Douglas Beal The Financial Case for Nations and Corporations to Put People and the Planet First Douglas Beal We are in a period of increasing societal disruption. Pressure is mounting to ad- dress the climate crisis. Racial equity issues have moved to the forefront. And the COVID-19 pandemic has caused untold suffering and death and upended economies around the globe. In the past, addressing such issues has been seen primarily as the responsibility of government. But increasingly, there are expectations that the private sector must play a leading role in driving progress on major societal challenges. I, along with my colleagues at Boston Consulting Group, have spent the last decade supporting nations and corporations in addressing social and environmental issues—and measuring how their efforts impact country GDP and company financial performance. My work in this area began with economic development, helping nations to advance in a way that improved the living standards of citizens. More recently I refocused on private sector work, helping companies and investors create strategies to deliver both business and societal value. The research and client work I’ve done in both areas reveal a powerful insight: whether one is talking about a country’s economic growth or a company’s prof- its or returns for shareholders, performance is not degraded by focusing on how decisions impact people and the planet. Rather, the evidence is mounting that integrating such factors into strategy enhances financial performance. Putting Well-Being at the Heart of a Nation’s Strategy BCG’s insight on these dynamics started with our work in the area of economic development. As we supported presidents and prime ministers around the world in honing their development strategies, it became clear they were looking for a way to measure their progress beyond the purely financial benchmark of GDP. This reflected their acknowledgement that robust GDP per capita growth in the short term means little if living standards are undermined in the long term (by poor health, underinvestment in education, a degraded environment, and a widening gap between rich and poor). The Sustainable Development Goals had not yet been put in place at this time, meaning a globally-recognized holistic framework for measuring country progress did not exist. We set out to create one. This led to some deep conversations about what really matters for a society. As Robert F. Kennedy said, GDP “measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” We had to ask our- selves: What actually makes life worthwhile? We thought about general measures of happiness, for example, and whether levels of citizen happiness would be a good barometer for a nation’s performance. Ultimately, we decided that happiness would be too subjective for what we wanted to achieve. Instead we decided to focus on well-being , the conditions and quality of life people experience. We then asked ourselves: how do you measure well-being—and how can a government contribute to it? We spoke with numerous experts and dug into the re- search on well-being to determine what factors should comprise our measure. We eventually zeroed in on 10 dimensions: income, economic stability, employment, health, education, infrastructure, equality, civil society, governance, and environment. We identified a series of indicators for each—a total of 40 in all. The result was the Sustainable Economic Development Assessment, a diagnostic tool and measurement framework launched in 2012. SEDA allows us to track how a country’s well-being compares to that of other nations, determine the pace of progress over time, and identify areas in which countries are performing well or need to improve. SEDA revealed valuable insights. First, not surprisingly, countries with higher levels of wealth tended to have higher well-being. Norway, for example, has had the highest level of well-being relative to the rest of the world every year since we launched SEDA. Second, not all countries convert their wealth (GDP per capita) into well-being at equal rates. Some deliver well-being levels that are beyond what one would expect given the country’s wealth—and others deliver well-being far be- low what would be expected. In recent years Vietnam has been among the leading countries in terms of converting wealth into well-being—outpacing countries such as Germany, France, and the US on this metric. Third, inequality—and not just income inequality—has a major impact on well-being. Certainly, income inequality gets significant attention in political and media circles. But SEDA captures a broader view, assessing not only income inequality but also the lack of equity in access to health care and education as well. And our analysis last year found, somewhat surprisingly, that high levels of social inequality are a greater drag on well-being than high levels of income equality. Over the years, as we continued to assess country levels of well-being, public sector clients, journalists, and others often raised a similar question. While it was clear that countries with higher levels of wealth or growth had more resources to advance well-being, we were frequently asked if the reverse was true. So, was there evidence that countries with a better record on well-being ultimately posted more robust GDP growth? In 2018 we decided to take a stab at answering that question. By then we could access ten years’ worth of SEDA data—enough time to give us confidence we could identify a long-term trend if it existed. Drawing on data for all 152 countries in our data set, we looked at a country’s initial well-being performance relative to its wealth in the period leading up to and including the financial crisis (from 2007 through 2009)—and its growth rate in the decade that followed. We found that on average, countries that produced better well-being for their population given their level of wealth did in fact have a higher GDP growth rate in the future. Our analysis also found that countries that had a better record at delivering well-being for citizens were more resilient during the financial crisis, taking fewer months to recover to pre-crisis GDP levels than countries with weaker records on well-being. It turns out that taking care of people and the planet is good economics. Focusing on Total Societal Impact As we worked with nations on development strategies, we urged them to think strategically about integrating the private sector into those efforts. This included understanding where the country’s most pressing needs existed and identifying the industries and companies that could play a role in addressing those needs. Banks, for example, can be key partners in expanding access to capital for entrepreneurs. Food manufacturers that expand their supply chain to include small-holder farmers can help raise incomes for those individuals and reduce poverty rates overall. And biopharmaceutical companies that move to expand access to medicine can play a vital role in improving health outcomes. Time and time again my economic development work in the public sector rein- forced the importance of the private sector in advancing important societal issues. In 2016, I started focusing more on working directly with large multinational corporations to find ways to improve both business returns and their positive impact on society. At that time, academic research had shown that integrating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance into investment decisions led to better returns from a portfolio perspective. What that meant for individual businesses was not quite as clear. Most of our clients are large corporations—and they had a lot of questions. First, CEOs and CFOs were grappling with whether they should think of good ESG performance as a cost or an opportunity. They also wanted to understand what specific ESG topics were most important for their industry. So, we set out to prove that in fact ESG is an opportunity—not a cost—and to identify those topics that matter for specific industries. In 2017, I joined a group of colleagues in the Social Impact practice to conduct a detailed study of ESG performance in four industries: biopharmaceuticals, oil and gas, consumer packaged goods, and retail and business banking. We assessed company performance in dozens of ESG topics, such as ensuring a responsible environmental footprint or promoting equal opportunity. We looked for any correlation with market valuation multiples and margins. Our goal was to determine whether companies that excelled in those areas, enhancing what we call Total Societal Impact (TSI), saw a difference in financial performance versus companies that lagged in those ESG areas. Now, as members of the Social Impact practice, we were of course hoping we’d find a link. In fact, the results exceeded our expectations. Nonfinancial performance (as captured by the ESG metrics) has a statistically significant positive correlation with the valuation multiples of companies in all the industries we analyzed. In each industry, investors rewarded the top performers in specific ESG topics with valuation multiples 3% to 19% higher, all else being equal, than those of the median performers in those topics. And top performers in certain ESG topics had margins that were up to 12.4 percentage points higher, all else being equal, than those of the median performers in those topics. The bottom line: not only was there no penalty for focusing on ESG, but companies that performed well in critical ESG areas were rewarded in the market. The Moment of Truth Our work in SEDA and TSI were completely different—looking at different players, using different methodologies, and conducted at different times. Yet the results yielded strikingly parallel insights: putting people and the planet at the center of strategy improves financial performance. Those insights have major implications for nations and companies as they navigate the current period of turbulence and disruption. Certainly, it is too early to know which countries around the world will prove more resilient in the face of the pandemic. However, our research does support the view that those nations that design recovery strategies that support citizen well-being are likely to fare best. In particular, governments should design economic re- vitalization programs that don’t just position their nation for economic success in the future, but also ensure the benefits of any gains are equally shared among citizens. And those that created massive stimulus programs must leverage them as an opportunity to accelerate progress in fighting climate change. For companies, the imperative to transform in ways that create positive societal impact is equally strong. Companies should protect employees by ensuring work- place safety, while also reskilling workers and accelerating hiring where feasible. And as they transform their business in the face of the pandemic, they should integrate a societal impact lens into the effort. They can, for example, improve the resiliency of supply chains while also reducing carbon emissions and environmental impact. They can look for new product opportunities that yield real societal benefits. And they can partner with other companies or organizations to maximize impact. There are early indications that companies with a strong focus on their impact on society are faring better right now. Some key MSCI ESG indices, for example, have outperformed non-ESG benchmarks since the start of COVID-19. The challenges facing society today are grave—and daunting. But nations and corporations have massive leverage to move the needle against climate threat, racial inequity, and the devastating pandemic. Without their leadership, it is hard to see how we can make progress in any of these areas. Lucky for us, the evidence shows it is in their economic interest to do so. Previous Next

Bess Markel Rural Despair and Decline: How Trump Won Michigan in 2016 Bess Markel Introduction When Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote in 2016, he shocked the entire world. In part, people believed he could never win because he would never crack the Democrats’ famous “Blue Wall”: the combination of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. But he did, winning counties that John McCain and Mitt Romney could not. Political pundits asked themselves: How did this entitled, brash, inexperienced New York millionaire appeal to rural voters? What seems like thousands of think-pieces have been written on the issue, each suggesting that Trump won the election because of Russian interference, deeply rooted misogyny, racial backlash to Obama’s presidency, the rise of social media, and a myriad of other factors. However, some scholars have suggested that Trump’s unexpected triumph could be traced to another factor: pain and discontentment across rural America. Over the past several decades, America’s working class has seen its way of life disappear. With a loss of jobs due to innovative technology, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, and mass migration out of Rust Belt states, residents of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin—areas that used to be vibrant parts of America’s heartland—feel left behind (1). Some believe that this downward trajectory helped spark the rise of Trump. While this might seem counterintuitive at first because Trump is viewed by the liberal media as an uncaring, East Coast elite, scholars have strived to understand the appeal of Trump among working-class, white voters, particularly in the Midwest. This line of research is particularly important for the future of electoral politics. The movement Trump’s election sparked, and even Trump himself, are not going away anytime soon. Understanding Trump’s appeal can explain his continued support and how other candidates can seize upon the movement he built. This research paper will explore the connection between despair and the rise of Donald Trump. It will use data on unemployment, education levels, and levels of drug- and alcohol-related deaths and suicide taken from the swing state of Michigan, which narrowly helped Trump win the 2016 election. The data section will show that Trump performed better in places where residents seemed more likely to feel economically and socially left behind. However, we must first classify and understand what scholars mean when they discuss despair in rural, working-class America. Understanding Rural Support for Trump Political scientist Katherine Cramer, in her book Politics of Resentment, argues that rural politics can be understood as stemming from the creation of a rural community consciousness, rooted in resentment toward “elites” and urbanites (2). Through interviews with a group of locals in rural Wisconsin, Cramer discovered what rural consciousness looks like and defines it as three sentiments: caring about perspectives of power, primarily that urban areas have all of it and rural areas have none; respect for the “rural way of life”; and the perspective that too few resources are allocated to rural areas (3). All in all, her definition of rural community consciousness paints a picture of rural Americans feeling that urban Americans, and by extension government officials who are overly influenced by urban values, have no respect for their way of life, and are draining rural resources and livelihoods through welfare programs and other legislative efforts that advantage urban areas. This perceived allocation of resources toward exclusively urban areas is not actually the case, and many government funds and programs target rural areas. However, governmental bodies do not always prioritize marketing their budget allocations and as a result many rural communities are uninformed about the inner workings of the political system. In addition, because rural Americans are disillusioned, they have low desire to learn about government activities, leading these causal beliefs to go unchallenged and unresearched (4). This breakdown in communication and understanding has long-reaching effects. The Republican Party has seized upon these sentiments to further its agenda. Many rural Americans are wary of governmental employees and programs that they view as elite and guilty of stealing rural money for personal or political gain (5). Journalist Thomas Frank understands the power of rural resentment but argues that it is not necessarily about a lack of understanding of budgetary inner workings or community anger but is rather about character assessment. He asserts that while resentment and hostility are important in understanding the rural vote, the most crucial factor is actually authenticity.6 Republicans, he argues, have successfully rebranded Democrats as out-of-touch city elites worthy of scorn. Even as Republican political figures push legislation that hurts working-class Americans, they successfully market themselves as relatable, the politicians that a voter would want to have a beer with (7). This authenticity wins them voters despite their lack of concrete political achievements for lower-income, working-class Americans. When putting these scholarly findings in conversation with the campaign message on which Trump ran, it is easy to see how in 2016 Trump played upon the resentment and despair of rural areas by framing the Democrats, and by extension the urban liberal elite, as the cause for all problems. Throughout the campaign, Trump had a habit of saying exactly what was on his mind, perhaps giving him an air of over-a-beer-authenticity and relatability—he certainly appeared honest due to his unfiltered dialogue. Moreover, his lack of political experience likely worked in his favor in areas where government officials are seen as untrustworthy. By contrast, his opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had held governmental office at various levels for many years, which played into Trump’s painting of her in the eyes of many rural communities as an urban elite living off the people’s hard earned money. Further complicating the relationship between rural and urban areas is the perception that urban areas are more liberal or have different ways of life. Sociologist Jennifer M. Silva argues that some rural voting patterns can be explained by the considerable amount of fear that exists in many of these places, both around shrinking economic opportunities and the general future of communities (8). This fear often manifests itself as a feeling that America must return to “disciplined values” such as hard work, or worries that immigrants are stealing all the well-paying jobs. In his campaign, Trump certainly identified these fears (9). This could be seen in his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric, seemingly placing the blame on them for the lack of decent-paying jobs. Trump also emphasized his skills as a businessman, arguing that they would help him run the country and increase the job market. Many authors believe that Trump’s strong performance in rural counties can be explained by the “landscapes of despair” theory, arguing that all of the areas in which Trump over-performed or Clinton underperformed have experienced immense social, economic, and health declines over the past several decades. These authors believe that Trump appeals to voters who are not necessarily the poorest in America but whose lives are worse off than they were several decades ago (10). Trump spoke to that pain and offered these Americans a message that appealed to their despair. Goetz, Partridge, and Stephens find that economic conditions have changed over time throughout rural communities, with urban centers becoming more prominent and fewer agricultural jobs available. However, they find that not all rural areas are doing uniformly poorly economically across America. Instead, there has been “profound structural change” in most of these areas in terms of the types of employment available (11). This structural change could contribute to the feeling among many rural Americans of having been left behind and could also explain some of the draw to Trump’s nationalism, as trade and increased globalization, along with new technology, have contributed to this extreme change (12). Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown agree with this theory and find a correlation be- tween higher rates of opioid addiction in a county and the percent of the county that voted for Trump (13). They found that opioid addiction is one way to measure the sociocultural and economic factors that often created support for Trump and noted that simple unemployment measurements fail to capture this same trend. These two pieces of data imply that the voting patterns of Trump’s supporters do not correspond with being worse off economically than the rest of America, but rather are related to whether people personally feel like they and their communities are backsliding, with opioid addiction as an indicator of this attitude. Gollust and Miller argue that the opioid crisis triggered support for Trump, not necessarily because it is a measurement of sociocultural factors within communities, but because it triggered a comparison in the minds of people living in communities where the crisis was rampant (14). Through experimentation, Gollust and Miller found that Republicans and Trump supporters were more likely than Democrats to view whites as the political losers in the country (15). It is easy to see how Trump’s aggressive rhetoric appealed to people who felt like they were losing and that they needed a fighter to advocate for them. Journalists and Political Research Associates Berlet and Sunshine believe that Trump’s rise can be attributed to changing ways of life and Trump’s connection to right-wing populism (16). They argue that there was a rise in the notion that the white-Christian-heterosexual-American way of life is “under threat” in the years preceding the election. They believe that Trump’s brash candidness, his willing- ness to invoke Islamophobia, homophobia, and xenophobia, and his appeals to Christianity and the patriarchy tapped into a deep-simmering rage that had been growing among rural people (17). In this way, white racial antagonism contributed to Trump’s success. Rural Americans redirected their despair into rage toward those individuals and collectives that they perceived as a threat to their way of life. This argument is heavily focused on the effects of bigotry and anger on people’s voting choices, whereas several other authors, such as Cramer and Frank, believe that rural support for Trump was much less rage-based and much more about a lack of trust in government and the feeling of being neglected for years. We believe that the theories of despair and feelings of backsliding can explain some of the trend toward rural support for Trump in 2016. We believe that data will show that the most important despair factors depict not how badly off a community was in 2016, but rather the comparative: how much worse off it was in 2016 compared to several decades earlier. Finally, we agree with Cramer’s theory of rural consciousness and feel that it may have played a role in general distrust for Clinton as a candidate, but found it impossible to test those attitudes given the data available. Methodology To test the effect of rural pain and despair in connection to GOP voting share in Michigan, we used data at the county level, primarily from 2016, which came from the United States Census Bureau and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (18). We focused specifically on the 2016 election because of the connection between Donald Trump’s share of the vote and struggling rural voters, which was higher than previous GOP candidates Mitt Romney and John McCain (19), as well as Trump’s reputation as an outsider (20). We chose to look at data from all Michigan counties, regardless of which candidate the county voted for or whether the county flipped parties between 2012 and 2016. We chose not to look exclusively at flipped counties because Trump flipped only twelve counties in Michigan. In order to obtain a statistically significant and unbiased result about the effects despair factors had on county result data, more than twelve data points were needed. We instead measured the effect of despair factors on the vote share that Trump received in each county in 2016. We defined six despair factors to represent the challenges and pains each county faced at the time of, or leading up to, the 2016 election. The first three of these factors are defined as the percent change in age-standardized mortality rates be- tween 1980 and 2014 for the following: alcohol use disorders, drug use disorders, and self-harm injuries ( alcoholchange , drugchange , and selfchange , respectively). The source from which we obtained information on drug use disorder–related fatalities did not provide a breakdown by substance so we are unable to determine how much of this factor can be attributed to the ongoing opioid crisis. However, due to the sweeping nature of the crisis, particularly in rural working-class communities, we believe there is some relationship between the drug-use-disorder mortality rate and the opioid crisis (21). Factors that measure changes in living conditions over time, such as changes in fatal overdoses, alcohol deaths, and suicides, will test whether despair is truly about voters’ communities becoming worse than they were before. The fourth despair factor ( undereducated ) represents the education level of each county, using the percent of adults over 18 whose highest educational attainment in 2014 was a high school degree or less. This is an important factor to examine while exploring despair because lower levels of education limit career and income options and are often correlated with greater instances of feeling trapped or stuck in a community (22). The final two factors in the exploration are unemployment and the percentage of the county population that died of any cause in 2016. This last factor is important to consider because higher death rates often show that a county has an aging population and can accordingly suggest that younger people are choosing to leave. If the theories described above are true, unemployment should not matter as much because the “landscapes of despair” theory focuses on decline in communities and in economic opportunities, meaning many voters could be employed but working longer hours, harder jobs, getting paid less, or feeling like they have fewer opportunities than they once did. To test this we ran the same statistical analysis for unemployment but specifically looked at whether the variable was statistically significant in predicting the Trump vote. If it was not, that would prove Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s theory that unemployment is not the best measure of Trump’s support in 2016. We used two statistical methods of analysis. First, we used histograms to compare a single despair factor, such as percent change in alcohol use disorder–related deaths, against the way that the county voted in 2016 to see if certain factors of despair disproportionately affected one party’s vote share. Second, we used the regression equation below to test our hypothesis that the six aforementioned despair factors led to Trump’s higher vote share in Michigan. Finally, we analyzed the despair factors individually to show their discrete effects on the GOP vote share in Michigan’s 2016 election. TRUMPSHAREi = β0 + β1DRUGCHANGEi + β2ALCOHOLCHANGEi + β3SELFCHANGEi + β4UNDEREDUCATEDi +β5UNEMPLOYMENTi +β6PRCNTDEATHSi +εi We fit the model using the county-level data we gathered to examine whether the test statistic led us to reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between these six despair factors and the percent of the vote share that Trump received in Michigan in 2016. We also used the R-squared from this regression to determine how strong the linear relationship of the regression equation was. Results and Discussion The results we found conclusively show that we can reject the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between the six despair factors and Trump’s success in a county. The first statistical method we used was comparing histograms of each factor broken down by party identification. We found graphical evidence to suggest that death rates, suicide, undereducation, and unemployment were disproportionately higher in Republican counties. Changes in alcohol and drug deaths ( alcoholchange and drugchange ) did not seem to be strongly correlated with one specific party, though counties that voted very strongly for Republicans did seem to have the highest values (highest percent changes from 1980 to 2014) for both of these variables. In some respects, the fact that many of these despair factors were higher in counties that voted Republican makes sense. By 2016, Barack Obama had been president for eight years, and often people who are unhappy with how the economy has been faring or who are unemployed vote for the candidate from the opposite party of the sitting president. However, large values of other factors, such as percent change in deaths from self-harm, are more alarming, as these first three variables measure changes dating back to the 1980s. We were surprised that alcohol and drug deaths seemed to be more evenly spread out between the parties than self-mortality, which was particularly unexpected due to the amount of literature on the correlation between those affected by the opioid epidemic and votes for Trump (23). Perhaps Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s theory that increased opioid usage is a good instrumental variable for Trump support still holds because this data only looks at drug mortality, not drug use. It is entirely possible that Trump counties have higher drug use, but we could not make a conclusion based on the data (24). However, due to the large percentage of drug overdoses that can be attributed to the opioid crisis, it is surprising that more of Gollust and Miller’s and Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s theories did not seem to be supported in this data set (25). The 3-D graphs in the appendix look at the relationships between the vote share that Trump received and percent changes in alcohol, drug, and self-harm mortality rates (26). The regression planes on these 3-D graphs show that percent change in self-harm mortality is the only variable with a clearly positive relationship to Trump votes. The other two changes in mortality variables have weaker linear relationships with Trump votes in part due to several county outliers. Exploring those outlier counties more and investigating why specifically they might not follow the common trend would be an interesting topic for ethnographic research. When we ran the regression analysis the first time, we included all six of the variables we categorized as measures of despair. We also ran the regression analysis with different combinations of these variables to see if we could increase the adjusted R-squared variable, which shows the accuracy of adding another variable to the model. We found that the model was most accurate when we excluded the unemployment value, and because its t-test statistic was not statistically significant, we made the decision to exclude it from the final regression we ran in order to have a more accurate model. At first, we were surprised