Book Reveiw: Y. T. Vinaya Raj. Re-imagining Dalit Theology - Postmodern Readings. Tiruvalla:Christava Sahitya Samithi. [2008].

Even though the book is only less than 100 pages, it is rich and solid in its contents. The attempt of the author is to construct an Indian Christian theology based on Dalit experiences along postmodern lines. Vinaya Raj views caste as an epistemological problem. He reexamines the classical Indian Christian theology which has heavily been biased towards Brahministic ideology. Vinaya Raj narrate the stories of Kerala Dalit leaders like Habel (Daivathan), the first Christian convert in Central Travancore, Poikayil Kumara Gurudevan (Yohannan) who declined his church membership to start his own Dalit movement, Pratyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha(Church of God of the Realized Salvation). He developed alternate liturgical traditions against the casteist liturgies of the traditional Christian communities. Vinaya Raj finally engages in a Dalit hermeneutics which would foster an "embodied spirituality" against the prevailing spirituality which neglected the significance of the body in human spirituality.

Dr. Sanal Mohan, Profesor at the School of social Sciences of Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, wrote a Forward and Rev. Sunny George has contributed an introductory study note. Both of them place the book in the context of Postmodernism. Sanal Mohan in his forward wrote that the use of postmodern theories have enabled the author "to identify the liberatory aspects of Dalit 'histories or narratives of life worlds'." The category, Dalit, is interpreted as epistemological, political and plurivocal discourses. Sanal Mohan highlights the contribution of Vinaya Raj in rejecting the essentialist notions of identity and his attempts towards constructing a new identity through discursive formation of a new Dalit subjectivity. This new subjectivity transforms itself to create a "new social body" (pp9-10).The discursive formation of the new Dalit subjectivity through the open ended historical , social economic process can construct new languages, meaning systems and social and cultural capitals. By differently conceiving the Dalit body the new subjectivity places itself "in a position to transgress th restrictions imposed" on it by creating some space for itself through the deconstuction of culture, history and traditions.

There are some striking observations Vinaya Raj makes. "Dalit" he says, is not a caste category: "It is a category through which Dalits reject the notions of caste and its formation of casteist subjectivity. It is a category by which Dalits envision a renewed social status and social space" (p.25). "Dalit" is a contested knowledge category which rejects the dominant Brahminic epistemology that conceives knowledge as "situated in the soul and disseminated through ritualistic practices"(27). The dominant epistemology ignores the role of body in the knowledge system. Dalits, Vinaya Raj argues, constitutes a social agency and social space and as a political discourse it provides for the Dalits the "possibility of determining themselves" (28).

Vinaya Raj is very critical of the traditional Indian Christian theology which is built upon the modern colonial frame work. He challenges the Dalit theologians to go beyond the modernist paradigm and carve out a new identity, not in terms of the binary "other," but as "contested knowledge" (Steven Seidman); or in terms of what Michel Foucault calls the subjugated "low ranking knowledges." Caste as an episteme, positions Dalits in a "subordinate" social status and renders them as "lesser human beings."

Vinay Raj is not very sympathetic to the Marxist categories which are modernsit and essentialist which makes people the object of the social process. Rather he conceives, following Anthony Giddens, Dalits as a social agency establishing a discursive consciousness through the life process. He is very much indebted to Derrida's deconstructionist model in developing his Dalit biblical hermeneutics. Dalit reading of the Bible is not simply reading of the text, but reading of themselves. Derrida's theory of deconstruction helps him to discern the power play behind the construction of meanings and to discover body as the hermeneutical tool of Dalit theology. Only the reconstructed Dalit body can transform Indian social body by shedding its casteist constrictions. Dalits can serve as the platform for a dialogical pluriform social existence in India.

Upinder Singh,A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century

PM's daughter takes on Marxist view of history
19 Jun 2008, 0128 hrs IST, Mohua Chatterjee,TNN


NEW DELHI: Just when PM Manmohan Singh has taken on his communist partners over the nuclear deal, his daughter, professor Upinder Singh, has come up with a book which challenges the Marxist version of ancient Indian history.

While praising Marxist historians for uncovering the history of non-elite groups and other contributions, Singh disagrees with them for their reliance on unilinear historical models derived from western historical and anthropological works.

She also delves extensively into ancient India's cultural past — art, literature, religion and philosophy — in sharp contrast to Marxist historians who focused on "social and economic interpretations".

Singh, however, is not one to discard the Marxist approach altogether. "Being a student of history in the 1970s, I am a product of the shift from the nationalist to the Marxist view and so I have drawn from both," the DU historian told TOI, identifying herself as "belonging to the liberal space which is so important".

Singh's 704-page A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century is targeted at graduate and post-graduate students and will be released on July 18.

With her keen interest in archaeology, Singh seeks to challenge Marxist historians like Romila Thapar, and provides, for those "writing the new NCERT school books," more than one interpretation of ancient Indian history, and encouraging them to look for more.

Elaborating on her divergences with the Marxist school which have dominated the campuses since the 70s, Singh stressed the need for students of ancient Indian history to pay attention also to cultural aspects — art, literature religion and philosophy. "Religious doctrines, I feel, are important for students to understand things in context," she said.

In the introductory chapter, Singh discusses the contributions and flaws of the various schools. "Marxist historiography also contributed towards uncovering the history of non-elite groups, many of whom had suffered centuries of subordination and marginalization. While making these valuable contributions, Marxist writing often tended to work with unilinear historical models derived from western historical and anthropological writings," she writes.

Sketching out her differences with the Marxist school, Singh notes that shift of population from rural to urban areas did not take place as suggested in the model as "most people of the subcontinent continued to live in villages".

Asked about likely controversies after the book's release, she said, "Given that a controversy came up about a book that did not exist, I must say it can really vitiate the atmosphere. History always has a political element, it is always connected with power and power structures, with strong views on it even among ordinary people. But ultimately the book will be judged in the long run by students of history."

Explaining the purpose in the preface, she said, "It is necessary to expose them to the complex details and textures of history... unresolved issues... have been presented as such, rather than conveying a false sense of certainty. Where there are debates, the different perspectives have been presented, along with my own assessment of which arguments are convincing and which ones are not."

"The Voice," a "New Bible Translation,"

"The Voice," Dubbed a "New Bible Translation," Bows in October
from Emergent Village by Steve Knight

FYI — this press release just arrived in my inbox from Thomas Nelson, and I thought I’d pass it along here for those who may be interested:

Thomas Nelson To Debut New Bible Translation The Voice™ in October

The Voice New Testament unveils a completely new Bible translation for today’s Christian

(Nashville, Tenn) June 17, 2008 – Thomas Nelson, Inc.’s Bible group is set to release The Voice New Testament in October 2008, featuring the first completely new Bible translation available to readers in several years.

The Voice represents a collaboration of historians, poets, storytellers and songwriters which provides a true interpretation of the traditional Bible text while including historical and cultural expansions of the story. With additional background on setting and characters, the project’s screenplay-like format is ideal for group studies and dramatizations, and the inserted devotional commentary will further help readers understand the context of the biblical story.

About 40 different authors are believed to have been inspired by God to write the Scriptures. The Voice retains the perspective of the human writers. Most English translations attempt to even out the styles of the different authors in sentence structure and vocabulary. Instead, The Voice distinguishes the uniqueness of each author. The heart of the project is retelling the story of the Bible in a form as fluid as modern literary works while remaining true to the original manuscripts.

Featured writers, scholars, artists and musicians for The Voice include the president of Ecclesia Bible Society and internationally acclaimed speaker and pastor Chris Seay (project founder); Blue Like Jazz author Donald Miller; internationally known speaker and author of over 12 highly acclaimed books Brian McLaren; theologian, author, and futurist Leonard Sweet; and nationally renowned author Lauren Winner. The translation and literary style of The Voice have been checked by biblical reviewers, theological scholars and a biblical archeologist, among others.

Replicating the manner in which the Bible was originally available in the church’s first century beginnings, The Voice translation has previously been introduced to the marketplace through the release of single books of the Bible, including Acts, Matthew, Luke, John, Hebrews, Mark and the soon-to-be-released The Voice of Romans. However, the release of The Voice New Testament marks the official launch of The Voice translation, bringing the previously released Scripture projects and the remaining Bible books together into one complete New Testament offering. The Thomas Nelson scholar/author team is also currently working on the Old Testament books which when finished will form The Voice Bible in its entirety.

For more information on The Voice New Testament and The Voice translation, visit www.hearthevoice.com or www.nelsonbibles.com.

Writing Tips

Five Timeless Tips on Writing
Published by Henrik Edberg June 6th, 2008 in Personal Development and People Skills.

Five Timeless Tips on Writing
Image by mezone (license).

