Statelessness A Contradiction in International Law with Asymmetrical Regional Solutions Samantha Altschuler Brown University Author Ginevra Bulgari Vance Kelly Lillian Schoeller Editors Fall 2018 An analysis of statelessness and its difficulties as explored by case studies on Slovenia and Myanmar. “Witness accounts, satellite imagery and data, and photo and video evidence gathered by Amnesty International all point to the same conclusion,” contends Amnesty International. They continue, “Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya women, men, and children have been the victims of a widespread and systematic attack, amounting to crimes against humanity."[1] How exactly is a state able to perpetrate these crimes against its own citizens in the human rights age without consequence? The answer lies in the word “citizen.” According to Myanmar’s domestic law, the Rohingya are no longer considered citizens and thus do not hold the rights of citizens. They belong to no nation, are protected by no law. They are stateless. Introduction The phenomenon of statelessness has plagued the international community since the end of World War I. This paper investigates why, despite the rise of the human rights and refugee regimes, the issue of statelessness remains unsolved. To do so, it will review the legal reality of statelessness and then argue that there exists a fundamental contradiction in international law that makes statelessness uniquely difficult to address. This contradiction, which arises from international law simultaneously protecting the individual’s human right to nationality and the state’s right to determine its nationals according to domestic law, creates the opportunity to render peoples stateless. This paper will then examine two key case studies: Slovenia will represent a successful handling of statelessness while Myanmar will demonstrate a failure. After analyzing the similarities and differences between the two cases, this paper will suggest that given the legal ambiguity surrounding statelessness, the successful resolution of statelessness depends on the values and interests of the regional supranational organization to which the state in question belongs. Those regions that, shaped by their geographies and histories, are characterized by values and interests that support human rights and intervention are more likely to resolve issues of statelessness; those regions that place a higher value on sovereignty and have interests in non-intervention will be far less likely to intervene in states’ internal affairs. Defining Statelessness At this point, it becomes necessary to legally distinguish the stateless person from the refugee or internally displaced person (IDP). The refugee is legally defined as someone who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country."[2] Refugees, in short, are citizens who fled their states for fear of persecution. Once outside their state, however, they are well protected under clear and strong international law. This is not to say that all states always uphold their obligations to protect refugees, but that legally the refugee outside his nation is entitled to safe asylum, medical care, schooling, work, and basic human rights and freedoms as would be extended to any other foreign legal resident.[3] An IDP is a citizen forced to relocate within his or her state “to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters.”[4] IDPs, by definition, cannot have crossed an international border. Unlike refugees who are outside their state and entitled to international protections, IDPs “being inside their country, remain entitled to all the rights and guarantees as citizens and other habitual residents of their country. As such, national authorities have the primary responsibility to prevent forced displacement and to protect IDPs.”[5] The 1948 Study on Statelessness conducted by the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee on Refugees and Stateless Persons defines the stateless as “persons who are not nationals of any State, either because at birth or subsequently they were not given any nationality, or because during their lifetime they lost their own nationality and did not acquire a new one.”[6] The stateless, without citizenship, do not qualify as refugees or IDPs. Accordingly, they are not entitled to international refugee protections, nor are they protected by any state. Furthermore, acquisition of citizenship is not so simple as the above report might suggest; domestic laws often ban particular groups, primarily ethnic minorities, from acquiring citizenship. The domestic procedures for conferring citizenship are unique to each state, but typically include some combination of jus sanguinis and jus soli, that is right of blood (citizenship granted by parentage) and right of soil (granted by birth in the territory). Jus sanguinis laws prove particularly problematic, as they frequently serve to determine nationality along ethnic lines and in doing so render ethnic minorities stateless. The Difficulty: Contradiction in International Law The fundamental contradiction that allows for statelessness lies in the simultaneous sanctity under international law of the universal human right to nationality and the state’s sovereign right to determine its citizenship. The right to a nationality is upheld in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on the Nationality of Married Women, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.[7] Furthermore, many international bodies and covenants assert that the right to a nationality protects against arbitrary deprivation of citizenship. The UDHR claims “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”[8] The ICCPR too holds that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived the right to enter his own country.”[9] The ICERD further enshrines the “right to leave any country, including one’s own, and return to one’s country.”[10] In 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council prepared a report on behalf of UN Secretary-General on “human rights and the arbitrary deprivation of nationality.” This report advocates, “The prohibition of arbitrary deprivation of nationality, which aims at protecting the right to nationality, is implicit in provisions of human rights treaties that prescribe specific forms of discrimination.”[11] Article 27 states, “Deprivation of nationality resulting in statelessness would generally be arbitrary unless it served a legitimate purpose and complied with the principle of proportionality.”[12] There is evidently no shortage of international conventions honoring the right to nationality and protection from arbitrary deprivation. At the same, however, international law grants the state the right to determine who is and is not a national. The Convention on Certain Questions Relating to Nationality law holds that “It is for each State to determine under its own laws who are its nationals. This law shall be recognized by other States in so far as it is consistent with international conventions, international custom, and the principles of law generally recognized with regard to nationality.”[13] The latter part of this 1st Article is rather confusing; which international conventions, customs, and principles it refers to is unclear. The case could and has be made by supporters of the human rights regime that it refers to international law discussed above. This would mean that states’ right to determine nationals would defer to international conventions protecting the right to nationality and protection from arbitrary deprivation. The opposite argument, favoring state sovereignty and the abundance of law protecting it, is bolstered by Article 2 of the same Convention, which states, “Any question as to whether a person possesses the nationality of a particular State shall be determined in accordance with the law of the State.”[14] This lack of clarity and the soundness of both arguments allow for each state to choose whether or not to act in accordance with conventions protecting against statelessness, and for other states in the global community to interpret whether or not they consider those acts legal. Many attempts have been made to reconcile the legal disconnect between the universal right to nationality and the domestic right of the state to determine its nationals. One such example is Special Rapporteur Córdova’s Report on Elimination or Reduction of Statelessness for the International Law Commission written in 1953. In Article 14, Córdova writes that “international law may also restrict the authority of the State to deprive a person of its own nationality. There are cases in which international law considers that a certain national legislation is not legal because it comes into conflict with the broader interests of the international community.”[15] Article 15 further clarifies that “the right of individual States to legislate in matters of nationality is dependent upon and subordinate to the rules of international law on the subject, and that, therefore, these questions of nationality are not, as has been argued, entirely reserved for the exclusive jurisdiction of the individual States themselves.”[16] These statements, however, remain both controversial and difficult to enforce. While the spirit of international law is arguably in line with Córdova’s call for states to defer to international convention, the letter of the law protects the sovereignty of states and does not directly address the gap between the individual right to nationality and the state’s right to determine citizenship. Paul Weis, co-author of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, explains in his now standard work Nationality and Statelessness in International Law: “to the extent that there are no rules of international law imposing a duty on States to confer their nationality, and few, if any, rules denying or restricting the right of States to withdraw their nationality, one may say that statelessness is not inconsistent with international law.”[17] Without international law instructing the state to create in its domestic law a standard set of rules regarding citizenship, Córdova’s report is easily ignored or contested. Any such laws would constitute a breach of state sovereignty and it is extremely unlikely they will ever arise, at least in any form other than purely voluntary guidelines. Thus, the contradiction between the right of the individual and the right of the state remains, and with it the opportunity for states to deprive unwanted individuals, mainly ethnic minorities, of citizenship. Recognizing the weakness of international law concerning statelessness, the UN established the 1954 Convention relating to Status of Stateless Persons. Rather than address the cause of the problem by attempting to impose duties or restrictions on states, the Convention instead focused on easing the symptoms. According to the UNHCR, the “1954 Convention is designed to ensure that stateless people enjoy a minimum set of human rights.”[18] These rights, as will be discussed at greater length in the case studies below, are far from upheld. The 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, on the other hand, actually attempted to address the root of the problem by providing something very close to the laws Weis referred to as non-existent. It “requires that states establish safeguards in their nationality laws to prevent statelessness at birth and later in life… establishes that children are to acquire the nationality of the country in which they are born if they do not acquire any other nationality” and “sets out important safeguards to prevent statelessness due to loss or renunciation of nationality and state succession.”[19] This convention represents the most direct attempt to combat statelessness but has unfortunately been met with minimal success. Unsurprisingly, states were slow to forgo their right to determine citizenship. Only 61 states are party, as compared to the 83 that are party to the 54 Convention. Further, the two states that will now be discussed as case studies are not party to the convention, highlighting the weakness of protections for the stateless. Case Studies Having established that international law does not conclusively protect against statelessness, the question arises as to why statelessness is successfully addressed in some cases and not in others. In answering this question, this paper next presents an example of the successful resolution of an issue of statelessness, which occurred in Slovenia, and an example of the devastating consequences of statelessness left unresolved, which is currently occurring with the Rohingya people in Myanmar. While these two cases, of course, represent only two examples of statelessness, they were selected specifically to represent the two opposite ends of the spectrum, success and failure. Case Study 1: Slovenia The Republic of Slovenia is a rather young state, having only gained independence in 1991 amidst the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). The Slovene desire for independence, however, stretches back much further. The ethnically Slovene people (not to be confused with the “Slovenian”, meaning of Slovenia) have throughout history belonged to various states and empires, including the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Habsburg Monarchy. After World War I, Slovenes for the first time attained a degree of independence through participation in the formation of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. The State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs later joined with Serbia to become the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. After occupation by Germany, Hungary, and Italy during World War II, Slovenia joined the SFRY. Under the rule of Josip Tito, Slovenia enjoyed considerable economic rights and freedoms that allowed their economy to flourish. Upon Tito’s death, politicians across the SFRY, most notably Slobodan Milosevic, mobilized support by taking advantage of existing ethnic hostilities. In addition to ethnic tension, the Slovenes felt exploited by the SFRY, which redistributed the fruit of their economic success to support the less successful economies of other SFRY republics. Slovenia held a referendum in 1990 and became independent in June of 1991. a. Rendering Stateless: Domestic Citizenship Law The history of subordination instilled in Slovenes the desire for not only independence but also the establishment of a national identity. After discontent with the communist and multi-ethnic SFRY, Slovenia was quick to write its independence into law with the drafting of a new constitution for a democratic and ethnically homogenous state. As occurred in many post-Yugoslav states, Slovenia’s constitution and citizenship laws defined the emergent state along ethnic lines. The preamble to Slovenia’s constitution invokes the identity of the majority ethnic group, Slovenes, reading “[Proceeding…] from the historical fact that in a centuries-long struggle for national liberation we Slovenes have established our national identity and asserted our statehood.”[20] Igor Štiks describes the way Slovenia drafted their new legislation, saying, “[W]hat initially presented itself as ethnic solidarity and a nationalist vision of recomposition of previously existed communities into neatly divided ethnocultural groups governing ‘their’ territory was soon enshrined in legislation” through the use of “citizenship laws as an effective tool for ethnic engineering.”[21] Under the SFRY system, each citizen held citizenship both to the SFRY and to one of its republics. The same month they achieved independence, June of 1991, Slovenia adopted the Citizenship Act of the Republic of Slovenia. The Act provided that those individuals who held both SFRY and Slovenian citizenship prior to the referendum on independence in 1990 (a year before Slovenia was actually independent) were automatically considered citizens. Those who were not had a six-month period to apply for citizenship, after which they would become illegal aliens.[22] While on its face this law may seem innocent enough, Štiks explains, “[T]he law itself becomes quite controversial when we consider that it enabled policies of ethnic engineering.”[23] After the six months passed, those who had not acquired citizenship, either because they had not applied or had not been approved, were rendered stateless. Slovenia now recognizes it left 18,205 people stateless, while the European Court of Human Rights places the number at 25,671.[24] Many of these citizens never applied for citizenship because they were born in Slovenia and assumed jus soli they were citizens, because they were simply unaware of the law at all, or because they did not understand it applied to them.[25] Others did attempt to apply, but were limited by the “short application period of six months, confusing procedures, numerous difficulties in obtaining all necessary documents at the moment of Yugoslavia’s break-up and subsequent escalation of violence, and finally by the overall political confusion since Slovenia was still legally part of the SFRY and was not internationally recognized until January 1992.”[26] Another group had their applications denied, for example, for failing to satisfy the requirement that they not “endanger public order”[27] (which was not defined) or that they possess “assured residence and sufficient income that guarantees material and social security.”[28] The government did not provide notification or explanation to those in danger of losing citizenship. Štiks explains that this “confusion was only partly the product of an unstable political context” and that the government in reality “created confusion intentionally. Arbitrariness could be found in many of the legal prescriptions and actual administrative practices, and was clearly part of a general strategy” under which “the citizenship laws and the procedures for acquiring new citizenship proved to be the main weapon of administrative ethnic engineering.”[29] The result was that those of ethnically Slovene descent were accepted jus sanguinis as citizens, while thousands of ethnic minorities, despite being born in Slovenia or having extended residence, were denied. Those ethnic minorities who did not acquire Slovenian citizenship were literally erased from the national registries overnight. “Their documents (e.g. passports, driver’s licenses and IDs) were invalidated. They lost all civic and social rights, jobs, health care and social benefits, and became ‘dead’ from an administrative point of view – they were izbrisani, i.e. erased.”[30] To be dead from an administrative point of view has very tangible consequences. Losing their citizenship meant the loss of both health care and legal employment, which in turn drove many to homelessness.[31] b. Domestic Response: Judicial Failure Though Slovenia enjoys a highly functioning judicial system, the numerous attempts of stateless peoples to bring their case to Constitutional Court saw very little success. In 1999, the Constitutional Court did find the Citizenship Act illegal and called on the legislature to correct it.[32] However, when legislation to do so was drafted, voter turnout was “less than a third of the 1.6 million electorate, and the Act was rejected by almost 95 percent.”[33] Mild, yet certainly insufficient, progress came in the form of an amendment to the Citizenship Act in 2002 creating a new article stating that “An adult may obtain Slovenian citizenship if he or she is of Slovenian descent through at least one parent and if his or her citizenship in the Republic of Slovenia has ceased due to release, renunciation, or deprivation or because the person had not acquired Slovenian citizenship due to his historical circumstances.”[34] Essentially, this amendment provided the option for ethnic Slovenes who had been rendered stateless in the confusion of 1991 to reclaim citizenship. It did nothing, however, for those who had been born in Slovenia to non-Slovene parents and thereby required citizenship jus soli. For these individuals, the new law introduced naturalization, which required the applicant “have lived in Slovenia for ten years,” “not constitute a threat to public order,” “fulfill his or her tax obligations and has a guaranteed permanent source of income,” and possess the “required knowledge of the Slovene language.”[35] This last requirement included a language examination where none existed before. Many of the stateless possessed insufficient mastery of the language, their first languages being Croatian, Serbian, Italian or Hungarian.[36] These requirements provided opportunity for ethnic discrimination, both obviously in the language examination and more subtly via the undefined “threat to public order.” c. International Response: Regional Intervention In 2006, the case of the stateless of Slovenia was brought before the European Court of Human Rights. After deliberation, the Court found “in July 2010 that Slovenia had violated the right to private life under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”[37] Slovenia appealed and the case was taken up by the Grand Chamber, which held in July 2011 that Slovenia had breached Article 8, as well as Article 14, prohibiting discrimination, and Article 13, the right to an effective remedy.[38] The Court “ordered Slovenia to pay between €29,400 and €72,770 to each of the six applicants in the case,” which amounted to “€150 per person per month” [39] spent stateless. While this case represented only a handful of the erased, it has set both legal and normative precedent for other stateless persons of Slovenia, who now have 65 cases pending. [40] James Goldstone, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, remarked, “This decision should enable thousands of the ‘erased’ to finally receive legal recognition…the judgment represents an important milestone in strengthening international norms against statelessness.”[41] Case Study 2: Myanmar “The word ‘Rohingya’ is a historical name for the Muslim Arakanese.”[42] Arakanese refers to the region formerly called Arakan, now a territory of Myanmar known as the Rakhine State. Arakan experienced periods of independence and domination until 1784, when it was “formally annexed by the Kingdom of Burma.”[43] This annexation later brought the ire of the British, who also had interest in the region. This resulted in the First Anglo-Burmese War, lasting from 1824 to 1826. It is important to note that this date of 1824 is now used in Myanmar as the marker of colonial rule. Research Professor Azeem Ibrahim explains, “Up to this point in time, the histories of Burma and Arakan were largely separate...”[44] A series of Anglo-Burmese wars thereafter ended in further British conquerings and their establishing “a clear division between a central region dominated by the Burman majority and outlying regions in which a complex patchwork of ethnic groups lived alongside one another.”[45] The ethnic origins of the Rohingya have recently been questioned. One group, including Ibrahim, contends “the Rohingyas settled in Burma in the ninth century, which, through the ages, have mixed with Bengalis, Persians, Moghuls, Turks, and Pathans, in line with the historically pluralistic population of Arakan State,” while the other considers them to be “illegal Chittagonian Bengalis who arrived as a by-product of British colonial rule.”[46] Unfortunately for the Rohinyga, the latter view has become widely accepted in Myanmar. In addition to being considered foreign, the association with British colonial rule is dangerous for the Rohingya. The British placed the ethnically Burmese Buddhist majority lower on the hierarchy during their rule than the Rohingya Muslims.[47] The Burmese deeply resented their inferior status, colonial rule, and the preferential treatment bestowed upon the Rohingya. Additionally, the Rohingya supported the British occupation. Ibrahim identifies this historical “link between religion, ethnicity and anti-British sentiment” as having a “profound influence”[48] in creating the intense ethnic hatred felt toward the Rohingya today. During World War II, Japan invaded and took over the region from the British. While the ethnic Burmese ranged from indifferent to supportive of the Japanese, the Rohingya supported British rule. This further heightened ethnic tensions in the area. The British recruited soldiers from both the Rohingya and ethnically Burmese, promising both groups independence after the war in exchange for their service. General Aung San famously led the Burmese to fight, first for the Japanese who made similar promises for independence, then later for the British. When Burma became independent in 1948, the Rohingya petitioned to join the Muslim state of East Pakistan. The petition was rejected, but had the effect of leading the “Burmese authorities to regard the Muslim population of Arakan as hostile to the new regime and to see them as outsiders whose loyalty lay with a different state. These events helped create a belief that only Buddhists could really be part of the new state.”[49] Burma’s history has been complex since achieving independence, but for the sake of brevity, it is here heavily condensed. Burma experienced a short period of democracy wracked with ethnic conflict and civil strife. General Ne Win first established a caretaker government, then later launched a military overthrow in 1962. Under military rule, Burma met protest and opposition with arrest and violence. In 1988, amid severe unrest, Ne Win stepped down. Student protests were met with police brutality, triggering demonstrations and further protests that were in turn met with military-grade violence. After a period of chaos and revolutionary fervor, General Saw Maung lead a coup, became Prime Minister, and instituted martial law. It was in 1989 that the military government changed the state’s name to Myanmar. Notably, in 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of famed General Aung San who had helped bring independence but was assassinated before it was realized, received the Nobel Peace Prize while under house arrest for her words regarding peaceful reform. Throughout the 2000s, the military government made several small steps to ease Myanmar into democracy, culminating in 2011 with political reform and the release of Suu Kyi from house arrest. Under the new democracy, Suu Kyi won a seat in parliament in 2012. She was elected to the presidency in 2015, but is constitutionally barred from the presidency. She is the de facto state leader, but called officially “State Counselor.” a. Rendered Stateless: Domestic Citizenship Law It was during the time of unrest in 1974 that an intense need to divert public dissatisfaction resulted in the Emergency Immigration Act. The Act “imposed ethnicity-based cards (National Registration Certificates), with the Rohingya only being eligible for Foreign Registration Cards (non-national cards).”[50] These cards represented the first step in depriving the Rohingya of their citizenship. The 1974 Constitution of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma then defined citizenship jus sanguinis, giving it to those whose parents were citizens in 1947 – a time when the Rohingya were not formally citizens (as they had never been required to register, given their assumed citizenship jus soli).[51] Finally, in 1982, the Burmese Citizenship Law created categories of citizenship grouped by ethnicity. The groups were meant to align with length of bloodline prior to 1824 (the date marking the start of colonial rule). If a group was not considered indigenous prior to British rule, they were declared foreigners. This is what happened to the Rohingya, who subsequently became stateless. The Law includes steps for naturalization, but as Ibrahim explains, “[T]he one category that is excluded is someone born to two parents neither of whom are already citizens (the Rohingyas are therefore, by definition, excluded).”[52] In the most recent census (2015), “Rohingya” was not listed among the 135 ethnic groups, and their status as illegal residents was cemented. The stateless Rohingya have been systematically abused for decades, but in 2012 there was an incident wherein an ethnically Burmese Buddhist woman was raped by a Muslim Rohingya man that escalated the crisis.[53] Violence against the Rohingya became severe and their status as stateless both intensified the hatred directed towards them (as it confirmed their status as illegal Bangladeshis) and left them without legal protection or recourse. For his report for the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Ullah conducted 29 interviews with Rohingya. He found the situation far worse than the lack of income or healthcare experienced by the erased in Slovenia. Rohingya women explained how their “status of statelessness makes them vulnerable to sexual attack at different levels by pirates, bandits, members of the security forces, smugglers, or other refugees.”[54] One interviewee, Mr. Kalam, explains his experience as follows: "We were born on this soil but we are called illegal migrants....my family is from Maungdaw, but we left a few days later the NaSaKa people raped my sister in front of my family members. My brother in-law tried to resist them but he was taken away by them and he never returned. They told us if we didn’t leave Myanmar they would kill us all brutally."[55] In October of 2017, Amnesty International reported that over 530,00 Rohingya attempted to flee the country.[56] Given Myanmar’s geographic position, that journey requires them to brave the sea. Ullah’s interviewees describe the danger of the journey, which included starvation, beatings, and observed suicide of many who threw themselves overboard.[57] Those who survived the crossing were often treated no better upon arrival. Human Rights Watch issued a report in 2009 entitled “Perilous Plight” following the emergence of graphic images of a group of Rohingya on board a boat from Myanmar to Thailand.[58] The report discusses “Thailand’s callous ‘push-back’ policy,"[59] calling out the Thai government for “saying that the Rohingya were economic migrants, not refugees, and that Thailand could not absorb the flow.”[60] Worse than sending the Rohingya back to Myanmar (which would breach non-refoulement laws if the Rohingya were legally refugees[61] , [62] ) is the reality that “In May 2015, gruesome mass graves were unearthed in southern Thailand, revealing scores of bodies belonging to mostly Rohingya refugees.”[63] The Rohingya represent the very worst possible outcome of statelessness. They exemplify the way in which a people without citizenship or refugee status become vulnerable. This vulnerability, when applied to a despised people, results in some of humanity’s darkest crimes, many of which are now being identified as ethnic cleansing[64] and crimes against humanity.[65] b. Domestic Response: Endorsement and Ignorance As described, there is an abundance of evidence supporting the fact that the violence against the Rohingya is state-sponsored. Ullah calls it “organized, incited, and committed by local political party operatives, the Buddhist monkhood, and ordinary Arakanese, directly supported by state security forces.”[66] There is no functioning judicial infrastructure to speak of in Myanmar, though if there were it would be useless given the intermittent application of martial law. Suu Kyi, to the great disappointment of the West who honored her with the Nobel Peace Prize, has been largely silent and apathetic regarding the Rohingya. She avoids using the word “Rohingya” in interviews, mentioning it only in connection with the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, a Rohingya resistance group, which she claims commits acts of terrorism.[67] In one interview, Suu Kyi downplayed the crisis to such an extent that she referred to it as a “quarrel.”[68] When cornered by the media, she claims the West exaggerates the crisis.[69] Furthermore, the government of Myanmar has been accused of interfering with humanitarian aid meant for the Rohingya. The Rahkine National Party spokesperson justified restricting the aid supply as follows: “When the international community give them [Rohingya] a lot of food and a lot of donations, they will grow fat and become stronger, and they will become more violent.”[70] In keeping with this logic, borders were shut to international agencies attempting to help the Rohingya, such as Médecins Sans Frontiéres (the French branch of the NGO Doctors Without Borders), in what the ISCI calls deliberate “state actions designed to systematically weaken the Rohingya community.”[71] c. International Response: Non-Intervention The international response has largely been that of naming and shaming. Both Amnesty International[72] and Human Rights Watch[73] have labeled the abuses in Myanmar as Crimes Against Humanity. The US has responded with words of condemnation. Rex Tillerson, US Secretary of State, stated in November of 2017, "These abuses by some among the Burmese military, security forces, and local vigilantes have caused tremendous suffering... After a careful and thorough analysis of available facts, it is clear that the situation in northern Rakhine state constitutes ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya."[74] Yet, the only action taken has come in the form of diplomatic visits, verbal urges, and sanctions that were lifted in 2015. The European Union also lifted their sanctions in 2013 (except for an arms embargo). The UN has crafted reports and condemnations, but there has been no mention of action beyond the normative sphere. The UN has plans drafted for providing the Rohingya in Bangladesh with resources and aid,[75] but despite the talk of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, there has been no movement in the General Assembly toward humanitarian intervention beyond aid. On the regional level, Myanmar is a member of the new supranational organization ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). The 30th ASEAN Summit in April of 2017 notably did not include the crisis in Myanmar on its agenda and made no mention of it throughout the entirety of the Summit.[76] According to an article from The Diplomat, President Widodo of Indonesia expressed to Suu Kyi “that stability in Myanmar was important not only for the country but also the region.”[77] This passing comment, representing the most direct acknowledgement of the crisis from the Summit, is a far cry from intervention or even condemnation by fellow ASEAN states. As is typical of the culture of ASEAN (which will be discussed later at length), the problem is identified as an issue of stability rather than human rights. Bangladesh, which is not an ASEAN member, has worked with the United Nations Development Programme to create a Humanitarian Response Plan.[78] The Plan seeks to raise US $434 million for humanitarian aid, resources, and improved infrastructure in the host communities receiving the influx of Rohingya. The area to which most of the Rohingya arrive, Cox Bazar, has a “population of 2,290,000 predominantly Bengali Muslims, is one of Bangladesh’s poorest and most vulnerable districts, with malnutrition and food insecurity at chronic moderate levels, and poverty well above the national average.”[79] The Plan stressed the difficulty for Cox Bazar to accommodate the Rohingya who are “adversely affecting the food security and nutrition situation, and impacting the local economy by introducing a labor surplus which has driven day labor wages down, and an increase in the price of basic food and non-food items.”[80] The Plan also identifies a need for capital to address the issue of the increase in the illegal methamphetamine “yaba” coming from Myanmar and entering the local drug trafficking circles in Cox Bazar.[81] Case Study Analysis Similarities: Both cases of statelessness begin with the establishment of independent states freeing themselves from the influence of larger empires they felt exploited by. Slovenia emerged from the SRFY, while Myanmar gained independence from British colonial rule. Both states had preexisting ethnic tensions and upon independence used jus sanguinis citizenship laws as tools of ethnic engineering to establish national ethnic identities that privileged the ethnic majority over ethnic minorities. Slovenia’s citizenship law was written in 1990, while Myanmar’s was written just a few years prior in 1982. Both states are members of the UN and have affirmed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both have chosen to join regional supranational organizations: Slovenia both the European Union and the Council of Europe, and Myanmar ASEAN. The Council of Europe has a doctrine of human rights, titled the European Convention on Human Rights, while ASEAN has formed the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights and has included human rights law explicitly in their Charter.[82] Differences: While both case studies feature a recent history of independence, only Myanmar has a colonial history. Among the many long-term effects of colonialism is the exacerbation of deep ethnic tensions.