Machine Gun Men: Not Your Grandfather’s Police

It was a common sight in New York City: soldiers, paramilitary or regular in origin, wearing battle fatigues and carrying assault rifles and machine guns, standing guard in various bustling points of urban interaction–train stations and bus terminals most commonly. Typically, these were deployed after some mysterious, unspecified warning would be made public by the Department of Homeland Security: threat levels had escalated to red or yellow or blue or orange (the precise spectral arrangement of this rainbow of danger always remained a little intractable to me.) As I would walk by these armed gentlemen, their guns locked and loaded–ok, perhaps not locked–looking suitably menacing to all and any evildoers, I would often wonder about the nature of the threat they were supposed to be guarding us from.

Did the Homeland Security folks imagine that an armed commando raid was going to be carried out in the heart of New York City, that a platoon of miscreants would alight from the 10:17 coming in from Hempstead, and open fire indiscriminately, scattering hand grenades as they went, and that our brave machine gun toting protectors would respond, responding with a spray of bullets their own, in these enclosed, hermetic spaces? That seemed unlikely, given the inevitable collateral damage that would result, and the known methodology of those who had thus far committed acts of terror in and against the US. (Unless, of course, you are counting the various gun-toting serial killers who go on periodic rampages in the US. But those folks aren’t terrorists, surely? Just misguided patriots.)

What did seem more likely, as I speculated about random searches in the New York subways, was that this kind of policing, complete with machine-guns and the soldiers was designed to accustom us to the presence of a militarized force as peacekeeper, protector and enforcer in our daily lives. It can search, and it can intimidate. You might engage in conversation with a beat cop, and you might even enter into a verbal dispute; you almost certainly will not do so with a black-clad figure with one hand perennially on the trigger of a high-powered munition.

We should keep these considerations in mind when we look at photographs of machine gun toting police in Ferguson, brought out to maintain ‘order’ in the wake of protests and unrest following the shooting of the unarmed Michael Brown. Under what circumstances are these guns to be deployed? Bear in mind machine-guns are classic anti-personnel weaponry, intended to set up killing fields of fire to stop an armed assault by heavily armed soldiers in its tracks. They are intended to pump hundreds and thousands of bullets quickly into a space of combat, rendering it deadly  to those caught in its crossfire. Did the police envisage a situation in which a group of protesters ransacking and damaging a store, or throwing rocks at the police, would need to be treated thus? If such a situation was not envisaged, then presumably, the machine-guns were there for show: to let us know the police have them, to intimidate and suppress, and to condition us to the increasing militarization of our law and order enforcement mechanisms.

But it won’t end there, of course. Just like shootings of unarmed men by the police are now passé so too can become the use of machine guns by the police. If they are always available, always at hand, it will not take too long before some policeman, used to the idea that he is this society’s bulwark against the forces of darkness–literally-will open fire, comfortable in the knowledge that only administrative leave awaits him.

When those killings will be protested, an even greater number of machine guns will be used to police them. And so it will go.

As I noted yesterday:

One can only speculate about the future contours of such a charged relationship. Perhaps the citizenry will be stunned and beaten down into cowering submission, or perhaps, someday, realizing the forces arrayed against them are only bored and amused by the conventional street protest and the filed judicial complaint, those famed gigantic arsenals of privately owned weaponry in America will be deployed to refuse and resist.

PS: At various points in writing this post, I committed a Freudian typing slip, one made easier by the location of letters on my keyboard: I persistently typed in ‘machine funs’ instead of ‘machine guns.’

Policing Ferguson: Executions, Demonizing Protest, Militarization

The killing–execution style–of Michael Brown, the protests in Ferguson that followed, and their policing, both rhetorically and literally, demonstrate some chilling facts about modern American life.

Most obviously,  police continue to over-police, with overbearing aggressiveness and force, communities of color.  They have poor relationships with their subjects–an apt description given the asymmetry of power that exists between them–and all too frequently, consider violent physical and verbal intimidation as an essential part of their arsenal of tactics. This is old hat, and nothing new is being pointed out in noting this. A long list of dead black men is adequate testimony to this age-old policy. As many have noted, white men can carry guns, subject only to withering descriptions of ‘open-carry patriots’, black men with toy guns are likely to be shot dead.

