Against Anti-Americanism.

"You cannot conquer America."

--William Pitt, November 18, 1777.






"My America is as real as almost all of the other Americas that readers and writers around the world have fashioned for themselves. ... There is no reason to believe the novelist is not better equipped to deal with the possibilities of a mysterious and difficult situation than anyone else, since he or she is always trying to discover what the nature of reality might be. It's as if the novelist is out there, sprung early, with something most people never contemplate -- which is 'How and what is the nature of this little reality before me?' The novelist is the first to ask, 'Do I love my wife? Does she love me? What is the nature of love? Do we love our child? How do we love? Would we die for our child? Or do we let the child die for us?' The novelist has to deal with these unholy questions because living with them is the only way to improve his or her brain. Without improving that brain, without refining the edge of one's perception, it is almost impossible to continue to work as a writer."

Norman Mailer, "Foreword," The Time of Our Time (New York: Random House, 1998), p. xi.

The United States of America is not so much a nation or a country as it is an entire universe. A library of volumes devoted to the subject would be inadequate to describe the complexities of this society. There are many Americas. Hence, there are many ways of being an American. And much disagreement about what America is "all about" or what it should be seeking to achieve. No two of us have to agree about this fascinating nation in order for each of us to be right in what we say. Nearly anything you say about the U.S. may be true from some perspective, and usually is.

If it is "true," to take one example, that an African-American young man growing up in the South Bronx, with a life-expectancy comparable to that of a young man in the war-torn Middle East, and an upper-middle class white woman in suburbia are both "Americans," then we need to wonder again about what it really means to call someone an "American," besides using the term as a convenient political label. What does it mean to speak of an American today, especially when the designation is self-chosen?

In a foreign country, both the young African-American man and our hypothetical white woman are instantly recognizable to others as Americans. This is a point made by the essayist Stanley Crouch. The key to that recognizability, I think, is a kind of confidence and ease, a sense of entitlement resulting from possessing the "correct" nationality in this world. This is not intended as arrogance or presumption, but as a statement of fact. It is how people see themselves when they are raised in a society that is often much less self-examining (as opposed to self-obsessed) than many others.

The behavior of both young people immediately identifies them as Americans, because of their sense that the world is theirs for the taking, that it exists "for" them in a way that no person from a small or developing nation can ever feel, not even someone who is a naturalized American citizen, like myself. There is also the revealing attire. Americans on holiday resemble, as Alison Lurie suggests, children at play: they sport baseball caps, sometimes worn backwards, sneakers, denims, loud colors and t-shirts with slogans on them. (My t-shirt, inspired by Monty Python and the Holy Grail, says: "I fart in your general direction.")

The rest of the planet is regarded as a gigantic Disneyworld-like "theme park" to be explored by "us," while we're on vacation. Accordingly, one is entitled to be annoyed at failing to find a hamburger place somewhere in the section of the Great Wall that one happens to be visiting. These days, of course, one is likely to find several such establishments, including a Burger King or two.

What people in other countries often fail to realize is the lack of malice and sheer innocence in this attitude on the part of Americans who would, as the phrase goes, "bend over backwards" to help if there were a crisis or emergency anywhere. That same impatient attitude by Americans exists at home, when people shop or visit a government office. Americans do not like to wait and assume a level of "customer care" that is increasingly unrealistic in a crowded and resource-challenged planet. Americans are accustomed to things that are still dream-like for many people in the world. They are shocked to discover the scope of poverty and suffering for billions of people in the world.

What is mistaken for arrogance or insulting condescension by others, is often a lack of sensitivity to the realities of different national contexts. Appreciation of these realities usually results in a very different, much more helpful and concerned attitude, on the part of those same Americans. If you don't know the people of the U.S., believe this, they are a magnificent and brave people, generous, kind, and usually best at their worst moments of struggle. We are fearless in confronting power that is used to hurt people, anywhere -- provided that we are aware of that abuse. On the other hand, Americans are often at their worst when they feel unchallenged, supremely in control, as we did immediately before 9/11.

In Rome, my host Giuseppe only nodded his head and said sadly: "... the shoes, the shoes ..." He could not understand what I assured him was a Protestant religious requirement: the wearing of sneakers in church. Patiently, I explained that everyone in America wears sneakers at all times, especially at formal occasions and funerals. I will always remember the expression on his face for the few seconds before he realized that I was joking. Today, of course, I would say the same of "cowboy boots" and I would be even more accurate.

The most important part of being an American, for me, has to do with the political freedom to decide what it means to be an American and what America "is," something which -- to an astonishing degree by comparison with other nations -- is primarily each individual's responsiblity in this country. It is this magical (in the sense of liberating to the imagination) power that each person in the United States possesses merely by virtue of his or her freedom that makes the choice of citizenship the only moral one, in my opinion, if you are going to live here. To do otherwise is to live off the fat of the land, to be unwilling to bear your share of the national burden, including the burden of suffering on occasions like 9/11.

You know you are an American if 9/11 was shocking and painful. It sure was for me. I fear that the ingredients for another such terrorist incident continue to exist and may well have worsened during the past six years. One damaging ingredient in the explosive mix we live with is the failure to appreciate the powerful intellectual currents bringing cultures into an unnecessary headlong collision. ("How can we be Moderns again?)

Is this sense of entitlement and privilege that I mentioned something that Americans should feel guilty about, to the extent that they recognize it at all? Does it have something to do with the epidemic of anti-Americanism in the world at the moment? I think so.

"Let me make one thing crystal clear," as Richard Nixon used to say. I have no tolerance for the criminals and hoods abusing their offices or benefitting from corruption in legal positions in places like New Jersey. I make no apologies for referring to them as exactly what they are -- cheap hoods and goons, who will soon receive what they deserve. I hope. This is part of the American independence that I celebrate. The slogan on my t-shirt is aimed at them in New Jersey. Try this same freedom in most other countries and you will quickly return with a new appreciation for the United States of America. America may be the only place where an absolute imbecile -- like Ms. Tolentino of New Jersey -- could be employed as a judge.

No discussion of anti-Americanism will be very helpful unless some definitions and clarifications are established at the outset. By anti-Americanism I do not mean a willingness to criticize the United States government or the war in Iraq or any particular politician, whether Republican or Democrat. Criticizing the country and complaining about politicians is as American as apple pie, however American that is. I am told that apple pie is actually a Sweedish dessert, which makes it very American indeed. So are "tostones" (fried plantains), which are available at my local "Kosher" Chinese take-out restaurant and have become all-American "comfort food," at least in certain neighborhoods in New York. The tastiest ones are made at the Indian restaurant on 179th Street. Try them. I live in a city where some of the best bagels are available from a very famous establishment in Manhattan that is said to be owned by a Puerto Rican, New Yorker. When you visit Manhattan, try "H&H Bagels," at Broadway and 80th Street (I believe).

It is not anti-American to deplore, as I do, the tortures that took place at Abu Ghraib -- which are not too different from what happens in many places right here at home -- or to express the hope that those responsible for such tortures, wherever they occur, will be prosecuted and (if convicted) sent to prison. There are over fifty convictions so far. More are on the way. I hope the people altering the spacing of paragraphs or inserting other "errors" in these writings will also go to prison. This may be a matter of bribing prosecutors to go after the computer criminals. The great thing about America is that "money talks and bullshit walks."

I certainly do not care whether anyone, anywhere, disagrees with any particular president's policies. The U.S. Constitution encourages and protects the right of persons to do exactly what the Left has been doing -- criticizing the government, especially when that government pursues a controversial military policy. Protest is a good thing in a free society.

As for my views: although I was against the war in Iraq and said so when it began, I do not believe that the efforts of the U.S.-led coalition to help establish a democratic and stable government in that nation can now be permitted to fail. This is true whatever one thinks of the details of Mr. Bush's "War on Terror." And it seems clear that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 events, something like a massive effort against terrorism was called for, which should not result in making us terrorists of course. My fear is that this effort in Iraq may already have failed. (Spacing may be affected by N.J. hackers or Cubanazos on a regular basis.)

This need for a response is becoming painfully clear to others in the aftermath of the Beslan, Russia incident, in addition to the bombings in Madrid and London. New Yorkers were only the first target and (for that reason alone) the most visible. This conflict was a long time coming because it is reflective of profound cultural and economic tensions in the world that pre-date 9/11. This will come as a surprise to many in Washington, but this struggle against terrorism is as much about the tension between modernity and postmodernity as it is about Israel's conflict with portions of the Islamic world. I hope and pray that Washington's "big wigs" understand that this country as well as the free world must wage a battle of symbols and images. The next attack aimed at the U.S. will target one of our great symbols, almost certainly a symbolic structure located in one of the great media centers, probably New York.

Domestically, the Bush administration set out to be more liberal than people realize. And it would like to be even more so now, allegedly, if it had a better economy to work with. Some early White House proposals for increasing access to health care, for example, and coping with financial pressures to ensure continuing opportunities for higher education -- something curtailed, sadly, in the most recent budgets -- were admirable, whatever one's politics or opinions of Mr. Bush may be. It is true that there has been an alarming increase in the disparity in wealth in the country and, as I say, access to higher education for working people is now threatened, as politicians from both parties bicker and squabble, sometimes over petty ego issues.

These quality of life issues are serious concerns for voters, along with human rights worries arising from the war and threats to civil liberties from the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 legislation. The personality criticisms of President Bush and the "culture wars" are less central, to me, but the moral issues are vital too.

Senator Kerry's health care proposal would have provided coverage for about 95% of the population, if I remember correctly, but it allowed for law suits against health insurers that, I believe, would result in lengthy and costly delays in payments to medical professionals, and that would have made the system unworkable. Mr. Bush's proposal for individualized health care accounts might have been more workable. Whatever the mechanism, it is high time that this nation had national health insurance. It is a disgrace that we do not have it. It is also crucial that education through the university level be available to all, regardless of economic status. We must make life-long learning an option in today's world. It is not acceptable for the U.S. to rank 21 out of 22 nations in math, science and reading competitions. See Motoko Rich, "Study Links Drop in Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading," in The New York Times, November 19, 2007, at p. E1.

It is important to recall that a war on terrorism is being fought and that the nation is still coping with the economic and "geo-political" effects (that is, shifting and uncertain alliances) and other consequences of 9/11 and the aftermath of Katrina. No administration will be as liberal as it would wish to be under these circumstances.