[83] While the ethnic Slovenes had a desire to assert their independence and bolster their ethnic identity, they did not have a history of ethnic conflict rooted in colonial oppression. The ethnic majority of Myanmar, however, harbors a hatred of the Rohingya for their support of the British colonizers and their privileged position under colonial rule. This hatred, left to fester for centuries and passed down through generations, helps to explain the view of the Rohingya dominant in Myanmar: that they are Bangladeshi foreigners that have no place in Myanmar. Another difference, also attributable (at least in part) to colonial legacy, is in development status. Slovenia is affluent and highly developed, as is typical of European states. Myanmar, like many Southeast Asian states, has been a Least Developed Country since 1987. For the last thirty years, they have not been able to reduce their Economic Vulnerability Index the requisite degree to graduate to a Developing Country.[84] Development Status, of course, reflects the state economy, but it also includes rates of literacy, undernourishment, child mortality, and education.[85] These factors influence the political realities of states. Slovenia has had the opportunity to invest in infrastructure and education that allows for high quality of life, reduced ethnic divide, and high levels of institutionalization and rule of law. Myanmar, on the other hand, has not had the resources to engage in those opportunities, and instead faced poverty that only hindered rule of law, aggravated tensions, and made people susceptible to mobilization along ethnic lines by military and political opportunists. While both states are part of supranational regional organizations, the strength, values, and interests of these two organizations are vastly different. The Council of Europe, founded in 1949, is characterized by a culture committed to Human Rights. Being an old organization comprised of wealthy and like-minded states, it has been able to develop strong institutions. The interest in and capacity to enforce human rights law manifests in the strength of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. This culture of human rights and strength of institutions combined with an interest from regional states absorbing the stateless together brought the Court to convict Slovenia of breaching the European Human Rights Convention. Slovenia, under the weight of this powerful regional organization, conceded. Additionally, Slovenia is a new member of the EU and has such had an interest in accepting the EU’s human rights norms in order to cement their status as an EU member (and to avoid EU sanctions). The fledgling ASEAN, on the other hand, only recently adopted their Charter in 2008. As such, the organization is young, weak, and not highly institutionalized. While its Charter seeks to “protect human rights,”[86] it lacks any judicial infrastructure for doing so. It does, however, contain articles explicitly outlining: “respect independence, sovereignty, equality, territorial integrity and national identity of all ASEAN member states,”[87] “non-interference in the internal affairs of ASEAN member states,”[88] “respect for the right of every Member State to lead its national existence free from external interference, subversion and coercion,”[89] and “abstention from participation in any policy or activity, including the use of its territory, pursued by an ASEAN Member State or non-ASEAN state or any non-State actor, which threatens the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political and economic stability of ASEAN Member States.”[90] From these articles it is abundantly clear that the culture of ASEAN is such that it values sovereignty and non-intervention far more than human rights. In addition to weak institutions and a culture that respects sovereignty, the ASEAN member states are not absorbing the Rohingya population and thus have no interest in intervention. Gruesome as it may be, the geographic reality of the Southeast Asian region is such that those who flee from Myanmar do so by boat, and many do not survive the oceanic crossing. Those who do are headed primarily to non-ASEAN member Bangladesh. The Rohingya who attempted to enter Thailand, which is an ASEAN member state, were either returned to Myanmar[91] or did not survive.[92] Findings: The Importance of Regional Asymmetry This paper maintains that nearly all of the above differences share a common factor: they are regional in nature. The realities of being a European state versus a Southeast Asian state are markedly different. These regions have different histories, resources, levels of institutionalization, values, cultures, and interests, all of which are reflected in the actions (or lack thereof) of their supranational organizations. Without clear international law, it falls on these regional organizations to choose whether to intervene on the part of the stateless in the name of human rights or to be silent and honor sovereignty. This essentially means that without the protection of international law, domestic law, or refugee law, the fate of stateless peoples is currently determined by the fortuity of geography. Should they be rendered stateless in a region with a strong, established supranational organization with a culture valuing human rights, their treatment will be wildly different than a stateless person born in a region with a young, weak supranational organization that values sovereignty. Conclusion This paper has demonstrated that the issue of statelessness is so difficult to address because of the fundamental contradiction in international law protecting the universal human right to nationality and the state’s right to determine who its nationals are. When these rights come into conflict, it remains unclear which law supersedes the other, thereby creating opportunities for deprivation of nationality. This paper examined one successful example of statelessness being addressed (Slovenia) and one devastating failure (Myanmar). The case studies reveal the common use of citizenship laws as tools of ethnic engineering in newly formed states. They also reveal the primary difference, and thus determining factor, to be regional. In these legally ambiguous situations it was the strength, values, and interests of the regional organizations that determined whether or not stateless peoples were protected. Moving Forward This paper contends that the highly unequal treatment of the stateless of Slovenia and Myanmar is unacceptable. Rather than allow the fate of the stateless to rest upon the nature of the regional organization in place, clear and strong legal rights and protections need be outlined for stateless peoples. One manner of achieving this goal would be an amendment to the laws of refugees to include stateless peoples. The refugee legally flees their nation for “well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.”[93] Amending the law such that this definition also includes persons fleeing for well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of statelessness would suffice. A second, more difficult, option would be to bolster a body of law specifically for stateless peoples (like that for refugees), as the current state of international law protecting stateless peoples is evidently insufficient. 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"Ending Statelessness." UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency. http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/stateless-people.html. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "Protecting Refugees: questions and answers." UNHCR. February 01, 2002. http://www.unhcr.org/afr/publications/brochures/3b779dfe2/protecting-refugees-questions-answers.html. Vogel, Toby. "Slovenia told to compensate Yugoslav citizens." POLITICO. April 23, 2014. https://www.politico.eu/article/slovenia-told-to-compensate-yugoslav-citizens/. Weis, Paul. Nationality and Statelessness in International law. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1979. Weissbrodt, David S., and Clay Collins. "The Human Rights of Stateless Persons." Human Rights Quarterly 28, no. 1 (February 2006): 245-76. doi:https://doi.org/10.1353.hrq.2006.0013. Westcott, Ben, and Laura Koran. "Tillerson: Myanmar clearly 'ethnic cleansing' the Rohingya." CNN. November 22, 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/22/politics/tillerson-myanmar-ethnic-cleansing/index.html. "Why is there communal violence in Myanmar?" BBC News. July 03, 2014. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-18395788. Wright, Rebecca, Katie Hunt, and Joshua Berlinger. "Aung San Suu Kyi breaks silence on Rohingya, sparks storm of criticism." CNN. September 19, 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/asia/aung-san-suu-kyi-speech-rohingya/index.html. Štiks, Igor. Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav States: One hundred Years of Citizenship. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

*Feature* JPPE INTERVIEW, ANDRE PERRY: Andre Perry is a fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, a scholar-in-residence at American University, and a columnist for the Hechinger Report. His work centers around issues of race, structural inequality, and education. His book, Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities , was published earlier this year, and he has had his work featured in MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, among others. May 2020 JPPE: Hey everyone, welcome to “The Difference Principle: Power and Inequality in America.” I’m speaking with Andre Perry, who is a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, a Scholar-in-Resident at American University, and a columnist for the Hechinger Report. His work tends to focus on race, structural inequality, and education, and it’s been featured in MSNBC, the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Post, CNN, among other places. He’s also the author of a new book, Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities, and the report deals with the devaluation of assets in black neighborhoods, which deals with findings he produced at Brookings in a study and presented to the U.S. House of Representatives. Hi Andre, how are you? Andre: I’m doing well, good to see you. You forgot to add that I was a fellow when you were an intern at the Brookings Institution, so good to see you again. JPPE: Good to see you again. So the first question is: when you look at the recent movements to shine light on race inequality in the US, what do you see? Andre: Oh, I see an opportunity to really transform policy in the United States in a way that produces equity and upholds the values that the constitution and other similar documents have promoted but not necessarily operationalized. So for me, as a researcher of policy, it’s encouraging to have so many different types of people marching in the streets, demanding change—structural change. So that just gives me the cover to really produce the kind of research and analyses I think is needed during this moment, but it is also part of my life’s work. I’ve been writing and researching structural inequality for years, and so this is my time— this is (my) equivalent of a super bowl—when it comes to structural inequality. There’s so much at stake, and we have an opportunity to truly change and transform the way we distribute resources and services in this country, so I’m looking forward to the years ahead. JPPE: And I saw that you began your earlier work with a focus on education. You spent time as an educator, and as a dean I saw as well, which I didn’t know, actually. And your most recent book and a recent report that you wrote for Brookings deals with these issues of housing, and you set up your book with what I thought was a really interesting anecdote where you describe your family background with an estranged biological mother and a father who was killed in prison at 27, and then you discuss it in the context of these feelings of not belonging and seem to extend that to the black experience in America. In your testimony in front of the House you said, “The value of assets building schools leadership and lend itself are inextricably linked to the perceptions of black people. How much of the demand that impacts housing price is affected by how people are perceived,” and it seemed that in your book you emphasized this point through the case studies that you highlighted in order to show this idea that our concept of equity is corrupted by an idea that white people are the “gold standard.” Practically, this manifested in the tangible form of black real estate being devalued by as much as 156,000,048,000 dollars. So, where did that shift to housing come from, and why did you choose to orient towards that? Andre: You know, kids don’t live in schools; they live in communities. Often times, when we are talking about academic performance, we ignore all of the other structural barriers that impede a child’s education. I wanted to examine all those other structures that impact children, so I could get at how they impact education, and what was clear to me is that it’s almost impossible to isolate education as a root cause of inequality, but a lot of people try to do that. They’ll say, “if we could only fix the school then everything will be alright.” JPPE: Right. Andre: And, you know, that’s just not true. So much of academic performance is predicted by forces outside of school: what kind of job your parents have, what kind of education your grandfather had, home prices, transportation, the criminal justice system. All of these things have an impact on children’s and parents’ lives, which end up playing out in the schools themselves. So I wanted to say, “hey, so enough of blaming schools for society’s problems with policy” because when you blame schools, you essentially have little room but to blame teachers and students and people in that school, and that’s just misguided. I say throughout my book—and it’s become a mantra of mine— that there is nothing wrong with black people that ending racism can’t solve. I say that to get to that we’ve got to stop blaming black people. There’s this white supremacist myth that says the conditions of black cities and neighborhoods are a direct result of people in them, and that white supremacist myth also plays out in our efforts to reform schools. We blame teachers, we blame students, we blame school boards, but we treat school boards and school districts like we treat black districts—we treat black school boards and black districts like we treat black people. “We will take them over, we will impose all kinds of restrictions on them, we do things we would never think of doing to a white district.” And so I started looking at other sectors and said, “hey, teachers are not to blame here.” In particular, black teachers: in my education chapter in Know Your Price, I outline the added value that black teachers bring in particular, and so when you see reform hit hard in many districts, and you see a reduction in the black workforce, you go, “hey, this is contradictory to what to the goal of reform is, and that’s to provide opportunity.” And people have to remember: kids eventually grow up and become adults, and we’re cutting off job opportunities for black folks—what the heck are we educating black people for? So the point is that I wanted to look beyond education in schools, because it is often used—or school reform is often used— to advocate our responsibilities for dealing with all the other structures that impede growth in black children and families’ lives. JPPE: So when you think about those other structures that impede growth, how do you delineate some of the other forces that have played a role in rising inequality since the 1970s that people might talk about: financializiation, technological disruption, globalization, and so on? How do you delineate that from the things that are specifically affecting black communities and the role of racism? Andre: Well, I took an approach where I wanted to identify assets that we could measure in terms of the impact of racism on it. And then what I did was I just started going asset by asset and just examining the impact of racism, and eventually I will have some grand theory of how all these things come together. But at least for now I just started looking at different sectors, and this is where housing came into play. Housing—there’s so much data that you can pull from to measure housing. And what we did in preparation for the book—and it’s sort of the anchor study—we examined housing prices and black neighborhoods where the share of the black population was greater than fifty percent and compared them to neighborhoods where the share of the black population was less than fifty percent. And a lot of people say, “yeah the black neighborhood prices are going to be lower because of crime, because of education.” So, we sought out just to control for many different social factors just to get an “apples- to-apples “comparison. And after controlling for all those things as well as many of the “Zillow metrics” you see, we found that homes in black neighborhoods are devalued by twenty-three percent, about 48,000 per home, accumulative there is about 156 billion in lost equity, and we know that people use that equity to start businesses. In fact it would have started up more than four million businesses based on the average amount blacks use to start up their firms. It would have funded more than eight million four-year degrees based on the average cost of a public four-year degree. It’s a big number. And I look at the devaluation, and the reason I say devaluation is because, again, these assets are strong, but they are devalued, often times purposely, through policy. And so my goal with this is—I’m not quite there where I can offer up a grand theory that could be applied to things like globalization and commercialization and things like that. However, I do know we have plenty of evidence to say that the value of assets are mitigated by their proximity to blackness. And we’re corrupted in terms of how we value these particular assets by the preconceived notions of whiteness and blackness, obviously whiteness being of higher value and blackness being of lower value. That plays out many different ways; you just saw, my study looked at home prices, but there was just a major study that was just released that’s getting a lot of headlines that shows that black communities pay more in property taxes than their white counterparts. Thirteen percent more. JPPE: Wow. Andre: And that generally comes about because there’s always been municipalities that charge black communities higher in taxes because of this perceived over-usage of services. They perceive black people overusing services, so they charge higher rates, but that’s also come from just a negative perception. These things play out many different ways. I just identified, like, six different ways devaluation occurs and hope to keep adding onto those ways so I’ll be able to offer a theory of sorts in the future. JPPE: Well, one question I have just listening to you talk about that is: I kind of wonder how you deal with the issue of hearts of minds, of there being these ingrained ideological forces that are just baked into the psyche of people, where there is a certain underlying racism. How do you deal with something like that? Because it seems like that might be difficult to address with just a single policy. Andre: I wrote the book—it’s a policy book, but it’s narrated using first-person narrative. I use a lot of biographical sketches, lots of case studies because getting at this issue of changing hearts and minds, I think you have to do both. You can’t simply make the head case to people. You also have to make a heart case, and more importantly, you have to make a case for culture change. I wanted to show how these racist ideas and devaluations play out in the lives of researchers, family members so they could see—in sort of real terms—what this means or what this says about our culture and what we need to change. So I think people will be pleased to see that I’m talking about a lot of heady policy ideas, and I try my best to scrub all the jargon off of them and really talk plainly. That’s something I always recommend policy folks do: don’t get caught up in your own policy community and talk your way out of compelling others to join in on the fun. But I purposely really try to bring out the data in the context of the lived experience so that people can really absorb them in a way that can excite change. You can’t do just a heart case or a culture case—you have to have something that addresses the real concerns in terms of intellectual nature of the policy. Is it harmful? Is it negative? And you have to show it in the numbers, and numbers don’t mean much when culture will overrun it. We see that in terms of bad policymaking. We will push bad policy because it fits into our notion of what America is or what we think it should be, and so we have thousands locked up in cages right now along the US-Mexico border because of negative perceptions of brown folks. We have got to look at culture when we talk about policy, and so that’s what I think my book does. JPPE: And when you look at how to build opposition to race inequality, in addition to cultural movements and engaging with people and as you said, changing hearts of minds, there are also these political questions of how you choose to champion policies that can help reduce race inequality and the effects of systemic racism wherever it might appear. One question I want to ask is about how best to do that. One the one hand, you might make the case that by championing general progressive causes that might level inequality and create equality of opportunity. You might be able to address some issues of race inequality through something like that, and it seems like there were subtexts of that when President Obama was running in 2008 when he was championing what became the Affordable Care Act. So how do you weigh the benefits and trade-offs of emphasizing these broad and underlying economic issues that really speak to—or attempt to speak to— everyone versus focusing more narrowly on: how do we deal with the specific problems that are spurring race inequality? Andre: People don’t understand how anti-black legislation negatively impacts the entire country. You can actually produce policy responses to racism that address the anti-black policies of the past while showing how this will have a positive impact on us all. You know, I look at housing devaluation and show how home prices in black neighborhoods are lower. Now, white people live in those neighborhoods too, and their home prices are lower, too. If you address the anti-black nature of housing pricing, then you improve the quality for a whole lot of people, not just black folks. So in addition, we still have to address race and racism. To say that the impacts of red-lining, which by the homeowner’s loan order corporations in thirties which drew red lines around black-majority neighborhoods, deeming them unworthy of investment in the form of low-interest home loans, that practice haunts black people to this day. The wealth gap is enormous. The immediate wealth of white families about 170 thousand and compare to seventeen thousand for black families. About ten times difference between the two. That was created because of anti-black policy, and we have to have remedies for those who have suffered because of that anti-black policy. So, what’s interesting is that after COVID—after three weeks of COVID and social distancing— people were saying, “give me . . . I need relief for my business, I need relief to pay the bills,” and I say, “well, try being socially distanced for generations.” And so yes, black communities need relief. You can call it a relief package, you can call it reparations, you can call it some type of race-based solution, but what COVID made clear is that the federal government has a responsibility of uplifting its citizens when times are hard, particularly when the federal government caused the harm. You know, between slavery, Jim Crow segregation, legal housing segregation, a biased criminal justice system. All of those things have caused harm—extreme harm—to the economics prospects, the social prospects of black Americans, and we need to remedy those. So yes, we can address anti-black policy by showing how it lifts all folks, so to speak, but if we really want to be equitable, the country should rally behind providing the kind of relief to black residents and citizens that is similar to how we provided relief to white people after the depression and other groups. JPPE: And certainly one thing that’s interesting about this moment, too, is that there are a lot of calls for policies and ideas that might have seemed radical a decade ago. Discussions of reparations or defunding the police seem much more widespread, at least to me, and I’m wondering, when you look at policies that are important to champion right now, what are some that you would like to see particularly? And if we removed the question of political feasibility, what are some policies that you ideally would like to see? Andre: Well, I have to say, I am absolutely ecstatic about the “defund the police” movement, and I’ll tell you why. Not only does it get at what is important in terms of increasing economic mobility, it also says that we need to move money in ways that reflect our priorities as a country and as a neighborhood. So, it’s clear that investments in police literally arrest economic mobility of the residents. I say this all the time: nothing says that a black man doesn’t belong in an economy like a police officer carefully kneeling in the back of the neck of a person and taking his life in broad daylight. That’s a statement about belonging in a community, and so for me, we’ve got to really look at this “defund the police” movement seriously as a framework. I’ve been telling people, “what’s your defund the police in education?” It’s obvious you can actually defund policing in schools—there’s a direct link—but the point is, what money are we going to move to excite economic growth? For me, I’m excited about this moment because we’re really putting a spotlight on the barriers—the structural barriers. It’s not upholding the tradition that black people are to blame, that parents are to blame. . . We’re getting at policy, real policy, real practices that have significant impacts on our daily lives. JPPE: I want to conclude with a quote from your book that I think speaks to a lot of what you just said. You said, “I want people to fight for power. It means getting elected. Sometimes it means going out in the streets. It means going into court with devaluation data that I’ve produced. It means suing the appraisal community. It’s going to take a lot of mobilization because again, racism doesn’t just go away. This is a conversation about power and taking what’s rightfully ours.” What do you say to people who say that they don’t necessarily want to work within the system; that it hasn’t gotten better and it won’t so long as they work within the system because the system has continued to find new ways to calcify inequalities on the one hand or generally preserve its towers of privilege? Andre: Well, I say, to them, protests and movements that are directly confronting the systems and the harms of systems—we need that. You don’t get change without outside agitation. And sometimes that might look like something burning in the streets. It might come in the form of marches. It might come from civil unrest in many different forms. But, let’s be clear: you don’t get police reform in this country by working within the system. You get it from what we’ve seen from over the last few months: by hitting the streets, demanding change, crowding the courtroom, and finding alternative means of being. At some point we need different types of housing structures. We need to look at cooperative housing, for instance. We need new ideas around community—neighborhood—safety. We need new systems, and that’s going to come from the outside. It’s going to come from demanding change. So for me, I see my role as an insider—you know I work at a mainstream think-tank—but I get energy from folks on the outside. I want to be a resource for folks on the outside. So now I have cover, as a member of a marginalized group, to put forth research and data that often is devalued because I am also devalued as a black man in a mainstream think-tank. So I’m all for working from the outside. That’s the only way change occurs, really—substantive change. For me, I look at television— I march as well, and I’m, like, giddy. I’m like, “yes, this is what we need: doing the things that insiders won’t do.” And that’s why we’re in the position we are today. JPPE: Andre, thanks so much for your time. Andre: Hey, thanks so much for having me.

Editorial board Foreword Volume I Issue I Introducing the inaugural issue of JPPE The ambition to start an international, interdisciplinary, academic journal of philosophy, politics, and economics was one that emerged as much as a consequence of a desire to take a new approach to undergraduate scholarship as it was motivated by an affinity for an old idea: ‘philosophy, politics, and economics’ (PPE). PPE is famously a product of the University of Oxford, which, in the 1920s, began to amalgamate the three disciplines into a single degree that could provide a strong, yet broad foundation for future policymakers. And in this regard, the program succeeded. Many major British politicians and public figures—from the Labour Party’s Ed Miliband to Former Prime Minister David Cameron to Christopher Hitchens—studied PPE at Oxford. It is important when considering the emergence of PPE, however, to recall the relative radicalism of the concept at the historical time period in which it emerged. Just as the Russian Revolution came to a close and the First World War left Europe devastated, the United Kingdom began to experience high unemployment. It was in this context of political strife, growing inequality, and seemingly insurmountable threats to global peace and human livelihoods that PPE emerged as a concept that could help spur the thoughtful ethical, political, and economic decisions that might affect positive change. And yet, despite the success of Oxford’s PPE program and the stunning propensity of the program’s top graduates to take seat in British Parliament today, it has not crossed the Atlantic to achieve the same popularity. Much of this is a consequence of a particularly English affinity for generalists; however, whatever the reason, this Journal holds that the failure for PPE to take off in the United States has been a shame. Though PPE has been criticized at times as an academic experience that produces broad knowledge as opposed to deep knowledge, the interdisciplinary program is, at its core, the single most effective tool to analyze modern circumstance as a social scientist. Brown University, to its credit, has seen nascent developments in PPE programming. Every year, students look to pursue Independent Concentrations that mimic Oxford’s program, and the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society, which, like this Journal, is sponsored by the Political Theory Project, highlights this growing trend. We created the Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics to encourage the growth in PPE-related academic work on Brown’s campus and, most importantly, to provide young people with a space to debate and put forth academic arguments that can kindle the discussions that ultimately transform communities and entire democracies. In achieving in this end, our Journal dedicates itself to five guiding principles. First, we value interdisciplinary understanding. By shifting toward a more broad approach to social sciences, the debates, which are too often compartmentalized, are made more accessible and inclusive. In each issue of JPPE, we aim to highlight the best economic arguments alongside the best philosophical and political arguments. This could for instance illustrate, at once, the ways in which a discussion of the minimum wage can be understood as a question of economic efficiency and as a question of political feasibility, as well as a moral proposition that asks important questions about the permissibility of income inequality. What results from this is not a dearth of deep knowledge, but rather a broad understanding in which the sum is greater than each of its individual parts. The bold idea of this Journal stems from a belief that the lenses of philosophy, politics, and economics are not only useful to considering contemporary circumstance. They are all essential. Second, we value diversity. In order to create a space that effectively reflects the character of contemporary debate among young people, as well as the issues most motivating the next generation of leaders and thinkers, it is essential that diversity of views and backgrounds are highlighted. As a non-partisan publication, we strive to highlight a range of political arguments so long as they are rigorous, thoughtful, and conceived in good faith. And though our Journal selects submissions name-blind, we are committed to promoting an inclusive environment for all our employees, welcoming staff members regardless of ethnic origins, gender, religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation, or age. This doesn’t just make us a more responsible organization, it makes us a better journal. Third, we value academic rigor. As an academic publication, we are committed to publishing the highest levels of student scholarship, and we require that submissions be well written, well argued, well researched, and innovative. In creating this Journal, however, our publication’s founders recognized the limits of undergraduate experience and knowledge as a means to assess the quality of scholarship. For this reason, our Journal is peer-reviewed, receiving guidance and feedback on what essays to publish from a team of over 25 eminent scholars. Fourth, we value free thinking and original arguments. Though many essays we receive are pieces that have been written for a classroom environment and thus may be confined to answer a particular array of questions in a smaller paradigm than academics might, we have been consistently impressed by the unique ideas students have put forth. It is the aim of our Journal to highlight these pieces of original analysis, which are too often tucked away into the cupboards of forgotten undergraduate work. Fifth, we value and desire to play an integral part in stimulating global leadership among young people. Though we are an academic publication, we aspire to influence discussions among undergraduates that can help spur re-evaluation, action, and change. In placing an emphasis on global leadership, we recognize that the real value of our Journal comes less through the answers our authors provide than through the discussions they encourage and the audacity of the ideas they propagate. The inaugural issue of our Journal you are now reading perfectly reflects our five guiding principles. In “A More Perfect Union”, for instance, the author encourages readers to more closely analyze the relationship between liberalism and national unity, pondering how a liberal democracy should best understand its relationship to patriotism. And in the “Latent Effects of Cannabis Legalization”, we publish original research on the criminalization of marijuana and its disproportionate effects on black communities. This edition also features pieces from two significant American leaders: Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza and Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer. Both mayors are important figures on the frontlines of local policy that seeks to make economic growth in the 21st century more inclusive and competitive, reducing the barriers to entry and ordinances that too often discourage participation in the American economy and in our democracy. We asked both mayors to highlight their achievements on this front not only as a means to highlight examples of effective local policy implementation, but also in order to more profoundly integrate the literature of future leaders with the work already being done by current leaders. We believe that all of these elements have helped us put forth a powerful combination of essays, and we hope JPPE will be a place where young people can go to consider new ideas and offer innovative solutions to addressing today’s ethical, economic, and political challenges. Our team is united by a shared love of argument, problem solving, and a deeply felt desire to help contribute to conversations that can so greatly impact livelihoods. And in a time where the world is rapidly changing, as forces like technological disruption, globalization, climate change, and political polarization threaten to vastly alter our human experience this century, young leaders will undoubtedly be called upon to develop new ideas to solve the challenges we face. JPPE aims to both facilitate and be a part of this great conversation.

