read along with Royce's metaphysics. Royce is America's answer to Britain's F.H. Bradley.

C.S. Peirce is probably the all-time greatest American philosopher, especially for those interested in hermeneutics and semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), a discipline which Peirce kind of invented, so that he is still being quoted not only by tenured faculty at, say, the University of Wisconsin, but also in philosophically "cool places," like Paris (Roland Barthes in the old days) and Bologna (Umberto Eco these days).

Walker Percy has published a lovely essay dealing with Percy's ideas in Message in a Bottle. Peirce was also certifiably insane, probably, and his love-life was so intense that it probably cost him his career at Harvard, together with all social respectability. I don't know if I can relate to that. One must never be so romantically foolish as to sacrifice professional success for a woman, which is something I would never do. Or would I? Maybe that much and more is due to those we love. ("That's so insensitive to women's issues!")

We forget that there was a time when idealism flourished in this land of the "bottom line" and "practicality." Peirce was not an idealist, but he had a mystical streak, as do most good philosophers. Science worshippers can relax, Peirce was also highly scientific and rigorous. There is a wonderful school of philosophical idealism associated, mysteriously, with the city of St. Louis. It must have been before they had baseball. Heidegger's comment about America being a land of "vacuum cleaner salesmen" or something like that , would have horrified Royce. Oswald Spengler said worse about the U.S., possibly as a result of America's effrontery in winning the First World War.

Royce was still in awe of Europeans, in a Henry James kind of a way, like all those American academics today in awe of French "Master Thinkers." I spent at least forty minutes discussing the philosophical ideas of one lawyer's favorite French philosopher, "Pierre Cardin." I did not have the heart to tell him that he was thinking of Michel Foucault. Both Foucault and Cardin would have been amused and flattered. No doubt that lawyer is on the New Jersey (or U.S.?) Supreme Court by now.

Rationalism (idealistic in form or not) has always had its American adherents, so has Continental theory, whether Marxist-inspired Critical theory, phenomenology or existentialism. Even the occasional postmodernist lunatic can be seen wandering the halls of academia, searching for the philosophical equivalent of the Dodo, in order to prove that it does not exist. Has anyone seen Stanley Fish?

One of my main intellectual interests is modern philosophy, so I read many histories of the subject and biographies of the various thinkers as well as works by each of them. At the moment, I am finishing Royce's lectures providing a history of modern thought from Spinoza to the late nineteenth century. At the same time, I am alternating chapters of Karl Lowith's massive From Hegel to Nietzsche. I am thinking of tackling Habermas after finishing these two books, or maybe Friedrich Beiser's Hegel. Perhaps I'll devote an essay to Oliver Wendell Holmes and "The Path of the Law." Yes, I know, I promised to read and review The Da Vinci Code.

I read A.N. Wilson's God's Funeral right before studying Royce, so that associating the collapse of Christianity or even the "waning of religion" (Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages comes to mind) with the rise of a secularized form of Christian metaphysics in idealism is easy for me, especially as I happily absorb Royce's confident prose. Royce's philosophy reflects a much smaller and more cheerful world than the one we live in today. Whatever happens to the organized churches or Catholicism, the ethical truth in Christian scriptures will not be affected by it. Many opponents of religion fail to understand this.

Churches or religious establishments are political and historical organizations with worldly roles to play. Religious or spiritual wisdom -- usually conveyed by means of myth -- is concerned with allowing persons to negotiate life's journey and transitions, primarily by finding meaning in their lives through love (eros) and coming to terms with death (thanatos). I plan to wrestle with Sigmund Freud in this blog eventually. The flaws in or criticisms of institutions has little to do with this important meaning of religion. The same goes for flaws in individuals who happen to adhere to one religion or another. You have said nothing about Catholicism by pointing out that individual priests have done bad things. You have not touched the ethical meaning of Christianity by noting the historical errors of the church.

The mood of Royce's lectures is optimistic and confident in a manner that is inconceivable in a post-Hollocaust world. Everything was possible in Royce's universe -- for white men, of course -- when God was in his heaven and President Eliot ruled at Harvard. By way of comparison, see Professor C. Delise Burns's The Growth of Modern Philosophy. It is astonishing for a woman (I think professor Burns is a woman) to have written and published this work in 1909. Even more for Mary Whiton Calkins, a professor of both philosophy and psychology at Weslley College, to publish The Persistent Problems of Philosophy in 1917. Both happen to be better than Royce's lectures at several points. Here is Ms./Mr. Burns (who had clearly been reading Freud, when no one was looking) capturing in a single paragraph what Royce says less clearly in a long chapter.

The later form of the "Wissenschaftslehre" and the popular works mark the progress from these concepts to a transcendental system which is an attempt to read the real world in its relation to the ideal; for the force that expresses the individual's first (unconscious) activity is not his own, and the end he moves toward is not merely personal. Also the limiting world is not, as limit, the construction of that which exists only by being limited (finite activity). On every side the finite self goes out into infinity; and the infinity, as to meaning, is the Divine Idea: the Absolute is God. [Summarizing Fitche.]

Royce (wisely) chooses to begin his account of modern philosophy not with Descartes, but with Spinoza. This is in order to clarify the connection between Spinoza's metaphysics and Royce's own concern with eschatology as well as post-Kantian German thought. These concerns unite both in Romanticism and in the subsequent "movements" of Hegel's dialectics. Royce does not suggest it, but one might go as far back as Aristotle and Aquinas to the dynamism in teleological method, since Spinoza's theory, by contrast, is a quest for comprehensiveness and perfection in stasis, a search for a machine-like precision in a universe of perfect coherence at a high level of abstraction where the air is very thin.

Unlike Descartes, Spinoza escapes dualism at the cost of freedom, however, through his identification and acceptance of this rational comprehensiveness and determinateness, that is, by his "intellectual love of God" in his "dual aspect" metaphysics, especially in the ethics. Doctoral candidates may wish to compare Spinoza's "Substance" with Hegel's "Spirit," as the movement from externalism to internalism in Western thought, which was only made possible by Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy. This internalism, by the way, turns out to be externalism anyway, as Ego becomes the very nature of the universe in the great crescendo of nineteenth century German philosophy. Robert C. Solomon has fun with this "cosmic pretense" in his history of European thought.

To my knowledge, no one has written a dissertation on the idea of sacrifice as the expression of love and acceptance of Divine Will in Spinoza (Jewish) or as becoming Spirit, through self-realization, in Hegel (Christian). Both men were concerned, in a way, with secularizing the idea of redemption. The thinking of these two men is related on this fascinating subject, which is found somewhere in that mysterious territory between theology and philosophy. Furthermore, there may be insights into both men's lives resulting from such an inquiry:

The world is one, and so all things in it must be parts of one self-evident, self-producing order, one nature. Spinoza conceives this order, describes its self-explaining and all-producing character, as well as he can, and then gives it a name elsewhere well known to philosophers, but used by him in his own sense. He calls the supreme nature of things the universal "Substance" of all the world. In it are we all; it makes us what we are; it does what its own nature determines; it explains itself and all of us; it isn't produced, it produces; it is uncreated, supreme, overruling, omnipresent, absolute, rational, irreversible, unchangeable, the law of laws, the nature of natures; and we -- we, with all our acts, thoughts, feelings, life, relations, experiences -- are just the result of it, the consequences of it, as the diameters are the results of the nature of a circle.