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”
E.L Doctorow

“Whether or not you write well, write bravely”
Bill Stout

“Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.”
Olin Miller

I usually don’t write much about writing. I usually refer guest posters with articles about blogging or writing to submit them to blogs like Problogger or Daily Blog Tips instead. But today I felt like mixing things up a bit and bringing in some variation.

So here are five timeless tips on writing. I suppose this article could be useful if you are a blogger but also if you’re a writer of some other kind. Perhaps one with an unfinished novel still waiting in the drawer.

1. It won’t always be easy.

“Every writer I know has trouble writing.”
Joseph Heller

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.”
Leonard Bernstein

When I started writing articles about music and film in Swedish quite a few years ago I used to wait for inspiration to come. I did the same thing when I first started blogging. I don’t do that anymore.

Inspiration can show up on its own, waltzing in through a door or a window. But doing things that way makes work inconsistent – both in quality and quantity - and you spend a lot of time waiting.

It’s often better to just start working. For the first minutes what you do may suck quite a bit and it’s hard going. But after a while inspiration seems to catch up with you. Things start to flow easier and your work is of a higher quality.

So don’t limit yourself to the moments where you feel inspired or you feel like the moment is just right to do something. Act instead. A lot of the time you can find inspiration along the way.

2. Remove.

“Even the best writer has to erase”
Spanish Proverb

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”
Elmore Leonard

“When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men’s minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.”
Cicero

Not much to add here. Get to the point quickly and you’ll have a better chance of getting through to the one you writing to. Just like when you are talking to someone in real life.

3. Be wholly alive and be present.

“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough”
William Saroyan

Be present and alive with whatever you do. Focus on what’s in front of you. This is not an easy habit to cultivate.

But I have found that over time you can learn to spend more and more time in the now.

In this space your writing will be easier and you may be surprised at how wonderful some of the things that flow out of you are. Again, this is useful in conversations too.

When you start to think too much you are going down a slippery slope. Your communication becomes overly complicated, unclear and with less emotional power behind it.

4. Write, write, write.

“If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write”
Epictetus

Good old Epictetus. Always gets to the point quickly. Just like when playing tennis you need to put in the hours. Maybe not the easy answer one wants to hear. But massive amounts of practise tend to sharpen your skill considerably in just about any field. For more tips from Epictetus have a look at Epictetus’ Top 7 Timeless Pearls of Wisdom.

5. Focus on your truth.

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
C.S Lewis

When you write I think it’s better to focus less on being original and more on expressing what you feel is the truth. What you feel has some truth to it often has truth to a lot of other people too. Because we are all pretty much the same. And the truth tends to get through to people. When you read something that tells the truth you can feel it in your body and in how it resonates with your emotions and thoughts.

This is not easy though. And the people that do it a lot often have a lot of courage. But I think it’s something to strive for.

Few things under the sun are new. Things often just seem new to someone because that person hasn’t heard about them before. But most of the time some guy talked about it many hundreds or thousands of years ago. In personal development, loads of people borrow from people like Buddha. And he probably borrowed stuff from some guy no-one can remember anymore.

I’m not saying that people do not add new things and parts of themselves when they express truths that have been said over and over throughout the ages. I’m just saying that you shouldn’t get too hung up on being original because a big part of human interaction and communication is being able to really connect, relate to and understand each other in some way. And you can do that by telling your truth.

Maria Misra: India Since the Great Rebellion Review b K.N.Panikkary

Transition to modernity

An interpretation of the historical process in India’s evolution into a modern nation


K.N.Panikkar

VISHNU’S CROWDED TEMPLE — India Since the Great Rebellion: Maria Misra; Allen Lane-Penguin, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. £ 6.99.

The historical process through which India evolved into a modern nation is the theme of this book. In the words of the author it is conceived as a “three act drama.” The first narrates the building of the empire and the “diverse and complex response of Indians to this curious edifice”; the second is concerned with the crisis of the imperial system and the successful struggle of the national movement, and the third narrates the post-Independence project of democratic and secular reconstruction, and the subsequent Hindu “nationalist” departure.

The author identifies the principle dynamics of this process as “the enduring tension between hierarchy and equality, between difference and commonality and between the conflicting views of how to integrate and ‘modernise’ India.” The distinct character of Indian modernity is a result of this dynamics which encouraged the coexistence of the ideas of formal equality and democracy with notions of hierarchy and difference. According to the author, the existing historiographies — liberal, Marxist and subaltern — have not been able to capture the essence of this dynamics. They have either romanticised it as “triumphant westernisation” or reduced it to “a struggle between all powerful elites and the hopelessly subordinated poor” or gave undue emphasis to “cultural rupture between the mass of Indians and their leaders.” The alternative proposed in the book, not being theoretically well grounded, does not meet the claim of explaining the “complex and halting evolution” of India “into a very particular kind of modern nation.”
Modernisation

The book is understandably not intended to be empirically exhaustive. But what is likely to baffle the reader is the basis of the selection of information which does not fall into a satisfactory scheme. The first “Act” on colonialism, for instance, opens with the British attempt to make loyalty the cornerstone of their policy, then devotes some space to the issue of modernisation and then to the caste and communal divide. They do not gel together to give an impression of what colonialism meant for Indians. In the bargain the central fact of colonialism, impoverisation of India, escapes attention. The author indeed points out the colonial interest implicit in the modernising measures like the construction of railways and canals. The railways made India easier to secure and at the same time helped to link the commercially prosperous areas of farming to the cities and ports from where commodities could be exported. The canals served to enrich the recruiting grounds and to ensure placid sepoys.

The author makes an interesting point about how the railways helped the increase in pilgrimage. After the construction of railways the number of pilgrims to Gaya, Benares and Puri had increased manifold and the numbers attending festivals such as the rath yatra at Jagannath temple had soared. “The coffers of the Brahmans and other religious professionals were not emptied by the iron progress of rationality and railways, but filled to overflowing.” The surge of religiosity in contemporary India, aided by communication revolution, can be read as a sequel to it.
Culture and politics

The Indian response to colonial presence and the post-Independence efforts at national reconstruction form the major part of the book. The author demonstrates how cultural concerns coalesced with politics through self-strengthening movements like the Ramakrishna Mission, the Arya Samaj and the agitations around cow protection, and the Age of Consent Bill. The importance accorded to the cultural issue is refreshing, particularly the emphasis on the cultural dimension of the Gandhian strategy. “It was through changing what people ate, how they dressed, their attitude to sex and religion that he proposed to emancipate India from self- imposed colonisation.” In other words, by foregrounding a cultural ideal different from what the “modernising” colonial rule had imbibed in the mind of the middle class. The discussion on post-colonial India is mainly centred on Nehru, the Emergency and Hindutva. A close associate of Nehru had once remarked that he was the sum of three rather conflicting influences: British liberalism, Russian Marxism and Gandhianism. By the end of his life he was not able to fully hold on to any of them and became a prisoner of political pragmatism, except in the case of a multi-cultural approach to national identity. But Nehru’s greatest contribution was the institutionalisation of democracy which was to a large measure responsible for the defeat of the Emergency. The author rightly suggests that the uncongenial climate created by the Emergency, combined with the Hinduism crafted for the modern age by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad had led to the rise of the Sangh Parivar.
Critique

That the references are not given in the body of the text, although there is an exhaustive bibliography of secondary sources on which this work is based, inhibits an engaged reading. The citations are referred to in the bibliography which is rather cumbersome to locate. The professional historian who would like to check the sources may not find this method very welcome. Nevertheless, it may not deter the general reader to whom this book may be of greater appeal. To both, however, the factual errors, which are not infrequent, are bound to be an irritant. In fact, there is an error in the opening sentence itself.

Finally, the metaphor of the temple in the title and analysis may suggest that the book is a Hindu view of Indian history, which it is not. In fact, the author is critical of the Sangh Parivar and the type of history it had foregrounded while in power. Her assessment of Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh is that “it is xenophobic, hierarchical, bellicose and reactionary.” The temple metaphor goes against the grain of the book.

Amitav Ghosh: Seeds of hope Reviews by PRIYAMVADA GOPAL

The Hindu Literary Review



Review

Seeds of hope

In Sea of Poppies, Ghosh has produced his most incisive engagement with imperialism.

At its best, his writing illuminates the connections between small human stories and massive historical changes...


Last year, Britain celebrated the 200th anniversary of its abolition of the slave trade whereby millions of Africans were captured and transported out of their homelands to work in colonial plantations. Britain had been vastly enriched by the trade but public outrage had been mobilised by exposes of repugnant practices including tossing dying “merchandise” overboard to claim insurance money.