Advisory Board The Advisory Board is a group of eminent scholars who participate in the peer review editorial process and provide guidance. Robert Blair Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Political Science, 2015 Yale University Justin Broackes Professor of Philosophy Brown University PhD. Philosophy, 1986 Oxford University David Christensen Professor of Philosophy Brown University PhD. Philosophy, 1987 University of California, Los Angeles Mark Cladis Professor of Religious Studies Brown University PhD. Religion, 1988 Princeton University Linda Cook Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Political Science, 1985 Columbia University Daniel J. D'Amico Professor of Economics Brown University PhD. Economics, 2008 George Mason University Brandon Davis Professor of Law and Society Kansas University PhD. Political Science, 2017 University of Alabama Shawn Fraistat Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Political Science, 2014 Yale University Kevin Duong Professor of Political Science Bard College PhD. Political Science, 2017 Cornell University Gianna Englert Professor of Political Science Southern Methodist University PhD. Government, 2016 Georgetown University Bradford Gibbs Professor of Economics Brown University Managing Director, 2008-2013 Morgan Stanley (London, Johannesburg) Stephen Kinzer Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs Brown University Sharon Krause Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Political Theory, 1998 Harvard University Michael Kuelwein Professor of Economics Pomona College PhD. Economics, 1988 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Charles Larmore Professor of Philosophy Brown University PhD. Philosophy, 1978 Yale University Glenn Loury Professor of Economics Brown University PhD. Economics, 1976 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Rose McDermott Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Political Science, 1991 Stanford University Kenneth Miller Professor of Biology Brown University PhD. Biology, 1974 University of Colorado Benjamin Powell Professor of Economics Texas Tech University PhD. Economics, 2003 George Mason University Grigorios Siourounis Professor of Economics Brown University PhD. Economics, 2004 London Business School David Skarbeck Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Economics, 2010 George Mason University Emily Skarbeck Professor of Political Theory Brown University PhD. Economics, 2009 George Mason University Nina Tannenwald Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. International Relations, Political Theory, 1996 Cornell University John Tomasi Professor of Political Science Brown University PhD. Philosophy, 1993 Oxford University Michael Vorenberg Professor of History Brown University PhD. American History, 1995 Harvard University

Two Forms of Environmental-Political Imagination: Germany, the United States, and the Clean Energy Transition Realism, Perspective, and the Act of Looking A Comparison of Chinese Cinematic Representations of the Second Sino-Japanese War Isaac Leong Brown University Author Zoe Zacharopoulos Alexander Vaughan Williams Lillian Schoeller Nicole Tsung Editors Spring 2019 Download full text PDF (28 pages) Introduction Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep (2000) and Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death (2009) belong to a new generation of Chinese cinema representing the traumas of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). As sixth-generation Chinese filmmakers, Jiang (born 1963) and Lu (born 1971) both began their filmmaking careers in China’s post-socialist era when the gradual opening of China’s film market to foreign investment transformed the landscape of Chinese cinema.[1] Their films, in many ways, reflect on the social contradictions of their time—not only in regard to China’s unequal economic rise, but also to the amnesia that celebrates China’s spectacular imperial past while ignoring its more recent and less glorious history.[2] In this context, China’s “War of Resistance against Japan” is perhaps the most brutal part of its “century of humiliation and exploitation.”[3] Undeniably, the atrocities inflicted on the Chinese people during the Sino-Japanese War have left a lasting wound on the national psyche. Yet, collective memory of this period—more specifically, its cinematic representations—has evolved alongside the changing priorities of the Chinese government. With fierce contestations for political legitimacy between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the exiled Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party, early Chinese films depicting the war tended to glorify the CCP as the only resolute and successful force fighting Japanese imperialism. Simultaneously, these films typically portrayed the KMT as corrupt, incompetent, or otherwise traitorous collaborators.[5] Echoing the Japanese narrative that pinned wartime responsibility on a narrow “military clique,” the socialist “Red Classics” of this period also avoided elaboration on Japanese war crimes for fear of “disseminating sentimentalism and capitalist humanism.”[5] It was not until the 1980s, with the attempt to heal the Communist-Nationalist fissure, that the official narrative of the war began to sharply change emphasis, stressing the Chinese-Japanese conflict much more than the domestic, ideological one. In these representations, the nationalistic message of popular resistance against the Japanese enemy is emphasized, and anyone who collaborates with the Japanese is quickly and uncritically denounced as an unpatriotic traitor. This narrative of righteous resistance offers a kind of vindication for the Chinese nation who, while remaining historically defeated by the Japanese, can find celebration of victorious battles on screen. As Chinese writer Yu Hua notes, there is “a joke that more Japanese have been ‘killed’ at Hengdian (China’s largest film studio) than at all the actual battlefields put together—more, even, than the total population of Japan.”[6] Set against this new backdrop of Chinese war films, Devils on the Doorstep and City of Life and Death seem to depart radically from traditional cinematic representations of the War of Resistance, and perhaps as a consequence, caused significant controversy in China. The former was banned from formal release in China, with the Chinese Film Bureau citing “errors in historical representation” and labelling the film as being “insufficiently patriotic.”[7] The latter, although not banned, was criticized by the Chinese media for its sympathetic portrayal of, and even identification with, its protagonist: a Japanese soldier plagued by guilt for witnessing the atrocities committed by his fellow soldiers against the Chinese. In this regard, the strong reaction to both films indicates how uneasily they sit with usual nationalist narratives about the Chinese “self” and Japanese “other.” Not only is the Japanese enemy humanized in some way, both films also problematize the issue of wartime collaboration and sideline the CCP’s role in leading the national resistance. The relationship between both films extends beyond the content of their similarly controversial and unconventional representations of the war. Though utilized for somewhat different purposes, Lu Chuan’s use of the black-and-white format in City of Life and Death owes a certain “creative debt” to Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep , which pioneered the use of the medium to represent the Second Sino-Japanese War in an age of color cinema.[8] Undoubtedly, this aesthetic decision to film in black and white is an attempt by both films to grapple with the broader issues of realism and artificiality, especially within the context of historical trauma. In representing the traumas of the war, both films also employ first-person perspectives and narratives, albeit in different ways. While Devils on the Doorstep depicts the experiences of war from the narrow perspective of an ordinary Chinese peasant, City of Life and Death adopts an approach common in the genre of docudramas by switching between different perspectives, though focusing on the experiences of a conscience-stricken Japanese soldier. Despite both films showing some commitment to representing the ordinary and subjective experiences of the war, the latter’s approach effaces individual histories and uses the victim’s perspective merely as melodrama in a more conventional narrative of Chinese victimhood.[9] By comparing both films in their relationship to realism and nationalist remembrances of the war, I argue that while the representation of the war in City of Life and Death reflects predominant historiographical problems concerning the Sino-Japanese War, Devils on the Doorstep is a more self-reflexive attempt to subvert and deconstruct nationalist narratives of the war. Set in the last year of the war in the Japanese-occupied part of northern China, Devils on the Doorstep captures the horrors and absurdity of the war from the perspective of a group of Chinese villagers who are mysteriously tasked by the Communist resistance to house and interrogate two captives—a Japanese soldier and his Chinese translator. Among the villagers, Ma Dasan—a strong, straight-minded, credulous and bumbling peasant—becomes the unwilling protagonist. Initially a farcical comedy depicting the confusion of the villagers who are unsure about how to deal with this unexpected and unwanted disruption of their lives, the story takes a darker turn when Dasan is tasked with killing the two prisoners. Partly because Dasan is unable to do the deed, and partly because the executioner he employs turns out to be a fraud, Dasan and the villagers eventually agree to return the prisoners to the Japanese army in return for food. While this deal is initially honored by the Japanese army, the celebratory banquet unexpectedly turns into a cold-blooded massacre of the entire village by the carousing Japanese soldiers, leaving Dasan as the sole survivor and witness of the massacre. When the war ends and the Japanese soldiers are pardoned by the returning Nationalists, Dasan finds himself unable to deal with the guilt and tries to kill every Japanese soldier he can in revenge. However, he is quickly subdued and in an ironic turn of events, executed, at the order of the returning Nationalist government by the same Japanese soldier that he saved. As a docudrama about the Nanjing Massacre, City of Life and Death adopts a vastly different approach to represent the traumas of the Sino-Japanese War. Switching primarily between the perspectives of the ordinary Japanese soldier Kadokawa Masao, the Nazi Party member John Rabe, and his fictional secretary Tang, the film tells a “collaged” story about the fall of Nanjing and the establishment and subsequent dissolution of the Nanjing Safety Zone.[10] Without a coherent dramatic narrative, three plot points stand out in the film, each centering around one of the three main characters: Rabe is pressured into providing the Japanese army with one hundred Chinese comfort women from the Safety Zone he sets up; Tang collaborates with the Japanese in an attempt to protect his family after Rabe announces his recall to Germany; and Kadokawa, stricken by guilt after witnessing the horrors and brutality of war, releases two Chinese prisoners and commits suicide at the end of the film. Given Lu Chuan’s style of realistic representation, it is needless to say that scenes of executions, mass shooting, and rape form the mise-en-scène of the film. The Gaze in Cinematic Realism Borrowing from Daniel Morgan, I propose that cinematic realism can be thought of in two different ways that correspond with the two films discussed in this paper.[11] Following the canonical understanding of André Bazin’s theorizations of film realism, the first conception, corresponding with Lu Chuan’s interpretation in City of Life and Death, sees realism as “a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time.”[12] On the other hand, as Morgan argues, realism need not be understood as a set of stylistic conventions that have come to define the realist aesthetic. Instead, he suggests that Bazin “sees a more complicated relation between style and reality. Though a film, to be realist, must take into account… the ontology of the photographic image, realism is not a particular style, lack of style, or a set of stylistic attributes, but a process and mechanism.”[13] Seeing realism as a way of interpreting reality thus enables “realist” films, like Devils on the Doorstep , to explore alternative stylistic and imaginative resources in their representation of reality. Discussing the use of black and white in City of Life and Death , the film’s cinematographer Cao Yu explained how the use of black and white not only provided the film with “a sense of reality” and “spiritual abstraction,” but was also necessary in avoiding the gory excesses and pornographic pleasures of the horror genre.[14] However, when mediating between these sometimes conflicting goals, the film seems to prioritize the achievement of authenticity and realism. In conducting research for the film, Lu Chuan and the rest of the production team spent weeks on end at the Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Sichuan combing through close to five hundred thousand photographs depicting the Sino-Japanese War with the main purpose of imitating the “reality effect” of the most compelling historical photographs.[15] The pursuit of realism and authenticity in cinematic representations of the Nanjing Massacre is not new and is perhaps, in the context of Japanese denial of the massacre for more than half a century, a symptom of a broader national anxiety to “‘prove’ that it actually happened.”[16] A comparison can be made here between City of Life and Death and its cinematic precedent, Mou Tun-fei’s Black Sun (1995). Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, Black Sun integrates documentary footage of the Nanjing Massacre into its dramatized and fictional narrative. In one of the most shocking images of the film, the meticulously reenacted execution of an elderly Chinese monk by a Japanese soldier cuts to the actual photograph which the scene is based on just as the gunshot is heard. In many ways, the recreation of such gory and violent images seems to be, at best, an attempt to bear testimony to the most excessive, horrific, and spectacular scenes of the Nanjing Massacre, and at worst, an exploitative atrocity film. Even though Lu Chuan disavows the medium of horror in representing the Nanjing Massacre and does not use archival footage to shock the audience in the same way that Black Sun does, there is a similar attempt to mimic reality in City of Life and Death . Using the existing visual culture of the Sino-Japanese War to create the film’s “aura of authenticity,” Lu Chuan develops the setting of the film by drawing on documentary photographs that would be familiar to a Chinese audience exposed to scenes of a war-ravaged Nanjing.[17] The appropriation of and reference to archival footage in the name of historical realism, however, poses its own problems. In referring to “historical analogues” in the name of realism, there is an underlying assumption that archival photographs and film footage can capture the past as it happened—an objective, dispassionate record of scenes and events.[18] Yet, as Susan Sontag suggests, this is an impossible task for photography as “people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world.”[19] In the context of war and genocide, however, the issues of realism are not only a theoretical debate, but have implications for our attempts to understand that past. Aside from film footage taken by the American missionary John Magee and a few other exceptions, the vast majority of all surviving visual records of the massacre were produced by the Japanese.[20] The collection of photographs that City of Life and Death was based on was in fact acquired from Japan and taken by Japanese soldiers and camera crew during the invasion of and subsequent massacre in Nanjing.[21] Although the motivations that lie behind the production of these images were very different from those of contemporary filmmakers like Lu Chuan, the mimicking of these photographic visions risk reproducing the very gaze of the perpetrator. As Elie Wiesel discusses in the context of the Holocaust: For the most part the images derive from enemy sources. The victim had neither cameras nor film. To amuse themselves, or to bring back souvenirs back to their families, or to serve Goebbel’s propaganda, the killers filmed sequences in one ghetto or another…The use of the faked, truncated images makes it difficult to omit the poisonous message that motivated them…Will the viewer continue to remember that these films were made by the killers to show the downfall and the baseness of their so-called subhuman victims?[22] Yet as Wiesel recognizes, these photographs serve an important purpose, whether for “eventual comprehension of the concentration camps’ existence” or as a representation of how the perpetrators perceived their role in war and genocide.[23] In this context, the problem with Lu Chuan’s appropriation of the photographic record is how it treats these photographs as an objective truth that allows one to unproblematically access the past. Rather than acknowledging the limits of the visual archive for our understanding of the Nanjing Massacre, City of Life and Death seems to reproduce the gaze of the perpetrators without self-reflexivity. In a startling sequence, hundreds of disheveled Chinese men, mistaken by the Japanese to be Chinese soldiers, are passively herded to the execution grounds and later mowed down by a barrage of bullets. At the end, the audience is almost made to identify with the Japanese perpetrators as the camera zooms in on the back of a Japanese soldier looking down on a sea of individually indistinguishable corpses, accompanied by non-diegetic and somewhat triumphant martial music. A Japanese soldier, standing on a pedestal, gazes out on a sea of Chinese corpses after a mass shooting. Scene from City of Life and Death. In relying on historical photographs, the realist cinematography of City of Life and Death also runs the risk of being tacitly pornographic in its depiction of sexual atrocities committed as part of the Nanjing Massacre. By transforming grainy photographs of women’s bodies into the aesthetic medium of cinema, the naked bodies of rape victims become a spectacle to fulfill the “public fantasies” associated with watching rape on-screen.[24] The relationship between reality and interpretation must again be problematized, and the gaze of the perpetrator is even more pernicious in inscribing meaning onto sexual atrocities. As film scholar and feminist Tanya Horeck argues, since the same scene of rape can be interpreted differently depending on the viewer and context, representations of rape in cinema are “battles over the ownership of meaning and of reality.”[25] In the context of City of Life and Death , sexual assault survivors are depicted as passive and disenfranchised victims whose voices never get heard. The subjectivity of the rape victim is not only effaced by the photographic gaze of the Japanese perpetrator, but continues to be suppressed in representations of rape within national discourse. As Chungmoo Choi convincingly argues in reference to the comfort women issue in Korea, “comfort women discourse displaces the women’s subjectivity, which is grounded on pain, and constructs the women only as symbols of national shame. As such, the primacy of the discourse on comfort women attends not to the welfare of women’s subjectivity but to the national agenda of overcoming colonial emasculation.”[26] Applying Choi’s analysis to the context of the Nanjing Massacre, it is telling how the “Rape of Nanking” continues to persist as a popular moniker for the “Nanjing Massacre,” which has been for many years the standard in both English and Chinese language scholarship. By conflating actual experiences of sexual atrocities with the metaphorical rape/penetration of the national homeland, the name appropriates rape into a masculine national discourse that obfuscates individual experiences of pain and trauma. In its representation of rape, City of Life and Death operates firmly within this national discourse. Depicting most of the Chinese characters in the film as an indistinguishable mass, Lu again represents the massive scale of sexual victimization at the cost of reducing the nature of these women to mere victims of rape. Like the “numbers game” which dominates national contestations over the history of the Nanjing Massacre between China and Japan, it is not the individual and subjective experiences of trauma, but its scale that counts towards the national narrative of victimhood.[27] Images of rape and sexual abuse abound in the film, but two female Chinese characters seem to stand out: Xiao Jiang, a prostitute, and Jiang Shuyun, a teacher. In one of two moments of dramatic self-sacrifice in the film, Xiao Jiang is the first to volunteer herself as one of the “100 comfort women” given to the Japanese army so as to spare the rape of other girls within the Safety Zone. While in the other sequence the Nationalist soldier Lu Jianxiong calmly stands up to face a certain but heroic death, Xiao Jiang’s sacrifice of her body is “naturalized by virtue of her being a prostitute in the first place.”[28] Raped to death, Xiao Jiang’s nude body is tragically and unceremoniously tossed into a pile of other bodies. Conversely, Shuyun’s death happens in a far more merciful and sympathetic manner. Captured by Japanese soldiers near the end of the film, Shuyun begs Japanese soldier Kadokawa to shoot her so as to save her from being sexually abused. It is thus implied that while Shuyun’s chastity is more important than her survival, for Xiao Jiang the sacrifice of her body and ultimately her life to protect the “pure” schoolgirls is an expectation. In doing so, the film fetishizes both the chastity of the schoolgirls and the illicit sexuality of the prostitutes. Such a portrayal fails to explore the individual subjectivities of the female characters, instead presenting them as symbolic rather than real figures. Like the discourse surrounding comfort women that prioritizes “a narrative of virgins forcefully kidnapped and raped over other experiences of victimhood,” the filmic representation of rape in City of Life and Death marginalizes the traumas suffered by individual rape victims, as it is the “compromised” and “indecent” women who are raped and their deaths neatly mark the national humiliation as a distant past.[29] Objectivity and Authenticity Entangled with the film’s quest to “recreate the world in its own image,” the pursuit of an objective representation of the Nanjing Massacre seems to be the film’s raison d’être. In this regard, a significant portion of City of Life and Death is framed from the perspective of the detached and presumably impartial Western observer.[30] Without a coherent narrative arc, the film is framed by a series of postcards written in English, by the American missionary Minnie Vautrin.[31] The film opens with a series of postcards that establish the historical background of the Nanjing Massacre, narrating the progress of the Japanese army from Beijing to Shanghai and finally to the then-capital Nanjing. Interestingly, there is no evidence that Vautrin actually wrote and sent postcards like these during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, even though she and Rabe—the two Westerners central to the film—detailed the fall of Nanjing extensively in their own diaries.[32] It is thus revealing that the film chose to imagine what Vautrin, rather than any Chinese character, would have written in her correspondence. In this case, the film’s quest for authenticity is implicated by the same notions of objectivity and detachment that plague the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre. Even though a vast collection of oral testimonies given by survivors has been collected, historical scholarship on the Nanjing Massacre has been slow to acknowledge and use these testimonies as reliable evidence.[33] Significantly, when Japanese reporter Honda Katsuichi published an extensive collection of interviews with Chinese survivors of the Nanjing Massacre and other Japanese war crimes, he was accused of “presenting the Chinese side of the story uncritically” and deniers were quick to seize on any discrepancies in the testimonies as “evidence of the fabrication of the Nanjing Massacre.”[34] While there are undoubtedly limits to the ability of oral testimonies to serve as unquestionable facts, the testimonies of victims illuminate a particular contingent and subjective truth that cannot otherwise be understood. The fetishization of objectivity and neutrality thus leads one to prioritize the written records of detached Western observers, consequently obscuring a historically significant part of the Nanjing Massacre. Considering how Western foreigners were either expelled from the city by December 15 or otherwise confined within the Safety Zone, they could have only witnessed at best “a fraction of what actually happened afterwards in a larger area with hundreds of thousands of residents.”[35] In the face of continuing Japanese denial, reflected most notably in a statement made in 2012 by Mayor Takashi Kawamura stating that the “so-called Nanjing Massacre is unlikely to have taken place,” the quest for objective detachment is simultaneously understandable and obfuscating.[46] On one hand, the eyewitness testimonies of detached Western observers like John Rabe and the American missionaries present at the scene of the Nanjing Massacre are perceived, even within China, to provide an objective account of the massacre that can be used in the battle against denial. Yet on the other, the testimonies of Western observers can only be testimonies of themselves and of their immediate context. If, as Leo Tolstoy suggests, the gap between a real event and the various fragmentary and distorted recollections of it can only be overcome “by collecting the memories of every individual (even the humblest soldier) who had been directly or indirectly involved in the battle,” then the attempt to frame and understand the Nanjing Massacre from the narrow perspective of Western observers elides the voices of Nanjing residents and survivors who undoubtedly experienced and remembered very differently from foreign bystanders.[37] Even though the choice to emphasize the role played by Western observers may not have been an ideal one for Lu Chuan, it is nonetheless an inadvertent effect of historiography that relies on written-documentation generated by Western observers—the famous The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang is one prominent example.[38] Belonging to a different world, the computer-animated yet realist postcards written in Vautrin’s hand reveal the limits of a Western perspective in representing the trauma of the Nanjing Massacre—its language is detached and devoid of the emotions that often underlie the testimonies collected from Nanjing residents and survivors. One of the postcards written by Minnie Vautrin shown immediately after brutal scenes of massacre and rape. Scene from City of Life and Death. Rethinking Realism Even though City of Life and Death and Devils on the Doorstep share the distinctive stylistic feature of black-and-white cinematography, its use in the latter film subverts the canonical understanding of realism and reveals the constructed nature of the photographic image. Jiang’s endeavor is an interesting and ambitious one, not only because cinematic realism originated in black-and-white cinematography, but also because, as highlighted earlier, war newsreels are frequently incorporated into documentary and docudrama films to enhance the authenticity of historical narratives. In a similar way, historical documentation is often perceived to possess a certain realist quality as a black-and-white text with fixed meaning, even though like photography, it is mediated by layers of language and interpretation.[39] Like City of Life and Death , Jiang’s film shares a close relationship with historical photographs of the Second Sino-Japanese war. In an interview, Jiang revealed how, in preparing for the film, they “took photographs of our actors in their costumes and made Xerox copies of them and placed them next to Xeroxes of actual historical photographs. No one could distinguish between them.”[40] Yet, unlike City of Life and Death , Devils on the Doorstep makes neither pretension to being a documentary nor attempts to imply the historicity of the narrative.[41] Instead, the film uses the visual medium associated with realism to make a self-reflexive critique of the relationship between history as the past and history as a representation. In the final moments of Devils on the Doorstep , the black-and-white aesthetic switches to color just as Ma Dasan is beheaded in an execution ordered by the returning Nationalist government. In this scene, we are shown Dasan’s execution first from the perspective of a Chinese villager watching the public execution, and then, in the only subjective shot in the entire film, from the disturbing perspective of Dasan’s decapitated head, watching as the crowd cheers.[42] Unlike scenes of execution and death in City of Life and Death , the depiction of violence in this scene is swift and hardly pornographic. The lack of sentimentality and horrific excess—the two elements that characterize portrayals of violence in City of Life and Death —makes this scene, in some ways, even more brutal and disturbing. On one level, by shifting attention away from the violence and to the act of watching it, Jiang criticizes the passive act of spectatorship that the surrounding Chinese villagers are guilty of and that we, as the audience, are complicit in. The spectating peasants exhibit no sympathy for Dasan, laughing and howling in a manner reminiscent of how the Japanese soldiers laughed and watched while butchering Dasan’s entire village. While parallels can be drawn between the reactions in these two situations, the contexts and the actors within it are obviously not analogous. Yet it is also the semblance of law and order in the case of Dasan’s execution that makes this scene especially troubling. While the Nationalist government claims to restore civilization to a village previously ruled by the savage Japanese devils,[43] they are guilty of what Michael Taussig calls “mimetic excess” by appropriating the very savagery they are meant to abolish.[44] Of course, this critique folds back on and implicates the spectators, who are not troubled by the brutality but behave with a veneer of civility which they believe divorces them from the plight of the victims. On another level, the shifts in perspective in this final scene expose the inherent gap between representation and reality, and consequently, the appropriation of wartime suffering and trauma by national narratives of the past. As the camera shifts away from Dasan’s perspective and to a frontal shot of Dasan’s decapitated head, the moving picture transforms into still photography and then into iconography.[45] Not only is this implied by the woodcut-like texture of the final shot, the image itself closely resembles widely-circulated atrocity photographs that have become a cliché in depicting Japanese wartime cruelty. In this way, the multiple shifts in perspective force the audience to question the truth and reliability of each perspective and to eventually acknowledge the gap between these different representations of reality and reality itself. Jiang further interrogates the relationship between representation and reality using Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q, to which Jiang frequently compared his film.[46] The novella tells the story of an ordinary Chinese peasant with the ability to transform personal humiliations and defeats into victories through deliberate renaming and misnaming. Though Ah Q is eventually publicly executed for committing theft, the narrator turns away from his satirical tone and presents this moment in a sympathetic and reflective manner. Lu Xun writes at the end of the novella: “Naturally all agreed that Ah Q had been a bad man, the proof being that he had been shot; for if he had not been bad, how could he have been shot?”[47] Turning the target of satire from Ah Q to the villagers, Lu Xun highlights the artifice of allegedly true representations: whether Ah Q’s stories of his defeats/victories, the court’s narrative of Ah Q’s guilt, or even, in a self-reflexive turn, the narrator’s/ Lu Xun’s “true story” of Ah Q.[48] While the motivations for Lu Xun’s literature must be read against the social and intellectual milieu of the May Fourth Movement, his critique of the “violence of representation” and of the privileging of certain voices over others remains highly relevant to the study of Chinese representations of the War of Resistance.48 In this regard, Jiang’s dialogue with The True Story of Ah Q highlights how conventional historical narratives about the war, framed as narratives of heroic national resistance and eventual triumph, ultimately purge history of its horrors and violence. Deconstructing Nationalist Tropes Like Lu Xun’s novella, Devils on the Doorstep must also be situated within the social context in which Jiang grew up. In various interviews, Jiang reveals how the images of Japanese “devils” in the film are based on “their looks, as I remembered them.”[49] Born in 1963, Jiang obviously did not see Japanese soldiers firsthand, but nonetheless had a certain image of them based on the representations of the war he grew up with. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, Jiang was familiar with images of the Japanese devil created in the “Red Classics” and other revolutionary films of that time. In these black-and-white propaganda films, such as Railroad Guerrillas (1956) and Mine Warfare (1962), the Japanese soldiers, always referred to colloquially as guizi,[50] were treacherous but ultimately silly and comical figures that would be easily ambushed and defeated by patriotic villagers.[51] Cognizant of the problems with such representations, Jiang resists conventional stereotypes of the Chinese peasant as ones which would avenge the nation for Japan’s brutal occupation. Devils on the Doorstep attempts to do this by considering how ordinary people experienced the war and faced up to the “prospect of imminent death during wartime.”[52] Like “Survival,” the novella from which the film was adapted, Devils on the Doorstep shifts away from the dominant perspective of patriotic Chinese soldiers and focuses on ordinary peasants’ quotidian struggle for survival.[53] Even though the mysterious resistance fighter catalyzes the tragic chain of events, he is ultimately a marginal figure in the film, appearing only once to drop off the two prisoners and, unlike in the “Red Classics” that Jiang alludes to, is never a heroic figure that leads the peasant resistance. Thus, resistance against the Japanese, the arch-signifier of the Chinese war mythology, is represented in the film as an abstract ideology foisted on the reluctant peasants, with a heavy and palpable dose of the absurd.[54] Rather than portray heroic and martial resistance, the film depicts the daily life of a Chinese village under Japanese occupation as if told from the perspective of the peasants themselves.[55] Devils on the Doorstep opens not with a scene of soldiers fighting or of Japanese “devils,” but of daily life in an ordinary village in Japanese-occupied China. It is clear from the opening sequence that despite having been a base for Japanese navy reservists for eight years, the village has been relatively untouched by the war. As Japanese sailors parade through the village playing their jaunty naval song, local Chinese children clamor in excitement while waiting for the Japanese commander to hand out candy. The commander then stops to bark instructions at one of the adult villagers to bring him clean water that night and the latter responds pliantly, like one of the children, even calling the Japanese soldier sensei (Japanese for “teacher”). While there is certainly a clear sense of hierarchy governing their interactions, and perhaps some fear in the peasant receiving the orders, there is no hatred and vengefulness as one might expect. Instead, the villagers adapt to the occupation with ingenuity, compromising with Japanese soldiers so as to create for themselves a space of autonomy and local “resistance.” From this perspective of the peasants, one can appreciate how the daily life of the war was motivated by a palpable sense of survival more than any abstract and ideological notion of nationhood. Yet it is also the everyday struggle for survival that reveals both the cruelty of war and the resilience of humanity, whose historical struggles against violence often get drowned in “black-and-white versions of history that pay attention only to the grand schemes of antagonism, such as class, nation, and ideology.”[56] Chinese peasant children dancing to the tune of the Japanese naval song, excitedly awaiting candy from the Japanese naval commander. Scene from Devils on the Doorstep. By representing the War of Resistance from below, Jiang also blurs the lines between wartime collaboration and resistance, perhaps explaining state and popular censure against Devils on the Doorstep .[57] The issue of collaboration during the War of Resistance has been a thorny issue in Chinese national memory. Broadly remembered as a “good war” which legitimized the nation, the party and the experiences of some who lived through it, national remembrances of the Second Sino-Japanese War tend to emphasize the Chinese as “positive and patriotic figures who are at the same time victims of savagery by others, rather than authors of their own misfortune.”[58] In this national narrative, collaborators, like the translator Dong Hanchen in Devils on the Doorstep and Rabe’s secretary Mr. Tang in City of Life and Death , are dismissed and demonized as hanjian, a term that is conventionally used to mean “traitor” but literally means a “betrayer of the Chinese race.”[59] Even though both films address the issue of collaboration, the discourse of salvation in City of Life and Death ultimately places the nation above the individual and fails to challenge nationalistic representations of collaboration. Hoping to protect the rest of his family from the brutality of the Japanese army, Tang collaborates with the Japanese by informing on Chinese “soldiers” living within the Safety Zone, simultaneously earning for himself the titles of tomodachi (Japanese for “friend”) and hanjian.[60] While this portrayal of Tang humanizes him far more than most representations of collaborators in Chinese cinema, and consequently seems to put him in a moral gray zone, the film ultimately adopts the nationalist narrative as Tang redeems himself and sacrifices his life for the sake of another, morally untainted Chinese compatriot.[61] By making Tang atone for his sin of collaboration, Lu projects patriotic heroism as a form of fantasy and an imaginative attempt at self-salvation. By telling the story of wartime collaboration as a heroic narrative of salvation, City of Life and Death not only obfuscates individual narratives and understandings of collaboration, but also suggests that the individual may somehow lose his life to save the nation to which he belongs. It is telling that Tang’s last words to his Japanese executioner were “my wife is pregnant again,” suggesting again that his patriotic death ensures the longevity of the Chinese nation.[62] In this regard, the film seems to be an attempt to “undo Japanese imperialism and injustice through a patriotic narration of the unity of the Chinese nation,” subordinating the individual to the nation, and ultimately failing to uphold collaboration as a possible moral choice.[63] In contrast, Devils on the Doorstep problematizes the meaning and morality of collaboration. Even though the most obvious collaborator—the translator Dong Hanchen—dies at the end of the film, his death is not a heroic one that absolves him of his guilt or puts the Chinese nation on a pedestal. It is instead an absurd execution filled with grim irony. When the KMT soldiers return and replace the Japanese dictatorship with a Nationalist one, the first order of business is the punishment and execution of wartime collaborators. Made an example by the Nationalist government, Hanchen is denounced as “scum who aided the Japanese to slaughter their own compatriots.” He is portrayed by the KMT military spokesperson, a comical figure speaking with a high-brow accent that distinguishes him from the village folk, as having “aided tyranny and avoided arrest,” his hands “stained with Chinese blood,” and “only execution will quell the masses anger.”[64] The irony of the KMT’s statements cannot be more clear—not only are Hanchen’s hands not “stained with Chinese blood,” Hanchen himself is not the typical opportunistic collaborator who has betrayed his people to serve the enemy. Rather than acting strictly as a translator for Hanaya, the Japanese soldier for whom he works, Hanchen deliberately mistranslates Hanaya in an attempt to preserve the peace. For example, the comical opening encounter between the villagers and the prisoners reads something like this: Village head: So, what’s his name? Have him tell us himself. Hanaya (in Japanese): Shoot me! Kill me! If you’ve got the guts, cowards! Villagers: How come his name is so long? Village head: Has he killed Chinese men? Violated Chinese women? Hanaya (in Japanese): Of course, that’s what I came to China for! Hanchen (translating): (hesitating) He’s new to China. Hasn’t seen any women yet. He’s killed no one. He’s a cook. (turning to Hanaya) Why are you doing this? Hanaya (in Japanese): I want to anger these cowards! I won’t cooperate with swine! Hanchen (translating): He begs you not to kill him! From this sequence, it can be observed how Hanchen is not a spineless stooge of the Japanese and does not merely “turn Japanese into Chinese and Chinese into Japanese.”[66] Through his mediation of language, he instead opens up a “humane channel of communication” that offers some hope of rapprochement between the Chinese and the Japanese.[67] In contrast, without a translator, the town square becomes like the Tower of Babel when the Chinese KMT first return. It is comical how the KMT representative and the accompanying American and British soldiers, despite their military rank, are unable to “order” a Japanese peddler to move his goods off the road or even just to stand still. Unable to communicate with each other whatsoever, they eventually drive their military jeep over his goods and use the language of force to achieve their goals. Seen in this context, Hanchen is not merely a passive translator who is servile to his Japanese masters but is instead an active agent who uses language as a way to shape reality and avoid violence. In his use of language, Hanchen can perhaps be compared to Guido in Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), a controversial film that similarly used both humor and surreal scenes to represent the Holocaust. As the main character who generates most of the comedy of the film, Guido turns the threats issued by concentration camp guards into instructions for a game so as to shelter his son from the horrors of their experience. Unable to stop the perversity of the camp and the likely death that awaits both of them, Guido’s translations are at least an attempt to protect his son’s childhood and innocence. In this regard, Guido and Hanchen both purposefully severe the link between words and their signified reality so as to seek a way out of an otherwise entrapping situation and to reclaim the possibility of survival.