that unemployment was not significant in the model; however, this seems to support the theory that many “despair voters” do have jobs—they are just low paying and highly stressful (27). This supports Goodwin, Kuo, and Brown’s analysis that the unemployment level is not a good measurement alone of whether a county voted heavily for Trump. More- over, the histogram shows that high levels of unemployment are not necessarily correlated with high percentages of the vote going to Trump. Clearly, there are other factors at play that this statistic fails to capture, and unemployment could be an incomplete benchmark for despair because it does not measure satisfaction in jobs nor whether a job pays a living wage. Overall, we found that a model with the five factors of despair besides unemployment gave an R-squared of .552, meaning that 55% of the variance among the percentage of votes Trump won in a certain county could be attributed to these factors alone. This is remarkably high considering that neither policies nor previous voting records were added into this regression. However, the only variables that were found to be statistically significant on their own were percent changes in self-harm deaths and percent of undereducated voters. We were surprised that percent changes in alcohol and fatal drug overdoses were not more significant than changes in self-harm deaths, but again, that could be partially attributed to the fact that the data only measures overdoses rather than frequency of use. While one would assume that there would be a positive representative relationship between the two, it is hard to know for sure. However, we can say that, on average, increases in despair in certain aspects of life are correlated with an increase in support for Trump in the 2016 election, supporting the original hypothesis of this paper that rural despair played into Trump’s win in Michigan in 2016. However, we fail to find definitive conclusions regarding some of the connections drawn in previous scholarly literature between opioid overdose and the Trump vote. Perhaps the most striking analysis is running the same regression but with Democratic vote share in the 2016 election and comparing the results with those from the Republican vote share. As seen in the table below, the coefficients for each variable nearly flip signs. A decrease in suicide-, alcohol-, and drug-related deaths, or other despair factors, can be expected on average to be associated with a positive increase among the percentage of the county “voting blue.” Counties that vote Democratic, at least on average, tend to have had some sort of positive change, on the individual or communal level, around certain measures of despair (28). This does not mean that Clinton voters were necessarily better off than all Trump voters across Michigan, but rather that Clinton voters had seen their lives improve, if only marginally, and Trump voters had not. Theories of despair regarding rural voters do not compare the lives of rural voters to those of voters in other areas of the state but rather investigate whether rural communities are worse off than they were several decades ago. Similarly, just because certain counties have seen an improvement in certain despair factors does not mean that their communities are not also grappling with alcohol, drug, and mental health issues. Additionally, better-educated counties tend to vote Democratic, with less-educated counties voting Republican. This is a reversal of certain historical trends (29). Again, at some level it is logical that voters who are doing better vote for the party that has been in power for the past several years. However, the data in these studies capture decades of crumbling communities. There is a downward trend in these communities in terms of levels of despair that shows that regardless of which party these counties vote for (whether they vote for the opposite party when they feel dissatisfied with the current one, or for the same party when things seem to be going well), neither party has been able to stop the 34-year trends of increases in suicide-, drug-, and alcohol-caused deaths. This validates theories of “rural consciousness” and “rural despair” by Cramer and Goetz, Partridge, and Stephens that rural communities clearly see and feel suffering in their communities and perceive a lack of attention and resources given to them (30). One could also argue that this supports Silva’s theory that many rural communities fear for their futures based on the downward spiral these communities have experienced for several years or decades (31). This fear could motivate voters to act more drastically or to believe that a massive change is necessary. In the voting booth, this could lead to their voting for a more unconventional candidate. Trump’s main slogan was “Make America Great Again,” suggesting that, at some level, he understood and was trying to court those experiencing this sense of despair. For many voters, America is the best it has ever been: we have unprecedented levels of rights and acceptance for women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Going back seems like regression, not progress. But as shown by this data, many of the counties that voted for Trump in 2016 were better off by certain metrics in 1980 than they are now. It makes sense that residents of these counties could be worried about the continuing decline of their communities and could want to go back to a better time and quality of life. Not to mention, according to Cramer’s thesis of rural consciousness, voters in rural Michigan could be very distrustful of any type of governmental employee promising change. Trump’s brand as a businessman with no prior political experience could have especially appealed to those affected by rural-consciousness thinking. His role as an outsider was relatable. His phrase “drain the swamp” directly spoke to the prevailing belief in these communities that Washington, DC is full of people who take taxpayers’ money and waste time. His opponent had been in the public eye for years in various government positions and was by extension seen, and marketed by conservative news outlets, as the leader of the “liberal elite.” Particularly in contrast with her, Trump could have seemed particularly appealing to those rural voters. The data we found strongly supports Cramer’s thesis that rural despair and resentment led to the crumbling of the Blue Wall. In order for Democrats to rebuild their former strongholds in these states, the party must examine the real pain and anger that many rural voters experience. They need to understand the hopeless- ness people are feeling and recognize why Trump specifically appeals to them. Trump, and the Republican Party, have been strategic in tapping into the anger, fear, and pain that rural voters feel. Democrats contributed to the phenomenon of rural consciousness and the belief that Democrats are coastal elites who neither care about nor understand middle America (32). Clinton and other Democrats have made several public missteps, including making fun of these voters, that have further reinforced this idea. Trump has succeeded in directing rural voters’ anger and mistrust toward the government, specifically bureaucracy and governmental programs that could actually help rural areas. Overall, Democrats need to strengthen their relationship with white working-class voters, and understanding rural despair and consciousness might be the first step to doing so. They need to consider creating messages that specifically address and appeal to rural voters and find and support candidates who can connect with them. To win back rural voters, Democrats also need to focus on messaging in rural America. That includes creating programs that provide resources and relief to these struggling areas, but also, perhaps more importantly, it requires making sure that rural communities are aware of these resources. If rural communities still view government as ineffective and uninterested in their problems, these programs will not be sufficient. It will take significant effort and messaging on behalf of Democrats to convince enough voters that the Democrats’ party, not Trump’s, actually represents rural Americans’ best interests. While President Biden managed to do this in 2020, very narrowly, it remains to be seen whether other Democratic candidates will be able to or will even want to capitalize on this messaging. It also remains to be seen which candidates will seem authentic to rural voters—clearly this was a big factor in Trump’s victory and was maybe an even bigger factor contributing to Clinton’s loss. Going forward, the Democrats will need to support candidates who can reach rural voters effectively and authentically, which remains a tall order. While Trump, not establishment Republicans, created a new coalition that drew on rural pain and despair, it would be naive to assume that the Republican Par- ty will not continue to take advantage of rural despair to win elections. Since Trump’s defeat, the messaging of the Republican Party has remained largely the same as when Trump was in office. If Democrats do not devote resources to successfully addressing these voters, they will have to accept the possibility that their once reliable Blue Wall will fall again or will never be rebuilt, and they will need to find another sizable coalition of voters to target in order to win elections at every single level. Appendix Endnotes 1 Pottie-Sherman, “Rust and Reinvention,” 2. 2 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment, 11. 3 Ibid., 54. 4 Cramer and Toff, “The Fact of Experience.” 5 Cramer, Politics of Resentment, 127. 6 Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, 113. 7 Thomas, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, 119. 8 Silva, We’re Still Here, 45. 9 Inglehart and Norris, “Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Parties.” 10 Monnat and Brown, “More than a Rural Revolt.” 11 Goetz, Partridge, and Stephens, “The Economic Status of Rural America in the President Trump Era and Beyond,” 101. 12 Ibid, 117. 13 Goodwin et al., “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016,” e180450. 14 Gollust, and Miller, “Framing the Opioid Crisis: Do Racial Frames Shape Beliefs of Whites Losing Ground?” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 45, no. 2 (April 2020): 241-276. 15 Gollust, and Miller, “Framing the Opioid Crisis: Do Racial Frames Shape Beliefs of Whites Losing Ground?” 16 Berlet and Sunshine, “Rural Rage,” 480–82. 17 Ibid, 490. 18 Foster-Molina and Warren, Partisan Voting, County Demographics, and Deaths of Despair Data. 19 Monnat, “Deaths of Despair and Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.” 20 Cramer, Politics of Resentment, 127-137. 21 Florian Sichart et al., “The Opioid Crisis and Republican Vote Share.” 22 Autor, Katz, and Kearney, “The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market.” 23 Goodwin et al., “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016,” e180450. 24 Ibid. 25 Imtiaz et al., “Recent Changes in Trends of Opioid Overdose Deaths in North America.” 26 Created with the help of Ella Foster-Molina. 27 Torraco, “The Persistence of Working Poor Families in a Changing U.S. Job Market.” 28 We do not mean to suggest that Democratic voters do not face their own share of struggles, rather that this data on average suggests that counties that voted Democratic were less affected by these specific measures of despair in 2016. 29 Harris, “America Is Divided by Education.” 30 Goetz, Partridge, and Stevens, “The Economic Status of Rural America in the President Trump Era and Beyond.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 40, no. 1 (February 16, 2018). 31 Kim Parker et al., “Similarities and Differences between Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities in America.” 32 Cramer, Politics of Resentment, 127-137. Bibliography Autor, David H, Lawrence F Katz, and Melissa S Kearney. “The Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market.” American Economic Review 96, no. 2 (April 1, 2006): 189–94. https://doi.org/10.1257/000282806777212620. Berlet, Chip, and Spencer Sunshine. “Rural Rage: The Roots of Right-Wing Populism in the United States.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 46, no. 3 (April 16, 2019): 480–513. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2019.1572603. Cramer, Katherine J. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker . Chicago Studies in American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Cramer, Katherine J., and Benjamin Toff. “The Fact of Experience: Rethinking Political Knowledge and Civic Competence.” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 3 (September 2017): 754–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592717000949. Florian Sichart, Jacob Chapman, Brooklyn Han, Hasan Younis, and Hallamund Meena. “The Opioid Crisis and Republican Vote Share.” LSE Undergraduate Political Review , February 13, 2021. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ lseupr/2021/02/13/the-opioid-crisis-and-republican-vote-share/. Foster-Molina and Warren. Partisan Voting, County Demographics, and Deaths of De- spair Data , February 2019. Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. 1st ed. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Goetz, Stephan J, Mark D Partridge, and Heather M Stephens. “The Economic Status of Rural America in the President Trump Era and Beyond.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 40, no. 1 (March 2018): 97–118. https://doi. org/10.1093/aepp/ppx061. Goodwin, James S., Yong-Fang Kuo, David Brown, David Juurlink, and Mukaila Raji. “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Pat- terns in US Counties in 2016.” JAMA Network Open 1, no. 2 (June 22, 2018): e180450. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.0450. Harris, Adam. “America Is Divided by Education.” The Atlantic, November 7, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/11/educa-tion-gap-explains-american- politics/575113/. Imtiaz, Sameer, Kevin D. Shield, Benedikt Fischer, Tara Elton-Marshall, Bundit Sornpaisarn, Charlotte Probst, and Jürgen Rehm. “Recent Changes in Trends of Opioid Overdose Deaths in North America.” Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy 15, no. 1 (December 2020): 66. https://doi. org/10.1186/s13011-020-00308-z. Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. “Trump and the Populist Authoritarian Par- ties: The Silent Revolution in Reverse.” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 2 (June 2017): 443–54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592717000111. Kim Parker, Juliana Horowitz, Anna Brown, Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn, and Ruth Igielnik. “Similarities and Differences between Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities in America.” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. Pew Research Center, May 22, 2018. https:// www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/what-unites-and-di- vides- urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/. Monnat, Shannon M. “Deaths of Despair and Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election,” 2016. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.27976.62728. Monnat, Shannon M., and David L. Brown. “More than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election.” Journal of Rural Studies 55 (October 2017): 227–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrur- stud.2017.08.010. Pottie-Sherman, Yolande. “Rust and Reinvention: Im/migration and Urban Change in the American Rust Belt.” Geography Compass 14, no. 3 (December 7, 2019). https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12482. Silva, Jennifer M. We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019. Torraco, Richard J. “The Persistence of Working Poor Families in a Changing U.S. Job Market: An Integrative Review of the Literature.” Human Re- source Development Review 15, no. 1 (March 2016): 55–76. https://doi. org/10.1177/1534484316630459. Previous Next

How Political Instability Unravels Religious Commitment Even in the Face of Uncertainty Abanti Ahmed Author Hans Xu Koda Li Xuanyu (Willard) Zhu Editors Abstract This paper explores the dynamic relationship between political instability and religiosity in Egypt and Tunisia, with a focus on the period from 2012 to 2018. The central research question examines how individuals navigate uncertainty and address political challenges, influencing the role of religion in their lives. The argument posits that tangible solutions to political challenges diminish religious commitment, while a lack of such solutions fosters an increased reliance on religion. Drawing on a detailed analysis of events, protests, and economic conditions, the paper reveals that the perception of uncertainty can be controlled and the pursuit of tangible solutions demotes religion to a secondary role in individuals' lives. When addressing citizens' concerns during economic challenges, political repression, and societal grievances, policymakers should consider creating platforms for discussion, promoting religious tolerance, and offering practical avenues for positive change, which can be achieved through religious accommodation laws, interfaith dialogue initiatives, and religious endowments. These initiatives ease society’s broader challenge in engaging in open dialogue about the complex human response to political instability that encourages a reevaluation of how uncertainty is navigated. Introduction The periods after pivotal moments in American history, such as the September 11 attacks and the Great Depression, were marked by sharp, brief increases in church attendance as communities sought solace during troubling times. Religious communities are often the first place that people who feel like they have lost control seek refuge. Is this short-lived surge because they have found alternative solutions or because religion slowly loses its allure in the face of prolonged turmoil? Perhaps online communities provide a platform that empowers apostates to be open and therefore increases their visibility. Alternatively, escalating religious persecution and intolerance might contribute to a decline in religiosity, as individuals distance themselves from beliefs facing opposition. Yet, the root causes behind these shifts remain unclear. In this paper, I will explore the conditions under which political instability decreases religiosity. In the currents of geopolitical turmoil, economic upheaval, and rocky political transitions, one might expect religiosity to be a steadfast anchor, providing relief in uncertain times. Yet, as the Arab Spring swept across the landscapes of Egypt and Tunisia, leaving behind a trail of political transformations, the unexpected occurred: religiosity rather than standing resilient, underwent stark fluctuations. The Arab Spring marked a significant period of upheaval and change across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, characterized by widespread protests, demands for political reform, and calls for greater social justice. While Tunisia is often recognized as the birthplace of the Arab Spring, the movement’s mass protests and uprisings transcended national boundaries, influencing countries like Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, and Bahrain, each with its unique socio-political context and grievances. In Egypt, if the period from 2012-2018 was marked by political turmoil, while the period from 2018-2021 focused on economic reforms and stability, then why did religiosity decrease during turmoil but increase during more stable times? In Tunisia, the opposite occurred; religiosity increased during periods of relatively more political instability from ongoing democratic transitions between 2018-2021 than between 2012-2018. In these two cases, fluctuations in religiosity trends were very similar over the same periods of time despite having divergent political outcomes. This is not to postulate that the essence of religion is solely a response to political instability or repression, nor does it assert that religion solely arises from a particular type of uncertainty. Rather, it underscores that within the realm of political instability, a condition that inherently diminishes religious commitment is a type of uncertainty that invites competitive resolutions that take precedence over religious avenues. Despite fluctuations in non-religiosity within a specific sub-group of the Egyptian population over the past decade, it has not exceeded 25%. Consequently, religion consistently maintains a primary role in the lives of the majority within this subset, highlighting its enduring significance and resilience amidst societal changes. My central thesis posits that when individuals are confronted with tangible solutions to alleviate the challenges that they attribute to their political instability, this set of solutions will take precedence over religious commitment. Religious commitment increases when individuals do not have access to these solutions and feel disillusioned by the future. Their perception of the future is important here, and I will discuss in these cases how these perceptions emerge and are sustained during political instability. Consequently, religion assumes a secondary role in individuals’ lives as it is outcompeted by alternative solutions that best alleviate their uncertainties. One secondary argument entails that overall trends of secularization, driven by societal shifts toward modernization, play a central role in diminishing religiosity. As societies modernize and prioritize democratic values, religious influence tends to decline. This argument suggests that broader secularization, marked by the declining significance of religion in public and private spheres, has an impact on individual piety. An alternative argument delves into the role of political Islam during periods of political instability. It suggests that individuals may attribute their political and economic grievances to religious frameworks, especially when political actors weaponize religion for political gains. This attribution may lead to a decline in religious commitment as people scrutinize religion's involvement in political decisions and its consequential impact on their daily lives. This paper will be structured as follows: First, I will discern the type of political instability I will examine. I will explore the types of uncertainties that come with political instability, and how uncertainty is tied to religious commitment. Then, I will showcase what happens to the role of religion when individuals perceive particular types of uncertainty to be present. Finally, I will introduce my cases of Egypt and Tunisia following the Arab Spring and explore how my proposed conditions of political instability are present in both despite their divergent transitions and outcomes. Theory Political instability exhibits diverse characteristics in terms of duration and intensity, ranging from brief upheavals to prolonged disruptions. My focus extends beyond a general assessment of political instability, emphasizing instances of uncertainty directly impacting citizens' daily lives and their perception of the world around them. This perception has cascading effects on how the role of religion is viewed, so I seek to analyze the relationship between individuals' perception of uncertainty with their resulting course of action and religious commitment. Religion, despite being an ancient phenomenon, can also be a psychological response to uncertainty and turbulent times. Religiosity is measured by attitudes toward religious practices, frequency of worship, and overall belief in God. When religion is tied to self-identity, changes within the political sphere are least impactful on individuals’ religiosity. In Lebanon, for example, individuals tend to identify with their religious and ethnic identities before an overarching national identity. In countries where people prioritize nationalism, ethnic divisions, and plurality of religion, the secondary nature of religion in everyday life makes it more susceptible to change in response to changes in the political sphere such as regime change, citizen repression, economic hardship, and military and police brutality. For instance, in Turkey, there are reports of decreased religiosity among youth and even self-reported accounts of hijabi women who wear the hijab in the public eye, but have said to have already “left Islam.” The Republic of Turkey—whose founding father, Ataturk, had revolutionized Turkey as a “modern” state, adopted a Latin alphabet in place of Ottoman Turkish, and removed religion in state affairs—has consequently experienced decades of secularization. Now, with President Erodgan, Turkish society reaches a crossroads with religion and secularization; as Erdogan increases the role of Islam in politics, such as reducing interest rates because “Islam demands it” while inflation increases. As a result, Turkish citizens attribute their economic challenges to religion. While religion may not be the direct cause of these difficulties, the deliberate political weaponization of Islam can contribute to this perception among the population. I postulate that there are two types of uncertainty: controlled uncertainty and random uncertainty. Under controlled uncertainty, individuals have an optimistic outlook that they have the power and agency to pursue tangible courses of action to relieve their uncertainties. In contrast, under random uncertainty, individuals have the pessimistic outlook that their uncertainties are beyond their control. This perception is coupled with a sense of disillusionment regarding the future. In Israel, for example, women responded to random uncertainty by participating in palm recitation to better cope with the uncertain conditions of the Second Intifada and the threat of terror. They inhibited both an absence of control over their uncertain circumstances and disillusionment with the future, which increased their reliance on rituals as a coping mechanism. Trauma is particularly powerful in identity formation, as it brings out what attributes and experiences individuals have in common. While existing research suggests that instability can heighten individuals' religious commitment by reminding them of their shared religious beliefs, this study aims to delve deeper by considering not just the presence of instability, but also its nature and activity. The activity of instability (e.g. living in a constant state of poverty vs. experiencing escalating instability) determines the type of uncertainty individuals perceive of their circumstances. When faced with controlled uncertainty, where the level of instability remains relatively stable, individuals may rely more on their religious beliefs as a source of solace and guidance. However, in situations of escalating instability, where uncertainty intensifies over time, individuals may be more inclined to explore alternative solutions beyond religion to address immediate challenges brought about by political instability. "The consequential secondary role of religion is supported by the notion of secular competition—when economic opportunities or social norms conflict with religious obligations—that individuals face when considering alternative solutions. For instance, during the Great Depression, as conditions worsened, many Americans cataloged the failures of capitalism and voluntarism, emphasizing citizens’ basic responsibilities to one another. Even conservative religious leaders began to join social workers and hungry Americans in calling for more vigorous federal intervention as they faced the suffering before them and their own inability to alleviate it. Their efforts took off in the summer of 1932, when tens of thousands of out-of-work World War I veterans and their families marched to Washington, DC to demand early payment of promised service bonuses. Yet as the federal government extended its place in Americans’ daily lives, leaders of some religious institutions feared for their own status. This historical example illustrates how under conditions of political instability, individuals may perceive a sense of control over their uncertain situation and may prioritize tangible courses of action over religious commitment due to the perceived favorability of the outcomes they desire." To determine, then, the conditions under which political instability decreases religiosity, I argue that when individuals face controlled uncertainty, their reliance on religion becomes secondary as alternative solutions with the potential for immediate favorable outcomes take precedence, but random uncertainty results in the increase in religiosity that many might predict. The cases of Tunisia and Egypt offer valuable insights into the dynamics between political instability, tangible actions, and the evolving role of religion under political instability. Case of Tunisia: Controlled Uncertainty In the case of Tunisia, the Arab Spring catalyzed in December 17, 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street vendor in the impoverished city of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, self-immolated. This came after market inspectors confiscated some of Bouazizi’s wares, claiming that he lacked the necessary permit. Bouazizi’s suicide was the result of desperation rather than symbolizing a political cause, though it was publicly interpreted as an act of protest. Several reward systems were activated after Bouazizi's suicide. Bouazizi was considered as a "hero for Tunisians and the Arab world as a whole" by Tunisian film directors, assumed a martyr by the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) of Tunisia, and named TIME magazine’s person of the year in 2011. The publicized suicide of Bouazizi made many people in similar situations believe that suicide was an appropriate action for them as well. Bouazizi was a university graduate distraught with the inability to financially support his mother and siblings, reflecting the vast majority of Tunisians experiencing soaring rates of unemployment. In 2009, the overall unemployment rate in Tunisia was 13.3%, but 30% among Tunisia's youth, who made up almost a third of the total population. The Tunisian government decreased expenditures from 45% to 29% from the 1970s to the 1990s, lowering the quality of public goods and services. Hence, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, president of Tunisia from 1987 to 2011, along with his family and other elites, created and strengthened the inner circle of cronyism—political elites appropriating economic resources and creating privileges by preventing outsiders. Controlling half the country’s wealth, the enterprises they owned produced 3% of total output and employed only 1% of the labor force. In addition, Ben Ali never allowed genuine political opposition to emerge and elections were manipulated: In 1989, he supposedly garnered 99.3% of the vote; in 1994, 99.9% and five years later, 99.4%. Political opponents — in particular Islamists— were persecuted, tortured or forced into exile. Tunisia's press was censored. According to the theory of suicide proposed by French sociologist Emile Durkheim, Bouazizi's self-immolation would be best categorized as anomic suicide. This type of suicide occurs when