Areas of continuing concern include encroachments on civil liberties, as I say, and the growing secrecy in governmental actions, but these are the sorts of criticisms that might be raised against any American administration under these trying circumstances. Besides, I doubt that Americans, or the citizens of most media-saturated and highly technological societies, had any real privacy left long before 9/11, given the realities of this information age. It is not only "truth that may be the first casualty of war," also individual rights that may be its first victims. Hence, it is important to be ever-vigilant in protecting national security after 9/11, while remaining clear about the values that we wish to see protected, like preserving some measure of autonomy from government scrutiny. I am not a "fan" of the Patriot Act.

An unfortunate and easily remedied criticism of the international politics of this administration is a lack of sentivity and cultural awareness when it comes to "exotic" others, which is just about everyone else in the world who is not from Texas. A little "sensitivity training" would not hurt. It is not a good idea, for example, to desecrate other people's holy books. The U.S. should never be in a position where such an allegation can be believed by serious persons anywhere, whatever any journalist may claim.

Jonathan Tepperman argues that criticism ceases to be constructive or meaningful (or sane), and becomes blatantly anti-American, when it is primarily vindictive and insulting. For instance, when the U.S. is caricatured as suffering from an "unfree press" by nations that imprison their critics, or as a non-functioning democracy by one of the world's dictatorships, I reach for my barf bag. To have European nations lecture the U.S. about human rights abuses, when some of them engaged in crimes against humanity in the late nineties, while others remained apathetic as they did so, renders their protests hypocritical at best. Do you speak to me of "ethics," Stuart? ("No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")

To call President Bush a "Nazi" is more than irresponsible. To suggest that there is no "real dissent" in this country or that Americans are all "fat and stupid" is way off the mark. Some are (Judge Tolentino); some are not (Condi). Similar remarks made about any other country on the basis of such appalling stereotypes would immediately result in condemnations and outrage. You can say anything insulting about the United States and Americans and it is O.K., as far as the international community is concerned. It should not be. I am old enough to remember then "U.S. Ambassador" Moynahan's tirade against anti-Americanism at the United Nations before his sudden departure for the greener fields of the U.S. Senate. I wish I could find a copy of that speech. I am sure that it would be more timely today than when it was delivered.

As an example of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, I might point to the work of the critic and theorist Terry Eagleton, whose brilliant and learned books I generally admire, but whose loathing of Americans can get on one's nerves: "If we perish, it will not be of failure or finitude but of breathless, bright-eyed idealists for whom the sky's the limit. Most of these are known as Americans." The Nation, June 13, 2005, at p. 20. You can count on a statement like this, or worse, every other sentence from Professor Eagleton.

I prefer to be criticized for "hopefulness," however naive it may be, than to be admired for a fashionably cynical hope that there is no hope. The trendy nihilism of those who have "seen through it all" is much more grating on my nerves than enthusiasm. If there is something that we can use at the moment, then it must be a little enthusiasm about the possibilities of politics, nationally and internationally. I remember a television interview with James Baldwin in which, with tears in his eyes, Baldwin burst into a lovely smile and said: "Can we tell our children that there is no hope? Of course not."

The United States is powerful and rich. American culture and entertainment media are overwhelmingly popular in the world not because Americans are all "fat and stupid," but because many (including the present writer, I hope!) are not. Americans are sometimes hated because of their freedom and creativity, because of what they have done in the twentieth century -- and I mean culturally and not just scientifically -- which has led to a success that everyone now wishes to emulate. They are hated because they are envied. They are also, sometimes fairly criticized for their -- no, our -- mistakes, sometimes horrendous mistakes. Is there any powerful nation that has not made those? I doubt it.

If you deny this U. S. cultural influence, then look at the way that people are dressed anywhere and everywhere these days. Take a look at the movies they go to see, the expressions they use, the music they listen to, and so on. To condemn the U.S. while doing your best to resemble an American cinema star and mouthing pop music lyrics sung by Brittany Spears is a little ridiculous. (I wonder whether Judge Tolentino and Luisa, her law clerk, were having sex?)

Both India and China pose a real challenge to the U.S. in the twenty-first century in terms of manufacturing electronic appliances and other products for the world market, but neither of those countries comes close or will do so in the foreseeable future, when it comes to the content of the entertainment created for electronic products. Culture is what gives value to all those DVDs, CDs, and T.V.s -- and culture is overwhelmingly supplied by the U.S. and other free societies, which will continue to be dominant for the foreseeable future in the popular arts and in information technology. No great, thrilling, or edgy art will come from a social setting in which expressive freedom is circumscribed. The more freedom exists, the more great art will be produced. This alone says something important about the United States of America. No more "errors" to be inserted in my essay today?

It cannot be a coincidence that the segment of the population both in India and China that is most affluent and best educated, also prefers American and European cinema and fashions. There is an increasing tendency to blend cinematic styles and influences in a new global cinematic culture and language that sees Hollywood as home, regardless of where film-makers come from. See what I mean about images and symbols? Fusion approaches are best for multicultural persons.

James Cagney in a disagreement with Luis B. Mayer said: "Without me, you have a blank screen." He passed on this advice to John Travolta. The true value of the global "soft" electronic product -- i.e., films, music, art, not to mention books -- will remain substantially American, and my own city of New York will be well-represented in this regard. Nobody wants to stare at a blank screen. Never count out the nation that supplies what goes on many those blank screens. Never underestimate a country that has a great influence on what young people everywhere will be wearing, the music they will listen to (at least voluntarily), and the nation which is the source of many of the world's dreams, fantasies and humor, also fears and nightmares.

The United States is a superpower in the supply and content of imagination in the world. And imagination is both more scarce and infinitely more precious than oil or gold. Perhaps this is because the U.S. is itself a product of imagination. America is (in my opinion) the world's greatest political invention. If the U.S. were a movie, then it would have to be described as the all-time "megahit," the greatest success in world politics. Best of all, the project of being an American -- like the revolution that gave birth to the nation -- is always an incomplete or unfinished adventure. There is always room for a sequel. In their recent book, Roberto Unger and Cornel West summarize their critique of contemporary America:

"An America triumphant in the world nevertheless seems unable to solve its own problems. Class injustice, racial hatred, and rationalized selfishness thrive today in a climate of disillusionment and feed on an experience of disengagement and disconnection. In this circumstance, the work of the progressives is so to speak, within and outside the Democratic party, [to provide] a clear alternative."

The Future of American Progressivism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), pp. 92-93.

Notice the optimism and hopefulness in the authors' conclusion:

"To understand your country you must love it. To love it you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as it is, however, is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in it which shows what it might become. America -- this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, [emphasis added] this long, halting turn of the no into the yes -- needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it." Ibid.

I believe that this re-making of the nation should take place with the coming of age of every generation of Americans. So did Thomas Jefferson.

It is, regrettably, true that Americans are often ignorant of the cultural achievements of others. But then, they are also often equally ignorant of their own cultural achievements. Americans are not inclined to bother learning about subjects that are unlikely to lead immediately to practical benefits, with some notable exceptions. On the other hand, many of the world's greatest scholars, on the "impractical" subject of your choice, are located right here in the U.S. This includes some of the world's most fascinating philosophers: people like Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West, Robert C. Solomon, Robert Pippin, Rick Roderick (get some of those Teaching Company tapes, you'll see what I mean) and lots of others, who are also popular among European and Latin American intellectuals. There is no country with greater talent for theoretical imagination and scholarship. Imagination means many things, including political and philosophical achievement. Professor Rorty, the patron saint of the radicals, writes:

"Most of us, despite the outrage that we feel about governmental cowardice or corruption, and despite our despair over what is being done to the weakest or poorest among us, still identify with our country. We take pride in being citizens of a self-invented, self-reforming, enduring Constitutional democracy. We think of the United States as having glorious -- if tarnished -- national traditions."

Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 252.

If American cultural ignorance is a national character flaw, something I admit, then by comparison with the national character flaws of others -- such as the tendency to replace political leaders by assassination or the stoning of adulterers who happen to be women, both practices which made a comeback recently in some countries that have since criticized the U.S.! -- cultural ignorance simply does not seem like such a terrible thing. In some European countries, the lack of cultural ignorance is balanced by deeply entrenched ethnic hatreds and a rigid class system, which are far worse.

While the U.S. is far from perfect, it is better than many, if not most or all other places in the world. Our criticisms of America are often the result of our high or maybe unrealistic expectations for this country, together with our tendency to forget that it is a human society like any other. This is something that its critics should bear in mind too. I have to force myself to remember, when I think about some of the injustices that take place here, that things are far worse in many or most other places. At least here I can get on the Internet and scream -- in italics -- about all of the terrible things that go on in the world. At worst, I will only be subject to computer sabotage and viruses, "hackers and crackers," I have been told, are at the service of state political "operatives," just ask Senator Lieberman.

After the recent Tsunami, the U.S. was immediately criticized by a U.N. official for "only" contributing 35 million dollars. Actually, the U.S. contributed more like 350 million dollars in the first week and the logistical means by which aid could be distributed to the needy. The U.S. is still the single greatest donor of humanitarian aid in the world, a fact that hardly fits the "greedy-American-capitalist" stereotype and which gets little publicity. Individual European nations with their own shameful histories of colonialism and empire are often, proportionately, far less generous and are hardly in a position to denigrate the moral achievements of others. But they do anyway and I am tired of it.

True, Japan will contribute 500 million dollars to relief efforts, which is highly commendable, but factor in the cost of the security provided by the U.S. that makes it possible for Japan to do so and the benefits -- yes, benefits -- derived by that country from the U.S. war on terror, not to mention the U.S. "promised" financing of the U.N. and its agencies' efforts in this crisis, and the balance begins to tip in favor of the U.S. once again. I have no doubt that the total amount of aid provided in the end by the U.S. will exceed that of any other single nation. This is a fact that should be mentioned as well as the criticims. Private donations from Americans will also certainly exceed those of citizens of any other nation.

Let us have no more visceral anti-Americanism. Rather, let us try to focus on the shared humanity of persons of all nationalities, who may always agree to disagree with us, even as they join us in a commitment to the fundamental values of freedom with social justice. It is for this reason that torture must never go unpunished in America or be associated in world opinion with the United States. Americans may choose to balance the tension between these values by favoring freedom over social justice; others may prefer to favor social justice and equality over individual liberty. Yet we may still cooperate and help one another to alleviate human suffering wherever it occurs.