Good sense requires an acceptance and trust in the wisdom of the whole, however baffling it may be to us. Counselor West says in The Matrix: Reloaded: "Comprehension is not a requisite of cooperation." Everybody was walking around for weeks saying -- "What does that mean?" Here is Royce summarizing Spinoza to explain it to you:

Feel, hope, desire, choose, strive, as you will, all is in you because this universal substance makes you what you are, forces you into this place in the nature of things, rules you as the higher truth rules the lower, as the wheel rules the spoke, as the storm rules the raindrop, as the tide rules the wavelet, as Autum rules the dead leaves, as the snowdrift rules the fallen snowflake; and this substance is what Spinoza calls God.

Those of us lacking Spinoza's serene genius for acceptance are doomed to struggle. We wage Promethean battle against the cosmic order. Santayana appropriates the Biblical phrase, "Dominations and Powers" to describe this order. We shake a human fist against the universe, along with Albert Camus, even when it is hopeless -- or because it is hopeless -- to struggle against fate. Thus, I reverse West's dictum in my Miltonian or Luciferian affirmation: "Comprehension and choice is always a requisite of my cooperation." Neo is right: "The problem is choice." My philosophical analysis of the theory of freedom in the Matrix is coming up.

Come to think of it, we could use a comment or two right now from Duke's "bad boy" and postmodernist Milton expert, Professor Stanley Fish. (See the exchange between Owen Fiss and Professor Fish on interpretation and objectivity in law.)

Hegel's take on all of this is time-bound, richly historical, calling on us to accept that "Spirit" reveals itself in all things, including our tragedies. Notice Hegel's obsession with Antigone and the mystery of all tragedy, so that if we step back and see the historical puzzle put together (read Tom Stoppard's Arcadia), Hegel insists that the "sublime necessity for our mortal strivings [and pains] is evident and we pronounce [life] good." I am not so sure:

Suppose that what our self-conscious being has to do is prove a proposition in geometry. As he proves, he appeals to somebody, his OTHER SELF, so to speak, to observe that his proof is sound. Or again, suppose that what he does is to LOVE, to hate, to beseech, to pity, to appeal for pity, to feel proud, to despise, to exhort, to feel charitable, to long for sympathy, to converse, to do, in short, any of the social acts that make up when taken all together, the whole of our innermost self-consciousness. All these acts, we see, involve at least the appeal to many selves, to society, to other spirits. We have no life alone. There is no merely inner self. There is the world of selves. We live in our coherence with other people, in our relationships. To sum it up all up: From first to last the law of conscious existence is this paradoxical but real self-differentiation, whereby I, the so-called inner self, am through and through one of many selves, so that my inner self is already an outer, a revealed, an expressed self. The only [real] mind is the world of many related minds. It is the essence of consciousness to lose itself in outer but spiritual relationships. Who am I then at this moment? I am just this knot of relationships to outer moments and to other people? [See R.D. Laing's Knots.] Do I converse busily and with absorption? Then I am but just now this center of the total consciousness of all those who are absorbed in this conversation. And so always it is of the essence of spirit, to differentiate itself into many spirits, to live in their relationships, to be one by virtue solely of their coherence.

For Hegel, I live in division, in alienation -- both within myself and against the world, in separation from my "other self" and community -- until I see the pattern that makes sense of my life over time. Yes, I know about Freud. It is that Hegelian pattern that explains the unity between my inner sufferings and the strife in the world, so that meaning is the "rose in the cross of the present." I am and can only be "realized" when joined with that other self, who contains the only possibility for the resolution of my contradictions, as I do for her. I am for her -- as she is for me -- mirror and door for all true self-becoming. (See my essay on "George Santayana and the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics.")

Much the same analysis applies to the dialectic between humanity and the universe in idealism. This is to suggest something also concerning the relationship between humanity and God in Western religious thought. The unity is all-inclusive. Catholics will be reminded of "the unity of the Holy Spirit."

Norman Mailer begins his essay on the presidential campaign of George McGovern, by gesturing at a predecessor: "Greetings to Charles Dickens across the veils of karma ..." Every philosopher does the same with regard to his or her predecessors in the tradition, giving them each a "high five," in order to define a personal set of ideas within "the intellectual project of the West." Every philosophy is a chapter in the book of universal Mind. Mind reveals itself only in the unfolding story of the universe and all life. My source at this point and one of the works which casts a shadow on all of my thinking is Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Hegel suggests that all of us, as a matter of being human, recognize God working out His destiny through us, using our lives, in that instrument of the divine that is the history (and herstory) of the universe and everything in it. I remember a powerful image of persons in history drawn from Gore Vidal's memoirs: We are puppets that are used and discarded by history's great forces. Professor Burns will get the last word by summarizing Hegel for us, better than Royce does, even as Professor Royce of Harvard University takes all the bows. Some things have not changed all that much since Royce's day:

[When Spirit comes to know itself as Spirit,] ... the objective and the subjective mind are one, unified in three movements -- Art, Revealed Religion, and (Absolute) Philosophy. In art the ideal appears as the beautiful; it is a revelation of the eternal, the absolute, but it is momentary. When that revelation is more than a glimpse of intuition, revealed religion takes its rise. This is not any empty creed, but a "dominant conviction of the meaning of reality"; and the final stage of all is called by Hegel "philosophy," though it is doubtul whether the word will stand the meaning put upon it, for it seems that he means a rational and logical mysticism. ... [W]hat has been implicit in ordinary religion becomes explicit. We recognize ourselves in the Absolute, which is God.

"Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking."

"Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking."

Graffiti, in Paris, May (1968).

Images will be blocked by New Jersey hackers. Computer attacks must be expected at all times from defenders of free speech and democracy.



On Sunday, May 21, I joined New York's "AIDS Walk" to raise funds for treatment and research in the fight against the plague of our time. Twenty million are expected to die in Africa alone in the next ten years. 47, 000 of my fellow citizens, friends and neighbors (although some came from as far away as India) walked with me, as did my daughter.

I have been reading sections of Sartre's Search for a Method and thinking of his concept of "totalization," and it occurs to me that yesterday I saw and experienced a totalization of a mood. The mood of concern or pain, at the thought of all the persons known -- or even loved -- who have suffered and died from this illness. I walked yesterday for all of my friends who have died from this illness, but also for the great philosopher and teacher Michel Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984.

My fear for the many millions more who will experience the horrors of this terrible illness -- which I have seen destroy lives -- is an important motivation to do what I can against the plague. 47, 000 is a respectable number. I hoped for more.

As we walked, many of us felt something that is all-too rare these days, a sense of community. The relationship among walkers was "mediated" (read Sartre, but also Ernst Bloch) by a shared concern and goal, the struggle against the scourge of AIDS. There was spontaneity and truth to the moment, which felt like oxygen for a suffocating man. We were experiencing a communal reality of concern and fear. In a horrible way, 9/11 was similar.

Reality is now mostly available at second hand, in movies, where we see an idealized version of what, we are told, real lives used to be like. The America of small town communities and Judge Andy Hardy is now mythical whereas the estrangement felt by many Americans from one another and their institutions has grown exponentially. To some extent, traditional small town America was always a myth -- today this myth is as distant as Egyptian narratives of the underworld.

