Friday, June 24, 2011
Great Minds Think Alike...in the LIbrary
As a great and pleasantly surprising discovery to follow along after the Harvard future of law libraries conference, I enjoyed this piece from The Atlantic, "What Big Media Can Learn from the New York Public Library." Great stuff as I forge ahead on my book project on identity creation in times of technological change. I wonder what a book with a focus on Carlyle and McLuhan may say to the crowdsource world?
Future of Law Libraries: The Future Is Now? Harvard conference 6/16/11
The conference organized by John Palfrey at Harvard Law has been summarized by John himself on his blog and also reflected upon by Joe Hodnicki of Law Librarian Blog ; I sat above where John did his blogging in real time. I had attended on the previous day a follow-up session on collaboration in managing foreign law resources in larger legal research libraries across the United States. As Carl Malamud's Law.gov evolves and the imaginings (and first steps) emerge in projects such as the World Legal Information Institute or perhaps LC's vision of a One World Law Library (OWLL), we were prepared in many ways for Robert Darnton's presentation on the Digital Public Law Library of America (DPLA) and Siva Vaidhyanathan's Human Knowledge Project (HKP).
As one who works as a kind of outlier, as many of us FCIL librarians do, on the fringe of the American law library world (despite discussions and scenarios about "globalization"), I am just as worried about the knowledge that people don't want as about the knowledge everyone wants. The exciting thing about Darnton's project, and its eventual merger perhaps with Europeana, is that for me it creates a space within cyberspace (as does Facebook, after all) but of a different kind such that we can balance mediated with unmediated access to knowledge. In other words, the digitized library of books and other resources, and eventually art and other realia, represents selected and vetted materials that will be discoverable alongside everything from everywhere. Why is this important? Well, I agree with Bob Berring in his conference opening keynote talk when he alluded to crowds being smart, the bottom-up flow of knowledge. But pace Cass Sunstein and others, I am not sure that crowds are always wise. They can produce clever solutions but not wisdom, and even the wisdom of the wise has to be challenged somehow (see the definitions and this very notion as taken by Merriam-Webster from Robert Darnton's work!).
An example from the world of foreign (to Americans) and indeed not-so-foreign law: civil law codes are intended to be succinct and transparent in Napoleon's original vision. However, to apply them to facts requires commentary. Likewise in common law, even if all cases are on Law.gov, how do many cases add up to a solid sense of the law, a statement of it, without some training? I think this is the greatest barrier pro se patrons in our system face. They still have to add up the decisions within a jurisdiction to get an answer, separating dicta out from holdings, etc. I agree that we are now way too far over on the side of privatization and commercialization of aids to this process, but some part of this world of commentary still needs to be there and organized through free hyperlinks between that and primary law. Cyberspace is the ideal place to do it, through two of the themes at this conference, open law and open access in general.
Finally, the digitized library will need to be nurtured in perpetuity, not as to formats and accessibility only but as to its content. If we are only Buy on Demand, we cannot educate. If we only own what people somehow thing they already want, how will they ever learn what they do not want to know? We could be headed for global groupthink despite the seemingly disruptive and subversive qualities of the internet (as recently on display in the Middle East).
Congratulations to John Palfrey and his great staff of librarians, both for a terrific meeting and a tour of their charette devoted to designing parts of this new knowledge database. If law libraries have been called the "lawyers' laboratory" (as recalled by Dick Danner), then he and his staff have undertaken a new and exciting realization of this concept in the world of digital innovation.
As one who works as a kind of outlier, as many of us FCIL librarians do, on the fringe of the American law library world (despite discussions and scenarios about "globalization"), I am just as worried about the knowledge that people don't want as about the knowledge everyone wants. The exciting thing about Darnton's project, and its eventual merger perhaps with Europeana, is that for me it creates a space within cyberspace (as does Facebook, after all) but of a different kind such that we can balance mediated with unmediated access to knowledge. In other words, the digitized library of books and other resources, and eventually art and other realia, represents selected and vetted materials that will be discoverable alongside everything from everywhere. Why is this important? Well, I agree with Bob Berring in his conference opening keynote talk when he alluded to crowds being smart, the bottom-up flow of knowledge. But pace Cass Sunstein and others, I am not sure that crowds are always wise. They can produce clever solutions but not wisdom, and even the wisdom of the wise has to be challenged somehow (see the definitions and this very notion as taken by Merriam-Webster from Robert Darnton's work!).
An example from the world of foreign (to Americans) and indeed not-so-foreign law: civil law codes are intended to be succinct and transparent in Napoleon's original vision. However, to apply them to facts requires commentary. Likewise in common law, even if all cases are on Law.gov, how do many cases add up to a solid sense of the law, a statement of it, without some training? I think this is the greatest barrier pro se patrons in our system face. They still have to add up the decisions within a jurisdiction to get an answer, separating dicta out from holdings, etc. I agree that we are now way too far over on the side of privatization and commercialization of aids to this process, but some part of this world of commentary still needs to be there and organized through free hyperlinks between that and primary law. Cyberspace is the ideal place to do it, through two of the themes at this conference, open law and open access in general.
Finally, the digitized library will need to be nurtured in perpetuity, not as to formats and accessibility only but as to its content. If we are only Buy on Demand, we cannot educate. If we only own what people somehow thing they already want, how will they ever learn what they do not want to know? We could be headed for global groupthink despite the seemingly disruptive and subversive qualities of the internet (as recently on display in the Middle East).
Congratulations to John Palfrey and his great staff of librarians, both for a terrific meeting and a tour of their charette devoted to designing parts of this new knowledge database. If law libraries have been called the "lawyers' laboratory" (as recalled by Dick Danner), then he and his staff have undertaken a new and exciting realization of this concept in the world of digital innovation.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Identity, Self, Non-self: Beginner's Mind
Starting anew and beginning again, as with this blog and my resolution to post regularly, fit well with S. Suzuki's notion of the beginner's Mind. It is strange that despite my readings in Buddhism and philosophy I had not yet read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind until seeing the 40th anniversary edition and buying it. As I begin my book project on identity construction in biography and on the internet, this notion of beginner's mind and its emergence for many Americans in the early 1970's world of discovering eastern thought appears at a fortuitous time.
The Buddhist notion of no-self and the illusion of a changing core identity is one of the notions that emerges from that world view that is most unlike any western notion of the individual. Uniqueness is part of their changing world, but the illusion of the ego is not. In this Shambhala 2010 anniversary edition, the presentation of the transcriptions of Suzuki's dharma talks brings out much that I will need to work with as I explore the world of self-creation: for him and the practice, "when we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door,..." (14).
As I outline and work through setting up this project of the coming years- and it will take that long, in all probability- this view will confront theories of biography and self-development that have been strengths and limits in the west: I plan to focus on biographers at times of technological change, such as Thomas Carlyle; historians of our mind and media as personified by Marchall McLuhan, and finally the illusions of Facebook and even blogs such as this one: we must, after all, take it to the "meta" level to reflect the kind of awareness that Suzuki stimulated in the simple, everyday message he conveyed to us to just sit. We can become aware in that way of awareness itself.
The Buddhist notion of no-self and the illusion of a changing core identity is one of the notions that emerges from that world view that is most unlike any western notion of the individual. Uniqueness is part of their changing world, but the illusion of the ego is not. In this Shambhala 2010 anniversary edition, the presentation of the transcriptions of Suzuki's dharma talks brings out much that I will need to work with as I explore the world of self-creation: for him and the practice, "when we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door,..." (14).