Most importantly, we can agree to place some actions -- for example, the indiscriminate murder of innocent civilians as a form of political protest or torture, at home or anywhere, including Iraq -- beyond the pale, in order to cooperate in punishing those who engage in these practices, whatever ideological justification they offer for such crimes. ("American Hypocrisy and Luis Posada Carriles.")

A Critique of Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London & New York: Penguin, 1999), $15.00.


"Most of us can no longer take either Christian or Marxist postponements and reassurances seriously. But this does not, and should not, prevent us from finding inspiration and encouragement in the New Testament and Manifesto. For both documents are expressions of the same hope: that some day we shall be willing and able to treat the needs of all human beings with the respect and consideration with which we treat the needs of those closest to us, those whom we love."

I.

Richard Rorty is one of the most influential contemporary American philosophers. He is read and quoted by academics working in the humanities as well as by theoretically-minded persons in law and government. He has been invited to the White House, a rare privilege for a philosopher who has spoken publicly and bravely on controversial issues, such as the debate concerning "political correctness" in our schools. Rorty writes for popular magazines and scholarly journals, and has now achieved the ultimate success for a philosopher in the contemporary world -- pop icon status. He is often misquoted by scruffy young men and women in Bohemian coffee houses, usually located in the proximity of New York University (NYU), who insist that Rorty proves that all values are relative, "so nothing is, like, really right or wrong."

Professor Rorty is routinely mentioned in the same breath with the Left Bank "Masters of Thought" deemed fashionable at any given time. When I was a law student in the eighties, the phrase was "Derrida, Foucault and Rorty"; these days it may be "Derrida, Lacan and Rorty"; or maybe a more politically correct combination of names that, say, features a gay French psychoanalyst; or perhaps some other bespectacled hero who is this week's glitzy Parisian genius.

I was not surprised to read in Paul Berman's book about the sixties of a popular slogan in Paris during May, 1968: "Marx, Marcuse, Mao." Maybe some day, in the U.S., it will be "James, Dewey, Rorty." To the extent that such a thing is possible, Richard Rorty and Cornel West are the "cool" philosophers in American universities. Both are well on their way to being pictured on t-shirts. Whether such a fate is a curse or blessing is unclear.

Although some of my opinions may be characterized as quite radical, I disagree with many of Rorty's philosophical arguments, which seem deeply flawed to me, even as I reject many of his conclusions. I wish to examine one brief essay by Rorty, which is fairly typical of his work, and yet is sufficiently concise to serve as a target for an Internet comment and critique.

I should note that Rorty has made his patriotism and commitment to America very clear. That is something on which we do agree. Neither of us defines "patriotism" simplistically. My criticisms should not be regarded as in any way a denial of the richness in Rorty's work, which is always well-written, scholarly, provocative, elegant, learned and well-worth studying, especially by those of us who disagree with him. I have read sections of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and many of Rorty's collected essays. I am now reading his major work, again, straight through, along with critiques and commentaries by scholars.

My fundamental disagreement concerns Rorty's epistemological skepticism and his metaethical stance. There is very little disagreement between us, I suspect, concerning the resolution of specific issues in politics and applied ethics, since both of us will probably arrive at results in keeping with the liberal positions on most of these controversies. The exception may be the terrorism issue. I am probably more of a Hawk than Rorty, which may be a result of my proximity to the tragedy in New York on 9/11 (though I cannot claim the status of a direct victim), as well as resulting from other biographical factors that are not amenable to philosophical analysis. For present purposes, anyway, I will leave all "applied" ethics aside.

I will also try to keep citations down to a minimum, since this is the Internet and my readers, if there are any, are likely to be those same scruffy young men and women in search of material to "borrow" for their term papers. Help yourselves, folks. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

Finally, most of what I say has been said by others, sometimes at excruciating length, in the unending quest by academics for publications leading to tenure. I make no claims to originality nor to being "on the same level" with Rorty, as a philosopher, except that we are both human beings interested in very difficult abstract questions. Unlike Professor Rorty, it has been made very clear to me that philosophy is not for the likes of me, usually such "instructions" are provided by very young people who may not appreciate that they are playing with fire. I am quite sure that philosophy is for the likes of me and you.

II.

I now turn to the essay entitled "Ethics Without Principles," in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 72. I favor an ethics of duty or principles, a deontological ethics; Rorty does not. The philosophers whose work has meant the most (to me) in thinking about ethics and ethical dilemmas are, first of all, Immanuel Kant; and also the more recent American thinkers developing Kant's insights, including John Rawls, Robert Nozick and Ronald Dworkin.

Although these men have been influenced by many more philosophers than Kant and there are great differences among them, my views concerning ethics would probably be placed with theirs, in the same philosophical category. On other foundational issues, my positions tend to be identified with phenomenology and the "hermeneutic" tradition.

No one accepts all of Kant's writings as "dogmatic" or some such nonsense. I certainly don't. The absurd caricature of Kant as a sort-of philosophical Torquemada is nowhere to be found in Rorty's highly sophisticated work. I doubt that many philosophers, including Kant's critics, would wish to deny the unique importance of Kant's Critical philosophy for the modern world and his great influence in contemporary ethical theory. I am sure that Rorty would be the first to admit this. In fact, it is precisely this influence that he is reacting against.

I have always believed that Kantian moral thinking needs to be supplemented with a morality that is more aspirational and social, less focused on the individual rights-bearer and moral agent, leading to a communitarian fulfillment. Paul Ricoeur has been described as a "Hegelian Kantian," which sounds about right to me. Rorty opens his essay by reminding us of his general view of truth:

"Pragmatists, in contrast, treat inquiry -- in both physics and ethics -- as the search for adjustment [emphasis added] and in particular for that sort of adjustment to our fellow humans which we call the search for acceptable justification and eventual agreement [emphasis added]: I have argued that we should substitute this latter search for the traditional descriptions of the quest for truth." (p. 72.)

For most of us non-philosophers, however, truth is not a search for "acceptable justification and eventual agreement." Even fellow pragmatist philosophers have problems with this claim. For instance, Susan Haack writes:

" 'True' is a word [that] we apply to statements about which we agree; but that is because, if we agree that things are thus and so, we agree that it is true that things are thus and so. But we may agree that things are thus and so when it is not true that things are thus and so. ... So true is not a word that truly applies to all or only statements about which we agree; and neither, of course, does calling a statement true mean that it is a statement we agree about."

We critical- or phenomenological-realists believe that truth has something to do with the way things are, "out there" or "objectively." We insist that what makes some justifications acceptable and procuring agreement from others likely, is that their experience of reality confirms our own, suggesting that something not merely about language or ourselves, but also about reality itself is at the center of the concept of truth. This need not commit us to forms of metaphysical realism, but it may lead to more modest positions, such as Professor Hilary Putnam's "internal" realism.

I was at a Barnes & Noble bookstore recently and found it necessary to visit the bathroom. I asked the salesperson, "Where is the bathroom?" I did not pose this question hoping that the response would be "true" only to the extent that the statement was "justifiable," that is, to the extent that we might agree to call it "true." If the salesperson had asked whether I wanted a "spiritual" bathroom or suggested that the section of the store devoted to psychology books might be appropriate, this would not have been a satisfactory answer. (On second thought, relieving myself in the psychology section of the store could be highly "therapeutic.")

I walked to the section of the store to which I was directed and found the bathroom. Reality said "yes" to the salesperson's statement, fortunately, given the state of my bladder. Hence, there was a subsequent likely agreement between us on the accuracy of the following statement: "The bathroom is on the second floor."

This accuracy was not merely the result of the meaning of words, but had a little something to do with the contents and distribution of the store, with the fact that there was indeed a bathroom where the salesperson said that there would be one.

My scruffy friends in the coffee shop will object at this point and say (as I used to say, in my callow youth): "Hey, 'bathroom' is a concept, man, and it all depends on how you define it." They may also object that I merely brought my pre-understood definition of the exact "words" in the salesperson's statement to my "experience" of the actual bathroom, which I then "interpreted," so as to adjust to my reality.

I am not convinced by this. My encounter with objective or empirical reality allowed me to determine the accuracy of a statement used by someone who understood the word and concept "bathroom" pretty much as I did, in a way confirmed by our mutual acquaintance with the geography of the real world. We did not conjure the bathroom, the bookstore, or the world into existence by the use of words; but came to understand and navigate empirical reality better by our shared creation of linguistic realities linked to and measured against, that prior external world (noumenal reality).

Our statements were "coherent" in themselves because they fit our experience of the world -- or at least of the Barnes & Noble "Superstore" at Lincoln Center, where I made some "super" purchases after visiting the "super" bathroom. Derrida's pronouncement that there is "nothing outside the text" depends on the crucial word "text." In addition to empirical reality, of course, we also inhabit social realities. This means, like it or not, moral realities. Suppose the salesperson had said:

"I hope that you explode. I am not going to tell you where the bathroom is because you are an evil absolutist, who believes not only that there is such a thing as truth, but even good as opposed to evil."

I might ponder the ethics of the situation, refrain from violence or insults and come to the conclusion (after meditating) that Professor Rorty's theory may not be all that helpful after all. Professor Rorty claims: "there is no distinction in kind between what is useful and what is right." (p. 73.) Furthermore, moral obligation is strictly a matter of self-interest and convenience, so that the requirement to "adjust one's behavior to the needs of other human beings" is only a matter of self-interest in the final analysis. (p. 74.)

We Kantians -- especially those of us who are warm-hearted and fun at parties -- think that this confuses duty with self-interest, a point which Rorty acknowledges. We think that there is such a thing as altruism and that it is sometimes rationally commanded or required of us to behave not simply in a neutral manner, but altruistically. In other words, we may have to behave in a disinterested fashion. We may have to sacrifice our desires to the requirements of duty. I may consider not self-interest, but duty, as the essential ethical criteria, thereby placing the interests of others ahead of my own.