When I lived in Cuba, as a child, scarcity required a ration card that determined how much sugar or coffee was available to each person. Now the people I see around me carry invisible ration cards that say how much reality they are entitled to receive. Each of us is allotted only a small measure of genuine human contact, but we can have as much as we like of the fake kind in the currency of media-images (as opposed to art) or commercial relations. (See the final section of my essay, "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

"You will end up dying of comfort." This was another of the slogans of May, 1968. Millions of my fellow citizens have died of comfort, the disease of affluence. I do not have the heart to tell them. Maybe they will never know it. One senses another moment of profound dissatisfaction and exploding anger in the air, an explosion that is perhaps only a few years away.

Revolution is coming again. It will begin in the streets. It will not come from the bored and affluent millions, but from many of those young people walking with me yesterday, articulating a sense of the anomie (Durkheim) and betrayal felt in a world that wraps them in plastic every day, even as it kills a child from hunger or disease every six minutes.

Feel free to correct this statistic. This is the last number I heard on this issue, which was several years ago. With the renewal of hostilities in Darfur, the situation is probably worse. Maybe it is every two or three minutes that a child dies. Meanwhile, Regis asks questions of his t.v. guests on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" Regis turns to the camera -- while appearing to look directly at the idiot sitting across from him -- with a boyish smile that he has rented for the evening, Regis asks: "Is that your final answer?"

My "final answer," Regis, is that you can give the million dollars to the United Nations Relief Fund, along with half of the obscene amount of money that you are paid to ask that moronic question.

Some of the busy New Yorkers who passed us, on their way shopping or to the office for a little weekend work, seemed puzzled. We walkers were officially "weird." A few of the walkers, who happened to be young men, wore ballerina outfits. This produced the standard stares from on-lookers, even in New York, also laughter.

We no longer live real lives, of course, until tragedy strikes. We merely consume. We go to the mall and buy more things that we do not need to get the rush, a kind of momentary assurance (which is available for a small fee, a smile from the salesperson is extra) that we are still alive. We measure our worth and importance in terms of our capacity to purchase expensive items to provide this momentary satisfaction, preferably when someone is present to see that we have the means to consume conspicuously.

"Look at me" -- many of my former colleagues say, as I once did -- "I have money, so I must be real and alive. See my car? My t.v. set?" Now I only say, "see me."

The same plea for reassurance that one is alive also exists when upper-middle class types of a certain age have sex with attractive young people, young people who find their elders' wealth attractive. Sexual tourists exemplify the exploitative nature of so much postmodern mega-capitalism. They visit countries to exploit and use, then discard the resources of the place, including its young people. I hope that this will not happen in Cuba. There are ways of generating wealth for all, that are also equitable and fair. Responsible forms of capitalism are available.

The AIDS walkers, like me, are naive or foolish. We are "unrealistic," the ultimate put-down in affluent America. We are not practical. "The disease will not be cured by what we are able to raise, so it is better to do nothing." We are told: "Who cares? As long as it is not me or anybody that I care about, the hell with them." People say this until it is them, or someone they love. And the powerful and wealthy often remain powerful and wealthy by hoarding those things -- power and wealth, that is -- while refraining from looking beyond the "real world" (defined as their narrow class interests) to the millions whose pains pay for that power and wealth. Oil should be red in America because it is really the blood of millions that brings us that oil for our SUVs.

"Real" worlds are things that we make with the materials at hand -- what Sartre describes as the "practico-inert" -- which is the condition into which my successful, middle class brethren are slowly sinking, the condition of objects. We take the empirical and historical conditions in which we find ourselves and make of them what we will. This means that we are responsible for the world that we have made, another Sartrean theme.

It is truly depressing and frightening to imagine that I am somehow, even a little bit responsible for the morons that I see in black robes misjudging people in the darkest corners of the U.S. legal system. Get a load of this kindergarden class photo and ask yourself: "Why are these people smiling?" http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/supreme/images/justices.jpg

Inevitably, we end by building worlds that are only portraits, for good or ill (usually, for ill) of what and who we are: The world is unjust, ugly, cruel, cold, unresponsive to our needs necause we are -- each of us -- all of those things too; but the world is also beautiful, filled with love, community is available, the future is infinitely malleable, revolutions are born and come to fruition. The world is your cynical, tired, angry parent; the world is also your beautiful, idealistic, passionate, brilliant girlfriend.

Who do you want to spend time with on Sunday afternoon? Why not become the person other people want to see on a Sunday afternoon? Why not transform the entire world into a beautiful Sunday afternoon? Why not spend time with both parent and girlfriend on Sunday afternoon? Why not try? Why not ... ?

It is time to have ideals again.

"Hell is other people," Sartre says. "Yes, but heaven is also other people," Marcel answers. I think they're both right. This is all so French.

You say I am only dreaming. I answer: Perhaps, but your dream that is called "reality" is a nightmare; my dream that is called "hope" is a realization "devoutly to be wished." You live what is, until it isn't; I live what isn't, so that it will be. Of course, I am thinking of RFK. And maybe I walked a little for him, too, because I know that he would have been with us. Not surprisingly, there were no U.S. Senators, Governors or Mayors on this walk. Just "little people," like me.

As we walked, a large group of students from the French high school on the East Side began to sing the French national anthem. I wondered if we were about to storm the Bastille. I suggested taking over Columbia University, but then we'd only have to pay the taxes for the property. That's our postmodern reality. People joined in the singing. There is no anti-French feeling in New York, but there is lots of anti-Bush feeling.

I sang under my breath, all the words I knew of this glorious anthem of revolution. I thought of Jose Marti's statue in the park, decorated with flowers for May 20th, Cuban Independence Day. I thought of the hopefulness of Jefferson and Madison at the birth of this great nation. What would they say today? I doubt their reviews would be favorable. July 4th is right around the corner, so I wonder: Are we still independent?

France is a dream for us, especially in New York, where Paris is everyone's fantasy. In Paris, the guy who worked in the hotel where I stayed was always asking me about New York: "Is it true that every French restaurant makes money in New York?"

He asked me this with a breathless eagerness. I answered, "Yes, pretty much." He explained that he wanted to get to Manhattan and make money. He probably has by now. Naturally, he also explained that he was a devoted Communist. I live in a society where the American Communist Party owns corporate stocks. The Communists are capitalists, or so I learned from Harper's. After all, they have to think about retirement and how to shelter their assets. That's also a postmodern culture, folks.

In a recent edition of The Nation, May 29, 2006, at p. 50, Catherine Smallwood reviews Michel Huellebecq's most recent novel, The Possibility of an Island. Huellebecq has captured a moment and mood in France, whose genius is tired right now, by "celebrating" nihilism and philosophical depletion, we are told of ...

... the brutalizing nature of late capitalism; for those lucky players in the free sexual market, the distractions of sex (albeit an increasingly routinized and decreasingly satisfying distraction); and the onset of a future even more rigid and joyless than the present.

Ms. Smallwood misses the point to much of this French "posing," which is only meant to provoke and outrage -- something which delights French intellectuals, like Huellebecq -- as they PLAY with ideas in a manner that is not only impossible, but unfathomable to earnest American young people, graduating from, say, Smith or Radcliffe, then "interning" at The Nation, as they work to save the world. I am certain that -- unlike Monica Lewinsky -- Ms. Smallwood does not purchase dresses at the Gap. She probably even goes on an AIDS walk. How stupid and naive can one be?