Those who had profited from the unpaid labour of millions, however, had no intention of sacrificing their lucrative commerce after slavery itself ended in 1834. Petitioned to protect the interests of plantation owners, the British government came up with a scheme to harness cheap contract labour from India and China. Though technically paid and voluntary, extremely harsh conditions and debt traps could make the experience of indenture little better than that of slavery. Indeed, some of the ships that had once transported slaves were now deployed to carry millions of girmitiyas from India across the ocean to places like Mauritius, Trinidad, Fiji and Guiana.

It is one such ship, the Ibis, that is at the heart of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first in a projected trilogy, painted on a magisterial canvas stretching from agrarian North India and Bengal to China and Mauritius. This breadth is reflective of Ghosh’s subject — the enormous reach of British imperialism from the Americas to Asia, Africa and Australasia and the globe-spanning displacements that millions endured. Celebrating the global presence of the Pravasi Bharatiya, generally symbolised by the successful techie in Silicon Valley, we often forget how costly, wrenching and terrifying migrations were for so many who undertook it, often under economic and social duress. Poverty, widowhood and caste violence drive two of Ghosh’s characters to the Ibis which puts them in hitherto unimaginable proximity with a Bengali zamindar convict, cheated by a British merchant. In turn, the Raja develops an unlikely friendship with a Chinese-Parsi afeemkhor, an addict produced by the British opium trade inflicted on China. Reeking of defecation, disease and death, the hold of this ship produces new and fragile communities, bringing together Hindu peasants and Muslim lascars, high-caste and low-caste, wives and widows, black men and white women. The stories of these engaging (and some particularly eccentric) characters shape this novel.

Like other Ghosh novels, Sea of Poppies uses “the imagination with precision” (to quote The Shadow Lines). Historical research and imaginative license work together to illumine the nuances of existence in another time. There’s no place here for literary myths about entire novels emerging unbidden from the heart. A labour of love it may be, but writing certainly involves hard work, the author’s and that of others whom he acknowledges. Ghosh’s trademark passion for language extends here to Bhojpuri and creoles, both of which immensely enrich the novel though the simultaneous (and occasionally quaint) translation from the Bhojpuri can feel a touch intrusive. Despite a few bumpy moments in the beginning, the story is compellingly told as it heads for open sea. A less intrepid novelist might have hesitated before depicting a sati, particularly one that seems slightly surplus to plot requirements, but it is made plausible within the larger narrative context.

Having turned down a Commonwealth Prize for The Glass Palace because he did not wish it to be “incorporated within that particular memorialisation of Empire”, Ghosh has, in Sea of Poppies, produced his most incisive engagement with imperialism yet. At its best, his writing illuminates the connections between small human stories and massive historical changes, including shifting economic practices, social relations and race hierarchies. Yet, this is no morality tale with Good Indians and Bad Angrezis. We are reminded that all societies are marred by inhumane and exploitative practices, though there is also resistance to them. Colonialism and its claim to bestowing freedom through subjection would not have survived without collaborators, both willing and unwitting — the high-caste subedars who bludgeon the indentured into submission as they do the chamars of their villages, the zamindars who buttress British mercantile enterprises, and even the impoverished poppy growers whose poorly-remunerated crops fuel addiction and misery thousands of miles away in China. But their stories are also, finally, narratives of resilience, transformation and that sustaining human resource — hope for a different future.

PRI YAMVADA GOPAL

Girard Among the Girardians

Girard Among the Girardians
by Joseph Bottum

Copyright (c) 1996 First Things (March 1996).

Violence Unveiled
By Gil Bailie
Crossroad, 293 pages, $24.95

The Sacred Game
By Cesareo Bandera
Pennsylvania State University Press, 318 pages, $16.95 paper

The Gospel and the Sacred
By Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly
Fortress, 175 pages, $14 paper

The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred
By James G. Williams
Trinity, 288 pages, $16 paper

In 1947, in response to Arthur Koestler’s anti-Stalinist novel Darkness at Noon, a French philosopher produced one of the most horrifying books ever written. Though many of his contemporaries thought Maurice Merleau-Ponty (and not Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus) to have the finest philosophical gifts of his generation, what makes Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror so horrifying is not simply that it exhibits a first-class mind pimping for Stalin and the Moscow Show Trials of the 1930s. What makes it so horrifying is that Merleau-Ponty is right—obscenely right, immorally right: violence can found culture, terror can preserve stability, the unanimity created by the sacrifice of a scapegoat can become so complete that it includes even its victim.

In 1972, a French literary critic returned to the question of the violent root of culture. But where Merleau-Ponty, uneasy with his own analysis, turned away from further investigation, Rene Girard has relentlessly pursued the effect of violence through literature, anthropology, psychology, and biblical criticism. In a stream of books-Violence and the Sacred (1972), Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), The Scapegoat (1982), Job (1985), and A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (1990)—and a torrent of articles and interviews, Girard has relentlessly pursued what even he laughingly calls his idee fixe: the way in which scapegoats found, preserve, and unify culture.

The pursuit has cost Girard something of the influence in American and European academic circles that he gained in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1961, he published Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, a study of desire and the way in which “triangular” relations form between characters in the works of certain novelists (especially Cervantes, Proust, and Dostoyevsky). In France the influential Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann gave the book the sort of major review that founds a young critic’s career—praising it primarily, I think, because Girard seemed to provide (in the “humanistic Marxism” line once held by Georg Lukacs) a way to use great literature to criticize bourgeois life without relying upon the Freudianism that dominated literary criticism at the time.

That promoting Marxism was not Girard’s actual intent has since become clear. Though the ultra-conservative critic Thomas Molnar once accused Girard of positivism and antireligious materialism, the postmodernist radical Hayden White has more believably accused him of medievalism and reactionary defense of religion. But through the 1960s, with the (still untranslated) studies of Dostoyevsky that followed Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and with a series of powerful essays (partially collected in the 1978 To Double Business Bound), Girard became a major figure in literary criticism and an important player on the American university scene. (Reared in France, he has spent his career teaching in America, recently retiring from Stanford.) The publication of Violence and the Sacred, his sortie onto the anthropology battlefield over which the structuralists and post-structuralists were fighting to the death, was greeted—by literary critics, at least—with ecstatic reviews.

Given the generally radical and overwhelmingly antireligious bias of modern literary criticism, this importance granted a Roman Catholic thinker represents a considerable anomaly. But there was a certain coyness about Christian faith in Girard’s literary and anthropological work through the sixties and seventies—a certain tempering of the wind to the shorn lambs of the literary fold, perhaps, or even a certain jesuitical misdirection. In a recent book-length interview with Michel Treguer, Girard speaks of his return to Catholicism in 1959. Only the most careful reader, however, could have discovered Christianity in Girard’s early writings. Michel Serres seemed eccentric and willful when, in his review of the 1978 study of psychology, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, he failed to mention that the book concerns the revelation of Christ. But many reviewers missed the implications of Christian revelation in the 1972 Violence and the Sacred. The influence of that earlier book and the place of its central chapters in anthologies of modern literary criticism may owe a great deal to this anti-Christian misreading.

As the possibility of misreading Girard’s ventures into biblical revelation became less plausible, however, Girard’s acknowledged influence on literary criticism began to wane. Despite the contemporary interest in victimization, citations by literary critics to his writings have became rarer and direct studies of his work (such as the feminist attacks by Sarah Kofman and Toril Moi) have became more combative. In recent years, Girard’s stock in the academic establishments of France and America has very much declined. But this decline has been matched with a gain, as a number of writers, banding together as the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, have taken up Girard’s notion of the sacrificial scapegoat and devoted themselves to its application. Like Leo Strauss, Ernest Becker, and Eric Voegelin before him, Rene Girard has been transformed into something of a sect in America, with disciples, translators, and proselytizers.

To some extent, the transformation may have had a good effect, releasing Girard from the ghetto of literary criticism and pointing him in directions he needed to go—notably with Fr. Raymund Schwager’s application of Girard’s work to orthodox Christology in Must There Be Scapegoats? (1978) and with Andrew McKenna’s analysis of philosophy’s hidden violence in Violence and Difference (1992). But this development may have had an unhappy effect as well, over-extending his thought and yet simultaneously narrowing it into a “Girardian System.” Both these effects—the good and the bad—are visible in four books published by Girardians in the last year: Cesareo Bandera’s literary study, The Sacred Game; James Williams’ new edition of his 1991 The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred; Robert Hamerton-Kelly’s study of violence in Mark, The Gospel and the Sacred; and Gil Bailie’s account of contemporary culture, Violence Unveiled.

Of the four books, Bailie’s Violence Unveiled is the best introduction to the Girardian topics of violence, culture, and sacrifice. It is an easily accessible and beautifully crafted analysis that moves freely from Greek literature to current news stories, from Aztec myths to Captain Cook’s experience in Tahiti, and finds in them all the grounds for a persuasive biblical and anti-violent Christian apologetics. Specialist and nonspecialist alike will find Bailie’s book rewarding; I recommend it highly. In The Sacred Game, the Spanish scholar Cesareo Bandera presents a much more technical study of the sacred in the poetical epics and philosophical aesthetics of both Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance; specialists will find Bandera’s introduction and his chapters on Virgil and Renaissance poetry especially fruitful.