As I outline and work through setting up this project of the coming years- and it will take that long, in all probability- this view will confront theories of biography and self-development that have been strengths and limits in the west: I plan to focus on biographers at times of technological change, such as Thomas Carlyle; historians of our mind and media as personified by Marchall McLuhan, and finally the illusions of Facebook and even blogs such as this one: we must, after all, take it to the "meta" level to reflect the kind of awareness that Suzuki stimulated in the simple, everyday message he conveyed to us to just sit. We can become aware in that way of awareness itself.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Tony Morrison's Beloved (1987)- a non-critical reflection
Reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved was like watching a documentary that focused on the origins of a major phenomenon in the world around me. Never a slave and not even of true Southern white lineage, I trace my first awareness that something was very wrong with the way some people were viewed and treated to my own experience looking out a school bus window at the consequences of mischief taking place inside. I must have been in third or fourth grade at the time when a boy on the bus one or two years older opened the bus window and threw a rock at a small group of black schoolgirls as we waited at a stop light in New Orleans. He hit one on the side of the head and she wailed and put her hand to the side of her face. The boys on the bus, perpetrator and friends, just laughed. So her novel was kind of an answer to me as a little girl as I sat there and wondered: how can anyone act that way toward another person for no reason?
But of course I knew then that most white people in New Orleans looked down on “colored” people, and until I was some way on in grade school, there were separate restrooms, water fountains, and theatre sections, even a separate waiting room in the train station, for black and white people. And by the time I went to college in Massachusetts I knew I wanted to get away from the world of racism and segregation and the anti-intellectual environment in which it thrived. New England was a Mecca for me as a place of enlightenment and liberalism. And I was prone to equate every area north of a line drawn at the Mason Dixon. I was not sufficiently aware at that time of racism outside the south.
Beloved tells part of that story and the story of the horrific effects of slavery and how it degrades and changes a society. The injustice, cruelty, loss, poverty and frustration of Sethe and her family as well as their rich love of life and ability to cope somehow- the characters are touching, fun, and realized so that they feel like family to most readers, I should think.
After reading the psychologically complex and sophisticated story of mother love and regret, one is changed and enriched, even if saddened, by another layer of decay in the infrastructure of the American soul. I see it every day now in DC and experience frustration over the health care debate and the plight of the poor. I’m optimistic that there can be change, and the election of Barack Obama proved that. But the sense of threat, and the superhuman standard to which he will be held in dealing with the aftermath of an incompetent previous administration – one which in my view damaged our commitment to the rule of law- are palpable.
Sethe and the former slaves lived with a much more serious and physical threat, the constant threat of violence. Morrison shows in the glowing and poetic rhythm of language in the community of general terror how the semiotics of terror can be fraught with strange beauty in the words of the hunkered down and in the random acts of their tormentors. Law is a sign or order for me more than a form of narrative- it contains stories but much more: categories and abstractions as well, and so can be abstract as well as concrete and relates to both. Narrative and story has a sequence or pattern of events at its core and resists abstraction, consigning categories to allegory and systematic philosophy. Or to library catalogues.
Beloved, both the character and the novel- is a sleepy afternoon in which one remembers something terrible, and then it comes to stay with you for awhile as your houseguest,. But horrifically, as if in a dream, you know the terror of your own mistake is not a stranger; it’s family. You gave it being, and it lives here. Help us to love it back into innocence despite our primitive ways.
But of course I knew then that most white people in New Orleans looked down on “colored” people, and until I was some way on in grade school, there were separate restrooms, water fountains, and theatre sections, even a separate waiting room in the train station, for black and white people. And by the time I went to college in Massachusetts I knew I wanted to get away from the world of racism and segregation and the anti-intellectual environment in which it thrived. New England was a Mecca for me as a place of enlightenment and liberalism. And I was prone to equate every area north of a line drawn at the Mason Dixon. I was not sufficiently aware at that time of racism outside the south.
Beloved tells part of that story and the story of the horrific effects of slavery and how it degrades and changes a society. The injustice, cruelty, loss, poverty and frustration of Sethe and her family as well as their rich love of life and ability to cope somehow- the characters are touching, fun, and realized so that they feel like family to most readers, I should think.
After reading the psychologically complex and sophisticated story of mother love and regret, one is changed and enriched, even if saddened, by another layer of decay in the infrastructure of the American soul. I see it every day now in DC and experience frustration over the health care debate and the plight of the poor. I’m optimistic that there can be change, and the election of Barack Obama proved that. But the sense of threat, and the superhuman standard to which he will be held in dealing with the aftermath of an incompetent previous administration – one which in my view damaged our commitment to the rule of law- are palpable.
Sethe and the former slaves lived with a much more serious and physical threat, the constant threat of violence. Morrison shows in the glowing and poetic rhythm of language in the community of general terror how the semiotics of terror can be fraught with strange beauty in the words of the hunkered down and in the random acts of their tormentors. Law is a sign or order for me more than a form of narrative- it contains stories but much more: categories and abstractions as well, and so can be abstract as well as concrete and relates to both. Narrative and story has a sequence or pattern of events at its core and resists abstraction, consigning categories to allegory and systematic philosophy. Or to library catalogues.
Beloved, both the character and the novel- is a sleepy afternoon in which one remembers something terrible, and then it comes to stay with you for awhile as your houseguest,. But horrifically, as if in a dream, you know the terror of your own mistake is not a stranger; it’s family. You gave it being, and it lives here. Help us to love it back into innocence despite our primitive ways.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980): the legal film as history and art
A docu-drama such as Breaker Morant, like most works of art, can be viewed through the lens of the time it portrays, the time it was made, and the time in which any viewer views it. This film contains additional layers of cultural, political, and legal perspectives that reflect upon a cloudy historical record, a strained British Empire and its restive colonial outposts, and the legal/philosophical issues surrounding the essentially transnational character of the laws of war their intersection with national military justice systems. I would like to begin with some brief and necessarily superficial background concerning the legal systems portrayed, and move on to consider how some of the factual vagueness, both in the film and surrounding the continuing investigation of the historical events, find reflection in how the film is put together. In the end, the stage play or the film can serve only to underscore the inherent state of dehumanization that constitutes guerilla warfare, suggesting that law cannot fix it and art cannot control its interpretation or impact. That the film somewhat subverts itself continues to fascinate audiences and critics living in various states of war.
South Africa, Australia, Great Britain and its colonies; comparative military justice and war
The colonization of the southern tip of Africa by the British was via the Cape Colony. The Dutch and their colonies of the East India Company carried a form of civil law, so-called Roman-Dutch law, to their colonies such as the Transvaal, established in 1858 but annexation was attempted by the British in 1877. The British would have allowed the private law to be kept under this system. The Boers resistant in an earlier war well enough to retain a kind of independence under a British protectorate. The last Dutch territory, the Orange Free State, is the entity depicted in the film and undergoing a messy and horrific defeat in this “ Boer War” of 1898–1900. The Australians, like other colonies, were given a form of parliamentary representative government in the 1850’s and became the Commonwealth of Australia in on January 1, 1901. In the film, Harry Morant refers in his court-martial to having joined the Bushveldt Carbineers (BVC) on April Fool’s Day, 1901 and conveys his sense, perhaps sincere, of irony. But a sense of separate Australian identity was becoming possible. As James J. Kirschke of Villanova University points out in a recent essay in the journal Film & History, “Say Who Made Her So: Breaker Morant and British Empire” (38:2, 2008), there was concern in the 1970’s about Australian identity, and perhaps in the run-up to the 1986 Australia Act, which terminated almost all of the constitutional connections with Great Britain, this was a way to get the George Witton story and the many other accounts of the Morant group’s court-martial into a different framework:
The characterization, then, of the Australian soldiers is as important as the historical presentation of the court martial. There is little doubt in the film that they shot the prisoners, and the film remains vague on the existence of orders from superiors to do so. Beresford is neither damning nor absolving the soldiers. His target, rather, is the way the event has been used to delineate a civilized Britain from a barbarous Australia. The B.V.C. soldiers are shown to be loyal and determined. Even at their execution, they comply with each military protocol, neither running nor ranting. Their conduct is as British as the empire could expect. (Kirschke, 48).
