Chelsea Manning’s Bad Luck With The American Polity

In The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind The Wikileaks Whistleblower(Verso Press, New York, 2013) Chase Madar writes:

If any lesson can be drawn from the Manning affair, it’s that leaks can make a great difference if there is organized political muscle to put them to good use. Information on its own is futile; as useless as those other false hopes of the global center-left, international law and its sidekick, the human rights industry, all of which have their uses, but are insufficient to stop wars and end torture. This is not to denigrate the achievements of the person who have us this magnificent gift of knowledge about world affairs. If the disclosures have not changed US statecraft–yet–the fault lies not in the cables, but in the pathetic lack of political organization among those individuals who don’t “have a position” in Halliburton stock–the 99% if you will.

There are two theses presented here by Madar: a) information is sterile unless coupled with political organization and action, and b) international law and the ‘human rights industry’ are ‘insufficient to stop wars and end torture’–they are ‘false hopes.’ (The former claim may be understood as a variant of Marcuse‘s praxis + theory axiom of politics.)

The seeming inefficacy of Chelsea Manning‘s leaks of a veritable treasure trove of revelations about the conduct of US foreign policy and warfare now becomes explicable; those seeds fell on infertile ground. Manning’s leaks were fed to a polity that is at heart conformist and accepting of authority, and whose most suffering faction–the staggering 99%–is disorganized, apathetic in large sectors, and all too easily resigned to a fate characterized by endless wars and a Nietzschean endless recurrence of the same cast of political characters and ideologies ruling the roost. ‘On its own’ information has no political valence; it is only when it serves as the premise of a political argument that it acquires traction.  At the risk of invoking the wrath of those who dislike military metaphors, perhaps we can think of information as ammunition; indispensable, yet insufficient without the right sorts of blunderbusses. (That pair of ‘false hopes of the global center-left, international law and its sidekick, the human rights industry’ are similarly indicted: both, on their own, decoupled from the capacity to enforce and from organized political muscle, are reduced to platitudes, mouthed in predictable time and fashion by the usual suspects. No enforcement authority backs them up; and the political realism of the postivisitic conception of both law and rights appears ever plausible.)

America got lucky with Chelsea Manning; but the luck only went in one direction. Manning didn’t get lucky with her nation; she was feeding information to a polity that didn’t know what to do with it (and which instead, called her a ‘traitor’ and imprisoned and tortured her.) The reception to the Panama Papers, which despite the initial furore, and even the odd resignation or two, is best described as equal parts yawn and shrug, provides further confirmation for this claim. Artful dodging of local jurisdictions to enable ‘fraud, kleptocracy, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions’ is old hat; and there is nothing we can do about it anyway.

Back to rearranging chairs on deck.

Chase Madar On American ‘Anti-Authority Posturing’

In The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind The Wikileaks Whistleblower (Verso Press, New York, 2013) Chase Madar quotes Ray McGovern, ‘a retired CIA analyst’ and admirer of Chelsea Manning, as saying that “he who isn’t angry [in the face of injustice and evil] has an ‘unreasoned patience [and] sows the seed of vice….Bradley Manning had the strength to be angry….But in America today we have far too much passive acceptance of injustice. We need more righteous anger.” Madar then goes on to make note of a curious feature of the American ‘character:’

We Americans can pride ourselves all we want on our anti-authority posturing, but a 2006 poll from the International Social Survey Programme of national attitudes towards individualism and authority tells a very different story.

In 2006, the ISSP asked the question “In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?” At 45 percent, Americans were the least likely out of nine nationalities to say that people should at least on occasion follow their consciences — far fewer than, for example, the Swedes (70 percent) and the French (78 percent). Similarly, in 2003, Americans turned out to be the most likely to embrace the statement “People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong.” [from: Claude Fischer, “Sweet Land of…Conformity? Americans Aren’t the Individuals We Think We Are,” Boston Globe, June 6 2010.)

This ‘curious feature’ is worth revisiting now as America hurtles toward its electoral encounter with Trumpism–and perhaps Clintonism–this November. One candidate promises to be authoritarian, to ride roughshod over the rights and civil liberties of fellow Americans, to eviscerate the US Constitution, to commit war crimes (like killing the noncombatant families of ‘terrorists’), all to ‘make America great again’–and he is cheered on by a squad that only grows louder. Another bids us be complacent, to reckon that America is already great and only needs tinkering around the edges, some incrementalist change perhaps–not the kind promised by raving old white-haired men who threaten to make college free and deliver universal single-payer health insurance. The former seems to have shut down the consciences of those who would support him, even if he is patently in the wrong; indeed, for him to be wrong is the new right. The latter appeals to the ‘unreasoned patience’ that induces ‘passive acceptance of injustice.’