With Williams’ The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred and Hamerton-Kelly’s The Gospel and the Sacred, however, the problems of “Girardianism”—of Girard’s insights taken as a scientific system—begin to come clear. Both books contain biblical readings that specialists will find interesting and provocative, and Williams includes a marvelous conclusion that applies his biblical exegesis to contemporary social analysis. But in his introduction Williams briefly indulges the temptation to make Girard’s “anthropology of revelation” systematic, while Hamerton-Kelly succumbs completely—devoting twenty-four pages (out of 175) to a systematic appendix on “the theory of the generative mimetic scapegoating mechanism” (or the “GMSM,” as he constantly abbreviates it).

Girard himself, however, denies that there is any “Girard System.” Following a tradition dating back to Descartes’ 1648 Conversation with Burman, French intellectuals often use interviews to put on record major qualifications of their work, and Girard has insisted in dozens of interviews that he has no theory. “If a Rabelais shows up,” he jokes with Rebecca Adams, “he will do hilarious things . . . with our use of the word ‘theory.’ . . . The next generation will wonder what could move so many people to go on endlessly writing the most convoluted prose in a complete void of their own making, disconnected not only from the reality of their world but from the great literary texts, of which recent theory has been making a shamelessly parasitic use.”

The desire to follow a French tradition, however, may not be the only reason that so much of Girard’s thought appears in interviews. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is an aggravating book to read, primarily because it consists entirely of interviews with a pair of psychiatrists, Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort. “We quite deliberately left out all concessions to the reader,” the introduction superfluously notes. But Girard’s resignation to using the form of an interview—his inability throughout the 1970s to produce a straightforward book on the anthropology of Christian revelation—originates, I believe, in his desire to avoid the tar pit of quasi-science in which Freud found himself so deeply mired.

Rather, beginning with what he calls a “dense intuition,” a “block” penetrated little by little, Girard has moved in his investigations since 1959 from an observation of desire in the novel to an observation of revelation in the Gospel. The great texts are deeper, stronger, and larger than our readings; they interpret our theories rather than allow our theories to interpret them. Things Hidden is a convoluted, difficult work that begins as anthropology’s critique of biblical revelation and turns into revelation’s critique of anthropology. At his best, Girard has simply let the progress of his reading—first in literature, then in anthropology, then in psychology, then in biblical theology—strip away the outer layers of his “dense intuition” to reveal the Cross.

This progress has sometimes exposed him as an opsimath, discovering important theological texts only late in his career. Though Fergus Kerr (in his defense of Girard against John Milbank’s objections in the 1990 Theology and Social Theory) reports that Girard was not aware of parallels between his own analysis and St. Augustine’s until others pointed it out to him, Girard observes in the interview with Treguer that three-quarters of what he has to say is already in St. Augustine. Though in 1978 he dismissed with surprising offhandedness the sacrificial theology of the New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews, in the 1993 interview with Rebecca Adams he mocks his own earlier dismissal and reasserts the importance of that text. The more orthodoxy Girard discovers, the more orthodox he becomes. This progress of discovery may be what preserved him from anthropology’s quasi-scientific reduction of all religions to a single phenomenon of the sacred: Girard sharply criticizes “the inability of the greatest minds in the modern world to grasp the difference between the Christian crib at Christmastime and the bestial monstrosities of mythological births.”

The insight on the edge of which Merleau-Ponty trembled in 1947 is an insight into the failure of mythology after Christ: the election of a scapegoat may in fact have worked to found culture in the days before biblical revelation, but the Gospels reveal how it works, and an understanding of how it works destroys the possibility of it working. If we know the victim to be innocent, we can still pronounce him guilty, but we will not succeed in being drawn together—we will not succeed in founding a culture—with the pronouncement.

Human desire is not essentialized, Girard argues against Freud; it does not come naturally packaged in such mandatory Freudian shapes as the death instinct, the Oedipal longing of the boy to possess his mother, or the woman’s envy of the male phallus. Desire is instead mimetic (as the great novelists have all seen), and we learn what to desire by watching the desiring of others. The key to understanding how the sacrifice of a scapegoat once worked to found and preserve culture lies in Girard’s notion of desire. Underneath cultural scapegoat myths there lurks the desperate hope of controlling the outbreak of swirling, undifferentiated desire—mimetic desire gone mad in a cultural crisis in which imitation imitates imitation and violence breeds upon itself.

Some Girardians seem to envision a pre-cultural state of primal violence and thus to open Girard’s thought to Milbank’s complaint that what little we know of ancient history offers no evidence that cities and towns were actually born in riot and mayhem. To interpret scapegoat myths, however, we need not posit a primal violence. We need only notice that every culture manifests in its myths a deep terror of the breakdown of all distinctions and the mimetic escalation of violence. Against this threatened violence of all against all, cultural myth poses the solution of another violence: the violence of all against one, the violence in which the scapegoat—the sin-eater, the disease-carrier, the heretic, the witch, the Jew—is arbitrarily selected as the source of the cultural breakdown and murdered, sacrificed, or expelled.

It is tempting to pause and note that by the elimination of the scapegoat, the cycle of mimetic violence ceases and the culture is able to establish its violence—preventing distinctions and forms. Indeed, Girard devoted most of Violence and the Sacred to analyzing the ways in which much religious ritual reenacts symbolically both the original mad mimetic violence of a culture and the cultural foundation achieved by the sacrifice of a scapegoat. Ritual thus serves the important cultural purpose of reinforcing and transmitting the lessons learned in a scapegoat-broken cycle of violence. The scapegoat, perceived as simultaneously the cause and the solution to violence, becomes the sacred: the single locus of both divine terror and divine blessing, the unity of the two manifestations of the holy famously described by Rudolph Otto.

The more interesting point, however, and the one that has occupied Girard for the last twenty years, is the impossibility of our ever knowing that this is in fact how myth works. The story of the scapegoat ought to be impenetrable. Myth serves primarily to hide the arbitrariness of the victim and the fact that the innocent victim is a victim at all. If we know the victim to be arbitrary, we cannot succeed in making him sacred; if we know the victim to be innocent, the cycle of violence and the breakdown of culture cannot be solved—as they were not solved in Athens, for instance, by the innocent Socrates’ death.

We have in cultural anthropology, however, one set of religious texts that seems to take the side of the victim. Often in the Old Testament and overwhelmingly in the New, the mythology of scapegoat sacrifice is penetrated and thereby rendered ineffectual. Christianity is a religion, as Paul Dumouchel puts it, that “should not exist.” Girard is entirely serious in his “anthropology of revelation,” but he means the opposite of the reduction of Judeo-Christian revelation to a general anthropological category of “sacred religion.” Judaism and Christianity are fundamentally anti-sacred in their partisanship for the victim, and this is only possible (logically, scientifically, anthropologically) if Judaism and Christianity actually do have a divine revelation—if the Bible, to put it bluntly, is true.

There are obviously dangers in this sort of thesis-driven biblical interpretation. Any study that lifts up one interpretive strand tempts us to pit certain biblical texts against others, and Williams in his readings must struggle against the temptation to dismiss the passages that run counter to his thesis. In a way that perhaps fails to do justice to the history of Hebraic texts, both Hamerton-Kelly and Bailie seem unduly willing to take the prophets as the center of the Old Testament.

Worse, this sort of biblical interpretation may tempt us not only to pit Christian revelation against Jewish religion (an opposition for which there is ample precedent in the New Testament), but to pit Christian revelation against the Jews. Robert Hamerton-Kelly has struggled in recent years against charges that his biblical scholarship betrays an animus against the Jews, and a careful reading of his work reveals that such charges are not true. But by beginning his study of the Gospel of Mark with a strong, visceral image of the bloodstained Temple in Jerusalem at the time of Christ, Hamerton-Kelly seems to admit the worse charge that the Gospels themselves are anti-Semitic (a charge Girard himself vehemently rebuts in a 1993 essay in the journal Biblical Interpretation).

There are also theological and ecclesiological dangers in this sort of thesis. That the Church has not always been true to the spirit of the Gospels is undeniable, but this fact does not invalidate the Church. Any reading of Christian history as a development in understanding a single Gospel theme risks, for example, Teilhard de Chardin’s sort of evolutionary theology, with its consequent dismissal of patristic and medieval formulations. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his brief critique in Theo-Drama, complains of Girard’s too easy rejection of St. Anselm’s account of the Atonement (as though God “finds it necessary to defend His honor”). In a weak moment at the end of Violence Unveiled, Bailie seems near to saying that the Church is something we must outgrow.