Bless you, Ms. Smallwood. I prefer your company to Huellebecq's, who would probably agree with me about this. Although I am not so sure, for where there is humor, there is still hope. Huellebecq's stilleto-like wit usually comes to the rescue in his work and (probably) in his life. Ms. Smallwood complains that Huellebecq is not "subtle." Worse, he is guilty of the ultimate sin in the world that Ms. Smallwood is likely to know. Huellebecq is not, gasp, "politically correct" or nice. "He is, like, so totally cynical." Well, duh.

Subtlety is not Huellebecq' strong suit. His typical fare is spiced up with brutally graphic, predictably boring and deeply misogynistic sex; stabs at ethnic minorities, especially Muslims; rants against global capitalism and expressions of raw grief [ask yourself, "Why grief?"] at the broken promises of the 1960s; and tirades against the veterans of May '68, who in his view shirked their responsibilities in the name of a revolution that degenerated into a sheer moral permissiveness.

What were you telling us about Huellebecq's celebration of permissiveness? So why is he upset by this licentiousness?

Huellebecq is not only subtle, but he is articulating concerns and dealing with issues only dimly perceived in this review. The book under discussion is clearly the work of a man deeply torn by feelings of commitment to ideals he sees as betrayed by his parents' generation, also hostile and nihilistic with regard to those same ideals -- especially romantic ones -- that he knows are the only things that make life worth living.

Huellebecq is a nihilist malgre lui. Huellebecq is (like anyone who drinks) in exquisite pain -- pain that he cannot decipher because he understands it only too well, whose causes are, partly, philosophical. THis will disappoint the bullshitters in New Jersey: I don't drink. I never drank when practising law. Crank up the smoke machine with some new bullshit about me.

I know that Ms. Smallwood will find this statement paradoxical, if not incomprehensible. Give her time, she'll get it when she sees her fortieth winter. Life is "complicated," Ms. Smallwood, like a hard calculus examination ro "whatever." (Is Ms. Smallwood related to Anne Milgram?)

In France and a few other places in the world, Ms. Smallwood, philosophical ideas are recognized to be life or death matters, which they are. Although Gore Vidal beat him to the punch in Kalki, here is what "subtle" looks like in the words of Huellebecq's "post-human" narrator-commentator ("post-human," like so many of us?) closing his highly romantic and apocalyptic work, The Elementary Particles:

History exists; it is elemental, it dominates, its rule is inexorable. Yet outside the strict confines of history, the ultimate ambition of this book is to salute the brave and unfortunate species which created us. This vile, unhappy race, barely different from the apes, which nevertheless carried within it such noble aspirations. Tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome and infinitely selfish, it was sometimes capable of extraordinary explosions of violence, but never quite abandoned its belief in love. ... This book is dedicated to mankind.

"Search for a Method."

My book is now available in Germany and may (someday) be translated into German. http://www.bol.de/shop/home/mehr-von/buch/fqba/juangalismenendez.html

October 11, 2010 at 6:16 P.M. "Errors" were inserted in this essay which had been left alone for a while. I have made all of the necessary corrections. My computer's cable signal was obstructed, again, this afternoon. I have rebooted my computer.

au castor,

If Michel Foucault was correct to suggest -- as he walked in Sartre's funeral procession -- that Jean Paul Sartre was the "conscience of his age," then the struggles of this extraordinary thinker, Sartre's very public agonizing over social justice issues and his daily quest for personal freedom must be considered exemplary, but also symbolic.

"A man is defined by his project," Sartre tells us in his final great work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre came to understand that his freedom was dependent upon the freedom of his neighbors, even distant neighbors, and that their pain was also his agony. This led him to the "supreme philosophy of the twentieth century, Marxism." Sartre says:

From Marxism, which gave it a birth, the ideology of existence inherits two requirements which Marxism itself derives from Hegelianism: if such a thing as a truth can exist in anthropology, it must be a truth that has BECOME, and it must make itself a TOTALIZATION.

Sartre was even willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, placing existentialism on the altar of the proletarian revolution, so long as there was the slightest hope of a "totalization" of this shared quest for freedom from poverty and misery through political revolution. As Sartre's life drew to a close, Marxism -- as embodied in concrete historical experiments and not as a system of ideas -- was increasingly seen as a disappoinment, even a failure. Marxism was the god that failed.

The hopes for a fully just society and optimism about the trajectory of history led only to the Gulag and atrocities of Cambodia's civil war, to a hideous realization of the worst nightmares in history. Yet a return to the Sartrean project leads to HOPE and not to despair, for in his "Search for a Method" and in the many pages of the Critique, one also discovers a much richer and more complex theory than any standard Marxist diatribe.

If it is true that Sartre's late work is indebted to Marx, then it may be no less true that it is also heavily indebted to Kant, and even more to Hegel. I am aware of Sartre's rejection of idealism, even as he adopts its vocabulary and "problematic," together with a personal dialectical method. There is a "spiritual hunger and adventure" outlined in Sartre's pages and not just a program for collectivist politics. "But the principal characteristic of individual praxis," Professor Thomas R. Flynn writes, "from the viewpoint of Sartre's overall strategy in the Critique is doubtless its self-luminosity."

It is with regard to that spiritual project of "self-luminosity" that one finds Sartre's late work amenable to reconciliation with a vast literature in theology and philosophy, drawing on Western religious traditions and secular ethical reflections. Hazel Barnes -- Sartre's American translator and one of his best readers -- says of the late work, especially "Search for a Method," which was intended to serve as a preface or addendum to the Critique:

The title, Critique of Dialectical Reason, suggests both Kant and Hegel. Like Kant in Critique of Pure Reason, Sartre is concerned with the nature, possibilities, and limitations of human reason. But there the resemblance ends, for Sartre's interest is not primarily epistemological or even metaphysical. The greater debt is to Hegel, and Sartre acknowledges it in his preface. Through Marxism, he says, existentialism has inherited and retains two things from Hegel: First, the view that if there is to be any Truth in man's understanding of himself, it must be a Truth which BECOMES; Truth is something which emerges. And second what Truth must become is a TOTALIZATION. "In 'Search for a Method,' " Sartre says, "I have taken it for granted that such a totalization is perpetually in process as History and as historical truth."

Sartre's late work takes us in one direction all the way to Marx, Frankfurt School theory, Guevara and Castro, but in the other direction it leads to Sartre's great contemporary Simone Weil, Edith Stein, Thomas Merton and Martin Buber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and to our contemporaries Paul Ricoeur, Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West. For the religious believer, the end-point of Sartre's atheistic search for meaning in community is simply Christ, that is to say, love. Rightly understood, love requires no religious belief or ideological litmus test and it is available to all.

At this point, the great Catholic theologian and philosopher Hans Urs Von Balthazar must be mentioned, including his collaboration with the current Pope on a work detailing the importance of Mary and femininity in Christian thought. Love is "grace" and indestructible "quiet strength" against all forms of oppression in this tradition, which is identified with woman's contribution to the Church. (See my short story "Pieta" at Critical Vision.)

To discover a tortured and beaten human being, covered in shit and blood, defying totalitarianism and State power anywhere, for Sartre, is to find oneself at his or her side. It is to insist that each of us must be Orwell's Winston Smith or we may become O'Brian. It is to choose to share in that tortured person's pain so as to make it one's own, in opposition to power. And by sharing in suffering, there is an immediate and ultimate "totalization" that is defined simply as "the human condition." I plan to write soon about Hannah Arendt. ("What is it like to be tortured" and "Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")

To see a child being led to a concentration camp is to be compelled to join in his or her fate. Both Edith Stein and Dietrich Bonhoeffer made that choice as a requirement of their Christian faiths. I have no doubt that, under similar circumstances Cornel West would make the same decision, but so would Angela Davis. Professor Davis would do so strictly on the basis of her own Marxist and African-American cultural traditions of resistance to unjust power. Among the executed in Hitler's camps were thousands of Catholic priests, who prayed with and served their Jewish brethren, hundreds of thousands of socialists joined them, along with millions of gays, gypsies and others deemed "marginal" or "undesirable." (See my essay "R.D. Laing and Evil" at Critical Vision.)