More interesting is the response to the protests that have followed. The language of ‘riot’ and ‘looting’ quickly comes to the fore: the former suggests uncontrolled, violent, inchoate responses; the latter suggests an outbreak of criminality, taking advantage of the cover afforded by the protests.  We will soon hear pious suggestions the rioters are indulging in counterproductive behavior, that they are destroying their own neighborhoods, that they are offering refuge to the criminals among them, that they would do better to seek justice–perhaps via an internal police investigation, a criminal indictment, a civil rights suit. They should, that is, channel and their indignation  and anger into dreary dead-ends that will defuse them and result in nothing more than a series of banal bromides.

Those on the receiving end of police violence know it is subject to no law; that the police’s famed ‘Thin Blue Line’ does not protect those who are policed but only the police themselves; that the resolution of a complaint against the police will always involve its misplacement in a series of bureaucratic procedures that will punish no one but merely prolong the bitter anger and frustration of those who have lost their loved ones. The anger on display in Ferguson is only the visible expression of a seething frustration that knows it can expect no justice from the system that regulates it, that is aware that talk of justice and procedure is a cruel joke, played by the powerful on the powerless. If the protests seem misdirected and inappropriate that is only natural; they are the only avenues left for those consistently on the receiving end.

Lastly, the policing of the protests shows how the never ending militarization of police forces will play out. The police resemble storm-troopers: they ride around in what look like armored cars, they use tear gas and rubber bullets, they point loaded weapons at unarmed men, women, and children, they will not hesitate to use armed and deadly force if provoked. When they could use it against young unarmed men, then why not against those who are actually mouthing aggressive imprecations, even if still not carrying guns? The images of this policing, of black-clad men, tramping through the streets, looking like an occupying force in wartime, will have precisely the impact desired: they will render ever more timid the citizenry, now more than ever made susceptible to the suggestion that it would do best, in times of political and civil strife, to stay safely behind locked doors and to disdain the public assembly, the storming of the barricades. (It behooves us to remember the policing of Boston in response to the Boston Marathon bombing; we are now increasingly used to the total shutdown of a city by police and paramilitary forces. Note too, that there was never any question of such an aggressive display of force against those guarding Cliven Bundy’s ranch earlier this year. )

One can only speculate about the future contours of such a charged relationship. Perhaps the citizenry will be stunned and beaten down into cowering submission, or perhaps, someday, realizing the forces arrayed against them are only bored and amused by the conventional street protest and the filed judicial complaint, those famed gigantic arsenals of privately owned weaponry in America will be deployed to refuse and resist.

Artificial Intelligence And ‘Real Understanding’

Speculation about–and vigorous contestations of–the possibility of ever realizing artificial intelligence have been stuck in a dreary groove ever since the Dartmouth conference: wildly optimistic predictions about the temporal proximity of the day machines (and the programs they run) will attain human levels of intelligence; followed by skeptical critique and taunting reminders of landmarks and benchmarks not attained; triumphant announcement of once-Holy Grails attained (playing chess, winning Jeopardy, driving a car, take your pick); rejoinders these were not especially holy or unattainable to begin with; accusations of goal-post moving; reminders again, of ‘quintessentially human’ benchmarks not attained; rejoinders of ‘just you wait’; and so on. Ad nauseam doesn’t begin to describe it.

Gary Marcus‘ skepticism about artificial intelligence is thus following a well-worn path. And like many of those who have traveled this path he relies on easy puncturing of over-inflated pretension, and pointing out the real ‘challenging problems like understanding natural language.’ And this latest ability–[to] “read a newspaper as well as a human can”–unsurprisingly, is what ‘true AI’ should aspire to. There is always some ability that characterizes real, I mean really real, AI. All else is but ersatz, mere aspiration, a missing of the mark, an approximation. This ability is essential to our reckoning of a being as intelligent.

Because this debate’s contours are so well-worn, my response is also drearily familiar. If those who design and build artificial intelligence are to be accused to over-simplification, then those critiquing AI rely too much on mysterianism. On closer look, the statement “the deep-learning system doesn’t really understand anything” treats “understanding” as some kind of mysterious monolithic composite, whereas as Marcus has himself indirectly noted elsewhere it consists of a variety of visibly manifested  linguistic competencies. (Their discreteness, obviously, makes them more amenable to piecemeal solution; the technical challenge of integrating them into the same system still remains.)