This is to say nothing of love, which entirely supersedes the strictures of morality. Duty (Kant) is what we are required to give to others; love (Jesus) is a total and unconditional giving of the self, far beyond what anyone has a "right" to expect from us, or what may be required of us. The first, to borrow Lon Fuller's terms, is a minimal standard of sociability (the morality of duty); the second is an ideal of humanity (the morality of aspiration). In any conflict between love and ethics, for me, love wins. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")

What would Jesus or Kant do in this situation? Perhaps both would counsel understanding of the unhelpful salesperson and a universal principle of concern and respect for a fellow human being obviously suffering from an unfortunate immersion in postmodernist discourse. Perhaps the salesperson has read one too many of Professor Rorty's books, failing to notice the good professor's smile in his cover photographs and his warning that "cruelty" is the worst accusation that can be made against any of us. Patience and compassion would be my response, together with a more diligent search for the men's room, which attests to my pragmatist sympathies.

But Professor Rorty says that "there was no point at which practical reasoning stopped being prudential and became specifically moral, no point at which it stopped being merely useful and started being authoritative." (p. 74.)

I wonder if someone were to offer the salesperson a fee for saying that there was no bathroom and if it were clear to this salesperson that such a self-interested act would not be discovered, then would it be right, "pragmatically," for the salesperson to lie to me? -- because there would be a selfish "gain" and no disadvantage in doing so? Is something other than "usefulness" the criterion by which to judge the quality of the salesperson's actions in such a situation? How do we define this "usefulness"? Game theorists always agree that it is best to take the money and run, especially if they are from New Jersey.

My guess is that we will end by re-introducing morality into the analysis under the rubric of "usefulness." I conclude -- I know that this is controversial -- that such a self-interested falsehood might be in keeping with pragmatic wisdom about the most practical (i.e., self-interested) solution in any given case. This is what the Hegelian-Kantian cannot accept.

The disagreement between Professor Rorty and many of his critics centers on the usefulness of the concept of what is "universal" or general human nature. Rorty rejects the notion. I like it and find it highly plausible. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")

I think that there are aspects of human beings that are pretty universal. We are all going to die, so that is a good place to start looking for the universal. This dispute also concerns the need for rationality in moral deliberations. Maybe the universality of morality and moral experience in human lives has something to do with that grim reaper we will all get to meet, eventually, and who may be a nihilist. This is to say nothing of our possible encounters with IRS agents. OAE?

Compassion and not rationality, according to Schopenhauer's development of Kantian ethics, is the basis of morality. Professor Rorty suggests that imagination (literature) and not reason, sentiment and not cogitation, is the key to the moral faculty. To which I answer: Why believe that what we call "thinking" is separable from such things as "sensibility," or that feeling is ever really distinct from calculation and reasoning? How do we define "intelligence"?

Imagination is simply a part of what we call reasoning, practical rationality or judgment. After all, we are not (thank goodness!) accountants of the spirit, equipped with moral calculators at birth, and such a possibility -- an army of philosophical moral auditors -- is certainly not a Kantian ideal. "Use them after their deserts, and who shall escape whipping?" Who indeed. OAE lawyers? Stuart Rabner? Hardly.

Persons who are religious do not believe in a God who is an auditor of moral lives. None of us would survive such scrutiny. A loving God's concern, or a conception of love as the key to human self-fulfillment, is transcendent of all such rules, which are designed for the messy reality we inhabit in this world of suffering and loss. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus explains that heaven is right here and now, so is God, both are love.

When confronted with these issues, pragmatists will go into contortions seeking to define "self-interest" to mean "selflessness," or "long-term self-interest for the species," or something else that looks a lot like altruism in the first place. The Kantian says simply "no, you must behave ethically -- even when you don't want to, but would much prefer to be evil."

Being "evil," as Milton's Lucifer might attest (how do we swear him in?), may be more fun (for some persons), or even addictive, but it will never be productive or helpful in any meaningful effort to improve the real quality of our lives. Truth-telling is a duty which we must not, in principle, deviate from on the basis of self-interest, though many of us will often do so, myself among them. Would you agree, Dr. Terry Tuchin of the C.I.A.? My torturers and thieves -- a Jew who became Mengele -- all disapprove of my "ethics." ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

The reality of human fallibility does not undermine ethics; rather, it confirms the need for ethical thinking. Time, place and manner become crucial considerations when it comes to truth-telling, for example, though Kant would disapprove. When truth is sought from you publicly, when it matters, then tell it, no matter what the consequences may be. When you're trying to get a date for Saturday night, a little embelishment is permissible. (See Woody Allen's "date scene" in Play it Again Sam.)

I would not go as far as Kant does on this point. Nonetheless, I agree that something more than self-interest will determine the rare occasions on which it may be morally permissible and even altruistic to lie. Never lie for twenty-one years, Terry! For instance, when the KGB enters my home asking for my loved-ones who are hiding in the closet, it may be O.K. to lie (despite Kant), but not necessarily for self-interested reasons. Out of love or compassion, perhaps, and at great personal risk -- for reasons that are the opposite of self-interested -- it may be peachy-keen to lie. ("On Bullshit.")

I am suggesting that there is a kind of "moral reality" like empirical reality existing "out there," objectively, arising from our interactions with other people, that tells us when we have screwed up. Not so, says Professor Rorty: "... the temporal circumstances of life are difficult enough without sadomasochistically adding immutable, unconditional obligations." (p. 76.)

Yet we do not "add" those obligations; they are simply "there" in our lives, as a matter of being human and living with other humans, whether we want them to be there or not.

Death is also "there" for us pretty involuntarily. And this is not unrelated or irrelevant to the presence of moral concerns. We cannot decide that, because things are "difficult enough," we should be permitted to escape death. We will die soon enough, so that it is a matter of concern to us now what sort of character we build in the world and how we leave things for others when we depart the scene.

Love is also something that is simply felt or experienced, like the proverbial boulder in our path. Love is something which often has nothing to do with feeling pleasure or with what is convenient. Woody Allen makes the point briefly: "The heart wants what it wants." It is sometimes anything but pleasant loving another human being. Yet such a feeling -- and much more than a feeling -- is inescapable, when it is real, also overwhelming. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")

Morality does not exist because it is easy nor because it is difficult for that matter. To use Rorty's analogy, humans cannot avoid developing and using language in order to live socially. By the same token, they will develop or discover and use morality as part of the rationality of sociability, in order to live with other people as fully human beings in large communities.

Development of a conscience is something that happens -- or should happen -- early in life. Great trauma may deform a person's capacity for moral development, but then much else will go awry with that unfortunate individual. With moral awareness, even powerful hatred and disgust -- rage at the exploiters and monsters of this world -- can be kept at bay. A challenge for many young men, especially in American urban centers, is coping with a monster within the self greedy for violence and bloodshed, slouching towards Bethlehem. ("What a man's gotta do.")

All of this implies that morality possesses an inherent objectivity or an internal logic. A comparison to the work of Lon Fuller on the logic and morality of law comes to mind. Right action remains "right" whether it is difficult or easy, whether we like it or not, whether we "agree" to it or not. An entirely amoral creature would be a kind of monster, not what we think of as a fully human being. A morally flawed person is what I call "normal" (human) as opposed to "beyond morality" (inhuman). Think of Adolf Eichman, who was certainly beyond morality as we understand the word, only in his own mind (based on a misreading of Kant), where all obligations ended with rule-following. In Cool Hand Luke the guard who explains that he's just doing his job, is told: "Calling it your job don't make it right, boss." Abu Ghraib? OAE? Robot bombs? All such horrors must remain unacceptable regardless of who is responsible for ordering such actions. Persons are never "collateral damage," never a means rather than an end. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

Professor Rorty will respond that there is no such thing as "a fully human being," in a transcendent sense, and that we can dispense with this concept anyway. I disagree. I would invite Professor Rorty to a little chat with someone like Eichman, having no doubt at all that Professor Rorty will quickly conclude that something important to human beings is "missing" from such a person's mind and heart. I believe that in Rorty's best work he disagrees with himself on this issue:

"Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity [emphasis added] to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people." Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: 1989), p. xvi. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

Why create solidarity? Is it not because we identify with the plight of others based on our rational recognition of sameness, which then allows us to imagine ourselves into the plight of another person? Is there not a crucial loss of humanity in a person who is incapable of such identification? There are such people. I've met a few of them. They enjoy inserting "errors" in the writings of others, especially persons whose intellects and talents are envied by these monsters. Rorty's discussion of solidarity often relies on a tacit appeal to an assumed understanding of human nature, a notion of what people are like, which is the very concept that he wishes to deny.

III.

Rorty has a tendency to introduce value terms into his analysis without justifying their use or providing an adequate basis for them. Thus, he says: "We would not wish to be well-fed while our children [or our parents?] go hungry; that would be unnatural." (p. 78.)

Why not be "unnatural"? How is this word understood? Is there such a thing as "unnatural"? Does "nature" tell us what is unnatural? If so, then how does this fit with Rorty's claim that we decide such things on our own?

If it turns out that reality or nature says "yes" or "no" to our descriptions, to our language constructions, so that what works has as much to do with "the way things are" as with the ways in which we "use language," then as Simon Blackburn suggests, Rorty's own position is undermined.

Many of the same doubts can be expressed when Rorty speaks of "better justificatory ability" (p. 82.) What makes it "better"? This is not clear. If the answer is that it helps us to "cope," then the question becomes: Why does it help us to cope? What helps us cope is what comports with the requirements of an independent and objective world that is stubbornly resistant to our efforts to tame or control it. Yet this independence and objectivity are what Rorty wishes to deny.

At the deepest level of his analysis, Rorty is concerned to challenge "the picture of the self which philosophers have expressed in terms of the division between 'reason' and the 'passions' ... Ever since Plato, the West has construed the reason-passion distinction as paralleling the distinction between the universal and individual, as well as between unselfish and selfish actions." (p. 77.)

At least in the contemporary re-workings of the Kantian-Hegelian tradition, as transformed by Freudian psychoanalysis (the "id" is associated with the "noumenal self," while "ego" is associated with the "phenomenal self"), it seems possible to speak of a coincidence of passion and reason, conscious and unconscious in one self -- which exists both "inside" and "outside" of the subject (socially), as Rorty wishes. It is one, and only one self that feels and thinks while also being an agent in the world. Granted, there can be no absolute division between the two aspects of the self. Nevertheless, the self may have multiple aspects, becoming a shape-shifter in our circus-like social settings today. Derrida?