[68] Crucially, Hanchen’s “translations” help the peasants overcome the social and cognitive distance that Hanaya strives to enlarge with his racist vitriol and yearnings for martyrdom, possibly avoiding violent confrontation and defusing the situation. Dong Hanchen and Hanaya Kosaburo panting after frantically shouting over each other during the interrogation – Hanaya shouting in Japanese and Hanchen in Chinese. The latter deliberately mistranslates Hanaya’s demands to be killed. Scene from Devils on the Doorstep. By looking at the discourse surrounding collaboration (hanjian) from the perspective of the villagers, Devils on the Doorstep also exposes the ambiguous and populist aspects of the label. Even though the Nationalist legislature established the hanjian crime as early as August 1937, in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese attack in Beijing, the term was broadly defined and indiscriminately used.[69] In part, this may have been because positions about collaboration and resistance were constantly evolving. Despite its efforts to present itself as a resistance government, the KMT practiced a policy of non-resistance towards Japan for years and did not completely reject the idea of peace talks with Japan until August 1937.[70] Combined with the encouragement of popular vigilantism in the prosecution of collaborators, the label of collaboration gained a populist valence that empowered passive victims of the war with “an opportunity to redeem their passivity with a display of patriotic fervor.”[71] Not only is this evident at Hanchen’s public execution, the villagers in the film constantly throw around the term hanjian, struggling to reach a stable meaning for the term and to reconcile that meaning with their own understandings of right and wrong. Is it collaboration to return the prisoners to the Japanese? Is it collaboration to feed the prisoners? Conversely, what if one were to starve them to death instead? What about the simple act of referring to the Japanese soldiers as “teacher” (sensei)? Eventually, however, the decisions made by the villagers remain outside the demands of nationalistic loyalties and discourse. When they find out the Japanese prisoner Hanaya is a peasant like them, the villagers, rather than “coming out with hackneyed expressions of hatred for a despised enemy,” acknowledge respect for someone with whom they have common ground and find solidarity with.[72] While their identification with Hanaya and exchange with the Japanese army may be seen through the nationalist lens as collaboration and fraternization with the enemy, the villagers ultimately complicate the nationalist dichotomy between collaboration and resistance, and open up the possibility of acknowledging the indiscriminate use of the demonizing label hanjian.[73] Unlike in City of Life and Death , collaboration in Devils on the Doorstep is always presented as an active choice, albeit under the oppressive conditions of war and occupation. By representing the war from the perspective of a single village, Jiang Wen confronts the complexity of communal decision-making in the village and avoids portraying his characters as one-dimensional and passive victims of the war. In contrast, the capacity for choice is evaporated in City of Life and Death when a kaleidoscope of perspectives is presented without interrogating any single one. Tang’s collaboration with the Japanese is presented as a natural consequence of his fear and uncertainty upon hearing about Rabe’s recall to Germany. Likewise, even the film’s protagonist—the sympathetic Japanese soldier Kadokawa—is presented as a character stripped of choice. In many ways, he is the morally upright and pure Japanese soldier corrupted by the brutality and arbitrariness of war. In the only scene where he kills, his shooting is an impulse without any lethal intention.[74] He is also only an observer to the brutal scenes of rape and massacre, seemingly absolving him of responsibility by attributing these acts to the universal character of war. Forced to witness the brutality, yet in no position to stop it, Kadokawa endures the trauma and guilt of war, himself becoming a victim of the war he is complicit in perpetrating. Confronted with this choiceless situation, Kadokawa ultimately commits suicide to rid himself of his guilt.[75] Such representations of the dehumanizing aspect of the Sino-Japanese war are, however, neither new nor exclusive to cinematic depictions of the war. Many soldiers who testified to the atrocity in Nanjing put the blame squarely on the war, and while these statements are truthful and useful to some degree, ...blaming everything on the war is at best inadequate and at worst can be used as an excuse to avoid confronting the crucial issue of agency, for even in the most brutal of wars not everyone killed or raped civilians. Acknowledgment of the dehumanizing impact of war, although highly important, cannot replace a critical analysis of the individual decisions as well as the particular political institutions.[76] Even though Devils on the Doorstep focuses more significantly on the Chinese experience of the war, it can be considered a cinematic attempt at critically analyzing the individual decisions made during the war. Jiang’s attempt at doing so can be appreciated by comparing his film with the original novella on which it is based. Told using the mode of heroic resistance, You Fengwei’s “Survival” presents the village chief who receives the two prisoners as acting primarily out of a sense of political duty. As kind-hearted folks, the villagers treat the prisoners humanely; but when it is revealed by the communist leadership that the prisoners are no longer of use and should be executed in situ, the villagers eventually carry out what amounts to a military command.[77] When confronted by the interpreter-prisoner, the chief’s only defense is: “Tell you what, you and the Jap devil’s capital punishments were decided by the resistance fighters, not us. We are just carrying out their orders. Understand?”[78] By justifying their actions as an order, the villagers are able to relieve themselves of the moral burden. In contrast, the film version presents the choices available to Dasan even amidst the oppressive conditions of occupation. Even though the mysterious resistance fighter forced Dasan to take in the prisoners at gunpoint, Dasan is later conscious of the choices available to him and his fellow villagers. For example, he speaks out against the option of killing the two prisoners even though they present a palpable and constant threat to the lives of the villages. To Dasan, killing the prisoners is “just not right” and he insists that “we [the villagers] can’t just decide to kill them. It’s just not good.”[79] Even though he eventually fails to convince the other villagers and it is decided through the drawing of lots that the task of executing the prisoners would fall on him, Dasan is still able to carve out space for himself to do what intuitively feels right to him. Acting against fate, he chooses to hide the prisoners instead of killing them as was ordered by his fellow villagers. Thinking of himself as an active agent rather than a passive victim, Dasan ultimately blames himself for the Japanese massacre of his village and attempts to seek revenge for it. While holding himself responsible for the deaths of his fellow villagers denies him “the complication of moral luck,” it is nonetheless clear that attributing what happened purely to luck “voids the subject of moral responsibility.”[80] In this context, Devils on the Doorstep presents the possibility for choice, no matter how limited, under the conditions of war and occupation. For Jiang, the conditions of nationalism and war are no longer adequate or exculpatory justifications for acts of violence—not only did Dasan choose to shelter the prisoners in spite of an execution order, the Japanese soldiers also chose to commit the senseless acts of violence even after the Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s surrender. In the final scene of the war, the burning village is disturbingly set against Hirohito’s radio announcement of unconditional surrender, ironically asserting: “Should we continue the fight, not only would the Japanese nation be obliterated, but human civilization would be totally extinguished.”[81] Framed in this way, the orgy of violence at the end of the war is not so much a direct military command even if it is linked symbolically with the Emperor, but is instead a choice made by Japanese soldiers, having fraternized with the Chinese, to purge themselves of the polluting effects of proximity. Conclusion By visualizing wartime atrocities, cinema claims a place in the public consciousness of history by recording, re-envisioning, and investigating the past. For City of Life and Death , the representation of trauma is an indisputable testament to the violence and brutality of the Second Sino-Japanese War. In adopting the aesthetics of conventional cinematic realism, the film posits that the past can be recreated in its own image and that the audience can thus be somehow transported back into that past. Referring to the use of three-dimensional dioramas in the War of Resistance Museum just outside Beijing, the museum guide states that by “cleverly taking models, artifacts and tableaux and making them into one, so that the eye cannot distinguish between what is painting and what is a model, [it feels] as if you were placing yourself on the battlefield at the time [of the event itself].”[83] While used in a different context, the realist sensibilities of dioramic representation seem to be equally characteristic of City of Life and Death . Yet as Hayden White argues, the scale and intensity of the traumatic events of the twentieth century make it impossible for any single human agent to have a full and conscious view of the causes, effects and moral implications of such events. Consequently, any expectation of representational objectivity must be set aside as well. The failure of humanist historiography for White means abandoning realist storytelling techniques and seeking literary modernism, which “provide the possibility of de-fetishizing both events and the fantasy accounts of them which deny the threat they pose, in the very process of pretending to represent them realistically.”[84] Nonetheless, the relationship between realism and other modes of representation are far more complicated. In this regard, Devils on the Doorstep is realistic without necessarily being realist.[85] By acknowledging that the past cannot be recreated in its own image, the film forces a critical rethinking of cinematic realism that achieves, in some ways, a more truthful representation of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Endnotes [1] Vivian Lee, “The Chinese War Film: Reframing National History in Transnational Cinema,” in American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows, eds. Lisa Funnell and Man-Fung Yip (New York: Routledge, 2014), 101. [2] Gary Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 38-39. [3] Yinan He, “History, Chinese Nationalism and the Emerging Sino-Japanese Conflict,” Journal of Contemporary China 16, no. 50 (February 2007), 8. [4] Timothy Tsu, Sandra Wilson and King-fai Tam, “The Second World War in postwar Chinese and Japanese film,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, eds. King-fai Tam, Timothy Tsu and Sandra Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2015), 2-3. [5] Yinan He, “Remembering and Forgetting the War: Elite Mythmaking, Mass Reaction, and Sino-Japanese Relations, 1950-2006,” History & Memory 19, no. 2 (Fall 2007), 49. ‘Red Classics’ (translated from the Chinese term hongse jingdian) refer to art works that reflect the ideological underpinnings of the CCP and often are used with reference to works that were approved during the Cultural Revolution. [6] Yu Hua, “China Waits for an Apology,” New York Times, April 9, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/opinion/yu-hua-cultural-revolution-nostalgia.html. [7] Timothy Tsu, “A genealogy of anti-Japanese protagonists in Chinese war films, 1949-2011,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 23. [8] Jie Li, “Discolored vestiges of history: Black and white in the age of color cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, no. 3 (2012), 250. [9] Dai Jinhua, “I Want to Be Human: A Story of China and the Human,” Social Text 29, no. 4 (2011), 141-142. My understanding of melodrama is borrowed from Amos Goldberg’s exploration of the relationship between the victim’s voice and melodrama. See Amos Goldberg, “The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History,” History and Theory 48, no. 3 (Oct 2009), 220-237. [10] Yanhong Zhu, “A past revisited: Re-presentation of the Nanjing Massacre in City of Life and Death,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, no. 2 (2013), 87-88. While most of Lu’s characters are ostensibly “historical analogues” inspired by real characters that have been written about, the two Western foreigners in the film—John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin—are actual people who lived in Nanjing during the massacre and documented it extensively in their diaries and correspondence. Together with other foreigners, they helped to set up the Nanjing Safety Zone. [11] Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (Spring 2006), 443-481. [12] André Bazin, What is Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 25. [13] Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin,” 445. [14] Li Yue, “Dancing with the Camera: A Special Interview with Nanjing! Nanjing!’s Cinematographer Cao Yu” (in Chinese), May 11, 2009, http://old.pku-hall.com/WYPPZZ.aspx?id=456. Note that Nanjing! Nanjing! is the alternative English-language title for Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death. [15] He Xi, “Nanjing! Nanjing!’s Sichuan Connection” (in Chinese), April 24, 2009, http://www.cinema.com.cn/YingYuTianXia/2245.htm. I borrow the concept of the “reality effect” from Roland Barthes, who argues that what we call “real” is “never more than a code of representation.” See Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 80. [16] Michael Berry, “Cinematic Representations of the Rape of Nanking,” East Asia 19, no. 4 (2001), 88. [17] Rebecca Nedostup, “City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing! 2009) and the Silenced Nanjing Native” in Through a Lens Darkly: Films of Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, eds. John Michalczyk and Raymond Helmick (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 64. [18] Shao Yan, “In the film we have kept our integrity: Exclusive interview with Lu Chuan” (in Chinese), Dianying shijie, April 2009, 24-29. [19] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 88. [20] Berry, “Cinematic Representations of the Rape of Nanking,” 95. [21] He Xi, “Nanjing! Nanjing!’s Sichuan Connection.” [22] Elie Wiesel, “Foreword” (trans. Annette Insdorf) in Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xii. [23] Wiesel, “Foreword,” xii. [24] Amanda Weiss, “Contested Images of Rape: The Nanjing Massacre in Chinese and Japanese Films,” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 2 (Winter 2016), 437. [25] Tanya Horeck, Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (New York: Routledge, 2013), 13. [26] Chungmoo Choi, “The Politics of War Memories towards Healing” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), eds. Takashi Fujitani, Lisa Yoneyama and Geoffrey White (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 399. [27] Daqing Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections on Historical Inquiry,” in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, ed. Joshua Fogel (Berkley: University of California Press, 2000), 151. See also Fujiwara Akira, “The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview,” in The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38, ed. Bob Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 51-52. [28] Nedostup, “City of Life and Death,” 65. [29] Weiss, “Contested Images of Rape,” 437. [30] As Michael Berry notes, the reliance on presumably impartial and objective foreigners to authenticate the Nanjing Massacre is not new to Chinese cinema, and he traces this “legitimizing power of the West” to Luo Guanqun’s Massacre in Nanjing (1987). See Berry, “Cinematic Representations of the Rape of Nanking,” 90-91. [31] Kevin Lee, “City of Life and Death,” Cineaste 35, no. 2, Spring 2010, https://www.cineaste.com/spring2010/city-of-life-and-death/. [32] John Rabe, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, trans. John Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Minnie Vautrin, Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). [33] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 139-143. Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking also describes the Chinese trauma of the Nanjing Massacre primarily through the lens of Western observers, relying heavily on the diaries of American missionaries Minnie Vautrin and John Magee, as well as the German businessman and Nazi Party member John Rabe. See Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic, 1997). [34] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 142; Honda Katsuichi, The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998). [35] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 139. [36] Paul Armstrong, “Fury over Japanese politician’s Nanjing Massacre denial,” CNN, February 23, 2012, https://www.cnn.com/2012/02/23/world/asia/china-nanjing-row/index.html. [37] Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 95. [38] Lu Chuan declined an offer to direct a film about the Nanjing Massacre that, according to him, “valorized” the role of John Rabe. See Keen Zhang, “City of Sorrow: Competing film portrayals of the Nanjing Massacre,” China.org.cn, April 30, 2009, http://china.org.cn/culture/2009-04/30/content_17702091.htm. Interestingly, the heavy influence of Western-centric historiography on City of Life and Death can be observed from how the main character Kadokawa Masao was reconstructed from a “historical analogue” found in Vautrin’s diaries. See Vautrin, Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing. [39] This is encapsulated in the Chinese phrase “白纸黑字” (baizhi heizi), which literally means “white paper with black words” and refers to the fixity/conclusiveness of written evidence. [40] Li, “Discolored vestiges of history,” 250. [41] Jerome Silbergeld, Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 150. [42] In doing so, the film departs the realm of conventional realism and into the realm of surrealism. See Kristof Van den Troost, “War, Horror and Trauma: Japanese atrocities on Chinese screens,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 62-63. [43] This is, of course, a reference to the eponymous “devils” in the film. In fact, Jiang Wen’s connection of the “devils” to the Japanese soldiers is even clearer in the original Chinese-language title of the film “鬼子来了” (guizi lailie), with the guizi (literally “devils”/”ghosts”) being frequently invoked in both wartime and postwar parlance to refer to the Japanese. See Julian Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war: the devils and buffoons of Jiang Wen’s Guizi Laile,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 2, no. 2, September 2004, 107-108. [44] Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992). David Wang applies the same concept to his analysis of Lu Xun’s literature, who was traumatized by his experience of the First Sino-Japanese War and subsequent turned to writing literature as a way of ‘saving China’s soul’. See David Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 35. [45] Li, “Discolored vestiges of history,” 254. [46] Lu Xun, “The True Story of Ah Q,” in Call to Arms (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2010), 141-212. Cheng Qingsong and Huang Ou, My Camera Doesn’t Lie (in Chinese) (Beijing: Zhongguo Youyi, 2002), 72-73. [47] Lu Xun, “The True Story of Ah Q,” 209. [48] Feng Zongxin, “Fictional Narrative as History: Reflection and Deflection,” Semiotica 170, no. 1, 2008, 189; Andrew Jones, “The Violence of the Text: Reading Yu Hua and Shi Zhicun,” Positions 2, Winter 1994, 593. See also Martin Huang, “The Inescapable Predicament: The Narrator and His Discourse in ‘The True Story of Ah Q’,” Modern China 16, no. 4, October 1990, 435. [49] Cheng and Huang, My Camera Doesn’t Lie, 75. [50] A derogatory term referring to the Japanese and other foreigners. See note 42. [51] Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 107-108. See also Xu, Sinascape, 43-44. [52] You Fengwei, From ‘Survival’ to ‘Devils on the Doorstep’ (in Chinese) (Beijing: Beijing Publishing House, 1999), 5. [53] You Fengwei, “Survival,” in Life Channel (in Chinese) (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue, 2005). [54] Haiyan Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 256. [55] Much of the film is shot within the claustrophobic interiors of village houses, where the villagers discuss and deliberate what to do with the prisoners. The use of language and poetry also reflects the playfulness and lyricism of peasant storytelling methods. See Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 112. [56] Xu, Sinascape, 44. See also Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 113. [57] Even though Devils on the Doorstep won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, Jiang’s success was almost completely ignored in China. His film was later banned for release in China. Chinese critics have argued that the film was “insufficiently patriotic” and had “grave errors in the representation of historical truth.” See Wang Fanghua, “Devils on the Doorstep’s Black and White Emotions through a Color Filter” (in Chinese), Dianying Pingjie, August 2013, 36-37. [58] Rana Mitter, “China’s ‘Good War’: Voices, Locations, and Generations in the Interpretation of the War of Resistance to Japan” in Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia, eds. Sheila Miyoshi Jager & Rana Mitter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 188-189. [59] Yun Xia, Down with Traitors: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 5. [60] Not only is the line between “soldier” and “civilian” blurred in the film and in reality, where a significant portion of the Chinese resistance army was composed of poorly trained and ill-equipped conscripts, most of the “soldiers” in the Safety Zone were also injured and disarmed, as Tang makes clear. [61] Zhu, “A past revisited,” 102. [62] Lu Chuan, Nanjing! Nanjing!: City of Life and Death, 2009. [63] Siu Leng Li, “The theme of salvation in Chinese and Japanese war movies,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 82. [64] Wen Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep, 2000. [65] Paola Voci, “The Sino-Japanese War in Ip Man: From miscommunication to poetic combat,” in Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War, 46. [66] Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep. [67] Silbergeld, Body in Question, 93. [68] Paola Voci, “The Light out of the tunnel: Re-thinking Chinese cinema’s war film realism,” Parol XXVII, no. 25, 2014, 93. See also Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Secret Histories of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1, 2001, 255. [69] Xia, Down with Traitors, 11-12. [70] Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 203. [71] Xia, Down with Traitors, 7. [72] Ward, “Filming the anti-Japanese war,” 114. [73] Xia reaches a similar conclusion from the analysis of postwar trial records of Chinese hanjian. See Xia, Down with Traitors, Chapter 2. [74] Stephanie Brown, “Victims, Heroes, Men, and Monsters: Revisiting a Violent History in City of Life and Death,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 32, no. 6, 2015, 531. [75] Zhu, “A past revisited,” 95-97. [76] Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre,” 157-158. [77] Tian Yu, “From Red Sorghum to Devils on the Doorstep: Conceptual evolution in Chinese film adaptations,” Postscript 23, no. 3, Summer 2004. [78] Translation from Haiyan Lee. See Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, 258. [79] Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep. [80] Translation from Haiyan Lee. See Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, 262. [81] Jiang, Devils on the Doorstep. [82] Silbergeld, Body in Question, 105. See also Xu, Sinascape, 49. [83] Rana Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History, and Memory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987-1997,” China Quarterly 161, March 2000, 288. [84] Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 32. [85] Silbergeld, Body in Question, 82-86. Bibliography Armstrong, Paul. “Fury over Japanese politician’s Nanjing Massacre denial.” CNN. 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Author Name < Back Interview with Geoff Mulgan Catherine Nelli JPPE: Great. So, we'll start off speaking about your new book, Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination . Could you explain what political imagination and radical political imagination are before speaking about what the book is about, your argument, and your process researching and writing it? Mulgan: So I became more and more concerned in the last few years that we might have a worsening problem of political imagination. And there were various signs of this, there was a kind of obvious one which the many activists, the many people who are politically enthusiastic can very easily see into the future, how things could go horribly wrong, could see ecological disaster, climate catastrophe, and so on. Which in many ways is a good thing, but very much harder to imagine or describe almost any kind of social progress, what would be a significantly better way of organizing welfare, or democracy, or health, or education. I observed that we have a huge capacity now for technological imagination. Vast sums of money spent on think tanks and conferences, looking at smart homes or smart cities or AI and so on, but almost nothing comparable in terms of serious work thinking about how our future society or economy could be run, rather than just the hardware. Politics—it's very striking. On the one hand, how many leaders now talk about going back to make America great again, or France or Britain or China or India. The last US election was a contest between two old men who haven’t really said very much about where they would want the world to be in a generation or two from now. I have increasingly felt that this sort of failure of imagination was fueling in a very subtle way a sort of fatalism—a sense that actually the world won't get better. Just as in our own individual lives, if we can't see something good on the horizon, something which might be better for us a year, five years down the line, it's quite hard to be happy and thriving. I think there's something equivalent for societies and the whole world. What I did in the book is partly researching the past of social and political imagination. And there'll be many ways in which people tried to look ahead; they did it through writing utopias, and there are hundreds, if not 1000s, of utopian writings from feminist utopias of the 15th century through to the great 19th century ones, like Bella , which was, I think, at the time the second best selling author ever in the US. There were attempts to create model communities, model towns, model organizations. There's the role of generative ideas. And one of the things I point out in the book is that often quite generic ideas like human rights or a circular economy may be a bit vague at first, but they then spawn lots of other ideas which become useful and change the world. And a large part of the book is about methods: what are the methods we could be using now to get better at thoughtful, rigorous imagination of the future a generation or two from now? How do you use methods, often from creativity and design, to expand your menu of options, you can then interrogate each of those, many of them might not be attractive, but at least to cultivate the habit towards the muscle of thinking creatively ahead. I look at the role of universities in that, I look at the role of political parties, which at times in history have played a big role in imagination, but have largely vacated it in much of the world. And also the role of places—how to create museums, galleries, physical places where people can come together to imagine into the future. And if nothing else, I hope the book will spark at least a bit of a debate on the question: Do we have a problem? Maybe some people will say we don't have a problem. Some people may say, well, actually, imagination is always bad, it leads to terrible results, and many of the blueprints in the last century, and many of the utopias did have horrible results. And one of the arguments I make is that now, we need to combine imagination with experiments. So you don't impose a fully formed blueprint on a city or a society; you try it out in a much more organic, experimental way. And others may say actually, technology is the answer to everything and we don't have social imagination because we don't need it. We can fix everything with a new anti-aging drug or some fantastic ecology, which will sequester carbon and so on. As I say, I think all of those will be wrong, but at least hopefully that will get a debate going. JPPE Do you look at a sort of comparative analysis of case studies from different countries? Or is the structure of the book more idea based? Mulgan It’s ideas. Basically, there were lots of references to real examples, either from history or from the present. And one of the parts of the book which is a bit more like comparative political analysis is trying to compare the dominant political imaginaries of the next 20 or 30 years globally. What are they? And I argue probably the most powerful ones or the strongest ones are nationalist techno authoritarian ones, particularly China, Xi Jinping thought, but in a different way the BJP’s to visions of the future in India. Putin doesn't really have one in Russia. But he and Erdoğan are other examples. And I argue that this is a very powerful semi-imaginary which actually is rather vague about the future but tries to tie together, in some ways, quite traditional authoritarian nationalism with high technologies. It's very 19th century Prussian militarism. I look at different imaginaries of the Green Movement and some of the frictions and issues in deep and less deep ecological thought. I look at what might happen to liberalism, a revived neoliberalism, and different strands of conservatism. But essentially, that is an attempt at a comparative analysis of both current and future imaginaries. JPPE Do you think digital technologies detract from or contribute to radical political imaginations? What are the different ways that they could contribute or detract? And in what way should they be conceptualized and used to the benefit of imagination? Mulgan So I've got quite a background in digital technology—my PhD is in telecoms and I've probably been immersed in all these things. And my answer is essentially “both and.” So sometimes thinking about things digitally can be very useful because as happened to retailing, or banking, or relationships, all sorts of things, if you look at it through a digital lens, you often deconstruct what's going on. And then you can remake it in a completely different way. So you end up with Amazon, not with, you know, high street shops or with match.com rather than people meeting in bars. And in that sense, actually, digital technology is quite useful for social imagination. And any imagination of where democracy might be in 50 years time has to have a substantial digital element. And those places like Taiwan and Iceland are reinventing democracy. The US still seems to be stuck in an 18th century model of democracy. We don't quite understand why, but that's another story. Digital is part of that, but if you only think in a digital way, as so much of the movement around smart cities, smart data, and smart homes did, you usually end up with results which are not very pleasant for humans to live in or which lose all sorts of dimensions of the present. And I think this was a big failure of the internet, where there was some incredibly naive techno optimism about how on its own the internet would spread democracy, equality, removal, corporations, etc. And often the exact opposite happened. And that tells us there was a major intellectual failure amongst the sort of Silicon Valley thinkers who simply didn't understand what they were part of. And that's why thinking simultaneously with a social lens and a technological lens is vital for the next 50 or 100 years. JPPE What’s the difference between social and political imagination? How do they coincide and interact? Mulgan I think they overlap with each other. There isn't a straightforward boundary line. By politics we tend to mean the things which politicians end up talking about put into their programs, maybe pass laws about in Congress or Parliament or the Bundestag. And that is the world of politics, which often does include or has at times included powerful visions of where society might head. There are many examples of where that happens outside politics much more through social movements and daily life. And people are getting on with social innovation and were ignoring the political realm. And often things start off social and then become political, so many ecological ideas, like the idea of a circular economy and radical recycling or veganism, you know, these tended to begin very much with social movements, and much, much later, became politicized, became an issue for laws and elections and programs and carbon taxes and so on. So one of the things I try to look at in the book is this dynamic between the social and the political, and then back into the social. For example, when you pass new laws on equality they in turn then affect the norms within every organization, ultimately, maybe back to the household and the family too. JPPE You speak about the tapering off of visions of the future. There seems to be a desire for change within the social world but very few productive outlets to channel this desire. How do you foresee this changing over time and how would you wish it to change to spark future action? Mulgan I think one answer to that lies with institutions and what role they play, especially powerful institutions can either encourage this sort of work or discourage it. So take universities. I've been doing a parallel strand of work, looking at why it is that in universities, and particularly in social science, the sort of exploratory design work, thinking ahead work, has largely disappeared from most universities all over the world. It's disappeared partly for good reasons, as people have become more data driven and more empirical, and partly because a lot of the radicals moved into a safe space of critique, rather than proposal. That was one of the weird things which happened to Marxism in universities in the last 20 or 40 years. It moved out of real active politics into academic critique. And founders haven't rewarded it because they've tended to reward deepening work within disciplines, whereas exploratory creative work has spread across multiple disciplines. And in a paper I published last year in Germany, I tried to set out in more detail what a probe of exploratory social sciences would be; what it would look like for the universities to have significant interdisciplinary teams working on the design options of a zero carbon economy or a radically transformed mental health system. And that's what I hope universities could do. At the moment they have almost no role in this and it’s incredible in a way. There's so much brain power in universities, and they don't play an active role. JPPE What would it take for them to do that? Mulgan Leadership. Money. You have to have a debate, you have to believe there's a problem. People at universities acknowledge there is a problem needing to be solved. So one of my purposes is at least a debate about that. And then political parties. I mean, the political parties in much the world have rather atrophied, hollowed out, hardened. And often it's the new political parties who are more creative than the old ones, which dominate your country and my country and some others. But if you were inventing a political party now, it would probably have much more of its core purpose being to organize a dialogue with the public about options for the future, about ideas. Instead, they tend to be captured by interest groups. They just work on winning elections or their money goes into election fighting rather than thinking. They’ve lost the capability of having broad open dialogues as opposed to campaigning, and so on. And it's interesting. Some of the newer parties have experimented with much more interesting methods of social dialogue like the Five Star Movement in Italy, Podemos in Spain, and there are quite a few others. I wouldn't say they've got there. But a political party which aspires to run a country should be owning part of this conversation about the options for the future. I think cities can do it. Good mayors often do have the resources to bring the whole of a city into a discussion about its physical future. So for example, just now we've just finished a really interesting session with a group of cities. A project I coordinate looks at what can be done over the next five or 10 years for cities to really prioritize population level mental health. And that's something which, you know, much of the public thinks is kind of obvious, that they should be doing that. And yet, politics lags far behind and nearly all the money is still in physical health, and hospitals and things like that. And very few political parties would feel comfortable actually even talking about mental health as a priority. They’re stuck in an anachronistic way of seeing the world. JPPE When did you first become invested in the power of political imagination and creative imagination? And how did you first identify the lack of the imagination that you see now? Mulgan I don't know, I suppose in different ways I’d probably be part of this. I've had a career which has partly been working in governments top-down, and I was part of some quite good exercises of political leaders trying to spark this. So Tony Blair, who has both strengths and weaknesses, but did at various times try to encourage big public conversations about the future and future priorities. I worked for an Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who did a huge exercise, getting the whole country thinking 15, 20 years ahead on climate change and pensions and water, and then bringing 1000 people into parliament to talk about the results. So I have seen how good leaders can do this from the top down. And from the bottom up, lots of grassroots organizations, social innovation projects, I've automatically tried to think radically about the future. But I guess since the financial crisis in particular, I think horizons have shrunk right in amongst leaders, but also amongst NGOs, social movement organizations, they'd be more in case of trying to survive. And that's happened alongside this growing sense of imminent ecological catastrophe. And these have all contributed to squeezing out the capacity to imagine radically. JPPE So does it require different methods of funding so they can move past survival mode? Mulgan I think there's certainly a big role for philanthropy. Your country has enormous amounts of spare money in philanthropy, but almost none of it goes into this. There are some good reasons for that, obviously, philanthropy tends to come from the beneficiaries of the old system, so they're never likely to be very radical in challenging it. I still think a little bit more effort on the part of the Fords and Rockefellers and Hewletts would have paid off because this isn't very expensive. But who else is going to create the space for people to think, to look ahead, to range a bit more widely? And I’ve spent most of my life on much more short term practical, pragmatic problem solving. But we all need some sense of the bigger picture, what that's leading towards, to help make sense of the actions in the present. And that's what's missing. And I would say in the US, politics, philanthropy, and higher education have all essentially failed their societal role in that respect. JPPE So as you said, it requires opening the debate so that people know that there's a problem. What are the steps after that? Mulgan Well then I think it's about organizing and funding and orchestrating the more detailed work, which needs to be done. And I do use the analogy with art or film or writing. Everyone can take part in it a little bit. We can all make our movies on Tiktok and so on. But actually, if you want really good films, it's actually quite hard, it's quite skilled, it's quite professional. It requires quite a lot of people. Or for a good Netflix TV series. And it’s the same for social imagination. You can start off with sparks and some of it can be very open and participatory. But if you are going to do a detailed thinking through how to regulate or organize a netzero economy that requires a highly specialized knowledge, interrogation, and argument, and so on. That's what universities should be doing. I work with a lot of governments around the world, you know, 10 to 15 at any one point. And if they're looking at a new policy area, you sort of assume there must be off the shelf, lots of lots of options, which they could consider. Let's say a new kind of universal basic income is one, which I've been a bit involved in, and is much talked about in much of the world. And there are quite a lot of pilots now of UBIs, but the quality of the work of it is still very thin. And if you are a government wanting to introduce one, actually, you will have to do most of the work designing it, thinking through its impact. There is not a menu of options you can draw down. And the same is true with almost any field. Let's say bringing the circular economy principles to fashion or whatever, the legwork and hard labor has not been done to prepare the options for others to draw on. And this is also true at a global level. The UN was set up in the 1940s, benefitting from lots of hard work, which had been done imagining what a UN could be in the dark years of the 30s. I've been doing work recently on what could be new global governance arrangements, if conditions became more favorable. There's nothing out there in terms of well thought through options. There's lots of good description, lots of good analysis, lots of good critique of all that's wrong with the UN. But it's as if the people who are the experts feel too nervous to ever put their names to a proposal, which someone else might shoot down. So we have this sort of bizarre deficit of looking ahead, whereas in other fields, like in sciences, or the life sciences or AI, lots of people are paid to think speculatively to design possible new genomic treatments or new algorithms. And the imbalance between a world of science and tech, which was too good looking ahead, and the world of the social and the political, which has given up on it, I think it's really become a serious problem.

