Why Kidney Markets Might Offend Me

Over at the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan notes my response to Alexander Berger’s NYT Op-Ed advocating the creation of organ markets, and provides a counter-response from Roger McShane:

[D]onors…see only the slightest increase in their risk of dying from kidney disease…their altruism is likely to lead to more than a decade of improved and prolonged life for the recipient. Donations are…cost-effective….such systems do fill the needs of the ill.

Let us grant all those points, all compatible with my original misgiving (Sullivan omits my final sentence where I say that organ markets might still work if there are not too many desperate entrants; incidentally, Frank Pasquale noted that in Pakistan, kidneys sell for $2000; that tweeted link points to an article by Pasquale that is worth reading in this context).

Let us now rewrite McShane (I have omitted McShane’s final sentence about Iran, which appears in Sullivan’s post):

Poor impoverished people that sell their kidneys see only the slightest increase in their risk of dying from kidney disease. Their altruism is likely to lead to more than a decade of improved and prolonged life for the recipient. Their donations are cost-effective….[a system which relies on purchases of kidneys from the poor and impoverished] fills the needs of the ill.

Fair enough? McShane’s words read a little differently now for me. The situation they describe strikes me as offensive; the society that is described by this picture is lacking in some vital quality. And that is because I did not render my original objection in the abstract; it was very much in the here and now, in this America, in this society, with its massive income inequalities, one that builds itself up on the backs of the poor, via the labor of those of whose attempts to organize themselves into collectivities is frowned upon, where Government and Corporation are indistinguishable.

I am not exclusively concerned with the efficiency of the market in being able to arrive at “optimal outcomes;” rather I am merely complaining, in perhaps a “unscientific”, “irrational” way, that the situation that might result from organ markets in the US–a society with gross income inequality whose poorest line up to sell their organs so that those who can afford organ transplants within the constraints of a grossly inefficient healthcare system can live longer–is likely to cause me to hold my nose. Perhaps it is because I suspect this same society will do nothing to improve the health of those who will find themselves selling their organs. I do not find an organ market, in the abstract, to be inherently offensive; in this society, I do.

Update: Fixed a grammatical typo; changed “non-scientific” to “unscientific”; changed “non-rational” to “irrational.”

Teaching Philosophy By Reading Out Loud

This semester, while teaching my two classes (Freud and Psychoanalysis; Modern Philosophy), I’ve relied at times on reading out loud my assigned texts in class. In particular, I’ve read out, often at great length, Leibniz’s Discourses on Metaphysics and The Mondadology, portions from The Critique of Pure Reason, and in the Freud class, portions of Civilization and its Discontents. I’ve followed this strategy for a variety of reasons.

First, more careful exegesis becomes possible, and little subtle shadings of meaning which could be brushed over in a high-level synoptic discussion are noticed and paid attention to (by both myself and my students). Second, students become aware that reading the text closely pays dividends; when one sentence in the text becomes the topic of an involved discussion, they become aware of how pregnant with meanings these texts can be. Third, the literary quality of the writing, (more evident in Leibniz and Freud than in Kant) becomes more visible; I often stop and flag portions of the text as having been particularly well-expressed or framed. The students become aware that these arguments can be evaluated in more than one dimension: analytical and artistic perhaps.

This method is exhausting, and that is an understatement. There is the obvious physical strain, of course, but doing this kind of close reading is also intellectually taxing. There is more to explain, more to place in context. I could not, and will not, do this for all the material that I teach. Indeed, I have only done this once before: once again, while teaching Leibniz and Kant in the same class some six years ago. (I’m not counting the various instances where I make students consult the text in class).

But most fundamentally, what this method does for the students (I think) and for me, is that it reminds us all that there simply is no substitute for close, critical engagement with material that is intellectually challenging.

Pearl Harbor and Tora! Tora! Tora!

Today is the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor. My intention today is not to talk about the attack but a cinematic depiction of it: the US-Japanese production Tora! Tora! Tora! directed by Richard Fleischer and released in 1970. I saw TTT with my father and brother at the Odeon Cinema in New Delhi; I do not remember the exact date (I was not even a teenager then), but I remember my viewing of TTT very clearly.