Bizarrely enough then, even though Trump and Clinton appear radically dissimilar candidates, their successes in the primaries of the 2016 election season seems to find their groundings in their common resonance with the attitudes Madar points out above.  Both candidates seemingly rely and thrive on a keen understanding of this acceptance of authority by Americans (it is the authority of Clinton’s technocratic credentials and ‘experience’ after all that most effectively shushes the passion and energy of Sanders supporters, describing it as ‘unrealistic’ and ‘destructive.)

Chelsea Manning was perhaps trying to save a country that isn’t angry enough, or angry at the right things, to be saved by him.

Brooklyn College And CUNY Owe Reparations To Student Activists

Yesterday, I made note of my attendance at a disciplinary hearing conducted by Brooklyn College and the City University of New York; the ‘defendants’ were two students accused of violating the Henderson Rules because of their participation in a ‘mic check’ at the February 16th Faculty Council meeting. Yesterday, I received news from the students’ counsel–the folks at Palestine Legal–that the students had been acquitted of three of the four charges. The one violation was of Henderson rule #2, and for that they received the lightest penalty: ‘admonition.’ A formal written ‘judgment’ will be issued next week. And this farce will come to a long-awaited close. But CUNY and Brooklyn College should not be let off the hook.

During my testimony, I was asked if the students had caused any ‘damage’ or ‘harm’ by their actions and speech. I emphatically denied that they had. Now, let us tabulate the damages and harms caused by Brooklyn College and CUNY’s administration. This is a charge-sheet the college and the university administrations need to answer to:

  1. The students protesters were immediately, without trial, condemned in a public communique issued by the college president and the provost. It accused them of making “hateful anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish comments to members of our community.” As I affirmed, no such comments had been made. Anti-Zionism is a political position; it is not hate speech. And nothing remotely anti-Semitic was uttered by the students. More to the point, the two students on the stand had not even chanted ‘anti-Zionist’ slogans. This condemnation by the college administration resulted in hate speech and abuse being directed at one of the students, a Muslim-American woman, one of our best and brightest, literally a poster child for the college because she appears on posters all over campus advertising our Study Abroad programs. The stress and fear this provoked in her can only be imagined; when she brought her concerns to the college administration, little was done to help her other than making note of the incident and asking to be informed if anything else happened again.
  2. The student protest occurred in February; the hearing was conducted yesterday, three months later, a week before graduation. Three months of stress and tension, and uncertainty about their academic fate for the students–because expulsion was on the cards. Three months of embroilment in a ridiculous charade that in the words of the Brooklyn College president Karen Gould, was supposed to teach the students that ‘actions have consequences.’ Yes, great wisdom was imparted to the students: that speaking up for causes near and dear to you, engaging in political activism, thinking critically–especially if you are a student of color, as both these students are–will provoke retaliation from insecure college administrations, unsure of the worth of their academic mission.
  3. Considerable CUNY resources were marshaled to prosecute the students: CUNY’s legal department was at hand yesterday, an external ‘judge’ had to be brought in from another college to chair the meeting, and at least a dozen faculty members spoke either against the students–for shame!–for for them. We could have spent yesterday reading, writing, attending to scholarship; instead, we had to spend hours waiting in sequestration chambers. I’m glad to have spent that time for a good cause, but it infuriates me that it was ever required.

The true ‘damage’ and ‘harm’ to CUNY and its community has been done by Brooklyn College and CUNY’s punitive and mean-spirited action against the students. Acquittals don’t address this damage; reparations are due.

Brooklyn College’s Punitive Retaliation Against Student Activists

On February 17th, I wrote a blog post here about the student protests at Brooklyn College that took place during the monthly faculty council meeting held the day before. Today, I attended a disciplinary hearing conducted by Brooklyn College–to determine whether two of the students who had participated in the protests should be ‘disciplined’ for ‘disrupting’ the meeting by violating the so-called Henderson Rules. (As Palestine Legal notes, they are charged with “violating Rules 1, 2, 3, and 7 of the City University of New York’s (CUNY) code of conduct, or the Henderson Rules. The charges against the students range from intentional obstruction and failure to comply with lawful directions to unauthorized occupancy of college facilities and disorderly conduct. The students may face penalties ranging from admonition to expulsion.”) My attendance at the meeting was as a ‘witness for the defense’: I testified on behalf of the students.

