Might Same-Sex Relations Be Evolutionarily Advantageous?

A prominent fallacious argument used against same-sex marriage is the good ‘ol ‘we’re only protecting our species’ one. I referred to it in a post a while ago:

[R]oughly, same-sex marriage is problematic because a) marriage is all about procreation and the raising of children and because b) evolution tell us that reproductive success is important, therefore: Gay marriage should be frowned upon.

I then went on to note the naturalistic fallacy committed by the proponents of this argument.

But there is a flip-side to this argument against same-sex relations from a supposedly evolutionary perspective. Might same-sex relations be evolutionarily advantageous? A affirmative answer to this question would not, of course, imply that same-sex relations were thereby to be understood as morally praiseworthy; that would be committing a naturalistic fallacy of its own. Rather, quite simply, it might show that contributions to evolutionary ‘success’–a poorly understood notion at best–can take many more forms than just the mere reproduction of offspring and thus defuse, in yet another fashion, the so-called ‘arguments from evolution against gay marriage.’

In reviewing Lisa Cohen‘s All We Know: Three Lives (a biography of Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland), Terry Castle writes:

For same-sex desire [Cohen] implies, has as much to do with introspection as it does with carnality, and in the ‘inopportune ardour’ of her subjects she recognises the potential for a certain radical mental freedom. It makes sense: to embrace one’s sapphic feelings – to come out to oneself – is necessarily to rethink the world. For not only is one made at once to confront one’s apparently permanent alienation from the ‘normal’ or mainstream, one finds one has to adjudicate, in the most piercing and personal way, on a raft of ethical, religious and scientific questions. Are one’s desires felonious or unnatural, as most traditional belief systems (distressingly) continue to insist? Or are they something rather more benign – simply a ‘variant’ expression of human sexuality? If the latter is the case, couldn’t one view same-sex passion, in turn, as a perhaps useful evolutionary adaptation? As an age-old demographic reality, possibly hardwired into the souls of some, that actually enriches and diversifies human civilisation? [From ‘You Better Not Tell Me You Forgot‘, London Review of Books, 27 September 2012]

Castle reminds us that reproductive success in producing offspring might not be the only way to understand successful ‘evolutionary adaptations’. Perhaps members of the species can, through their ‘variant expressions of human sexuality’ contribute to the ‘success’ of their species in other ways? The ‘radical mental freedom’ of the same-sex members of our species might spark an efflorescence of activities–perhaps artistic, scientific, literary, cultural–that make possible its  adaptive success in a variety of environments. (Think Tchaikovsky, Wilde, Woolf, Turing – the list goes on and on.) Indeed, these activities by: enriching our lives, making them worth living, enabling us to find meaning in this world, might even(!) facilitate the reproductive success of the species.  (Some might think, of course,  that the excessive devotion paid to Turing’s children–the modern electronic computer–does no such thing.) Viewed in this light,  the presence of species members who do not partake in opposite-sex relations–with or without producing offspring–might come to appear as a positive characteristic of the species.

Samuel Chase and Judicial Supremacy

In the history of the US Supreme Court, Samuel Chase holds a singular, if dubious honor: he is, to date, the only Supreme Justice to be impeached (he was, however, ultimately acquitted by the US Senate).

The background to his impeachment is indicative of the political ferment so common  in the early days of the new republic. From Wikipedia:

President Thomas Jefferson, alarmed at the seizure of power by the judiciary through the claim of exclusive judicial review, led his party’s efforts to remove the Federalists from the bench. His allies in Congress had, shortly after his inauguration, repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801, abolishing the lower courts created by the legislation and terminating their Federalist judges despite lifetime appointments; Chase, two years after the repeal in May 1803, had denounced it in his charge to a Baltimore grand jury, saying that it would “take away all security for property and personal liberty, and our Republican constitution will sink into a mobocracy[.]” Jefferson saw the attack as…an opportunity to reduce the Federalist influence on the judiciary by impeaching Chase….The House of Representatives served Chase with eight articles of impeachment in late 1804….The Jeffersonian Republicans-controlled United States Senate began the impeachment trial of Chase in early 1805, with Vice President Aaron Burr presiding and Randolph leading the prosecution.

What is perhaps even more interesting about the Chase impeachment is that, according to Robert H. Jackson‘s The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy: A Study of a Crisis in American Power Politics (Vintage, 1941), ‘the proceedings to impeach him took so wide a sweep that the whole Federalist judiciary felt itself likely to be removed if Chase was convicted. They may have been right.’