However, the legal and constitutional changes within the Empire, and the necessity of fighting a brutal war against small farmers using guerilla tactics to create a formidable insurgency, are perhaps the issues of most lasting relevance today, and with an imperial Germany lurking in the background of this story (they had a foothold north of the Orange River), we start to see a familiar pattern of civilian combatants, spies, and secret orders. The emergence of gold and other precious resources set the stage for maximum barbarity on all sides. By the late 1970's, regardless of the accuracy of the film, Australians and Americans would also remember Vietnam and the My Lai massacre.
Laws of War- late Nineteenth Century
Despite several rounds of conferences and codifications, such as the earlier Lieber Code (1863), and the Hague Conferences (1899-1907) that were contemporaneous with the events of the film, there was nothing like the idea in the treaty establishing the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that would have rejected superior orders as a defense. The international instruments did consider the situation of civilians and “rebels” and the ambiguity of civil wars and civilian combatants in some respects, but reciprocity was required to be mutual and could be negatively interpreted for retaliation. (Watts, S. Reciprocity and the Law of War, 50 Harv. J. Intl L. 365, 397-398(2009).
In Prof. Kirschke’s article, cited above, there are several interesting notes citing several works on the event and comparing Kitchener’s take on the Boer insurgents with the aim of the court martial to begin to repair relations with the Boer’s and Germany for the limited purpose of peace (and territorial) negotiations.
The film and Perceptions of War and Law
An academic and philosophical debate took place in the journal Critical Arts (Johannesburg, South Africa: Critical Arts Study Group], 1980- ) from its first volume with a monographic essay and into vol. 2 no. 3 (1981-1982) and vol. 3 no. 3 (1985) about the themes of imperialism, racism and the role of cinema and whether the social character of art is subverted in such a successful film, and so forth. These debates were part of a debate about the role of art in cultural struggle, and at that time South Africa’s struggle in particular was still going on in an earlier post-colonial phase. The critique of the subversion of art and law through myths, and debates over how much this film really condemns imperialism, do not seem nearly as relevant to a current viewing of a film with several sub-texts that appear now after the American adventure in Iraq.
One subtext is that of the need to situate blame, and post-Nuremberg, the entire chain of command is seen as morally culpable, and the legal defense now pulled out from under the accused (we were just obeying orders). But the nature of the BVC as an “irregular” counter-insurgency group with no real orders has already undermined its legitimacy as a kind of vigilante group with inchoate state approval, not unlike the police juries and nightriders of the American south in the century after the civil war. The rapid cuts from past to present and toned down to faded memory enliven the court-martial visually but do not add much to the now rather obvious hypocrisy.
Another anchor for the film is the role of poetry and rhetoric: Morant is a conventional cynical poet on the make, using language to capture that obvious hypocrisy, but it establishes him mainly as having a persona that he has built through war and daring deeds. The zeal of Major Thomas, his lawyer, has somehow more honesty and a more faithful allegiance to the power of accurate language and eloquent but logical reasoning. He is less a sophist and more honest with language than those eager to have a bit of adventure, promote a newly emerging country (“Australia forever”), and in the end show what a good soldier one can be. Thomas does not “defend” so much as represent the rule of law, and the incredible audacity of applying that rule to situations where the descriptive language is crucial: is it a crime, a war, or terror? Beresford’s camera cannot hide the human toll taken by the words.
************
Cited or reviewed in law reviews:
Graber, Doris Appel .The Development of the Law of Belligerent Occupation 1863-1914 (1949).
Neff, Stephen C., War and the law of Nations: A General History. Cambridge, 2005.
Wiener, Frederick Bernays , Civilians Under Military Justice: The British Practice Since 1689 Especially in North America (1967.
The Popular and historical accounts are listed at the Widipedia article, Court-Martial of Breaker Morant, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_martial_of_Breaker_Morant and pasted below:
Bleszynski, Nick (2002), 'Shoot Straight, You Bastards': The True Story Behind The Killing of 'Breaker' Morant. Random House Australia. ISBN 1-74051-081-X.
Davey, Arthur; "Breaker Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers" (Van Riebeeck Society, Cape Town 1987) ISBN 0620124857 and 9780620124850
Denton, K. (1973). The Breaker. Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-12691-7. But see Denton, Kit, Closed File: the True Story Behind the Execution of Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock. Adelaide: Rigby, 1983.
Pakenham, Thomas (1979). The Boer War. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-77395-X.
Pollock, John (1998). Kitchener. Constable. ISBN 0-09-480340-4.
Ross, K.G., Breaker Morant: A Play in Two Acts, Edward Arnold, (Melbourne), 1979. ISBN 0-7267-0997-2
Ross, Kenneth G. (1990). Breaker Morant, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-7267-0997-2
Wallace, J.W. (1976). The Australians At The Boer War. Australian War Memorial/Australian Government Publishing Service.
Witton, George (1982). Scapegoats of the Empire. Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-14666-7.
Woolmore, William (Bill) The Bushveldt Carbineers and the Pietersburg Light Horse (2002, Slouch Hat Publications Australia) ISBN 0-9579752-0-1
South Africa, Australia, Great Britain and its colonies; comparative military justice and war
The colonization of the southern tip of Africa by the British was via the Cape Colony. The Dutch and their colonies of the East India Company carried a form of civil law, so-called Roman-Dutch law, to their colonies such as the Transvaal, established in 1858 but annexation was attempted by the British in 1877. The British would have allowed the private law to be kept under this system. The Boers resistant in an earlier war well enough to retain a kind of independence under a British protectorate. The last Dutch territory, the Orange Free State, is the entity depicted in the film and undergoing a messy and horrific defeat in this “ Boer War” of 1898–1900. The Australians, like other colonies, were given a form of parliamentary representative government in the 1850’s and became the Commonwealth of Australia in on January 1, 1901. In the film, Harry Morant refers in his court-martial to having joined the Bushveldt Carbineers (BVC) on April Fool’s Day, 1901 and conveys his sense, perhaps sincere, of irony. But a sense of separate Australian identity was becoming possible. As James J. Kirschke of Villanova University points out in a recent essay in the journal Film & History, “Say Who Made Her So: Breaker Morant and British Empire” (38:2, 2008), there was concern in the 1970’s about Australian identity, and perhaps in the run-up to the 1986 Australia Act, which terminated almost all of the constitutional connections with Great Britain, this was a way to get the George Witton story and the many other accounts of the Morant group’s court-martial into a different framework:
The characterization, then, of the Australian soldiers is as important as the historical presentation of the court martial. There is little doubt in the film that they shot the prisoners, and the film remains vague on the existence of orders from superiors to do so. Beresford is neither damning nor absolving the soldiers. His target, rather, is the way the event has been used to delineate a civilized Britain from a barbarous Australia. The B.V.C. soldiers are shown to be loyal and determined. Even at their execution, they comply with each military protocol, neither running nor ranting. Their conduct is as British as the empire could expect. (Kirschke, 48).
However, the legal and constitutional changes within the Empire, and the necessity of fighting a brutal war against small farmers using guerilla tactics to create a formidable insurgency, are perhaps the issues of most lasting relevance today, and with an imperial Germany lurking in the background of this story (they had a foothold north of the Orange River), we start to see a familiar pattern of civilian combatants, spies, and secret orders. The emergence of gold and other precious resources set the stage for maximum barbarity on all sides. By the late 1970's, regardless of the accuracy of the film, Australians and Americans would also remember Vietnam and the My Lai massacre.
Laws of War- late Nineteenth Century
Despite several rounds of conferences and codifications, such as the earlier Lieber Code (1863), and the Hague Conferences (1899-1907) that were contemporaneous with the events of the film, there was nothing like the idea in the treaty establishing the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that would have rejected superior orders as a defense. The international instruments did consider the situation of civilians and “rebels” and the ambiguity of civil wars and civilian combatants in some respects, but reciprocity was required to be mutual and could be negatively interpreted for retaliation. (Watts, S. Reciprocity and the Law of War, 50 Harv. J. Intl L. 365, 397-398(2009).