I had been brought up in a military pilot’s household, and was an enthusiastic consumer of war comics and books. The WWII movies I had seen till then were fairly simple morality plays; gallant English and Americans took on leering Nazis and Japanese and cut them down to size with a dazzling combination of weaponry, insouciance, and moral rectitude. The violence in the movies was reasonably sanitized. War appeared in these movies the way it appeared in the comics: the sort of thing a schoolboy could get behind.

TTT changed that, and quickly. It was the first cinematic description of an Allied defeat in the Second World War that I had seen; it was extraordinarily violent (and loud; the opening scene of the flyby over the Japanese Imperial Fleet shocked even this schoolboy, brought up on military bases); and it was the first time I had seen “the US”, “America”, “the USA”, come off second-best at anything. (Strictly speaking, that might not be true; it is possible that by then I had seen the US come third in the medals tally in the 1976 Olympics at Montreal).

When I emerged from the Odeon after that matinee show, blinking, into the glare of the hot Delhi sun, I was still stunned. I had known, dimly, of Pearl Harbor, but I had not realized the carnage associated with it; the shots of USN sailors on fire still haunted me.

In the years to come, a great deal of my original naivete about war would resurface in various forms. But if that sentiment ever had a competitor in my understanding of that most intense of all political conflicts, TTT had a great deal to do with it.

Should Selling Kidneys Be Legal?

In today’s New York Times, Alexander Berger, who will be donating a kidney on Thursday, argues that a market associated with kidney donation would lead to better outcomes than the current voluntary-unrecompensed donation model.

Berger’s is an interesting argument; I’m going to respond to one small part of it here. In addressing the fear that an organ market could be “predatory” (the associated nightmarish vision is that of the poorest members of society running to the nearest donor clinic, shedding kidneys in exchange for pittances), Berger writes:

[W]e regularly pay people to take socially beneficial but physically dangerous jobs — soldiers, police officers and firefighters all earn a living serving society while risking their lives — without worrying that they are taken advantage of. Compensated kidney donors should be no different.

My first response to this line was “Whaddya mean “we” kemosabe”? More seriously, the example Berger gives us undermine his case.

Consider “soldiers;” our all-volunteer Armed Forces attract a disproportionate number of “young, poor, minority” men and women, who are then sent off to fight wars, while similarly young, though not-poor, not-minority men and women, who do not find themselves in such dire economic straits do not need to do so. The compensation offered these young folks appears inadequate to me. And so, when it comes to service in the Armed Forces, something “predatory” is going on precisely because the economic circumstances of so many folks are so dire that their bargaining power in the military labor market is severely limited. This means then, that the burden of the wars our nation fights is disproportionately borne by the “young, poor, minority” men and women who quickly take on any old compensation offer and thrust themselves into the front lines.

My worry for the organ market that Berger has in mind is quite simple: in our current economy, it will rapidly devolve into a situation where the number of economically desperate donors will bring down the price of organs to a level that ensures that organ donors will receive little compensation for their contributions. The health of those that can afford organ transplants in our current healthcare system will be enhanced, yes. But it has been enhanced by an economic system that immiserates people sufficiently enough to make them want to give parts of their bodies to others for inadequate compensation.

An organ market might still be a fair one, but only when the entrants to the market are not too desperate to enter it.

An “Intellectual Property” Lesson From A Busker

On Saturday morning, as I sat at 7th Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, waiting for a Q train to take me back home, I noticed a banjo player playing across the tracks from me on the Manhattan-bound platform. The station was noisy as usual, but still, somehow, his urgent strumming and foot stomping (on a percussion device I cannot name) managed to catch my attention. The banjo was insistent and perky, and the beat provided by the foot-drum (there you go, I named it myself), combined with it to produce an oddly compelling rhythm. As befitting a subway busker, his instrument case sat open next to him, awaiting small change and rumpled bills. I thought of making a contribution, and sighed, “If only I wasn’t going the wrong way; I’d have given him some cash; I’ve got a train to catch.” And then, bizarrely, another voice spoke: “Fool! You’ve blathered on so much about voluntary contributions underwriting new economic paradigms for supporting artists in a world free of onerous “intellectual property” regimes, and you won’t cross the tracks to stick a bill in a busking bowl?”

So I got up, checked to see if a train was coming, ran up the stairs, across the divider, down the stairs, up to a startled banjo player, threw in a dollar bill (there seemed to be a few more of them in there), and ran back up the stairs back to my platform. The homeward-bound Q train pulled in, and a dollar poorer, I headed home.