One of the members of the judiciary ‘frightened’ by the turn of events was none other than John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States, who had, in 1803, presided over the famous ruling in Marbury v. Madison that had established judicial review over the legislative branch of the US Government. But, now, confronted by a tide turning against the judiciary, one underwritten by fury at they seemingly excessive power it had granted itself, he became ready to trade it away in exchange for security in the judicial office. So he ‘wrote to Chase an amazing letter proposing to scrap the whole pretension to judicial supremacy’:

I think the modern doctrine of impeachment should yield to an appellate jurisdiction in the legislature. A reversal of those legal opinions deemed unsound by the legislature would certainly better comport with the mildness of our character than a removal of the judge who has rendered them unknowing of his fault.  [From: Albert J. Beveridge, Life of Marshall, Houghton-Mifflin, Vol III, p. 177]

As Jackson notes, ‘this certainly indicates no strong confidence that judicial judgment was to be final.’ (Chase’s impeachment was not on legal or ethical grounds but on the basis of ‘judicial performance.’) Fortunately for Marshall (and future versions of the Supreme Court) the impeachment failed–in part because some senators refused to indict Chase on the grounds that the quality of his jurisprudence was adequate grounds for removal–and the Marshall doctrine of judicial supremacy and the judicial independence became enshrined in US law.

Moral Saints, Just Lacking Modesty

Over at The Boston Review, David V. Johnson interviews Larissa MacFarquhar on her writing about ‘moral saints’, (‘people who have a very demanding sense of moral duty and live their lives accordingly’). MacFarquhar took this project on by way of offering a thesis opposed to the one advanced by Susan Wolf in her ‘Moral Saints‘ which argued that because ‘our conceptions of perfect moral virtue…and of a well-lived life are irreconcilable’ our notions of morality, the good moral life and thus the notion of the ‘moral saint’ need to be revised and/or jettisoned. MacFarquhar, for her part, was struck by the skepticism and hostility about the very idea of a ‘moral saint’:

Some thought people who appeared to be extremely ethical must be somehow cheating—that they couldn’t actually be doing all those good things. Others believed they were doing those things, but they found that so weird that they thought they must have some kind of mental illness—that they must lack the ordinary component of desires or feelings, or that there was something robotic about them.

What these skeptics and critics are getting wrong, for Macfarquhar, is a bunch of things:

If the suspicion is hypocrisy, I think we underestimate the sort of people I’m writing about—it’s entirely possible to live an extremely ethical life without being hypocritical. But besides that, I think people overvalue certain kinds of sins. For instance, many people have said to me, when they hear who I’m writing about, ‘Well, don’t they just act morally to make themselves feel better? Don’t they get all self-righteous and overly proud of themselves?’ I think that pride and self-righteousness are far less important than most people seem to think they are. I think that if you’re doing something that’s hard to do and good to do, and that makes you feel proud, I just don’t see why that’s so terrible. One kidney donor told me that his donation made him feel better about himself—that it was one really good thing he’d done in his life, which he had otherwise made a pretty complete mess of. Some psychologists think you shouldn’t donate in order to feel better about yourself, but it strikes me as an excellent reason!

What’s more, I think what is criticized as self-righteousness or preachiness is often the result of a desire to further whatever cause the person is engaged in. If a person held back from talking about his cause out of a desire to appear less self righteous, that would be its own problem—and a much more serious one.

Interestingly, Macfarquhar’s response does not confine itself to the suggestion that the ‘moral saints’ in question do not show the traits attributed to them (piety, pride etc). Rather Macfarquhar’s response is that these character attributes are not problematic to begin with. In part, I agree with Macfarquhar: pride and a heightened sense of self-esteem do not strike me as especially problematic outcomes of a chosen course of action. There is a caveat relating to the pride though, and it occurs to me because the latter part of her response is a little too blithe in dismissing the problems with ‘preachiness.’ Being the subject of a proselytizing sermon is never a pleasant experience, no matter which desire underwrites the delivery of the sermon. If the moral saint is committed to living the life of extreme moral virtue then he or she, in order to increase their level of social acceptance, might have to internalize yet another virtue: that of understated humility about their ’cause’. Perhaps the moral saint can remain proud of his or her actions while also being resolutely committed to letting others make up their minds about the proper way to live one’s lives.