Our "this worldly" existence is not all there is to us. We also live in a shared world of ideas and aesthetic values. You may call them "systems of meaning or meanings." There is some life yet in those ancient metaphors derived from Plato, by way of Kant. And if Rorty is correct to say that no, metaphor is all there is; then you pick your metaphor, Professor Rorty, and I will stay with mine. In fact, one way of thinking of postmodernist culture is in terms of a forced choice among metaphors. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")

I will continue to think of an objective external world that contains such things as bathrooms. I will also think in terms of a valid and independent (in the sense of objective) and shared moral order that tells me when things are right or wrong, that lets me know quickly enough when I have made mistakes, sometimes quite painfully. Perhaps what I am getting at is related to what Roger Scruton describes as "culture."

To admit that our reasoning is always only "ours," is not to deny that some reasonings are better than others; some maps are better than others; some interpretations of a text are better than others -- whether the text in question is a traffic signal, or a clock, or the U.S. Constitution, and this is not only a matter of how language is used, but mostly it is the result of "how things are."

There is more than agreement to the concept of truth. The same applies when it comes to moral truth: Reality will say "yes" or "no" to us. I am not willing to give up just yet on the possibility of transcendence. Accordingly, I prefer to direct myself towards the "yes" rather than the "no," towards love and not hate, while always insisting on justice.

Rorty raises doubts in this essay about the philosophical or rational plausibility of a generalized or universal moral concern for humanity, as opposed to loved-ones or those who are close to us.

Why should we care about the homeless person on the corner? Professor Rorty writes: "It is neither irrational nor unintelligent to draw the limits of one's moral community at a national or racial, or gender border. But it is undesirable -- morally undesirable." (p. 81.)

The best answer that our civilization has given, concerning the rationality -- the key difference between us, I surmise, concerns the scope of "rationality" -- of universal moral empathy is derived from the Hebrew Bible, and later from Plato by way of Christianity and Kant. It is simply that this homeless person on the corner is you. He is Christ, for the Christian, just as you are, made of the same star-stuff, burdened with the same sorts of guilt, pain, joy, fear of death, and potential capacity for love and achievement. ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")

"I tell you solemnly," as President George W. Bush's favorite philosopher once said, "in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me." (Matthew 25:34-40.)

It is not all that great a distance from this truth to: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all [persons] are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights."

Or "From each according to his ability to each according to his need." (Karl Marx)

Abu Ghraib? Robot bombs? Are we torturing and killing Christ every day? ("Cornel West On Universality" and "Would Jesus be a Christian?")

If this humanism is naive, foolish or gullible, then I will be happy to be those things, too. My guess is that I will have lots of company, including Professor Rorty.

Cornel West on Multiculturalism and Universality.

Unfortunately the image accompanying this post has been blocked by a new virus. It was an image of a strong African man holding a white child in his arms that may be found at: http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/shimages/vvimages/inamerica5.jpg

This image is found offensive by people, who also seem to find many of these posts offensive. We must not allow racists or antisemites to silence us. We must never give in to hatred or intimidation. It still amazes me that this image of an African-born man holding, loving and protecting a child is more disturbing to American officials than pornography.



Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), $19.95.

"The distinctive appeal of American pragmatism in our postmodern moment is its unashamedly moral emphasis and its unequivocally ameliorative impulse. In this world-weary period of pervasive cynicisms, nihilisms, terrorisms, and possible extermination, there is a longing for norms and values that can make a difference, a yearning for principled resistance and struggle that can change our desperate plight."

Western societies are burdened with an increasingly intense struggle over multiculturalism and a related concern to avoid the dangers of racial and ethnic factionalism and ideological division. We wish to see ourselves as members of families and communities, as citizens of nations and yet still members of a single species, nation, family and religous affiliation, striving to achieve peaceful coexistence with others in recognition of that shared humanity. We are uncertain about:

"... how we think of universality when it has been used as a smoke screen for a particular group. How do we preserve notions of universality given the fact that various other particularities -- traditions, heritages, communities, voices and what have you -- are moving closer to the center of the historical stage, pushing off those few which had served as the centering voices between 1492 and [1945?]"

Cornel West, "Diverse New World," in Debating P.C.: The Controversy of "Political Correctness" on College Campuses (New York: Dell, 1992), p. 327.

If we agree that one monolithic understanding of Western culture is unattractive or evil, that one understanding of what our responsibilities are, as human beings, is no longer plausible because it is too exclusive, then we should not feel obligated to discard the ideas of universality nor of cultural truth (especially complex ideas of such truth) in their entirety. We should not decide that all of the Western tradition is in need of revision or dismissal, or that we can do without it. We can not do without it. It is our tradition. It enriches us.

Race, ethnicity, sexual-preference and heritage matter -- but some things matter more. I suggest that the things which matter most are those which are fundamental and not parochial or trivial in our tradition. I believe that what unites us is more important than what divides us: decency, integrity, respect for human rights and the infinite and absolute moral worth of persons -- of all persons, regardless of race or class, religion or gender, or sexual orientation.

Skepticism about a single human nature, or an imperial conception of Western civilization, should not lead us to discard the unifying ideal of a "family of humanity," nor our need to identify with those who are externally different from us yet internally alike -- alike in frailty and suffering, and in the unwillingness to surrender freedom, as well as in the need for love.

In opposing "cultural imperialism" and all forms of racism, together with homophobia and sexism -- all of which I detest -- it should be clear that I do not wish to become a different sort of "politically correct" bigot. I have no desire to indulge in the mirror-image of those hateful attitudes that we have come to regard as benighted.

Hatred of whites is just as loathsome as hatred of blacks; antisemitism refers to the hatred of all semites, whether they are Muslims or Jews; religious intolerance is unacceptable when directed at any group; sexism in all of its forms is vile.

Professor West makes the point that we are all one species, one people, with a common genetic heritage and a shared ancestry, deriving from the material origins of the universe and from the emergence of human beings in the African plains. What is more, we are all made of that primal "stuff" of the universe. As a species, and this comes as a shock to racists, we have common ancestors in Africa -- as I never tire of explaining to racists -- despite our current physical differences.

This is to suggest that we give up the quest for "purity" of race or aristocratic pedigree. We must understand that, like it or not, we are in this situation together. We sink or swim together, as a species. We belong to one another, so that the great artistic and scientific achievements also belong to all of us, make us all richer, but may even be thought of as the collective creative achievements of all of us. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

No, this is not to deny the contributions of individuals of genius. Yet we must not forget that there are necessary conditions to make, even the emergence of genius, possible. A great film maker born before the invention of the movie camera, will never become what he or she might have been. Persons denied basic education, something which happens to billions of human beings on the planet today, will never become the scientists, artists, or philosophers that they might become. This impoverishes all of us. No wonder they want to silence me for saying these disturbing things.

If one ultimate or fundamental human act is that of artistic creation, then each of us is a participant in that act when any of us engages in it, especially when creative effort leads to the very best results by the finest artists. Take pride in the achievements of Shakespeare, Mozart or Da Vinci, of Jane Austen or Paul Robeson, Cervantes or James Baldwin because they are also your achievements. Do not be misled by differences in ethnicity or skin color into believing that such a person's achievements can not be your own. The greatest cultural achievements are yours as much as anyone else's, they exist "for" you.

Artists create works and (appropriately) attach their own names to them. Nevertheless, works of art and all that they inspire belong to the tradition, finally, and to the culture and species. Plato's writings are now part of the cultural legacy of people living thousands of years after the philosopher's death, in a time and place that he could not have imagined. Those puzzling dialogues still live and inspire readers to ponder philosophical ideas, even in rejecting Plato's solutions. They are invitations to philosophizing that are all the more welcome because of their ability to assume a hybrid form today, for the new t.v.-reared subjects engaged in philosophical endeavor. They appeal to everybody. They should. They're great.

Let us admit that it is o.k. to say that much, regardless of whether Plato was male or female, straight or gay (and he probably was gay, though he would not have recognized the concept), and whatever the degree of darkness in the shade of his complexion. Let us be willing to recognize another great writer today, whatever his or her color, ethnicity, or economic class, without worrying too much about whether some are offended by the work this person produces. I doubt the quality of any work of art that is not found offensive by at least one person who comes into contact with it. Professor West points out:

"Europe has always been multicultural. Shakespeare borrowed from Italian narratives and pre-European narratives. When we think of multiculturalism, we're so deeply shaped by the American discourse of positively valued whiteness and negatively valued blackness, that somehow it's only when black and white folk interact that real multiculturalism is going on. ... But Europe is an ideological construct. It doesn't exist other than in the minds of elites who tried to constitute a homogeneous tradition that could bring together heterogeneous populations -- that's all it is."

Moreover:

"... In responding to these circumstances, the problem has been that most of us function by a kind of self-referential altruism, in which we're altruistic to those nearest to us, and those more distant, we tend to view as pictures rather than as human beings, we do have a common humanity. We must not forget our long historical backdrop. The present is history -- that continues to inform and shape our perceptions and orientations." (History that hurts?)

Debating P.C., pp. 324-325. ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")

And finally:

"The political challenge is to articulate universality in a way that is not a mere smokescreen for someone else's particularity. We must preserve the possibility of universal connection. That's the fundamental challenge. Let's dig deep enough within our heritage to make that connection to others."

Ibid., at p. 331 (emphasis added). ("Jacques Derrida's 'Philosophy as Jazz.'")

One of the things that acquisition of a tradition -- such as the Western philosophical tradition -- can do for us is to allow for a Sartre-like "totalization" of the reading experience, so as to construct a community of fellow readers or a "sharing-with" other students of the tradition. To philosophize, or just to read, is already an entry into the social, political, communal realities of our world. This is another important benefit of the classics: they provide us with instant community.

In my writings and in every attempt that I make to articulate my thoughts, I hope to engage the reader's attention and invite agreement, but I prefer to offend him or her rather than apathy or to produce the indifference of the banal and harmless sentiment contained in a greeting card. I hope to reach that center of value in the reader that is like mine, by reaching my own center of value. I hope to be human as opposed to merely male, Latino (whatever that means), ex-Catholic, socialist, heterosexual, but most of all I insist on being FREE.

Cornel West on Kolakowski and "Combative Spirituality."

The Cornel West Reader (New York: Perseus Books, 1999), $20.95.