Saul Bellow on Artists and Philosophers

In his two-part essay in the New York Review of Books on being a Jewish writer in America, Saul Bellow is typically uneven. There are some rambling portions (Bellow seems to have a talent for such rambling, nowhere more evident than in this bizarre 1994 New York Times Op-Ed where he attempts to defend himself during the “Tolstoy of the Zulus” flap), accompanied by moments of lucidity:

[Q]uestions that can be closed by philosophic argument often remain open for art, and it is therefore a mistake for writers to accept the preeminence of the philosophers, and write poems, novels, and plays to illustrate, to confirm, to work out in their art and in human detail, the thoughts given to us abstractly by distinguished (and also by undistinguished) thinkers. (Cartesians, Kantians, Hegelians, Bergsonians, Marxians, Freudians, Existentialists, Heideggerians, etc.) Neither the philosopher nor the scientist can tell the artist conclusively, definitively, what it is to be human.

This does not need much commentary except to say that writers who “work out in their art and in human detail, the thoughts given to us abstractly by distinguished (and also by undistinguished) thinkers” often, precisely, by this very act, serve to remind us that an ostensibly “closed” question, remains, in fact, very much open. (I do think Bellow could have said something stronger in his first statement: Questions that appear closed by philosophic argument always remain open for art; it isn’t clear to me indeed, what it would mean for a question to remain “closed” for an artist; what form could such a question take?).

Update: My ever-alert cousin Priya (in comments) pointed out a typo, which I’ve now fixed. Thanks!

Two Bad Ways of Liking Pop Music

Numero Uno: The easy academic way. The interest in pop music needs to contextualized by making your interest and listening pleasure part of a project of aesthetical investigation: What makes a pop song “listenable”? What is the semantics of “catchy”? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a track to be “pop”? I realize these are the kinds of questions only an analytically trained philosopher would ask; so we could also, as an alternative, think about framing questions like: What values does pop music seek to inculcate in us? Where did they come from? What is its history? Is pop music just ideology? What power relations does pop music preserve and enable?

Numero Dos: The plebeian, quasi-religious way: Describe your interest and pleasure in pop music as a “guilty pleasure”; this instantaneously grants oneself the virtue of modesty and self-effacement, acknowledges the “sin” involved in listening to pop music (thus rendering oneself distant from the ranks of the unrepetant). So, yes, I have partaken of the pop music temptation, but my heart is in the right place, because I know well enough to feel guilt when I listen to it. Of course, there is little talk of penance (perhaps by listening to all of Chopin’s Nocturnes), so it is unclear how much guilt the guilty really are feeling. The “confession” of this listening pleasure is supposed to indicate the presence of a guilt that cannot be repressed any longer; but I’m inclined to think that the reason the offender confesses is that the pleasure cannot be.

Getting Rid of “Mastery” Over Mountains

A couple of days ago, in response to my post on the language of mountaineering, my friend Karl Steel said (on a Facebook page somewhere, far, far away):

Great piece, but haven’t you shifted the language of battle from climber vs. mountain to climber vs. self? what if we lose the battle or mastery language altogether

Karl is right, of course. And indeed, “losing” the language of “battle” and “mastery” is what I had in mind when I said:

There is something hopelessly naive in this request for reconfiguration of the language. After all, to use the language of “overcoming”, “conquest”, and “assault” works because it props up so many other tropes and fictions: that the summit was possible without any partnership (human or technological) is perhaps the most vivid and urgent of these.

So, to reiterate: I think the language of “mastery” and “battle” persists at heart because mountaineering is fundamentally conceived of as a solo endeavor. Now, even group expeditions can be described in the same language; indeed, perhaps even more so, because more militarized language can kick in: see for instance, the use of “logistics”, “campaign”, “supply routes” and so on. But still, I think, the fundamental act is conceived of as a man, alone, getting on top of the mountain, and it is to address that seemingly individual feat that I think the really heavy-duty arsenal of “overcoming” is deployed.

Interestingly, before commencing my discussion of whether mountaineering language could be reconceived as “self-mastery” I had noted a thought, which I perhaps should have developed further:

But this makes me think of the impoverishment of the language we employ for indicating human accomplishment: perennially pitted “against” something, as having been achieved in opposition to forces ranged against it. Perhaps we are stuck with that language.