Eagleton on Sex and Sexuality: Fun, and Not-So-Much (Respectively)

In yesterday’s post, I offered a couple of critical remarks in response to Stanley Fish‘s review of  Terry Eagleton‘s Reason, Faith and Revolution. Those remarks were directed at a pair of passages excerpted from Eagleton. Today’s  post features Eagleton too, but cast as reviewer, not reviewee, on everyone’s favorite topic: sex (and the considerably more serious business of sexuality).

In reviewing Hal Gladfelder’s Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland (‘Grub Street Snob‘, Londong Review of Books, 13 September 2012), Eagleton writes:

Sexuality is not to be confused with sex. Sex is what people do, whereas sexuality is largely the province of the intelligentsia. Sex can be fun, but sexuality can be serious stuff. Academic writing about it hardly ever captures its amusing, even farcical dimensions, whatever it is that makes it such a perennial subject of curiosity and intrigue. Hearing that two people can be sleeping together can often provoke a spontaneous grin, provided neither of them is your partner. Even so, sex and sexuality are hardly on different planets. Most of those who write on sexuality have sex lives themselves, and thus tend to practice what they preach. Studying sexuality is always at some level self-study, rather as writing about popular culture, for most of the students who do it these days, involves watching movies and TV shows they would have watched anyway. There is thus a convenient continuity between’s one’s academic and one’s actual life, as with a psychiatrist who is an expert on his own psychosis.

The contrast between sex and sexuality, between the doing and the writing about it, is of course quite acute, rather as there is one between jokes and humor and their academic analysis. In the case of sex and sexuality the problem is compounded by the fact that sex is a pretty undignified business. Rarely, if ever, as we have found out for ourselves, do its physical expressions ever match the highly stylized, graceful, in slow-motion, couplings of the screen–whether large or small-or the novel. Academic writing about sexuality has thus had to put a wrap on these rough edges and cloak itself in stately (or incomprehensible) prose. This leads to the scarcely believable situation of academic talks on sex that do not elicit as much as a single giggle from their audience. The titles of talks and papers on sexuality attempt to make up for this–Eagleton helpfully provides ‘Putting the Anus back in Coriolanus‘ as an example and I can point to ‘Unzipping the Monster Dick: Deconstructing Ableist Penile Representations in Two Ethnic Homoerotic Magazines’–but they might be fighting a losing battle given the overwhelming likelihood that the prose on display will be turgid and uninspired. In part, this is just because this is academic writing, but here, I suspect the subject matter induces reticence even in those bold enough to venture into its precincts.

A smart academic would find a way to write racily about sexuality. I’m not about to start, but I wish someone would.

Fish on Eagleton on Religion

Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton‘s Reason, Faith and Revolution in The New York Times and approvingly quotes him contra the excesses of Christopher Hitchens:

[T]he fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

This is a peculiar remark to make. Religion might not be in the business of offering explanations for natural phenomena now, but that is because it has, over an extended period, as a tactical and strategic move, ceded that explanatory function to science. Its history suggests that it has often seen itself in the business of offering explanations and indeed, comprehensive theories of the world that begin at its beginning and go on till its end. Hitchens’ remark is crude in suggesting the religious are only motivated by a desire to seek the kind of comforts made possible by technology but Eagleton’s suggestion that the description of religion is entirely misguided ignores the historical role that religion has played in the lives of its adherents in years gone by.

The same considerations apply to another one of Eagleton’s passages quoted by Fish:

[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement. Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after something else.

Again, one can provide metaphorical and non-realist readings of religion that do not see it as an explanatory theory but it is not clear such readings do full justice to the way that practitioners of religion see it, as a system which makes the world coherent. But systems which seek to provide such clarity are, contra Eagleton and Fish both, attempts to explain the world. If those systems are found wanting, it is because rival explanations for the same phenomena they claim to make comprehensible are found more satisfying, more able to do justice to the desiderata posed by the explanandum.

The move to cast religion as a non-explanation of anything is an interesting defensive move in light of the criticisms made of its extravagant ontological and ethical claims but it is not one that strikes me as likely to be successful. If religion did not seek to explain the incomprehensible then what comfort could it provide to the faithful? If you arrive at religion with a mystery and leave with one, then it hasn’t distinguished itself from the rest of this mysterious existence of ours.