‘Understanding’ often does a great deal of work for those who would dismiss the natural language competencies of artificial intelligence: “the program summarized the story for me but it didn’t really understand anything.” Or in running together two views of AI–wholesale emulation, including structure and implementation of human cognitive architecture, or just successful emulation of task competence. As an interlocutor of mine once noted during a symposium on my book A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents:

Statistical and probability-based machine-learning models (often combined with logical-knowledge based rules about the world) often produce high-quality and effective results (not quite up to the par of nuanced human translators at this point), without any assertion that the computers are engaging in profound understanding with the underlying “meaning” of the translated sentences or employing processes whose analytical abilities approach human-level cognition.

My response then was:

What is this ‘profound understanding’ that we speak of? Turns out that when we want to cash out the meaning of this term we seek refuge again in complex, inter-related displays of understanding: He showed me he understood the book by writing about  it; or he showed me he understood the language because he did what I asked him to do; he understands the language because he affirms certain implications and rejects others….

[D]o I simply show by usage and deployment of a language within a particular language-using community that I understand the meanings of the sentences of that language?….If an artificial agent is so proficient, then why deny it the capacity for understanding meanings? Why isn’t understanding the meaning of a sentence understood as a multiply-realizable capacity?

Marcus is right to concentrate on competence in particular natural language tasks but he needs to disdain a) a reductive view that takes one particular set of competences to be characteristic of something as poorly defined as human intelligence and b) to not disdain the attainment of these competencies on grounds of their not emulating human cognitive structure.

The Only Apparent Easiness Of Meta-Protest

Finding fault with the form and content of political critique or protest comes easily to some: You chose a mode of protest that was inappropriate–it was too loud, it was violent, it was not inclusive enough; your protest is hypocritical–you do not protest injustices relevantly similar to the ones you protest currently; and lastly, and relatedly, why protest this, and not that?

Here are some recent exhibits of these objections and responses to them:

1. Corey Robin engages with Michael Kazin‘s ‘Why Single Out Israel’ objection to the BDS movement. (Do check out the follow-up too.)

2. I respond to Bernard-Henri Lévy‘s ‘selective outrage’ accusation (like Kazin, Lévy’ insinuates anti-semitism.)

3. Vijay Prashad responds to Manu Joseph‘s dismissal of Indian leftist and middle-class critique of Israeli policies in Gaza.

There is considerable overlap in these responses (Robin and I cover some of the same bases in our noting the necessary and appropriate selectivity of political action; and Prashad and I both note that ties with Israel–political and economic–animate and crucially direct and focus the protests in the US and India.)

Another–entertainingly well-written–instance of such a debate may be found in George Scialabba‘s acerbic response to Paul Berman‘s recent essay on Alexander Cockburn. In it, Scialabba takes on a common complaint made against the American left–its alleged sympathy for totalitarian regimes–and eviscerates it:

For decades Berman and others have promulgated a misleading and self-serving distinction between the “anti-imperialist” left and the “anti-totalitarian” left. The former allegedly attribute all the world’s evils to capitalism…and are reluctant to criticize any regime that calls itself…“socialist” or “communist.”…The anti-totalitarians…assert[s] instead the primacy of democracy and human rights….since American leaders repeatedly profess their determination to assist freedom and democracy everywhere, American foreign policy, even if it involves the illegal use of military force, will often deserve support.

The anti-imperialist/anti-totalitarian distinction is misleading because…one side (Cockburn’s) is protesting crimes that their readers can readily, as citizens, do something about, and in fact are ultimately responsible for, while the other side (Berman’s) is not. Abuses by Castro and Chavez, and crimes by Saddam and Iran’s ayatollahs, are undoubtedly real. But the U.S. government did/does not support those regimes and was/is not responsible for their crimes….Certainly the U.S. should do everything possible (and legal) to undermine, or at least chastise, those authoritarian regimes. But of course, it already does that—and in fact does a great many illegal things as well…for strategic reasons. Embargos, support for coup attempts, and outright invasions are all acts of aggression…which the anti-totalitarians have a distressing tendency to wink at….