individuals experience a chronic state of societal disorganization, where traditional sources of regulation, such as religion and government, fail to provide moral constraints in the face of an unregulated capitalist economy. Anomic suicide is often associated with a sense of disillusionment about the future, leading individuals to see self-infliction as a way out. It's important to note that self-immolation directly contravenes Islamic law, as the Quran prohibits harm to oneself. Therefore, Bouazizi’s act can be viewed as a poignant illustration of the prioritization of social circumstances over religious beliefs. Despite the religious prohibition, Bouazizi saw self-immolation as a desperate means to escape his dire socio-economic situation. This conflict between religious doctrine and the perceived urgency of his socio-economic plight highlights how individuals may prioritize immediate material concerns over religious commitments. After years of severe economic hardship, during which most Tunisians were struggling to survive while President Ben Ali’s family, friends, and allies were getting richer, Bouazizi’s self-immolation marked the tipping point. Tunisians began to protest. Tensions heightened on December 22nd when another young man from Sidi Bouzid climbed up an electricity pylon and electrocuted himself on the cables, saying he was fed up with being unemployed. The new wave of strikes first erupted on December 17th in Sidi Bouzid, and came after the labor unions announced that they would organize peaceful marches to urge the government to improve its performance in development and employment. A few days later, a teenager was killed when police in Sidi Bouzid opened fire on protesters. An interior ministry spokesperson said police had been forced to "shoot in self-defense" from protesters who were setting police cars and buildings ablaze. The Tunisian government had been trying to manage the crisis politically before using force and the Tunisian development minister traveled to Sidi Bouzid to announce a new $10m employment program. The Tunisian government’s concessions—often met with skepticism on its sincerity and implementation—were a response to the resilience and violence of the crisis, showing Tunisians that the government was reacting to their demands rather than solely resorting to violence. This instilled hope in Tunisians regarding the positive trajectory of their protests. Despite protests, the rich were getting richer, the poor were not only getting poorer, but also had no job prospects, no ability to express themselves, and no way of criticizing government policy. The protests that erupted in Sidi Bouzid were spontaneous, yet they were marked by a level of organization and sophistication that appeared grounded in the sheer determination of those who participated in them. Tunisians faced a more costly and risky path due to being the first country to protest, unlike Egyptians who benefited from the momentum generated in Tunisia. The cost of cronyism and corruption to Tunisia is much higher because it also hinders job creation and investment and contributes to social exclusion. The presence of cronyism exacerbates the costs of protest by increasing repression, legal and financial consequences, social stigmatization, and psychological toll for protesters. The fear of retaliation from security forces was high, and protesting carried significant risks, including arrest, torture, and disappearance. For Tunisians, the standard method of expressing dissent has been informally within the party framework, but the masses participate in riots and demonstrations. The first president of Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba (1957-1987), carefully appointed members of the political elite and removed them from office in such a way as to prevent anyone from building up a political base to keep factions to a minimum. The Tunisian economy was heavily centralized around the ruling elite and suffered from widespread corruption and cronyism. Economic grievances were a major driver of the Tunisian uprising, and many protesters were motivated by frustrations with unemployment, poverty, and lack of economic opportunities. The economic challenges faced by Tunisians may have increased the perceived costs of protesting, as individuals risked losing their livelihoods or facing economic hardships as a result of participating in protests. In Tunisia, the uprising was driven by a broad-based coalition of activists, students, workers, and ordinary citizens who came together to demand change. Solidarity among protesters helped to mitigate some of the risks associated with protesting by providing emotional support, practical assistance, and collective action. From this, it is clear that Tunisians perceived their uncertainties as resolvable through risky actions, therefore partaking in actions that would immediately relieve their grievances rather than remaining disillusioned with their future, which ultimately decreased their religiosity during this period. On January 13, 2011, Ben Ali appeared on national television and made broad concessions to the opposition, promising not to seek reelection as president when his term would end in 2014. He expressed regret over the deaths of protesters and vowed to order police to stop using live fire except in self-defense. Addressing some of the protesters’ grievances, he said he would reduce food prices and loosen restrictions on Internet use. Ben Ali’s concessions did not satisfy the protesters, who continued to clash with security forces, resulting in several deaths. The next day, a state of emergency was declared, and Tunisian state media reported that the government had been dissolved, Ben Ali fled Tunisia, and that legislative elections would be held in the next six months. Ben Ali’s reign from 1987-2011 had ended and Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, appointed by Ben Ali in 1999, assumed power. The aftermath of Ben Ali's departure marked a significant moment for Tunisia, as protests persisted despite the regime change. Protesters had gathered in the area to demand that the interim government step down and the current parliament be disbanded. Demonstrators were also asking for suspension of the current constitution and the election of an assembly that can write a new one, as well as organize the transition to democracy. There were daily protests that members of Ben Ali's Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD) party were in the new government and thousands of largely peaceful anti-RCD protests emerged.36 After persistent clashes between protesters and armed forces, Ghannouchi announced his resignation particularly following the death of three people in the country's capital, Tunis: “I am resigning today because I am not willing to be a person that takes decisions that could cause casualties," he told reporters Sunday. He also questioned "why a lot of people considered their main target to keep attacking the government, although a lot of its members agreed to join in this critical time." Ghannouchi’s resignation can be seen as a tangible outcome of the protesters' efforts. It signifies that their voices were heard and that their actions had a direct impact on the political landscape. Ghannouchi's acknowledgment of the need to avoid decisions that could cause casualties reflects a recognition of the legitimacy of the protesters' grievances and a commitment to avoiding further violence. Bouazizi's actions were instrumental in differentiating between controlled uncertainty and random uncertainty, providing Tunisians with a tangible catalyst that transformed disillusionment into proactive engagement with the future. Role of Religion Becomes Secondary As people sought to find concrete control over uncertain circumstances amid political instability, their dedication to religious beliefs weakened. Involvement in organized protests, the confrontation of severe repression, and the navigation of severe economic hardships became the focal points of their attention, demoting religious commitment to a secondary position. In 2012, the Pew Research Center surveyed Tunisians and found that though democratic principles were high priorities, as were the economy and security. 92% said that improving the economy ranked as the most important priority while 79% said that it was very important to maintain law and order. Also, people found democratic freedoms more important than religious divisions. This shows that Tunisians found these economic and democratic principles to take precedence over other grievances they faced. In this time period, a perceived resolution for these priority issues was through civil resistance, demonstrations, general strikes, and self-immolations, that were leading to visible outcomes and relieving uncertainty in a way that religion was not. Outside the party system, Tunisians became politically active, especially Tunisian women, who protested the draft constitution, the economy, and the ruling coalition. Within this political context of newly found political liberalizations, similar to Egypt, various religious groups started coming out of the underground in order to take advantage of the political openings. As these political openings were prioritized, trust in religious leaders went down from 38% to 35% between 2012 and 2018 and those who say they are not religious increased from 18% in 2012 to 30% in 2018. Tunisian Muslims that attend mosques at least some of the time decreased from 52% in 2012 to 30% in 2018. Tunisia’s troubled economy was the biggest challenge in 2017. The national unity government took some measures to stimulate growth, but it struggled to implement key reforms. High unemployment, a rising inflation rate, and tax increases plagued Tunisians. In January 2018, protests erupted in more than a dozen cities over price hikes. This further emphasizes the continued prioritization of addressing economic challenges by the Tunisian people. Secularization In Tunisia, the decades of Ben Ali’s secular regime had excluded religion from the public sphere. Its cascading effects have led Tunisia to have notably lower religiosity than other Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries with the proportion of people who said they were not religious increasing from 15% in 2013 to over 30% in 2018. The ousting of Ben Ali created political opportunities for Islamists, yet the secularizing impact of his two-decade-long regime remains a compelling explanation for the decline in religiosity between 2012-2018. Following the dissolution and drafting of a new constitution in October 2011, Tunisia no longer enforced secularism through repression. Surveillance, restriction, and harassment of Islamist activists that were previously practiced by the government ceased during the year. The new draft gave rise to Islamists to fight for power. In the months that followed the 2010-2011 revolution, several hundred imams were replaced, often by violent Islamists who accused the imams of having collaborated with the former Ben Ali regime. By October 2011, the Ministry of Religious Affairs announced that it had lost control of about 400 mosques. 6 The “uncontrolled” classification means that a mosque’s imams were operating without the official authorization of the Ministry of Religious Affairs. In Tunisia’s new political landscape, the content of prayer services was also no longer controlled by government authorities, a step many Tunisians approved of and viewed as part of the new liberties acquired through the revolution. In 2014, secular parties edged out Islamists at the polls. In the October parliamentary elections, Nidaa Tounes, a secularist political party, won 85 seats compared to 69 for Ennahda, an Islamist political party. Veteran politician Mohamed Beji Caid Essebsi, the head of Nidaa Tounes and a former prime minister, was elected president in December. But turnout was lowest among the young, who ignited the Arab uprisings; among cities, the turnout was lowest in Sidi Bouzid, the birthplace of the uprisings that spread across the Middle East and North Africa. In 2016, Nidaa Tounes, the ruling secular party in Parliament, splintered. Ennahda founder Rachid Ghannouchi declared the Islamist party was abandoning political Islam. Amidst competition between Islamist and secular parties, when asked whether Turkey or Saudi Arabia is a better model for the role of religion in Tunisia’s government, 78% of Tunisians prefer the more secular Turkey, seeing it as a model for religion and politics. While the trends toward secularization during this period seemingly impact individual piety levels, the dominant controlled uncertainty factor holds greater significance, given that secularization has not been exclusive to this period and has prevailed since the era of Ben Ali. Despite the freedom of Islamist parties to enter political life, the government’s loss of control over regulating mosques, and new liberties granted toward religious freedom, levels of non-religiosity still prevailed. Political Islam In contrast to secularization efforts during Tunisia’s political transition, the country simultaneously experienced concerted efforts from Islamists to increase the role of religion in politics. During this period, the presence of political Islam coupled with economic and political insecurities might have led individuals to deviate from religious commitments as they witnessed greedy power grabs from both Islamists and secular parties who employed religion as a political instrument. From January to October 2011, an interim government moved toward reform, recognizing new political parties and disbanding Ben Ali’s party. On October 23, Ennahda, a moderate Islamist party, won the national elections and formed a coalition government with two secular parties. Ennahda first emerged as an Islamist movement in response to repression at the hands of a secularist, authoritarian regime that denied citizens religious freedom and the rights of free expression and association. In 2014, the new constitution incorporated mentions of Islam as the religion and culture of the Tunisian people while also establishing a state role for protecting freedom of religious worship and expression. Ennahda, formerly an Islamist movement, transitioned into a party of "Muslim democrats," distancing itself from the label of "Islamism" due to negative associations with radical extremism. This shift reflects a strategic response to counter the misinterpretation and abuse of Islam by radical groups like ISIS, positioning Ennahda as a moderate political force advocating for democratic principles. Ennahda’s re-labelling as “Muslim democrats” reflects frustration with outsiders not understanding its supposedly true democratic nature which may have resulted in individuals associating their challenges with these religious changes in governance and frustration with religion being politicized. Today, Tunisians are less concerned about the role of religion than about building a governance system that is democratic and inclusive and that meets their aspirations for a better life. However, the interplay between political Islam and religiosity is tied to perceptions of uncertainty. The prevalent economic hardships—regardless of the presence of political Islam—left Tunisians uncertain about the future. In 2011, 78% of Tunisians expressed optimism that the economy would improve to some extent within the following 2-3 years. However, by 2018, this hope had significantly dwindled, with only 33% of Tunisians maintaining confidence in a better economic outlook over the same timeframe. Case of Egypt Egypt stands as a prominent example of a country profoundly affected by the events in Tunisia. The success of the Tunisian Revolution in ousting President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali provided a template for dissent, inspiring Egyptians to rise up against the longstanding rule of President Hosni Mubarak. The images and narratives of Tunisian protesters challenging authoritarianism and demanding change resonated with Egyptians, fueling their own aspirations for political reform and social justice. In Egypt, decades of corruption, police brutality, media censorship, unemployment, and inflation led labor and youth activists, feminists, and individual members of the Muslim Brotherhood to protest. From the occupation of downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square, to labor strikes, acts of civil disobedience, clashes with armed forces, and others, violence between protestors and the police resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries. The wave of organized protests gained momentum following the oustings of Presidents Hosni Mubarak and Mohamed Morsi in 2011 and 2013, respectively. These pivotal events demonstrated to Egyptians that mass mobilization could be an effective means of addressing the longstanding issues they had endured. Despite Mubarak's lengthy rule from 1981 until his departure in 2011, previous protests had proven ineffective in leading to his resignation. However, the timely catalyst provided by Tunisia's Revolution ignited a sense of urgency among Egyptians, inspiring them to seize upon the pan-Arabist phenomenon sweeping the region. This newfound determination empowered Egyptians to confront their decades-long grievances head-on. Egyptians, seeking an immediate end to enduring abuse and corruption, embraced large, organized protests despite harsh governmental crackdown and threats of death. Their perception of the uncertainty faced during this period appeared to be remedied by protests and political changes, thereby diminishing the role of religion to a secondary position. The Egyptian case took advantage of the momentum that the Tunisian revolution brought, making it unique to examine the intricate relationship between their resistance and the decline in religious commitment, challenging the notion that religious avenues are the primary recourse during times of political instability. Controlled Uncertainty Egypt has been an authoritarian government since 1952 with periodic revolts and unrest. The causes of the 2011 protests against Mubarak also existed in 1952, when the Free Officers, who led the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, ousted King Farouk. Issues such as inherited power, corruption, under-development, unemployment, and unfair distribution of wealth have persisted as constants in Egyptian life since 1952. Successive Egyptian regimes have systematically used repression to ensure order. The authoritarian barter “bread and security for freedom” has been widely disseminated along with the notion that the country was not yet ready for democracy. Egypt has long grappled with a systemic pattern of human rights abuses and repression embedded in its governance, prompting citizens to attribute their crises directly to the government. While these challenges have persisted since 1952, worsening economic conditions, government corruption, and Mubarak’s rule, coupled with the influence of the Arab Spring ignited by the events in Tunisia, led Egyptians to unite in similar protests in 2011. The momentum from Tunisia became a catalyst, empowering Egyptians to engage in hands-on initiatives challenging Mubarak’s authoritarian government. President Hosni Mubarak's regime was also repressive, but opposition groups had more space for political activism compared to Tunisia, which lacked a traditional history of political dissent. Mubarak’s regime escalated violence against protesters significantly as protests enlarged with the anticipation of Mubarak’s resignation. Pro-Mubarak demonstrators targeted journalists, and, in what became known as the “Battle of the Camel," plainclothes policemen rode into Tahrir Square on camels and horses to attack unarmed protesters. The issuing of laws restricting public assembly allowed security officials to ban protests up to their discretion and were consequently allowed to use indiscriminate force on defying protestors. Egyptians mobilized protests in diverse ways and when they were repressed through laws restricting public assembly or with increasingly violent police responses, organized protests grew larger and more inflamed. Messages were picked out in stones and plastic tea cups, graffiti, newspapers and leaflets, and al-Jazeera's TV cameras which broadcast hours of live footage from the square everyday. When one channel of communication was blocked, people tried another. Mubarak had grown fearful of the protestors’ relentlessness—first pledging to form a new government, then promising not to seek another term in the next elections, and later becoming increasingly defiant about not stepping down—all the while asking protesters to return to normal. Eventually, Mubarak was forced to step down and the Supreme Council of Egyptian Armed Forces (SCAF) assumed leadership of the country on February 11, 2011. Protests still endured; during March and April 2011, SCAF granted a number of concessions to protesters’ demands in an effort to clear the streets of continued demonstrations. Human Rights Abuses Mubarak’s regime initially responded to the protests with brute force and tear gas, beating and arresting protesters. The regime responded to later increases in protest mobilization by shutting down internet service and mobile phone text messages, replacing regular police forces with the military, and imposing a curfew. This exemplifies a cycle of human rights abuses that not only heightened violent responses but also fueled additional protests, as Egyptians became increasingly outraged. Egyptians faced constant repression and abuse for decades under Mubarak’s rule, and used religious commitment as a coping mechanism before Tunisia catalyzed the Arab Spring, bringing newfound hope that Egyptians could better their circumstances. Since 2013, the military and security-led regime has reinstated its control over society and citizens with an iron fist, curtailing freedom of information and banning freedom of expression. Peaceful political participation and civil society activism, which were the pillars of the January uprising, have been de facto outlawed by the adoption of an arsenal of undemocratically spirited and restrictive laws. Protesting was costly and these laws banning public assembly made it much more risky for Egyptians to participate in protests, but the momentum of the revolution had assured individuals that there would be large turnouts, therefore bolstering their confidence in protesting as a means to confront the military and security-led regime. Egyptians, fueled by the momentum of their revolution and triggered by the ousting of Mubarak and Morsi, found empowerment in protesting. The logical nature of their efforts heightened hope for the future, as each overthrow or victory seemed to validate their path to stability. The move against Morsi deepened the political schism. Millions of Egyptians had taken to the streets against Morsi, but large numbers also protested the ousting of Morsi. A crackdown by security forces killed hundreds and Egypt declared a state of emergency. The emergency measures allowed security forces to detain people indefinitely for virtually any reason. They also granted broad powers to restrict public gatherings and media freedom. Gallup classifies respondents as thriving, struggling, or suffering, according to how they rate their current and future lives on a ladder scale numbered from 0 to 10 based on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. Egyptians gave their lives some of the worst ratings they ever have in the weeks leading up to former President Mohamed Morsi's removal from office. The 34% of Egyptians who rated their lives poorly enough to be considered suffering in June was up from 23% in January. Fewer than one in 10 rated their lives positively enough to be considered thriving. Role of Religion Becomes Secondary Fridays frequently became “days of rage” in Egypt and elsewhere because of the convenience of organizing would-be protesters during Friday prayers. Likewise, mosques themselves are often said to have served as organizational hubs for protest. Mosques functioned as a locus of anti-government agitation and logistical centers of preparation for demonstrations. While it may seem that protest activities at mosques contributed to an apparent increase in mosque attendance, thus suggesting elevated overall religious commitment, these places of worship primarily assumed roles as organizational centers during the peak of the protests, prioritizing logistics over prayer and religious services. Although, of course, mosques and Friday services were still attended for customary reasons, the dual functionality of the mosque introduced secular competition as highlighted earlier in the Theory section. Individuals are confronted with the dilemma of choosing between prayer and protest. Protest is a costly behavior that becomes progressively less risky as the number of participants increases. Hence, overall Mosque participation during the height of mass protests between the overthrow of Mubarak in 2011 to the beginning of El-Sisi’s presidency in 2014, declined. Prior to the Arab Spring, strength in religious beliefs were at high levels: the belief that things would be better if there were more people with strong religious beliefs decreased from 89.8% in 2005 to 83.4% in 2013. Additionally, the percentage of individuals with the belief that religious faith is an important quality in children decreased from 47.1% in 2005 to 27.7% in 2013. Muslims who say they attend the mosque at least some of the time decreased from around 85% in 2012-2014 to 75% in 2018-2019. Secularization In Egypt, as the regime experienced waves of regime changes and upheavals, the period between 2012-2016 witnessed efforts toward constitutional reform emphasizing the protection of civil liberties, the separation of powers, and the establishment of a democratic system of government. While Islam remained the state religion, the constitution also guaranteed freedom of religion and prohibited discrimination based on religion. The constitutional assembly was almost entirely composed of Islamists (Muslim Brothers, Salafis, and independent Islamists). Dozens of articles addressed individual rights and liberties of Egyptian citizens, which was more than the number of articles mentioning Islam. By enshrining these goals in the constitution, the government was held accountable, making failure to fulfill its constitutional obligations not just an act of inefficiency but anti-constitutional. Examples include Article 61, which demands to eradicate illiteracy within ten years; Article 66, which requires the state to provide opportunities for sports and physical exercise; and Article 184, which instructs the state to assimilate living standards across the country. While Islamist groups participated in the drafting of the constitution, the outcome reflected a broader commitment to democratic principles and social reforms driven by the demands of the people. In 2013, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ousted Morsi and campaigned for the presidency on an anti-Islamist platform. He deemed the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, imposing restrictions on their operations and political activities. Liberals called the Brotherhood’s vision for Egypt “totally contradictory with the Egyptian national character,” which they argued respected pluralism of religion and the separation of religion and politics. The banning of the Muslim Brotherhood has likely contributed to the loss of faith in Islamist parties. El-Sisi also claimed that ‘the religious discourse in the Islamic World has lost the values of humanity in Islam’ and rejected the idea of an Islamic state. When he won the presidency in 2014, many moderate Muslims supported El-Sisi because he had taken a clear stand against Islamist radicalism and expressed a genuine desire to support a peaceful understanding of Islam. And in 2018, when El-Sisi ran again, he was re-elected with 97 percent of the vote, although the turnout was low and he faced virtually no competition. The crackdown against human rights defenders and independent rights organizations have made effective monitoring of the elections extremely difficult, especially with the number of organizations that were granted permission to monitor the elections being 44 percent fewer than in the last presidential election in 2014. This has resulted in elections facing criticism for not meeting the standards of a free and fair democratic process. This can also suggest that through negative partisanship, or the phenomenon of individuals forming their political opinions based on their opposition to certain individuals or parties, people viewed El-Sisi as either the best among limited options or endorsed his secularization efforts. Political Islam When governments weaponize a religion that the majority of their populations affiliate with, it is reasonable to link political Islam and individual piety to assert that piety levels and overall religiosity may decrease. This is a competitive argument because perceptions of Islam are directly shaped by how their governments implement Islamic laws, often at the expense of neglecting the needs of the people. Individuals are increasingly witnessing religion being wielded as a political tool. On one hand, they are promised welfare services in the name of Islam, while on the other hand, their repression is justified through the manipulation of Islamic texts. While El-Sisi initially presented himself as anti-Islamist, appearing on stage with the Coptic Pope, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar (the country's most esteemed institution of Islamic learning), and Galal al-Murra, a prominent Salafist, following the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi, he privately holds conservative Islamic views. In A 2006 paper that Sisi wrote for the U.S. Army War College, he argued that democracy in the Middle East could only be of an Islamic nature, and that Islam provides the intellectual framework for his political beliefs. In addition, in 2011, when crowds protested against the military for imposing “virginity tests” on female protesters, Sisi declared that it was his responsibility to “decide if [protesters] were honorable.” However, the fluctuating influences of political Islam in Egypt between 2012-2018 indicate that it is not a strong enough condition on its own for political instability to decrease religiosity. Even the most liberal Egyptian party in 2012, the Free Egyptians Party, publicly defended a constitutional clause making the principles of Sharia the source of legislation. Even when the dominant strategy of the incumbent government was to combat political Islam—as has been the case since July 2013—the formal discourse of President El-Sisi included frequent mentions of the Qur'an and Hadith.33 The Muslim Brotherhood witnessed a consistent rise in support from July 2011 to February 2012 at 63%, followed by a sharp decline in April 2012 to 42%. Prior to the Brotherhood’s rise to power, many believed that its political inclusion would lead to its democratization and moderation. Throughout the eighteen days of demonstrations in January and February 2011 that toppled Mubarak, Brotherhood leaders were aware that the protests were not dominated by Islamist ideas but