What the Girardian analysis can help us see, however, is the way in which Christianity itself contributes to our current cultural crises. Hitler sacrificed millions of Jews to found what turned out to be a twelve-year reich, Stalin made scapegoats of millions of “counterrevolutionaries” to preserve a regime with only fifty more years of life, and every little dictator since has slaughtered his own victims to create or maintain an ephemeral authority. Thousand-year cultures are not founded by sacrifice anymore, for the process of scapegoating no longer seems to work very well. Everyone in the world has learned the Christian demythologizing of sacred violence too well, and no one trusts sacrifice to do what it once did.

Of course, the Serbs still undertake ethnic cleansing, the Iraqis still speak of the Kurds as a disease, the Chinese still hunt down counterrevolutionaries—for there is no other way they know to try to maintain themselves. The culture-founding violence of the sacred is the only method we know for ending the culture-destroying violence of mimetic desire. Gil Bailie, throughout his book, and James Williams, in his conclusion, trace the appearance and breakdown of the “scapegoat mechanism” in innumerable contemporary events. Bandera similarly includes in The Sacred Game a fascinating “Marxian Epilogue” in which he traces the sacrificial logic of Marx’s analysis of money (though its relation to the rest of his book is not immediately apparent).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was entirely right when he defended the objective need of the revolutionary state to sacrifice subjectively innocent scapegoats, just as the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt was right when he spoke in the late 1920s of the state’s need to kill its political enemies on strictly “existential-ontological” grounds. But Merleau-Ponty and Schmitt were nonetheless self-defeating in their attempts to describe the process (when we understand how a myth works, it stops working), and they were too late besides. The consistent failure of sacrifice in modern times, the escalation of apparently insoluble violence, and the strange cycles of mimetic victimization into which we have fallen (in which victims compete for notice of their victimization) are all results of the universalizing of Christian revelation’s invincible demythologizing of the sacred.

What has been lost in the universalizing, however, is the specificity of Christian revelation. This unspecific universality is presumably what historians mean when they speak of contemporary culture as the post-Christian age. The pre-Christian sacred scapegoat can no longer preserve culture, and we face the collapse of all our cultural distinctions in a mad cycle of mimetic violence. But despite this, or even perhaps because of this, Girard suggests that we may at last have reached the moment for a new cultural appropriation of Christian revelation—of those things hidden since the foundation of the world. Violence can no longer cast out violence, Satan can no longer cast out Satan, and only our return to the gospel can save us.

Advani regrets releasing book on Benazir

Advani regrets releasing book on Benazir
Blue Star Monday, June 09, 2008

New Delhi: After objections by Pakistan Peoples Party, senior BJP leader L K Advani on Monday expressed "regret" for releasing a controversial book on Benazir Bhutto, saying its contents are "disturbing" for anyone who knew the slain Pakistan prime minister.

Advani conveyed the views to PPP spokesman Farhatullah Babar when the latter called him to register objections for releasing the book "Goodbye Shehzadi" last month.

In the book, author London-based journalist Shyam Bhatia claimed Benazir personally transfered nuclear secrets to North Korea by smuggling classified CDs in her overcoat.

"I regret having attended the function. Had I read the contents of the book, I would not have gone for the book launch," Advani was quoted by party spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy as saying.

Advani reiterated that Bhutto was "a good friend" of his and that "the contents of the book are disturbing for anyone who knew her", Rudy said.

Advani visited the function after being "strongly pursued", Rudy said, adding he spent only few minutes there. "The few words he spoke during the launch were based on the glimpses of the book which he was told," Rudy said. Things have been put in "better perspective" after Advani talked to Babar, the BJP spokesman said.

The book has come under attack from PPP which has threatened to take legal action against Bhatia for levelling "scurrilous" allegations against Benazir and showing her in poor light. The PPP has expressed "surprise" at Advani's decision to launch the book, saying his presence at the event had "lent respect to...Some of the wild allegations in the book".

© Copyright 2008 PTI. All rights reserved.

Living Library' that Loans Out People

'Library' Loans Out Muslim, Immigrant, Witch
People Check Out People for 30-Minute Conversations to Overcome Prejudices
By MARK RICE-OXLEY (ABC News)
LONDON, June 8, 2008


It works like a conventional library. Tables and chairs are set out for study. Librarians bustle purposefully, staffing the checkout desk.


Except these aren't books on loan. They're people.

Welcome to the Living Library. Here, you borrow individuals who represent stereotypes that often are the target of prejudice or hatred.

At this east London library on a recent Saturday, there were 26 "books" available, including a Muslim, an immigrant, a transgender individual, a witch and an Indian atheist.

Readers borrow them for half an hour, hear their narrative, question them, even pry a little, and -- so the theory goes -- break down some of their preconceptions and stop "judging the book by the cover."

The idea is the brainchild of Ronni Abergel, a Danish antiviolence campaigner, who has taken the Living Library to 12 countries and watched it flourish in places as diverse as Australia and Turkey.


"We live in a time where we need dialogue," says Abergel. "With dialogue comes understanding and with that comes tolerance and that's the mission of the Living Library: to promote understanding and tolerance through dialogue."

There is certainly plenty of dialogue at this London venue.

At one table, a Rwandan refugee explains to a listener why immigrants cannot be dismissed both as a drain on the public purse and a threat to local jobs. At another, a transgender individual relates why she felt biologically compelled to change sex. An Indian atheist and a Muslim are setting forth their worldview to "readers."

And those 'books' that aren't currently checked out -- among them a witch, a funeral director, a medium and a police officer -- are swapping stories in the back room, eating sandwiches, and waiting for their next appointment.

All of the "books" are unpaid volunteers, as are the organizers, recruited for the event.

Upon entry, readers can browse a list of available "books," then sign up for their "book" with volunteer librarians. On this Saturday, more than 50 people signed up, and some books were booked out almost the entire day.

excerpts from Remembering Tomorrow by Michael Albert

Chapter 6

Why Do It?



Another excerpt in the serialization of Parts One and Two of the memoir Remembering Tomorrow by Michael Albert, this time chapter 6 and 7, distributed in this 40th year since the New Left and May 68.









Would You Torch a Library?



Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.
—Bertolt Brecht



When I was giving speeches at MIT, I was repeatedly asked, would you burn down a library to end the war? I would say, of course I would burn down a library to end the war, wouldn't you? A library has books. A war destroys not only books, but authors and readers. If I could end the war by burning down all the libraries in this city, I would do it in a heartbeat. And so would you, unless you are callous. But in the real world burning libraries won't end wars. What will help end the war has none of the onus of burning books. You can educate. You can demonstrate. Will you do that? That's the real question. In the documentary The Sixties, Henry Kissenger describes how Nixon was preparing to use nuclear weapons. He had to back off, however, due to immense dissent throughout the country. It wasn't burning a library that ended a war, it was amassing gigantic opposition that threatened policies held even more dear.







The Provost's Proposition



It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no fortunate one.

—John Fogerty



Shortly after the 1968-69 undergraduate association presidential (UAP) election, I was sitting in my new office when MIT's provost, Jerome Weisner, second in command at MIT, knocked on the door and entered. Weisner had been science advisor to John Kennedy. He was a Humphrey supporter and had been, and still was, a civil rights advocate. Weisner had a sense of humor, too, being known, for example, for saying that "getting an education from MIT is like taking a drink from a fire hose." He wasn't all bad politically, either, saying, "It is no longer a question of controlling a military-industrial complex, but rather, of keeping the United States from becoming a totally military culture." Still, we both knew that Weisner had actively assisted my opponents in the UAP election and had been miserable when I won. My campaign planks included no war research, open admissions, and indemnities to the Black Panther Party. Nonetheless, Weisner came to make peace. Weisner was a good liberal put out by his inability to relate to student radicals more positively. He thought we ought to appreciate him and his accomplishments and respect his advice. I thought that Weisner was buffoonish and unworthy of respect, though I do remember how in meetings he used to deploy his pipe as a prop people's eyes would gravitate to, giving him prominence in the room, and added power. Others do the same trick by where they sit at a table, hand motions, clothes, etc.



Anyway, I remember three parts to our discussion in my campus student government office. In the first part, after some chatting, I asked Weisner something that I had been wondering for some time. This was the first era of antimissile missiles and I had a strong suspicion that work on them was entirely a boondoggle in addition to being politically destabilizing. So I asked about this, and Weisner took a pencil, stood it point upward, and said, "This pencil has as much chance of shooting down an incoming Intercontinental Ballistic Missile as any antimissile missile we could conceivably deploy." Weisner knew that the antimissile program was a massive sop to high-tech industry. I asked how he could know that and not trumpet the truth. Weisner shrugged. Interestingly, decades later, new efforts at antimissile programs that were promulgated by the Bush regime, and before Bush by Clinton, have had as an opponent a fellow named Theodore Postal. Ted was a year ahead of me at MIT and a fraternity brother during my year at AEPi. Now he is employed by MIT but causing trouble for militarists. Ripples persist.