For the last four decades at least, human rights abuses in U.S. client states—Turkey, Indonesia, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua under Somoza, Argentina, Brazil, Iran under the Shah, Iraq under Saddam (until 1991)—vastly exceeded those in Soviet client states. The anti-totalitarians said comparatively little about the former, even though the U.S. could usually have halted the abuses simply by threatening to cut off military and diplomatic support….the anti-totalitarians kept a sharp focus on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, over whose governments they had no leverage and whom the U.S. government needed no encouragement to oppose.

The anti-totalitarian position amounts…to this: vigorous criticism of the crimes of one’s government’s enemies, whose policies one cannot affect; feeble or no criticism of the crimes of one’s own government, whose policies one can affect.

As Scialabba and Robin rightly suggest, with varying degrees of explicitness, one straightforward suggestion contained in these forms of meta-protest is to either cease the protest altogether, or to force it into a channel where it may be suitably defused. As ideology-preserving measures go, meta-protests have a long and dishonorable record of success; the rhetorical and critical forms of responding and refuting them could do with a little more airing.

The Post-Running Glow, And Watching Batting Practice

On Tuesday morning last, I awoke at 5:45 AM, drank coffee, changed into a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, laced up my running shoes and went for my now-regular twice-a-week 3.4 mile-loop of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. (I accompany an old friend, a far more serious runner than me, on the days he does his ‘easy runs.’)

After we had finished our run, I was sweaty, and suffused with the endorphin-saturated glow that runners like to term ‘the runner’s high.’  My way home lay along a small cluster of sporting fields: tennis courts, football fields, baseball diamonds. As I walked back, slowly, along the wire-mesh fences that marked off the boundaries and edges of these zones of recreation from the walkways and parking lots of the offices of the Park Authority, the summer sun’s rays, already finely honed to a warm sharpness by 730AM, shone through their grills, drawing diffraction patterns on me and all that lay around me. I was primed to regard this little urban oasis’ landscape with a benevolent and appreciative eye; this early in the day, as other residents of the city scrambled to prepare for their work and school days, I had already acquired the virtuous distinction of having performed service for both body and soul. And I had spent time with a friend, talking about matters cultural and political and emotional. Conversation with friends; physical endeavor; quiet meditative time; there seemed to be a Epictetan aura around my simple doings that morning.

At one end of the baseball diamond, a father and son pair appeared engaged in a distinctive summertime occupation: batting practice. The young lad adorned himself with his helmet, and twirled his bat in anticipation; his father, away on the pitcher’s mound, behind the practice L-screen, reached, again and again, into a sack full of baseballs, picked out one, and threw it over at varying speeds and trajectories; the batter in training swung or let go, trusting his judgment of balls and strikes; sometimes balls thudded into the fences behind which I now stood, my progress home temporarily halted, gazing on at this spirited attempt to acquire competence in a difficult sporting task; sometimes lusty contact was made and the baseball departed to sundry corners of the field, awaiting retrieval once the sack of spares had been depleted. Here was sport, here was family, here was physical aspiration.

I could not stay too long; my day’s responsibilities awaited me; I had to get home in time to aid my wife in her departure for work by taking my daughter to day-care; and then, I would have to turn to my writing, my syllabus preparation, and unfortunately, my perennial states of distraction. All too soon, I would be possessed by anxiety and self-doubt about my intellectual abilities, my suitability for the task of writing; I would fret and fume by all that I would leave undone as the day drew on. So this little morning-time instruction in that oldest of lessons, about the cost-free nature of simple pleasures, acquired in retrospect, as many of life’s experiences often do, some of the hue the summer sun had afforded to my treed and shaded surroundings on my walk back home from a run around the park.

Note: In an older post, I had regretted my inability to run regularly thanks to an old ankle injury; this latest bout of running marks a return of sorts to a much beloved activity of mine. I do not intend to risk injury and only run twice a week.