Brooklyn is Back in the Playoffs, Or, The Lure of Tribalism

Tribalism in sports is a funny thing. Like most Brooklyn residents, I was upset and dismayed by the rushed development deal for the Atlantic Yards project, the centerpiece for which was the Barclays Center, home of the Brooklyn Nets, transplanted from across the river, where they functioned as the New Jersey Nets. (Back in those days, way back in the 1990s, when Dražen Petrović played for the Nets, I cheered them on till Petrovic’s tragic loss in a car accident deflated me.)  The battle over that deal, which pitted local residents in Prospect Heights, Downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene, and Park Slope against the Marty Markowitz–Bruce Ratner combine (and sundry other fat cats), exhausted and embittered most who engaged in it; the scars haven’t healed yet and for some, appear unlikely ever to.

The Barclays Center is up and running. I haven’t been inside it yet, but I hope to. Season ticket offers have come and gone, despite my excitedly mentioning the possibility of going to see Nets games to many an out-of-town visitor. I remain hopeful that I will be able to go next year, next season. (I doubt I will go to live musical performances there though; somehow, I can’t see myself patronizing arena shows any more.) And now that the playoffs are here, I am confronted with the incontrovertible fact that yet again, the well-directed marketing of a sports franchise has worked to induce quasi-tribal feelings in the susceptible sports fan. In this case, me.

For shortly after the Nets commenced operations at the Barclays Center, I found myself concerned with the team’s fortunes. I took pleasure in the Nets’ early season winning streak; I read many a print article dissecting and analyzing the return of a franchise to this storied borough; I bemoaned stories of their internal dissent and divisions and hoped better sense would prevail; I admired their uniforms, shirts, hoodies, caps and sundry paraphernalia,  and sent out subtle hints to family and friends–all artfully ignored thus far–that the perfect gift for me was at hand; heck, I even started trash talking the New York Knicks. (I won’t be trash talking them while they play the Celtics though.)  I am not the most serious of Brooklyn Nets fans, but I at least engage in some of the rituals of fanhood and seem set to continue engaging them. I am even planning to take my daughter to their games once she is old enough to appreciate a live sports event.

My first sense that this tribalistic response had been triggered in me came when I was reading a newspaper early this season and checked the standings for the first time. There, right below ‘New York’ in the conference table, was an entry for ‘Brooklyn’. ‘We’ had a franchise again, a sports team that bore the name of my home. I never lose an opportunity to describe fandom for professional franchises as a bit like cheering for Ford v. Chrysler, but somehow, mysteriously, on that day, seeing Brooklyn’s name in print overrode that skepticism, even if it was in a sport that always ranked behind football and baseball in terms of my New York-based loyalties. (The incompetent Knicks had something to do with this emotion, I”m sure.)

I don’t think expressing allegiance to a ‘local’ sports team means I’ve finally made this borough my home, almost eleven years after I began working and living here, for I’ve felt at home even before the Nets showed up.  I do think though, that I might have been looking for more ways to make visible my allegiances to Brooklyn and the Nets have provided one more way to do that this year. (For those who would suggest resisting the Atlantic Yards project might have been a better way: I tried too. Once that ended, and the Center became a fait accompli, I’ll admit it: I looked forward to a sports team returning to the borough. )

‘OK to be Gay if You’re a Woman’: Brittney Griner Comes Out

Brittney Griner came out on Wednesday and it didn’t make news:

[Even as] there is increased speculation about whether a male athlete — any male athlete — will come out while still playing a major professional team sport, one of the best female athletes in the history of team sports comes out, and the reaction is roughly equivalent to what one might see when a baseball manager reveals his starting rotation for a three-game series in July.

What’s the story?

First, female athletes have been coming out for a while:

Individual-sport stars like the tennis legend Martina Navratilova and team-sport players like basketball’s Sheryl Swoopes and soccer’s Megan Rapinoe are among the women to continue playing after publicly discussing their sexuality.

That’s great. Griner’s ‘news’ isn’t news because it’s old news. We’re on our way to a post-gay society. Hurrah.

But perhaps Griner’s ‘announcement’ made no waves because the really ‘problematic’–and thus ‘important’–way of being gay is to be male and gay. Which is to say that if you are a woman and gay, it’s not that much of a ‘problem’, because all the problems we homophobically associate with gayness–you know, like weakness and being, er, feminine–are true of women anyway (misogyny and homophobia – a twofer!). So, your coming out isn’t a big deal. Or: Who cares if you are a gay woman? Being a woman is kinda gay anyway; if you were a man we’d pay attention. This is one big sexist mess.

“We talk a lot in the L.G.B.T. community about how sexism is a big part of what contributes to homophobia,” said Anna Aagenes, the executive director of GO! Athletes, a national network of L.G.B.T. athletes. “It’s disheartening when there are so many great role model female athletes out that we’re so focused on waiting for a male pro athlete to come out in one of the four major sports.”