Continue reading “Brooklyn College’s Punitive Retaliation Against Student Activists”

‘Straight Outta Compton’ And Ambivalence

A couple of weeks ago, I finally watched F. Gary Gray‘s Straight Outta Compton, the cinematic biography of N.W. A. (More accurately, I saw the ‘Unrated Director’s Cut,’ which features an additional twenty minutes not found in the theatrical release.) Since then, many tracks from the N. W. A, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy E oeuvre on my Spotify playlist have received extended playtime; the music is as astonishing as it ever was. And yet, as I listen to these tracks I’m reminded again about my deep and abiding ambivalence about gangsta rap, and the unease it perennially stirs in me.

Tracks like ‘Straight Outta Compton,’ ‘Fuck tha Police,’ ‘No Vaseline‘ ‘Ain’t Nothing But A G Thang,’ ‘Real Compton City Gs‘ are exhilarating. There is defiance and unbridled energy, mordant social commentary (no one is better on police brutality), some exquisite verbal styling and delivery of lyrics, a dazzling fusion of varied musical styles–the whole package. These tracks–and many others like them–are irresistible in many dimensions. (If you feel like getting charged up for a tough day at work, ‘Straight Outta Compton’ or ‘Fuck the Police’ are great tracks to play as you get dressed and head out the door; woe betide that annoying co-worker who tries to get under your skin that day. Lyrics like “Boy you can’t fuck with me/So when I’m in your neighborhood, you better duck/Cause Ice Cube is crazy as fuck” will do that to you.) It is small wonder they found so much playtime on radio stations and television channels–even if in some venues they had to be sanitized. Which brings us to an enduring problem with them.

Quite simply, there is little room to maneuever, to offer exculpation, when confronted with lyrics like these:

Now I think you a snitch,
throw a house nigga in a ditch.
Half-pint bitch, fuckin’ your homeboys.
You little maggot; Eazy E turned faggot.
With your manager, fella,
fuckin’ MC Ren, Dr. Dre, and Yella.
But if they were smart as me,
Eazy E would be hangin’ from a tree.
With no vaseline, just a match and a little bit of gasoline.
Light ’em up, burn ’em up, flame on…

Or:

I find a good piece o’ pussy, I go up in it
So if you’re at a show in the front row
I’m a call you a bitch or dirty-ass ho
You’ll probably get mad like a bitch is supposed to
But that shows me, slut, you’re composed to
A crazy muthafucker from tha street

Such examples can be multiplied effortlessly. There is misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, violent death threats–another comprehensive package of sorts. The defense of these lyrics is a familiar one: these tracks are not promotions or endorsements of the lifestyles and attitudes noted in them; rather, they are reports of an existent state of affairs, a grim reality, in precincts unknown to most Americans. The contestation of this defense has resulted in an enduring debate, one facet of which was visible in the the sharp accusations of misogyny that made the rounds once again during Straight Outta Compton’s theatrical release. That case is damning, and rightly so.

And so, I find myself perplexed once again: the musical qualities attract, but many ‘messages’ within it repels; there is no way to listen to this music without that tension present.

On Avoiding Conversations With Children

Yesterday afternoon, as I rode back from Manhattan to Brooklyn to pick up my daughter from daycare, I noticed three children board the subway car I was seated in. One of them was a friend’s son, all of nine years old; he was accompanied by two younger children. An older woman, clearly their chaperone or caretaker, stood near by. I smiled in recognition (even as the young lad’s back was turned to me) and thought of standing up and walking over to say ‘hi.’ But I didn’t.

A sudden doubt–followed by apprehension–had afflicted me. It had been a few months since I had seen young ‘E’; my time with him then had limited, as he had spent most of his time then playing with several other children; indeed, in general, I had only had limited contact with him over the past few years, and I was not entirely sure whether he would recognize me instantly if I greeted him. My knowledge of his name would reassure him that I was not a perfect stranger but that delayed recognition could be problematic. For ‘E’ was not alone; he was escorted by an adult, one who would not find too palatable the the idea of an strange man on the subway striking up a conversation with her ward. Of course, I would be able to name ‘E’s parents, and talk about them in familiar terms, and convince her–and perhaps ‘E’ as well–that all was well, but that initial minute held out of the promise of being excruciatingly uncomfortable.