... love is the analogue of reason, [Hegel writes in his early religious writings,] insofar as it finds itself in other men [and women]; or rather, forgetting itself, finds another self in whom it lives, feels, and energizes -- in the same way that reason, as the principle of universal laws, recognizes itself again in every rational being.

The sight of workers' misery in France led Simone Weil to insist on experiencing the factories and living the humility of poverty. Rather than being indifferent to imprisonment and torture, bored by executions (and there are many ways of executing someone) of so many of our mostly African-American young men and women -- and Latinos or Latinas -- we must stand with all victims (yes, criminals are victims too) and share in their fate. ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey" and "Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison.")

This is to make clear the revulsion that dehumanization of any person should produce in all of us. That dehumanization makes the "crime of punishment" sometimes far worse that the "crimes that are punished" by a legal system, which is too often racist and biased against the weakest and poorest members of our society, especially women. If a person is led to these insights, then whether it is Marx or Jesus (Kant or Hegel) who gets him or her there may be less important than the insight itself.

For this reason alone -- the criminality in punishment by the State in racist society -- we must oppose the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal (who is innocent of murder) or anyone's execution. Racism and bias simply cannot be removed from a death penalty system that is reflective of deep and pervasive (if subtle) racism in society. Punish, by all means, but do not become worse than what you seek to punish. Society must be better than the convicted killer. Society must never murder. Society must never torture.

As I worked in the factory, Simone Weil writes, indistinguishable to all eyes, including my own, from the anonymous mass, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. Nothing separated me from it for I had really forgotten my past and I looked forward to no future, finding it difficult to imagine the possibility of surviving all the fatigue. What I went through there marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression that there must be a mistake and that unfortunately the mistake will in all probability disappear. There I received forever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red hot iron which the Romans put on the forehead of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave.

Simone Weil leads us to the realization of community in loving. Love is not a dreamy, wishy-washy emotion for expression in greeting cards. I have seen powerful men laugh at the suggestion that love is at the heart of ethics and politics. "What are you some kind of a fag?" I am told that it is all about "power" or "money is the meaning of life." Marx's point is that money is NOT the meaning of life, but that it has a lot to do with alienation. Love is said to be too feminine or "vague" an "emotion."

There is a not-so-subtle sexism underlying such attitudes, a feeling that -- in a law school sense -- we must be "rigorous" at all times. The Freudian implications of this overused word "rigorous" should be obvious. We are told to become tough-minded, realistic pragmatists and "men and women of the world." These attitudes to the administration of law and political power are especially tragic when they are uttered by women.

Sartre's work leads us to Weil, as I say, but also to other "spiritual revolutionaries" (Cornel West) immersed in worldly struggles. James Baldwin's conversation with Bertrand Russell (there is a famous photograph of the two men having tea) must have been fascinating. For it was Baldwin who articulated, beautifully and elegantly, Lord Russell's life-long quest for a "share in the suffering of humanity," something acquired by Mr. Baldwin as a birth right. James Baldwin was what Russell wished to be: an aristocrat of suffering. Describing the place which provides the shared territory of Sartre and Russell, James Baldwin writes an Africanized and Americanized version of Hegel's dialectics of Spirit:

But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

Baldwin is restating Sartre's argument, spiritualized, explaining human being-in-the world as a call to share in suffering through a totalization, which is simply love. The works of these writers come together in what is described as a "praxis-consciousness" or an awareness of the responsibility to overcome the distance between self and other, value and fact (Sartre's "practico-inert" as the grim reality against which we must struggle), by constructing Paul Ricoeur's "Ogival crossing" that takes us to the other in his or her moment of pain. Think of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "salvific mission." Dr. King not only accepted, but willed his own death as the price for his people (which is all of us) to reach the "promised land." Hegel's work is inescapable at this point, especially his early life of Jesus and Phenomenology of Spirit:

There is a higher way [to combat injustice,] the way of Christ, and of all who have been called "beautiful souls." Such souls follow the path of suffering, in so far as they abandon all their personal claims, and refuse to contend for them; but they pursue also the path of valor, in so far as they rise above this loss of particular ... interest, and feel no pain in it. Thus they save their lives in losing them, [think of Edith Stein or Dietrich Bonhoeffer,] or assert themselves just when they let go of everything with which immediately their life seemed to be identified. Fate cannot wound such spirits, -- for, "like the sensitive plant they withdraw at a touch into themselves," and "escape from the life in which they could be injured." So Jesus demanded of his friends that they should "forsake father and mother, and all that they had, in order that they might not be bound by any tie to the unhallowed world, and so be brought within the reach of fate." ... Forgiveness of sins, therefore, is not the removal of punishment, [no justice, no peace] for punishment cannot be avoided; nor is it the removal of the consciousness of guilt, for the deed cannot be undone; it is "fate reconciled by love."

In my moments of despair that my via cruxis will not end, that I cannot expect to be heard or recognized, to be SEEN by the powerful in my woundedness and anger -- along with many millions or billions more persons, like me, in the world -- I am reminded of Roberto Mangabeira Unger's closing prayer in Knowledge and Politics, so as to continue to struggle and hope:

Desirous of faith, touched by hope, and moved by love, men look unceasingly for God. Their search for Him continues even where thinking must stop and action fail. And in their vision of Him they find the beginning and the end of their knowledge of the world and of their sympathy for others. So is man's meditation on God a final union of thought and love -- love which is thought disembodied from language and restored to its source.

But our days pass, and still we do not know you fully. Why then do you remain silent? Speak, God.

"Hermano": An Evening With Christopher Hitchens and Why I Love Brits.

Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (new York: Basic Books, 2001).
Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (New York: Nation, 2004). Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (New York: Verso, 2003).
Joanthan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (New York: Signet, 1960), originally published in 1729.




A handsome, middle-aged man in a beautiful midnight blue suit, wearing a white shirt with a button-down collar and gray silk tie sits in a plush leather chair. He is chatting, in dulcet tones and in an Oxbridge accent, with a BBC interviewer and tells the following anecdote:

"A foreign ambassador and his wife are in a silver Rolls Royce, heading for Buckingham Palace and an official reception. They are accompanied by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. As they cross an intersection, a chemical accident in a nearby building has left a foul and nearly unbearable odor, which pervades their vehicle, creating an uncomfortable silence and a very unpleasant ten minutes or so. Finally, they drive out of the affected area and Prince Philip leans foward to offer an apology. With a smile his guest explains ... 'Not to worry, my wife also has gas after a big dinner.' ..."

As everyone laughs, the gentleman from the "Foreign Service," smiles and lifts an eyebrow.

My guess is that the gentleman who told this story -- whose interview I saw many years ago on PBS -- was a spy for "Her Majesty's Secret Service." At some point in his life, drenched in literature as he clearly was, he had decided to become "James Bond," except that Ian Fleming's invention had been improved by Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene.