In Prof. Kirschke’s article, cited above, there are several interesting notes citing several works on the event and comparing Kitchener’s take on the Boer insurgents with the aim of the court martial to begin to repair relations with the Boer’s and Germany for the limited purpose of peace (and territorial) negotiations.
The film and Perceptions of War and Law
An academic and philosophical debate took place in the journal Critical Arts (Johannesburg, South Africa: Critical Arts Study Group], 1980- ) from its first volume with a monographic essay and into vol. 2 no. 3 (1981-1982) and vol. 3 no. 3 (1985) about the themes of imperialism, racism and the role of cinema and whether the social character of art is subverted in such a successful film, and so forth. These debates were part of a debate about the role of art in cultural struggle, and at that time South Africa’s struggle in particular was still going on in an earlier post-colonial phase. The critique of the subversion of art and law through myths, and debates over how much this film really condemns imperialism, do not seem nearly as relevant to a current viewing of a film with several sub-texts that appear now after the American adventure in Iraq.
One subtext is that of the need to situate blame, and post-Nuremberg, the entire chain of command is seen as morally culpable, and the legal defense now pulled out from under the accused (we were just obeying orders). But the nature of the BVC as an “irregular” counter-insurgency group with no real orders has already undermined its legitimacy as a kind of vigilante group with inchoate state approval, not unlike the police juries and nightriders of the American south in the century after the civil war. The rapid cuts from past to present and toned down to faded memory enliven the court-martial visually but do not add much to the now rather obvious hypocrisy.
Another anchor for the film is the role of poetry and rhetoric: Morant is a conventional cynical poet on the make, using language to capture that obvious hypocrisy, but it establishes him mainly as having a persona that he has built through war and daring deeds. The zeal of Major Thomas, his lawyer, has somehow more honesty and a more faithful allegiance to the power of accurate language and eloquent but logical reasoning. He is less a sophist and more honest with language than those eager to have a bit of adventure, promote a newly emerging country (“Australia forever”), and in the end show what a good soldier one can be. Thomas does not “defend” so much as represent the rule of law, and the incredible audacity of applying that rule to situations where the descriptive language is crucial: is it a crime, a war, or terror? Beresford’s camera cannot hide the human toll taken by the words.
************
Cited or reviewed in law reviews:
Graber, Doris Appel .The Development of the Law of Belligerent Occupation 1863-1914 (1949).
Neff, Stephen C., War and the law of Nations: A General History. Cambridge, 2005.
Wiener, Frederick Bernays , Civilians Under Military Justice: The British Practice Since 1689 Especially in North America (1967.
The Popular and historical accounts are listed at the Widipedia article, Court-Martial of Breaker Morant, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_martial_of_Breaker_Morant and pasted below:
Bleszynski, Nick (2002), 'Shoot Straight, You Bastards': The True Story Behind The Killing of 'Breaker' Morant. Random House Australia. ISBN 1-74051-081-X.
Davey, Arthur; "Breaker Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers" (Van Riebeeck Society, Cape Town 1987) ISBN 0620124857 and 9780620124850
Denton, K. (1973). The Breaker. Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-12691-7. But see Denton, Kit, Closed File: the True Story Behind the Execution of Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock. Adelaide: Rigby, 1983.
Pakenham, Thomas (1979). The Boer War. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-77395-X.
Pollock, John (1998). Kitchener. Constable. ISBN 0-09-480340-4.
Ross, K.G., Breaker Morant: A Play in Two Acts, Edward Arnold, (Melbourne), 1979. ISBN 0-7267-0997-2
Ross, Kenneth G. (1990). Breaker Morant, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-7267-0997-2
Wallace, J.W. (1976). The Australians At The Boer War. Australian War Memorial/Australian Government Publishing Service.
Witton, George (1982). Scapegoats of the Empire. Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-14666-7.
Woolmore, William (Bill) The Bushveldt Carbineers and the Pietersburg Light Horse (2002, Slouch Hat Publications Australia) ISBN 0-9579752-0-1
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Summer reading II: Noise
Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
The end of the 19th century and its fin de siѐcle foreboding set the stage for all of the scandalous performances and “rioting audiences” with which the history of 20th century music unfolds. I had heard before in my own music history studies of the performances of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprѐs-midi d’un faune as each roused a tonally lazy and satisfied bourgeoisie out of its collective conformity. Ross builds the story slowly and concentrates on the artistic and personal biographies of the major composers, inserting where necessary the descriptions and music theory to make the story comprehensible.
The main theme of the book is one of the rise of diverse conceptions of tonality, including atonality and its several versions, as part of serious music in a legacy of “art for art’s sake” that he implies has served the cause of serious music poorly over the century (I prefer the term “serious” to “classical” since I reserve the latter term for Mozart and Haydn and their contemporaries). To other versions of tonality that were explored, one would add those derived from Far Eastern and indigenous cultural traditions, and these emerged as western musicians discovered other musical systems.
I enjoyed reading about Berg, Schoenberg, and the arrival of so many later on in California and Los Angeles. The rise of minimalism and Philip Glass, one of my favorites, could have been more thoroughly explored. Finally, the end of the book ,with its rather superficial coverage of those “serious -music- or jazz-influenced “ musicians in the pop, rock, and folk categories, made me wish that at the outset he had covered only the fate of serious music rather strictly. However, he was right to include the evolution of jazz improvisation into its cool phase, and the ordered noise of John Cage. The impassioned narrative of how each successive set of composers try to take the musical trends to the next level, and the readable character of the book, both served, I’m sure, to win it the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2007.
What does twentieth century music say to us about that century and its violent upheavals, wars, and ideological shifts? It would be easy to speak of fragmentation and globalization; those are heard in the rise of percussion and the Babel of new instruments and tonalities as well as new amplification. But so much hatred is covered by the false sweet sounds; now in the twenty-first century we can hear sweet hymns of Christian fundamentalism and detect nothing of the insecurity and racial fears of a new right wing. Perhaps I am just an aging 1960’s person as I long for music that is not just angry and eager to shock; we need the music of peace at a deeper level. This may be where Philip Glass and his zen minimalism as well as the themes of Kundun and Satyagraha come in.
Postscript: A real benefit to the book is its web site audio files, and while some are very short (owing to permissions and the length of the book), for students it would be essential to listen to the excerpts; music survey courses of course include CDs and databases which provide more extensive coverage, but –this is, after all, free.
The end of the 19th century and its fin de siѐcle foreboding set the stage for all of the scandalous performances and “rioting audiences” with which the history of 20th century music unfolds. I had heard before in my own music history studies of the performances of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprѐs-midi d’un faune as each roused a tonally lazy and satisfied bourgeoisie out of its collective conformity. Ross builds the story slowly and concentrates on the artistic and personal biographies of the major composers, inserting where necessary the descriptions and music theory to make the story comprehensible.
The main theme of the book is one of the rise of diverse conceptions of tonality, including atonality and its several versions, as part of serious music in a legacy of “art for art’s sake” that he implies has served the cause of serious music poorly over the century (I prefer the term “serious” to “classical” since I reserve the latter term for Mozart and Haydn and their contemporaries). To other versions of tonality that were explored, one would add those derived from Far Eastern and indigenous cultural traditions, and these emerged as western musicians discovered other musical systems.
I enjoyed reading about Berg, Schoenberg, and the arrival of so many later on in California and Los Angeles. The rise of minimalism and Philip Glass, one of my favorites, could have been more thoroughly explored. Finally, the end of the book ,with its rather superficial coverage of those “serious -music- or jazz-influenced “ musicians in the pop, rock, and folk categories, made me wish that at the outset he had covered only the fate of serious music rather strictly. However, he was right to include the evolution of jazz improvisation into its cool phase, and the ordered noise of John Cage. The impassioned narrative of how each successive set of composers try to take the musical trends to the next level, and the readable character of the book, both served, I’m sure, to win it the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2007.