My second memory of the Weisner meeting was of Weisner's prime purpose in coming to my office. He invited me to spend a weekend with him at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis on Cape Cod. He jovially told me how I would have a great time and I would meet Teddy Kennedy and others and develop friendships that would be valuable later in life. Weisner was, in short, brazenly seducing me with an offer of entry into the young people's branch of the Kennedy mystique. I dismissed the invitation without a thought. Weisner was flustered. How could I reject such an obvious invitation to power, relevance, and wealth? I tried to convey to him just how unattractive his offer was. "Would you consider an invitation to visit a mass murderer a perk? Would you consider it seductive? Or would you find it obscene? For me this decision is trivial," I told him. "I am not giving up something I would want to have."



The third item on Weisner's agenda, after I rejected his invitation, was a promise. Preparatory to leaving my UAP office and our having no further communications other than on opposite sides of police lines, Weisner told me that he would never allow me to be thrown out of MIT unless I did something utterly insane or horribly destructive. He didn't like my priorities, he admitted, and he knew we would always be at loggerheads, but, Weisner said, "I will defend your right to pursue your goals." I think Weisner probably meant it, but only because he couldn't envision what was to come. MIT had never thrown out any students for political activism, and he didn't see any reason to think it would start with me. I replied that, in fact, he would indeed throw me out of MIT, despite there being no just cause. It would be for being effective at opposing the MIT administration and the war. He would do it because he would be desperate to get rid of me. He laughed and said, "Not a chance, I'll take the bet." I laughed and said, "We'll see." Ha ha, about a year later, expelled, I won.







Chemicals, Son?



I'd rather be living a free man in my grave

Than as a puppet or a slave.

—Jimmie Cliff



Weisner dangling Kennedy's Camelot to induce me to leave the movement wasn't even the oddest or most brazen offer I got. Protocol requires that the undergraduate association president of MIT's student body give a yearly speech to notable alumni. So I had that honor, my year as UAP. Obviously, this was quite a lark. My audience was a group of successful graduates returning for a kind of power reunion. Corporate executives, politicos, and media types, as well as scientists and engineers all assembled in a large lecture hall to hear the student president, me, pontificate on matters of the day. Isn't protocol silly? At any rate, I gave one of the more militant speeches I ever delivered. I had no misgivings about convincing the power alumni, so I decided, what the hell, I would say exactly what I felt and let the chips fall however fate decreed. The speech was peppered with vulgar assaults on U.S. elites, including MIT's administration, the government, corporate America, and my audience. I explained my values and those of the movements I supported. I finished to dead silence, stepped down, and strode down the aisle to leave the hall. Make my day, why don't ya?



As I got near the door, an elegantly dressed man, probably in his forties, but maybe younger, blocked my path. I braced myself expecting to get assaulted. Instead, he held out his hand to shake, and once he got mine, he hung on, leaned in, and said in a low voice, "Chemicals." Yes, it was like the scene from The Graduate, except in the movie the industry proposed was "plastics." I looked askance at my suitor and said, roughly, "What the fuck are you talking about?" He said "Listen, you are wasting your time here. You can come with me right now. You don't even have to graduate from MIT; you can pick up a degree anytime. We'll go back to my firm in Germany"—it was some chemical company that he named—"and we will make you a vice president right off." His manner said, let's get cracking, this is an offer you can't possibly refuse.



I had just savaged capitalism, corporations, his whole world, and yet all this chemical entrepreneur saw was that I was smart, confident, and a good speaker, and therefore a good profit-making prospect. He thought if he made a sufficiently lucrative offer I would dispense with all I had said and sign on with his gray-flannel operations. My contrary allegiances would melt into nothingness.



Weisner too had heard me swear my revolutionary allegiances before he sat in my office and held out his arms hoping I would plop into them as his prot?. He too thought my commitments would disintegrate upon my hearing about a Kennedy-benighted future. Who could refuse Camelot? Corporate America was worried about sixties dissent sweeping the country. Simultaneously, however, for a given individual, corporate Americans were confident offers of big-time power would easily buy allegiance.







Reasons for Rejecting Lucre



The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

—Blaise Pascal



The arrogance of these co-opters, in my eyes, was incredible. But it was also daunting because I could see that offerings by the powerful most often must have successfully ensnared young souls. Otherwise my suitors would not have been so confident. What they couldn't understand about me, however, and what was perhaps most important for me to realize about myself, wasn't that I was displaying some kind of great discipline in turning them down. That kind of rejection of desirable lucre is indeed rare, and I didn't display any more of it than the next person. It was, instead, trivial for me to reject Weisner and Mr. Chemical because what they offered repulsed me. I didn't desire their bounty. In fact, you couldn't force me to go with either of them on grounds of personal fulfillment, much less on moral grounds. Their offers, even if I had nothing on my plate in their place, morals aside, were repulsive. That's what the hippies begot.



Three decades later Barbara Ehrenreich taught at the summer school called Z Media Institute. I had known Barbara intermittently for many years, but she had since gained considerable stature and was now not only a quite successful leftist author, but also a sometime columnist for Time. At a session with the ZMI students one asked Barbara, a bit incredulously, how she avoided selling out. Weren't the temptations great?



Barbara said she couldn't speak for others, but in her case it wasn't a matter of great discipline or anything worthy of admiration. She just found people's sellout offers repugnant. "A future of power lunches and stressful competitive bidding in a world of pretense, even if studded with financial largesse, isn't very attractive. The people aren't interesting. The glitter isn't pretty. The power is to do only what the more powerful deem desirable. What's hard about saying no to that? It's easy." Well, that was my situation with the alumni's chemical vice presidency and the provost's Camelot. The offers were easy to reject.



When I became a professional activist—a person going from project to project always aiming at social change—it meant not becoming a physicist, which had been my prior life aim. That was a real sacrifice, letting go of something in my blood, but, honestly, I just slid into activism and thus out of physics. I never sat down and said, okay, is it graduate school and physics, or is it rioting and politics? I just did steadily more rioting and politics, and in time there was no more room for graduate school and physics.



So, suppose Weisner had sat in my office and said, "Here, come with me to visit with Richard Feynman (one of the world's finest physicists). Feynman wants to take you on as his private student. You will later easily get a powerful position in physics, whether here at MIT or with Feynman out at Caltech. You will have the best conditions available. Feynman and I both think you will be very successful, perhaps all the way to Stockholm. What do you say?" Now that would have been an offer it would have been hard to refuse. I like to think I would have said no, but like Barbara, I don't know for sure.







Chomsky and My Career



Well I try my best to be just like I am

But everybody wants you to be just like them.

—Bob Dylan



Interestingly, there was one conversation that almost derailed my leftward drift. It was with Noam Chomsky. I sat in his office one day and asked him about his own choices. Why did he do linguistics as compared to doing only radical politics? Chomsky said there were three reasons. One was political. His achievements in linguistics gave him security and freedom that facilitated his political involvements and made his words more likely to be noticed. Second, though, Chomsky said he felt that he would dry up and decay if he didn't do creative intellectual work in his discipline, and would then likely be good for nothing in any realm. Third, he just plain loved it—and life was a mix of choices, some undertaken for principle, others undertaken out of taste and preference.



Noam rarely advises anyone about anything. But Noam did suggest that I should think hard about staying in physics. Victor Weisskopf, who was then the head of the MIT physics department, who was reasonably progressive, and whom Noam later told me was quite moved by some of my speeches, was sure I could be excellent in the field and had asked Noam to try to reel me back in. But Noam's entreaty came too late to affect my choice. I had already drifted too far to return, and at the time I didn't put much thought into it. I was primarily a political being, already.



Noam was right though, in various respects. I have spent a whole lot of time doing things because they were needed and right, despite a relative lack of personal inclination. That I would write and publish really has no relation to my own innate preferences or talents. But I also speak a lot, and that is up my talent alley. I work on economic vision, which has at least some intellectual components that I enjoy, however far it is from my real strengths. I still spend a lot of time, it turns out, reading physics and other science books, keeping that part of me alive, if not nourished and blossoming.



Had I done physics, would my mix have been ideal? Would I have had a more worthy and perhaps also a more fulfilling life? I don't know. I suppose it is possible. Who can say? But as far as aiding political pursuits, I have doubts that I could have pursued physics with the kind of intensity necessary to gain major credibility (how many physicists' names do you know?) and even if I had beaten the odds, while it might have meant I could write politically with a larger audience, or write more authoritatively about nuclear power, for example, it would also have meant I wouldn't have worked on all the various projects and organizations I have, and likely would not have had the same things to say. The trade-off seems a bad one to me, however much I might sometimes miss the ins and outs of what I imagine to be the physicist's life.