"When you talk about hope, you have to be a long distance runner. This is again so very difficult in our culture, because the quick fix, the overnight solution, mitigates against being a long distance runner in the moral sense, the sense of fighting because it's right, because it's moral, because it's just. That kind of hope linked to combative spirituality is what I have in mind."



Cornel West, in a much more accomplished and successful way than I can hope to achieve, has sought to bring together his life-experiences as an African-American intellectual with his theoretical concerns as an important philosopher:

"My work is a feeble attempt to understand and respond to the guttural cry that erupts from the depths of the soul of each of us. The existential quest for meaning and the political struggle for freedom sit at the center of my thought. My writings focus on the specific and contemporaneous ways in which we grapple with concrete and universal issues of life and death, oppression and resistance, joy and sorrow."

The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. xv.

In a provocative essay examining the philosophy of religion of Leszek Kolakowski, West writes from the heart:

"... human beings must learn how to be failures and how to cry for help while acknowledging that this very capacity to learn and wisdom to cry out is a form of empowerment from a Reality greater than human beings that keeps people struggling and living. The major foes are self-deception, for example, forms of happiness that are really types of bad faith, and self-deification, for example, the refusal to acknowledge the need for divine help or aid."

The Cornel West Reader, p. 388.

And he concludes:

"Kolalowski links the religious conception of learning how to be a failure yet avoiding insanity to God’s inability to commit suicide. This crucial divine inability (even Nietzsche has God killed by humans!) confines evil to a separation from God -- that is, Sin -- that is moral, not ontological. The world is viewed as essentially good, yet existentially evil. On this Christian view, a deep sense of the tragic is required, yet the world is not inherently tragic."

The Cornel West Reader, pp. 388-389.

A friend has guided my steps towards the rediscovery and study of some key passages from Augustine’s Confessions and other works, as well as interpretations of them -- all of which, I am ashamed to admit, I knew hardly at all (despite having survived examinations dealing with the material since my Catholic high school days). I have now returned to Augustine’s ideas in an effort to make up for lost time:

"As the mind, then, itself gathers the knowledge of corporeal things through the senses of the body, so of incorporeal things through itself. Therefore it knows itself also through itself, since it is incorporeal, for if it does not know itself, it does not love itself."

Augustine, "On the Trinity," Book IX, Chap. III, from Basic Writings of St. Augustine, quoted in The Age of Belief (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1954), p. 34.

Through participation in the memory of ideas transmitted by our civilization -- that is, through philosophical effort -- we come to know ourselves, and to know ourselves, for the Christian philosopher and especially in the gnostic tradition, is also to know God. It is to know love as a healing force in our lives. We must discover, Augustine suggests, what we have always known. "We must remember to remember." ("The Allegory of the Cave" then "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

This neo-Platonic effort of recollection, which begins with our shared language, need not involve the acceptance of a particular dogma, religious or otherwise, but rather, it has to do with the acceptance of a tradition and of the choice to embrace a particular attitude and disposition in life -- the choice to remain an individual, a person -- seeking to abide by the moral law, yet finding one’s own way to “love” and be of service to others. See Irving Singer, The Pursuit of Love (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1994), p. 144 (“Love and Do as You Will”).

The point at which we touch bottom in the self, at which we strike the essence of the self, is the point at which we find not only the source of memory, but also (for the religious person) the divine. "Knowledge of ourselves," say the mystics, "is knowledge of God."

For the non-religious person, the point of contact is with that structure in which we participate and which contains all of us, call it our shared culture, and which is nonetheless much larger than we are or ever will be. Perhaps both are speaking of the same entity. (See "Pieta.")

Think of each person as occupying a tiny point in an infinitely complex and fine web or network of relations that stretches back to the origins of the universe and forward until -- and I know that this is a paradox -- the end of time, so that even the tiniest gestures and effects have a purpose and meaning, they are the proverbial flutterings of a butterfly, a meaning that may not be seen by any one of us from any single perspective or at any one time. We experience ourselves as fragments, yet we must believe ourselves to be parts of a vast whole.

Do we believe that everything somehow makes sense in the grand scheme of things? Not necessarily, not anymore. To speak of an "implicate order" (David Bohm) or of a larger coherence is not -- not at all -- to speak from a rational and secular standpoint, such as the one that I defend, necessarily to accept any kind of theodicy that says "everything is for the best" or that "we live in the best of all possible worlds." Much less is it to claim that those of us who suffer should not bother ourselves with thinking about the social injustices that cause us to suffer, nor trouble ourselves to replace political leaders or forces exploiting us because we should trust in a superior intelligence that watches over us or in a coherence that we only dimly apprehend. This is the sort of attitude that makes religion, as Marx claimed, the "opium of the people."

The kind of religion that I respect inspires a form of resistance to unjust power -- Professor West calls it a "combative spirituality" -- on behalf of very worldy forms of social meliorism, even as the metaphysical optimism that I have discussed also suggests that things may never be as bleak or as meaningless as they seem.

This gamble provides some hope for those of us who want to believe, despite the odds against it, that there are non-religious grounds for insisting that we are each implicated in the lives of all others, that their pain is ours too, and that we must never give in to hatred or vengeance, rage and frustration -- as tempting as these emotions become on occasion -- because those persons who hurt us are more deluded and self-destructive than anything else.

In the end, hatred becomes a form of self-destruction for those who hate. Hate is a kind of cancer that always ends by devouring the host organism. Hatred can perform a distracting function. By hating we numb our own pain, we feel less, directing our energies towards those who hurt us. I refuse to take a step towards becoming what they are. I refuse to diminish my capacity to feel because it is to water down my humanity. I refuse to hate, even as I call for justice. This means that I have no alternative but to accept my pain, to live with suffering, without palliatives: no anesthetic, no hate, no denial of the pain. I also have no alternative but to struggle in order to come to terms with the monsters who have hurt me and so many others. In my struggle against hatred, sometimes I win; sometimes the hatred and disgust I feel at my torturers wins. However, I always keep struggling against those destructive emotions.

Can I believe this? I would like to. There are days when I know that I am in danger of succumbing to rage. And I need all the help that I can get to avoid giving in to despair and fury right now. Norman Mailer says: "the shits are killing us." Maybe some day this will change. For now, we must not be deterred or prevented from struggling on behalf of the causes and values in which we believe, whatever obstacles must be faced and overcome. We will not give up our faith in the healing power of love nor abandon the effort to find love in our lives. We must insist on justice. "Combative spirituality" sounds about right.

R.D. Laing and Evil.

The image that accompanies this post has been blocked by a virus or other "bug." This confirms many of the points that I am making in this article, so that I believe that it should remain as a symbol of what I am attempting to understand and transcend. The image has now been removed altogether, but it may be found with the published version of this essay. The original article has been published by The Society for Laing Studies, and is available at the link provided below. I will not censor my opinions or refrain from expressing them. For as long as I am able to communicate in this blog, I will speak freely.

This essay has been vandalized and repaired after each alteration. Sadly, I expect the censorship, suppression, and vandalism of my work to continue for the foreseeable future.

This essay has been published by The Society for Laing Studies at: http://www.laingsociety.org/colloquia/peaceconflict/natureofevil.jgm.htm

I am very grateful for this publication and for the creation of a link to this blog at that site. This essay has also been selected for inclusion in a Critical Psychiatry web site in the UK. http://www.uea.ac.uk/~wp276/article.htm

R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1961).

Daniel Burston, The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

I.

I remember an old black and white photograph of a boy who appears to be about eight years-old. He is wearing a cloth cap, a thin jacket and his hands are in the air. There is a look of shock, fear and confusion on his face. Snow seems to drift down lazily from a gray sky, other people, men and women as well as other children, are walking or standing near him in a similar pose. They are wearing arm bands with a yellow Star of David. There are soldiers standing near him, wearing heavy coats, carrying weapons, holding large dogs and they seem to be laughing. I don't remember exactly whether the background to this photo is the Warsaw ghetto or the Auschwitz concentration camp, but I think there may be more than one image of this boy in collections of photos of the Holocaust. I think of this image as one of arrival rather than departure.

I see the boy as arriving at a concentration camp. It is an image that has haunted my imagination. I do not know this boy's name. I cannot say for certain what happened to him. It is almost certain that he perished not long after this photo was taken. I find myself becoming emotional even now, as I type these words, and hold the image in my mind. He probably died, along with many others, in a most horrible way, in that hideous factory of death.

I came accross this photo in the seventh grade, when I was studying the Holocaust and purchased a book on the subject that was much too difficult for me then, The War Against the Jews by Lucy S. Dawidowicz. I still have a copy of that book -- which I rediscovered, recently, like an old friend, in a sidewalk bookstall in Manhattan. I recommend this book or any other on this topic -- as painful as it is to read about -- to friends in order to help children to discuss the Holocaust, something which must be a part of the education of every person living in the aftermath of that horror. A new edition of Elie Wiesel's Night may also be perfect for this purpose.

My daughter, Silvia, has studied this episode in human history and the civil rights movement, and we have talked about what they may mean, and whether it is possible to make sense of such events. I hope that we will always do so.

In 1968, another eight year-old boy arrived at Newark airport, on a bitterly cold day in the month of January. He looked a lot like that young German-Jewish boy, decades earlier, arriving at Auschwitz. He also wore an inappropriately thin cloth jacket and a dazed expression. His father had been executed by a firing squad in his native Cuba. His mother had been detained and not permitted to leave the island, not to be reunited with him until months later. He was hungry and frightened. He had not one cent in the world. He was with relatives who may have seen him as an unwanted burden. He did not know the language spoken in this strange, gray and very cold country. As he departed from his native land the previous day, he also had been laughed at by soldiers in military fatigues, carrying weapons. He would also be laughable to his new classmates.

I was the eight year-old boy who arrived at that airport in January of 1968. I did not understand then why people shoot or torture others because of their political beliefs, or for their religious beliefs, why good men and women on both sides in wars and revolutions die and suffer for a "cause," or -- as I soon came to see on American television which, amazingly enough, was available in "living color" -- because of their dark skin.

I am not sure that I understand these things very well even now. I doubt that anyone, especially those "experts" who claim that they know all about it, really does understand any of this. I know that witnessing such things injures people deeply, especially children, for generations to come. I know that injuries done to children hurt them anew each day of their lives. I have come to accept, as well, that if it is true that we are all "trapped in history," to use Tolstoy's phrase, then we cannot escape the tragic and scarring choices that will arise between love and hate, compassion and understanding in our lives.