Causal Analysis, Moral Culpability, And Gaza

If X causes Y, and Y causes Z, then surely X is the cause of Z? So goes the intuition–very roughly–that the causal relation is transitive. It thus often underwrites arguments about moral culpability and responsibility–sometimes even in legal settings. If I am the cause for your actions, then I am culpable, by one reckoning, for the effects of your actions.  (Again, very roughly, for there are very interesting interactions with moral agency here.) The skeptical have, for a long time, pointed to a possible W, the cause of X, which might be dragged into this business, thus endlessly postponing the business of causal ascription as the chain of causes is extended backwards to the origins of the universe. The distinction between distal and proximal causation in legal contexts is sometimes taken to clarify the confusion that might result if this causal chain were to be so extended.

As most pragmatically inclined folks never tire of pointing out, causal ascription is an inherently interest-laden enterprise; our identification of causes is driven not so much by metaphysical clarity about the necessary and sufficient conditions for causation as it is by our desire to be able to produce certain effects and not others, to assign blame and responsibility at some points in the causal chain and not at others. Some parts of the causal chain appear more amenable to our influence than others and thus influence our causal ascriptions in legal and moral analysis. We cannot, for instance, do much about the chemical properties of water and its effect on human lungs when it comes to preventing deaths by drowning, but we can certainly offer swimming lessons and put up warning signs around large bodies of water. (The distinction between distal and proximal causation is a related pragmatic aspect of causal analysis; see too, my little pointer to moral agency above.) And of course, our identification of points in which culpability originates are driven very much by our–sometimes overt, sometimes concealed–motives and interests. What ends are we interested in bringing about? Where might our sympathies lie?

I was reminded of some of these considerations during a discussion on Facebook,  where the following question was asked, in relation to the assignment of responsibility and culpability for the deaths of civilians in Gaza: .

What…is Israel supposed to do? What’s the right response to having a country on your border that sponsors – rather openly – rocket attacks on your territory, and has built a network of tunnels under the border and a whole terror infrastructure from which its operatives can enter the territory and attack your citizens?…I can’t get my mind around the notion that anyone other than Hamas bears the responsibility for this horror. 

Here, Hamas bears moral culpability for civilian deaths: they fire rockets (or kidnap teenagers), which provoke Israeli retaliation, which causes the deaths of Gazan civilians.

In one of my responses, I asked:

Is your general claim that any cross-“border” violence is an invitation to massive, violent retaliation that might involve as an unfortunate side-effect eighty percent civilian casualties?

This was responded to with:

If some crazed Canadian drug lord starts firing mortars into Buffalo NY I wouldn’t recommend massive, violent retaliation. If the Canadian government refused to recognize the US and armed fighters to attack across the border, and refused to assist in their capture … different story. It’s an act of war ON HAMAS’ PART, and when Israel responds with additional acts of war, I don’t think they are culpable.

I then responded with:

As for culpability, is Hamas also responsible when Israel is told by independent relief agencies that children are sheltering in a particular venue and still bombs them anyway?

And then, to bring us to the subject matter of this post, I wrote:

To grant your point about culpability is to do no more than to stop the analysis of the causal chain at a point that suits the thesis you want to establish: that Israel is not morally responsible for the deaths of innocents.

And I then asked the rhetorical question:

You’ve studied proximal causation in legal theory. Who is culpable here?

This discussion, I think, illustrates quite well, the points raised in my preliminary discussion above. Note too, that one response to the Israeli claim that Hamas is culpable for the current deaths of civilians–because of rocket attacks, or the kidnappings of Israeli teenagers–always has been: What about the occupation?

Steven Salaita and Academic Freedom in Academic and ‘Non-Academic’ Spaces

Steven Salaita might have thought he was headed for a new faculty position: the University of Illinois had made him a job offer, he had accepted, and resigned his position at Virginia Tech. But not so fast: the Chancellor of the university rescinded the offer, apparently because of Salaita’s aggressively vocal presence on Twitter, where he has sent out more than a few angry 140-character blasts directed at Israel’s current policies in Gaza.

The defenses of the Chancellor’s decision follow rather predictable trajectories: one, curiously adopted by Cary Nelson, former president of the AAUP and unstinting champion of academic freedom, is that Salaita’s public speech shows evidence of incivility and uncollegiality, which should be appropriate considerations in hiring and firing decisions; that they show evidence of his inability to ensure his students’ appropriate treatment in his classrooms, presumably because those with ‘pro-Israel’ views would feel threatened that they would not be treated on par with others; that Salaita would have done better to restrict his pronouncements to peer-reviewed academic journals. The second, related to the first, is that Salaita, not being protected by the First Amendment, is subject to the same regulation of his speech that all those who are acted on by private, non-governmental actors are; if you speak in public, you should expect to pay the ‘consequences’ for it.