Oliver Hicks The Necessity of Perspective: A Nietzschean Critique of Historical Materialism and Political Meta-Narratives Oliver Hicks Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche both contributed immensely to 19th century political philosophy and laid the foundation for countless revisions, interpretations, and new theories throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. While they share a common goal of exposing hidden, socially constructed restraints in order to liberate the individual, they differ sharply on both the nature of those societal restraints and what liberation actually looks like. I present these thinkers as foils: Marx guided by a normative approach that sees liberation as an inevitable conclusion of current social conditions, and Nietzsche describing liberation as necessary but ultimately ambiguous. Ultimately, I assert that this ambiguity is a necessary acceptance of true liberation that ought to humble any assertion of truth, morality, or rationality. I. Introduction But everything is fair It’s a paradox we call reality So keepin’ it real will make you A casualty of abnormal normality - Talib Kweli, Respiration (1) The above remarks are from a verse of the 2002 duet album Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star , in which artist Talib Kweli describes his inner-city New York landscape. The broader context of the song speaks to the harsh and often hopeless reality of a low-income Black experience. It begins with a dialogue from the seminal hip hop documentary Style Wars , in which a New York graffiti artist describes a recent work titled “Crime in the City.” The work implicitly asks the audience whether “crime” is all his city has to offer or if it is simply what one chooses to see when examining the New York streets. Kweli contributes his own perspective in the aforementioned line, in which he calls his reality a “paradox” where everything in this world is fair. Thus, nothing can be unfair with the proper perspective, lending itself to the paradox of never being able to pin down what is truly right or wrong. Kweli speaks of inter-gang violence, where young Black men are pitted against each other for the scarce resources present in their desolate environment. Yes, success is good, but at what cost to the broader struggle of their community? The second part of his stanza questions the efforts of anyone in this world to be truly “real,” as Kweli plays with a definition that is so integral to one’s identity in the hip hop community. Hip hop and rap are built around delivering viscerally authentic, or “real,” stories, usually about struggle, persecution, and ultimately perseverance against an adverse world. Thus, “keeping it real” becomes the idealized form of living as opposed to whitewashed versions of struggle or falsified stories for commercial success. But what does “realness” actually entail, and is it captured by this idealization? Kweli would answer that it is less objective than it might seem. Any attempt at authenticity is undermined by another perspective, and thus the vanity that accompanies an allegedly “real” individual instead makes them a casualty: they are not truly real, authentic, nor honest versions of themselves, but rather they are only “real” by an externally defined perspective, one that society wants for them. Kweli is inverting a pillar of rap culture by arguing that what is deemed true “realness” by people in the city is actually defined by the same subjective standards used to define its opposite. Put simply, the inner-city stories to which Kweli is referring are authentic as defined by what is expected of the storytellers: to be hard, cold-blooded, and insensitive to the harsh world around them. But does this produce genuine versions of who these individuals could be given different circumstances? Or are they simply buying into the “abnormal normality,” one defined by social constructs that is ultimately abnormal to whatever their “real” selves might be? The question of authenticity amidst veiling social norms is one discussed by a variety of modern political theorists, all seeking to understand who we are in order to understand who we ought to be—and how we ought to be governed. From descriptions of a primordial state of nature proposed by early contract theorists to Karl Marx’s world-encompassing system of historical materialism, these modern thinkers attempt to sketch out the natural, psychological, and social undercurrents of our behavior. Though Marx was the first to usher in a hermeneutics of suspicion by critiquing existing philosophical norms in search of hidden truths, he did so with the intent of outlining his own normative conception of humanity's goal (or his own end point on the linear timeline that is progress): communism. Decades later, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed “we are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge” in his preface to On the Genealogy of Morals. He proposed a philosophy that sought to interrogate reigning value systems that presented themselves as natural or self-evident without replacing them with his own explicit normative solution (2). Nietzsche recognized the limitations of philosophical inquiry while operating within the system he was critiquing. Humans lack a basic sense of what is good as enshrined in the concept of natural law or historical materialism because our entire system of moral values is a product of changing power dynamics. More importantly, we cannot see any semblance of truth unless we shed these artificial moral constructs. The relativity inherent in our ability to make judgements of ourselves and fellow citizens ultimately moves the goalposts of political theory itself: we are no longer moving toward that ideal form with which Plato was so obsessed because we cannot accurately define it. There are no political meta-narratives, no slate of criteria with which we can accurately and objectively identify our deepest human nature—to do so would be to dismiss far too many factors and make far too many assumptions. Rather, we must instead work to interrogate our unwavering beliefs in perceived truths or ideal forms in order to understand how we might escape them as they arise. As shown by Talib Kweli in his aforementioned lyrics, the inability to shed the social, moral, and ethical constructs that surround a particular Black experience raises questions regarding the obscuration of truth and the need for a variety of perspectives. Using Nietzsche’s skepticism of philosophy and morality as a foil for Marx’s historical materialism, I will draw on a number of their works to discuss the validity of any proposed political meta-narrative. First, I will present a brief model for viewing history as forward-facing in the pursuit of a realized ideal form, courtesy of Marx. Then, I will use Nietzsche to reject the notion of an ideal form and instead emphasize the need for perspective to understand any type of truth, political or otherwise, in order to escape the social constructs that mystify this truth and enslave us to normative ideals. II. Historical Progress as Forward-Facing: Marx’s Determinism Marx famously remarked at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”(3). More importantly, however, was the history that Marx was proposing henceforth. Communism was not just a prescription for the ills of capitalism, but a prediction of the inevitable collapse of the market economy itself: the contradictions intrinsic to capitalist function would ultimately lead to its own demise. Communism would simply be the final and best option for a post-revolutionary society. In this way, Marx lays a deterministic view of human progress. If humanity keeps moving forward as is, we will reach an inflection point; if we actively work to deconstruct the status quo, we will reach that same inflection point sooner. Though bleak, this notion of progress posits its own normative assumption that society is moving forward : ideology has simply masked antagonistic class divides while capitalism exploits them, but we will inevitably overcome this stain on history to usher in a new and better world. This deterministic presentation of history, or historical materialism, is one of Marx’s greatest contributions to political philosophy. Using this dialectical approach, Marx identified two main forces that drive historical change: the division of classes and the division of labor. The evolution of class systems is best articulated in the first section of the Manifesto , where Marx focuses primarily on Europe’s transition from feudal to modern societies, namely bourgeois societies. Feudal societies were composed of complex hierarchies: feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs, and more. Among these classes existed a constant dynamic of oppression, wherein higher classes dominated subordinate ones as defined by the material conditions of each (14). Centuries of global exploration, however, produced ever-expanding markets and ever-increasing demand that revolutionized the modes of production and condensed class antagonisms into Marx’s binary: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This defined the “Modern Industry” that Marx witnessed in the 19th century, wherein “the modern bourgeoisie is itself a product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange” (5). Underlying this series of class revolutions are developments in the division of labor: first in tribal communities, then ancient communes, feudal states, commercial states, and finally the capitalist state of the bourgeoisie. The division of labor reflects both the growth of the productive capacities of these communities as well as the growth of divided interests among individuals. For example, Marx argues that the division of labor within a nation first leads to the “separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labor, hence to the separation of town and country… [then] to the separation of commercial from industrial labor” and so on (6). Occurring simultaneously are infinitesimal divisions within these branches “among the individuals cooperating in definite kinds of labor” (7). Ultimately, Marx places the modern industrial state, with all of its complex and specialized divisions, on an historical timeline that inevitably moves toward the maximization of its productive capacities since it is constantly in competition with similarly structured nations. This maximization, however, along with its own internal contradictions, begets its own destruction. The consolidation of “scattered private property” into the consolidation of “capitalistic private property” in the hands of an increasingly smaller elite becomes too heavy to support itself, and the fetters that confine the socialization of labor for exploitation ironically lead to the organization of a massive, oppressed class that revolts against their slave-wage masters (8). This revolution, Marx argues, is a smoother transition than the original consolidation of private property via the socialization of labor, since the latter is the “expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers,” but the former is the “expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people” (9). However, the light at the end of this tunnel that is capitalism and the driving force behind this expropriation of the few by the many is Marx’s concept of “species-being.” As human beings, Marx considers our most basic and fundamental essence to be our drive to engage in productive activity; it is our “working-up of the objective world,” in which “[man] duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created” (10). This creative process, when done freely, consciously, and socially, is what separates us from animals and satisfies our life purpose: we choose what to make and when to make it in order to survive. Capitalism disrupts this process by commodifying labor and subsequently alienating the laborer first from their product, second from their process, third from themselves, and finally from each other (11). As a result, the worker becomes antagonistic to the entire system of private property: they are resentful of the bourgeois capitalist, suspicious of their fellow worker, and disillusioned with themselves, all because of alienation from their species-being. The rediscovery of our species-being is the natural epilogue to the implosion of capitalism. And yet, this conclusion relies on Marx’s own crypto-normativity. Like the early contract theorists who came far before him, Marx is simply making his own normative assumption regarding human nature: we live to create the world around us, and are only satisfied by seeing ourselves in that world. One could argue that the exploitation of this process is a violation of a Marxist natural law, and that a communist revolution is a means of retributive justice. As noble as it may be to argue that communism is the inevitable end point of a history structured by material conditions, Marx’s theory is limited by its own dogmatic assumptions. However, he was not alone in proposing human history as a deterministic teleology. Marx built his theory off the critique of Hegel, who argued a similar conception of history driven by conflicts in ideas rather than material conditions. Adam Smith falls into this same category, emphasizing the ability to improve society through the accelerating efficiency of mutually beneficial economic transactions and production (he even titled his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations —“Nations” being plural to suggest collective benefit in pursuing capitalistic ends). Immanuel Kant believed in the ability of individual societies to develop the faculties of humankind over time, leading again to the upward trajectory of progress and the inevitable achievement of our full potential. However, each of these thinkers suffer from the same flaw: they boldly claim to know the end stage of humanity and the final form to which political philosophy strives while being limited by their own historical context and intellectual horizons. III. Rejection of the Pure Form: Nietzsche’s Response Though his work is filled with a multitude of social and moral critiques, Nietzsche claimed that “the worst, most durable, and most dangerous of all errors so far was… Plato’s invention of the pure spirit and good as such” (12). Consistent with Nietzsche’s long-standing critique of religion was his belief that Christianity had become “Platonism for ‘the people’” by providing an ideal form to which, by restricting one’s indulgences and taking leaps of faith, one could strive and achieve a good moral life. To Nietzsche, however, faith extends far beyond theology: it applies to every corner of philosophy and knowledge. Philosophers’ pursuits of knowledge are done in vain, since each proposes an alleged “cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic” that is, in reality, simply “an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of ‘inspiration’... that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact” (13). A particularly heinous example of this prejudice is Kant’s “discovery” of a new human faculty, one that allowed him to argue man’s capacity to make synthetic judgements a priori . Nietzsche argues this discovery was in fact not a discovery at all, but a lazy leap of faith that compelled him to answer his own questions “by virtue of a faculty” and essentially invent his own causa sui (14). Consequently, Nietzsche argues that we ought to approach knowledge with suspicion. By questioning the value of truth and certainty in the face of their opposites, Nietzsche rejects the idea of proposing a fully contained and explanatory system for any type of knowledge, since “in the philosopher… there is nothing whatever that is impersonal; and above all, his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is ” (15). Dogmatic philosophy and its ideal forms, therefore, are less interesting to Nietzsche than the necessity of our belief in them. Rather than ask what our beliefs say, a better question to pose is what these beliefs say about us . By accusing all philosophy of being dogmatic, Nietzsche is drawing attention to the philosophical limitations of any single individual. As such, a new generation of philosophers ought to embrace “the dangerous ‘maybe’ in every sense,” instead putting their faith in possibilities rather than certainties (16). To recognize one’s own inability to offer an all-encompassing system for the world is to endorse the necessity of perspective, the variety of which is the only way to understand the true nature of anything. To deny this necessity, which Nietzsche calls “the basic condition of all life,” is to instead continue the pursuit of that Platonic good spirit or ideal form (17). Rather than working to defend knowledge as we come to understand it, philosophers should be constantly interrogating knowledge in an attempt to free themselves from their own prejudices. In doing so, one rejects the idea of truth as purely objective and “knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge” (18). Nietzsche draws attention to the fact that there is no view from nowhere: “there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be” (19). Put differently, one can liken Nietzsche’s concept of truth to a statue: any singular view of the statue only provides a singular picture of it. The view from the front of the statue will give a completely different image than that from the back, assuming we could even agree upon which is front and back in the first place. A plethora of angles upon which to view the statue, therefore, is necessary to truly understand it since any individual view is inherently limited by their position relative to the object. “Free spirits,” then, unlike those who throughout history have proposed their singular view of the statue as correct, are that new generation of individuals who constantly question their own prejudices and adopt new angles (20). In this way, one could argue that Nietzsche rejects the concept of Truth altogether, and perspectivism becomes a practical tool for understanding the world around us as we develop our own concepts of knowledge. At the very least, Nietzsche seems to suggest that regardless of the existence of any Truth, we cannot even begin to understand Truth unless we prioritize an ensemble of perspectives over any individual one. In doing so, we can use the former to prevent us from being limited by the latter. Once again, Nietzsche’s perspectivism has less to do with its relationship to truth (capital-T or otherwise) and more to do with its relationship to the individual and their inherently limited perspective. This concept of agency and power in the face of social restraints is consistent throughout Nietzsche’s works, and one of the most obvious ties is in his critique of Christianity. Nietzsche makes explicit his disdain for the church in The Genealogy of Morals by arguing that the church itself pioneered a type of slave morality that inherently limits the capability of man by suppressing his instincts. Throughout history, however, this morality was used strategically by the weak (namely priests) to seize some semblance of power from the nobility, whose morality is entirely self-affirming, contemptible towards things outside itself, and emphasizes power over restraint (21). Not unlike Talib Kweli’s description of his catch-22 lifestyle as a gangster in inner-city New York, Nietzsche asks us to consider a bird of prey and a lamb: “there is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey—but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs” (22). In fact, he continues, the lambs would be perfectly well off to regard anything like a bird of prey as evil, since it is the source of violence against them; the bird of prey, however, might view this “somewhat derisively, and will perhaps say: ‘we don’t bear any grudge at all towards these good lambs, in fact we love them, nothing is tastier than a tender lamb” (23). The perspective that is intrinsic to these qualitative judgements of good and evil both undermines their objectivity and highlights a cornerstone of Nietzsche’s philosophy: will-to-power. With regard to Marx, Nietzsche dismisses one of his most basic assumptions using this concept of the will-to-power: … life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation; —but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organization within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equal—it takes place in every healthy aristocracy—must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavor to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendency—not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely Will to Power… “Exploitation” does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function; it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life (24). By arguing that exploitation is not inherently evil, it is easy to dismiss Nietzsche as equally normative with different assumptions. The difference, however, is that Nietzsche’s critique does not lead him to propose a political solution or theorize a political meta-narrative meant to end suffering as he sees it, for that would be replacing one restraining superstructure with another. Will-to-power, according to Nietzsche, is not a facet of human nature that must be complemented by politics nor economics: the will-to-power is a means to finding that solution. It is the unaffected and unfettered ability of truly “free spirits” to escape the confines of “good” and “evil” themselves. As discussed above, no philosopher is truly impartial nor void of their own prejudices, and political meta-narratives such as Marx’s unwavering rejection of exploitation cannot exist to serve their purpose without accepting some degree of dogmatic assumptions. Nietzsche himself is no exception, which is why he hypothesizes these free spirits rather than identifying with them. But continuing to engage in philosophy, particularly political philosophy, without interrogating these assumptions and prejudices is distracting; we cannot begin to construct new worlds until we have deconstructed old ones. Earlier in Nietzsche’s career, we see a similar critique of Christian morals in a different context. In On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life , Nietzsche argues that Christianity seeks to define an end point for humanity by predicting “an end to life on earth… and [condemning] the living to live in the fifth act of the tragedy” (25). By limiting the scope and potential of humanity, Christianity restrains the true potential of the strong and capable, or those who might have the potential to transcend the social or moral limitations they have inherited. Moreover, Nietzsche argues that “Christianity would like to [destroy] every culture which incites to striving further and takes for its motto memento vivere … [it] rejects with a shrug of the shoulders everything in the process of becoming, and spreads over it the feeling of being very late arrivals and epigoni” (26). Though Marx’s calls to action for the proletarian revolution seem counterintuitive to a feeling of being “late arrivals” or “epigoni,” Nietzsche’s critique holds true with regard to Marxism’s crypto-normative, deterministic approach to social organization. Marx provides an all-encompassing system that is meant to both explain and predict the movement of human progress, which owes itself entirely to factors and conditions that are beyond the individual. In a way, this parallels Nietzsche’s diagnosis that we are products of our society to a degree much higher than we realize. The difference, however, lies in their prognosis. Marx believed that the course of these societal effects, namely material conditions, would inevitably lead to the implosion of the status quo that, if properly prepared for, could usher in his optimal form of social organization. Individuals, therefore, might not be “late arrivals” nor “epigoni,” though Marx certainly seems to think that these individuals are entirely at the behest of their own material conditions. The asymmetrical influence that these material conditions have on us—the proletariat being exploited by these material conditions and the bourgeoisie benefitting from them—leads Marx to draw moral conclusions: exploitation is bad and satisfaction of species-being is good . What Marx fails to do is recognize that he is a product of his own material conditions, and so are his theory and determinations of “good” and “bad.” The quasi-utopian society that is only permitted by the revolution is itself borrowing descriptions from the idealized lifestyles of the bourgeoisie. In The German Ideology , Marx suggests that man in a capitalist society is “a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his livelihood,” which is true for most working-class individuals. He then adds that in a communist society that same man may “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as [he has] a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (27). The ability to actively satisfy one’s species-being, or to do as one pleases without the alienating incentives required by capitalism, is simply the universalization of bourgeois life—it’s not hard to imagine that these hypothesized jacks-of-all-trades did exist in 19th century Europe, they just happened to be the elite. He who can labor (or engage in any productive activity) without being defined by that labor is a privilege of the ruling class—and one that Marx identifies as good and therefore preferable. In other words, a communist society destroys class conflicts by creating the conditions of one class for all classes. This is not to say that Marx is proposing an egalitarian utopia as his positive project, since he does believe in a relatively heterogeneous society living by the mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”(28). Moreover, the concept of class itself is theorized to dissolve post-revolution, but this does not mean that Marx’s ideal conditions for all human beings aren’t plagiarizing the conditions of a single class as observed pre-revolution. When workers own the means of production rather than capitalists, they will have the resources, leisure time, and material conditions to produce in accordance with their species-being and satisfy Marx’s normatively defined purpose (or achieve his own concept of “good”). Like Kant, Marx is creating his own causa sui . A Nietzschean contribution to Marxism might argue, then, that capitalism must be deconstructed in the same way that we might deconstruct Christian morality: not with the intent of replacing these superstructures with our own normative solution, but by interrogating them to essentially see where it takes us. Again, the elusive free spirit is not an indirect, self-congratulatory description of the value of Nietzsche’s own theories, nor is it a pessimistic and nihilistic acceptance that nothing truly matters. Rather, it is a new theory in itself—one that considers the possibilities of a new generation of entirely self-affirming thinkers stripped of their prejudices and social restraints. IV. Conclusion Marx’s ultimate conclusion is that a history of society determined by material conditions leaves us no choice but to reject our current modes of production in favor of a society that complements the satisfaction of our species-being. If we don’t, then capitalism will destroy itself anyway. Marx certainly presents himself as a revolutionary determined to unite the working men of all countries toward a common purpose, but it’s difficult to reconcile this call for individual agency toward a collective purpose with the material conditions that seem to govern us regardless of that agency. Marx’s own logic is, again, itself determined by the superstructures he seeks to identify; he is no more or less a product of them than any of the characters in his theory. The vain assertion of a universal truth that is species-being simply uses his own normative definition of what is good by borrowing language from those who have already determined what is good: the bourgeoisie. Consequently, we see his proposed political meta-narrative, that contradictory principles of capitalism inevitably lead to the realization of human emancipation, is at best incomplete and at worst deeply flawed. In the case of the former, we can at least use Marx’s critique of capital to understand how material conditions have shaped our world views: they can determine incentives, exploit workers based on factors beyond their immediate control, or assign value to both people and commodities. These are invaluable critiques that have wide-ranging implications, but they are nowhere near close enough to providing an all-encompassing system of human behavior. In the case of the latter, however, we are met with the dangerous hubris of which Nietzsche is so suspicious. The true nature of anything can only be understood by simultaneously interrogating our prejudices and assumptions while recognizing the need for multiple perspectives. Truth ought to be sought after, but it is extremely elusive and mystified by social constructs, whether they be political, material, moral, sexual, racial, or otherwise. From a postmodernist perspective, Nietzsche was perhaps prodigal. Today, we live in a pluralist world that is constantly challenging the normative assumptions that structure so much of our interconnected lives. Critical race theory has interrogated the fundamental principles of our facially neutral laws; emerging disciplines of queer and feminist studies have reshaped the way we understand and perform our gender and sexuality; successive generations of increasingly agnostic individuals have undermined religiously-grounded social norms to further liberate the arts and create a vibrant pop culture. Social media alone has become one of the greatest conduits for self-expression and has created channels of communication that the world has never before seen. Everything from college campuses to corporate boardrooms have acknowledged the importance of representation and diversity in order to create more inclusive communities. The 21st century is an era of interrogation that requires one to accept a multiplicity of perspectives. Ultimately, it could be said that we are unified by a common obligation to better understand each other. In a way, Marx becomes the casualty to which Talib Kweli is referring in his verse. The idealization of a satisfied species-being is arguably a normality defined by what is expected of human beings in a capitalistic world: to enjoy their work. It is not difficult to imagine that this is actually abnormal, and the entire concept of labor as we understand it could transform or even wither away in the epochs to come due to technology, climate change, or some other unforeseen development. Nietzsche therefore becomes a critical theorist superseding even Marx, for he seeks to critique not just one superstructure but all the superstructures that limit our ability to define for ourselves what is good, bad, evil, true, rational, or authentic. Political philosophy ought to continue elevating the voices that provide these pointed critiques and encourage generations of free spirits as they come. As Kweli might argue, to truly engage in philosophy is to suspect any normality as actually abnormal, and not suffer as a casualty of its misleading assumptions. Rather, we ought to use these suspicions in the service of life and work towards the most ideal form of social organization we can find while recognizing that there is always work to be done. Endnotes 1 Black Star. “Respiration (feat. Common).” Track 11 on Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star . Rawkus Records, 1998, CD. 2 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 451. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. 3 Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 473. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. 4 Ibid, 474. 5 Ibid, 475. 6 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 150. New York: Norton, 1978. 7 Ibid, 150. 8 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Capital, Volume One.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 437. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. 9 Ibid, 438. 10 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 76. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. 11 Ibid, 72-77; Marx describes species-being at length throughout the Manuscripts. 12 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Beyond Good and Evil.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 193. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. 13 Ibid, 202. 14 Ibid, 207-208. 15 Ibid, 204. 16 Ibid, 201. 17 Ibid, 193. 18 Ibid,. 555. 19 Ibid, 555. 20 Ibid, 242-243. 21 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 472–479. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967.; Nietzsche describes his master-slave dichotomy of morality throughout the first essay of his Genealogy , though particularly in sections 10, 11, 12, and 13. 22 Ibid, 480. 23 Ibid, 481. 24 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Beyond Good and Evil.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 393. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. 25 Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life . Translated by Peter Preuss. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980. 44 26 Ibid, 45. 27 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 160. New York: Norton, 1978. 28 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Critique of the Gotha Program.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 531. New York: Norton, 1978. References Black Star. “Respiration.” Track 11 on Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star . Rawkus Records, 1998, CD. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 437–601. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 469–500. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 146–200. New York: Norton, 1978. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Capital, Volume One.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 294–438. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 66–125. New York, New York: Norton, 1978. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Beyond Good and Evil.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 179–435. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Essay. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche , translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 437–601. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1967. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life . Translated by Peter Preuss. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Critique of the Gotha Program.” Essay. In The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by Robert C. Tucker, 525–542. New York: Norton, 1978. Previous Next