I stayed quiet and remained sitting in my seat. If ‘E’ had turned and recognized me, I would have responded to his greeting; but I was not about to initiate contact. I contented myself with the thought that I would write to his mother later in the day, saying something like “Guess what? I saw ‘E’ on the Q train today, riding back home.’

My reticence reminded me of a cultural lesson that I had been instructed to imbibe before I migrated to the US from India almost three decades ago. Those who had been to the US before me–high school and college mates who had begun their studies there–had warned me that my cultural predilection for greeting and talking to the children of perfect strangers in public spaces would have to be attenuated by some realities of American life: American parents did not approve of such contact; it was considered a social taboo; and woe betide you if some parent caught you talking, no matter how innocently, with their unescorted child. In Indian public spaces, it was common for strangers to talk to the children of other strangers and sometimes even display a kind of cheek-pulling affection; such behavior would not go down well in American precincts. Keep your assessments of cuteness to yourself; resist the temptation to spark up conversations with a toddler; and so on.

I listened, and I internalized those lessons. I do not talk to a child unless the parent is present. (Even when I escort my daughter to the local playgrounds; once a young girl began talking to me at a playground, and I walked away from her; perhaps an overreaction, but I was not about to take any chances.) Of course, I can empathize; after all, I’m a parent too. Still, there is occasion for some sadness here, that our societies are as afflicted as they are to make such caution necessary.

Lessons From A Vision Of A Funeral Pyre

My grandfather’s funeral was the first I attended of a significant family member. It was also the first time I witnessed a cremation, that fiery return to the ashes–and possibly eternal cycles of becoming and passing away–which signals the end of a Hindu’s life. As we prepared for it, I was aware, even through the haze of my grieving for a man who had assumed such a vivid and dominant presence in my life, that I was about to undergo a transformative experience of one kind or the other.

It was not long in forthcoming. After the preliminary prayers had been chanted, and my grandfather’s body wrapped in a white shroud and placed on top of the pyre, my uncle–my grandfather’s eldest surviving son–stepped up and brought a burning taper to it. The wooden logs caught fire quickly and long tongues of flame moved up and through their thickets, rapidly turning into a fierce blaze. I stood on the other side of the pyre; I could see my grandfather’s feet pointing toward me, suddenly exposed, sticking out from the under the sheet that covered the rest of his body.

As the flames grew, so did the radiant heat, and I took a step backward. As I did so, I noticed that my grandfather’s feet had blackened, charred by the fire that turned skin into soot. And then, abruptly, without notice, the blackened skin peeled, exposing an ivory-white flesh below, which began to melt and drip off the the now exposed bones; a bony, skeletal foot began to emerge. I instinctively winced, and started forward; I wanted to protect my grandfather from this horrible, agonizing, consignment to the flames. He was trapped and helpless; pinned under by the weight of the logs.

I didn’t, of course. There was nothing to protect. My grandfather was gone; he was beyond pain and sensation and feeling and suffering. I was staring at the remnants of his body, now lacking the appropriate relationship to the totality I had called my ‘grandfather.’ It could feel nothing, sense nothing. Old instincts died hard; standing there, in that April heat, as the Central Indian sun beat down on me, I could scarcely believe this all too evident fact.

The pyre continued to blaze; the bones in my grandfather’s feet had now started to crack and crumble under the still raging flames. All around me, a sombre group of family and friends gazed on. I had received news of my grandfather’s worsening health a mere twenty-four hours before; we had dashed to his home by overnight train in an effort to meet him, and on arriving, had learned he had passed away the previous night itself. I had spent the morning in a daze, scarcely believing this larger than life figure was gone, never to return.

But now there was no doubt about it; I had received confirmation that the time had come for my grandfather to ‘return’; this cremation had quickly and efficiently prepared his physical remains for the next stage of their transformation and further utilization in this world’s ongoing becoming.

Mass Incarceration And The ‘Overfederalization’ Of Crime

America’s mass incarceration is the bastard child of many. Among them: racism, the War on Drugs (itself a racist business), the evisceration of the Constitution through ideological interpretive strategies, prosecutorial misconduct, police brutality, and so on. Yet other culprits may be found elsewhere, in other precincts of the legal and political infrastructure of the nation.