We will all have to decide whether we wish to stand with those men holding the weapons and laughing or with those women, children and old people with their hands in the air, being marched to their enslavement and murder. This insistence on a choice is one of the legacies of the Holocaust and the attempts at genocide that have followed it. Neutrality in the face of the atrocities of our history is no longer an option, if it ever was. Now take another look at those photos from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo -- at least, the photos that have been released to the world -- and tell me why torture is O.K. when we indulge in it. ("American Doctors and Torture' and "American Legal Ethics Today.")

In the choice between power and pain, I will always choose to share in the pain of the powerless many rather than to wield the power that causes so much pain. I recall the moving words of Robert F. Kennedy -- referring to the assassination of his own "family member" by a white man, at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. -- calling upon those tempted to hate all white men because one white man had been guilty of this single murder, to refrain from hatred and violence, so as work together with persons of all races for a world in which such tragedies would no longer occur.

My own struggle against hatred intensifies, every day, with each newly inserted "error" that is corrected by me, including those discovered and corrected today. Each laceration of my prose is a small taste of that malignancy that is slowly devouring America. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

Many of us will be hurt as children. Many of us will make the wrong choices as a result of these injuries. Many of us will respond to victimization by victimizing others. Many of us will refuse to examine the ways in which we may come to resemble the people who have frightened and hurt us. No one has taught me more about living with and understanding overwhelming emotional pain and the nature of the choices forced upon us all by great evil than the philosophers whose books I have read over the years. From among those thinkers, I wish to focus here on the writings of R.D. Laing.

R.D. Laing remains an important and controversial psychoanalyst and philosopher. His ideas are still provocative and powerful. They continue to irritate the psychiatric establishment. Nothing recommends a thinker better, to my mind, than the ability to irritate the professional and academic establishments years after his death. From my first encounter with Laing's writings in the eighties, as a college student when I heard about him in a philosophy class, I knew that this was a thinker whose ideas I would come to know well. ("Can you lie to yourself?")

I have now read many of Laing's published works and I have read a great deal about him. I am certain that Laing's work has saved lives. It has inspired much interpretative commentary and reaction. In my judgment, Laing's philosophical contributions, apart from his work as a therapist, are significant and place him in the front rank of radical phenomenological thinkers. In what follows, I wish to say something about Laing's understaning of evil, of the harm that we do to one another and to ourselves, and of the unavoidable task of coming to terms with the capacity within each of us both to cause and to suffer, as well as to overcome, such harm.

My method is personal and subjective. It is not an attempt at value-neutrality, scientific objectivity or statistical analysis. My goal is humanistic truth, rather than scientific fact-finding. Like Laing, I am a phenomenologist ("methodological idealism," according to Terry Eagleton) with an interest in the theory of interpretation or "hermeneutics." According to the Dictionary of Philosophy, the word "hermeneutics" means "the theory of interpretation first of texts, and secondly of the whole social, historical and psychological world. The method is contrasted with objective scientific method by Weber and Dilthey."

I begin with (and from) my own limited and partial perspective on things. I do not believe that I can step out of the human condition in order to examine it. I am certain that I participate in what I seek to understand, in the "life-world" of human meanings and interactions, so that any serious effort to know another human being -- including a person who has hurt us -- can only really succeed if there is an opening up to that other person's experience or subjectivity. This is more difficult than it may seem, for this "opening up" must come from a perspective of shared humanity and genuine empathy. No scientific perspective will provide all answers, not even the most important ones, when it comes to human subjectivity or its products. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "Is it rational to believe in God?")

For Laing, there is no way that such communication, authentic communication or understanding, is possible in the absence of a mutual willingness to accept vulnerability, to risk opening up to the full "message" or "meaning" of the Other, and this is either a kind of love or it is nothing:

"When two or more persons are in relation, the behavior of each towards the other is mediated by the experience by each of the other, and the experience of each is mediated by the behavior of each. There is no contiguity between the behavior of one person and that of the other. Much human behavior can be seen as a unilateral or bilateral attempt to eliminate experience. A person may treat another as though he were not a person [because this is always safer]."

Laing said of the genuine effort to communicate with and understand any other human being:

"I think it is clear that by understanding I do not mean a purely intellectual process. For understanding one might say love. But no word has been more prostituted. What is necessary, though not enough, is a capacity to know how the other person is experiencing himself and the world, including oneself. If one cannot understand him, one is hardly in a position to begin to love him in any effective way." (See my forthcoming essay, "Dehumanization.")

I shall begin with Laing's recognition of the capacity for evil within all of us and also for "mystification," that is, the ways in which we mask the harms that we do to others as forms of "concern" for others ("this is for your own good"), and the harms that are done to us within families and social groups as benefits received by us. Laing was particularly troubled that therapists not disguise their own imposition of power upon helpless patients, a process that is never innocent nor entirely apolitical, as ways of "helping" or "loving" them. ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")

No therapist who brings a political agenda to the therapeutic encounter, including any information-gathering mission for the State, can avoid becoming something other than a therapist -- most likely a torturer. Most horrifying of all is the therapist who delights in torture and becomes adept at rationalizing pleasure at inflicting pain as therapy. "We can learn from you," Dr. Mengele said to his victims. Finally, I say a little about Laing's ideas concerning "transcendence" and "love." Love is an ambiguous concept for Laing. He saw that it might be a mask for domination, but also realized that:

"The main fact of life for me is love or its absence. Whether life is worth living depends for me on whether there is love in life. Without a sense of it, or even the memory of an hallucination of it, I would lose heart completely. When one studies human biology, one will hardly ever come accross the term or the concept and very little evidence of it."

I agree with Laing about the crucial importance of love and about the bond that results from genuine communication, which can arise even from a therapeutic relationship.

II.

For Laing, "normality" is a troublesome term. All societies deform and constrain the spiritual possibilities, the freedom and authenticity of persons, by forcing men and women to conform to what is deemed a correct way of being. In other words, to accept a doubtful official "normality" that is actually a kind of madness and violence. This is merely the socially acceptable form of madness and violence -- acceptable and useful to powerful elites and establishments anyway. Some forms of imposed normality are preferable to others. One is much better off in the U.S., coping with social or commercial pressures to purchase a "pet rock," say, than in societies, such as Stalin's Soviet Union, where one is more violently pressured to "conform" or be shipped to the Gulag. (''The Reader': A Movie Review" and "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")

To be sure, there must be standards of social behavior and cooperation among citizens if societies are to work. Yet the process of acculturation and socialization in most families and societies in the contemporary era -- even in nations like the United States and the United Kingdom -- is much more ambitious and devastating (if also more subtle) than such mild phrases may suggest. This process, again, must not be compared to the brutal repressions routinely experienced in totalitarian states, whether of the Right or Left.

Advanced industrialized societies require a certain sort of individual, a "docile subject" (to use Foucault's terminology), willing to perform the duties allotted to him or her without too many inconvenient qualms or hesitations, especially of the annoying moral sort that get in the way of what is advantageous for the collectivity, as defined by a mysterious "they." Thus, it becomes useful to deny the reality of morality. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist.")

Moral freedom may be a universal gift of the human subject, but it is a highly troublesome characteristic when your goal as a dictator is to get people to organize and work on the difficult task of moving, say, all those Jews into those trains and getting them off in a timely fashion to the concentration camps -- which themselves need to be run efficiently, of course, by "true patriots." The same goes for getting citizens to cooperate with the suppression of rights to freedom of expression in all closed societies.

If you want to get good American boys and girls, young men and women, to do the right thing in the fight against terrorism and not to ask too many difficult questions at places like Abu Ghraib, well, it is important to make sure that they have been "brought up right" and been "taught the right values." Evidently, a few of them have been brought up in such a way that the events of Abu Ghraib could take place without too many questions being asked. They are certainly being asked now by judges and prosecutors. ("America's Unethical Medical Torturers" and "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?")

In the U.S. and other free societies, we cannot claim that our citizens are morally perfect, only that the imperfections are discussed publicly, acknowledged when necessary -- or so we hope -- and that the guilty are held accountable, after being accorded due process and only after that guilt is proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Nothing excuses the actions at Abu Ghraib, which are attributable to the individuals who committed them, and not (I continue to hope) to political leaders, like President Bush or Secretary Rumsfeld, who -- far from ordering them --must have understood that they would be held accountable for such actions in the court of public opinion. I cannot accept that the U.S., as a matter of policy, resorts to such tactics. It does not have to do so. Besides, given the propaganda value of those images of torture to the enemies of the U.S., it would be idiotic as well as evil for American political leaders to endorse such tactics, if (as many of my friends believe) they did endorse or call for them. With each day that passes it becomes clearer that some American political leaders are morally responsible for those hideous atrocities. I am sure that they will answer to history for their crimes. ("American Lawyers and Torture" then "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics' and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

The paper trail is still far from conclusive on this question of guilt and the presumption of innocence attaches even to conservative politicians. I hope that no American national political leaders would be so foolish or malignant as to endorse or call for the tortures that took place at Abu Ghraib. Although there are certainly parts of the country where such tactics and cover-ups by the authorities -- especially of what happens in prisons -- are not unusual. New Jersey being the prime example. As always, Shakespeare is way ahead of us, reminding us in Henry V: "Each man's duty is the king's ... but his soul is his own."

The actions of the torturers were their own actions, not the President's or the nation's actions, because they were not -- I will continue to believe this in the absence of conclusive proof to the contrary -- a matter of systematic governmental policy. This is not to underestimate the evil in those actions. It is not to deny that similar and equally evil actions, tortures, take place in the United States and in other countries, and that so-called "therapists" make such tortures possible or even become torturers. Whoever tortures and for whatever reason has done evil.

In March, 2010 -- years after the foregoing paragraphs were written -- it seems clear that my worst fears were confirmed by an even more dismal reality. The U.S. did, in fact, engage in a policy of torture in violation of international and domestic laws as well as our highest law, the U.S. Constitution. This was accomplished with the eager assistance of medical doctors and lawyers who will not be punished for their crimes. In fact, such coopted professionals are the persons entrusted with judging the "ethics" of "lesser persons," such as myself. Far from being disturbed by the opinions of such "professionals" concerning my ethics, I find it sad and unpleasant that I must share my brief sojourn on this earth with such loathsome individuals. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics" then "Is Senator Menendez 'For' Human Rights?")