What does twentieth century music say to us about that century and its violent upheavals, wars, and ideological shifts? It would be easy to speak of fragmentation and globalization; those are heard in the rise of percussion and the Babel of new instruments and tonalities as well as new amplification. But so much hatred is covered by the false sweet sounds; now in the twenty-first century we can hear sweet hymns of Christian fundamentalism and detect nothing of the insecurity and racial fears of a new right wing. Perhaps I am just an aging 1960’s person as I long for music that is not just angry and eager to shock; we need the music of peace at a deeper level. This may be where Philip Glass and his zen minimalism as well as the themes of Kundun and Satyagraha come in.
Postscript: A real benefit to the book is its web site audio files, and while some are very short (owing to permissions and the length of the book), for students it would be essential to listen to the excerpts; music survey courses of course include CDs and databases which provide more extensive coverage, but –this is, after all, free.
Summer reading I: Weimar
Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Having thoroughly enjoyed my undergraduate encounter with a course entitled “Central Europe Since 1815, “ I entertained the possibility of moving on to this professor’s other excellent course, “The Culture of Europe between the Two World Wars. “ I read a good deal of the literature from the period out of interest and upon the recommendations of students who did take the course. This kind of cultural history, exploring all aspects of a period (however brief, in this case) in politics, arts, and technological innovation invites a real participation in its spirit and sometimes real concern that certain attitudes and dangerous tendencies may be surfacing in one’s own contemporary situation. Reading Weitz’s very readable and compelling history of what has long been regarded as a pivotal moment, one that could have been a golden moment in German history after a devastating war, does rekindle in one’s mind all the debates about the Allies’ treatment of Germany and of course, whether Nazism and the rise of Hitler could have been avoided.
Weitz covers the political situation in detail, and this was useful to me because this was my area of least knowledge; I know more about literary developments and about the art history of the period. He also emphasizes architecture and again, speaking selfishly, this helped me fill in some gaps about early modernism, one of my strong interests.
The subtitle “promise and tragedy” certainly employs the right key words to bring up the relevant ethos of the time. Glimmers of our current financial dilemma and our silence as an American people in the face of a war that went forward in violation of international law flash across the scene and make me feel uncomfortable. While the equation of Jews with internationalism etc. is born of an anti-Semitism that we left behind, one hopes, with Richard Nixon (who appropriated internationalism to himself, nonetheless, with better than expected results) , other aspects of nationalism, “nativism” and such ghosts of the Twenties of the Twentieth Century have ghostly cousins at present in the form of Sarah Palin’s McCarthyism of lies and distortions regarding modest attempts to reform and humanize our health care market. There is anger, and it is dangerous.
Where is the serious art to hold its image up to our collective face that we might see it for what it is? (see review of The Rest Is Noise for more reflection on this question).
Having thoroughly enjoyed my undergraduate encounter with a course entitled “Central Europe Since 1815, “ I entertained the possibility of moving on to this professor’s other excellent course, “The Culture of Europe between the Two World Wars. “ I read a good deal of the literature from the period out of interest and upon the recommendations of students who did take the course. This kind of cultural history, exploring all aspects of a period (however brief, in this case) in politics, arts, and technological innovation invites a real participation in its spirit and sometimes real concern that certain attitudes and dangerous tendencies may be surfacing in one’s own contemporary situation. Reading Weitz’s very readable and compelling history of what has long been regarded as a pivotal moment, one that could have been a golden moment in German history after a devastating war, does rekindle in one’s mind all the debates about the Allies’ treatment of Germany and of course, whether Nazism and the rise of Hitler could have been avoided.
Weitz covers the political situation in detail, and this was useful to me because this was my area of least knowledge; I know more about literary developments and about the art history of the period. He also emphasizes architecture and again, speaking selfishly, this helped me fill in some gaps about early modernism, one of my strong interests.
The subtitle “promise and tragedy” certainly employs the right key words to bring up the relevant ethos of the time. Glimmers of our current financial dilemma and our silence as an American people in the face of a war that went forward in violation of international law flash across the scene and make me feel uncomfortable. While the equation of Jews with internationalism etc. is born of an anti-Semitism that we left behind, one hopes, with Richard Nixon (who appropriated internationalism to himself, nonetheless, with better than expected results) , other aspects of nationalism, “nativism” and such ghosts of the Twenties of the Twentieth Century have ghostly cousins at present in the form of Sarah Palin’s McCarthyism of lies and distortions regarding modest attempts to reform and humanize our health care market. There is anger, and it is dangerous.
Where is the serious art to hold its image up to our collective face that we might see it for what it is? (see review of The Rest Is Noise for more reflection on this question).
Summer reading; back to August post, the follow-up
As I begin my fall list of "outside" reading (that is, not related to anything I'm writing at the moment)I realize that I need to enter my selection of top books I read this summer. These were my favorites or the more unusual offerings which made me think about issues or literary theory in a new way. So here come several posts under this heading!
Friday, October 02, 2009
The Free and the Brave under a director's lens
Last night at Georgetown Law the the library sponsored the first in a series of screenings of films under the series heading "Law at the Movies." The series has been organized by my colleague Kumar Jayasuriya and sponsored by the Friends of the Law Library. Last night's inaugural film was introduced by two of the faculty who have joined an informal group interested in providing law students with some encounters between law and the film medium. Our first offering was John Ford's Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
I recalled almost nothing of the film after seeing it on television at some point in my much earlier life. Television negates any real experience of many films, but even more so back in the days when cropped versions were built around commercial advertising. So this was a treat for me, and I reflect upon it in connection with my continuing media studies (and a new project I'll announce soon via this blog).
Naomi Mezey of our faculty pointed out many features of the largest, zoomed out facets of the film: the juxtaposition of "talk and force" as well as the feminizing of the Jimmy Stewart character, the young lawyer Ransom Stoddard during his rocky start in the dusty town of Shinbone, rendered more/less "wide open" as a territory settlement by having a comic non-entity for a federal marshal. The John Wayne character, Tom Doniphon, was the kind of ambivalent hero that she described well: we watch as he and Ransom compete, in the minds of the audience, for first and second chair in this orchestration of philosophical tunes. Randy Barnett agreed generally with her remarks, which included some mention of how the coming of law, government, and civilization to this partly Hobbesian world had "costs" that are alluded to in the name of the horrific outlaw Liberty Valance and in the world of the ranchers, of which Tom is one (though he is interestingly neutral on issues that they represent in the film).
I agree partly with these remarks and offer just a few observations of my own. A student in the audience before the show stated that the film was shown in a European philosophy class, and indeed John Ford has inspired many European filmmakers artistically and in the themes of some of his many historic and great films. True, there is much here to spark further discussion of Plato and Hobbes, to name only two.
But for me a film is often foremost about the time in which it was made, in this case, 1962. Tom Doniphon represents in so many ways the plain integrity of the American myth of the West, the anti-intellectual American who still controls most of our culture, but who has a point about knowing when to back up words with action. And a handgun, of course. But who knew, in the continuing struggle of a post-war world living in an almost continuous post-colonial state of perceived emergency, that the path to be steered carefully between tribalism and the rule of law leads to suburbia? (Yes, Tom's life and plans are centered on that first house, no mortgage!) That must have been most comforting to audiences in 1962; but three cheers for Ford when the sole black resident of the town (albeit a servant) is encouraged to step up to the lunch counter- in this case, the saloon bar.
So while the town is busy becoming consumers, and the ranchers are busy becoming producers who resent regulation (don't fence me in), the deeper issue of the bully/victim is explored in the encounter between Ransom and Liberty Valance. Long before our recent school shootings, it may have become clear to some that every victim is a bully and every bully, a victim- well, perhaps. Psychopaths are an exception, as in this case. The sheer brutality of Valance and the disturbing mix of distant outrage but near tolerance of his torture techniques on the part of the townfolk, even if we consider it a tolerance engendered by fear, is done wonderfully by Ford and at time when the myth of the West was always one of sanitized violence. The silver-tipped whip hints at what most of Hollywood then would not show: that terrorism was a very real part of living in and settling the American West, even leaving aside native peoples. (The Mexicans in the film are left to be picturesque and benign, not yet a threat).