Non-Self Through Time Anita Kukeli Author Hansae Lee Koda Li Nahye Lee Editors Buddhism, like other major religions, has a particular philosophical framework underpinning its teachings. In other words, Buddhism and other religions might be thought of as offering a set of answers to philosophical inquiries, such as questions about moral right and wrong or questions about our position in the universe. The area of philosophical inquiry with which this paper is concerned is the philosophy of self. What does it mean to be a person? Buddhism engages with this debate. Foundational Buddhist thought, or Theravada Buddhism, offers a particular conception of personhood called anatman , or “non-self.” The idea here is that the commonly accepted notion of the self if mistaken; we are not selves. Ordinarily, pre-philosophical reflection on the question of what a person is, one might likely respond that a person it a unified individual entity, such as you or me. Philosophical views depart from this common concept to varying degrees. Some define a person as a human body, comprised of cells and ultimately governed by biological processes. Alternatively, perhaps a person is a mind, constituted most fundamentally by their beliefs and feelings and decisions. Maybe personhood is some mix of the two, or something else entirely. In contrast, the Buddhist conception of personhood rejects the notion of the self as a definable single entity entirely. At first glance, this may seem unacceptable to someone unfamiliar with Buddhist teachings. However, by reproducing the arguments presented in early Buddhist texts, I will show that anatman is on its own a plausible view. I will argue that the real trouble for anatman arises when considered within the broader tradition of Buddhist thought, especially in regard to samsara and karma . Samsara refers to the Buddhist idea of a cycle of rebirth, closely related to karma. Both samsara and karma involve the self persisting from one lifetime to the next. But, if there is no self, how can it persist? Surely, for something to persist through time, that thing must exist. So, it seems that if we accept anatman , and there is no such thing as a self, then we cannot accept samsara or karma. To resolve this tension, there must be a description of this persistence through time that does not require the existence of a self. I will argue that the Buddhist concept of dependent arising accomplishes this, and therefore resolves the tension between anatman on the one hand and samsara and karma on the other. Anatman The argument for anatman derives from the concept of the five aggregates. This is a Buddhist concept that refers to five constitutive parts of a person. The five aggregates are translated various ways, but for the purposes of this paper I will offer them in simple terms. The five aggregates consist of 1) material form, 2) sensation, 3) perception, 4) volitional force, and 5) consciousness. A foundational Buddhist text, the Questions of King Milinda, includes a conversation in which a Buddhist monk named Nagasena purports that the self does not exist. His interlocutor, King Milinda, then asks, what is it that the name Nagesna is denoting? Does it refer to material form? To sensation? He continues through each of the five aggregates, and Nagasena responds that it is none of these (Milinda’s Questions 36). To explain how that may be, he uses an analogy of a chariot. A chariot is not its wheels nor its axle nor its pole, though it is also not an entity separate from these things (37). In this case, the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. Therefore, the chariot, as an entity, doesn’t exist. Rather, “chariot” is merely a term used to denote a collection of things and nothing more. Similarly, Nagasena’s name is just a useful term referring to the collection of constitutive parts called aggregates, but not to an individual self (34). The self cannot be reduced to any one of the five aggregates, and it is also not an entity separate from them. Indeed, when understood in this way, the self simply doesn’t exist. Samsara Samsara , or the cycle of rebirth, is another foundational Buddhist concept. It posits that when someone dies, they are reborn. This means that each of us have past lives that we don’t remember, from which we died and were reborn. So, we persist through one lifetime into the next. This notion of samsara is closely related to the Buddhist concept of karma , which ascribes a desert component to this cycle. Karma drives the rebirth cycle by attributing the quality of the life into which a person is reborn to the actions of their past lives. If someone commited immoral acts in their past lives, they would face the consequences by being reborn into a hellish miserable life. Conversely, if someone committed good acts, they would be reborn into a happy beautiful life (Sayings 203). This causal explanation between the actions someone undertook in their past lives and circumstances of their current life is what’s referred to as karma . In foundational Buddhist thought, Karma governs the persistence within a person from one lifetime to the next, and thus is related to samsara . The concepts of saṃsāra and karma , hand in hand, appear to be incompatible with anātman . If we grant that no person can point to any of the five aggregates and claim — “That is me!” — but, at the same time, a person is nothing more than those aggregates, we can accept the claim that the self does not exist. That is the structure of the argument presented above by Nagasena. However, accepting that the life a person is living right now is a consequence of a life they lived in the past requires that that person is persisting over time. That is, if we are to correctly say that Anita, for instance, deserves the poor quality of her life because she undertook immoral actions in her past lives, it must be that the Anita experiencing this poor-quality life is the same Anita who undertook those immoral actions. Otherwise, the immoral actions of the past lives couldn’t be attributed to the person who is living the consequentially poor-quality life. So, karma and saṃsāra require persistence. However, if the self doesn’t even exist, surely it cannot have the quality of persisting over time. Persistence necessitates existence. This is the tension that arises with the consideration of anātman in conjunction with saṃsāra ; it seems we cannot accept one without rejecting the other — unless, that is, we have an account of non-self that involves persistence through time. Dependent Arising The concept of non-self can extend through the dimension of time with the inclusion of dependent arising. In another early Buddhist text, the Buddha delineates a series of causal chains. He says, “Conditioned by ignorance there are volitional forces, conditioned by volitional forces there is consciousness, conditioned by consciousness there is mind-and-body, conditioned by mind-and-body there are the six senses…” until he arrives at suffering (Sayings 210-211). This causal chain is called dependent arising. Within this series of states, each caused by an earlier one and causing the next, we find the five aggregates: between volitional forces, consciousness, and mind-and-body. So, the five aggregates we refer to when we speak of the self are themselves just parts within a system that extends beyond them. In this way, the non-self is positioned within a greater system of causal chains. If this understanding is applied to the earlier concepts of saṃsāra and karma , the tension between them and anātman may be resolved. Initially, the idea that there is a cycle of death and rebirth called saṃsāra seems to presuppose the existence of a self, particularly as an individual entity that persists through time. Moreover, the proposition, known as karma , that the conditions of one’s present life are a consequence of past lives ascribes continuity within a self as it undergoes multiple life cycles. It seems to follow from this that one’s past actions result in one’s current experiences, meaning that the person who commits the actions must be the same person who has the current experiences. So, there must be a self that persists. But, if the cycle of rebirth driven by karma is reconsidered through a lens of dependent arising, there is no need to account for the existence of an individual entity called a self. It need not be the case that there is a self who at one point both committed certain actions and is now experiencing the effects. There need not be an individual entity to which these actions are attributed. Rather, there can be certain actions committed and resultant effects being experienced. Indeed, the constitutive parts of a person, the five aggregates, are nothing more than steps within a greater causal chain. By accepting dependent arising, we can understand what was once necessarily the persistence of the self through time as, instead, a causal relationship and no more. Earlier states bring about later states. There is no self. Conclusion By including an account of non-self over time, such as dependent arising, the tensions between saṃsāra and anātman are resolved. The argument for anātman in a given moment, what I’ve referred to as static non-self, derives from the five aggregates. As expressed in the chariot analogy, a person is not any one of the five aggregates and a person is not anything more than them. Therefore, the existence of a unified self is a mere illusion. This is an important claim within Buddhist thought because it is included in a foundational teaching: that clinging to the self is the cause of suffering. This might be enough to motivate letting go of the idea of the self, for the purpose of ending suffering. However, the idea that clinging to the self causes suffering isn’t enough to justify the plausibility of non-self. It must also be consistent with other teachings in Buddhism. Initially, it seems to be incompatible with the teachings of saṃsāra and karma . These teachings seem to necessitate a self that persists through time, because surely it must be the same person who lives through the multiple lives involved in a particular cycle of rebirth driven by their own karma . But, if the self doesn’t exist even for a given moment, how can it exist from one moment to the next? Indeed, it doesn’t. This can be explained through the concept of dependent arising, a dynamic picture of non-self. Through this lens, the five aggregates are placed in a causal chain of events. This way, there can be causal continuity within a person's life — or lives — without there necessarily being a self. Past events cause later events, and so goes the cycle of rebirth. Finally, there is no incompatibility between anatman and the rest of Buddhist teaching, and it can be justifiably accepted as a plausible account. In this manner, dependent arising resolves the tension initially faced between anatman and saṃsāra . References Gethin, Rupert. 2008. Sayings of the Buddha : a selection of suttas from the Pali Nikayas, Oxford world's classics. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. Gethin, Rupert. 1998. The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford [England] ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Travis Harper More Than Just a Thought Crime? A Retributivist View of Hate Crime Legislation Travis Harper Most are familiar with the common conception of a hate crime: a violent act that involves some form of animus towards a particular group, usually a protected class. “Hate crimes” are considered to be more morally reprehensible than their counterparts that are not motivated by any particular animus or hatred. Accordingly, different jurisdictions have enacted legislation criminalizing these types of acts, oftentimes associating them with harsher penalties than crimes committed for other reasons. Still, while hate crimes seem like a simple and intuitive concept, the actual statutes that different legislatures enacted to criminalize them tend to vary in their definitions and application. In the United States, for example, anyone who “willfully causes bodily injury to any person... because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin of any person” shall be found guilty of a federal hate crime (1). Germany, however, takes a different approach. While “under German criminal law, ‘politically motivated’ (2) hate crimes do not constitute explicit offenses or give rise automatically to higher sentences,” judges have a wide latitude to take aggravating factors into account when sentencing (3). Germany does , however, have a statute which criminalizes those who “incite hatred against” and “violate the human dignity” of populations or individuals on “account of their belonging to a... national, racial, or religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origin” (4) Clearly, the concept of a hate crime is not as intuitive as it seems to be. Thus, the question remains: What is a “hate crime”? Moral and legal theorists have wrestled with this same question, along with raising other concerns. “Hate crimes” are unique in that their mens rea element, the requisite intent of the perpetrator in order to be found guilty of the crime, typically entails proving some form of hatred or bias. Thus, hate crimes effectively criminalize specific “hateful” mental states. Whether or not a person has committed a hate crime does not depend on their actual physical actions; rather, it depends on their motivations in doing so—whether they did so because of some animus towards their victim or a particular group of people. Naturally, this begs the question: To what extent is this justified? Can we punish offenders for their motivations in committing a crime along with their actions? Heidi Hurd, lawyer and legal theorist, sought to answer questions akin to these in her article, “Why Liberals Should Hate ‘Hate Crime Legislation’.” In doing so, Hurd argues that when “hatred and bias are construed as mens rea elements... they [become] alien to traditional criminal law principles”(5). She also argues that hate crime legislation—at least how it is conceived of today—is unjustifiable. Specifically, Hurd outlines that hate crime legislation has no place within our “act-centered theory of criminal punishment” and “liberal theory of legislation” because of the way it effectively criminalizes “emotional states... [that] constitute standing character traits rather than occurrent mental states (intentions, purposes, choices etc.)” (6). Hurd’s critique is quite comprehensive and forces all advocates for hate crime legislation to ask themselves: is there any justification for hate crime legislation that is in line with a liberal theory of legislation? This is the question that this paper seeks to answer. Through a critical analysis of Hurd’s argument, references to other legal theorists and philosophers, and empirical evidence, I will argue that within a retributivist theory of punishment, hate crime legislation is justifiable and morally accept- able. A retributivist theory of punishment prioritizes proportionality, the principle that the punishment associated with a crime varies based upon the severity of the crime, or how morally reprehensible the crime is, which can be determined by the amount of harm an action causes. I will argue that hate crimes cause more severe harm to the victim than do crimes committed for other reasons. Further, since hate crimes are unique in that they cause harm to both the victim and their community, they constitute both a public and private harm. Thus, not only is it morally acceptable, but rather it is required to make hate crimes distinct within the criminal law with increased punishment compared to crimes that are not committed due to any particular animus. Further, I will argue that hate crime legislation does not merely criminalize mental states or political beliefs; rather it criminalizes the explicit intent to cause increased harm to a specific group of people. This is a standard that any hate crime statute should make abundantly clear. It is worthwhile to clarify what this paper does not seek to address. This paper will not weigh the merits of a retributivist’s conception of punishment against that of a consequentialist; surely, a consequentialist’s justification of hate crime legislation would be vastly different, most likely focusing on the possible benefit that could arise from specifically criminalizing hate crimes. Additionally, the paper will not analyze hate crimes and hate crime legislation from a sociological perspective; rather, it will focus on the moral and philosophical implications that legislators must consider when drafting hate crime legislation. Hurd’s Argument Within her critique of hate crime legislation, Hurd offers two possible arguments in support of making hate crimes distinct within the criminal law, entailing harsh- er punishment. The first of these relies upon a precedent within Anglo-American common law. Specifically, it is not uncommon for those who have “particularly vicious reasons for action” to be more harshly punished (7). For example, some jurisdictions have enhanced punishments for pre-meditated murder, those that deliberately take the life of another. Hurd also highlights the existence of “specific intent crimes,” or “crimes that require defendants to commit prohibited actions with certain further purposes” (8). Burglary, for instance, is an example of a specific intent crime as it requires that someone “must break and enter with some further intention, say to steal, rape, or kill” (9). Hurd posits that neither of these doctrines serve as justifications for hate crime legislation, primarily due to her contention that “hatred” and “bias” are emotional states, not occurrent mental states like intentions. If this is the case, then hate crime legislation is inherently criminalizing mental states, leaving those who support hate crime legislation with two lines of argumentation. Firstly, they might argue that the types of hatred and bias typical to hate crime legislation, contending that, for example, “racial hatred or gender bias is morally worse than greed, jealousy, and revenge” (10), or any other motive for that matter. Secondly, they might further a utilitarian argument, claiming that “hatred and bias are uniquely responsive to criminal sanctions in a way that greed, jealousy and vengeance are not” (11). Both of these arguments, however, violate liberalism in the way that they arbitrarily choose a specific motive to be either considerably more morally reprehensible or responsive to criminal sanctions. I take two main responses to Hurd’s argument. First, I take issue with Hurd’s characterization of hatred and bias when they are construed as mens rea elements; hatred and bias can be considered to be occurrent mental states when they are understood as the intent of the actor to create the increased harms associated with hate crimes, not just the actor’s bigoted views in and of themselves. Second, even if this were the case, and hate crimes did criminalize bigoted views, I argue that considering hatred and bias to be particularly culpable mental states is justified. Hate crimes are considerably more morally reprehensible than crimes committed for other reasons because of the aforementioned increased harm they cause, and they deserve increased punishment accordingly. I will address these two concerns separately. Hate Crimes and Specific Intent Crimes One of the key concerns that Hurd addresses is the extent to which hate crime legislation can be drafted within the bounds of liberalism and Anglo-American Common Law. One of Hurd’s main contentions within her article is that hate crime legislation, at least in the way that it is conceived of today, criminalizes emotions or dispositions, as opposed to occurrent mental states. I argue that this is not the case, because of the fact that hate crime legislation does not and should not criminalize the mere fact that a perpetrator holds a specific belief; rather, it should criminalize their intention to cause specific harms to their victim and the victim’s community at large. Michael Moore, in his work The Moral Worth of Retribution, defines “intentions”—within a retributivist theory of punishment—as “function states whose roles are to mediate between background states of motivation and those (bodily) motion-guid- ing states of volition that are parts of actions” (12). Moore illustrates this distinction through the analogy of a person deciding to get their hair cut. The background state of this action is that they “desire to get a haircut,” their intention is the belief that “if [they] go to the barber shop, [they] will get a haircut” and finally, the “motion-guiding state of volition” is that they indeed make the decision in their mind to “go to that barber shop” (13). Thus, the intention that is relevant in regards to criminal liability is one in which the actor decides on a means to reach a specific goal. Applying this framework to hate crimes, the “emotional states’’ that Hurd references are not the intentions that are legally relevant; rather, they are background states of motivations. They are the deep desires of the actor. The intention , however, is the actor’s decision to act upon their bigoted motivations in order to accomplish a variety of goals, whether that be spreading a message, or intimidating members of the group they are targeting. The intention that is legally relevant is that an actor decided to resort to violence in order to spread their bigoted beliefs. Admittedly, most hate crime statutes do not make clear this distinction. Often, they simply mandate that the perpetrator chose their victim “for reason of” one of their specific identities. Thus, any hate crime statute must be clear in that if someone is to be convicted of a hate crime, then they must have intended to cause some specific harm to a particular community. With this understanding of intentions, the mens rea element of hate crimes does not criminalize an emotional state; rather, it criminalizes a specific intent to cause harm, not just to a person but to a broader community. As I will argue later, these harms are legally relevant because they cause hate crimes to be particularly more morally reprehensible than crimes committed for other reasons. Hurd’s critique, in this case, is mostly doctrinal, but it does carry key moral implications. Even if a hate crime causes considerably more harm, the physical action is not different from crime that is completely devoid of any hatred or bias motivation. Is it reasonable to criminalize someone based on the fact that they have hateful beliefs? Is this a violation of the liberalism that grounds Anglo-American common law? The next section of this paper seeks to answer these questions by discussing the morality of hate crimes. Hate Crime Legislation and the Harm Principle In order to justify the distinction within the criminal law between hate crimes and other crimes—particularly when they tend to carry harsher punishment—we must identify a principle that can aid in determining which actions are crimes, and the extent to which they should be punished, if possible. This principle must have two characteristics: (1) It must align and be consistent with a retributivist theory of punishment by being sufficiently “backward-looking” and (2) it must allow for the differentiation of crimes beyond mere moral intuition— differentiating crimes that are “worse” than others, deserving harsher punishment, while aligning with a liberal theory of punishment. John Rawls has famously characterized this theory as one that emboldens the state to enforce the “right” and not the “good” (14). These two specifications ensure that the justificatory logic underpinning hate crime legislation aligns with traditional Anglo-American common law principles, and falls within the scope of this paper and Hurd’s argument. The first of these specifications naturally flows from the scope of this essay. The principle used to justify any sort of hate crime legislation must be “backward-look- ing” or focused on the act itself. This is in opposition to any sort of principle or justification that is consequentialist or “forward-looking.” A consequentialist “approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question” (15), with the “party” at hand being society as a whole, or even the actor themselves. Clearly, a consequentialist’s justification of hate crime legislation is different than that of a retributivist, which this paper intends to address. The second consideration is directly relevant to Hurd’s argument and, naturally, my critique thereof. One of Hurd’s primary critiques of hate crime legislation is that, if “hate” as a mens rea element is not considered to be an “occurrent mental state,” then hate crime legislation effectively criminalizes emotional states. Further, Hurd argues that criminalizing emotional states shifts from a “liberal theory” to a “perfectionist theory” of criminal law. This “liberal theory” of the criminal law extends from the general theory of Political Liberalism. Specifically, in draft- ing legislation, criminal or otherwise, the “government should be neutral among competing conceptions of the good life” (16). Within a society, there will be multiple conceptions of the good life, and the government should only be emboldened to enforce rights that are the result of an “overlapping consensus” that mediates “among conflicting views” (17). Hatred and bias, when not directly connected to an action, are generally considered to be moral beliefs or character traits—and as Hurd notes, “liberals have long believed that theories that construe certain character traits as virtuous or vicious belong to the province of the Good, rather than the Right” (18). Considering that I intend to argue that hate crimes primarily carry harsher sentences due to their being significantly more morally reprehensible than crimes committed for other reasons, the principle used to justify this distinction must aid us in determining which crimes are indeed “more morally reprehensible” beyond one’s moral intuition which would align with a liberal theory of punishment. It is quite easy and normal to determine what crimes “feel” more morally reprehensible based upon our own individual moral intuitions. Legislators, however, cannot simply draft criminal legislation based upon their own subjective moral intuitions on a case to case basis; that would not be entirely consistent with political liberalism. Any principle that we use in determining which crimes are more morally reprehensible must not only be applicable to hate crimes, but to any crime which is being considered. As Aristotle notes, “all law is universal” and legislators must take into account and legislate based upon “the usual case” (19). Thus, the principle used to justify hate crime legislation must also be one that is universally applicable. The principle that is most fitting is the “harm principle,” or the concept that the only actions that can be considered crimes are those that cause harm to others or the public. The most classic explication of this principle can be found in the work of John Stuart Mill, in which he claims that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” (20). Put simply, the government can justify criminalization and punishment, overriding some individual rights, based upon the degree to which one being punished has caused “harm” to others. This principle aligns with the two specifications outlined earlier. The harm principle is sufficiently retributivist; If one were to justify punishment based upon the harm principle they would be focusing on the actions of the individual. Applying the harm principle compels legislators to ask: How much harm did the individual cause in their actions? The answer to this question directly affects whether or not their actions are considered criminal and the extent to which they should be punished. Further, Mill was an ardent liberal, and naturally, the “harm principle” aligns with a liberal theory of punishment. The harm principle works upon the liberal logic that an individual has the right not to be subjected to undue harm. While the harm principle does meet the specifications laid out earlier, “nowhere does [Mill] give an explicit general stipulation” as to what constitutes harm. In order to understand how hate crimes should be considered under the harm principle, we must further define our understanding of “harm” (21). Joel Feinberg, in his work Harm to Others, provides a useful definition of “harm.” Concretely, Feinberg defines it as a “setback to interests” (22) that can relate to an individual or to a wider group of people, where interests are “a miscellaneous collection, [consisting] of all those things which one has a stake” (23). While there are nuisances that could be considered harms—a person’s stock performing poorly, for example, could certainly be understood as a setback to interest—these nuisances only become harms in the legal sense when they are the results of an invasion by others. Further, Feinberg provides that this “invasion” becomes legally relevant if the actor is “in a worse condition than [they] would have otherwise been had the invasion not occurred at all” (24). Take, for example, an instance of a person being physically violent towards another. Physical violence towards another person to which they did not consent would certainly be a setback to the victim’s interests—perhaps to their interests in their own health and wellbeing, especially if they had been injured. Further, they would most definitely be in a worse condition due to the physical “invasion” by the other person. Additionally, harms can also manifest themselves as public or private harms. There are many crimes that most would consider to be harms that do not thwart the interest of one specific person. Take, for instance, those who counterfeit money; they are not harming any one person; rather, they are harming society as a whole, thwarting the interests of society by negatively affecting the economy. Working with this understanding of harm and how it operates within the harm principle, we can begin to analyze hate crimes and the harms that they cause. Subsequently, we can begin to analyze whether or not they are considerably more morally reprehensible, warranting increased punishment. I argue that hate crimes indeed cause significantly more harm because they cause an increased amount of harm to the individual in addition to causing public harm as well. Hate crimes cause increased private harm to their victims given that hate crimes do not just attack a person ; they attack their identity as well, causing a fractured sense of security and identity and leading to a myriad of negative effects, or harms . “Crimes... communicate a message to the victim that they do not count and are not worthy of respect” (25) and once someone becomes the victim of a hate crime, they begin to cope and rationalize why they specifically were targeted. While those who aren’t victims of hate crimes could just cite that they were “at the wrong place at the wrong time,” victims of hate crimes cannot adopt this as a possibility. When one is the victim of a hate crime, they will know that they have been target- ed based upon an aspect of their identity, and this in turn causes their identity to become “central to their internal awareness of why they have been victimized” (26). The unique way in which hate crimes target identity causes a variety of immeasurable harms to victims. They often cite increased sentiments of shame and guilt compared to those that have been victimized for other reasons. Not only that, hate crime victims report increased levels of anxiety and depression compared to those that have been victimized for other reasons. Certainly these negative effects are setbacks to interests as defined by Joel Feinberg. They fracture the victim’s sense of self and cause actual physical ailments, leaving them in a much worse condition than that in which they would have been if they had not been attacked at all, and especially if they had not been victimized because of their identity. Beyond the increased harms that hate crimes cause to their victims, they also cause additional public harm uncharacteristic of crimes committed for other reasons: harm caused to the wider community of the targeted group. While hate crimes are attacks on specific individuals, they are more so “symbolic messages to society about the worthiness of certain groups of people” (27). This message is a signal to minority communities that they are “unequal, unwelcome and undeserving of social respect,” and more pertinently, this message is a threat as well. The message of hate crimes creates a heightened sense of vulnerability and insecurity amongst minority communities that leads to an intense fear of victimization, inhibiting community members from living life without extreme caution. Members of minority communities that have been affected by hate crimes often note that the “fear and anxiety” felt by the victims of hate crimes “spreads to other community members” (28). This can be considered a public harm within the framework of the harm principle that I outlined earlier. The effects that hate crimes cause to minority communities can be defined as a setback to interests; again, it is certainly within our interest to be able to live our lives without fear of persecution or assault. Hate crimes deprive minority communities of their ability to do so. When hate crimes are considered within the framework of the harm principle, it is clear that they are more morally reprehensible. Does this naturally lend itself to the conclusion that they deserve increased punishment? I argue that, within a retributivist theory of punishment, it does lend itself to this conclusion given the principles of proportionality. Within the retributive model proposed by Immanuel Kant, the degree of punishment should adhere to “the principle of equality, by which the pointer of the scale of justice is made to incline no more to the one side than the other” (29). Considering the concept of proportionality within the framework of the harm principle, the degree of punishment for a crime should be proportional to the harm created by the crime. If that is the case, then hate crimes surely warrant increased punishment because of the increased harms that they cause, not only to their direct victims, but also to the communities that they affect. Conclusion This paper sought to provide a justification for hate crime legislation that con- formed to the principles of liberalism and aligned with a retributive theory of punishment. I found that harsher punishment for violent crimes related to hatred or bias towards a specific group can be justified when examined using the harm principle. Because hate crimes cause considerably more harm to their victims and minority communities, they are considerably more morally reprehensible than crimes committed for other reasons. When assessing whether or not these increased harms warrant increased punishment, we can rely on the notion of proportionality —that punishment for a crime should be proportional to the harm it creates. When examined in this way, increasing criminal sanctions for hate crimes is justified. Further, there are a variety of considerations that need to be taken into account when drafting hate crime legislation: specifically, hate crime legislation should be written to construe the mens rea element of the crime to be the intent to cause the increased harms to the individual and the minority community. Hate crimes are intuitively more morally reprehensible. At first we may think that they deserve increased punishment based upon how these crimes make us feel ; however, we should constantly question ourselves, examining whether our gut moral instincts align with the moral doctrines that guide our actions and the criminal law. In this case, hate crimes do indeed deserve increased punishment based upon these moral doctrines. Thus, legislatures intending on criminalizing hate crime legislation, or any crime for that matter, should not only take doctrinal considerations into account, but should also consider the moral justifications for why these actions deserve criminal liability. If this is the case, the law will begin to be much more consistent and comprehensive with the moral doctrines that we have adopted as a society. Endnotes 1 “Hate Crime Acts,” 18 U.S.C § 249 (2009), https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC- prelim-title18-section249&num=0&edition=prelim. 2 According to the German Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, a “politically motivated” crime includes crimes committed for reasons of the victim’s race, “political opinion, nationality, ethnicity, race, skin color, religion, belief, origin, disability, sexual orientation.” 3 Human Rights Watch, “The State Response to ‘Hate Crimes’ in Germany: A Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper,” Human Rights Watch, December 9, 2011, https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/12/09/state-response-hate-crimes-germany. 4 “Incitement of Masses,” German Criminal Code § 130 (1998), http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_ stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1241. 5 Heidi Hurd, “Why Liberals Should Hate ‘Hate Crime Legislation,’” Law and Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2001): 216. 6 Hurd, 216. 7 Ibid, 218. 8 Ibid, 218. 9 Ibid, 218. 10 Ibid, 226. 11 Ibid, 226. 12 Michael Moore, The Moral Worth of Retribution (Oxford University Press, 2010), 449. 13 Michael Moore, “The Metaphysics of Basic Acts III: Volitions as the Essential Source of Actions,” in Act and Crime: The Philosophy of Action and Its Implications for Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 1993), 136–37. 14 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Expanded Ed., Columbia Classics in Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2005). 15 Jeremy Bentham, “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bentham-an-introduction-to-the-principles-of-morals-and-legislation. 16 Michael J. Sandel, “Political Liberalism,” Harvard Law Review 107, no. 7 (1994): 1766. 17 Sandel, 1775. 18 Hurd, 230. 19 Aristotle, “Politics,” trans. Benjamin Jowett, 1994, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.5.five.html. 20 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Batoche Books, 1859), 13. 21 D.G. Brown, “The Harm Principle,” in A Companion to Mill, ed. Christopher Macleod and Dale E. Miller (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 411. 22 Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others, vol. 1, 4 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1984). 23 Feinberg, 1:38. 24 Feinberg, 1:34. 25 Mark Austin Walters, “The Harms of Hate Crime: From Structural Disadvantage to Individual Identity,” in Hate Crime and Restorative Justice (Oxford University Press, 2014), 71. 26 Walters, 73. 27 Mark Austin Walters, 84. 28 Ibid, 84. 29 Morris J. Fish, “An Eye for an Eye: Proportionality as a Moral Principle of Punishment,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 28, no. 1 (2008): 63. Bibliography Aristotle. “Politics.” Translated by Benjamin Jowett, 1994. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.5.five.html. Bentham, Jeremy. “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.” Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/ben-tham-an- introduction-to-the-principles-of-morals-and-legislation. Brown, D.G. “The Harm Principle.” In A Companion to Mill , edited by Christopher Macleod and Dale E. Miller, 409–24. John Wiley & Sons, 2016. Feinberg, Joel. Harm to Others . Vol. 1. 4 vols. Oxford University Press, 1984. Fish, Morris J. “An Eye for an Eye: Proportionality as a Moral Principle of Punishment.” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 28, no. 1 (2008): 55–71. Hate crime acts, 18 U.S.C § 249 (2009). https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtm- l? req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title18-section249&num=0&edition=pre- lim. Hirsch, Andrew von. “Injury and Exasperation: An Examination of Harm to Others and Offense to Others.” Michigan Law Review 84 (1986): 700–717. Human Rights Watch. “The State Response to ‘Hate Crimes’ in Germany: A Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper.” Human Rights Watch, December 9, 2011. https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/12/09/state-response-hate-crimes-germany. Hurd, Heidi. “Why Liberals Should Hate ‘Hate Crime Legislation.’” Law and Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2001): 215–32. Incitement of masses, German Criminal Code § 130 (1998). http://www.gese-tze-im- internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1241. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty . Batoche Books, 1859. Moore, Michael. “The Metaphysics of Basic Acts III: Volitions as the Essential Source of Actions.” In Act and Crime: The Philosophy of Action and Its Implications for Criminal Law , 113–66. Oxford University Press, 1993. Thought Crime 94 ———. The Moral Worth of Retribution . Oxford University Press, 2010. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism . 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Author Name < Back From Sex to Science: The Challenges and Complexity of Consent Matthew Grady I. Abstract Since the beginning of biomedical research on human subjects, the notion of consent has been widely debated and highly contentious. With philosophers and bioethicists focusing on the issue of what constitutes truly informed consent and the proper ethical guidelines for retrieving it, the existing notion of consent in biomedical research fails to fully consider the potentially coercive forces on participants. Consent has also been an issue of import amongst philosophers of sex and feminist scholars. Rallying behind the contemporary idea of a robust version of consent—one that fully encompasses the ways in which agents may be coerced into consenting to a sexual act—these philosophers have argued that societal norms, external pressures, and the nature of consent itself often render consent insufficient to guarantee the moral permissibility of sex. I will argue that these two seemingly distinct concepts of consent in sexual and biomedical spheres face many of the same ethical issues. Borrowing from recent discussions around coercive factors influencing consent in sexual interactions and my own experiences in biomedical research settings, I will draw parallels between these two notions of consent in order to illuminate a more accurate and robust philosophical framework for setting ethical guidelines around obtaining consent in biomedical research settings. II. Introduction As biomedical research has increased exponentially with regard to both enhanced funding for the practice of human-subject experimentation and new research methodologies for promising medical interventions, there is an urgent need for robust ethical guidelines around utilizing human subjects in biomedical research contexts. This paper will focus on the use of human subjects in average biomedical research experiments, which typically recruit and pay individuals to undergo a certain medical procedure, take a specific drug, etc. before approval of the medical intervention for the general population. Across all of the varying perspectives regarding how to best recruit, treat, and compensate human subjects, consent has remained an absolute standard and necessity for conducting ethical biomedical research. While philosophers and bioethicists have contentiously debated over the necessary conditions for obtaining consent, most have widely (if not completely) neglected factors that may wrongfully induce human subjects to consent to biomedical research. Consent has also been a central topic of importance within the philosophy of sex and feminist p hilosophy, yet its development has remained quite distinct from the understanding of consent in the field of biomedical research and subject recruitment. Philosopher and bioethicist Alan Wertheimer has made a connection between the notion of consent in sexual interactions and biomedical research, but my parallels and conclusions will clearly be distinct from his and will primarily focus on developing thoughts inspired by the initial connection made by Quill Kukla in “A Nonideal Theory of Sexual Consent.” In sexual interactions, most philosophers agree that consent is a necessary, but insufficient, element for ensuring the permissibility of sex between p artners. Consent is something to be given freely, and many forces may serve to coerce or influence an individual into granting their consent, thus potentially curtailing the normative goal of “ideal” consent. Traditional discussions of consent are structured around fulfilling the normative goal of obtaining consent that is free from undue influence on one’s agency, autonomy, ability to make rational decisions, etc. Consent, under this view, is either valid or not—anything constraining an agent’s ability to consent automatically invalidates its moral force. Quill Kukla has introduced a “nonideal theory of sexual consent,” which classifies consent as degreed and emphasizes that genuine consent can still be achieved in the presence of potentially coercive factors. Under this conception, agency and autonomy are present in lesser and greater degrees within different sexual interactions, and agents are continually pressured by coercive forces. Thus, consent is not valid or invalid; instead, genuine consent (or robust consent as I will often refer to it) is built when coercive factors are controlled to such a degree that all sexual partners possess sufficient agency to make a fully rational decision to consent. This does not deny our ability to determine whether a sexual act is morally permissible and establish a standard for morally permissible ways to obtain consent. Rather, it allows us to adopt a nuanced view of consent as a nonideal concept, wherein agents can consent under our oft-constrained and coerced statuses. Philosophical inquiries into coercive factors impacting one’s ability to obtain genuine, robust consent in sexual interactions have focused on external pressures, societal norms, and the implications of consent as the dominant framework itself. Yet, bioethicists have neglected this crucial area in their understanding of consent. Much can be gained for our existing notion of consent in biomedical research settings by embracing the approach taken by philosophers of sex. Consent operates in many different facets of life—agreeing to consent forms, consenting to a sexual interaction, consenting to someone entering your home, and many other forms of implicit and explicit acts of consent . However, the nature of consent within sexual interactions and biomedical research settings is distinct from other forms, making them especially morally-laden. Given violations of these kinds of consent are particularly harmful to one’s bodily autonomy, sexual interactions and biomedical research settings are especially deserving of rigid consent guidelines. The genuine robustness of these two forms of consent is also dependent upon the satisfaction of external conditions not always under the control of the agent granting consent (ex. a non-coercive partner in sexual interactions or a biomedical institutional review board that grants approval for a biomedical experiment), opening up the potential for coercive factors to render a certain act morally impermissible. T hese two distinct forms of consent face many of the same ethical issues and should be engaged in a conversation with one another—a conversation that has been neglected thus far. I hope to build a more accurate, encompassing framework in the biomedical sphere by which we can set ethical guidelines for engaging human research subjects in a truly consensual manner based on the progress made by philosophers of sex, like Kukla and others. To conduct this comparative analysis, I will begin by discussing the existing notion of consent within the biomedical research field and detailing the major issues of importance currently debated. I will then proceed to review the ways in which many philosophers of sex have taken a broader approach to defining consent—one that takes into account the coercive factors that may inhibit an agent’s ability to grant consent with full autonomy and agency. I will then draw comparisons b etween these two distinct notions of consent to reveal several coercive factors in biomedical research settings that may render “informed” consent coerced. Finally, I will suggest how we may build a broader philosophical framework to scaffold the agency of human subjects when consenting to potentially dangerous biomedical research experiments. III. The Existing Notion of Consent in Biomedical Research After many instances of harmful treatments being given to vulnerable, often marginalized populations, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis study, bioethicists began to question what truly constitutes informed consent in biomedical research settings. This question has included exploration into both the b est ways to obtain consent, as well as the proper way to interpret the term, “informed.” The p redominant conclusion on how to best define informed consent has overwhelmingly neglected consideration of coercive factors that impact the ability for human subjects to rationally consent to biomedical trials. As will become clear, there are an abundance of underexplored factors that may constrain one’s ability to rationally consent to participate in a biomedical research trial. This paper aims to fill this lacuna in the current understanding of biomedical research consent. There are many interesting debates around the understanding of biomedical consent that will become relevant to my argument later, the first being the therapeutic misconception. This phenomenon occurs quite often in biomedical research settings, where human subjects possess the incorrect belief that they are receiving life-changing or potentially beneficial treatments, despite being told about the potential of receiving a placebo treatment, or the chance that the experimental drug may be ineffective. The implications of the therapeutic misconception for ensuring the genuine nature of a human subject’s consent are vast. Consent hinges upon an agent’s uncoerced ability to make an informed decision, and philosophers of biology have rightfully debated what constitutes truly meeting the informed standard of consent. Can one really be said to have full decision-making agency and possess the needed information to genuinely consent if they wrongly believe, as subjects with the therapeutic misconception do, that they are guaranteed life-saving treatment? This is not to say that consent is in some way unobtainable in biomedical research settings; however, we ought to properly understand the implications of the therapeutic misconception on a subject’s ability to grant their consent in a knowing, informed fashion. In addition to the therapeutic misconception, there is another important debate around whether informed consent requires comprehension in any way. Some argue that full comprehension of what the study entails is the only way to ensure the participant is aware of all of the risks and does not possess the therapeutic misconception. Participants have also been shown to severely misunderstand the actual p rocedures, treatments, etc. they are consenting to, whether that be due to not reading the consent form or not fully understanding the researcher’s explanation of what will occur during the study . By not comprehending both the purpose of the study and the exact particulars involved in it, research subjects may fail to meet the “informed” requirement of informed consent. Regardless of the exact answers to these concerns, it is clear that the current discourse surrounding biomedical consent has yet to satisfactorily explore the intricacies of the coercive factors impacting consent in medical experiments. Participants may be hindered in their ability to grant genuine, uncoerced consent when, as research shows is often the case, they do not understand the purpose or specifics of the research study to which they are consenting. In a way, participants in many biomedical studies consent to a version of the study that does not carry the significant risks of harm they take on when consenting—is this morally permissible? How can we ensure coercive factors, like the therapeutic misconception, do not wrongly influence a human subject to consent to a potentially dangerous experiment? These ethical issues debated within the philosophy of biology can be b etter answered with a revised, robust version of consent—one which thoroughly examines and addresses the coercive factors that unduly encourage someone to grant consent without b eing truly informed and open to participating. IV. Moving Beyond Mere Consent: Philosophy of Sex While consent works to p reserve the agency of a sexual partner, the vast majority of philosophers agree that consent is necessary for sex to be morally permissible, not sufficient. When consenting to a sexual act, a person is utilizing their agency and autonomy—their capacity to make free and independent decisions to meet their own ends—to make a rational choice, so consent both contributes to and draws from one’s agency. We now recognize the ability of rational agents to utilize their agency to consent to sexual acts that may still be morally problematic, whether that consists of morally dubious sexual actions or acts obtained with a coerced notion of consent. Given the importance of sexual consent, we need an understanding of it that can account for any and all factors that may coerce a sexual partner into granting consent when they otherwise would not have. Philosophers have addressed the issue of consensual sex that may be coerced in a variety of fashions. Some feminist scholars, like Catharine MacKinnon, have taken a radical approach, claiming that no consent is truly valid under heteronormative structures. Their understandings of consent highlight the ways in which external societal conditions may render consent insufficient if they constrain one’s options to the point where consent becomes obligatory, rather than freely given. Nicola Gavey provides a compelling account of how heteronormative , oppressive structures may render one’s consent involuntary or obligatory in sexual situations because of societal conditions pressuring women. Women sometimes feel obligated to consent to unwanted sexual advances because of the heteronormative forces that pressure them to enter a subservient, diminutive role within sexual interactions. Other philosophers take a different approach to consent by illuminating varying ways in which traditional consent is not sufficient to guarantee a good moral standard for sex. Power dynamics, a misunderstanding of what will actually take place during sex, the offer of money, socialized b ehaviors, and societal pressures are all examples of coercive factors that may encourage one to say yes, even when one did not originally intend to. A person may not be able to fully, rationally consent to a sexual act if pressured by these sorts of coercive factors. Philosophers operating with this lens focus less on making a valid versus invalid distinction of consent and instead emphasize the way consent can be constrained or limited by oppressive structures and other coercive forces. The moral permissibility of a sexual act depends on the agency and autonomy possessed by all of the sexual partners consenting, which may be constrained by coercive factors. By emphasizing the coercive factors outside of direct threats from a partner that may constrain one’s genuine consent, feminist philosophers have been able to build a more robust understanding of consent—one that accounts for the coercive factors that may wrongfully influence one to consent to a sexual act. To summarize all of this into a more digestible framework, I find Quill Kukla’s non-ideal theory of consent to be particularly illuminating. Essentially, under Kukla’s perspective, consent is a “nonideal concept,” where virtually no sex will turn out to be consensual if consent requires the full autonomy of its participants. Their framework allows for the permissibility of sex and obtaining consent even when coercive forces are present; all agents are constrained in different ways, by different power relations, as a result of different identities, and that does not fully invalidate our ability to consent. Instead, to ensure one’s consent is genuine in the presence of common coercive factors, Kukla argues we must “scaffold” consent by “[being] sensitive to the limits of and possibilities for agency and consent in a given context and [adjusting] accordingly,” to ensure a partner possesses agency and autonomy. Scaffolding can be accomplished socially or interpersonally, where practices, environments, and relationships can help to enable a sexual partner’s agency. Kukla uses the example of a retirement facility embracing guidelines, policies, and management that allow its patients to have sex in such a way that does not threaten their ability to participate safely or diminish their own agency in pursuing sexual relationships. On the interpersonal level, agents can also aid in scaffolding their sexual partner’s (or partners’) agency and autonomy by ensuring their partner feels the, “ability to exit a situation, trust, [and] safety,” among other crucial practices that build and protect one’s ability to genuinely consent. Policies here scaffold consent by examining potential coercive factors and building social practices which are inclusive and protective of sexual agency. Again, philosophers of sex, like Kukla, have explicated external factors, such as power dynamics, money, the traditional, overriding depiction of a woman “giving” consent to a man’s request, and heteronormative structures, that may coerce someone to consent to a sexual act. In identifying these, philosophers can strategically recommend scaffolding structures to ensure the moral permissibility of sexual interactions and to enhance the agency and autonomy of sexual partners. I argue that the bioethicist ought to take on a similar project of identifying coercive factors and scaffolding their designs to preserve agency, autonomy, and genuine consent in biomedical research experiments. This challenge has been neglected thus far, and the current understanding of informed consent fails to fully account for coercive factors; thus, the biomedical research community is in need of a scaffolding strategy to preserve genuine, robust consent. The following section attempts to embrace the approach taken by Kukla and others in developing a more robust theory of consent within biomedical research settings. V. Can Biomedical Research Achieve Genuine, Robust Consent? To curb coercive factors from playing a role in one’s decision to have sex, Kukla proposes a more robust, nonideal theory of consent, which works to scaffold protections for an individual’s autonomy in the process of granting consent. Kukla’s framework understands that agents are constantly influenced by external, coercive factors. I argue that we should embrace this approach in the b iomedical research field, which requires a thorough understanding of the implicit and explicit factors that encourage participants to grant consent to medical experiments and treatments. I will now begin to detail four p rimary coercive factors that have been underexplored by philosophers of biology, highlighting the direct parallels that can be found with the coercive factors that impact sexual consent. In drawing these parallels and embracing a more robust understanding of consent, this paper will aim to demonstrate the need for greater encompassing ethical guidelines around biomedical research experiments. A. Compensation: Fair or Coercive? The standard practice for most biomedical research trials is to compensate their human subjects for their participation and time spent completing the study (and any additional costs incurred, medical expenses, inter alia). To recruit enough human subjects for a statistically valid biomedical study, researchers must offer compensation as an inducement to p articipate. Many ethical questions have been explored by philosophers and bioethicists, including how much to pay human subjects, whether payment for certain kinds of research is morally acceptable, and if payment can truly compensate for the serious risks involved in participating in experimental research. However, most have neglected to explore the role money plays as a coercive factor to participate in potentially dangerous research and its impact from a scaffolding perspective. Participating in biomedical research can be a valuable way to earn both active and p assive income, yet money is known to influence the rational decision-making of moral agents. Might someone “consent” to engaging in a biomedical research study that crosses their ethical and/or physical level of comfort in desperation for money? Philosophers of sex have rightly acknowledged that money can serve as an influential and potentially coercive force for consenting to certain actions because an agent may, in an attempt to earn crucial income for themselves, consent to sex in which they would not normally be comfortable engaging. A very similar ethical dilemma arises in the case of biomedical research. Consider this fictional example: an extremely poor woman who struggles to pay for her basic necessities agrees to take a highly experimental drug that could have damaging, long-term side effects. She would not normally endanger her own health in this way, but she is so desperate for passive income that this compensation is too important to pass up. Under the existing notion of informed consent in b iomedical research, this kind of participation would still be considered fully consensual when, clearly, money played a coercive role in her decision. This is not to say that all sexual interactions and all biomedical research settings involving the exchange of cash are coercive (e.g. sex work depends on the presence of money, but is not necessarily coerced), but we ought to pay crucial attention to these areas because of the morally problematic force money can have on obtaining consent. Money has the potential of encouraging and even forcing one into doing things they would not normally be comfortable with, so compensation is especially deserving of ethical guidelines. See Largent, et. al. for a further discussion of the concerns here. Imagine a case where someone decides to consent to a risky biomedical research trial with full comprehension of the risks and particulars involved with the medical study. They choose to accept all of the accompanying risks with participation because the potential compensation is worth their involvement according to a rational assessment by the agent in question. I concede here that this person may not be making a coerced decision to consent—this person, depending on the background circumstances and personal costs, may be choosing to utilize their agency to make a rational decision to pursue compensation. But, it is equally important for research designers to ask, ‘If this subject were in a greater position of agency and authority, would they still be comfortable with making the same decision?’ This question concerning the potential for coercive influence is neglected and unaddressed in the vast majority of biomedical research settings. Not all cases will reveal coercive factors influencing a subject’s decision, but bioethicists have neglected to fully accept the incredibly powerful and sometimes coercive influence compensation can have on a person’s ability to rationally consent. Furthermore, many research studies design their compensation schedule in a way to coerce participants into completing the entirety of a biomedical experiment by offering a significant “bonus” at the end of the study. Given that consent hinges on the ability for an agent to say “no” at any time to any part of an experiment, compensation can wrongfully be utilized as a tool of coercion, in that a research subject may feel unduly compelled to complete a study in hopes of receiving the bulk of their compensation at the end of the research. Compensation, in this role, can coerce consent and thus render the consent given as less robust, less agential, and likely to be less morally permissible than a more scaffolded version of biomedical consent. B. Underexplored Power Dynamics Furthermore, there exist underexplored power dynamics that may induce individuals to consent to biomedical research that they might not otherwise. It is not uncommon for physicians to offer (or even suggest) participating in an experimental research trial to their ailing patients. The physician here possesses a status of authority and level of power that may wrongfully induce their patient to agree to participate, despite the overwhelming risks, in benefits to their own research or that of their colleagues. This is not to say that all actions by a doctor wrongfully operate on a power dynamic, but recommending someone to consent to a trial with clear and substantial potential for harm rightfully deserves a more critical lens for moral judgments. Another example worth noting is when professors recruit their students to participate in their own b iomedical research. Might a student consent to participate merely because their p rofessor, who is in a position of power, asked them to do so? I argue that both of these cases illuminate a power dynamic that may render the given consent here as below the standard for moral permissibility and fully robust consent. Just as a boss requesting to have sex with their employee possesses an imbalanced power dynamic, so do certain recommendations of research studies by people of authority. By understanding the coercive influence of underexplored power dynamics in biomedical research recruitment, we can begin to build a more robust theory of consent that accounts for this coercive factor. C. The Misunderstanding of Particulars By Research Participants As previously discussed, it has been well documented that human subjects often misunderstand the particular actions and risks involved with their participation in biomedical research trials. While comprehension is difficult to fully impart on human subjects, might some of these knowledge gaps wrongfully encourage one to consent to a research study? As mentioned earlier, if one is under the guise of the therapeutic misconception, they may be more willing to consent to potentially dangerous research in the hope of receiving free treatment; however, there is no guarantee they will receive any sort of efficacious medical intervention. Research participants are also often unaware of the particular procedures, treatments, etc. they will have to undergo, meaning they cannot grant fully informed consent to them. A similar ethical dilemma arises in the case of sexual consent: one may consent to a sexual interaction without knowing the full breadth of what will occur. Biomedical researchers ought to work (or alternatively, “scaffold”) toward ensuring their research participants have full knowledge and comprehension of any factor of the research that might change their decision to consent. Only a more robust consent framework within biomedical research settings can properly protect the autonomy of human subjects to provide truly informed consent. D. Lack of Knowledge Regarding Research Intentions The final factor that I argue merits greater consideration in our ethical guidelines around b iomedical consent concerns the ability of the patient to understand the intentions of the research. Due to the nature of biomedical research, human subjects are often not informed of every detail of the study in order to maintain scientific objectivity and integrity. So, a human subject may be told what the study consists of, while not fully understanding the intentions of the research. What if a human subject consents to participating in a Phase I biomedical trial without knowing that the intention of the research is to produce a drug that only the extremely wealthy will be able to afford (an unfortunately common occurrence in the US)? Or, what if the aim of the research is to reach a conclusion that goes against one’s own morals, like that racial differences are essential rather than constructed? Just as one possesses a right to know the intentions behind their partner asking for consent to have sex, human subjects have a right here as well because the information presented may actively encourage one to not offer consent in the first place. Our existing definition of consent for human subjects in biomedical research experiments does not properly account for preserving, or scaffolding, the full rational decision-making of human subjects. While understanding the need for a certain level of confidentiality, the intentions behind the research itself may serve as a deterrent for someone to grant consent. So, in order to have genuine, robust consent, we must be able to set ethical guidelines that actively inform the participant of any detail that may render their consent below the bar for moral permissibility if unknown. VI. An Argument for a More Robust Consent in Biomedical Experiments I present these four coercive factors not in an attempt to develop a fully-fledged account of proper consent in biomedical research, but rather to demonstrate that our existing notion does not go far enough to protect the autonomy of human subjects. All four of these concerns do not apply equally in every context, but they do merit a greater, more nuanced understanding of consent and how to ethically scaffold against coercive factors. Philosophers of sex, like Kukla, have begun to p opularize the idea of a robust, nonideal theory of consent as a way to scaffold ethical precautions to engaging in sexual acts with a partner. The field of biomedical research ought to embrace a similar strategy and approach, and these four factors can begin to identify the key elements influencing the autonomy and agency of sexual partners. To scaffold a human subject’s ability to grant their uncoerced consent, we need to maximize their knowledge of anything essential to their rational decision-making. This would involve instituting clear and expansive policies to combat the therapeutic misconception and ensure participants understand the potential harms they may undergo. Researchers should also develop pay schedules and formats that work to ensure that the benefit incurred from compensation does not wrongly coerce one into participating or lacking the ability to revoke their participation at any time. Crucially, though, we ought to concurrently reform the issues of capitalism and systemic wealth inequality that force many people in the US to sell their own bodies for lifesaving income. Finally, we should adopt stricter guidelines for participating in biomedical research experiments to both restrict coercive power dynamics and pursue further scaffolding of subjects’ agency and autonomy. It is important to note, though, that this paper is primarily concerned with the philosophical issues that might constrain one’s genuine consent, and I invite bioethicists to create a more concrete and thorough list of ethical guidelines to scaffold agency in experiments. By conducting a rigorous philosophical analysis of coercive factors that influence human subjects, philosophers of biology will be better equipped to develop their own version of robust consent that can account for coercive factors. This new, reinspired lens from a philosopher of sex into scaffolding consent should help to control the damaging effects of coercive factors and grant the human subject greater autonomy in making rational decisions regarding whether and when to participate in biomedical research. Research study designers can utilize the recognition of these coercive forces, scaffold ethical practices to combat their influence on diminishing an agent’s authority and embrace a more robust understanding of consent in biomedical research experiments. VII. Conclusion My aim in this paper has been to draw parallels between the currently distinct notions of consent within sexual interactions and biomedical research to illuminate the similar ethical issues facing both. Many feminist scholars and philosophers of sex have taken an approach of examining the societal conditions, other external pressures, and nature of consent itself to illuminate the ways consent may be unduly coerced in rational agents. In doing so, they have been able to develop a more robust framework around a nonideal theory of consent that socially and interpersonally scaffolds (but not completely) a person’s agency in order to minimize coercive factors in one’s decision to consent to sex. By detailing parallel coercive factors present in the biomedical research field, I hope further philosophical inquiries will be able to develop a similar robust consent framework for biomedical research involving human subjects. On a more practically conclusive note, biomedical research experiments are luring; research designers purposefully advertise their studies to sound like easy, safe ways to make money, despite their risks. As shown by decades of research studies with devastating effects on communities of color, biomedical research experiments target specific populations…populations that are often BIPOC, low-income, young, and most vulnerable to being coerced into consenting in a biomedical research setting (see NIH for more on the crucially important element of structural medical racism). I’ve seen firsthand the consequences of a biomedical research industry that has consistently used advertising to tempt many young people, like myself, to participate in potentially harmful studies—experiments where we may not be in a fully agential capacity due to coercive factors. Money, power relations, a lack of understanding regarding the experiment, and other coercive factors constantly influence the ability for people, especially those of marginalized or fiscally disadvantaged backgrounds, to make a fully rational choice in consenting to biomedical research. 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Noah Tesfaye The Black Bourgeoisie: The Chief Propagators of "Buy Black" and Black Capitalism Noah Tesfaye Introduction Following the murder of George Floyd, there was a resurgence in a phrase all-too-common in the recent US political zeitgeist: “Buy Black.” Instantly, Black businesses received an overwhelming outpour of support as many non-Black people sought performative or material actions to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Centering the narrative and vision behind these ideas of “Buying Black” was not only affluent white people but the Black commercial media and the Black bourgeois at large (1). Amidst claims to defund and abolish the police, wealthy Black people called, as rapper and activist Killer Mike said in reference to Atlanta, “to not burn your own house down” but to instead support Black businesses and seek justice righteously (2). In this press conference with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, the stark contrast between the masses of Black people who own little to no land in the city and the select few bourgeoisie celebrities who proclaim “Buying Black” as a liberatory practice for Black people was evident. Therefore, developing a framework of a political economy of racialization allows us to view the racialized motivations of capitalism to diversify and maintain power with a critical lens. For instance, revolutionary scholar Cedric Robinson attributes the origins of racism to “the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples” (3). He maintains that racial capitalism arose from “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society [that] pursued essentially racial directions” (4). There is a vested interest in subverting claims of Black liberation by the Black bourgeoisie to build up the “myth and propaganda of Black buying power,” as Jared Ball coins in his book of the same title, to maintain their capitalist interests. It is through the collective efforts of the Black bourgeoisie to propagate Black capitalism that they accept the continued exploitation of working-class Black people. A Relevant History to US Racial Capitalism To develop a political economy framework of racialization and examine how Black people have assimilated into capitalism, it is imperative to center the conditions of Black Americans more broadly today. First, we will look at how race has played a role in the justification of the exploitation of Black people in America. Then, we will investigate how wealthy Black people have been able to exploit these conditions to further perpetuate such inequality within a racial capitalist hierarchy. Race is integral to understanding the economic position of Black people, not just because of the way Black people arrived on the continent but also in the legacy of government policies that have contributed to the economic segregation of today. As a result, Black people have next to no wealth in the United States; by 2053, it is estimated that median Black household wealth will be zero (5). The asset that many Americans often associate with wealth-building is buying a home. However, for decades, Black people have had little access to affordable housing and loans at market interest rates. Established in 1933, the Home Owners Loan Corporation institutionalized abstract criteria, such as “desirability,” to fulfill a loan (6). Furthermore, “the HOLC’s actions attributed property values to the racial or ethnic identity of residents then helped codify it into a national housing policy” (7). This resulted in the creation of domestic colonial projects through restrictions on the purchase of real estate and allowed for the “economic serfdom of Negroes by its reluctance to give loans and insurance to Negro businesses” (8). Meanwhile, mortgage lenders redlined neighborhoods by deeming populations as having “detrimental influences,” as a means to justify offering conservative loans with bad terms or no loans at all to Black people (9). Practices executed by the HOLC as well as state and local legislators to justify redlining also expanded into the creation of what is known as the “ghetto tax,” whereby grocery and convenience store items in inner-city communities were sometimes more expensive and sold under exploitative installment plans (10). It is not just that the economic conditions of Black people have been poor or fraught with challenges, but that with that context and contrast, a vision of “Buying Black” is hollow. Today, instead of focusing efforts towards highlighting the much higher risks Black people have faced concerning eviction since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black bourgeois have asked Black people to build and support Black business (11). Origins of Black Buying Power & Black Capitalism The origins in this rhetoric about Black capitalism and “Buying Black” in more modern examples are not from Black Americans but from the US government. Corporate America, in conjunction with the Black bourgeoisie, further developed the rhetoric of Black capitalism to exacerbate racial inequality. As discussed in Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, it was the Nixon administration that began to prop up this vision for Black capitalism as a means towards suppressing radical movements. The author Marcia Chatelain notes that “[i]n lieu of supporting critical civil rights protections for fair housing and school desegregation, Nixon promoted legislation that provided business loans, economic development grants, and affirmative action provisions on federally contracted projects as a means of suppressing black rage and securing black endorsements” (12). Amidst Nixon’s efforts towards building his Southern Strategy and winning the 1968 presidential election, he ran on the premise that Black capitalism would ensure racial equality (13). Yet, due to the logistical restraints of there being so few Black entrepreneurs along with the clear intentions Nixon had in stifling revolutionary activity, Black capitalism was, from the outset, designed to selectively help Black people (14). What is more surprising than the Nixon administration seeking to subvert and crush Black radicals is the way in which wealthier Black people began to propagate Nixon’s agenda. As fast-food restaurants were being established in areas where Black people were offered franchisee licenses during the 1970s, Black “franchise pioneers believed that business would save the day and the days to come for their people” (15). Franchise owners were complicit in letting the federal government and those in control of capital across the country use the support of their businesses as a justification to divest from public programs and instead invest in less accessible resources. In the 1980s, Black fraternities and sororities, one of the more prominent symbols of the Black elite class, even went so far as to partner with McDonald’s on an advertising campaign commercial called the “Fraternity Chant” (16). If corporate America could get the Black bourgeoisie to more openly endorse and support policies centered around Black capitalism, instead of seeking people’s programs or organizing with Black liberation groups such as the Blank Panthers, US racial capitalism could persist. Significance of Race to Studying the Bourgeois There is no shortage of books, New York Times articles, or 60 Minutes segments on the racial wealth gap. Texts like How to Be an Antiracist or articles that imply that racial inequality is simply a matter of a “battle between the souls of America” do not adequately address, with nuance, the Black bourgeoisie’s influence on upholding racial capitalism (17). Rather than seeking to identify how and why these conditions continue to be perpetuated, many point to “the government” or “Republicans.” As Cedric Robinson theorized, race has been integral to capitalism since its foundation. Due to the development of neoliberalism in the US and the heightened sense of individualism in a consumerist society, Black neoliberal politics manifests into upholding the status quo of American politics rather than taking significant measures to directly address inequality. Amidst the advancement of globalization spearheaded by the Clinton administration, the Black working class was abandoned even further due expansion in the prison industrial complex, aided by the passing of the Crime Bill of 1994. This, in conjunction with the rise in the commercialization of hip hop and mainstream Black art writ large, helped propel Black individualism to its prominent position today as an antagonism to the “superpredator” attitude the likes of Hillary Clinton and other politicians had for Black people. Black people can also utilize and exploit racial capitalism to their benefit at the expense of others. To really understand how Black people continue to be exploited and