And then there is the stereotype that successful female athletes are gay, that strong and athletic women are gay, and that they are so, because, you know, they are ‘manly’ and hence ‘unnatural’, which then feeds right back into the notion that women cannot be strong and athletic without being, somehow, ‘un-women.’

 “There’s certainly going to be people who say, ‘Oh, it’s just another lesbian,’ ” Murrell said….That persistent stereotype about female athletes does damage on multiple levels….While a number of heterosexual male athletes…have publicly supported the efforts of L.G.B.T. athlete groups, it has been much harder to find straight female athletes to speak out…“We’ve had tremendous success in getting straight male players to speak to the issue; we’re having a tougher time finding straight female athletes speaking on this issue because they’ve spent their entire careers fighting the perception that they’re a lesbian.”

So, take the notion that a woman being gay is not a big deal, combine that with the stereotype that to be strong and athletic you have to be a not-quite-normal-woman i.e., gay, and you’ve possibly gained some additional insight into why Griner’s news isn’t news.

The Closing of the NYPD’s Mind

Today, Brooklyn College hosted a panel titled ‘Are We Safer? Costs, Benefits, and Alternatives to 20 Years of Aggressive Street Policing” (organized by the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Law and Civil Liberties, Professor Anna Law.) The panel’s discussants were: John DeCarlo, Michael Powell (New York Times), Alex S. Vitale, and Franklin E. Zimring.  The range of topics covered in this discussion between three academics (DeCarlo has served in the police in the past) and one journalist were wide-ranging: the significance of statistics pertaining to police-citizenry contact (racial divisions, nature of contact, outcomes of contacts etc); the gap between academic and press coverage of police and criminology issues; the insularity of the New York City Police department; the tactics and strategies of New York City policing; their effectiveness in reducing crime in New York City; hidden causal factors in crime reduction; the constitutionality of the NYPD’s tactics; and so on.

I will not try and recapitulate the entire discussion as I did not take detailed notes. Here, however, is what stood out for me the most.

Both Powell and Vitale reported on a culture of seclusion that exists within the New York City Police department: it does not reach out to make, or invite, contact with journalists or academics who might be reporting on, and studying, it. There is no attempt by the department to offer insight or perspective into its decisions, to clarify and elucidate its  responses to past events, to engage in debate with scholarly or informal analysis about their operations and methodologies. It is, in sum, a closed and opaque system: it does not seek transparency in any way. Perhaps its members might complain of being misunderstood as a result of the lack of any meaningful full duplex communication, but this is a situation that  the department seems to have willfully created. Vitale reported that while he occasionally receives requests for copies of his writings on the NYPD, he has never been able to enter into a dialog with police officers; this is in sharp contrast to his interactions with other police departments elsewhere–both in the US and overseas–who have organized conferences and meetings with their officers for him, and thus sparked off an ongoing conversation, one hopefully educational for both parties. (On a side note: Professor Law invited the NYPD to participate in today’s panel and they either declined or did not return her email.)

The culture of seclusion at the NYPD is alarming in several dimensions. For one thing, it contributes to groupthink within the department; it remains embroiled in an echo-chamber of its making, content to suspiciously peruse the offerings of those who would dare write on it, but never bothering to engage in argument with them, either to change their minds or to entertain the possibility of having theirs changed. Engagement with commentary on the NYPD should not be viewed by it as an optional, supererogatory public relations exercise; rather, it should be understood as an essential part of its communications with the ‘community’ it polices. This is what one segment of the community thinks and understands about it, this is what it reports to its remaining members; it behooves the NYPD to be part of this conversation. Both parties would be enriched by the other’s perspective.

The NYPD and the communities it polices, are hurt by its barricading itself in its precincts and the subsequent closing of its mind.

Courage in the Face of Terror, Elsewhere

After 9/11, we were told how brave New Yorkers were, how resilient this city was, how its people would come together in the face of adversity, how it had seen worse and endured and would do the same again. After 7/7 we were told that Londoners, who lived in a city that had survived the Blitz and fought off Nazi attacks, would live to fight another day, that the day after the attack, stoic Londoners who could take a punch and roll with it were already back at work determined to move on, keeping upper lips stiff, and their chins up. Now, after 4/15 we are told Boston was the wrong city to mess with, that it and its residents will take this and move on, that the terrorists will find no victory here, that the city is strong and will endure.