rather oriented toward the broad goals of freedom and social justice. As a result, Brotherhood leaders were deliberate in their strategies to appeal to voters by not expressing their Islamist views too overtly. This deception was caught on by Egyptians. Nevertheless, between 2011 and 2013, the old state chose to cooperate with Islamists, including the Brotherhood, to neutralize the revolutionary mood in the country. After coming to power, the Brotherhood quickly lost support among the main recipients of its social welfare network: the poor. The Brotherhood’s relationship with the poor was entirely clientelist and was concerned exclusively with creating an electoral base as opposed to developing a more substantive ideological or political relationship. It preferred to reproduce poverty as long as it translated into welfare recipients and, by extension, loyal voters. However, the strength of the argument that the presence of political Islam decreases religiosity diminishes when considering the current scenario, where political Islam exerts even more influence, and yet, religiosity has increased. This discrepancy suggests that the dynamics between political Islam and religiosity are subject to evolving perceptions of uncertainty. During the height of the revolution, Egyptians may have perceived their uncertainties about the future differently, driven by a sense of optimism and the belief in activism. In contrast, the present disillusionment with uncertainties about the future may be contributing to an enhanced role of religion in their lives. The increased religiosity could be a response to the perceived inadequacy of political solutions to address current challenges, prompting individuals to turn to religion as a source of guidance in times of persistent uncertainty. Conclusion I have posited that the conditions of political instability that decrease religiosity are controlled uncertainty and the secondary role of religion. When individuals are presented with concrete solutions to address challenges they attribute to their political circumstances, these solutions will assume greater significance than religious commitment. And when individuals lack access to these tangible solutions and experience disillusionment about the future, religious commitment tends to increase. The pivotal factor in this dynamic is individuals' perception of the future, and this analysis delved into how these perceptions manifested and endured during periods of political instability. Consequently, the outcome is a demotion of religion to a secondary role in individuals' lives, outcompeted by favorable solutions that emerge from the uncertainties they face. It's noteworthy that Egypt has faced challenges since the Mubarak regime, raising concerns about the possibility of a new Arab Spring. Despite the ongoing deterioration of human rights conditions, the intensity that characterized the Arab Spring has diminished. Reflecting on the revolution has yielded diverse opinions, with some viewing it as a success while others perceiving it as a failure. Although repression in Egypt may arguably be more severe today, the period between 2011 and 2016 marked a distinct phase. The ongoing debates surrounding the success or failure of the initial Arab Spring make it seem improbable for a similar movement to occur. Despite the immediate changes following the revolution, both Egypt and Tunisia continue to grapple with longstanding grievances. Tunisia, in particular, is confronted with economic challenges, with approximately 6,000 Tunisians joining ISIS, marking the highest per capita rate globally. Tunisians became disillusioned with post-revolution politics, especially well-educated youths, who experienced unemployment at extremely high rates. Despite the gradual political progress seen over the past seven years, economic rewards have yet to emerge, spurring some to radicalize. Some remaining questions that emerge are: Do individuals revert to heightened religious commitment after resolving political instability, or does the influence of tangible solutions have a lasting impact on their religious commitment? How would foreign interventions impact the relationship between tangible solutions and religious commitment and does it affect individuals' perceptions and responses? Are there distinct patterns in how men and women respond to political instability in relation to their religious commitments? References: [1] “MENA Youth Lead Return To Religion” Arab Barometer, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.arabbarometer.org/2023/03/mena-youth-lead-return-to-religion. [2] “How sectarianism affects Lebanon's foreign policy,” Middle East Monitor, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20211206-how-sectarianism-affects-lebanons-foreign-policy/. [3] Bilici, Mucahit. “The Crisis of Religiosity in Turkish Islamism.” Middle East Report, no. 288 (2018): 43–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45198325. [4] “Lira Slides After Erdogan Says Islam Demands Lower Rates,” Bloomberg, accessed December 14, 2023, [5] Richard Sosis and W. Penn Handwerker, “Psalms and Coping with Uncertainty: Religious Israeli Women’s Responses to the 2006 Lebanon War,” American Anthropologist, no. 1 (March 2011): 42, https://anthropology.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/944/2018/06/2011-Sosis-Psalms-and-Coping-with-Uncertainty.pdf [6] Elizabeth R. Nugent, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition (Princeton University Press, 2020), 46. [7] Alison Greene, "Religion and the Great Depression," Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (April 26, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.513. [8] “Arab Spring.” Encyclopædia Britannica, February 25, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/event/Arab-Spring. [9] Riccardo Alcaro, "Introduction: Bouazizi’s Inextinguishable Fire" in Re-thinking Western Policies in Light of the Arab Uprisings, (Istituto Affari Internazionali 2012), 11. [10] Mehran Zarghami, "Selection of Person of the Year from Public Health Perspective: Promotion of Mass Clusters of Copycat Self-immolation," Iran J Psychiatry Behav Sci. 2012;6(1):1-11. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3939949/ [11] Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, "Arab Spring," Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Arab-Spring . [12] Climate Diplomacy, "Food Price Inflation and the Revolt in Tunisia," accessed April 17, 2024, https://climate-diplomacy.org/case-studies/food-price-inflation-and-revolt-tunisia. [13] Fatih Kırşanlı, "Crony Capitalism and Corruption in the Middle East and North Africa," Journal of Economy Culture and Society, forthcoming, 17 pages, posted July 12, 2023, Yozgat Bozok University, accessed April 17, 2024. [14] DW, "Zine El Abidine Ben Ali: The Robber Baron of Tunisia," accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.dw.com/en/zine-el-abidine-ben-ali-the-robber-baron-of-tunisia/a-50501648. [15] Robert Alun Jones, “Suicide” in Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1986. Pp. 82-114. [16] Al Jazeera, "Protests Continue in Tunisia," accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2010/12/26/protests-continue-in-tunisia. [17] Al-Ahram, "Tunisia strikes to cover more cities," accessed April 17, 2024, https://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/2705/World/Region/Tunisia-strikes-to-cover-more-cities--.aspx. [18] Marwa Hermassi, “THE TORMENTS OF THE REVOLUTION,” Columbia University Press, (2015), https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/alsa16318-009/html. [19] “How Tunisia’s revolution began,” Aljazeera, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2011/1/26/how-tunisias-revolution-began. [20] World Bank, "The Unfinished Revolution," accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/MNA/tunisia_report/the_unfinished_revolution_eng_chap3.pdf. [21] David S. Sorenson, "The Dynamics of Political Dissent in Egypt," The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 27, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2003): 207-228, accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.jstor.org/stable/45289248. [22] Michele Penner Angrist, "The Expression of Political Dissent in the Middle East: Turkish Democratization and Authoritarian Continuity in Tunisia," Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (October 1999): 730-757, accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.jstor.org/stable/179427. [23] Encyclopedia Britannica, "Jasmine Revolution," accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Jasmine-Revolution. [24] CNN, "Tunisian Government Dissolved Amid Protests," accessed April 17, 2024, http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/02/27/tunisia.government/index.html. [25] CNN, "Tunisian Government Dissolved Amid Protests," accessed April 17, 2024, http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/02/27/tunisia.government/index.html. [26] “Chapter 6. Tunisia: National Conditions and Views of the Future,” Pew Research Center, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2012/07/10/chapter-6-tunisia-national-conditions-and-views-of-the-future/. [27] Elizabeth R. Nugent, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition (Princeton University Press, 2020), 229. [28] Esen Kirdiş, “Uncertainty and the Religious Market: The Unexpected Rise of Salafism in Egypt and Tunisia after the Arab Spring,” Journal of Church and State, (March 2020), https://academic.oup.com/jcs/article/63/1/23/5801163. [29] “Arabs are losing faith in religious parties and leaders,” Arab Barometer, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.arabbarometer.org/2019/12/arabs-are-losing-faith-in-religious-parties-and-leaders/. [30] “Tunisia Timeline: Since the Jasmine Revolution,” United States Institute of Peace, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.usip.org/tunisia-timeline-jasmine-revolution. [31] “The Arab world in seven charts: Are Arabs turning their backs on religion?,” BBC, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-48703377. [32] Refworld, "United States Department of State: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012 - Tunisia," accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/usdos/2012/en/87501. [33] "The Radicalization of Tunisia's Mosques," Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, accessed April 17, 2024, https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-radicalization-of-tunisias-mosques/. [34] “Tunisia Timeline: Since the Jasmine Revolution,” United States Institute of Peace, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.usip.org/tunisia-timeline-jasmine-revolution. [35] “Chapter 6. Tunisia: National Conditions and Views of the Future,” Pew Research Center, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2012/07/10/chapter-6-tunisia-national-conditions-and-views-of-the-future/. [36] "Political Islam and Muslim Democracy in Tunisia," Foreign Affairs, accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/tunisia/political-islam-muslim-democracy-ennahda. [37] Elizabeth R. Nugent, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition (Princeton University Press, 2020), 230. [38] "Political Islam and Muslim Democracy in Tunisia," Foreign Affairs, accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/tunisia/political-islam-muslim-democracy-ennahda. [39] "Ennahda: From Within Islamists or Muslim Democrats? A Conversation," Brookings Institution, accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ennahda-from-within-islamists-or-muslim-democrats-a-conversation/. [40] "Political Islam and Muslim Democracy in Tunisia," Foreign Affairs, accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/tunisia/political-islam-muslim-democracy-ennahda. [41] Arab Barometer, "Tunisia Public Opinion Report 2018-2019," accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.arabbarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/ABV_Tunisia_Report_Public-Opinion_2018-2019.pd f . [42] "Arab Spring: Egypt," Religious Literacy Project, Harvard Divinity School, accessed April 17, 2024, https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/arab-spring-egypt. [43] Daron Acemoglu, Tarek A. Hassan, Ahmed Tahoun, “The Power of the Street: Evidence from Egypt’s Arab Spring ,“ MIT Economics, (February 2016): 1-32, https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/The%20Power%20of%20the%20Street%20-%20Evidence%20from%20Egypts%20Ara.pdf. [44] Amr Hamzawy, “Authoritarian Narratives and Practices in Egypt,” JSTOR, (2022): 32, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.12237894.8?seq=6. [45] Elizabeth R. Nugent, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition (Princeton University Press, 2020), 233-234. [46] Internet role in Egypt's protests,” BBC, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-12400319. [47] Elizabeth R. Nugent, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition (Princeton University Press, 2020), 234. [48] Internet role in Egypt's protests,” BBC, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-12400319. [49] Amr Hamzawy, “Authoritarian Narratives and Practices in Egypt,” JSTOR, (2022): 26, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.12237894.8?seq=6. [50] “Egypt Timeline: Since the Arab Uprising,” United States Institute of Peace, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.usip.org/egypt-timeline-arab-uprising. [51] Gallup, "As Morsi Ousted, Egyptians Suffer From Political, Economic Hardships," accessed April 17, 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/163877/morsi-ousted-suffering-shot-egypt.aspx. [52] Michael Hoffman and Amaney Jamal, “Religion in the Arab Spring: Between Two Competing Narratives,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 76 No. 3, (2014): 593-606. [53] Michael Hoffman and Amaney Jamal, “Religion in the Arab Spring: Between Two Competing Narratives,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 76 No. 3, (2014): 593-606. [54] “Public Opinion (Egypt),” The Association of Religion Data Archives, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.thearda.com/world-religion/national-profiles?u=73c. [55] “Arabs are losing faith in religious parties and leaders,” Arab Barometer, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.arabbarometer.org/2019/12/arabs-are-losing-faith-in-religious-parties-and-leaders/. [56] United States Institute of Peace, "Egypt's 2012 Constitution," accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/PB139-Egypt%E2%80%99s%202012%20Constitution.pdf. [57] Elizabeth R. Nugent, After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition (Princeton University Press, 2020), 240. [58] “Is the MENA Region Becoming Less Religious? An Interview with Michael Robbins,” Arab Barometer, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.arabbarometer.org/2020/04/is-the-mena-region-becoming-less-religious-an-interview-with-michael-robbins/. [59] “Major Points from Sisi’s First Election Interview,” Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, accessed December 14, 2023, https://carnegieendowment.org/2014/05/08/major-points-from-sisi-s-first-election-interview-pub-55542. [60] “Top 10 reasons why many Egyptians will vote for Sisi,” Aljazeera, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/5/25/top-10-reasons-why-many-egyptians-will-vote-for-sisi. [61] “Egypt Timeline: Since the Arab Uprising,” United States Institute of Peace, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.usip.org/egypt-timeline-arab-uprising. [62] Human Rights Watch, "Egypt: Planned Presidential Vote Neither Free nor Fair," accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/13/egypt-planned-presidential-vote-neither-free-nor-fair. [63] "Sisi's Secret Islamism," Foreign Affairs, accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2014-05-26/sisis-secret-islamism. [64] Gallup, "Support for Islamists Declines in Egypt as Election Nears," accessed April 17, 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/154706/Support-Islamists-Declines-Egypt-Election-Nears.aspx. [65] "Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's Failures," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, accessed April 17, 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/2014/07/01/egyptian-muslim-brotherhood-s-failures-pub-56046. [66] “Tunisia's Foreign Fighters,” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, accessed December 14, 2023, https://www.arabbarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/ABV_Tunisia_Report_Public-Opinion_2018-2019.pdf

Alexa Stanger Happening on “Polished Society”: Towards a Theory of Progress and Corruption in the writings of Adam Ferguson and David Hume Alexa Stanger As two of the most important philosophical thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Ferguson wrote formative texts in the philosophical discourse of modernity. Witnessing the emergence of commercial society and constitutional governments, both thinkers saw the classical republican model of politics, with its teleological bent and emphasis on cultivating the proper function of humans, as obsolete in the context of the commercial world. Neither civic virtue nor a pursuit of the proper function of humanity could explain the emergence of modern society—nor could they explain how commercial society might progress (1). In a sharp contrast to ancient philosophy, Hume and Ferguson realized the importance of locating their philosophy within a historical context. Even if the chief role of history is to serve as a record of the virtues or practices that have historically proved to be beneficial, Hume and Ferguson’s application of history provides a new prism through which people’s judgement might be filtered, introducing the space for a theory of progress. Indeed, the notion of humanity’s ability to progress, if not a belief in the inevitability of progress itself, is integral to both writers and to Enlightenment thought: “polished society,” where the full flourishing of the arts and sciences might be realised, was the logical progression of human society from its “rude” origins (2). The newfound importance ascribed to wealth, manners, and freedom meant that the ancient formulations of moral and civic virtue, such as those found in Plato’s writings, had to be re-evaluated in the context of the modern state. Nevertheless, Ferguson retains some notion of Classical teleology in his republicanism, a point where he diverges from Hume, in what Fania Oz-Salzberger describes as a “theory of commercial modernity with classical-republican linch- pins” (3). Where Hume has endless praise for the merits of modern society, Ferguson holds significant reservations. Hume’s vision of progress contains both a moral and a material character whereas Ferguson fears a deep tension between these two forces. Often neglected in Hume’s shadow, Ferguson is cast as the pessimistic commentator on bourgeois society, “a bemused, perplexed and rather worried observer of the kind of Civil Society which he sees emerging” (4). He sees the dark underside of commercial society that, whilst demonstrating how society has progressed from its primitive predecessors, might also plant the seeds of its corruption. In reading these two philosophers alongside one another, we might come to a better understanding of how the same philosophical current creates room for a theory of progress, a shining optimism in the path that industrialisation laid before human society, whilst retaining a sober skepticism of what might lie beneath the polish. An inquiry into Hume’s concept of human nature provides the basis for under- standing how polished society might arise and how this society might subsequently progress. His methodology thus deftly engages a set of timeless observations, namely those pertaining to human nature, within the context of humankind’s historical development. Today, “polished society” might be understood as a narrow, elitist notion of the values society should nurture, though in the Scottish Enlightenment this term referred to qualities of “polish” as an indispensable quality of civilized life and the foundation for progress in all aspects of society, not limited to politics but extending into art, religion, even the built environment. Hume famously declared that “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” arguing that in spurring an agent to act, the feelings the action provokes surpass any rational analysis of outcomes (5). However, Hume arguably overstates his point: reason is not entirely removed from the equation when people assess whether or not to act. In fact, there is a significant level of rational exercise at work in the self-reflective process where people evaluate the sentiments attached to a certain action—an exercise introduced in Hume’s philosophy by his concept of justice. It is “the sense of virtue [...] deriv’d from reason, ” that facilitates a self-reflective process that corrects people’s natural near-sightedness (where the “strongest attention is confin’d to [oneself]”) in the interests of longer-term societal preservation (6). Hume thus strikes a necessary balance between rationality and sentiment in informing how a people have tempered their passion-directed actions as a result of living in society (7). More pertinent to an understanding of progress in Hume’s philosophy is his notion of humankind as fundamentally self-interested yet partially benevolent. Hume dismisses the Hobbesian state of nature as pure fiction. As Hume conceives the individual as being primarily directed by sentiment, the notion of human character as fundamentally sympathetic arises. The Humean individual is depicted as standing at the hub of a network of social relationships, and it is through assessment of how one’s action might not only be received by the individual themselves, but also by those around them that leads to moral sympathy in Hume’s formulation. This sympathetic construction of human nature gives rise to another concept in Hume’s philosophy: the “partial benevolence” of humanity (8). Hume sees self-interest, albeit attuned to how this self-interest might complement the broader interests of society, as the chief director of human action: “this avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society” (9). Although he indicates here how this self-interest might initially appear destructive and all-consuming, the consideration of the interests of “nearest friends” expands self-interest beyond the purely selfish. Unselfish self-interest is possible; though self-interest begins with an individual’s attention on their personal needs, awareness of the interests of close friends tempers this selfishness. The balancing of myopic focus on the self with the interests of an individual’s associates foreshadows the idea of partial benevolence, where a concern for the interests of one’s associates pulls at humankind’s naturally sympathetic imagination and shapes how closely one chooses to follow their self-interest. Partial benevolence becomes a check for this insatiability, channelling it into a useful form that motivates individuals to engage in an active life in order to satisfy their appetites. As people find a middle ground between self-interest and its blind pursuit, they make space for progress in the realm of polished society, be that commerce or the arts, whilst also solidifying the “bands of affection” that are necessary to the preservation of society. Consequently, these self-interested bands of affection might actually serve the public interest in the long-term through ensuring that an individual remains in society but also set the wheels of progress in motion. Similar to Hume, Ferguson also recognizes self-interest as a fundamental characteristic of human nature and emphasises the associational aspect of polished society, whereby humans inevitably interact and largely cooperate with one an- other in order to live. It is the “motive of interest” that “animate[s] the pursuits, or direct[s] the measures, of ordinary men” (10). Indeed, it is this associational tendency of humanity that Ferguson fears commercial society, overrun with the vicious effects of capitalism, will ultimately undermine. However, this notion of association—that a human is influenced by the relations he draws between himself and their fellow person—is extended to include not only interpersonal relations but also intergenerational and even intergovernmental ones: “man proceed[s] from one form of government to another, by easy transitions [...] the seeds of every form are lodged in human nature” (11). It is perfectly natural that one form of human society should build upon its predecessors’ society, conveying a linear progression of history in Ferguson’s political thought. The tendency of governments and human associations to build upon one another is a product of what Ferguson characterises as the tendency of “nations [to] stumble upon establishments” (12). He claims that it is not in human nature to “foresee” but rather to “know by experience” precisely what form of government might arise (13). Ferguson argues that humans learn from history what actions are most conducive to a stable society, enabling them to dispense with the errors of the past and thus embark on the gradual advancement of society: one generation builds on another. In this way, the inevitability of progress, even if this does not bar the possibility of regress, is ingrained in Ferguson’s philosophy through his view of history as a linear process. In fact, one might argue that what Ferguson sees as the failure of primitive societies is a prerequisite for his philosophy on the emergence of polished society. In his Essay on the History of Civil Society, Ferguson writes “Nations, which in later periods of their history became eminent for civil wisdom and justice, had, perhaps, in a former age, paroxysms of lawless disorder [...] The very policy by which they arrived at their degree of national felicity, was devised as a remedy for outrageous abuse” (14). Ferguson shows that in such national development, there was an intentional attempt on the part of their lawmakers to restructure their society in view of redressing past failings and avoiding their repetition. It is through understanding past mistakes, inquiring into why nations have failed, that humans might work toward progress. It is worth not- ing that Ferguson does not see history as a grand narrative documenting humans as passive, but sees history as directly driven by human action: “the attainment of one end is but the beginning of a new pursuit” (15). History is thus in part driven by humans’ insatiable self-interest, which requires them to be endlessly engaged in the workings of society, giving them an investment in their society that will be conducive to its progression. The social nature of human character, the fact that one is born into society and actively creates and participates in society’s custom, helps us understand the role of custom in Hume’s philosophy, which can then be applied to a theory of progress. Hume makes clear the importance of custom in explaining why certain values have been retained in human association and how these values shape our moral judgement: “each century has its peculiar mode in conducting business; and men, guided more by custom than by reason, follow, without inquiry, the manners which are prevalent in their own time” (16). The crucial role of custom in shaping human action becomes intuitive when connected to Hume’s concept of the natural sociability of humankind and his construction of human society. Furthermore, Hume’s understanding of custom helps resolve a potential logical break in his philosophy regarding the space for progress. If Hume’s philosophy emphasises the importance of sentiment, with all its changeability in directing human action and morality, one might question how progression can arise, when this notion implies a degree of consistency and gradual change. It is the role of sentiment in conjunction with history that turns these inconsistent actions of human nature into a pattern of action that we name custom. This custom, in turn, directs future human action while remaining a product of what was originally deemed moral by human sentiment: “habit soon consolidates what other principles of human nature had imperfectly founded,” and in this way history acts as a stabilising force (17). Although both Hume and Ferguson historicize human nature, they do not go so far as Hegel’s dialectic, where human nature itself is altered by human action in the unfolding of history and the synthesis of conflicting human interactions (18). In fact, Hume holds a rather conservative view of the influence of history on human action, stating that history’s “chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature” (19). This statement is potentially misleading if the “constancy” of human nature is misinterpreted as the predictability of human action: history does not serve only to erode difference and show the universal properties of human nature but also shows how these properties arose by accident but were retained as a result of their demonstrated usefulness in practice. In this conception of a human nature informed by historical events, Alix Cohen observes a malleable element of human judgement that overlays the selfish quality of Hume’s formulation of human nature, which is “influenced by society and political structures” (20). In fact, Hume emphasises the inconstancy of human nature: “‘tis difficult for the mind, when actuated by any passion, to confine itself to that passion alone, without any change or variation. Human nature is too inconstant to admit of any such regularity. Changeableness is essential to it” (21). It is precisely this inconstancy in human nature, unable to predict the workings of the imagination, that allows for history to enter onto the scene. By replacing reason with sentiment as the primary motivator for human action, Hume renders humankind susceptible to the influence of convention in directing one’s actions, because people realise that their actions have consequences and can predict how their actions might be received. This is not to say that a person becomes subject to, nor even the “slave of” passions, but rather that in critical self-reflection of how to direct their actions, the person is profoundly influenced by the passions that might arise from society’s regard for their actions (22). This is the necessary effect of Hume’s formulation of society as a network of relations and exposes a dynamism in human nature conducive to progress. Having demonstrated how both Ferguson and Hume conceive of humans as naturally social, influenced in their actions by custom and the “lessons of history,” one might now consider where a theory of progress fits into their philosophies. It has been established that both thinkers regarded modern, commercial society as the most artistically and technologically advanced form of society, where the arts and sciences flourish as never before (23). Furthermore, in preserving the beneficial consequences of human action as custom, the role of history makes room for the idea that commercial society tends toward building on such historical principles for overall betterment. Hume’s notion of justice as the safeguarding of property rights connects political stability with