Obviously, this British cousin succeeded in his ambition and is very likely, even now, at work in Washington, D.C., seducing interns and stealing documents for his government, doing both as needed. No doubt he was born in East London, never attended university, and his parents had emigrated to Britain from Poland. Whatever else he was, this man had become an artist whose greatest creation was himself.

I am often accused of being an "Anglophile" and said to "hate" my own ethnicity. Much the same was said of Hannah Arendt, for similar reasons, also of Philip Roth. I am charged with being both "anti-American" and "pro-American"; I am accused of being a "Communist" and also a "Fascist." Sometimes both on the same day, which would be a neat trick. I may have to try it someday, perhaps in my old age.

Some of this is the result of being a writer with a horror of banality and conventionality, of the dull, unthinking, intellectual conformity that is the death of mind for anyone. Mostly this failure to understand what I say results from the unwillingness of persons to surrender the platitudes and cliches (accents are not available on this keyboard) which they use to perceive the world and to construct their realities. Their small, tiny realities and political bromides have nothing to do with me.

No writer or thinker -- and I hope to be both -- can be reduced to a conventional or trite perspective, much less to a psychobabble platitude. No one is a platitude. Kierkegaard's self-chosen epitath will be mine too, "here lies that individual." No, "lying" is no longer a part of my daily life, sadly. On the other hand, it is the very fabric of the lives of many liars and frauds that I left behind as "colleagues" in the legal profession, as they happily abscond with public funds, in the charming (if radioactive) neighborhoods of north Jersey. New Jersey's legal "community" -- I use the word "community" loosely -- is a world well lost.

"But don't you write fiction? Isn't that lying?" This is usually spoken by one of my former colleagues, in a fading polyester suit, in the tones of a vigorous cross-examination. My answer is that the most uncompromising form of truth-telling is writing literary fiction. At this point, I am accused, yet again, of being incomprehensible and indulging in paradox, hating my "Cuban identity," and being a "Communist." I plead non compos mentis, but only after listening to these ill-informed accusations and to those who make them. I am none of those things. I am not something that such people are capable of understanding. I will not be reduced to your stereotypes and demeaning categories. Do not judge everyone by your sad selves in the smoke-filled back rooms of the Garden State. (Only one newly-inserted "error" since last time is excellent.)

Christopher Hitchens is that rarest of journalists who is also an artist. He writes beautiful, sharp, piercing and melliflous sentences. He is witty and smart, street tough in both a London and New York sort of way as well as a charmer, when he wants to be. Christopher is a literary friend, since I know that we really would be friends for life, if we associated at all. In a way, we are friends for life. I met him only once at a signing ceremony (if that counts) and we hit it off immediately, laughing within the first minute of meeting. His handshake and our mutual parting smile, as our eyes met, together with Christopher's whispered word "hermano," has stayed with me. We "contrarians" have to stick together in order to prove that we are iconoclasts and individualists.

We share a fondness for paradox that is said to be very English. Christopher Hampton's British misanthrope (with a bow to Moliere) says: "My problem is that I am indecisive ... at least, I think I am."

Christopher is a fiercely independent journalist, not easily classified politically. My guess is that we are both best thought of as democratic socialists concerned to protect civil liberties. We share a fondness for the underdog, a hatred for all sorts of abuse by the powerful (anywhere), we hope to be defenders of artists' and intellectuals' independence. We are among the finest flowers of Western civilization at this decadent moment in history. We are also humble.

Christopher is one of the best literary critics in the English language. He reads books by the truckfull (me too), especially English literature, which (watch this, I am about to get in trouble again!) happens to be THE BEST literature in the world.

Guillermo Cabrera-Infante (a loyal British subject at his death), during a talk delivered at New York's Public Library, mentioned arguing with a member of Spain's Royal Academy of Literature on this point and being told that "Shakespeare is not so good." At which point, Cabrera-Infante indicated that he knew what he was dealing with, "a moron." He may have indicated as much to the member of the Academy, by asking the professor if he could spell "moron" correctly. The answer to that question is not known to us.

Anyone who loves literature, no matter who the person may be or where he or she lives and whatever other literatures are also admired, should acknowledge that English literature is simply the greatest literature in the world. This is beccause it is the greatest literature in the world. This would be true if English literature could claim only one writer, Shakespeare.

There is also no better philosophical tradition, though Germans, French and American traditions of philosophical production are the equals of the Brits. I admit that Italians and Spaniards, Latin Americans and the very great Indian and Asian traditions are all potential rivals, but I know them much less well than the British-American history of thought. It is possible to view the English-language philosophical tradition as a single history of struggle with the great issues in life. It happens that the two greatest philosophers of the modern world are Germans: Kant and Hegel. On the other hand, the interpretations and creative use of their works in the English language are probably some of the very best anywhere.

To mention just a few other Brits who occasionally took up the pen to create literature there is Fielding, Richardson, Swift (whose view of lawyers I will offer today in conclusion), Dryden, Marlowe, both Johnsons, Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, Stevenson (so beloved by Borges), Conan-Doyle (Christopher's review essay on Holmes is a masterpiece), Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Waugh, Forster, Woolf, Orwell, Greene, and many more. I could easily discuss any of these figures with Christopher for hours. Martin Amis refers to Christopher as "the Hitch," so I will do the same, mostly because I have no right or permission to do so. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince" and "A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")

This gift for literature is in the English air (along with the rain) and may help to explain the British gentleman that I spoke of earlier. Every Brit is a writer in a corner of his or her soul, also an actor. This is because each of them has been invented by Shakespeare. With the acquisition of this glorious music called the English language -- where Shakespeare's presence is still felt and found -- one gets (free of monetary charge) a gift of imagination and an engraved invitation to make use of it. So we English-speakers do. We wield the magic ("Hogwarts" anyone?) of the world's greatest literature, which contains a powerful yearning for freedom and equality. Take a look at George Santayana's essay "English Liberty in America." Also, see Peter Ackroyd's Albion and English Music.

Christopher is philosophically aware, perfectly capable of discussing Adorno or Benjamin, Hegel or Foucault, Lezama-Lima or Guevara, Chomsky (with whom there was some unpleasantness recently) or Zinn. Hitchens loves Vidal, almost as much as I do, reads the great Americans (Roth's recent American cycle is a stunning achievement), somehow managing to find time to know the details of most international events and controversies. Whenever you see "Christopher Hitchens" listed as the writer of something in a magazine or any periodical, get it and read his article. If you are out there and read this Mr. Hitchens, it is time to get off the pot and write that novel. The same goes for me.

As for my feelings about Cuba and Cubans, I love the land where I was born, but as an American or "United States person," as Gore Vidal says, who is most American in his independence and "iconoclasm." Look it up. My greatest political passion is for the United States Constitution, which is to politics what Shakespeare's poetry is to literature, a paragon of what is humanly possible. (See "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

The Constitution of the United States is worth dying for, folks. I don't care whether saying this is unfashionable or considered corny in trendy corners of Manhattan, because it is true and it needs to be said today.

This Constitution is as much an ideal as an actuality. It prohibits torture. Yet many are now tortured by Americans, myself among them. We have to fight to preserve that Constitution every day. Americans are mostly magnificent. Their best features are not captured in the distorted image of them -- of us, as a people -- in the world today, which is really a partisan perception of a tiny group of very powerful persons (from both parties) and their spokespersons, who are usually coopted minority group members. Whether they are African-Americans, Latinos, or something else, minority spokespersons are too often only "house slaves" of the establishment.