Laing defines normality, as I say, as a "state of complicity in social fantasy systems" that leads to a surrender of what is most authentically individual and creative in the "normalized" person. Perhaps the utterly banal Adolf Eichman ("I have nothing against Jews, personally"), as described by Hannah Arendt, who is without an iota of rebellion but thoroughly at the service of the society in which he was reared, is the best example of Laing's fully normal person, "ontologically divided" and blissfully unaware of it. It is a frightening thought that any number of potential Eichmans may be found today among American professionals in law, medicine, psychology and even politics. Worse, some of these Eichman-types may be Jews. Ask the authorities why insensitivity and indifference to human suffering is tolerated or deemed a sign of "professionalism":

http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/images/lavecchia.jpg (How do you live with yourselves as members of New Jersey's tarnished Supreme Court?)

In a mood of palpable exasperation at the so-called "normality" of the architects of the Holocausts and Gulags, of the UMAP concentration camps that housed "sexual deviants" during the late sixties in Cuba, and at the U.S. planners of the deliberate destruction of villages in Vietnam in order to "save" them, Laing states:

"What we call normal is the product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience ... It is radically estranged from the structure of being."

Laing believed that this proces of turning persons into "normal" citizens or "docile subjects" might best be described as a brutal violation of people, coupled with the myth that they were really being loved or educated. Some people in extreme cases found it necessary to cope with such a violation, with such a discontinuity between description and reality in their lives, by encouraging powerful forms of dissociation, even madness, as a survival mechanism, in order to avoid the total destruction of their spirits.

Madness might then be seen as a kind of journey inward, or "Metanoia" of the spirit, aimed at putting together the pieces of the psyche and regaining the strength to continue a life's journey in a more integrated and spiritually renewed fashion, one that allows for proper affect and relatedness to others. For some people -- this seems to include quite a few philosophers -- such a journey might become essential to survival, so that even well-intentioned obstructions by psychiatrists or other willing agents of conformity or "adjustment" to some arbitrary standard of morality (or normality) may prove disastrous. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")

"Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death."

Again:

"I shall attempt to develop a little further the concept of transformation of a potentially liberatory kind. I suggested the term Metanoia. It is a traditional term. It is the Greek New Testament term, translated in English as rependance, in French as conversion. Literally, it means a change of mind."

Such a journey, as I shall suggest below, may require some honesty about what it is that one is doing in putting those people on those trains to Auschwitz, for example, or by sending them off to Stalin's Gulags in Siberia, or (to a lesser degree) by torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Ironically, it is the people who formulate policies of "mass extermination" who are rarely seen as crazy themselves -- and this, as Laing suggests, may be the craziest thing of all.

This sort of honesty in a public setting is impossible except in what Karl Popper describes as the "open" societies of the world, where absolute power and authority as well as responsibility, rests exclusively with the people. We are responsible for America's actions on the world stage.

III.

How is this transformation to be effected? What is the mechanism by which the therapeutic relation can help to bring about the successful completion of this spiritual journey? ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

Laing speaks of "transcendence and love," but also of "transcendence through love." The parallels to gnosticism and kaballistic mysticism are obvious and fruitful. Laing recognizes the importance of genuine love as a healing and redemptive power in human life. The love that accepts the "being" of the other, that is respectful of the autonomy and independence of the other. Laing defines authentic love as "that which lets the other be." One is reminded of Augustine's famous sentence, "I hope that you will be." The essence of this love is a total recognition and even a celebration of the other's freedom, autonomy, independence, otherness. It is the opposite of punishing dissidents and sexual "deviants." ("Is there a gay marriage right?")

Useful analogies exist to the writings of Iris Murdoch ("On God and Good") and Jean Paul Sartre ("The Transcendence of the Ego"), but also to the work of John MacMurray, a recent discovery for me. All human being is "being-with," that is, for some idealists, phenomenologists and existentialists, identity only exists or "is" in terms of one's relations with others -- this very much includes the therapeutic relation -- so that the possibilities of "being with," of the development of one's full potentialities in a true loving relation and relatedness to others, are incalculable and unlimited, whereas in our normally alienated and false relatedness to others and the world, in which we are (as Heidegger, of all people, would express it) "forgetful of being" and yet totally "adjusted" ego-selves, we can only live a falsehood. (Again: "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review" and "Can you lie to yourself?")

Each of us must decide at a crucial stage in our lives whether to live our truths or to dwell in falsehood. The path to salvation is only open to those who choose their truth and their accompanying pain, who choose "themselves" in Nietzsche's language, as excruciating and devastating as this may be, despite the advice of therapists who would have us "adjust" and "forget."

It is all too easy to be filled with frustration and anger in the "absolutely normal" condition of the "true believer," who is typically found in totalitarian societies and, occasionally, in liberal societies too, alienated from his or her true self, in a state of fragmentation. In such a state, we shrivel up and spiritually, we die, or at least some of us do. It is then possible for us to act, seemingly without moral qualms -- for example, by failing to attend to our responsiblities or to the harm that we may cause in this way, like New Jersey's judiciary and soiled legal profession -- or, much worse, in those "closed" societies where such a thing is possible for some very alienated people, by ushering neighbors into the crematoria without any pangs of conscience, or by serving as criminals and torturers for the State, or by betraying family members or friends by informing against them to State officials for a small fee. ("Crimes Against Humanity in New Jersey.")

In a less exlicit way than Jung, Laing gestures at the need for a gnostic encounter with the "numinous," a re-connection with the self-validating mystical experience -- so similar to the experience of the schizophrenic journey -- underlying all religious symbols and archetypes. Commenting on the notable affinities between Jung and Laing, Professor Daniel Burston says:

"Laing's affinities with (and indebtedness to) Jung become even more obvious when he details the nature and extent of our collective alienation from the 'inner' world and condemns the ego as an agent of adaptation to 'external' reality, equating it with the 'false self.' Though he never said so succintly, the Freudian view of the ego evoked his contempt because of the premium it placed on adapting to reality, relinquishing fantasy, and so on; in this way, he felt, it devalued contact with the realms of reverie and contemplation that earlier civilizations had cultivated carefully. By Laing's reckoning, our estrangement from phantasy[sic.] and 'inner' experience is just as detrimental to our sanity, in the long run, as the psychotic's estrangement from the external world around him."

A balanced and centered reorientation towards others allowing equal importance to the inner and outer human realities might be described as the fulfillment of the schizophrenic journey. It can result from a re-connection to the archetypal images and spiritual sources within the self that allow us to open up to others, lovingly and peacefully. For this purpose of reintegration, art and especially cinema, can be essential to healing and alleviating human psychological pain. ("'Finding Neverland': A Movie Review" and "'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")

The freedom that belongs to us, then, is the freedom that comes from "owning one's own life," achieving individuation, being something more than a social role, a functionary or torturer, and instead a "person," in the full sense of this word. This is the only salvation that may be available to us. It means that there are persons for whom the Freudian "reality principle" is unrealistic and even harmful, as are all forms of behaviorist conditioning that seek to move "beyond" the freedom and dignity of persons. ("Behaviorism is Evil.")

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is quoted as saying:

"When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make the male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the Kingdom]." (See the text in the Appendix to Professor Elaine Pagels' The Secret Gospel of Thomas.)

The idea that knowledge of our own true nature -- "therapy" in the philosophical sense -- is also an intuition of the nature of the "divine" or, in secular terms, of the universe all around us is a prominent feature of both Christian and Hebrew mysticism that is in keeping with some of the latest findings in science. I am reminded, for example, of the work of physicist David Bohm concerning "dialogue" and the "implicate order of the universe." For many Jews, and also in accordance with Sufism in Islam (see the writings of the Persian poet, Nizami), and for the early Christians, "knowledge of ourselves is knowledge of God"; while for some of our greatest scientists today, it appears that: "knowledge of the universe is knowledge of ourselves." (See the film Mindwalk.)

IV.

I now close my eyes and conjure the image of that faded photograph of a frightened boy arriving at the gates of a concentration camp. I am always overcome with pity and anger when I contemplate this image. It still seems to me that this is the image of the twentieth century -- and perhaps of the dark side of all centuries: laughter at the fear and suffering of a child, whose offense is merely "to be." This is what makes the Holocaust, the Shoah, so emblematic of all such horrors. The hatred directed at that child, the joy in the faces of those men as they contemplate his helplessness, together with their delight in what would become his fate, all speak of the depravities that might result from the brutalizations that make free human beings into willing and unquestioning servants of the State. ("What is it like to be tortured?")

Yet this image contains a spark of hope as well. I seem to remember that a few paces behind the boy, a woman is walking with her hands held high. There is a smile on her face for that boy. There is a strength in her bearing, a dignity and grace that I will never forget. She is poised, beautiful and, I sense, uncowed by those men. Her concern is directed at the boy. She must have been a very brave young woman -- and a loving one. Many such women may be seen in photos of victims from the period, some with children and others alone.

It is mostly such women who remind me of what human beings are capable of achieving, even in such circumstances. I associate this image of a Jewish woman, along with others that I recall from photos of the camps, with the portraits of the Virgin Mary in Western art. Also, it brings to mind more ancient depictions of the goddess in Mediterrenean culture (Isis), images predating Christianity. I think of it when I consider the lives of major twentieth century moral exemplars such as the Jewish-Christian Saint Edith Stein, the philosopher Simon Weil, or the American philosopher and novelist Susan Sontag, whose recent death was a great loss for American culture. This is not merely a maternal association, in simplistic psychoanalytic terms, but a recognition of a fundamental and universal human attribute associated with the feminine in all of us: compassion, love, empathy as forms of transcendence as well as resistance. It is a representation, for me, of a uniquely indestructible, feminine, gentle strength. (See my stories "Pieta" and "Master and Commander.")

This image of feminine (and ultimately, human) compassion, strength and courage, symbolizes the possibility of "transcendence through love." (See my essay on Shakespeare's Hamlet.) Perhaps this single image that I have been describing will also serve to illustrate the message of Laing's life-work, which is simply a reminder of the resourcefulness and genius of the human psyche in defending itself from, and coping with, great evil and pain. That message is captured as well in the closing verse of W.H. Auden's great poem, "September 1, 1939" -- as Freud knew, the poets have always understood the wisdom of the unconscious:

Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.