The odd thing is, I was recently lucky enough to get a chance to see at least a glimpse of what a physicist's life for me might have included. I had a high school friend named Irwin Gaines. Irwin and I were pretty comparable in our mental faculties. He had a far better memory than I did, making school much easier for him, but that doesn't bear too much on physics. He was intellectually faster than me, too. I think my advantage relative to Irwin for a physics career would have been that it helps to believe you can conquer all obstacles so you can tackle large questions. That was more me than Irwin.



At any rate, Irwin became an accomplished experimentalist, where I had wanted to be a theorist. I visited Irwin for the first time in about thirty years a few years ago, at Fermi Lab in Illinois, where he works facilitating experiments in high-energy particle physics. Linda Lurie, another very smart student in our high school, was still married to Irwin all these years later. It was a pleasant trip, but mainly I did not get jealous for a lost life path as I feared I might. Even considering only daily qualities and direct personal characteristics, I preferred my life situation to Irwin's, and I think that would probably remain so for all but the very top-ranking theoretical physicists, of which the number is tiny. Could I have been one of them? There is a lot of luck involved in such success even if I had sufficient qualities, which is far from certain.



Of course, I could have wound up on other paths too, such as that of my brother Eddie, the gambler. I think the biggest meaning of my brother Eddie's life for me was that it convincingly demonstrated how being on a particular social path could constrict one's personality, change one's values, warp one's aspirations, and delimit one's capacities. This insight was to continually inform my understanding of events and prospects. When I am feeling generous about Eddie, I believe he became an antisocial gambler to rebel against the same constricting and alienating world that I later rebelled against as a social revolutionary. Being a gambler is not being a wage slave, whatever ill effects it embodies. Eddie loved the lifestyle, relative to other available possibilities. There but for fortune, and seeing what it did to him, went I, I guess.













Chapter 7

Campus Organizing









Damning Dow



It is necessary, with bold spirit and
in good conscience, to save civilization.
The bare and barren tree can be made green again.

Are we not ready?

—Antonio Gramsci



One of the first militant demonstrations at MIT occurred in 1967. Dow Chemical Company was coming to recruit students to their firm. Recruitment by corporations on campuses was typical, and involved a few people setting up a temporary office to interview prospective applicants. Part of the problem was having corporations of any type at all on campus, at least for many activists. More specifically, however, the issue was Dow.



Dow manufactured napalm, which was a chemical mixture dropped from planes that burned skin even when doused with water. It was a heinous weapon, widely opposed as inhumane, and widely used by the U.S. against the Vietnamese. I vaguely remember meetings planning for the Dow recruiters. The meetings were called by SDS and MIT Resist. The protest was part of an SDS national campaign against recruiting on campus. Phil Raup, an MIT graduate student, was an active national SDS member and brought the idea to our campus. I was just getting into the Left. MIT SDS was not yet Rosa Luxemburg SDS.



We decided to block entry to the placement offices with our bodies. I got to the event early, before breakfast, and so did Peter Bohmer, who was three years older than me, a graduate student in economics, and became a close friend, to remain so for decades. Peter and I were packed in next to each other and talked a lot during the day. Peter had more developed politics, and I mostly tried to soak up his knowledge and experience. We blocked the entire floor for many hours. There was no real violence, but I remember a young MIT administrator, highly belligerent, a big guy with intimidating, confident manners who gave off vibes that if he had the authority he would vamp us into oblivion. His name was Paul Gray. In the 1980s he rose, as one might expect, watching garbage rise, to become president of MIT.



The logic of the Dow demonstration, which we wrote up in leaflets and distributed all over campus, was that since we wouldn't let the Mafia recruit at MIT, why should we let Dow Chemical do so? Dow produced napalm, which was more overtly destructive than anything the Mafia did.



We also argued that students should not have the right to work for Dow Chemical just like community members should not have the right to join the Mafia. Overt membership in criminal institutions should confer guilt by mutual association, a view that arguably went a bit too far, not least because we were all students at MIT, which was itself a criminal institution in the same respects as Dow Chemical was, contributing in various ways to the war.



We had many discussions and arguments with students who had appointments and wanted to get in to see the recruiters, as well as with MIT officials and employees. No one got through, and even with the administration the discussions, while sometimes heated, never crossed the line to outright physical conflict. The ensuing debate (except with Paul Gray) was at this early date in MIT activism, quite civil. Eventually, the Dow recruiters gave up on-campus recruiting, though it is certainly possible they made secret appointments off campus.







The Calculus of Dissent



Strong reasons make strong actions.

—William Shakespeare



M any people celebrated the Dow action on the grounds that we had successfully disrupted recruitment, but I thought that was completely beside the point. Yes, we had to disrupt the meetings if we were to address Dow effectively. But disrupting meetings was a means to an end. Raising consciousness and laying the seeds for more future involvement by more people was the aim. I think we succeeded on those grounds, too, but it was a very different criterion.



Here's how I thought about it. Suppose we had been cleared out of the hall and the recruitment had continued as planned but the act of clearing us had been widely discussed on campus and had aroused more people's interest and affected more people's ideas. Assuming it aided movement building, would that have been less of an achievement? Would getting routed have made us less successful? I didn't think so. Suppose we had found a way to prevent the recruitment of MIT students by Dow but our approach had less effect on people's future views and contributed less to building antiwar activism. Imagine we surreptitiously blackmailed Weisner into calling it off. Would that have been better? Not to my thinking.



In the heat of social conflict, the above calculus wasn't always obvious to everyone. Many of my friends, for example, focused on the proximate details of obstruction, not on broader movement building. Indeed, throughout the sixties, people frequently lost track of the logic of their own actions and evaluated them by self-denying criteria imposed by media. We struck a university or tried to shut down a building or stop a meeting and looked only at the scorecard of the confrontation itself. In our confrontational posture, bent by media machinations, we judged the day and all the efforts leading up to it, and all the follow-up efforts, in terms of whether the opposed meeting occurred or not. How we assessed our actions, in other words, was sometimes incredibly self-defeating and confused, missing the real point.



The day of the demo against Dow, and all the work leading up to and following that day, should have been judged, some of us argued then and later, not on the basis of narrow, proximate, tactical details, but on the basis of movement building. One reason activists frequently focused on proximate details rather than the larger picture was that we vested the proximate with so much tactical attention that it crowded out the real prize. We got caught up in it like in a prizefight or ball game.



Another reason we often lost track of the larger picture, however, was that some people really did care only about the proximate issue and nothing more. They were not confused but only wanted Dow out. For example, at MIT there was tension between those caring only about MIT complicity, and those caring about ending the war in Vietnam, or even ending imperialism. Similarly, at strikes, there was tension between those wanting to win a higher local wage and those wanting to increase the bargaining power of labor more widely, or even to replace capitalism. And at women's health clinics there was tension between those wanting to supply medical care locally, those wanting to gain reproductive rights and to smash the glass ceiling obstructing women from management socially, and those wanting to end patriarchy globally. All over the sixties, this divide existed.



At MIT, my friends and I used to constantly hassle over what to do and how to do it. If we wanted new campus rules, higher pay in a workplace, a new affirmative action law, pollution controls, or the end of a war, we knew that we had to force authorities to submit. Activism from Selma through Cambridge by way of Indochina taught that those who had power would meet demands only when they decided that refusing demands would cost them more than granting them. Those of us attuned to this logic realized that to win battles we must raise costs that elites refused to bear. We had to convince elites that the only way to eliminate the threat we created was to meet our demands. That was the first half of the logic of dissent that some of us were learning. The second half had to do with focus.



As with building an antiwar movement beyond ending recruitment on campus, or as with building an anti-imperialist movement beyond ending a particular war, or as with building a movement to win new defining social institutions beyond ending imperial policies, the additional logic was that you must contribute to a continuing process. What you did should affect immediate activists and people viewing activism in ways that increased the prospects for future successes. Each act of dissent, from painting walls and holding rallies to marching, sitting in, or burning draft cards or buildings, should increase the numbers of committed activists and their organizational wherewithal, as well as move the larger public into being more supportive of our long-term goals. The Dow demo made all this clear. That's what dissent should do, for those who participate.







Cynicism 101



No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.

—Lily Tomlin



When I would talk with MIT students about obstructing Dow, ending war research, ending the war, or ending poverty, racism, or capitalism, underneath people's confusion there was always another obstacle. Sessions would last hours. Concerns and doubts would surface. I would begin such talks offering evidence about the war's horrors. But most of the serious discussion that followed wasn't about U.S. motives, it was about whether people should resist or not. And the reason many of my fellow students repeatedly offered not to resist was because "people suck."