Academic freedom, in these viewpoints, becomes bogus; there are no special freedoms that accrue to those engaged in teaching and research in universities; or if they do, they are, as Nelson suggests, only to be found in teaching and research in specifically academic forums. When faculty step out of those restricted domains, they leave their academic freedom behind. You are free to teach what you want; you are free to research what you want; you are not free to say and write what you want ‘outside.’

Some of Nelson’s concerns are addressed by my colleague Justin Steinberg, who in an email to Chancellor Wise protesting Salaita’s ‘dehiring’ wrote: :

Tweets are like (self-made) bumper stickers that one might put on one’s car; they do not reveal anything about how one comports oneself in face-to-face discourse or in the classroom. Just as it would be wholly inappropriate to rescind a job offer based on the perceived tastelessness or stridency of the bumper stickers that bedeck one’s car, it is equally inappropriate to do so on account of the tone of one’s social media posts.

As Amardeep Singh notes in his thorough examination of Salaita’s online record, Twitter is an inherently limited medium; it all too easily facilitates reductive understandings of the points made in its confines. Because it is so physically limited, it often encourages polemical excess: your tweet will soon scroll off your followers’ timelines; there are so many tweets; better to pack as much gunpowder as possible into your volley. Further, if Nelson’s guidelines to faculty hiring were to be taken seriously, with so much public speech taking place on social media, an increasing number of conversations could come in for scrutiny, increasing the likelihood that we may be indicted all too easily for incivility. The net result would be to self-censor online speech. Whatever Twitter’s faults, it offers a new medium of discourse, and it would be unfortunate if those using it were to censor themselves.

And why stop at social media? Any polemical remark made anywhere becomes grist for the mill; a conservative professor expressing his unvarnished–but overheard–opinions about the decline of the American family at a colleague’s dinner party should not be allowed into classrooms where single mothers might be taking classes. The ridiculousness of this situation should be apparent. All over the American university system, many professors with radically diverse political and ethical views teach, conduct research and supervise students; are we to now vet their speech in all and any fora so that we may judge whether they are able to provide safe spaces for their students? Or are we rather to trust them to be able to comport themselves in learning environments, which almost invariably feature diverse political opinions and leanings? As we seem to do more often than not. To set aside certain topics and not others as toxic to the touch will rely, rather unsurprisingly, on making untenable distinctions between them and others on which rather pungent opinions are expressed as a matter of course. (With probability one, Twitter’s archives may be searched to find evidence that academics have expressed such views on all manner of topics; have they all been restricted from coming into contact with various student demographics?)

Nelson is also relying on an incoherent distinction between academic and non-academic spheres of speech, with the former only present in conventional fora such as journals. Au contraire; an academic’s intellectual productions are not so easily demarcated. I consider my writing here to be an important component of my academic role; it helps me think aloud in different shape, manner, and form than the confines of monographs and journals, and thus, helps inform them as well. (Material written here has, for instance, found its way into my latest book.) I sometimes ruminate on my teaching experiences here, and sometimes think aloud about my syllabi. This blog is not a peer-reviewed space, but it no less academic for that. Social media is where a great deal of information-sharing and discussion takes place; it offers a modern form of the salon, with different avenues and modes of participation available. To suggest that this is not an academic space of learning and its dissemination is to turn a willfully blind eye to its structures and usage.

The university is supposed to provide a haven for untrammeled inquiry; to provide spaces within which teachers, researchers, and students may explore many avenues of intellectual exploration, with these not restricted by conventional niceties; we expect to have our mental spaces rearranged within its confines. Academic freedom is supposed to safeguard these modes and methods of learning and teaching. And that learning and teaching will take many different forms and modes; to insist that academic freedom will only be offered in some fora and not others is to say that academic freedom is to be restricted, and only made available in safely restricted ways. That is, it is to be rendered meaningless.