commercial activity: commercial activity, along with humankind’s naturally self-interested disposition, compels people to establish as well as to adhere to the rules of justice so that they might enjoy the fruits of a collective labour. In this way, the progress of political society goes hand in hand with the progress of economic thought: “polished society,” therefore, manifests both civic and commercial advancement. Furthermore, Hume posits leading an active life as almost part of human nature, suggesting that economic progress is the logical corollary of his formulation of humanity; he claims that it is not only the love of the fruit of labour but also the occupation itself that produces pleasure on pursuing activity as opposed to idleness (24). It is this dual satisfaction that such labour produces, including a sentimental element elevated above a purely material interest, that demonstrates how human nature might guide societal progress. Work invigorates the mind such that humankind has a selfish interest in seeing industry and the arts flourish; a person’s natural predisposition towards activity and commitment to their work thereby necessarily entails an aggregate progress. In considering the general progress of society, the notion of moral progress (or at least the evolution of tastes) also plays a constitutive role. In commercial society, Hume argues that “the possessor has also a secondary satisfaction in riches arising from the love and esteem he acquires by them” (25). The love of this secondary satisfaction gives rise to the potentially destructive human greed in commercial society that Ferguson so feared, but it nonetheless provides an impetus for humans to engage in commercial activity, such as trade and manufacturing. These secondary satisfactions deriving from said “love and esteem” (sentiments connected to a judgement of character and reputation) demonstrate how morality might also play a role in an assessment of economic progress. This sympathetic character of man- kind gives rise to these feelings of love and esteem, which are innately associated with the acquisition of wealth and status. In this way, it might be expected that the progression of morals, or at least an evolution of tastes, accompanies or even acts as a precondition for economic progress. However, an evolution of tastes does not necessarily constitute an evolution of morality in itself and Hume is noticeably conservative in his discussion of humankind’s capacity to attain “improvement of judgement.” He states that people “cannot change their natures [...] all they can do is to change their situation,” thus implying that moral advancement is not a consequence of societal progress, at least in the form of industrialisation or greater commercialisation (26). For better or worse, in his construction of moral sentiment as a reflexive phenomenon, Hume sees the cultivation of moral sentiment as secondary to the progress of economics, arts and even politics. Conditioned by custom and the perceptions that an individual holds of his fellow people, moral sentiment cannot actively determine progress but rather is shaped by it. Indeed, it is at this juncture that Ferguson comes into most direct conflict with Hume’s philosophy, as he resoundingly argues that moral progress is not a necessary consequence of societal progress. In fact, he argues that even in polished society, human nature is fundamentally unchanged, although such change would guard against its corruptive tendencies, such as greed: “there have been very few examples of states, who have, by arts or policy, improved the original dispositions of human nature, or endeavoured, by wise and effectual precautions, to prevent its corruption” (27). He verbosely writes of the destructive effects of commercial society, exposing people to the pursuit of wealth within the new commercial machinery of modernity without regard to their actions’ broader societal impacts. The “continued subdivision of the mechanical arts” in the progress of commerce heralds the emergence of an atomised society, where “the sources of wealth are laid open” and humankind, “ignorant of all human affairs [...] may contribute to the preservation and enlargement of their commonwealth, without making its interest an object of their regard or attention” (28). This introduces the notion that commercial society is the crucible where progress gains momentum but also paradoxically creates the corruptive forces that cause its decline: “The mighty engine which we suppose to have formed society, only tends to set its members at variance, or to continue their intercourse after the bands of affection are broken” (29). Ferguson argues that it is only humanity’s natural interest in self-preservation that, with re- flection and foresight, might lead humanity to temper their pursuit of gain so as to mitigate the total destruction of society. It is when these interests stray too far from national interest that society is rendered vulnerable, a risk that Ferguson sees as heightened in commercial society. However, where this interest takes the form of “enlightened interest,” humankind’s superior nature is capable of moderating this raw self-interest to orient it towards achieving something more elevated, namely the “ambition or the desire of something higher than is possessed at present” (30). Introducing an almost normative element to the object of natural self-interest, Ferguson’s philosophy draws closer to his classical predecessors and opens up a space for progress. Ferguson seems to believe that ambition, which might be thought of as the commercial variant of Aristotle’s drive for the proper function of humans, drives progress in society. However, there is undoubtedly a dark side to this ambition, which must be modulated. In order to protect society from unfettered ambition, Ferguson draws further on a quasi-teleological argument. Ferguson locates the seeds of corruption in humankind’s tendency to value material gain—either for the gain itself or the notions of esteem associated with the possession of great wealth—above other virtues more aligned with the public interest. The danger of polished society is this redefinition of virtue along commercial lines: the transferral of “the idea of perfection from the character to the equipage,” such that a pursuit of “virtue” leads to the desire to dominate one’s fellow citizen, subjugating the public interest to the private (31). Although this change in the concept of virtue is deeply troubling for Ferguson, he nevertheless admits that the drive towards this new “perfection of equipage” is a powerful incentive for people to engage in politics, stating that “the desires of preferment and profit in the breast of the citizen, are the motives from which he is excited to enter on public affairs” (32). This introduces a contra- diction in Ferguson’s work. His solution for retrieving bourgeois society from a cycle of progress and decline is to encourage “active political citizenry” among the populace, preventing the spirit of “servility,” which ironically accompanies the rise of industry, from also allowing the rise of tyranny (33). This argument for active political engagement has clear Aristotelian undertones, which become even more explicit in Ferguson’s solution for commercial corruption. In his view, the hope for bourgeois society lies in active political participation, ideally by the individual who might orient their actions to the public interest. In doing so, Ferguson believes the individual might “educate” the lower classes through leading by example and demonstrating how civic virtue might be combined with power and wealth. Such a politician is necessary for preventing public life from being perceived as “a scene for the gratification of mere vanity, avarice, and ambition” instead “furnishing the best opportunity for a just and a happy engagement of the mind and the heart” (34). However, if people enter politics out of purely ambitious motives (themselves the products of polished society’s new idea of perfection) can this ideal politician exist in reality? It is not ambition itself that causes problems, but how the object of this ambition might conflict with the responsibilities of public office. Ferguson makes some attempt to resolve this tension in proposing a cyclical progress of society, though this is also potentially at odds with his linear notion of history, writing that “when human nature appears in the utmost state of corruption, it has actually begun to reform” (35). Although Hume does not fear the corruption and decline of commercial society as Ferguson does, Hume’s theory of justice indicates a conservative view of the extent to which society might progress, particularly in the realm of political innovation. Where Ferguson casts conflict as a means through which political society might develop, stating that “the virtues of men have shone most during their struggles,” Hume strongly guards against rebellion except in the most desperate case (36). In order to prevent a habit of disobedience from arising, Hume argues that rebellion should only be “the last refuge [...] when the public is in the highest danger from violence and tyranny” (37). Since resistance may only be countenanced in the most dire situations, Hume appears to discourage political innovation, at least where it risks rebellion. Recalling how political progress and economic progress appear to go hand in hand in his philosophy, one might wonder whether he foresees a limit on societal progress. In the interests of preserving stability, Hume even discourages political innovation on the part of the wise individual: to “try experiments merely upon the credit of supposed argument and philosophy, can never be the part of a wise magistrate, who will bear a reverence to what carries the marks of age”—he will cater towards societal consensus (38). In this way, individual action is circumscribed, revealing a disconnect between progress at the individual and societal levels, even questioning the ability of the “wise” individual to drive societal progress. One might wonder what the benefits of moral improvement are if the finest person must cater to the most vulgar elements of society. Hume’s philosophy certainly allows for such moral progress but perhaps only to a point, which he regards as the commercialised bourgeois society that he found himself living in and has endless praise for (39). It is almost impossible to separate human nature, morality, and the role of his- tory from Hume’s and Ferguson’s theories of progress. Humankind’s historical context and indeed the level of refinement of the society that humans live in determines the customs that will shape their moral judgement. Being fundamentally self-interested and motivated by sentiment, it follows that people’s actions are directly influenced by the level of civilization manifest in their surroundings. One might worry that basing the promise of societal progress on the power of humankind’s sympathetic nature to direct their actions towards a public interest is inherently unstable, given the inconstancy of their passions. However, it is possible that an attempt to correct this inconstancy would be fruitless considering how societal progress changes what humanity considers virtuous or part of the pub- lic interest. In fact, Oz-Salzberger writes that “wealth, in the modern European state, could no longer be opposed to virtue; ‘virtue’ itself was being transformed into a civil rather than civic, moral framework” (40). It is this transformation of the notion of virtue, produced by commercial society, that Ferguson fears will lead to corruption, both on a moral and societal level. What is perhaps most innovative to the theory of progress that evolves in both Ferguson’s and Hume’s writings is the role of history. In their philosophies, history does not provide a blueprint for how society must progress nor is it deterministic in how the interactions of human societies might grease the wheels of history towards a more polished, liberated end. Rather, history is useful as a sociological instrument for demonstrating how beneficial practices that humans have “stumbled upon” come to be a part of their nature, without fundamentally changing their character. History does not determine morality nor human identity as such but rather provides an extra layer for understanding how human judgement has evolved and why certain customs have gained such power. In fact, history might safeguard societal progress against decline through preserving political wisdom that has been derived from history, encouraging society to learn from humanity’s past successes and errors. As both authors were writing in response to such historical moments as the English Civil War, it would be almost illogical to dismiss history’s role in informing their ideas of progress and corruption, especially when so much of what they wrote was being informed by the lessons of these historical moments—practical manifestations of how people’s actions might be shaped by history. Endnotes 1 See Christopher J. Berry’s The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment for a more in-depth analysis of how Scottish Enlightenment thinkers understood “commercial society”, a society that is neither polity nor clan but contains governments and institutions systematic in their division of labor. 2 John Varty’s essay elaborates on how Ferguson, Hume and other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment formulated this idea of society’s progression from ‘primitive’ or ‘rude’ society’ to ‘civilized’ or ‘polished’ society. See John Varty, “Civic or Commercial? Adam Ferguson’s Concept of Civil Society,” Democratization 4, no. 1 (Spring 1997). 3 Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Political Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by Alexander Broadie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),168. 4 Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals , (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1995), 62. 5 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature . Ed. L.A. Selby-Biggs, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 415. 6 Hume, Treatise , 496 and 488. 7 David Miller describes this balance between the purely rational and the purely sentimental in the formulation of moral judgements in Hume’s philosophy as ‘mitigated scepticism’ (David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought , (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 41.). 8 David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology , 107. 9 Hume, Treatise , 491-2. 10 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society , (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 132. 11 Ferguson, Essay , 120. 12 Ibid, 119. 13 Ibid, 120. 14 Ibid, 230. 15 Ferguson, Essay , 205. 16 From Hume’s History of England , cited in Miller, Philosophy and Ideology, p. 103. 17 David Hume, “Of the Origin of Government,” Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by E. F. Miller, (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 39. 18 Hume states that ‘all plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary,’ (“Idea of A Perfect Commonwealth”, Essays, p. 514). By contrast, Hegel sees human nature as contextual and integrally social. For Hegel, the human mind is “a living unity or system of processes”, and, most importantly, is “world-historical”. Stating that “man is what he does”, Hegel argues that human nature is inherently linked to human action. For more reading on Hegel’s dialectic and his understanding of human nature, see Chrisopher J. Berry, Hume, Hegel and Human Nature (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1982). in particular 129-146. 19 From Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , cited in Miller, Philosophy and Ideology, 102. 20 Alix Cohen, “The Notion of Moral Progress in Hume’s Philosophy: Does Hume Have a Theory of Moral Progress?”, Hume Studies, 26, no. 1 (April 2000), 110. 21 Hume, Treatise , 283. 22 Ibid, 415. 23 Miller, Philosophy and Ideology , 124. 24 Hume discusses this in “Of Refinement in the Arts,” Essays. 25 Hume, Treatise . 26 Hume, Treatise , 537. 27 Ferguson, Essay , 195. 28 Ibid, 173. The division of labour, rather than being a form of justice in its Classical formulation, allows for the pursuit of self-interest that does not necessarily contribute to the overall harmony of society. Thus, although such specialisation might enable a general progress in mechanical and commercial arts as each individual devotes. themselves, albeit out of self-interested motives, towards advancing their field of expertise, it also leads to the weakening of an individual’s allegiance to the wellbeing of his society as a whole. This effect is also bolstered by man’s natural tendency to subjugate long-term consequences in the view of short-term gain. 29 Ferguson cited in John Varty, “Civic or Commercial? Adam Ferguson’s Concept of Civil Society,” Democratization 4, no. 1 (Spring 1997), 35. 30 From Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , cited in Lisa Hill, “Adam Ferguson and the Paradox of Progress and Decline,” History of Political Thought, vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 1997), 679. 31 Ferguson, Essay , 239. 32 Ibid, 245. Indeed, Ferguson argues that ignoring this fact is a corruption in itself: ‘the pretended moderation assumed by the higher orders of men, has a fatal effect in the state.’ (Essay, 245). 33 Hill, “Adam Ferguson and the Paradox of Progress and Decline,” 681. 34 Ferguson, Essay , 244. 35 Ibid, 278-9. 36 Ibid, 196. 37 Hume, “Of Passive Obedience,” Essays, 490. 38 Hume, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” Essays, 512. 39 Hume indicates what this necessary balance might look like: ‘Some innovations must necessarily have place in every human institution; and it is happy where the enlightened genius of the age give these a direction to the side of reason, liberty, and justice: but violent innovations no individual is entitled to make. (“Of the Original Contract,” Essays, 477). 40 Oz-Salzberger, “The Political Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment,” 169. Bibliography Berry, Christopher J. “Sociality and Socialisation.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment , edited by Alexander Broadie, 243-57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Hume, Hegel and Human Nature. Dordrecht: Springer, Netherlands, 1982. The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Cohen, Alix. “The Notion of Moral Progress in Hume’s Philosophy: Does Hume Have a Theory of Moral Progress?”, Hume Studies 26, no. 1 (April, 2000) 109-128. Ferguson, Adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Gellner, Ernest. Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1995. Hill, Lisa. “Adam Ferguson and the Paradox of Progress and Decline,” History of Political Thought , 18, no. 4 (Winter 1997) 677-706. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature . Ed. L.A. Selby-Biggs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Hume, David. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by E. F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985. Kalyvas, Andreas and Katznelson, Ira. “Adam Ferguson Returns: Liberalism through a Glass Darkly,” Political Theory 26, no. 2 (April 1998) 173-197. Miller, David. Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Oz-Salzberger, Fania. “The Political Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by Alexander Broadie, 157-77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pittock, Murray G. H. “Historiography.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment , edited by Alexander Broadie, 258-79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Varty, John. “Civic or Commercial? Adam Ferguson’s Concept of Civil Society,” Democratization , 4, no. 1 (Spring 1997) 29-48. Previous Next

Kimberly Ramos Authenticating Authenticity: Authenticity as Commitment, Temporally Extended Agency, and Practical Identity Kimberly Ramos The everyday concept of authenticity presupposes the existence of an underlying, unchanging self to which to be authentic. However, with the rise of bundle theories in philosophy of mind and neuroscience, it is unlikely that we have an essence of self to which to be authentic. In this case, should we abandon the concept of authenticity entirely or formulate a new account of it? I argue that authenticity is still important to one’s everyday life, particularly when making difficult decisions about one’s identity in terms of morals, goals, and values. Rather than being true to an objective essence of self, I argue that we can be true to the self as a construct (a self-concept). We create this self-concept with consistency and steadfastness in our commitments, as well as our ability to be an agent that fulfills those commitments. Thus, authenticity and self- hood are more about undertaking important projects and a creative process of becoming rather than unearthing and expressing an essence of self. Just be yourself. Embrace your most authentic life. Or, if you like, “To thine own self be true.” We often encounter such pithy aphorisms. Some of us might find such advice to be helpful because it pushes us to pursue a career or life path that brings out the best version of ourselves. On the other hand, such advice could also induce anger because of its irrationality and emptiness. The self, as others of us might point out, is just a construct, so what is there to be “true” to? Or perhaps the whole concept of authenticity is simply confusing. We might agree that it is good to be authentic to one’s self but find it confusing as to what sort of identity this means for our own lives. We might, like philosopher Elisabeth Camp, pose this question: “What is my true self, such that I should pursue and cultivate it?” The everyday, common view of authenticity assumes that (1) we possess a “true” self, and (2) we ought to embrace this “true” self. But as more is learned about the mind and brain, it seems increasingly unlikely that a true, underlying self exists. Dr. Christian Jarrett, a writer for the British Psychological Society, mentions a study conducted by Strohminger et al. Strohminger and her colleagues observed that belief in an underlying “true” self is common across cultures, and inherent in this belief is the concept of authenticity. However, they are skeptical that this true self actually exists because such a self would be “radically subjective” (1). We see this sort of radical subjectivity in a study conducted by Quoidbach et al. The study found that people tend to underestimate the amount of change they will undergo in the future. They believe that their personality, core values, and preferences will be preserved over time, even though these attributes have already changed from the past to the present (2). The belief in the consistency of the self and its preferences is radically subjective in that it is based on feeling alone—it is not based on objective fact or essence. If at least some personality traits and values can and do change over the course of one’s life, then the common view of authenticity does not seem plausible. There is no true and essential self to which to be authentic because the self is not immune to change. An action which is authentic to me today might not be authentic to me in ten years. If this is the case, then how am I to decide what is most authentic: my past values, my current values, or my future values? In rejecting true and essential self, philosophers of mind, psychologists, and neuroscientists including Douglas Hoftstader, Thomas Metzinger, and Daniel Dennett have turned to bundle theories. David Hume, one of the first bundle theorists, expresses the general sentiment of bundle theories in viewing the self as a series of “bundled” perceptions that change from moment to moment (3). As such, bundle theorists declare there is no rational reason to believe in an enduring self over time. Under their view, a new self exists each moment. If no enduring and underlying self exists, then pursuing the everyday view of authenticity seems somewhat futile. Authenticity would only be possible to a given self at the singular moment it exists, which does not seem satisfying given that, from a practical standpoint, we view the self as a consistent entity, at least on a day-to-day basis. This paper is dedicated to redefining the way we commonly think about authenticity and the self. Is there even a “true” self to be authentic to? And why should we desire authenticity at all? Three Cases: Authenticity as a Common Concern Before discussing more of the practical reasons for desiring authenticity at length, I will begin with a few “real world” examples to illustrate authenticity as a common concern within one’s daily life. (a) Neryssa and Her Corporate Job : Neryssa dislikes her current job as a human resources manager at a large corporation that manufactures soda. Though she enjoys working with people, the corporation’s product and mission don’t align with her personal values. She desires a job that feels more representative of the person she takes herself to be, but she isn’t sure if her job should even matter in terms of her sense of identity and values. (b) Rowan and Their College Major : Rowan needs to decide between a major in English or in History. On the one hand, they love literary analysis, especially as it applies to the fantasy genre. On the other hand, they also enjoy detangling and reconstructing historical narratives. When they think about the job prospects of each, they find each option to be about equal. Rowan wants to pick the major that “fits” them best, but at this juncture, both choices seem equally well-fitting. Which should they choose? (c) Julia and Her State Senate Campaign : Julia is running for election to the state senate. Her platform emphasizes environmental consciousness, especially in contrast with her opposition, who takes donations from large corporations that con- tribute to the climate crisis. Julia’s team suggests that she run a slander ad that, while not conveying outright lies, strongly insinuates that the opposition is cheating on his partner. While the ad would help Julia win the election and implement environmentally sustainable legislature, Julia isn’t sure that she can condone the ad. She takes herself to be someone who “plays by the rules” and holds herself to high moral standards. What should she do? In each of these three examples, authenticity plays a role in the decision making process of the individual involved (4). In (a), Neryssa desires a job that feels more authentic to her person. A job which represents her values is important to Neryssa, and thus, authenticity is relevant to her creating a life she enjoys. In (b), Rowan wants to know which of two options is more authentic of them to choose. Like Neryssa, they want to make a choice that will lead to a fulfilled and enjoyable life. In (c), Julia must choose between becoming a state senator and her morals. An understanding of authenticity might help her decide between these two options. I would wager that we, like Neryssa, Rowan, and Julia, have come up against similarly difficult decisions that challenge who we take ourselves to be and leave us wondering what decision is most authentic. I would also wager that the simple advice “Just be yourself!”would not help much in the situations described above. The purpose of this paper, then, is to provide a novel account of authenticity that (1) takes into account the lack of an underlying “true” self in light of bundle theories, and (2) helps us confront difficult decisions in which one’s identity is in question. Ultimately, I will propose a commitment-based account of authenticity, in which the personated, socially-constructed self and the commitments it makes are the basis for determining authentic action. A “True” Self? A Foray Into Bundle Theories and a Postmodern Ac- count of Authenticity Discussions about the self often turn to psychology and the brain. Following John Locke and his discussion of substance in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , the view of the self shifted from one of body or spirit to one of psychological substance, particularly consciousness (5). But, as philosopher David Hume later pointed out, the brain and its associated consciousness do not have a substance of self. In more modern terminology, this means that there is no lobe or neural center that constitutes an essence of self, which is an inherent entity upon which one’s identity is founded. Rather, the self is the “bundle” of thoughts and impressions present at any moment (6). These bundles pass away and give rise to new thoughts and impressions. Thus an entirely new self arises that bears no necessary or logical connection to the previous self. To support his argument, Hume asks us to turn inwards and observe the contents of consciousness: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I al- ways stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist (7). If we look inwards, we can find only perception. We can also find memories, but these are the revival of past perceptions (8). We do not find any singular thing that we could call an essence of self. Hume does not completely negate the existence of the self. There is certainly something that perceives. But, Hume argues that given the evidence, we cannot extrapolate beyond this fairly minimal conception of the self—what Elisabeth Camp more recently calls a “bare skeletal ego.” Again, the self just is perception. Science writer and neuroscientist David Eagleman offers an updated view of how bundle theories apply to the biology of the brain and thus supports bundle theories originating from Hume: So who you are at any given moment depends on the detailed rhythms of your neuronal firing. During the day, the conscious you emerges from that integrated neural complexity. At night, when the interaction of your neurons changes just a bit, you disappear...the meaning of something to you is all about your webs of associations, based on the whole history of your life experiences (9). Like Locke, Eagleman locates the self in consciousness, which he describes as “detailed rhythms of neuronal firing.” And when this neuronal firing shuts down perception during sleep you “disappear,” reflecting Hume’s claim that when we are “insensible” of perceptions we do not really exist (10). The self is perception and neuronal firing, and this neuronal firing impacts the way we experience and interpret the world. Hume’s description of the self is the foundation for most modern bundle theories. Thomas Metzinger, a German philosopher, similarly undermines belief in an essence or substance of self: “There is no such thing as a substantial self (as a distinct ontological entity, which could in principle exist by itself), but only a dynamic, ongoing process creating very specific representational and functional properties” (11). Like Hume, modern bundle theorists doubt an underlying self that exists over time and endows one with a sense of “I,” which is closely tied to one’s perceived personal identity and autonomy. While bundle theorists claim we do not have any rational reason to believe in a sense of “I,” they do admit its practical necessity, as well as the human inability to abandon it. Douglas Hofstadter expresses the