What is best about us, as Americans of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, is a quality shared with our British cousins and others throughout the world. It is an uncomprimising independence that flows from a visceral conviction that each person is a locus of rights and dignity, an inviolable moral subject, no matter what evils are done to him or her. In violation of that fundamental juridical and political principle, persons have been tortured outside and within the United States to the indifference of men and women in black robes, who fail miserably in their duties each day that these horrors continue to go unpunished and are covered up by them. See: http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/supreme/images/wallace_j1.jpg (Why?)

Liberty is a principle or belief captured as much in the resonant phrases of Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution, in Shakespeare's great speeches in Henry V and in the irreverence of his grave digger in Hamlet, as it is in the barbs of "The Hitch," or in Anthony Hopkins's favorite curse to speak to (and of) the powerful: "Fuck 'em." These are words to live by, which I am tempted to place on my tombstone.

Christopher discovered in middle age that he has Jewish ancestry (so does more than one person that I care about and respect), even as I know myself to be American down to the bottom of my soul, in the words of the Oracle in the Matrix films, "balls-to-bones." I have been an American almost since I can remember. This allows me to absorb and bring into my political identity, my Cuban and Latin American roots, Cuban humor (which is street-wise and erotic), African-American street culture, Jewish humor (From Philip Roth to Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen), Cuban literature and cinema, wonderful painters, poets, music; even as I reject a not-so-wonderful Cuban political tradition of thuggery, Fascist and Communist totalitarianism, corruption, machismo, violence and sexism and homophobia as well as anti-semitism, as many Cuban-Americans who happen to be Jewish can attest.

Hating racism and antisemitism, by the way, will not preclude me from pointing out that a person who commits "crimes against humanity," but happens to be a member of one of those groups, should be punished for it.

The totalitarian impulse is what I do not like in Cuban culture, or anywhere -- including American culture. Neither do many Cuban-Americans who detest, as I do, the Right-wing fanatics who claim to speak for all Cuban-born persons in the United States. No one speaks for me. No one faction or group speaks for all Cuban-Americans. We reflect the same range of opinion on all subjects as any other group of Americans.

I want to leave you with a small sample of Christopher's prose, so that you will go out and buy his books. I want to get his essay on the Anglo-American comedy, which I have not yet read. Appropriately, I have selected this paragraph from "Havana Can Wait":

Cuba. The very name -- short, pungent, yet romantic -- has ineffaceable associations. Cuba -- the place where the United States received a foretaste of Vietnam in its humiliation in the Bay of Pigs. Cuba -- where the missiles of October gave the world its longest and steadiest look at the nuclear furnace when that hellish door swung briefly open in 1962. Cuba -- home base to the gangsters who clustered around JFK and may even have killed him. Cuba -- whose exiled fanatics were caught in the Watergate building. Cuba -- whose troops inflicted the salutary military defeat on the South African forces in Angola. Cuba -- an island, like Ireland, which refuses to accept its real size and weight in the world, [me too, or is that all of us? England?] and whose writers and poets and musicians populate our imagination. Can such a place undergo a graceful menopause, like a veteran of some Buena Vista reunion?

I doubt it, Christopher. A poster in Havana proclaims: "Revolutionaries are always young!" I say on behalf of the United States and the American struggle for independence that gave birth to this great nation: "Revolutions are always young because they are always unfinished." I promised to quote Dean Swift's comments on the legal profession, and it occurs to me that Mr. Hitchens is only a more recent incarnation of Jonathan Swift, so that Chris might have spoken exactly these words, in his inimitable drawl, if he had lived in the eighteenth century:

I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. For example, if my neighbor hath a mind to my cow, he hires a lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire another to defend my right, it being against all the rules of law that any man should be allowed to speak for himself. Now in this case I who am the right owner lie under two great disadvantages. First, my lawyer, being practised almost from his cradle in defending falsehood, is quite out of his element if he would be an advocate for justice, which as an office unnatural, he always attempts with ill-will. The second disadvantage is that my lawyer must proceed with great caution, or else he will be reprimanded by the judges, and abhorred by his brethren, as one that would lessen the practice of the law [by being honest]. And therefore I have but two methods to preserve my cow. The first is to gain over my adversary's lawyer with a double fee, who will then betray his client by insinuating that he hath justice on his side. The second way is for my lawyer to make my cause appear as unjust as he can, by allowing the cow to belong to my adversary: and this, if it be skillfully done, will certainly bespeak the favor of the bench.

I have reserved Joanathan Swift's most bitter and perceptive comments concerning judges in order to dedicate them now to the distinguished members of New Jersey's judiciary:

... judges are persons appointed to decide all controversies of property, as well as for the trial of criminals, and picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth and equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury, and oppression, that I have known several of them refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty, by doing anything unbecoming their nature or their office. [After all, even in New Jersey, judges must have some principles.]

In pleading [and in their decisions] they studiously avoid entering into the merits of the cause, but are loud, violent, and tedious in dwelling upon all circumstances which are not to the purpose. For instance, in the case already mentioned, they never desire to know what claim or title my adversary hath to my cow; but whether the said cow were red or black; her horns long or short, whether the field I graze her in be round or square, whether she was milked at home or abroad [the last word is not intended as a sexist slur!] what diseases she is subject to, and the like; after which they consult precedents, adjourn the case from time to time, and in ten, twenty, or thirty years, come to an issue.

"Crimes Against Humanity" in New Jersey.

George J. Annas, "Unspeakably Cruel -- Torture, Medical Ethics, and Law," The New England Journal of Medicine May 19, 2005, 352; 20. http://www.NEJM.org
Karen J. Greenberg, The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold war to the War on Terror (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
Harold Pinter, "Art, Truth and Politics," in Not One More Death (London: Verso, 2006), p. 14.

Before reading this essay, please see "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System," January 15, 2006, http://www.CriticalVision@blogspot.com

Revelations that American soldiers, allegedly under specific orders from their immediate supervisors and possibly with the consent of the highest officials in the land, tortured Iraqui detainees have raised serious doubts about the values of the United States of America. I continue to hope, perhaps irrationally, that President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld did not order these acts of barbarity. Both men have condemned these crimes and deny having ordered them. I refuse to believe anything different in the absence of compelling proof against them, which I have yet to see in the news reports and books that I have read. I say this despite increasing doubts expressed by critics concerning the plausibility of the Bush Administration's denials. Sadly, it is becoming abundantly clear that these denials are doubtful at best.

The reason to forbid torture is not simply its ineffectiveness as an information-gathering technique, but that it is evil. The United States of America should not be associated with such tactics. The obviousness of this observation does not diminish the need to say it. The world needs to hear this from the United States and from individual Americans.

For much of the world it is now an open question whether the U.S. commitment to human rights, both internationally and within the nation's borders, is real or only a matter of hypocrisy and lip service. The apparent indifference to torture has not helped with America's image abroad nor with its credibility on human rights issues. Prosecutions are underway and "the investigation is on-going," as they say, so that we may continue to hope that this shameful episode in the nation's history is only an aberration.

Much seems to depend on whether the victims of torture are "ordinary Americans" (which is a code term for "middle class whites" as opposed to "others"). I am suggesting that torture must be abolished regardless of the race or ethinicity of the victims.