Israel And A Jewish Solution To The Palestinian Problem

When I was eight years old, my mother told me the story of the Jews. We were on a month-long vacation, the mother of all road-trips; our destinations included the mountains and the valleys of Kashmir and the Garhwal. One day, after a long and tiring drive through innumerable twisting roads, we had reached our long-sought destination for the day, a charming forest bungalow, and after we had eaten dinner and settled in for the night, she drew my brother and me close to her and told us their tale.

It was a story that haunted and inspired me: a story of suffering and perseverance, of persecution and survival, of endurance and persistence in the face of adversity. It was a tale of dispersal and flight, of resistance, of the preservation of the things most precious to the Jewish identity. She told us of the Holocaust, of the unimaginable horrors of the concentration camps, and then, she told us of Israel, and its creation as a safe haven, finally, for an eternally persecuted people. She told us of a land reclaimed from the desert, made fertile and populated by a people who saw within its borders a chance to make their lives anew, away from the death and destruction that had been visited them during mankind’s most horrible conflict. She told us of their continued fight for survival through the wars that followed; their continued and enduring resilience. She told us of their learning and culture; she told us of their intellectual accomplishments in science, literature and the arts; she told us of the value they placed on education and lifelong learning.

And, then, unforgettably, bringing up the example of the Rothschilds, she told us of Jewish philanthropy, how a long-oppressed and suffering people had taken their immense, hard-earned wealth and used it for the greater good, deciding that their pain would be unique only in that they were determined to not let others suffer as they had, that they would do what they could to decrease the sum total of the inevitable pain and anguish that is every human’s lot on this earth.

I do not remember if my mother told us about Palestine and its dispossessed people. Perhaps she did, but only briefly. Perhaps she meant to tell us another time. Or perhaps she did, but I could not pay attention, for I was riveted by other components of the tale I had just heard.  Perhaps my mother only told me the Exodus version of happenings in the Middle East, and elsewhere. All stories are incomplete; this one surely was.

I grew familiar with the story of the Palestinians much later; the moral burden that placed upon the residents of Israel and perhaps Jews everywhere, only became clearer to me much later in my life. By then, because of the story I had first heard as a eight-year old, and its storyteller, and because–other than Edward Said–the strongest and clearest voices that pointed out Israeli missteps were always Jewish, I had come to believe–even as figurative scales fell from my eyes–that a resolution of the ‘Palestinian problem’ lay within the moral, intellectual and political reach of the Jewish people.

It might be their sternest challenge yet, to find the moral clarity and the political courage to undo undoubted injustice, one which Judaism’s ethical codes most certainly instruct them to.

Lucid Dreaming: A Pleasant Side-Effect of Sleep Disruption

A disrupted night’s sleep is one of the unfortunate concomitants of parenthood; rumor has it that so terrible is the toll that it extracts that some are scared off procreation altogether. Rare is the parent of the infant or toddler who has not tendered a complaint about sleep deprivation to his bored, unsympathetic, childless friends and family. (The wise ones tell it to the ‘been there, done that’ crowd.)

But like most of life’s dispensations, this one is not unmixed in the blessings and curses it tenders. As but a trivial example, a disturbed morning’s sleep means that I can rise early to catch the opening session of the live telecast of a cricket game being played six time-zones away. But by far the most pleasurable side-effect of disrupted sleep are the lucid dreams that result when you do manage to fall asleep again. An amateur chemist scheming to produce a new best-selling psychotropic drug might do well in aiming to produce some of these effects in his  intended product.

I first noticed the intense imagery and quasi-hallucinatory sensations present in the dreaming during a sleep session following disruption in the most unfortunate of ways: during painful, hungover mornings. On those occasions, I would awake early in the morning, my head pounding, my mouth cotton-dry, and stumble out to the kitchen to partake of painkillers and water, and then stumble back into bed to sleep it off. Then, I noticed that as I would fall asleep, I would be entertained by all manners of colorful, vivid dreams; their most startling feature was, almost invariably, the sensation of flight.

Somehow, magically, I would have acquired the powers of airborne locomotion; I could swoop, plummet, hover, soar, dive; I would acquire aerial perspectives on familiar landscapes; so realistic were some of these episodes that I would also experience the sickening vertigo that I unfortunately suffer from when confronted with heights. But the lucidity of these dreams quickly conquered the vertigo, for I was able to reassure myself that no harm could come to me during the dream.