utility of the sense of “I” in I Am a Strange Loop : “Ceasing to believe altogether in the ‘I’ is in fact impossible, because it is indispensable for survival. Like it or not, we humans are stuck for good with this myth” (294). It is natural and practical for an individual to construct a sense of “I” to navigate the world, make future plans, and distinguish herself from others. As Hofstadter states, a sense of “I” is thus necessary to survive in and engage with the world. If there is an objectively existing self, it is momentary and fleeting. And, in being solely composed of processes and perceptions, it is not an entity we can be perfectly authentic to over time. Nor is there an essence of self that we can stake personal identity upon. Instead, our sense of “I” comes from the temporally and subjectively existing selves we construct as useful “myths” (12). Let us call this subjectively existing entity the “self-concept” for the sake of clarity. The common view of authenticity, however, assumes that there is “true” underlying self to which to be authentic to. Under this view, authenticity is the expression of one’s “real” self. But, as bundle theorists have stated, there is not an underlying, temporally-extended self to em- brace! How can we be authentic to something that isn’t objectively real, if at all? Beyond proclaiming that personal identity is a construct, bundle theorists do not offer us any answers about authenticity. Still, I think bundle theorists would likely embrace what Varga and Guigon call a “postmodern” view of authenticity. This account of authenticity abandons an essential self and embraces a more minimal construction of self and authenticity: Postmodern thought raises questions about the existence of an underlying subject with essential properties accessible through introspection. The whole idea of the authentic as that which is “original”, “essential”, “proper”, and so forth now seems doubtful. If we are self-constituting beings who make ourselves up from one moment to the next, it appears that the term “authenticity” can refer only to whatever feels right at some particular moment (13). The bundle theorist, in viewing the objectively existing self as a continual and ever-changing process, would endorse the idea of a “self-constituting being” that makes itself up from “one moment to the next” (14). Thus postmodern authenticity is merely whatever feels right at some particular moment. And if we reject an essential, underlying self—which, given the psychological evidence from Strohminger, Quoidbach, and bundle theorists, I think we should—it seems we are left to embrace the postmodern account of authenticity. However, I do not find the postmodern conception of authenticity satisfying because we do not view ourselves as beings that make themselves up from one moment to the next. Rather, we wake up each day believing that we are more or less the same person we were the day before, with the same projects and goals, social relationships, and values. In our three “real world” examples, the postmodern view of authenticity gives Neryssa, Rowan, and Julia no direction as to what sorts of values or projects they ought to pursue to feel personally fulfilled. It may be true that they are just bare Humean selves from a purely objective standpoint, but they don’t view themselves as such. Consider if, in virtue of the postmodern account of authenticity, we were to tell them, “Well, just do what feels right in the moment.” They would probably respond along the lines of, “The problem is I don’t know what feels right in the moment, and the choice I make will impact my future. I don’t want to make the wrong choice!” They view themselves as people who are concerned about their futures, their well-being, and their personal projects. Neryssa, Rowan, and Julia all regard themselves as selves that exist over time with relatively consistent attributes. I think it is likely that most humans view themselves as selves that exist throughout time with somewhat consistent attributes, too. For instance, if I go to sleep liking the song “Piano Man” by Billy Joel and having a desire to learn the song on the guitar, I expect to wake up the next morning with the same sort of preferences and goals. And in taking myself to be a person with specific aspirations, I necessarily find myself interested in my future and what it holds for me. On the pain of speaking for a reader, I find it probable that they conceive of themselves in this manner, too. Elisabeth Camp offers further practical reasons for embracing a sense of “I” concerned with authenticity beyond the bare Humean ego. She argues that the sense of “I” allows an individual to make sense of and evaluate her life given her values and goals, to select relevant characteristics of selfhood and thus form a meaningful identity through which to understand herself, and to create and carry out future plans based on the self-concept she wants to create or maintain (15). Camp’s three listed benefits of a sense of “I” point to authenticity: we want to know who we are, if we have lived up to what we want to be, and how to best preserve a sense of self. In the service of self-understanding and pursuing a fulfilling life, we ought to care about a sense of “I” along with authenticity and its application to our lives. For an account of authenticity to be useful, then, it should take into consideration our perceived existence as temporally-existing selves with an eye to the future and the values and projects we hope to fulfill. In other words, a more satisfying and practical account of authenticity should work alongside our intuition of hav- ing a “true self,” even if the true self turns out to be more of a construct than an objectively existing entity. This new account of authenticity seems to be related to being loyal to a constructed self-concept. To restate, this account should (1) take into account the lack of an underlying “true” self in light of bundle theories, and (2) provide us with some direction in confronting difficult decisions in which one’s identity is in question or at stake. The Self-Concept and Concerns of Self-Deception In this section, I will define the self-concept and discuss some difficulties self-deception poses to the self-concept, though ultimately I think we can table such difficulties. Before we address the wider question of how one might be authentic to the somewhat subjective self-concept, we need to first define the self-concept. Here I will draw from Elisabeth Camp’s character model of self. This model describes the objective self as possessing “a distinctive way in which a particular ‘I’ inhabits, interprets, and engages with the world—a particular nexus of dispositions, memories, interests, and commitments” (16). These dispositions, memories, and interests, fit in with our earlier discussion of a psychological, Humean ego if we view them at a singular point in time. The self, as Camp defines it, is not so much a unified identity that endows one with a sense of “I.” Rather, it is a particular way of experiencing and interpreting the world. Here, it is worthwhile to note that these interests and dispositions constitute a “something” that makes up the bare, Humean ego. I do not wish to misrepresent Hume or bundle theorists in saying that there is no self whatsoever. Instead, we should recognize that the bare Humean ego is an existing self, an underlying “something” that makes up an individual. The problem regarding authenticity we find with the Humean ego is its impermanence and lack of a unified, temporally existing identity. The underlying Hueman ego is not an essence or substance of self that can endow us with a sense of “I” and a lasting identity. The bare Humean ego allows us to say “I exist,” or “Something that is me is here having experiences,” or perhaps even, “At this current moment, I would like to have a glass of lemonade,” but it would not allow us to say anything about the kind of person we are, especially if the statement has to do with a characteristic or commitment that is meant to describe us over time—perhaps something to the effect of, “I am the type of person to pursue graduate study.” So the Humean ego endows one with momentary consciousness but not a sense of self or identity. Camp believes that an individual comes to an understanding of herself when she posits a “self-interpretation,” and thus forms the meaningful identity the bare Humean ego lacks. Camp compares a self-interpretation to a theory, as both create a coherent pattern or explanation “by electing and structuring a coherent unity out of [a] teeming multiplicity [of evidence].” Camp remarks that we can evaluate the effectiveness of a self-interpretation in the same way we would evaluate a theory. The more disparate elements it unites, the stronger the theory and related self-interpretation. Just as many theories can be equally probable or valid, so too can multiple self-interpretations. Likewise, when interpreting a body of data, there are clearly some interpretations that are better than others. While many interpretations may be on a par in strength, we can still distinguish between “bad” theories, which are not much grounded in the evidence nor realistic, and “good” theories, which take into account the available body of evidence for realistic interpretations. Let us say that the self-concept is the self-interpretation an individual embraces as the “best” explanatory theory for themselves given the current evidence. The self-concept is one’s understanding of their experience of the world. It is also the constructed identity that unifies one’s dispositions, memories, and interests. Thus, it is the self-concept that endows one with a sense of self and identity. I want to emphasize that even though one’s self-concept is subjective, there are limitations to its construction. The self-concept relies on objective evidence: the particular dispositions, interests, and memories held by an individual. This evidence is publicly accessible, too. Irish philosopher Philip Pettit remarks that an individual is a “figure in the public world, characterized by public properties” (17). The dispositions and interests held by an individual influence her behavior, actions, and statements. As such, the evidence becomes accessible to the public and available for use in forming a self-interpretation. Though the interpretation itself is subjective in how one decides to connect evidence and organize it into a meaningful pattern, an individual’s dispositions and interests remain objective because they exist without any given meaning. For example, say that Cassandra has an interest in almost every genre of music: country, hip hop, indie, classical—she likes it all. Before interpretation, this is simply an objective fact. Cassandra’s friend, Russel, believes that Cassandra likes many different genres of music because she is an open-minded person. Cassandra, on the other hand, believes that she likes so many genres because she had friends with varied music tastes growing up. Cassandra and Russel take an objective fact and then attribute meaning to it through interpretation. I would compare this sort of interpretation to the construction of historical narratives. Historians share the same set of facts about a historical event, but how they choose to connect them and endow them with meaning will vary. Given the objective nature of these public properties, we can blame an individual for a particularly self-deluding interpretation. For instance, a man who believes he is Napoleon might point to some evidence as reasons for him forming such a self-concept—perhaps he has a talent for tactical strategy and horseback riding— while ignoring glaringly contradictory evidence such as the fact that he is not French and he was not born in 1769. But this is a quite obvious case of self-delu-sion. What about more ambiguous, “real life” cases? I do not want to venture too far into this topic, but I would like to put forth a general means of avoiding, or at least living, with self-delusion. Firstly, we ought to approach self-concepts with the understanding that we are constructing theories, and like theories, self-interpretations are provisional. They can and should be replaced when new evidence comes to light, and if we are individuals that are dedicated to self-understanding and epistemic respectability, we ought to undergo regular introspection to uncover new evidence or re-contextualize old evidence. I think it is likely that we do so already. As fairly self-centered creatures, we like to talk about our lives with our acquaintances. Much of the time, this naturally incorporates interpretation of the self. Perhaps you spend some time talking with a friend over lunch about why you like horror movies. That evening, you discuss with your partner why they feel unfulfilled by their current job. Before bed, you silently think about whether you are the sort of person who would be happy adopting a child. With our recognition of self-concepts as provisional comes a sense of what Laurie Paul calls “epistemic humility.” We can be wrong about the sort of person we think we are, and so we must approach the self-concept knowing that we will likely get quite a few things wrong. Perhaps you thought you were the sort of person who values their career over family, but once you were faced with the actual choice to stay home and raise children or accept a promotion, you found that your priorities lay with family. What is most authentic for us to do is not always represented by the current self-concept, and this only comes to light when we encounter a choice that tests our self-concept. These choices are an integral part of self-discovery. Once again invoking epistemic humility, it seems that we are never fully done defining the self-concept. There will always be additional evidence generated or uncovered through events that test or reveal one’s character. Thus, we should accept that the self-concept is a provisional entity which we must continually discover and refine. Authenticity as Commitment, Temporally Extended Agency, and Practical Identity An Existing Definition of Authenticity Charles and Guigon pose this question in their entry on authenticity in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “What is it to be oneself, at one with one- self, or truly representing one’s self?” They contrast this more complicated view of authenticity of self with the authenticity of objects, in which the latter is defined as the state of being “faithful to an original” or a “reliable, accurate representation” (18). While I agree that the authenticity of a self is more complicated than that of objects, I see no need to generate an alternative definition of authenticity if we can produce a “standard” to which an individual might be faithful. The existing thing being judged for authenticity in terms of faithfulness to an original or reliability in representation is a particular self-concept. Our account of authenticity will need to explain how we can temporally extend the self-concept and thus create a standard to be faithful to over time. The next natural question has to do with what it means to say that a person is a “reliable, accurate representation” of themselves (19). To form a “reliable, accurate, representation” of oneself, there are two primary “keys”: commitment and tempo- rally-extended agency, both of which I will discuss in the remainder of this section. The Personated Self, Commitment, and Agency The first key to a new account of authenticity lies in commitment. Here I will make use of Philip Pettit’s discussion of commitment and selfhood. Though Pettit primarily focuses on selfhood and identity in his article “My Three Selves,” I believe we can extend his conclusions to our current discussion of authenticity. According to Pettit, a person is defined as an “agent with the capacity to personate,” where personation is the act of presenting a persona and “inviting[ing] others to adopt [this] picture of who you are” (20). For instance, say that my friend asks me to keep a promise and I agree to do so. In doing so, I am making a claim about myself and a commitment to that claim: I will keep my friend’s promise. If I want my personated self to be relied upon, I ought to do as I said I would and keep the promise. If I do not, my earlier claim is compromised in its assertion as the truth. An individual must “live up to their words in practice: they act as the attitudes communicated would warrant" (21). In effect, the individual treats their personated self as real and, in living up to their personated self, invites others to do the same. In doing as I said I would, I fulfill the persona I set forth, thus endowing it with a sense of provisional reality. Here we come up against an objection. In making commitments or endorsing a particular self-interpretation, it would seem that an agent must be almost narcissitically focused on the creation of the self-concept at any given moment. Pettit’s own view is in tension with this sort of narcissism: “To return to a point made earlier, however, this self is not a construct that I intend to create as such...That claim ties personhood, implausibly, to a highly intellectualized form of reflection and a pattern of self-scripting that sounds downright narcissistic, as critics have suggested” (22). Relying on a “highly intellectualized form of reflection” poses a problem because it would require us to undergo a good deal of reflective agony about the person we take ourselves to be every time we make a commitment. Furthermore, it is entirely possible for an individual to possess a rich identity without undertaking highly intellectualized reflection. I think that we can still be quite conscious and aware of the commitments we endorse without being overly focused, or even highly aware of, the personated self we are creating in most cases. The following example will help us overcome this objection. Say that you ask me to drive you to the mechanic to pick up your car. I will likely say yes barring a major inconvenience. When I agree to drive you to the mechanic, I do not fully conceptualize the person that I believe myself to be. Rather, I feel as a matter of good will that I should help you out. If you were to ask me why I drove you, I could come up with the answer upon momentary reflection: I agreed because I take my- self to be the sort of person to help out a friend in a bind. But I don’t take the commitment itself to be constitutive of my self-concept unless prompted by some out- side inquiry or internal reflection. Furthermore, in such moments of self-reflection I do not focus on a singular commitment but a larger collection of commitments that I attempt to arrange into a meaningful pattern, thus forming a self-concept. Pettit echoes this sort of intermittent reflection, writing, “...it is important that it may take effort to achieve a full knowledge of who and how in this sense I am... Thus, it may take time and trouble for me to develop such a sense of where I am committed” (23). In other words, the personated self is something we make somewhat unconsciously through conscious commitments, and it is only later, through adequate reflection, that we develop a “sense of where we are committed,” and thus a self-concept to which to be faithful to (24). Now we can return to the initial example of my promissory commitment to my friend. In keeping my promise to my friend, I find that I have been faithful to my commitment in this particular instance. If I expand this promissory commitment to be constitutive of my self-concept and thus the sort of person that I take myself to be, I will as a matter of principle continue to fulfill my promises. If I successfully keep such commitments, my actions, behaviors, and claims will accurately and reliably represent my self-concept. My friend will accept that I am the sort of person to keep a promise, given that I continue to keep promises when called upon to do so. So authenticity relies on the fulfillment of the commitments one sets forth as constituting their self-concept (or at least, a sincere attempt to fulfill such commitments). With commitment comes the second key: temporally extended agency. As Pettit suggests in his definition of a person, persons are a particular sort of agent—an individual or entity that undertakes or performs an action (25). When we make commitments, we become agents concerned with values, goals, and policies that are enacted over time. American philosopher Michael Bratman uses the goal of writ- ing a paper as an example of temporally extended agency: I see my activity of, say, writing a paper, as something I do over an extend- ed period of time. I see myself as beginning the project, developing it over time, and (finally!) completing it. I see the agent of these various activities as one and the same agent-namely, me. In the middle of the project I see myself as the agent who began the project and (I hope) the agent who will complete it. Upon completion I take pride in the fact that I began, worked on, and completed this essay. Of course, there is a sense in which when I act at a particular time; but in acting I do not see myself, the agent of the act, as simply a time-slice agent. I see my action at that time as the action of the same agent as he who has acted in the past and (it is to be hoped) will act in the future (26). Similarly, an individual can make a commitment to be a particular sort of person that acts in a particular sort of way, and then carry this commitment over time. The individual does not view their self-concept and associated commitments as a “time-slice agent,” even if the Humean self changes from moment to moment (27). Rather, commitments connect both the personated self and the self-concept through time. Harry Frankfurt, another American philosopher, similarly argues that the individual makes plans and acts in virtue of the commitments which she cares about, and thus becomes “inherently prospective; that is, [she] necessarily considers [herself] as having a future” (28). So too do such plans entail a “notion of guidance” along with a “certain consistency or steadfastness of behavior; and this presupposes some degree of persistence” (29). To re-emphasize my point, though we may objectively be bare Humean selves, on the basis of forming commitments and endorsing them over time, we create a provisional sort of self that is temporally extended in terms of agency and identity. Even if the objective self shifts from moment to moment, the commitments we endorse remain somewhat consistent and thus so does the self-concept. Furthermore, for our self-constituting commitments to have a real impact on who we take ourselves to be and how other people perceive us, they must be somewhat consistent. Like a theory, a self-concept should accurately “predict” future behavior and actions—if a self-concept were not consistent, it would not have much credibility or trustworthiness for those around us. Nor would it be a source of guidance and meaning for the individual. To sum, a personated self arises out of one’s commitments (and more generally, one’s intent to act/actions). A personated self is temporally extended into a more unified identity when one is faithful to their commitments, though a reflective understanding of this identity is not yet present. To construct the self-concept and achieve a level of self-understanding, the collection of commitments are arranged into a meaningful pattern as if to say, “I am this sort of person because I have made several commitments of this kind in the past, and I would like to continue doing so.” The self-concept, though subjective, gives us a standard to which to be authentic and guides our future actions in the service of preserving authenticity. We decide who we are and who we want to be, and then we do our best to fulfill the self-concept we conceive. At the core of authenticity, we find a steadfastness and consistency towards one’s commitments. I also believe that the required degree of faithfulness to a commitment is normative. I cannot give a full account here, but if we accept Quoidbach’s conclusion that core values, personality traits, and preferences change over time, then we should also allow commitments and authenticity to shift over time. An individual should be required to uphold her commitments for as long as they accurately rep- resent the person she takes herself to be at present. In this manner, our novel ac- count of authenticity occupies a median position between that of bundle theorists and a true and essential self. The self-concept is stable from moment to moment unlike the self put forth by bundle theories. However, the self-concept is revised as one undergoes self-discovery and changes as a person, so it does not rely on consistent and core personality traits like the essential self. What is authentic to me today might not be authentic to me in ten years, though our account of authenticity allows for gradual changes over the course of one’s life. We are held to our commitments, but only to a point. Authenticity is, then, a moving target. How Commitments Originate Commitments and the behaviors and actions they endorse may seem arbitrarily chosen, especially if one does not have a given reason to endorse a particular self-concept over others. Here I will discuss how commitments originate and what reasons they are based on. First, I wish to introduce the concepts of fixed traits and free traits. According to personality psychologist Brian Little, a fixed trait is an inborn or “culturally endowed” personality trait such as introversion or conscientiousness (30). A fixed trait is “fixed” in virtue of its givenness. I cannot wake up and decide, as a matter of will, to no longer be an introvert. Free traits, on the other hand, are “tendencies expressed by individual choice,” such as cultivating an interest in soccer (31). However, Little also believes that fixed traits and free traits can coexist, particularly in how an individual chooses to modify fixed traits to fulfill a goal. In the spirit of our earlier discussion of temporally extended agency, Little states that we must “extend personality temporally ,” because over time, particular personality traits are emphasized or downplayed based on one’s core projects (32). A core project is defined as “meaningful goals, both small and large, that can range from ‘put out the cat, quickly,’ to ‘transform Western thought, slowly’” (33). Importantly, a longstanding core project related to one’s life work and identity resembles Pettit’s definition of commitments. Little uses himself as an example: as an introvert, he dislikes public speaking. However, he also values being a professor and sharing knowledge, and thus pushes himself out of his comfort zone during lectures and speeches (34). His commitment to teaching and imparting knowledge allows him to take a fixed trait and disposition, introversion, and treat it as a free trait for a limited amount of time to work towards his core project. Though it may not be authentic of Little to become a professional public speaker, it is still authentic of him to undergo public speaking engagements due to his commitments. Little’s self-concept might be the following: “I take myself to be an introvert, but if I have a cause I really care about, I’m willing to talk in front of a crowd and thus act as if I were an extrovert.” Little’s acting like an extrovert does not make him one, but rather invites others to view him as someone who can successfully engage a crowd with a speech regardless of introversion or extroversion. Therefore, commitments are based upon inborn and culturally endowed behavior, dispositions, and interests, although we might have some control over if and how we enact such traits. In his paper “The Importance of What We Care About,” Harry Frankfurt offers support for the necessity of given traits. He writes, “While what is antecedently important to the person may be alterable, it must not be subject to his own immediate voluntary control. If it is to provide him with a genuine basis for evaluations of importance, the fact that he cares about it cannot be dependent simply upon his own decision or choice” (35). We must start with some given and objective behaviors, dispositions, and interests, lest our entire constitution be entirely arbitrary. Though we cannot choose our given traits, I believe we still have a degree of freedom in which traits cultivate and express. We can, as Millgram argues, “take an interest in something, in the hope of finding it interesting” because we are curious and will ourselves to look into a new interest (36). The same sort of curiosity and flexibility applies to behaviors and dispositions. We cannot fundamentally change these characteristics, but perhaps we can be curious enough to see how flexible they are in our expression of them. Like Little, we can undertake a project that pushes us outside of our comfort zone. This allows us to observe how freely we can manipulate a fixed trait. There is a balance between commitments we undertake knowing that we will have to alter fixed traits and commitments which we accept because we acknowledge we have particular fixed traits. Thus, another consideration of authenticity is understanding how far and for how long we can push ourselves past fixed traits until we experience what Little calls “burnout” (37). We might also find that there are behaviors and interests that we simply cannot enact or adopt, try as we might. A few years ago, I tried to cultivate an interest in ornithology. Though I was curious, I could not adopt or sustain the interest, and eventually abandoned my attempts at doing so because it did not bring me any pleasure and I had no other strong reasons to keep trying. On the other hand, there are behaviors and interests that we simply cannot abandon or downplay. While I cannot bring myself to be interested in ornithology, I find it difficult to remain uninterested in The Bachelor when it airs. Perhaps my lack of interest in ornithology and my inability to abandon interest in The Bachelor are the result of my not trying hard enough. To this sort of objection, I reply that I have no reason to try harder, nor a further interest in doing so. I might try harder to develop an interest in ornithology if I had a commitment or core project that related to it, such as spending more time with a friend who likes bird watching. I might also try harder to abandon my interest in The Bachelor if I read a scientific article about the detriment of reality TV to the human brain, which would be in tension with my greater commitment to intellectual health. As it stands, I don’t have any further interest or relevant commitments that would have me try harder to mold these traits. Thus, part of living authentically might be realizing which of our traits are involuntary and which of our traits are voluntary—in other words, which traits are decidedly fixed and which traits are some- what mutable. Living authentically is a balance of acceptance and choice in terms of forming and fulfilling commitments, as well as discovering what commitments we can and cannot enact. Our account of authenticity has arguably come to resemble Harry Frankfurt’s account of freedom of will. Frankfurt argues that freedom of will relies on the hi- erarchical ordering and endorsement of desires and volitions (38). Likewise, I