I still think that reconfiguring that language requires, more than anything else, reconceiving human accomplishment as not solitary adventures but collective action, a reconception that is required elsewhere in getting rid of the pernicious fallacy of “the author” (a madness that now finds its legal teeth in our modern debates over “intellectual property”). But much, much, more on that later.

Can The Mere Presence Of Police Be An Escalation?

Yes. Here is a familiar scenario: students at an American university call a meeting or an assembly. They congregate, and as they do so, a large contingent of security guards or police, sometimes armed with deadly weapons, sometimes not, show up, and form impressive-looking rings of security, setting up cordons and enclosures. The escalation has begun.

A little while later, one of two things surely will happen: either a student will note the presence of the police, and finding it bothersome and offensive (as it is), will address it in something he or she says. Perhaps something like “the police are watching us, they want to silence us,” which sets off other student responses of unease and discomfort (many, many students at urban campuses, especially students of color have already had unpleasant interactions with police in the past, and do not, frankly, find that having police or security guards around makes them feel any safer).

Or, the police will suddenly find some reason to enforce some notion of propriety on the student proceedings; this enforcement is almost invariably, carried out heavy-handedly, and violates the rights to free assembly of the students and anyone else present. The latter is what happened last week at Brooklyn College. This violation takes place because those in charge of law and order, always, somehow, are more disturbed and vexed by young folks talking loudly about politics than they are about the status quo – the din of the former is always greater.

One day, campus authorities will come to understand that when students congregate and gather to engage in political conversation, as they often seem to be doing these days (whether at UC Davis, UC Berkeley or Baruch College, CUNY), the only escalation that will take place is going to be due to the presence of campus police; their presence begins the escalation; it does not end it. It is a cause, not an effect.

Today, at Brooklyn College, the Wolfe Institute sponsors an event titled Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Everywhere? Whats Next?. Our biggest worry in organizing the event was the possibility that Brooklyn College administration would again send a large contingent of campus security guards to “oversee” the event, which would inevitably be seen as oppressive and problematic by the students. I’m glad to say, at this moment, a few hours before the event kicks off, that the college President Karen Gould, has agreed to reduce the security profile of the meeting and to let it in proceed in peace.

I will report back on how things went.

Posner on Occupy Wall Street

Over at the Becker-Posner blog, Richard Posner (finally?) turns his attention to Occupy Wall Street. By and large, other than little quibbles about phrasing that accommodates Posner’s extreme market-friendliness, there is little to disagree with here: OWS was inspired by the Arab spring, depressions lead to demonstrations, social media makes organizing easier, the police tactics were tactically flawed, that OWS’ central complaints were “income inequality, lack of jobs, and the baleful influence of the banking industry.” I disagree that occupying public spaces was a mistake; au contraire, there was a vanishingly small chance OWS and its related occupations would have attracted a fraction of the press coverage they did had the protests been limited to sporadic marching and online bluster. A fixed, visible presence capable of acting as the locus of activist energy was always critical in elevating OWS’ profile; without it OWS would have lacked its distinctiveness as a political movement.

But then, at the end, after offering us as reasonable a take as one might expect from the champion of the economic in human affairs, Posner splutters:

Railing against income inequality, job loss, and banking abuses is thus understandable, but it doesn’t do any good. The “Occupiers” are anarchic and disruptive, and the solid middle of American society, which rejects the Tea Party because of its goofy ideas, is likely to reject the Occupy movement because of its style, while broadly sympathetic to its antipathies. But if the movement attracts charismatic leaders amidst a stagnant or worsening economy, it may become a force in American politics

This is a depressingly familiar, reductive, and not very deep summing up of political action: don’t bother protesting because it won’t do any good; good, “solid” people don’t like noise; come back when you have a “charismatic leader.” That is, channel your “anarchic and disruptive” forces into attracting the “solid middle” all the while making sure you march under the flag of that old rescuer of politics: the charismatic leader. So much for changing the political conversation.

OWS should take heart though, from Posner’s contention that they have found sympathetic resonance with the “solid middle” when it comes to their shared “antipathies.” Perhaps even if there is disagreement about prescription and treatment one should be heartened by agreement, on diagnosis and prognosis, across the political and intellectual divide that separates Posner and OWS.

Hope. Eternal. And All That.