This now seems unlikely since new revelations have appeared suggesting that torture is a routine aspect of life in New Jersey, for example, and probably in other places. There are reasons to believe that torture is a secret component of the legal system of that unfortunate state, where such horrors are only one part of the "underground" reality of the "unofficial" court-political/power system. http://www.nj-civilrights.org

The New Jersey state slogan ("New Jersey -- Come see for yourself!"), which cost taxpayers $250,000.00, has now been quietly abandoned after six months' use. Would it not be better for New Jersey to admit past errors, refuse to employ secret torture sessions in future interrogations, while adopting a slogan that says: "We no longer torture people?" Many people think so.

When I think of New Jersey's legal system, I am reminded of film director Carlo Ponti's response when he was told that one of his writers in an American film was considered a Communist by Senator McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee. Signor Ponti said ... "So what? Who do we fix and how much?" No doubt Carlo Ponti had spent some time in the Garden State. (See "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")

Torture is a "crime against humanity," defined as such since the Nuremberg Trials. Obeying orders is no defense to such crimes. In the words of General Telford Taylor in 1946, Nazi physicians "... are responsible for wholesale murder and unspeakably cruel tortures." Health care workers, especially physicians and nurses, using their training to obtain information by means of the infliction of mental suffering on victims are guilty of "unspeakably cruel and heinous" crimes. This is true wherever and whenever such things occur. (See "Is New Jersey Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz unethical or only incompetent?")

Let us ask Chief Justice Poritz: Given your knowledge of the tortures taking place in New Jersey -- on your watch, in a legal system over which you presided -- how do you live with yourself now? How do you feel when you judge the ethics of others? Like a fraud? Does the ethnicity or race of victims, provided that it is different from your own, make it O.K.? What have you become? How does a Jew become Mengele?

Torture is prohibited under Amendment VIII, of the U.S. Constitution as "cruel and unusual punishment" and is also barred under the "due process" clause of the XIVth Amendment. Yet it is, allegedly, a daily reality in American prisons and interrogation chambers, maybe in U.S. society generally. See Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003), pp. 60-83. Women are sexualized and tortured, raped or otherwise violated, routinely in American jails and prisons. New jersey may be the worst offender in this regard. This is intolerable. Under the U.N. Convention and Human Rights Law signed by the U.S.:

"Torture is any act against an individual in the offender's custody or physical control, by which severe pain or suffering ... whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on that individual for such purposes as obtaining from that individual or a third person information or a confession, punishing that individual for an act that individual or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, intimidating or coercing that individual or a third person or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind." (emphasis added)

A person cannot consent to torture; torture is never for the victim's own good; secrecy does not render torture permissible; complicity by state institutions or anonymous slanders of the victim(s) in the media only makes the offense worse; while participation by lawyers, physicians or therapists in such acts makes these offenses especially loathsome and despicable, even if they torture to get information they consider "useful." Torture is a betrayal of a physician's oath and a befouling of the therapeutic encounter. (Terry and Diana) It is "unethical," in the full meaning of the word, for any attorney to be aware of or to participate in any torture of persons. (That's you, John, and "others.")

Yet torture happens all-too often, usually with a wink from public officials, who sometimes join the "fun." http://www.judiciary.stae.nj.us/images/lon.jpg (If this image is blocked, then do a search on Google under "Justice Virginia Long" of the New Jersey Supreme Court.) In Hudson County the torture got a little out of hand recently and may have resulted in the killing of at least one inmate; while in Passaic County, the use of dogs as part of torture has led to a class action suit.

This fondness for torture on the part of some U.S. officials is true not only in Iraq, but also in some of the worst jurisdictions in the U.S., as I say, where corruption has become the norm. Many people, especially minority group members, have experienced brutality at the hands of the authorities. Many have also been subjected to some form of torture, usually in such a way that the victim cannot prove what happened, so that he or she is forced to live with the indignity of knowing that the torturers continue to live freely in society. A question for my torturers is whether their families in Ridgewood and Clifton know what they do and that they lie about their crimes, concealing the truth from their victims -- victims who will not go away or relent in the struggle to face torturers and rapists.

"Therapists" lend themselves to questioning people in violative ways that, nonetheless, allow the authorities to deny that such things occur in the land of the free and the home of the brave. These infuriating hypocrisies and contradictions in a young Latino's or African-American's (or anyone's) life, for instance, help to explain the seething anger that one must live with, every day, even if one continues to believe in the promise or hope that is America.

I understand that people who have not experienced such things will find it difficult to believe that American institutions can be so corrupt or that the nice folks living next door, who may work for the "government," know or participate in the violation of human rights. Victims of abuse find it equally difficult to believe that anyone can take seriously denials of responsibility for torture by public officials in places like New Jersey. And yet, as civil libertarians, we must afford everyone -- including Garden State politicians and judges -- a presumption of innocence.

Where are they on this issue? Hiding? Is their response only that they are "against smoking in public places"? There is a mysterious contemporary silence concerning torture on the part of the highest courts in various states riddled with corruption. I wonder why?

Let us hope that public figures will do the right thing. It would certainly be a welcome surprise to find politicians -- even judges -- standing firm against torture. Too many state Supreme Court justices only take time from posing for their portraits to negelect their duties to a citizenry increasingly fed up with, for example, New Jersey's routine political corruption and illegality in high places.

Torture is morally evil. Not even defenders of torture in the human "ticking bomb" situation condone or approve of torture (not publicly, anyway), including psychological torture, as a method of obtaining information in ordinary legal proceedings. And secrecy is always offensive to legality. But torture is also addictive for torturers, who come to delight in wielding power over others, so that the infliction of pain on others becomes its own reward. Terry, does this ring a bell? How about Diana?

The most popular forms of torture in America are so-called "hands off" torture techniques developed by American intelligence agencies. These methods involve, primarily, use of drugging, hypnosis, stress/anxiety inducement, frustration and other methods for creating depression and collapse. Guilt is very effective in this regard. Long term effects of such artificially created psychological trauma are devastating. These methods are barbaric and cruel, leaving victims with life-long psychological injuries, difficulties with affect and social functioning, while causing personality distortions in torturers too. Yet torture may well have become a not-so-secret method of social control in the United States.

We must eradicate torture in all of its forms, including psychological torture. Any physician or lawyer engaging in, or aware of, acts of torture intended to provide information that is to be used against victims in court proceedings, is guilty of crimes against humanity and depravity. I wish any physicians or attorneys engaging in such activities to know that no amount of sophistry absolves them of moral responsibility -- and legal liability too, if they get caught, and I hope that they will be -- for such loathsome actions.

Any tribunal or adjudicative body knowingly basing its decisions or findings of fact on information procured by such illicit means lacks legitimacy, so that its decisions are rendered invalid and unworthy of respect. Any continuing cover up of the use of torture in legal proceedings, which is also a daily occurrence in the most corrupt jurisdictions, makes the offense more heinous and must stop immediately, with full disclosure of all facts to victims of such tortures.

For each day that torture continues to be covered-up, it is repeated upon the bodies and minds of victims. We must finally take the great civilizing step of ending torture everywhere today, now.

Please communicate your horror at such practices to your elected officials, state tribunals and to professional bodies, throughout the United States and globally. If you have engaged in the torture of others, as a therapist or security official, then have the decency to admit your actions and make some effort to atone for them. Tell judges and politicians in your state what you think of such crimes.

Consider the portrait accompanying this essay, and let us ask such persons today to reflect on what they have become. We can always hope that there is some remnant of decency and morality left in such people. After all, they must have been children once.