believe authenticity relates to ordering one’s commitments by their strength, especially when we are faced with two competing commitments. Authenticity comes from the commitments we endorse, and one commitment, such as the inborn tendency to be introverted, can be overridden by a stronger commitment and accompanying desire such as the commitment to be a professor that engages in public speaking with the desire of imparting knowledge. Therefore, another aspect of authenticity is reflecting upon what one cares about, and then determining, either by an act of will or an acceptance of one’s nature, which of these values “overrides” the others. Our new account of authenticity also bears relation to Christine’s Korsgaard’s description of practical identity. In deciding which commitments to make, we create policies or “laws” which dictate future actions: “When you deliberate, it is as if there were something over and above all of your desires, something that is you, and that chooses which desire to act on. This means that the principle or law by which you determine your actions is one that you regard as being expressive of yourself” (39). Korsgaard further supports my assertion that commitments are expressions of the self-concept. Making commitments builds what Korsgaard calls one’s “practical identity,” which is “a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.”40 Where the personated self focuses on the making of commitments to present a self to others, the practical identity emphasizes making commitments to define and justify the actions of a self. Indeed, Korsgaard’s description of integrity might as well be discussing authenticity: Etymologically, integrity is oneness, integration is what makes something one. To be a thing, one thing, a unity, an entity; to be anything at all: in the metaphysical sense, that is what it means to have integrity. But we use the term for someone who lives up to his own standards. And that is be- cause we think that living up to them is what makes him one, and so what makes him a person at all (41). Along with authenticity and practical identity comes a sense of “integration” or “oneness” of self. The commitments, values, interests, and actions of an individual come together under the self-concept to form a rational pattern. Korsgaard additionally indicates another consideration in our search for authenticity: we should attempt to form commitments that exist in harmony with each other rather than in tension. In doing so, we form a self-concept better equipped for consistency and steadfastness. Practical and Existential Reasons for Committing Once you have made a commitment, why should you keep it? Let’s return to our earlier example: I tell my friend that I’m the sort of person to keep a promise, and he asks me to promise that I will attend his jazz concert tomorrow evening. What are the consequences of my failure to show up and fulfill my promise? Pettit offers three excuses that I might use in such a situation, which we will apply to our discussion of authenticity. The first is an excuse of circumstance (42). Say that I call my friend after the concert and profusely apologize for missing the event. However, I have a relevant excuse for the context. At the last minute, a family member of mine was admitted to the hospital and my presence was needed. With this excuse (as long as it is true), my friend excuses me from living up to my earlier promissory commitment. In fact, I could use an excuse of circumstance as many times as necessary, though it is unlikely that I would be able to genuinely use such excuses unless I were an incredibly unlucky person. We can regard ourselves as acting authentically in this situation because, although we had two competing commitments, we fulfilled the commitment we felt was stronger. If my friend understands my self-concept and rationally approaches the situation, he will likely understand why I valued my commitment to aiding my family in an emergency over attending his jazz concert. In this context I suffer little to no consequences for failing to uphold my promissory commitment. The other two excuses are less so the product of uncontrollable circumstances but of mental states or events. They result in interpersonal consequences. The first is an appeal to being misled by one’s mind. Say that I tell my friend that I truly thought I could make a promise to go to his concert, but when the occasion arose, I found that I simply could not keep it. Perhaps I remembered that I don’t like crowds, and therefore could not attend the concert. My initial willingness was an instance of self-delusion, or at the very least, a lack of self-knowledge (43). If I use this excuse, my friend would begin to see me as easily misled and too quick to form self-judgments. What kind of person, he might ask, forgets that they dislike crowds? Certainly not a person who is properly introspective. My friend would regard me as untrustworthy when it comes to my statements about commitments, and thus would disbelieve elements of my self-concept. If my self-concept does not match up with my personated self and its actions, then I have failed to act authentically. I will suggest that authenticity is an attractive quality in a friend and necessary for a steady relationship. If I continue to be inauthentic, then I might destroy our relationship. The second excuse is a matter of changing one’s mind (44). Say that I was not misled when I made the prior commitment, but I decide I no longer want to keep my promise. Besides being outrightly rude in changing my mind about this commitment, I also appear “wishy-washy,” or indecisive, to my friend. I make commitments without thinking about what they entail. My friend would regard me as unreliable and “flaky.” I would fail to be faithful to my commitments, and it might cost me my reputation. My friend would be less likely to rely on me and to let me rely on him in return (45). Again, authenticity is necessary for maintaining stable interpersonal relationships (46). Beyond potentially losing a meaningful interpersonal relationship, breaking commitments bears pressing existential implications. Varga and Guigon, in quoting Sartre, express a worry about the “cost” of breaking self-constituting commitments: If an agent acts against her commitments, she risks the “radical transformation of her being-in-the-world.” If I say that I am the type of person to keep a promise and then fail to do so, I will have to take this new behavioral evidence into account. If I fail to keep a promise multiple times, then my action is not simply out of character—it is my character. If I avoid deceiving myself, I will have to admit that I am not the type of person to keep a promise, and thus must change my self-concept. My personated self, the outward persona which I present to others through my attitudes and actions, would come apart from my practical identity and self-concept. I would lose who I take myself to be. Korsgaard adds to this worry: “Consider the astonishing but familiar ‘I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.’ Clearly there are two selves here, me and the one I must live with and so must not fail” (47). Here, she elaborates upon the discomfort of losing who one takes themselves to be. As we have previously seen in the case of the personated self vs the self-concept, there is a tension between who we take ourselves to be and who we really are by virtue of our behavior and actions. I would have to live with the knowledge that I want to be someone who keeps their promises, but, based on my actions, I can no longer claim this commitment as part of my self-concept. Again, if I do not delude myself, I have to recognize that I am not a reliable person nor a good friend when it comes to promises. As Korsgaard points out, I would have trouble “living” with myself; my self-esteem would suffer. Indeed, this sort of asymmetry in my personated self versus my self-concept has some serious consequences if I let it infect too much of my being: It is the conceptions of ourselves that are most important to us that give rise to unconditional obligations. For to violate them is to lose your integrity and so your identity, and no longer to be who you are. That is, it is no longer to be able to think of yourself under the description under which you value yourself and find your life worth living and your actions worth undertaking. That is to be for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead (48). This is quite the cost. If I value being the sort of person who keeps their promises, then I would find it difficult to exist with the knowledge that I am someone who does not do so. While I think Korsgaard’s statement here is overly dire in terms of breaking only a few loose commitments, she illustrates the real and pressing threat that losing one’s authenticity poses. If I fail to live up to several of my commitments, especially those which I designate as highly integral to my self-concept, I risk creating a life in which I find no value, meaning, or self-esteem. My personated self would be so far removed from my desired self-concept that I would feel the disconnect Korsgaard mentions between “me and the one I must live with” (49). Such an existential state is likely the source of statements such as, “I am a stranger to myself,” and “I do not recognize myself any longer.” Finally, having long-term commitments is part of an enjoyable life and the avoidance of boredom. Little and Frankfurt concur on this end. Little is quoted as saying, “Human flourishing is achieved through the sustainable pursuit of one’s core projects,” which can be reframed as lasting commitments to one’s goals (50). Frankfurt, too, identifies final ends as the driving purpose of one’s life: “If we had no final ends, it is more than desire that would be empty and vain. It is life itself. For living without goals or purposes is living with nothing to do” (51). We need commitments as final ends in order to build fulfilling and interesting lives. Further- more, commitments stave off the encroachment of boredom. Boredom, Frankfurt claims, threatens one’s “psychic survival” (52). Besides losing a sense of personhood, a lack of commitments and the development of boredom would endanger one’s mental existence and inner life. We can see, from discussing the existential implications of breaking commitments, even more reasons to pursue authenticity. Applying Our New Account of Authenticity Now that we have a new account of authenticity, let’s return to the three cases we posed earlier. How does our new account of authenticity offer guidance to Neryssa, Rowan, and Julia? For (a), we would first ask Neryssa how much her job contributes to her sense of identity, and thus, her self-concept. If she does not stake much of her identity upon her job, then for the sake of authenticity, she does not need to search for a new job. If she does take her work to be a large part of her identity, then she will need to search for a new job because the current job is in tension with her self-concept and the person she takes herself to be. We would also ask Neryssa how much the company’s product and mission misalign with her personal values. If she works for a corporation that espouses anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric while simultaneously taking herself to be someone who supports LGBTQ+ rights, she might, as Korsgaard warns, find it difficult to “live with herself.” Let’s say that Neryssa does stake a fair amount of her identity on her job. In addition, let’s say that the company’s values are greatly misaligned with Neryssa’s values. We would say that it is more authentic of Neryssa to leave her current job and search for a job that is representative of her values and the person she takes herself to be. We might even counsel her and suggest that, in staying in a job that is in tension with her self-concept, she risks burnout, the loss of her sense of identity, and general dissatisfaction. Furthermore, she might find it difficult to even commit to a job that she cannot fully endorse. In terms of authenticity alone, we would say that it is best for Neryssa to search for a new job. In (b), it would be helpful if we suggest that Rowan reframe the question. Instead of worrying about which major is the most authentic choice, we would remind Rowan that authenticity is not an expression of an essence of self. Rather, authenticity is a commitment to the self-concept, or, the self they take themselves to be. Therefore, they should ask themselves which major they would find themselves most capable of committing to. Can they envision a long-term commitment to either history or literature? In reframing the question in this way, we take away the agony related to the question, “What kind of person am I?” and turn our attention to a new question: “What kind of person would I like to be?” This question is prospective and forward-looking, and it emphasizes that there is no truly “right” choice (although some choices might be more “right” than others). We make a choice “right” by committing to it, given that we have the capability and interest necessary to commit to it in the first place. In Rowan’s case, they have the added benefit of being able to change their major. Say that Rowan declares an English major, but after a semester of classes, realizes that they would much prefer life as a history major. They can now change their commitment and self-concept. Thus, Rowan’s case endows us with a bit of advice for ourselves. When we can, we might try out a choice or experience before making a commitment to it and staking our identity upon it. For example, say that you are interested in becoming a parent. Before committing to parenthood (which, unlike a college major decision, cannot be reversed once chosen), you might spend some time taking care of young children and talking to their parents about the pros and cons of raising a child. While spending time with young children and talking to parents cannot fully replicate the actual experience of becoming a par- ent, you would at least have a clearer idea of what parenthood entails. In (c), we would remind Julia that her decision for or against the attack ad will become evidence that constitutes her self-concept. This is because decisions of this nature are “expressive of yourself” (Korsgaard 83). She needs to evaluate which she values more: the ultimate goal of her campaign, which is to promote environ- mentally sustainable legislature; or her personal morals and commitment to “playing by the rules.” If she runs the attack ad, she commits to being the sort of person who values the greater cause over her personal morals. If she decides against the attack ad, she commits to being the sort of person who values her personal morals over the greater cause, even if the greater cause is quite worthy. What we are asking of Julia is similar to what we asked of Rowan: “What sort of person would you like to be?” As we did with Neryssa, we would tell Julia to make the commitment that results in a self-concept she can “live with.” Though running the attack ad might help Julia win the election, the victory will mean little if she has sacrificed the self-concept that she wants to embody. Or perhaps Julia determines that she values the ultimate goal of her campaign more than her personal morals. In doing so, she commits to a new self-concept, one that values the greater good over her personal qualms. What matters in Julia’s case is that she decides in relation to a self-concept she can endorse and commit to, and thus continue past the decision with minimal tension between the person she takes herself to be and the person she acts as. Her self-concept, whatever it ends up being, will also influence how she reacts to and values future decisions, so it is imperative that she be able to commit to this new self-concept over time. I hope these three examples properly illustrate how one would use this new account of authenticity in real-world situations. I believe authenticity is of greatest importance when we are faced with difficult, self-constituting decisions. On a day- to-day basis, we might find it unnecessary to ask whether an egg salad sandwich or a hamburger is a more authentic lunch choice. However, it is necessary to spend time reflecting upon the self-concept and authenticity when the choice we face has clearly life-altering consequences or stands to change the way that we conceive of ourselves. And though authenticity may be an important factor in how one makes decisions and conceives of themselves, it is not necessary that authenticity and steadfast commitments constitute a morally admirable or respectable life. A person could commit to being flaky, to being a nuisance to their friends, or to being a criminal mastermind all while still being authentic. On a final note, it may seem as if one cannot help but be authentic if, at the end of day, authenticity amounts to a sincere commitment to one’s self-constituting choices. It seems like Neryssa could just as easily authentically embrace the practicality of keeping her current job as she could embrace the authenticity of seeking more fulfilling work, as long as she fully commits to her choice. However, I do not think this new account of authenticity is too weak regarding the tension between the personated self and the self-concept. Again, I will use the quote from Korsgaard: “Consider the astonishing but familiar ‘I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.’ Clearly there are two selves here, me and the one I must live with and so must not fail” (53). Sometimes the person we take ourselves to be is markedly different from the behavior we exhibit and values we espouse. In these situations, we have two options. One option is to accept a new self-concept in light of new behavioral evidence. Alternatively, we can change ourselves or our lives, thus pursuing greater harmony between the person we act as and the person we take ourselves to be. The discomfort of not being able to live with oneself is what holds us to a stricter attribution of authenticity. Conclusion From the initial doubt that bundle theories cast upon the necessity and nature of authenticity, we find ourselves with a novel account of authenticity centered upon steadfastness to the commitments which we take as integral to our self-concept. It is this self-concept that endows us with a sense of “I” and identity. When the actions and behavior of the personated self successfully act as a “reliable, accurate representation” of the person we take ourselves to be, we are authentic to that sense of identity. When faced with difficult decisions which have the potential to shape who we take ourselves to be, it may help to ask ourselves not what is most authentic of some underlying essence of self, but what we would find most natural to commit to. With this sort of direction, we will hopefully continue to construct self-concepts which we can “live with” and bring fulfillment and satisfaction to our lives. Endnotes 1 Christian Jarrett, “There Is No Such Thing as the True Self, but It’s Still a Useful Psychological Concept,” 2017. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/08/22/there-is-no-such- thing-as-the-true-self-but-its-still-a-useful-psychological-concept/ 2 Jordi Quoidbach, et al., “The End of History Illusion,” Science , vol. 339, (2013), 98. 3 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature , (Oxford: 1896), 134). 4 There are other considerations at play in each scenario. For instance, in (c), there are also considerations of ethics. In (a) and (b), there are considerations of practicality and utility in regards to selecting a job and a college major. Still, authenticity plays a role in what the agent chooses and how they decide to value considerations of ethics, practicality, and utility, so each scenario will involve authenticity in some way, although authenticity might not be the only deciding factor. 5 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book II: Ideas , 118. 6 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature , 134. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid, 11. 9 David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You , (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), 34-35. 10 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature , 134. 11 Thomas Metzinger, “Self Models,” Scholarpedia , 2007. 12 Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop , (Basic Books: 2007), 294. 13 Somogy Varga and Charles Guignon, “Authenticity,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , 2020. 14 Ibid. 15 E Camp, “Wordsworth’s Prelude, Poetic Autobiography, and Narrative Constructions of the Self,” Retrieved 2021, from https://nonsite.org/wordsworths-prelude-poetic- autobiography-and-narrative-constructions-of-the-self/. 16 Ibid. 17 Philip Pettit, “My Three Selves,” Philosophy , vol. 95, no. 3, 2020, 6. 18 Varga and Guignon, “Authenticity.” 19 Ibid. 20 Philip Pettit, “Philip Pettit: My Three Selves. Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture 2019,” YouTube , uploaded by RoyIntPhilosophy, 2019, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=DUzuNVuEIYA. 21 Pettit, “My Three Selves,” 7-8. 22 Ibid, 18. 23 Ibid, 19. 24 Three more brief notes. (1) It is possible that the first time I make a commitment to be a certain sort of person that the commitment does require substantive reflection and narcissistic intellectualization. But hereafter, the fulfilling of the commitment is somewhat automatic as a matter of policy. If I find no difficulties in fulfilling my commitment (say, a competing commitment), it should be easy for me to do so with little reflection. (2) Some decisions concerning commitments do require substantive reflection and narcissistic intellectualization, along with an awareness of both. However, these sorts of commitments are likely “tests of character” or life-changing decisions, so they warrant such agonizing and reflection. I have in mind the decision to marry someone, to have a child, to go to war, to change careers, etc. (3) Here we can easily see how “taking stock” of one’s life might prompt a series of new commitments and the abandonment of old ones. We look back on the commitments we have made and decide, through the gradual making and fulfilling of new commitments, to form a new self-concept. In instances of conscious change, we would be aware of the new commitments we make—we would be more “mindful” of the personated self being created than we naturally find ourselves to be. 25 Pettit, “My Three Selves,” 7. 26 Michael Bratman, “Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency,” The Philosophical Review , vol. 109, no. 1, 2000, 43. 27 Ibid. 28 Harry Frankfurt, “The Importance of What We Care About,” Synthese , vol. 53, no. 2, (1982), 260. 29 Ibid, 161. 30 Susan Cain, Quiet , (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012), 209. 31 Craig Lambert, “Introversion Unbound,” Harvard Magazine , July 2003, www.harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/introversion-unbound.html. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Cain, Quiet , 209-210. 35 Frankfurt,“Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy, Inc. , vol. 68, no. 1, (1971), 18. 36 Elijah Millgram, “On Being Bored Out of Your Mind,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , vol. 104, (2004), 179. 37 Lambert, “Introversion Unbound.” 38 Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” 15. 39 Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity , (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid, 84. 42 Pettit, “My Three Selves,” 17. 43 Ibid, 9. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid, 19-20. 46 By authenticity in relationships, I do not mean "showing your true self." Many of our relationships might only exist because we present ourselves in a curated fashion. So authenticity in relationships might simply be keeping one’s commitments. However, as in our discussion of free trait theory, there is a limit to which we can keep up an image that is in tension with our given traits. Authenticity in a relationship is, once again, a balance between the person we are for others (free or mutable traits) and the person we cannot help but be (fixed traits). 47 Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity , 84. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Lambert, "Introversion Unbound." 51 Harry Frankfurt, "On the Usefulness of Final Ends." Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly , vol. 41, (1992), 6-7. 52 Ibid, 12. 53 Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity , 84. Works Cited Bratman, Michael E. “Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency.” The Philosophical Review , vol. 109, no. 1, 2000, pp. 35–61. JSTOR , www. jstor.org/stable/2693554? seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. Cain, Susan. Quiet . New York, Crown Publishers, 2012. Camp, E. (2020, September 17). Wordsworth’s Prelude, Poetic Autobiography, and Narrative Constructions of the Self. Retrieved February 19, 2021, from https://nonsite.org/wordsworths- prelude-poetic-autobiography-and-narrative-constructions-of-the-self/. Eagleman, David. The Brain: The Story of You . New York, Vintage Books, 2015. Frankfurt, Harry G. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 66, no. 23, 1969, pp. 829–39. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/2023833. Frankfurt, Harry G. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” Journal of Philosophy, Inc. , vol. 68, no. 1, 1971, pp. 5–20. JSTOR , www.jstor. org/stable/pdf/2024717.pdf? refreqid=excelsior%3A4fc27219ea9ee0fb- c13044d020500b1. Frankfurt, Harry. “On the Usefulness of Final Ends.” Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly , vol. 41, 1992, pp. 3–19. JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/23350712seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. Frankfurt, Harry. “The Importance of What We Care About.” Synthese , vol. 53, no. 2, 1982, pp. 257– 72. JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/20115802?se- q=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop . Basic Books, 2007. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature . Oxford, 1896. The Online Library of Liberty , people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/HumeTreatise.pdf. Korsgaard, Christine M. The Sources of Normativity . Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511554476. Jarrett, Christian. “There Is No Such Thing as the True Self, but It’s Still a Useful Psychological Concept.” Research Digest , The British Psychological Society, 22 Aug. 2017, https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/08/22/there-is-no-such-thing-as-the-true-self-but-its-still-a- useful-psychological-concept/. Lambert, Craig. “Introversion Unbound.” Harvard Magazine , July 2003, www.harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/introversion-unbound.html. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book II: Ideas . Edited by Jonathan Bennett, Jonathan Bennett, 2007, www.earlymoderntexts.com/ assets/pdfs/locke1690book2.pdf. Melchert, Norman. The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy . New York, Oxford UP, 2007. Metzinger, Thomas. “Self Models.” Scholarpedia , 2007, www.scholarpedia.org/article/Self_models#The_phenomenal_self-model_.28PSM.29. Millgram, Elijah. “On Being Bored Out of Your Mind.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , vol. 104, 2004, pp. 165–86. JSTOR , www.jstor.org/sta- ble/4545411? seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. Millgram, Elijah. “On Being Bored Out of Your Mind.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , vol. 104, 2004, pp. 165–86. JSTOR , www.jstor.org/sta- ble/4545411? seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. Pettit, Philip. “My Three Selves.” Philosophy , vol. 95, no. 3, 2020, pp. 1–27, doi:10.1017/S0031819120000170. Pettit, Philip. “Philip Pettit: My Three Selves. Royal Institute of Philosophy Annu- al Lecture 2019.” YouTube , uploaded by RoyIntPhilosophy, 28 Oct. 2019, www.youtube.com/ watch? v=DUzuNVuEIYA. Quoidbach, Jordi, et al. “The End of History Illusion.” Science , vol. 339, 4 Jan. 2013, pp. 96–98., doi:https://wjh-www.harvard.edu/~dtg/Quoidbach%20 et%20al%202013. Varga, Somogy, and Charles Guignon. “Authenticity.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Stanford Center for the Study of Language and Information, 20 Feb. 2020, plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity. Previous Next

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. This should not detract from the important results found in biomedical research and the necessity for it; instead, I am hoping to emphasize the stakes of and potential harms from coerced consent. We need to scaffold the ability for everyone of every identity to make a fully rational, uncoerced decision on whether and when to consent to a biomedical research experiment. References Beres, M. A. (2016). ‘Spontaneous’ Sexual Consent: An Analysis of Sexual Consent Literature. Http://Dx.Doi.Org/10.1177/0959353507072914 , 17 (1), 93–108. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353507072914 Booth, S. (2002). A philosophical analysis of informed consent. Nursing Standard (Royal College of Nursing (Great Britain) : 1987) , 16 (39), 43–46. https://doi.org/10.7748/NS2002.06.16.39.43.C3211 Carnegy-Arbuthnott, H. (2020). On a Promise or on the Game: What’s Wrong with Selling Consent? Journal of Applied Philosophy , 37 (3), 408–427. https://doi.org/10.1111/JAPP.12393 Candilis, P. J., & Lidz, C. W. (2010). Advances in Informed Consent Research. The Ethics of Consent : Theory and Practice . https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195335149.003.0013 Cappelen, H., & Dever, J. (2019). Bad language (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/bad-language-9780198839644 Dankar, F. K., Gergely, M., & Dankar, S. K. (2019). Informed Consent in Biomedical Research. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal , 17 , 463. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.CSBJ.2019.03.010 Dickert, N., & Grady, C. (1999). What’s the price of a research subject? Approaches to payment for research participation. The New England Journal of Medicine , 341 (3), 198–203. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199907153410312 Eyal, N. (2019). Informed Consent. In Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2019 Spring Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=informed-consent Gavey, N. (2016). Technologies and Effects of Heterosexual Coercion. Http://Dx.Doi.Org/10.1177/0959353592023003 , 2 (3), 325–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353592023003 Tilton, E. C. R., Jenkins Ichikawa, J., Albert, S., Anderson, S., Ayars, A., Boonin, D., Bowen, J., Bromwich, D., Caldwell, K., Conrad, K., Cumberbatch, L., Elefson, G., Gilbert, C., Graf, L., Gunkel, J., Haughton, J., Jenkins, C., Jost, L., Kennedy, C., … Woollard, F. (2021). Not What I Agreed To: Content and Consent. Https://Doi.Org/10.1086/715283 , 132 (1), 127–154. https://doi.org/10.1086/715283 Trott, A. M., & Anderson, E. (2019). Women in Philosophy: The Limits of Consent in Sexual Ethics. Blog of the APA . Kukla, Q. R. (2021). A Nonideal Theory of Sexual Consent. Https://Doi.Org/10.1086/711209 , 131(2), 270–292. https://doi.org/10.1086/711209 Largent, E. A., Grady, C., Miller, F. C., & Wertheimer, A. (2012). Money, Coercion, and Undue Inducement: A Survey of Attitudes About Payments to Research Participants. IRB , 34 (1), 1. /pmc/articles/PMC4214066/ Raja, H. (2020). Author and Citation Information for “Sex and Sexuality.” In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=sex-sexuality Schmidt, T. A. (2003). The legacy of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments for emergency exception from informed consent. Annals of Emergency Medicine , 41 (1), 79–81. https://doi.org/10.1067/mem.2003.17 Shamoo, A. E., & Resnik, D. B. (Eds.). (2016). Responsible conduct of research (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/responsible-conduct-of-research-9780197547090?cc=gb&lang=en& Sreenivasan, G. (2003). Does informed consent to research require comprehension? Lancet (London, England) , 362 (9400), 2016–2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(03)15025-8 MacKinnon, C. A. (1989). Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: “Pleasure under Patriarchy.” Ethics , 99 (2). Moorthy, G. (2020). Recruiting Psychology Students to Participate in Faculty/Department Research. Voices in Bioethics , 6 . Morgan, S. (2003). Dark Desires. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2003 6:4 , 6 (4), 377–410. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:ETTA.0000004638.15926.1A Wertheimer, A. (2010). Rethinking the Ethics of Clinical Research: Widening the Lens. In Rethinking the Ethics of Clinical Research: Widening the Lens . Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ACPROF:OSO/9780199743513.001.0001 West, R. (1995). The Harms of Consensual Sex. The American Philosophical Association Newsletters , 94 (2). West, R. (2020). Consent, Legitimation, and Dysphoria. Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works , 83 (1), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12489