Fear of the Other and also the need to build a state solution to random, private violence indeed has a trade-off in the film as Ransom learns that government is also a tool of the tribes. He also learns that he was paradoxically both brave and a coward. So was Tom: mostly selfless in his love for Hallie, he still got his best, safest shot while Valance was distracted by Ransom in his momentary role as decoy.
Let's face it: none of us is perfectly brave or perfectly free. We are only as free as the least free person in our community, local or global.
As a final footnote it is interesting to look at the names of the characters and the principals of the film. Director John Martin Feeney (John Ford) and actor John Wayne (Marion Morrison) left the traces of Irish tribe in their birth names aside for the commodification of Hollywood, though Ford may have recanted somewhat later on. And that odd Doniphon, which sounds like Donovan: even the massive Wikipedia reveals only one other of note: Alexander William Doniphan, a soldier in the Mexican-American war who was lawyer and author of a legal code (the Kearny code) that was to have been used in an annexed Mexico and New Mexico, a kind of hybrid code, "an amalgam of Mexican, Texan and Coahuilan statutes" [with some Livingston Code of Louisiana, Missouri law mixed in](Roger D. Launius, Alexander William Doniphon, Portrait of a Missouri Moderate, 1997)at 115. But I digress- fulfilling here the codex theme of the blog as well as asking, in the end, whether we can leave the little house and garden of our minds and embrace the Other, at least by the study of comparative law? (Okay, like Ransom, I am forever the nerd).
So here is a paradoxically joyful "ouch" as we embrace John Ford's violent, beautiful film, a real "cactus rose."
I recalled almost nothing of the film after seeing it on television at some point in my much earlier life. Television negates any real experience of many films, but even more so back in the days when cropped versions were built around commercial advertising. So this was a treat for me, and I reflect upon it in connection with my continuing media studies (and a new project I'll announce soon via this blog).
Naomi Mezey of our faculty pointed out many features of the largest, zoomed out facets of the film: the juxtaposition of "talk and force" as well as the feminizing of the Jimmy Stewart character, the young lawyer Ransom Stoddard during his rocky start in the dusty town of Shinbone, rendered more/less "wide open" as a territory settlement by having a comic non-entity for a federal marshal. The John Wayne character, Tom Doniphon, was the kind of ambivalent hero that she described well: we watch as he and Ransom compete, in the minds of the audience, for first and second chair in this orchestration of philosophical tunes. Randy Barnett agreed generally with her remarks, which included some mention of how the coming of law, government, and civilization to this partly Hobbesian world had "costs" that are alluded to in the name of the horrific outlaw Liberty Valance and in the world of the ranchers, of which Tom is one (though he is interestingly neutral on issues that they represent in the film).
I agree partly with these remarks and offer just a few observations of my own. A student in the audience before the show stated that the film was shown in a European philosophy class, and indeed John Ford has inspired many European filmmakers artistically and in the themes of some of his many historic and great films. True, there is much here to spark further discussion of Plato and Hobbes, to name only two.
But for me a film is often foremost about the time in which it was made, in this case, 1962. Tom Doniphon represents in so many ways the plain integrity of the American myth of the West, the anti-intellectual American who still controls most of our culture, but who has a point about knowing when to back up words with action. And a handgun, of course. But who knew, in the continuing struggle of a post-war world living in an almost continuous post-colonial state of perceived emergency, that the path to be steered carefully between tribalism and the rule of law leads to suburbia? (Yes, Tom's life and plans are centered on that first house, no mortgage!) That must have been most comforting to audiences in 1962; but three cheers for Ford when the sole black resident of the town (albeit a servant) is encouraged to step up to the lunch counter- in this case, the saloon bar.
So while the town is busy becoming consumers, and the ranchers are busy becoming producers who resent regulation (don't fence me in), the deeper issue of the bully/victim is explored in the encounter between Ransom and Liberty Valance. Long before our recent school shootings, it may have become clear to some that every victim is a bully and every bully, a victim- well, perhaps. Psychopaths are an exception, as in this case. The sheer brutality of Valance and the disturbing mix of distant outrage but near tolerance of his torture techniques on the part of the townfolk, even if we consider it a tolerance engendered by fear, is done wonderfully by Ford and at time when the myth of the West was always one of sanitized violence. The silver-tipped whip hints at what most of Hollywood then would not show: that terrorism was a very real part of living in and settling the American West, even leaving aside native peoples. (The Mexicans in the film are left to be picturesque and benign, not yet a threat).
Fear of the Other and also the need to build a state solution to random, private violence indeed has a trade-off in the film as Ransom learns that government is also a tool of the tribes. He also learns that he was paradoxically both brave and a coward. So was Tom: mostly selfless in his love for Hallie, he still got his best, safest shot while Valance was distracted by Ransom in his momentary role as decoy.
Let's face it: none of us is perfectly brave or perfectly free. We are only as free as the least free person in our community, local or global.
As a final footnote it is interesting to look at the names of the characters and the principals of the film. Director John Martin Feeney (John Ford) and actor John Wayne (Marion Morrison) left the traces of Irish tribe in their birth names aside for the commodification of Hollywood, though Ford may have recanted somewhat later on. And that odd Doniphon, which sounds like Donovan: even the massive Wikipedia reveals only one other of note: Alexander William Doniphan, a soldier in the Mexican-American war who was lawyer and author of a legal code (the Kearny code) that was to have been used in an annexed Mexico and New Mexico, a kind of hybrid code, "an amalgam of Mexican, Texan and Coahuilan statutes" [with some Livingston Code of Louisiana, Missouri law mixed in](Roger D. Launius, Alexander William Doniphon, Portrait of a Missouri Moderate, 1997)at 115. But I digress- fulfilling here the codex theme of the blog as well as asking, in the end, whether we can leave the little house and garden of our minds and embrace the Other, at least by the study of comparative law? (Okay, like Ransom, I am forever the nerd).
So here is a paradoxically joyful "ouch" as we embrace John Ford's violent, beautiful film, a real "cactus rose."
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Summer reading; first, in summary
Reading for pleasure does not for me mean "non-serious" reading. Since I enjoy serious topics, philosophy and such, and since I am usually writing some sort of publication for which I have research-driven reading, my leisure reading covers a wide range of materials I am reading for no particular reason other than intellectual curiosity. My list of books I am lining up to read are on LibraryThing.
This summer, in addition to working on a book chapter for an edited collection of essays about the core sources for international legal research, I went through a few titles of which the following are just highlights. I like to wander back to fiction, as well as cultural history and philosophy. I am giving each a brief review in my next blog post.
Jose Saramago, Death With Interruptions (2008)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (2009)
Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913)
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
"..the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve.."
To revive the blog and my own reflections on texts of all kinds, I can think of no better way to do it than to respond to President Obama's Inaugural speech. I was inspired by the intelligent, adult tone of the speech as well as the musical variations on "'Tis the Gift to Be Simple." But most of all, as I've been reflecting myself on the ongoing nature of bully becoming victim becoming bully becoming victim in our human history and even now in Gaza, Barack said after St. Paul, "...the time has come to set aside childish things..." and there can be greater indictment of the petty crimes as well as the human rights violations of the warmongering of the outgoing administration. Hope does seem to be springing forward for all of us.
As Cheney was wheeled away in a bizarre appearance, in a wheelchair and reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove, the sorrow of waste and damage, human and ecological and now economic, was the only low tone in an otherwise inspiring beginning for our country. I feel personally inspired and ready to continue with teaching, writing, and promoting a conscious examination of communication theory to law, comparative and religious.