In ‘The Balance of Power Between The Federal Government and the States’ (in: Alan Brinkley, Nelson W. Polsby, Kathleen M. Sullivan eds., New Federalist Papers: Essays in Defense of the Constitution, , WW. Norton, New York, 1997), Kathleen M. Sullivan writes:

[T]here may be reason for the courts to draw outer limits to federal power when the structural, political, and cultural safeguards of federalism break down and the federal government encroaches needlessly upon areas traditionally and sensibly regulated by the states. The worst example in our recent politics is the overfederalization of crime. The Constitution names only three crimes: counterfeiting coins or securities, piracy on the high seas, and treason. But Congress has created more than three thousand federal crimes under the power to regulate interstate commerce. There are many crimes that should be federal, such as bombing federal buildings or sending explosives through the mail. But should it also be a federal crime to grow marijuana at home or to hijack a car around the corner? Federal crimes have proliferated not because it is good crime policy but because it is good politics: as Chief Justice Rehnquist has observed, “the political combination of creating a federal offense and attaching a mandatory minimum sentence has become a veritable siren song for Congress,” loud enough to drown out any careful consideration of the comparative advantages of state and federal crime control.

Shifting crime control from the states to the federal government in purely local cases diverts the work of federal investigators, prosecutors, and judges from areas of greater federal need. It also fills federal prisons with non-violent and first-time offenders who occupy space that could better be used for violent, career criminals whose operations cross state lines. There is no reason why the new federal crimes may not be handled by the states, as they have been traditionally, unless they involve multistate enterprises or intrastate enterprises so vast as to overwhelm the resources of state authorities.

The federalization of a particular crime acts as a ‘promotion’ of sorts: it elevates the perceived undesirability and dangerousness of the crime; it thus clears the way for harsher sentencing. As Rehnquist’s remark above suggests, the legal system’s response to a particular crime may be viewed as qualitatively and quantitatively inferior till the time it federalizes it and adds a harsh minimum sentence; only such a combination will assuage the retributivist impulse that so seems to animate the punishment policies of our penal system. Moreover, the current state of affairs lends itself to a situation where a conservatively inclined Supreme Court could, under the guise of tilting this balance of power back to the states, strike down progressive legislation. As Martin Garbus noted in Courting Disaster: The Supreme Court and the Unmaking of American Law (Henry Holt, New York, 2002, pp. 128-130) the Supreme Court struck down, precisely as part of an ideological anti-federalist strategy, in United States vs. Lopez, “the first United States Supreme Court case since the New Deal to set limits to Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution“, an act of Congress criminalizing possession of a handgun at school.

The Supreme Court’s Commerce clause rulings helped unite the nation, but as the history of mass incarceration shows, it has helped create a nation within a nation too, one locked up and discriminated against for life.

 

My First Academic Conference

The first academic conference I attended was the 1999 Annual Meeting of the Association of Symbolic Logic, held at the University of California at San Diego. I submitted an abstract for a presentation, which was accepted, and so off I went, hoping to gain ‘experience’ and ‘exposure.’ My paper was based on part of my then in-progress dissertation; to be more precise, it presented the first model of belief revision I was currently working on with my thesis advisor.

I  had applied for, and received, some limited funds for travel–these barely covered the flight to San Diego and did not help with car rental fees. (I had arranged housing with a philosophy graduate student at UCSD.) I arrived in San Diego, picked up my rental car, and drove to my host’s place. The next morning the conference began, and so did my disorientation.

First, I was in the wrong conference. This meeting’s attendance was mostly comprised of mathematical logicians (set theorists, model theorists, proof theorists, recursion theorists, complexity theorists, and the like) – no one was likely to be interested in the model of belief revision I was presenting. It was simply not interesting enough, at the formal and mathematical level, for this crowd. And its philosophical underpinnings and motivations were hardly likely to be of interest either; those features were not the sorts of things mathematical logicians looked for in the formal work that was being presented that weekend.

Second,  as a related consequence, I knew no one.  This was an academic community I had no previous contact with–I knew no faculty or graduate students in it. I wandered around the halls and rooms, occasionally striking up brief conversations with students, sometimes introducing myself to faculty. My thesis adviser was known to some of the faculty I introduced myself to; this fact allowed for some useful ice-breaking in conversations. (I also managed to embarrass myself by pushing copies of my paper into some hands.) But mostly, I stayed on the peripheries of these social spaces.

Third, the subject matter of the talks was utterly unfamiliar and incomprehensible. I had studied some logic, but I was an amateur yet. And the inclinations of the mathematical logicians who comprised the primary attendance at this conference were pitched entirely differently from the philosophical logic I had been exposed to: their work was almost entirely concerned with the mathematical properties of the frameworks they worked on. I attended a couple of talks, but all too soon, bewildered and bored, I gave up.