disincentivized from seeking collective organization and liberation, we must look beyond Black entrepreneurship, Twitter, and Black real estate Instagram pages, for these are individualized success stories within racial capitalism. In their article “Black Politics & the Neoliberal Racial Order,” Michael C. Dawson and Meghan Ming Francis attempt to trace through the ways in which Black people have assimilated into neoliberalism and diversified capitalism. As they see it, Black neoliberalism emphasizes “self-reliance, excessive consumerism, and individualism” (18). To buy into capitalism, Black people must shed their traditions in collectivism and community-building. Neoliberalism demands Black people to concede grassroots organizing and to instead make the most of society as it is currently constructed. That became the central mindset and rhetoric espoused as the Black bourgeoisie began to take shape. Former President Barack Obama once equated “raising one’s children, paying a decent salary,” and other private, voluntary acts to “marching” (19). Rather than proposing Black people seek to remedy the conditions they face, the same conditions that are routinely echoed throughout mainstream media, Obama implied that mere existence was a form of fighting for one’s rights. This is an example of individualizing systemic oppression; instead of calling to dismantle the entire class system that exploits poor Black people, the Black bourgeois would rather make poor Black people feel as though they are largely responsible for their class position. Obama is asking Black people to focus on their own immediate conditions as a form of struggle, instead of demanding for a greater fight for Black liberation because that call protects his class interests and not poor Black people. The Black Bourgeois and their Propaganda What makes this development of Black neoliberalism so insidious is how “neoliberalism often allows small segments of communities to be helped through community/voluntary action and activists’ searches for best practices and policies” (20). The emphasis here is “small segments.” It is not that a Black business would not benefit from more financial support as we saw in the summer of 2020, but the larger ramifications of supporting Black businesses can only go so far when correcting for centuries of irreparable harm done to Black people in and by America. Black people can and continue to receive small wins amidst the continuously shrinking wealth within the population as a whole. If Black people are truly building power and seeking to create cooperative businesses that sustain communities instead of cultivating resources within capitalism, corporations would not advertise or publicly support Black businesses like they have since June. Are we supposed to presume that Oprah or Tyler Perry or any prominent members of the Black bourgeoisie are unaware of the centuries of inequality and believe that “Buying Black” will be a substantive fix for the plight of the Black masses? No. It is not to say that wealthier Black people are acting completely with malicious intent; however, Black bourgeoisie members collectively are helping sell and deliver this Black capitalism, “Buy Black” propaganda to the masses of working-class Black people. They continue to perpetuate and oftentimes expand on rhetoric that upholds Black capitalism by blaming individuals for not working hard enough or not being smart enough to make more money. “The Story of O.J” by JAY-Z, a song released in 2017, breaks down how Black people are not building enough wealth and how Jewish people spent money on real estate while Black people would spend it at the strip club. The song in short “is a metaphor for opportunities wasted due to poor individual choices and is meant, as Jay-Z has said, to be more than just a song, saying that it is really about ‘... we as a culture, having a plan, how we’re gonna push this forward...’” (21). In reality, “The Story of O.J.” symbolizes revisionist Black history - of the centuries of exploitation Black people have faced. As JAY-Z continues to profess that the only means towards freedom is to flip buildings, buy paintings, and “Buy Black,” his words limit the scope and imagination of the masses for a politic beyond the present conditions. Even if JAY-Z is from a working class background and he was lucky to attain massive success with his music, his current class conditions prevent him from adequately calling for more substantive changes to correct for centuries of Black inequality. To a similar end “the expressed ‘plan’ is to eschew politics in favor of a sole focus on economics, Black capitalist economics with buying power as a central philosophy as the ‘only hope’ for freedom, and all presented as progressive, pro-Black, empowerment messaging” (22). If there exists any chance to adequately analyze the US through a comprehensive political economy framework of racialization and come up with solutions to free people of such dehumanizing conditions, it must be with the consideration that even those of oppressed backgrounds can uphold racial capitalism. The Black bourgeoisie has shown through their actions that they are not interested in engaging substantively or seeking to liberate the masses because they themselves have become comfortable with the comforts of capitalism evenwhile the rest of their “people” suffer. Looking forward Black radical organizers in America today are not “interested in making capitalism fairer, safer, and less racist. They know this is impossible. Rather, they want nothing less than to bring an end to ‘racial capitalism’” (23). The policy proposition that rose to prominence again this summer, in spite of uprisings and more imaginative visions for a just world, was instead to “buy Black” and “support Black businesses.” It was through the likes of Killer Mike, Beyoncé, and other members of the Black bourgeoisie who touted such demands rather than stand in line with the movement-building going on in the streets. Rihanna, for example, benefits from Black capitalism because her consumers consider supporting her business as “woke” even as it is financed and backed by white capital. “Buying Black” can act as a means not just towards individualizing the ends of this policy plan, whereby the owner of a particular business will reap the benefits of sale, but it also individualizes the way that we as citizens need to behave. We are asked to consume and spend more rather than create and collectively stand together. It is not that the Black elites are unaware of the conditions that working-class, poor Black people face, but rather they collectively have sought to propagate this vision of “Buying Black” as a means to an end to centuries of state-waged war against Black people - an end for which there is no economic policy that could help the masses. There is a reason why James Warren coined this group in 2005 “The Black Misleadership Class.” The Black bourgeoisie traffic misinformation and are purposefully complicit in the continued strife of the masses of Black people in the United States. If we hope to build a political and economic vision for a world where Black people are no longer exploited, oppressed, marginalized, or silenced, it is crucial that we seek to contextualize both the race and class position of Black people within American society to then mobilize against the Black bourgeois and against US racial capitalism. If history is anything to go by, we must be prepared to stand and organize together, collectively, against the Black Misleadership Class to build a world where Black people can truly be liberated. Endnotes 1 The term “Black bourgeoisie” used here is not directly related to E. Franklin Frazier’s text Black Bourgeoisie in which the term is used to refer to the Black middle class rather than the Black capitalist class. Along these lines, by the capitalist class, I am referring to the class that does not earn money solely through labor but also through the accumulation and exchange of assets. 2 Emmrich, Stuart, “Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’s Press Conference Shows True Leadership During A Crisis.” 3 Robinson, Cedric, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2. 4 Ibid, 2. 5 Asante-Muhammad, Dedrick et al, "The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide Is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class,” 5. 6 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, “Back to the Neoliberal Moment: Race Taxes and the Political Economy of Black Urban Housing in the 1960s,” 189. 7 Ibid, 189. 8 Ibid, 191. 9 Ibid, 189. 10 Ibid, 195. 11 Thomas, Taylor Miller, “Coronavirus Relief Favors White Households, Leaving Many People of Color at Risk of Being Evicted.” 12 Chatelain, Marcia, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, 14. 13 Weems, Robert E., and Lewis A. Randolph, “The National Response to Richard M. Nixon’s Black Capitalism Initiative: The Success of Domestic Detente,” 67. 14 Weems, 68. 15 Chatelain, Franchise, 15. 16 Ibid, 177. 17 Kendi, Ibram X, “A Battle between the Two Souls of America.” 18 Dawson, Michael C. and Meghan Ming Francis, “Black Politics and the Neoliberal Racial Order,” 46. 19 Ibid, 48. 20 Ibid, 48. 21 Ball, Jared, The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power, 2. 22 Ibid, 2. 23 Robinson, Black Marxism, xi. Works Cited Asante-Muhammad, Dedrick, Chuck Collins, Josh Hoxie, and Emmanuel Nieves. Rep. The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide Is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class. Institute for Policy Studies, September 2017. https://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/The-Road-to-Zero-Wealth_FINAL.pdf . Ball, Jared A. The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Chatelain, Marcia. Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Liveright, 2020. Dawson, Michael C., and Megan Ming Francis. “Black Politics and the Neoliberal Racial Order.” Public Culture, vol. 28, no. 1 78, 2015, pp. 23–62, https://doi.org/10.1086/685540 . Emmrich, Stuart. “Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’s Press Conference Shows True Leadership During A Crisis.” Vogue, May 2020. Frazier, E. Franklin. Black Bourgeoisie. The Free Press, 1957. Kendi, Ibram X. “A Battle between the Two Souls of America.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, November 16, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/americas- two-souls/617062/ . Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. “Back to the Neoliberal Moment: Race Taxes and the Political Economy of Black Urban Housing in the 1960s.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 2012. Thomas, Taylor Miller. “Coronavirus Relief Favors White Households, Leaving Many People of Color at Risk of Being Evicted.” POLITICO. POLITICO, August 7, 2020. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/07/coronavirus-relief-racial-eviction-392570 . Weems, Robert E., and Lewis A. Randolph. “The National Response to Richard M. Nixon’s Black Capitalism Initiative: The Success of Domestic Detente.” Journal of Black Studies 32, no. 1 (September 2001): 66–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/002193470103200104 . Previous Next

The Captain and the Doctor: On the Enchantment of Modern Men George LeMieux Author Alexander Gerasimchuk Fatima Avila Editors Though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This ship is England. Introduction Modern man is lost. He is not home to himself. He lacks the longings that great men once had. While Nietzsche, Rousseau, or Burke might better articulate or explore this problem, I intend to explore how it might be remedied, a possible antidote to our modern poison. From the Western canon, I have identified three such antidotes or rather three figures who might re-enchant the modern man, the man of the democratic age. They are the vanguard of Marx, the conqueror of Nietzsche, and the disciple, which is first constituted Biblically but later in Toqueville among others. I shall conduct this search through the metaphor of a ship’s captain, in this case, Captain Jack Aubrey as depicted in the celebrated series and film Master and Commander , which I will briefly outline. Before that outline is given, I will first justify this metaphor by the virtue of captaincy itself (despite the fact I would shoehorn this favorite film of mine into anything). Then in the aftermath, I will examine these three figures as our “captains.” In this examination, I hope to reveal that modern man may only be enchanted, or at least enchanted to humanity’s benefit, by a disciple. For our captain, only the disciple offers a path that does not self-destruct and looks beyond worldly motivation. A Metaphor Since there is a long and storied history of philosophers making use of the ship and other nautical nomenclature as metaphor for their sophisticated views on man, government, and what other nonsense comes to their minds, I see no reason to deviate from the tradition. For what is better than a ship with captain and crew? She, like her nation, must suffer through trial and tribulation, storm and battle. She must adjust her sails so that she catches the wind but not let loose so much as to rip her masts apart. She must have a rigid hull built to withstand cannon and carronade, but she must also have flexibility, lest the changing temperatures and humidity crack her hull. She must be led by a captain, strong and decisive in his command. Yet he must not be a tyrant. He must court the hearts of his men so that he may win their will. If not, his men will mutiny. The uninspired crew would have no other reason to entertain the otherwise insufferable conditions of life at sea. Indeed, I do think this will be a fitting metaphor. The Captain Captain Jack Aubrey of His Majesty's Royal Navy is a man caught between two worlds, between two times. Behind him is the aristocracy of old: kings, queens, lords, ladies, and government by the few for the many, at least ideally. In front of him stands modernity: merchants, naturalists, revolutions, counter-revolutions, Napoleon, the new world, America, and democracy. Such is the world of Captain Aubrey as depicted in Patrick O'Brian's novel and Peter Weir’s film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Jack is a man of tradition. He respects the Crown. He reads his scripture. He loves his country. Jack’s hero is none other than Duke and Admiral Horatio Nelson, a brave and sturdy man who dies defending his love of king and country. And yet Jack sees his idols, his pillars crumbling. He has witnessed the chaos of the revolutions in France. He holds the Burkean sentiment that it is the modern radicals that “despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; [...] they have wrought underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have ‘the rights of men.’” It is this modern threat with its rights and revolutionaries that is epitomized by the two foils of the film. The first foil is the Acheron —the ship of the modern age. She is at the forefront of naval technological advancement. Her hull is braced by three layers of live oak and white oak, making her near impenetrable for any ship of her class. She is the largest of any frigate built, able to carry more guns, yet also more aerodynamic, “heavier, but faster spite it” (Weir, Collee). In every way, she outclasses the H.M.S Surprise , Jack’s nimble but aging frigate. And where is the Acheron built? Boston. While Peter Weir had the financial sensibility to make the antagonist of the film French, i.e. Acheron , Patrick O’Brian’s ship was called U.S.S Norfolk . It is with this name that the dichotomy O’Brian intended is much clearer. It is the new world and the old world, His Majesty and Mr. President. And the new world is winning. The second foil is not a figure of oak and iron but of flesh and bone. Doctor Stephen Maturin is the ship’s surgeon and a savant of a surgeon he is. He is also a naturist, collecting, diagraming, and recording the various species he encounters on the ship’s voyages. Upon the ship’s travel to the Galapagos Islands, the parallels to the young Darwin are evident. More important, however, than any of this, he is Jack’s best friend. Despite sharing little common interest, much less a common worldview, Jack confides in Stephen what he confides in no one else. Stephen, in turn, voices his dissent to Jack, when no crew member nor officer would otherwise dare. He is both his greatest ally and greatest challenger. He is the check to Jack’s ambition and the prosecutor of his reason. He is the liberal to Jack’s conservatism. He echoes the voices of democracy, of the social contract, and the danger of tyrants. His respect for Jack comes not from his title or station but from how he leads, how he governs. It is Stephen who most quickly becomes the radical, the revolutionary, when Jack steps out of line. The Jack we see at the film’s beginning is willing to die on the hill of order and naval tradition. He is unable to see anything but the objective of his mission. Stephen and even the other officers are unable to go as far. To Jack’s credit, it is his daring and force of will, despite insurmountable odds, that makes him a great captain. In his pursuit of the Acheron , Jack takes risks that make his moves unpredictable and effective; his crew calls him Lucky Jack for a reason. But those risks do not come without their costs, even if Jack is lucky more often than he is not. Eventually, Jack carelessly pursues the Acheron into a storm and loses a man and a mast in the process. Still, Jack does not turn tail, despite Stephen’s pleas. He refits and refocuses. Only by the film's end does Jack reform and he does so not through reasoning but out of his friendship with Stephen. When Stephen is injured in an accident on board (a marine shoots him while aiming for a bird), Jack sends his ship ashore to one of the Galapagos islands instead of continuing his pursuit, likely to his detriment. This act of compassion, as it turns out, is the saving grace of the Surprise. Not only is the Acheron spotted on the far side of the island, but Stephen inspires Jack on how to capture her. While Jack's act of compassion does not separate him from his ideology, it reveals a complexity in his nature. In not letting his warrior-like nature subjugate the other parts of his conscience, Jack demonstrates his command of self, making him a good captain in more ways than one. His compassion for Stephen, despite their differences, allows him to occupy a middle ground between old and the new, between those of high and low station, between those conservative and radical. Despite their differences, Jack and Stephen end their days together with music, with a duet, playing the cello and violin as the Surprise sails into the sunset. Looking at this time and this day, in this new world, one must wonder if such bonding, such good feeling, such balance between the conservative and the liberal is possible. Every day the position of the radical, of the accelerationist, becomes more compelling even to the conservative. In America, the rigging and line that once held hull and sail together have frayed and torn, not in the harshest winds but in their daily use. The physical lines that once held men together are now virtual, connections in the cloud and the internet. These lines between men were once tangible things; now, there are few of these left. The conservative now must ask himself what he intends to conserve and if he is capable of such conservation. With conservatives far to the right, liberals far to the left, and a confused chasm in between, can those old ropes hold society together any longer? Perhaps, it is time to cut the rope. Perhaps, it is time for both right and left to become radical. Or, perhaps, there is faith to be had in those old ropes. Perhaps, there could be a man to renew their strength, reorganize them, and apply a fresh coat of tar to protect them. Perhaps, there might be a man who could tie new ropes without cutting away the old. Is there such a captain for this ship of modernity? Is there a Jack who can reason with the moderns, take heed of their desires but not be dragged off course? What does such a captain look like? The Captain’s Virtue Before one can talk of any mystical quality a good captain must have, one must first talk about his primary obligation, his duty, his vocation. For if this station is not sound in virtue, the metaphor is not fit for its goal. A captain, such as Jack, is the leader of a warship and of its crew. He would not be a good captain if he could not sail, navigate, or command the ship in battle. He must understand every part of his command and responsibility. It was for such reasons that those men who became captains most often started their time at sea from their early teens as Midshipmen, who were responsible for commanding gun crews of sailors twice their age. It is this good practice, of physical strain and tangible purpose, that makes the vocation virtuous. Virtue is not found in sophistry or the professing of morality but in good works and deeds. Both Rousseau and Marx recognized that the “sensible” men of the world are not the magistrates but the “workers” and the “people.” In this way, the captain is a unique station. It is a position that reaches downward to the grit and servitude that is required but reaches up toward order and inspiration. On one hand, a captain must stand amongst his sailors and with his marines facing the enemy, taking with them every shot fired, equally as likely to be impaled by shrapnel and splinter, equally as likely to take grapeshot from a swivel gun, equally as likely to take a cannonball straight through his gut. On the other hand, a captain must reach upward. He must engage in strategy, diplomacy, and negotiation. He takes his orders from admirals, parliament, and the King. He must, with his officers, stand apart and govern the crew, making sure he does not fraternize with them or become too social. He must whip those who are insubordinate. And it is he who gives the parting sermon after his men die in battle. The captain is both above and below, a man who mediates between king and country, between God and his men. Vanguard For Marx, the nature of our captain is clear. He must be a vanguard, a man who can reach from the high to the low, from bourgeois to proletariat, a man who has the means to lead the proletariat to “acquire political supremacy” and “ constitute itself the nation” (Marx 488). The vanguard can not be of the lower classes as they do not hold the means of production or own sufficient property. The vanguard will not be the bourgeois socialist who wants “all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting from them.” That man would not lead nor fight in the “impending bloody conflicts” that the revolution requires. But the captain might. He, by virtue of his practice, gains access to the epistemic standpoint of the working man. He can call his men into battle because he will be in that battle himself, because he will stand in front, with pistol and cutlass in hand, because he knows their plight and their struggle. Yes, the captain might be the perfect vanguard, if he had the disposition and the courage required to lead the revolution. But no vanguard will heal or reinspire the whole nation. He will take the radicals he agrees with and burn the rest. The ideal vanguard may be the captain, the general, or some other man of higher but not so noble station, that comes down to act on behalf of the proletariat. But the unifying captain is, in the root of his position, opposed to such a severing. More fit, would be the treasonous first officer who leads a mutiny against the captain and the remaining loyal officers. To be a vanguard is to be a “slash and burn” farmer who wreaks devastation on the present vegetation so that the soil may be made fertile again. There will be no healing, under the vanguard. Conqueror Then perhaps the captain, who must fight to re-enchant our new world, must be a conqueror. The conqueror does not require a revolution, or at least not an ideological one, for the conqueror has no need for the traditional radical who operates on moral principles. He is not the vanguard who cries out to the poor that they must liberate themselves. The conqueror only asks for good men, inspired to fight for their home and fatherland, inspired to make something more of what they have been given. The conqueror rises in rank and comes to lead a nation because of his proven success on the battlefield. This captain inspires not because of his pleasant sailing or wise words but because he sinks ships. Nietzsche asks “[m]ust the ancient fire not some day flare up [...] More: must one not desire it with all its might.” Is it not blood that would surely wake the modern man from his slumber, wake the animal instinct inside of him? Perhaps the true conservative can only believe that “antiquity incarnate” arises through a conqueror, a superman, a Napoleon. And yet one must ask of Nietzsche, what is to happen after the conquest? What is to happen after one has conquered all he can or has been defeated? What was Napoleon to do, having failed in Russia? What was Alexander to do when he lay sick and dying in his bed? What is left to hold a nation together when the expansion has stopped and the wars have come to an end? How is a conqueror to at last govern his people? If the measure of man’s vitality is only to be strength and victory, then there will be no man who finds purpose in times of peace. When the soldier again becomes the carpenter after his service is done, he must now aspire to be the superman of carpentry. He must strike down all other table builders and door makers in his path if he is to achieve vitality. He will feel not for his fellow man, now that he does not need him to protect his flank or cover his advance. He will be a frustrated and lonely man, who, in his attempted rationalization to maximize his will and vitality, will frantically look around every corner to become the carpenter of all carpenters, betraying every man who gets in his path. Nietzsche might retort that one should not care for the carpenter, for all carpenters are weak men who failed to rise to a higher station. But if one is to build a society, does one not need the carpenter? Would it not be better to be his friend so that he may more willingly and caringly craft one’s furniture? Perhaps Nietzsche thinks that forcing the carpenter to build a chair would be better to maximize the will than to engage in normal transaction or to politely ask him. Society needs carpenters; a ship needs sailors. Neither will run well if every request is made out of threat or a difference in power. Sure power may be unequally distributed among men, and men will surely wield that power to their advantage, but every interaction need not be a Melian Dialogue . No unification of society, no mending of wounds, could ever take place in such a one-dimensional existence. Even if, for but a fleeting moment, conservative and liberal may be united by the fires of war, such a state is only temporary. While the ancient fires may rise again, they may just as quickly die. For all Napoleon was, how many more revolutions and fragile republics followed? There was no remnant of antiquity to build upon. Instead, it was democratic man who, upon the rubble of Europe, raised his new throne. In his time, Tocqueville correctly surmised that democracy would be here to stay: “I think that in the long run, government by democracy shall increase the real strength of society.” While “slave” in its morality, democracy is dominant in its presence. Its practitioners are no longer just the carpenters or even the priests; they are the captains, the generals, the senators themselves. While European antiquity lay unaware, the strength and size of America, of democratic power, grew. “Something that passed unnoticed a century ago now strikes the attention of all.” Now, antiquity not only lacks the popular momentum to overcome the democratic age, but it lacks the strength. If there is to be a man who rekindles the flame of the West, he will not be a conqueror who slays democratic man. He will be a democratic man himself. And What for God? Purposely absent from the mind of Marx’s vanguard and Nietzsche’s superman is the Kingdom of God. Nietzsche and Marx are the archetypes of, as John Courtney Murray would categorize them, “the postmodern atheist”. The post-moderns not only leave God out of their government, philosophy, and science as the moderns do; they actively strike Him out, act against Him, and demonstrate how He cannot exist. The postmodern is offended that a God could exist and (in Marx’s case) allow for so much scarcity, so much evil, or (in Nietzsche’s case) deprive man of his freedom, the will, that makes man human. God, if he exists, is either a tormenter, imprisoner, or both. Nietzsche further declares that the morality man claims to have derived from God, the morality of the Christian and the Jew is the greatest perversion of the natural order: strength and weakness. Good and evil, concepts of vengeful weaklings, invert the true “morality” by which man once lived and should live again. Of Marx’s and Nietzsche’s cases, Nietzsche’s is the stronger. When one eliminates God from the worldly equation, one must also eliminate the morality that came with Him. Marx may claim scarcity is the great evil, but this concept of evil only comes through sympathy for the suffering of others. What is the evil of inequality or greed or a dominant bourgeois class if there is no concern for fellow man? From where does the humanist goodness, ascribed by Marx to the elimination of suffering, originate? Without an order, ordained above and outside by divine authority, there can be no objective good. No worldly cosmodicy is sufficient to prove an objective good. If one’s ultimate goal is “good” for the nation, one cannot look to Nietzsche for a cure; the concept of good is, in fact, part of the disease. But if one looks to Marx, one cannot find a source of good. Therein, the postmoderns are fruitless. And democratic man seems to agree. The true moral plague is that democratic man is not looking for goodness but instead assumes it. The modern atheist does not kill God but walks away from Him. In His absence, he does not search for truth or morality but merely replicates the idea of good that was passed down to him. He imitates, but his imitations, as they are not rooted in the source, are imperfect: bastardized (Murray and Nietzsche agree). He might even hold some personal religious sentiment but will not act on religious conviction. He does not mix the personal with the external world. He will work, govern, and wage war but will never do so in the name of God. He lives as if God does not exist. This … breed says in effect that, since he cannot know what God is, he will refuse to affirm that God is. But this stupidity, one may well think, surpasses that of the idolater. It is not merely an implicit refusal of God; it is an explicit denial of intelligence. The essence of God does indeed lie beyond the scope of intelligence, but his existence does not. It is this modern man—the man who does not deny God but shoves him aside—that has become commonplace. This modern man feels neither the warm light of heaven nor the scorching hellfire below. He wanders in a cold fog, blind, deaf and dumb. He lingers in the cave only seeing shadows of the truth. Because he does not see the source of the light, he assumes there is no source and does not search for it. It is this modern man who must be re-enchanted. Disciple So how is our captain to deal with the moderns, with the Dr. Maturins that now sail aboard every ship? What is he to do with those who synthesize values of democracy and the equality of man but do not acknowledge the creator who created them equally? Thankfully, the modern agnostic, despite his lack of reason in comparison to the Nietzschean, has not yet thrown off his moral yoke. In some ways, he still feels a connection to the world beyond the material. There are yet some embers left to kindle. There are yet men left to kindle them. There is hardly any human action, however private it may be, which does not result from some very general conception men have of God, of His relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and the duties to their fellows. Nothing can prevent such ideas from being the common spring from which all else originates. If man is to truly be re-enchanted—to be inspired and given lasting direction—he must look to that only thing which is transcendent, that is not merely of time and matter. If there is ever again to be unity amongst men, there must be unity with their creator. There must be disciples to show us the way. When man has been enchanted, even democratic man, it has been with and through religious spirit, fostered by disciples and prophets. These men once walked among us. These were the men in between God and humanity, Heaven and Earth, men who heard His voice and acted on His will. They were Moses and Abraham and David and Paul and Peter. God even revealed Himself to man in mortal form, in and through man’s pain and flesh. And yet, despite all of these, man’s faith remains weak. The disciples' task is never finished. He may never stop, for if he does, man is quick to forget and quick to lose his way. He will lose himself in the desert, and never find the promised land, his true home, his self. The disciple must be an ever-present and ever-constant reminder of God. The captain, disciple in his most righteous form, has some divine spark, some glint in his eye, some Promethean fire in his bosom that animates bravery and fortitude. The captain calls his men to voyage into the unknown, across the far side of the world. He calls his men to fight for a home that long disappeared behind a horizon last seen thousands of miles ago. He brings together those born across the empire, those who share little, and those who resent much. The duty the captain must call his men to cannot be incentivized with the stuff of the earth. He can promise them no amount of riches or glory among men to keep them steadfast. There is something the captain must awaken in his men that moves their spirits, their souls, guiding them toward something not here attainable. Only manna sent down from upon high can quell a spiritual hunger. And so the Captain must be like Moses, the interlocutor between man and God—newly the interlocular between conservative and liberal. He does not make the manna nor the law in the heavens, but he does transmit them. He walks down from Sinai to deliver to those below. He understands the plight of his crew, the doctor, and the common man, but he does not let them build golden calves. He has ambition but he does not raise towers of Babble; he does not push onward without cause. Where have these disciples gone? Where is Moses to be seen? Who upholds the commandments given from on high? Might it not be the lack of disciples but man who is the problem? Have there been one too many golden calves built in town squares, one too many towers of Babylon raised to the mockery of Heaven? Are there enough ears today willing to hear a sermon, enough lips willing to say a prayer? I contend there are. While the world may not be presently enchanted, there have been moments, glimpses, of enchantment. There was Reagan who stood in the way of the communist threat with his quick wit but mild manner. There was Dr. King who appealed to the heavens, preached to the masses, and marched hand in hand with the persecuted. There was Churchill who looked the devil right in the eye and spat back at him. There was Lincoln who looked over a battlefield and made a promise those men would not die in vain. There was Washington who led his soldiers, served his time, and ceded his throne. It was these disciples that reminded man of himself, of his nature, of his longings. They called upon God, evoked a higher duty, and bound men to each other. They knew that “[r]eligion [...] imposes on each man [...] obligations toward mankind, to be performed in common [...] and so draws him away from thinking about himself.” Like a captain, those disciples, who were fit to suffer, suffered in common with their men when they could have stood afar. Dr. King marched with his men, was imprisoned for them, and died for them. Reagan too took a bullet for his nation, although he fortunately survived. Lincoln, in his service and his stress, aged himself twenty years in the span of four and was assassinated shortly thereafter, giving the last full measure of his devotion. Washington lost battles for months on end in the bitter cold until he found success in a Christmas night attack. Oh, the joy nations will feel when leaders acquire such courage again when they call upon the heavens as they did not so long ago. Oh, they will know that feeling that gathered hundreds of thousands on the National Mall, that mustered the men who crossed the Delaware, that had black and white Union soldiers singing “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” as they marched surely to their deaths at Fort Wagner. Only then can man come home to himself. Conclusion Who is our captain to be? What direction would we have him take our ship? Must he not be both a man of the people and a man of the elite, a democratic man who still has a touch, a memory in him, of that antiquity, that nobility, that honor of old? Still, he is not the vanguard of the proletariat, for the vanguard is a mutineer hellbent on revolution, not a captain. Neither is he the conqueror, for the captain must govern his ship beyond the rush of battle. He must lead his crew through those many times at sea which are dull and mundane. He must care for his men beyond their use in warfare. He must be selfless because that is what God calls him to be in times of struggle, a disciple who looks upward before he looks onward. But if those fires are ever to rise again, if the trumpet must once again cry its song of battle, the captain must be ready. He must again be simply a man of his trade, a good seaman and a good officer. He must dexterously maneuver his ship, out-sail, and outsmart his opponents. And when he must call for cannon fire, he must know what to cry to his men. He must have their best, not just for him, but for their God, their nation, and their fellow man. JACK - Want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? CREW- No! JACK- Do you want to call Napoleon your king? CREW- No! JACK- Want your children to sing The Marseillaise? CREW- No! JACK- Mr. Mowett, Mr. Pullings, starboard battery! References Burke, Edmund, et al. Select Works of Edmund Burke: A New Imprint of the Payne Edition. Liberty Fund, 1999. Marx, Karl, et al. The Marx-Engels Reader. Norton, 1978. Murray, John Courtney. “The Problem of God Yesterday and Today.” Georgetown University Library, 1963, library.georgetown.edu/woodstock/murray/1964c. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1989. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Two Discourses and the Social Contract. Translated by John T. Scott, The University of Chicago Press, 2014. Tocqueville, Alexis De, et al. Democracy in America. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Weir, Peter, and John Collee. Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. Twentieth Century Fox, Aug. 2001.