As Cheney was wheeled away in a bizarre appearance, in a wheelchair and reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove, the sorrow of waste and damage, human and ecological and now economic, was the only low tone in an otherwise inspiring beginning for our country. I feel personally inspired and ready to continue with teaching, writing, and promoting a conscious examination of communication theory to law, comparative and religious.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Habgood on the Evangelical Textual Mistake
While catching up on my book review reading, I came upon a review by Dr.John Habgood(Lord Habgood, formerly Archbishop of York and one of the outstanding theologians of the Anglican tradition, in my opinion), who brings together science and religion, among many other important convergences. In reviewing the work of an evangelical, Richard Turnbull, (Anglican and Evangelical? Continuum, 2008)in the TLS of March 21, 2008 (subscription required), he makes two excellent points. One is commonly held by many non-evangelicals, like myself, namely a rejection of the belief that "Scripture alone" provides the basis for the Christian faith, and he cites not only the conferring of authority on these documents by the church itself (and by implication their attribution to the church as author) but also biblical criticism and scholarship, which is the hermeneutical and textual approach I've been exploring as central to my own intellectual life.
The second important point is one that has come up often in my discussions with skeptics: the theory of what he calls "penal substitution," which he defines as the suffering and death of Jesus as the penalty for our sins, taking all of God's wrath and "making it possible for God to forgive us.) (TLS 3.21.08 at 8).Fortunatey, I was never taught this, so I take it on his (unfootnoted) word that some evangelicals believe this. He acknowledges the echoing of language from Isaiah and St. Paul, though surely this is within the tradition of prefigural language that characterized the early Jewish attempts at understanding what Jesus' death was about. In a very articulate way, he expresses it as I believe it should be expressed, as the ultimate revelation of God's love in the face of human wrath, the rejection of Jesus and his message of love. We are the wrathful ones, not God, and the cross brought forgiveness of the ultimate result of human hatreds, not a sacrifice as of old to propitiate the imagined god of the people, who had not yet built his temple in their hearts, as we are all called to do.
The second important point is one that has come up often in my discussions with skeptics: the theory of what he calls "penal substitution," which he defines as the suffering and death of Jesus as the penalty for our sins, taking all of God's wrath and "making it possible for God to forgive us.) (TLS 3.21.08 at 8).Fortunatey, I was never taught this, so I take it on his (unfootnoted) word that some evangelicals believe this. He acknowledges the echoing of language from Isaiah and St. Paul, though surely this is within the tradition of prefigural language that characterized the early Jewish attempts at understanding what Jesus' death was about. In a very articulate way, he expresses it as I believe it should be expressed, as the ultimate revelation of God's love in the face of human wrath, the rejection of Jesus and his message of love. We are the wrathful ones, not God, and the cross brought forgiveness of the ultimate result of human hatreds, not a sacrifice as of old to propitiate the imagined god of the people, who had not yet built his temple in their hearts, as we are all called to do.
Friday, March 28, 2008
The Courtier and the Heretic
subtitled "...Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World," this double philosophical biography (Norton,2006) by Matthew Stewart was an interesting review for me of aspects of both philosophers' works, and I have to confess that I have not read Spinoza's Tractatus or Leibniz' Monadology (both in translation) with any slow, deep reflection since college. But this was a stimulating, if somewhat superficial, refresher of some issues I am still grappling with as I look at systematic theologies as well as newer process theologies.
Relevant to some of the legal and social ramifications of metaphysics is the different tack Stewart takes in comparing the responses to modernity of these two thinkers; it is one which he believes, as stated in his "Note on Sources" at the back, is one of his more original contributions. That is, he looks at Spinoza and Leibniz as moral and political philosophers, too. They were reacting to the rise of modern science, and as Lawrence Principe and others remind students, science and religion were forced apart only gradually. These two philosophers seem to have seen it coming, as it were, and anticipated the consequences but ironically also contributed to them.
Spinoza's seeming "God intoxication" but actual near pantheism and alleged atheism certainly remind one to regard immanence with caution and begins the challenge: materialism or radical infusion of the Divine? And how can this one Substance, be it Mind, energy, even Love, be regarded still as personal? Spinoza certainly seems to have rejected that.
Enter Leibniz- lacking the (ahistorically for the West) "zen" attitude of Spinoza (although I was surprised to learn of his interest in China as just then encountered by the Portuguese Jesuits)but committed to a new view of transcendence. We are still trying to figure out what the monads (and the Monad) are and if they help at all. Certainly the wave/particle and water/wave attributes that we can now accept as co-existing in matter (or rather, in matter/energy) thanks to the quantum perspective may be somewhat like the missing link that Leibniz sought to find. But even after Kant it still comes down to Plato and Aristotle with the former getting it right grammatically and the latter closer to a truth we can take more literally as to the complex of matter and form that every thing seems to be.
But I am still stuck with the God problem and the personal nature of Love. Whether Spinoza was motivated to eliminate God as a model for the monarchs he wanted to overthrow in favor of personal freedom of conscience and a nascent awareness of human rights, and whether Leibniz was motivated by a need to preserve the moral status quo from the anarchy of individual liberty- I leave that to Stewart to go on pondering. I am still in the theological and metaphysical woods, looking for the answer to the disappointment we feel about the seeming lack of immortality of our consciousness in any real, felt way. Even if the ashes are windowless monads, why do we want them to continue to be aware of the Love that Moves us (Dante)?
Relevant to some of the legal and social ramifications of metaphysics is the different tack Stewart takes in comparing the responses to modernity of these two thinkers; it is one which he believes, as stated in his "Note on Sources" at the back, is one of his more original contributions. That is, he looks at Spinoza and Leibniz as moral and political philosophers, too. They were reacting to the rise of modern science, and as Lawrence Principe and others remind students, science and religion were forced apart only gradually. These two philosophers seem to have seen it coming, as it were, and anticipated the consequences but ironically also contributed to them.
Spinoza's seeming "God intoxication" but actual near pantheism and alleged atheism certainly remind one to regard immanence with caution and begins the challenge: materialism or radical infusion of the Divine? And how can this one Substance, be it Mind, energy, even Love, be regarded still as personal? Spinoza certainly seems to have rejected that.
Enter Leibniz- lacking the (ahistorically for the West) "zen" attitude of Spinoza (although I was surprised to learn of his interest in China as just then encountered by the Portuguese Jesuits)but committed to a new view of transcendence. We are still trying to figure out what the monads (and the Monad) are and if they help at all. Certainly the wave/particle and water/wave attributes that we can now accept as co-existing in matter (or rather, in matter/energy) thanks to the quantum perspective may be somewhat like the missing link that Leibniz sought to find. But even after Kant it still comes down to Plato and Aristotle with the former getting it right grammatically and the latter closer to a truth we can take more literally as to the complex of matter and form that every thing seems to be.
But I am still stuck with the God problem and the personal nature of Love. Whether Spinoza was motivated to eliminate God as a model for the monarchs he wanted to overthrow in favor of personal freedom of conscience and a nascent awareness of human rights, and whether Leibniz was motivated by a need to preserve the moral status quo from the anarchy of individual liberty- I leave that to Stewart to go on pondering. I am still in the theological and metaphysical woods, looking for the answer to the disappointment we feel about the seeming lack of immortality of our consciousness in any real, felt way. Even if the ashes are windowless monads, why do we want them to continue to be aware of the Love that Moves us (Dante)?
Friday, February 01, 2008
Codes and Hypertext: The Intertextuality of International and Comparative Law
The Syracuse Journal of International Law invited essays suggesting areas of further research and the creation of tools and resources for information studies related to international and comparative law. My contribution, now with the editors, suggests ways to explore literary and information theory that connect these to continuities between the print and electronic media experiences. The first paragraph is posted below:
Codes and Hypertext: The Intertextuality of International and Comparative Law
Marylin J. Raisch
Introduction
Recent discussion of scholarly communication in the emerging internet landscape of hypertext has brought the study of law into an interdisciplinary , intertextual framework . International and comparative legal research, as a major area of special inquiry for practice and scholarship, must be brought into this discussion along with the texts- primarily codes and treaties as well as constitutions and judicial opinions- which form its body of meaning. The language of its norms, whether they be of private law, contract, human rights, or religious law, resonate across cultural contexts, making comparative law and transnational understanding twin means to important ends such as peace and trade. Critical to this discussion and necessary to close this gap in international and comparative law in the global information society will be aspects of communication theory and the philosophy of technology.