I did not feel I belonged. Not here, not at any academic conference. I was intimidated and made diffident; my doubts about my choice of career and dissertation topic grew. By the second day of the conference, this feeling had grown worse, not ideal preparation for my talk. Quaking in my boots at the thought of being exposed to a grilling by a heavy hitter in the audience, my nervousness knew few bounds. Fortunately, the worst case did not eventuate; I put up my slides, described the work underway, answered a perfunctory question or two, and walked off the ‘stage,’ relieved. 

That year, the final year of my dissertation work, I attended three more conferences–a graduate student meeting at Brown, and international professional conferences in Sweden and Greece. By the end of the summer, I was a little more comfortable in my skin at these spaces. One such attendance almost certainly helped secure me a post-doctoral fellowship. (Yet another saw me lost again among mathematical logicians.)

Over the years, I’ve attended many more. But I never got really comfortable with conferences; I never felt like I fitted in. Now, I don’t go to conferences any more; the travel sounds interesting, but the talks, the questions and answer sessions, the social schmoozing, the dinners, (and the conference fees!) don’t sound enticing. I prefer smaller-scale, more personally pitched interactions with my fellow academics.  But perhaps a suitable conference venue–with mountains close by–will overcome this reticence.

Epistemology and ‘The Leftovers’

Imagine that an extremely improbable event occurs, one for which there was no warning; your best theories of the world assigned it a near-zero probability (indeed, so low was this probability then calculating it would have been a waste of time). This event is inexplicable–no explanations for it are forthcoming, and it cannot be fitted into the explanatory frameworks employed by your current conceptual schemes. What effect would this have on your theory of knowledge, your epistemology, the beliefs you form, and the justifications you consider acceptable for them?

This question is raised with varying degrees of explicitness in HBO’s The Leftovers–which deals with the aftermath of the sudden disappearance of approximately two percent of the earth’s population. ‘The Departure’ selected its ‘victims’ at random; no pattern appeared to connect the victims to each other. The ‘departures’ all happened at the same time, and they left no trace. There is no sign of them anymore; two percent of the world’s population has been vaporized. Literally.

The Leftovers is not a very good show, and I’m not sure I will watch it any more (two seasons has been enough). It did however, afford me an opportunity to engage in the philosophical reflection I note above.

One phenomena that should manifest itself in the aftermath of an event like ‘The Departure’ would be the formation of all kinds of ‘cults,’ groups united by beliefs formerly considered improbable but which now find a new lease on life because the metaphysical reasonableness of the world has taken such a beating. Critics of these cults would find that the solid foundations of their previous critiques had disappeared; if ‘The Departure’ could happen, then so could a great deal else. The Leftovers features some cults and their ‘gullible’ followers but does little of any great interest with them–lost opportunities abound in this show, perhaps an entirely unsurprising denouement given that its creators were responsible for the atrocity called Lost.

As one of the characters notes in the second season, ‘The Departure’ made the holding of ‘false beliefs’ more respectable than it had ever been. And as yet another character notes in the first season, that old knockdown maneuver, the one used to dismiss an implausible claim made by someone else, that ‘the laws of nature won’t allow that,’ is simply not available anymore.  Science used to tell us that its knowledge was defeasible, but now that that dreaded moment, when evidence of the universe’s non-uniformity, irregularity, and non-conformance with scientific laws is upon us, what are we to do? In The Leftovers a scientific effort gets underway to determine if geographical location was determinative of the victims’ susceptibility to being ‘departured,’ but it seems like this is grasping at straws, a pathetic and hopeless attempt to shoehorn ‘The Departure’ into extant scientific frameworks.

So, in the aftermath of ‘The Departure,’ we reside in a zone of epistemic confusion: we do not know how to assign probabilities to our beliefs anymore, for the definition of ‘likely’ and ‘unlikely’ seems to have been radically altered. That old ‘you never know’ has taken on a far more menacing tone. Only the resumption of the ‘normal’ stream of events for a sufficiently long period of time can heal this epistemic and metaphysical rupture; it will be a while before our sense of this world’s apparent predictability will return. But even then, every argument about the plausibility or the implausibility of some epistemic claim will take place in the shadow of that catastrophic disruption of ‘reality;’ the reasonableness of this world will always appear just a tad suspect.