I trust I sound repetitive above. For there is a pattern in there. (One whose details could be unpacked in even greater detail had I been more diligent in tracking down the original sources of commentary that I refer to.) Its outlines are clear: some places, some locales, which bear the brunt of acts of ‘terror’ and ‘dastardly attacks’ committed by ‘terrorists’ and ‘cowards’ are sites for the display of resilience and courage and fortitude. They serve as showcases for local character on occasions on which the accumulated history of resistance that they have built up can be unfurled in the face of the offender.

These tributes, well-meant and sincere and full of compassion for those whose lives have been afflicted by the scourge of the anonymously violent, give me occasion for pause. I wonder if other sites, other venues for the display of terror, are inhabited by people who show similar fortitude and courage. I wonder whether Baghdad–where improvised explosive devices like those used in London and Boston are exceedingly common, as are the tangled masses of flesh and blood and torn limb that are their inevitable result–is populated by the brave or by the cowardly, by the determined or by the milquetoast.  I wonder whether its citizens get up in the morning and go to work the day after a bombing; I wonder whether the parents who live there dare to send their kids to school the day after a massacre in their neighborhoods, and if they do, whether they are congratulated for their non-quivering upper lips and their chins held upright. I’m curious about whether the citizens of Gaza recover quickly after an aerial assault causes the loss of life of their loved ones. Do they just flop around, wailing and mourning, unhinged and disconsolate, plotting their next dastardly revenge? I wonder about those who live in Afghan villages, subjected sometimes to the invasive patrol, the droning drone, the unexploded ordnance or mine, or a local warlord’s imprecations. Do they display ‘stubborn resilience’ as well? Or are all these folks–the ones in Baghdad, Gaza, or Afghanistan–just fatalistically resigned to their fates?

Depending on how we view their actions, we might find the  people who live in places like these deserve our admiration too.

The Boston Bombings Are Bad News

By now, the bombings at the Boston Marathon are ‘old news’ for our  24-hour news and social media cycle. We’ve now run through the standard template of responses to such an attack: suspicion of the usual suspects,  rallying cries of support for the afflicted, stern, righteous denunciations from political leaders, racist rants of revenge and retribution, speculation about the identities of those responsible, unhinged conspiracy theories, and lastly, suggestions that those indulging in outpourings of grief for the injured and the killed should extend their empathy to a community that includes others beyond Americans. (This last points cuts home deeply. It is hard to react to news of the death of the eight-year Martin Richard–and the serious injuries to his mother and sister–in any way other than shock and horror, an emotion that quite directly evokes memories of fatal drone attacks on children in Afghanistan, acts of brutality that we have now become used to.)

The Boston bombings are the kind of terrorist attacks that have the most corrosive effect on a polity. They immediately provoke calls for heightened security, in a tone of resignation that accepts a police state as the natural consequence of these provocations. See for instance, this comment by Tom Brokaw yesterday (as cited by Glenn Greenwald in an excellent series of notes summing up the responses to the Boston bombings):

Everyone has to understand tonight that, beginning tomorrow morning early, there are going to be much tougher security considerations all across the country, and however exhausted we may be by that, we’re going to have to learn to live with them, and get along and go forward, and not let them bring us to our knees. You’ll remember last summer, how unhappy we were with the security at the Democratic and Republic conventions. Now I don’t think we can raise those complaints after what happened in Boston.

9/11 saw a bothersome, poorly-directed, and often unjust security strategy directed inward at the US; these attacks have the promise to extend those security responses to relatively undisturbed pockets of American life, conjuring up images of ever more invasive search, frisk, question and detainment procedures at railway stations, bus stops, sporting events, movie houses; in short, just about any public space in heavy use. Because of their insidiousness–deadly explosive devices hidden in a public space, designed to hurt any and all innocents–these kind of terror acts generate the most fear and paranoia; the normal, the secure, the mundane is violated, and all that is solid and impenetrable seems vulnerable and threatened. And because these deadly attacks were covert, relied on subterfuge and deception, and are still exceedingly uncommon here in the US, they inspire even more fear and loathing in response, and thus provide plenty of cover for those who would suggest civil liberties are an indulgent luxury, that law enforcement agencies need ever more power and license, that American communities need to be subjected to ever greater profiling.  Politicians and a motley gaggle of provocateurs will no doubt make the case for these actions in the days to come.

These attacks in more ways than one–and for many more people than those sadly killed and injured yesterday–are very bad news indeed.