What these MIT students would say was that there was ultimately no point to resistance regardless of my facts, which they agreed were right, and regardless of the war's immorality, which they also admitted. The reason they gave to not demonstrate, organize, or even learn about the facts and conditions of the people we were murdering overseas was that all people are greedy, nasty, and brutish, so nothing positive was possible. These MIT classmates told me that human nature leads to war and injustice. There is no way to prevent this trajectory. You can't stop war, these classmates asserted, in the same way you can't make trees talk or make stones cry. There is no more point opposing war's trajectory, they concluded, than blowing into the wind. If we don't fight wars, someone else will. So we should do nothing.



The second most prevalent reason MIT students gave against resisting was that it was impossible to fight City Hall. You may have good goals and intentions. You may even come up with a way of seeking your preferences that wouldn't create a new mess just as bad as what you are battling against. Nonetheless, you can't win. This was the old folk's home at the college mustering defeatism on behalf of inaction. You can't stop the war, my classmates asserted, in the same way that a kid can't outbox Muhammad Ali. The state and corporations are too powerful.



Even if people could live better lives in a better world, humanity is too entangled in this world to reach a better one. The obstacles are insurmountable. We are condemned. And these views are also common now, in the U.S. and probably everywhere else in the world too. Belief that there is no alternative and that you can't win change is a straitjacket preventing opposition to oppression.



I remember a related phenomenon that always simultaneously amused and depressed me. I'd be handing out antiwar leaflets, and those who didn't eagerly take the antiwar leaflet would brush it away like it was infected with deadly germs. Sometimes the person despised us but often it was clear that that wasn't the root of it. I would walk along with such people, going backward, facing them from in front, as they moved forward, and I repeatedly offered them the leaflet. They would keep refusing and I would keep thrusting it at them. They could easily take the leaflet and then throw it out, or they could shout or threaten me off, but few who avidly didn't want it did that. The leaflets were indeed germ-infected. The disease was antiwar activism. The leaflets sat atop a slippery slope. If you took a leaflet, you might read it. If you read it, you might accept its message. If you accepted its message, you might demonstrate. The leaflet was dangerous because it might hook you into something you wanted to avoid. Better to avoid seeing it.



People who actively resisted communication sometimes explicitly hated us and our views, of course. But more often their resistance stemmed either from doubting the efficacy of activism for reasons noted above, or from wishing to avoid dangerous involvement. It was important to understand this because it meant organizing was not just a matter of conveying previously unfamiliar truths, however important that aspect was. I began to realize that reaching people often entailed overcoming not only ignorance, but also fear of failure.







Organizing Mechanics



First of all two people get together

an' they want their doors enlarged

—Bob Dylan



In the early 1960s and right up to 1965, there were occasional, quite small antiwar demonstrations on the Boston Common. MIT students who went to these demonstrations were generally not protestors but instead part of a large crowd of sometimes-violent hecklers. Campus antiwar activity was almost nonexistent, particularly at MIT, right through my first year there. But from my sophomore through my senior year the situation went ballistic. Antiwar rallies on the Boston Common regularly exceeded 100,000 people, with only a handful of hecklers. MIT students poured out of dorms and fraternities to join marches. In 1968 and 1969, we had not only massive but also very militant demonstrations.



When I ran for office at MIT, I would go into a dorm to speak and the entire dorm would turn out to listen and then discuss the issues. These sessions would last a few hours and many folks would continue talking afterward. What happened? What induced such a change in consciousness and activism in just a few years?



Partly, events happened all over the country and around the world, and each one prodded others. There was a sequence of campus activities from the Berkeley free speech movement in the early sixties through rallies and demonstrations, to the sanctuaries, and finally the massive building occupations at many schools, including Harvard, just up the river from MIT. There were constant rallies and actions at MIT, too, continually growing in scale, but what I want to highlight here is different.



At MIT, a relatively small group of people—at first, about 15 or so—organized the campus. We redesigned corridors, put up posters, and sponsored educational events. We held rallies and teach-ins. We talked to fellow students, over and over, at every opportunity. We went door to door in dorms and fraternities night after night. We stuck leaflets under people's doors, mimeographing them all one night and then distributing them all the next night, going around to talk about reactions thereafter. We sat and talked to folks in the eating areas. We brought up the war and many other issues in classes. We continually urged new people to address their often-incredible ignorance or conservatism.



The thing about movements in the sixties is that people discovered that their pains were not due to personal inadequacies. People got angry at newly unveiled culprits. Lies were uncovered and the lies made people indignant.



The civil rights movement highlighted racism and repression in the restaurants, bus stations, and streets of the south, and then also in northern ghettos. It painted before people's eyes stark images revealing that the horrendous situation of blacks in the U.S. was systemic. Legal lynching and all manner of economic and social indignities came into bright light due to the public actions of the bus boycotters, the lunch counter sitters, the vote registrars, and the rest of civil rights activists risking and sometimes losing their lives to turn racism around. We saw that. We became angry.



The antiwar movement offered a second revelation. The U.S. was engaged in a vicious war against peasants half a world away, not for a good cause, but for power and wealth. The U.S. brought mayhem on a poor peasant land. Images of assassination and destroyed towns accompanied claims that power and greed were the cause. The more we brought human carnage to light, the more we unveiled corporate motives, the more people got angry and considered systemic issues. Movement focus went from dissociating from right wingers, to dissociating from liberals, to dissociating from the underlying institutions of corporate capitalism and bourgeois democracy.



The women's movement provided the most explicit case of mind-changing, soul-transforming revelation. Women began to gather in one another's homes to discuss their life situations. They spoke about their experiences more openly than ever before and discovered that the rapes, brutalities, denials of dignity, and depredations of intelligence that they all daily endured were not unique. The oppressive patterns were so common from one woman to the next that once women's private stories were made public, one woman after another realized that their seemingly private situations couldn't be due to personal preferences, nor even due to a particular man or a few men they just happened to have unluckily hooked up with. It was systemic. The system could be fought. Up burst the energy of struggle.



And finally, or in some ways firstly, the hippie, youth, antiauthoritarian cultural movement was similarly revelatory. Now it was boredom, irrelevance, ageism, and alienation that were shown to be not personal infections but social impositions. Hippies rebelled at suburban plasticity. Hippies rejected daily life and all its accouterments, not just the most oppressive features, but even those indicating success. Hippies found suburbia and the American dream obscene. Hippies created alternative lifestyles. It wasn't just our hair growing.



The sixties I participated in erupted over anger at promises unmet and ubiquitous lies and hypocrisy. A big part of our sixties emergence was people receiving honest, accurate information. A smaller though also necessary part was people overcoming cynicism. At MIT we had to bring the truth about Vietnam into every dorm room, fact by precious fact, and then, after getting antiwar revelations across against student incredulity, we had to overcome cynicism too. I suspect that the situation has reversed in the decades since. I suspect the biggest issue now is overcoming cynicism, while providing honest, accurate information is a smaller—though still necessary—part of developing movement support. I believe, in other words, that 40 years ago when people heard things were broken and realized that many citizens were suffering who didn't have to, they got angry.



Today, however, I suspect that everyone knows more or less who and what is at fault regarding poverty, health care, and war, and who is suffering. The problem today is that while consciousness of injustice is more advanced, cynicism—the view that nothing better is possible and that the enemy is all powerful—has become far more prevalent and powerful.



Still, beyond these contextual changes, which bear on what needs doing now, there is the issue of organizing and just what it is. In the sixties, organizing was face-to-face talk with everyone we could corner. Now organizing is often sending e-mails. Whereas in the sixties I would stay up all night mimeographing a leaflet, looking at the end of the night as if I had rolled in ink, and then stay up the next night with many others taking the leaflets to room after room, perhaps getting as many as 1,000 of them under people's doorjambs via two full nights of work by a bunch of people, now, in a click of a mouse, I can send 200,000 e-mails each containing the equivalent of a long leaflet, right to people's desks.



This is luxurious efficiency. E-mail is cheap and labor-saving. The international ties that e-mail has facilitated are enormous. The galvanizing of quick responses and gatherings is a blessing. But, as an organizer's tool, e-mail also has a dangerous flaw. We can only send e-mail to addresses that we have. On campuses all over the U.S., for example, student activists e-mail to their lists with ease and regularity. For those who are on the lists, information flies. Wisdom accrues. But most students aren't on the lists. They get no e-mail. They hear of no evil. The point is, it is one thing to use new technologies to augment the essential task of constantly reaching out to talk with more and more people in steadily deeper ways. It is another thing for the dynamics of using new technologies to crowd out time given to talking to new people. Talking matters. Reaching new people matters. Leafletting, in the old days, facilitated both talking and reaching new people. E-mailing, efficacious for some purposes, nonetheless nowadays often has a tendency to crowd out both talking and reaching new people.