Codes and Hypertext: The Intertextuality of International and Comparative Law
Marylin J. Raisch
Introduction
Recent discussion of scholarly communication in the emerging internet landscape of hypertext has brought the study of law into an interdisciplinary , intertextual framework . International and comparative legal research, as a major area of special inquiry for practice and scholarship, must be brought into this discussion along with the texts- primarily codes and treaties as well as constitutions and judicial opinions- which form its body of meaning. The language of its norms, whether they be of private law, contract, human rights, or religious law, resonate across cultural contexts, making comparative law and transnational understanding twin means to important ends such as peace and trade. Critical to this discussion and necessary to close this gap in international and comparative law in the global information society will be aspects of communication theory and the philosophy of technology.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Poison or Cure? Hitchens/McGrath debate at Georgetown
Last week I attended the debate and discussion at Gaston Hall sponsored by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs as well as something called the Ethics and Public Policy Center, with which I was unfamiliar. The title of the debate was Poison or Cure? Religious Belief in the Modern World. I take it from the program that the Ethics and Public Policy Center, unlike the Berkley Center, is perhaps more of a Christian evangelical think tank. Fortunately, the Berkley Center is a pluralist and scholarly center; otherwise I think the sponsorship would have made the event appear to someone like me to be less seriously open-minded. Even so I wish that Tom Banchoff of the Berkley Center had been moderating the discussion and not just introducing the event.
In preparation I read Vol. 1 of Alister McGrath's A Scientific Theology, Nature and found it intriguing if slow-paced. It assumed a desire to see a parallel view of "nature" (contested, but the historical versions of the term were reviewed) and Christian belief in a salvific presence and history. He never really got to a proper attempt at a theodicy. This is a pity, as he could have attempted it and been more forceful and clear in the debate with Hitchens. I did not get a chance to read Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything before last night so I may try to do that soon- it may answer some of the questions I will put here.
Hitchens had a typcially theatrical and bold "take no prisoners" approach to what he sees as the horrors of religion and the immoral implications of the doctrines of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The debate was not fully joined insofar as McGrath spoke only of Christianity. Hitchens said at the outset that he would not deal with other monotheisms, then went on to stray from his own limitation to address them all in the course of the evening.
Here are the questions I might have put after hearing the debate:
To Hitchens: Many scientists have been amazed by the success of mathematics and is predictive powers in applied physics and the like. What do you make of it? Not a loaded question but one he should have been asked since he is a journalist and McGrath a scholar of both biochemistry and theology.
To Hitchens again: You stated that even many people who call themselves religious confess that the scriptures of their faith are really metaphorical in most parts or embody myth or legend. However, exegesis of these texts uses the same method of "peeling the onion" as is used in other textual criticism without implying, as you do, that such a method calls into question the truth value or legitimacy of the ideas contained therein. It does so no more than learning (as we did) that Thomas Wise, a bibliographer and (later revealed) con man forged a first edition of Jane Austen's work. Discovering that made the nature of her work more clear and interpretation more sound. It did not call into question the value of studying the works of Jane Austen.
To McGrath: Is religion really the only source of morality?
To McGrath again: do we not have to answer to the apparent indifference of a loving God to suffering? Is this not still the greatest barrier to the moral rationality of monotheistic belief? Is the sacrifice of Jesus (as opposed to his teaching) not violent and hard to explain since it must be at once foreordained and yet freely chosen by him in some way?
McGrath puts much store on the Incarnation and the Logos in the first volume of his study and the latter notion carries many interesting implications. I am still peeling this onion myself.
Finally, Hitchens said in a quick response that he did not want to endorse any confusion between the supernatural and the transcendent or "numinous," implying his disbelief in the former but leaving me with the impression that he had something more to say about the latter. I hope that the moderator's closing suggestion that we "do this again" by having a "part II" of the debate with the two adversaries might actually take place so that Hitchens might develop this with more scholarship (as opposed to mere cleverness)and McGrath might take a stronger stand in some areas, perhaps more like Dorothy Sayers in The Mind of the Maker. Still some real problems there but strong overall.
I will post link to the webcast which they said would be up by sometime this week.
In preparation I read Vol. 1 of Alister McGrath's A Scientific Theology, Nature and found it intriguing if slow-paced. It assumed a desire to see a parallel view of "nature" (contested, but the historical versions of the term were reviewed) and Christian belief in a salvific presence and history. He never really got to a proper attempt at a theodicy. This is a pity, as he could have attempted it and been more forceful and clear in the debate with Hitchens. I did not get a chance to read Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything before last night so I may try to do that soon- it may answer some of the questions I will put here.
Hitchens had a typcially theatrical and bold "take no prisoners" approach to what he sees as the horrors of religion and the immoral implications of the doctrines of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The debate was not fully joined insofar as McGrath spoke only of Christianity. Hitchens said at the outset that he would not deal with other monotheisms, then went on to stray from his own limitation to address them all in the course of the evening.
Here are the questions I might have put after hearing the debate:
To Hitchens: Many scientists have been amazed by the success of mathematics and is predictive powers in applied physics and the like. What do you make of it? Not a loaded question but one he should have been asked since he is a journalist and McGrath a scholar of both biochemistry and theology.
To Hitchens again: You stated that even many people who call themselves religious confess that the scriptures of their faith are really metaphorical in most parts or embody myth or legend. However, exegesis of these texts uses the same method of "peeling the onion" as is used in other textual criticism without implying, as you do, that such a method calls into question the truth value or legitimacy of the ideas contained therein. It does so no more than learning (as we did) that Thomas Wise, a bibliographer and (later revealed) con man forged a first edition of Jane Austen's work. Discovering that made the nature of her work more clear and interpretation more sound. It did not call into question the value of studying the works of Jane Austen.
To McGrath: Is religion really the only source of morality?
To McGrath again: do we not have to answer to the apparent indifference of a loving God to suffering? Is this not still the greatest barrier to the moral rationality of monotheistic belief? Is the sacrifice of Jesus (as opposed to his teaching) not violent and hard to explain since it must be at once foreordained and yet freely chosen by him in some way?
McGrath puts much store on the Incarnation and the Logos in the first volume of his study and the latter notion carries many interesting implications. I am still peeling this onion myself.
Finally, Hitchens said in a quick response that he did not want to endorse any confusion between the supernatural and the transcendent or "numinous," implying his disbelief in the former but leaving me with the impression that he had something more to say about the latter. I hope that the moderator's closing suggestion that we "do this again" by having a "part II" of the debate with the two adversaries might actually take place so that Hitchens might develop this with more scholarship (as opposed to mere cleverness)and McGrath might take a stronger stand in some areas, perhaps more like Dorothy Sayers in The Mind of the Maker. Still some real problems there but strong overall.
I will post link to the webcast which they said would be up by sometime this week.
Reviving the blog with reflections on rationality, broadly conceived
In reviving this blog I hope to create space for my own reflections and the articulation of my thoughts concerning many points of convergence among important issues in law, religion, and the philosophy of science. Since my field is information, my own stance will be critiqued and at times even deconstructed for clarity.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Revived blog
Like the phoenix rising from its ashes, and in this case my laziness and cold tea bags, I once again have decided 'tis better to have y blogged and shared than never to have blogged at all. Or words to that effect, as Peter Sellers once said in a long-ago LP comedy album to which my brother Jeff and I are probably the only remaining ones still referring. I'm actually going to have to copy posts out of a handwritten journal in order to get started again, just because the journal has so much in it that I want to say. Until then,....
Friday, November 18, 2005
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