The lucidity of these dreams very quickly enhanced their pleasures; as the dream begins, I feel a rush of pleasurable anticipation; I know a familiar, and yet endlessly varied, pleasure lies ahead. The pleasure at the dream-borne flights that soon follow is considerably enhanced by my knowledge that it is only in these dreams that I will be able to enjoy the pleasures that the considerably more intrepid than me enjoy during activities like hang-gliding or para-sailing.  Because the dreams are lucid, I enjoy greater control over my flight, and often, even over the visual effects I seem able to produce in my dreamscapes.

So pleasurable are these dreams that I am able to comfort myself, as I cast about, hoping to fall asleep after I have been awakened by a few wails that even if I will have been denied my rightful allotment of hours of sleep, the few that will come my way will be pleasurably entertaining and continuously edificatory about the mysteries of human phenomenal experience.

 

Political Schooling Via The Usenet Newsgroup

As my post yesterday should have indicated, we are educated by a variety of modalities. A powerfully formative one for me was my exposure to Usenet newsgroups.

I discovered newsgroups in 1988, shortly after I began work as a research assistant with the Computerized Conferencing and Communications Center at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. I ‘worked’ long hours in our laboratory; email and newsgroups occupied much of that time (in between writing code, debugging code, and stepping out for coffee and cigarette breaks). I had arrived in the US from India in 1987,  a bachelor’s degree in hand; I considered myself well-read, but this inflated estimation of my edification was soon to be revised.

In the late eighties and the early nineties, Usenet newsgroups were largely populated by those with some form of university affiliation: faculty, students, staff, post-doctoral fellows. (Commercial affiliations were not unknown, but these were outnumbered by academic ones; the .edu address was most commonly visible.)  That demographic, unsurprisingly, voluble and prolific in its writing. (It is to the credit of the hacker community that so many of its members wrote often, and well, on newsgroups.)

The following hierarchy of newsgroups captures their eclectic and comprehensive nature:

  • comp.* — Discussion of computer-related topics
  • news.* — Discussion of Usenet itself
  • sci.* — Discussion of scientific subjects
  • rec.* — Discussion of recreational activities (e.g. games and hobbies)
  • soc.* — Socialising and discussion of social issues.
  • talk. * — Discussion of contentious issues such as religion and politics.
  • misc.* — Miscellaneous discussion—anything which does not fit in the other hierarchies.

I read a few of the .sci, .soc, .talk, and .rec groups on a daily basis. These were the time-sucks of their day; you could spend hours and hours, reading, responding, and engaging in flame wars. They were how you filled lunch and coffee breaks; they could make you stay up late at night, and log in frequently to see if new articles had shown up, to see if anyone had responded to your post.

It was here, in Usenet newsgroups, that I read many, many well-written, articulate, clearly argued and defended, points of view that I had never read before: free speech absolutism, the legalization of drugs, Palestinian self-determination, women’s reproductive rights, privacy rights, gay and lesbian rights, free software versus proprietary software, feminism, interpretations of the American constitution.  And many more. (I also spent a great deal of time reading and discussing cricket in the cricket newsgroup and the Grateful Dead in rec.music.gdead; ) When world-shaking events like the fall of Berlin Wall or Tiananmen  Square occurred on the world stage, they provoked corresponding discussions in the relevant groups. I read furious debates; refutations and counter-refutations; angry tirades; racist and xenophobic rants; calm, reasoned, erudite quasi-dissertations.

I had often entertained conventional views on or all some of these topics before I encountered newsgroups; very few of them survived their encounter with newsgroup discussions.  I read a great deal of revisionist history; I was offered many perspectives on world historical events that I had glibly thought I had understood  well. I had been complacent; I was no longer so. The sense of instability in my beliefs was alarming, but it was also exhilarating. I learned that seemingly air-tight arguments and refutations often contained fatal fallacies and weaknesses that could be exposed by close reading and careful attention to their logical and rhetorical form.

Some discussions were tedious, and many were repetitive, and later in the mid-nineties as the Internet bloomed and blossomed, I found the newsgroups less useful. I stopped reading them soon thereafter. But I never forgot those early readings–which produced in me a kind of ‘shock of the new.’

Many, many thanks are due to all those unnamed teachers of mine.