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 . Expanded Ed. Columbia Classics in Philosophy. Columbia University Press, 2005. Sandel, Michael J. “Political Liberalism.” Harvard Law Review 107, no. 7 (1994): 1765–94. Walters, Mark Austin. “The Harms of Hate Crime: From Structural Disadvantage to Individual Identity.” In Hate Crime and Restorative Justice . Oxford University Press, 2014. Previous Next

Adithya V. Raajkumar “Victorian Holocausts”: The Long-Term Consequences of Famine in British India Adithya V. Raajkumar Abstract: This paper seeks to examine whether famines occur- ring during the colonial period affect development outcomes in the present day. We compute district level measures of economic development, social mobility, and infrastructure using cross-sectional satellite luminosity, census data, and household survey data. We then use a panel of recorded famine severity and rain- fall data in colonial Indian districts to construct cross-sectional counts measures of famine occurrence. Finally, we regress modern day outcomes on the number of famines suffered by a district in the colonial era, with and without various controls. We then instrument for famine occurrence with climate data in the form of negative rainfall shocks to ensure exogeneity. We find that districts which suffered more famines during the colonial era have higher levels of economic development; however, high rates of famine occurrence are also associated with a larger percentage of the labor force working in agriculture, lower rural consumption, and higher rates of income inequality. We attempt to explain these findings by showing that famine occurrence is simultaneously related to urbanization rates and agricultural development. Overall, this suggests that the long-run effects of natural disasters which primarily afflict people and not infrastructure are not al- ways straightforward to predict. 1. Introduction What are the impacts of short-term natural disasters in the long-run, and how do they affect economic development? Are these impacts different in the case of disasters which harm people but do not affect physical infrastructure? While there is ample theoretical and empirical literature on the impact of devastating natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, there are relatively few studies on the long-term consequences of short-term disasters such as famines. Further- more, none of the literature focuses on society-wide development outcomes. The case of colonial India provides a well-recorded setting to examine such a question, with an unfortunate history of dozens of famines throughout the British Raj. Many regions were struck multiple times during this period, to the extent that historian Mike Davis characterizes them as “Victorian Holocausts” (Davis 2001 p.9). While the short-term impacts of famines are indisputable, their long-term effects on economic development, perhaps through human development patterns, are less widely understood. The United Kingdom formally ruled India from 1857 to 1947, following an ear- lier period of indirect rule by the East India Company. The high tax rate imposed on peasants in rural and agricultural India was a principal characteristic of British governance. Appointed intermediaries, such as the landowning zamindar caste in Bengal, served to collect these taxes. Land taxes imposed on farmers often ranged from two-thirds to half of their produce, but could be as high as ninety to ninety-five percent. Many of the intermediaries coerced their tenants into farming only cash crops instead of a mix of cash crops and agricultural crops (Dutt 2001). Aside from high taxation, a laissez-faire attitude to drought relief was another principal characteristic of British agricultural policy in India. Most senior officials in the imperial administration believed that serious relief efforts would cause more harm than they would do good and consequently, were reluctant to dispatch aid to afflicted areas (ibid). The consequences of these two policies were some of the most severe and frequent famines in recorded history, such as the Great Indian Famine of 1893, during which an estimated 5.5 to 10.3 million peasants perished from starvation alone, and over 60 million are believed to have suffered hardship (Fieldhouse 1996). Our paper focuses on three sets of outcomes in order to assess the long-term impact of famines. First, we measure macroeconomic measures of overall development, such as rural consumption per capita and the composition of the labor force. We also use nighttime luminosity gathered from satellite data as a proxy for GDP, of which measurement using survey data can be unreliable. Second, we look at measures of human development: inequality, social mobility, and education, constructed from the India Human Development Survey I and II. Finally, we examine infrastructure, computing effects on village-level electrification, numbers of medical centers, and bus service availability. To examine impacts, we regress famine occurrence on these outcomes via ordinary least-squares (OLS). We use an instrumental-variables (IV) approach to ensure a causal interpretation via as-good-as-random assignment (1). We first estimate famine occurrence, the endogenous independent variable, as a function of rainfall shocks–a plausibly exogenous instrument–before regressing outcomes on predicted famine occurrence via two-stage least-squares (2SLS). Since the survey data are comparatively limited, we transform and aggregate panel data on rainfall and famines as counts in order to use them in a cross-section with the contemporary outcomes. We find for many outcomes that there is indeed a marginal effect of famines in the long-run, although where it is significant it is often quite small. Where famines do have a significant impact on contemporary outcomes, the results follow an interesting pattern : a higher rate of famine occurrence in a given district is associated with greater economic development yet worse rural outcomes and higher inequality. Specifically, famine occurrence has a small but positive impact on nighttime luminosity–our proxy for economic development–and smaller, negative impacts on rural consumption and the proportion of adults with a college education. At the same time, famine occurrence is also associated with a higher proportion of the labor force being employed in the agricultural sector as well as a higher level of inequality as measured by the Gini index (2). Moreover, we find limited evidence that famine occurrence has a slightly negative impact on infrastructure as more famines are associated with reduced access to medical care and bus service. We do not find that famines have any significant impact on social mobility–specifically, intergenerational income mobility–or infrastructure such as electrification in districts. This finding contradicts much of the established literature on natural disasters, which has predominantly found large and wholly negative effects. We at- tempt to explain this disparity by analyzing the impact of famines on urbanization rates to show that famine occurrence may lead to a worsening urban-rural gap in long-run economic development. Thus, we make an important contribution to the existing literature and challenge past research with one of our key findings: short-term natural disasters which do not destroy physical infrastructure may have unexpectedly positive outcomes in the long-run. While the instrumental estimates are guaranteed to be free of omitted variable bias, the OLS standard errors allow for more precise judgments due to smaller confidence intervals. In around half of our specifications, the Hausman test for endogeneity fails to reject the null hypothesis of exogeneity, indicating that the ordinary-least squares and instrumental variables results are equally valid (3). How- ever, the instrumental variables estimate helps address other problems, such as attenuation bias, due to possible measurement error (4). Section 2 presents a review of the literature and builds a theoretical framework for understanding the impacts of famines on modern-day outcomes. Section 3 describes our data, variable construction, and summary statistics. Sections 4 and 5 present our results using ordinary least-squares and instrumental two-stage least- squares approaches. Section 6 discusses and attempts to explain these results. 2. Review and Theoretical Framework 1. The Impact of Natural Disasters Most of the current literature on natural disasters as a whole pertains to physical destructive phenomena such as severe weather or seismic events. Moreover, most empirical studies, such as Nguyen et al (2020) and Sharma and Kolthoff (2020) , focus on short-run aspects of natural disasters relating to various facets of proxi- mate causes (Huff 2020) or pathways of short-term recovery (Sharma and Kolthoff 2020). Famines are a unique kind of natural disaster in that they greatly affect crops, people, and animals but leave physical infrastructure and habitation relatively unaffected. We attempt to take this element of famines into account when explaining our results. Of the portion of the literature that focuses on famines, most results center on individual biological outcomes such as height, nutrition, (Cheng and Hui Shui 2019) or disease (Hu et al. 2017. A percentage of the remaining studies fixate on long-term socioeconomic effects at the individual level (Thompson et al. 2019). The handful of papers that do analyze broad long-term socioeconomic outcomes, such as Ambrus et al. (2015) and Cole et al. (2019), all deal with either long-term consequences of a single, especially severe natural disaster or the path dependency effects that may occur because of the particular historical circumstances of when a disaster occurs, such as in Dell (2013). On the other hand, our analysis spans several occurrences of the same type of phenomenon in a single, relatively stable sociohistorical setting, thereby utilizing a much larger and more reliable sample of natural disasters. Thus, our paper is the first to examine the long-term effects of a very specific type of natural disaster, famine, on the overall development of an entire region, by considering multiple occurrences thereof. Prior econometric literature on India’s famine era has highlighted other areas of focus, such as Burgess and Donaldson (2012), which shows that trade openness helped mitigate the catastrophic effects of famine. There is also plenty of historical literature on the causes and consequences of the famines, most notable in academic analyses from British historians (contemporarily, Carlyle 1900 and Ewing 1919; more recently Fieldhouse), which tend to focus on administrative measures, or more specifically, the lack thereof. In terms of the actual effects of famine, all of the established literature asserts that natural disasters overwhelmingly influence economic growth through two main channels: destruction of infrastructure and resulting loss of human capital (Lima and Barbosa 2019, Nguyen et al. 2020, Cole et al. 2019), or sociopolitical historical consequences, such as armed conflict (Dell 2013, Huff 2019). Famines pose an interesting question in this regard since they tend to result in severe loss of human capital through population loss due to starvation but generally result in smaller-scale infrastructure losses (Agbor and Price 2013). This is especially the case for rural India, which suffered acute famines while having little infrastructure in place (Roy 2006). We examine three types of potential outcomes: overall economic development, social mobility, and infrastructure, as outlined in section three. Our results present a novel finding in that famine occurrence seems to positively impact certain outcomes while negatively impacting most others, which we attempt to explain by considering the impact of famines on urbanization rates. Famines can impact outcomes through various mechanisms; therefore, we leave the exact causal mechanism unspecified and instead treat famines as generic shocks with subsequent recovery of unknown speed. If famines strike repeatedly, their initial small long-term effects on outcomes can escalate. In order to distinguish long- run effects of famines, we construct a simple growth model where flow variables such as growth quickly return to the long-run average after the shock, but stock variables such as GDP or consumption only return to the average asymptotically. Our intuition for the basis of distinguishing a long-run effect of famines rests on a simple growth model in which flow variables such as growth quickly return to the long-run average after a shock, but stock variables such as GDP or consumption only return to the average asymptotically (5). Thus, over finite timespans, the differences in stock variables between districts that undergo famines and those that do not should be measurable even after multiple decades. As mentioned below, this is in line with more recent macroeconomic models of natural disasters such Hochrainer (2009) and Bakkensen and Barrage (2018). Assume colonial districts (indexed by i ) suffer n i famines over the time period (in our data, the years 1870 to 1930), approximated as average constant rates f i . The occurrence of famine can then be modeled by a Poisson process with interval parameter f i , which represents the expected time between famines–even though the exact time is random and thus unknown–until it is realized (6). For simplicity, we assume that famines cause damage d to a district’s economy, for which time r i is needed to recover to its assumed long-run, balanced growth path (7). We make no assumptions on the distributions of d and r i except that r i is dependent on d and that the average recovery time E[ r i] is similarly a function of E[ d ]. If the district had continued on the growth path directly without the famine, absent any confounding effects, it would counterfactually have more positive out- comes today by a factor dependent on niE[tf] and thus n i , the number of famines suffered. We cannot observe the counterfactuals (the outcome in the affected district had it not experienced a famine), so instead, we use the unaffected districts in the sample as our comparison group. Controlling for factors such as population and existing infrastructure, each district should provide a reasonably plausible counterfactual for the other districts in terms of the number of famines suffered. Then, the differences in outcomes among districts measured today, y i , can be modeled as a function of the differences in the number of famines, n i . Finally, across the entire set of districts, this can be used to represent the average outcome E[y i ] as a function of the number of famines, which forms the basis of our ordinary-least squares approach in section four. This assumes that the correlation between famine occurrence and outcome is equal to 0. To account for the possibility their correlation is non-zero, we also use rainfall shocks to isolate the randomized part of our independent variable in order to ensure that famine occurrence is uncorrelated with our outcome variables. The use of rainfall shocks, in turn, forms the basis of our instrumental variables approach in section five. The important question is the nature of the relationship between d and ri . While f can be easily inferred from our data, d and especially r are much more difficult to estimate without detailed, high-level, and accurate data. Since the historical record is insufficiently detailed to allow precise estimation of the parameters of such a model, we constrain the effects of famine to be linear in our estimation in sections four and five. 2. Estimation Having constrained the hypothesized effects of famine to be linear, in section four, we would prefer to estimate (1) below, where represents our estimate of the effect of famine severity ( famine i), measured as the number of famines undergone by the district, on the outcome variable outcome yi, and Xi is a vector of contem- porary (present-day) covariates, such as mean elevation and soil quality. The con- stant term captures the mean outcomes across all districts andis a district-specific error term. Much of the research on famine occurrence in colonial India attributes the occurrence of famines and their consequences to poor policies and administration by the British Raj. If this is the case, and these same policies hurt the development of districts in other ways, such as by stunting industrialization directly, then the estimation of (1) will not show the correct effect of famines per se on comparative economic development. Additionally, our observations of famines, which are taken indirectly from district-level colonial gazetteers and reports, may be subject to “measurement” error that is non-random. For example, the reporting of famines in such gazetteers may be more accurate in well-developed districts that received preferential treatment from British administrators. To solve this problem, we turn to the examples of Dell et al. (2012), Dell (2013), Hoyle (2010), and Donaldson and Burgess (2012), who use weather shocks as instruments for natural disaster severity. While Dell (2013) focuses on historical consequences arising from path dependency and Hoyle (2010) centralizes on productivity, the instrumental methodology itself is perfectly applicable to our work. Another contribution of our pa- per is to further the use of climate shocks as instruments. We expand upon the usage of climate shocks as instruments because they fit the two main criteria for an instrumental variable. Primarily, weather shocks are extremely short-term phenomena, so their occurrence is unlikely to be correlated with longer-term climate factors that may impact both historical and modern outcomes. Secondly, they are reasonably random and provide exogenous variation with which we can estimate the impact of famines in an unbiased manner. We first estimate equation (2) below before estimating (1) using the predicted occurrence of famine from (2): We calculate famine as the number of reported events occurring in our panel for a district and rainfall as the number of years in which the deviation of rainfall from the mean falls below a certain threshold, nominally the fifteenth and tenth percentiles of all rainfall deviations for that district. As in (1), there is a constant term and error term. As is standard practice, we include the control variables in the first-stage even though they are quite plausibly unrelated to the rainfall variable. This allows us to estimate the impacts of famine with a reasonably causal interpretation; since the assignment of climate shocks is ostensibly random, using them to “proxy” for famines in this manner is akin to “as good as random” estimation. The only issue with this first-stage specification is that while we instrument counts of famine with counts of lo w rainfall years, the specific years in which low rainfall occurs theoretically need not match up with years in which famine is recorded in a given district. Therefore, we would prefer to estimate (3) below instead, since it provides additional identification through a panel dataset. Any other climate factors should be demeaned out by the time effects. Other district characteristics that may influence agricultural productivity and therefore famine severity, such as soil quality, should be differenced out with district effects, represented by the parameters. Differences in administrative policy should be resolved with provincial fixed effects. Unfortunately, we would then be unable to implement the standard instrumental variables practice of including the control variables in both stages since our modern-day outcomes are cross-sectional (i.e, we only have one observation per district for those measures). Nevertheless, our specification in (2) should reason- ably provide randomness that is unrelated to long-term climate factors, as mentioned above. Finally, we collapse the panel by counting the number of famines that occur in the district over time in order to compare famine severity with our cross-sectional modern-day outcomes and to get an exogenous count measure of famine that we can use de novo in (1). To account for sampling variance in our modern-day estimates, we use error weights constructed from the current population of each district meaning that our approach in section 5 is technically weighted least-squares, not ordinary. While this should account for heteroscedasticity in the modern observations, we use robust SM estimators in our estimations (McKean 2004, Barrera and Yohai 2006) to assure that our standard errors on the historical famine and rainfall variables are correct (8). The results of these approaches are detailed in section six. 3. Data 1. Sources and Description Our principal data of interest is a historical panel compiled from a series of colonial district gazetteers by Srivastava (1968) and details famine severity at the district level over time in British India from 1870 to 1930. Donaldson and Burgess (2010) then code these into an ordinal scale by using the following methodology: 4 – District mentioned in Srivastava’s records as “intensely affected by famine” 3 – District mentioned as “severely affected” 2 – Mentioned as “affected” 1 – Mentioned as “lightly affected” 0 – Not mentioned 9 – Specifically mentioned as being affected by spillover effects from a neighbor- ing district (there are only four such observations, so we exclude them) In our own coding of the data, we categorize famines as codes 2, 3, and 4, with severe famines corresponding to codes 3 and 4. We compute further cross-sectional measures, chiefly the total number and proportion of famine-years that a district experienced over the sixty-year periods. This is equivalent to tabulating the frequency of code occurrences and adding the resulting totals for codes 2 to 4 to obtain a single count measure of famine. Our results are robust to using “severe” (codes 3 and 4) famines instead of codes 2, 3, and 4. Across the entire panel, codes from 0 to 4 occurred with the following frequencies: 4256, 35, 207, 542, and 45 respectively. We also supplemented this panel with panel data on rainfall over the same time period. Several thousand measuring stations across India collected daily rainfall data over the time period, which Donaldson (2012) annualizes and compares with crop data. The rainfall data in Donaldson (2012) represents the total rainfall in a given district over a year, categorized by growing seasons of various crops (for ex- ample, the amount of total rainfall in a district that fell during the wheat growing season). Since different districts likely had different shares of crops, we average over all crops to obtain an approximation of total rainfall over the entire year. We additionally convert this into a more relevant measure in the context of famine by considering only the rainfall that fell during the growing seasons of crops typically grown for consumption in the dataset; those being bajra, barley, gram (bengal), jowar (sorghum), maize, ragi (millet), rice, and wheat. Finally, to ensure additional precision over the growing season, we simply add rainfall totals during the grow- ing seasons of the two most important food crops - rice and wheat - which make up over eighty percent of food crops in the country (World Bank, UN-FAOSTAT). The two crops have nearly opposite growing seasons, so the distribution of rainfall over the combined growing seasons serves as an approximation of total annual rainfall. Our results are robust with regards to all three definitions; the pairwise correlations between the measures are never less than ninety percent. Moreover, the cross-sectional famine instruments constructed from these are almost totally identical as the patterns in each type of rainfall (that is, their statistical distributions over time) turn out to be the same. As expected, there appears to be significant variation in annual rainfall. The ex- ample of the Buldana district (historically located in the Bombay presidency, now in Maharashtra state) highlights this trend, as shown in Figure 1 on the following page. In general, the trends for both measures of rainfall over time are virtually in- distinguishable aside from magnitude. As anticipated, famine years are marked by severe and/or sustained periods of below-average rainfall although the correlation is not perfect. There are a few districts which have years with low rainfall and no recorded famines, but this can mostly be explained by a lack of sufficient records, especially in earlier years. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are a few districts that recorded famines despite above-average rainfall, which could possibly be the result of non-climatic factors such as colonial taxation policies, conflicts, or other natural disasters, such as insect plagues. However, the relationship between rainfall patterns and famine occurrence suggests that we can use the former as an instrument for the latter especially since the correlation is not perfect, and famine occurrence is plausibly non-random due to the impact of British land ownership policies. Figure 1: Rainfall over time for Buldana from 1870 to 1920 Notes : The dashed line shows mean rainfall for all food crops; the solid line shows the total rainfall over the wheat and rice growing seasons. The blue and purple lines represent the historical means for these measures of rainfall. The rad shading denotes years in which famines are recorded as having affected the district. We construct count instruments for famines by first computing the historic mean and annual deviation for rainfall in each district. We can then count famines as years in which the deviation was in the bottom fifteenth percentile in order to capture relatively severe and negative rainfall shocks as plausible famine causes. For severe famines, we use the bottom decile instead. The percentiles were chosen based on famine severity so that the counts obtained using this definition were as similar as possible to the actual counts constructed from recorded famines (see above) in the panel dataset. For modern-day outcomes, we turn to survey data from the Indian census as well as the Indian Human Development Survey II, which details personal variables (ex. consumption and education), infrastructure measures (such as access to roads), and access to public goods (ex. hospital availability) at a very high level of geographical detail. An important metric constructed from the household development surveys is that of intergenerational mobility as measured by the expected income percentile of children whose parents belonged to a given income percentile, which we obtain from Novosad et al. (2019). Additionally, as survey data can often be unreliable, we supplement these with an analysis of satellite luminosity data, which provides measures of the (nighttime) luminosity of geographic cells, which should serve as a more reliable proxy for economic development, following Henderson et al. (2011) and Pinkovsky and Sala-i-Martin (2016). These data are mostly obtained from Novosad et. al (2018, 2019) and Iyer (2010), which we have aggregated to the district level. The outcomes variables are as follows: 1. Log absolute magnitude per capita. We intend this to serve as a proxy for a district’s economic development in lieu of reliable GDP data. This is the logarithm of the total luminosity observed in the district divided by the district’s population. These are taken from Vernon and Storeygard (2011) by way of Novosad et al. (2018). 2. Log rural consumption per capita. This is taken from the Indian Household Survey II by way of Novosad et al. (2019). 3. Share of the workforce employed in the cultivation sector, intended as a mea- sure of rural development and reliance on agriculture (especially subsistence agri- culture). This is taken from Iyer et al. (2010). 4. Gini Index, from Iyer (2010), as a measure of inequality. 5. Intergenerational income mobility (father-son pairs), taken from Novosad et al. (2018). Specifically, we consider the expected income percentile of sons in 2012 whose fathers were located in the 25th percentile for household income (2004), using the upper bound for robustness (9). 6. The percentage of the population with a college degree, taken from census data. 7. Electrification, i.e. the percent of villages with all homes connected to the power grid (even if power is not available twenty-four hours per day). 8. Percent of villages with access to a medical center, taken from Iyer (2010), as a measure of rural development in the aspect of public goods. 9. Percent of villages with any bus service, further intended as a measurement of public goods provision and infrastructure development. Broadly speaking, these can be classified into three categories with 1-3 representing broad measures of economic development, 4-6 representing inequality and human capital, and 7-9 representing the development of infrastructure and the provision of public goods. As discussed in section two, our preliminary hypothesis is that the occurrence of famines has a negative effect on district development, which is consistent with most of the literature on disasters. Hence, given a higher occurrence of famine, we expect that districts suffering from more famines during the colonial period will be characterized by lower levels of development, being (1) less luminous at night, (2) poorer in terms of a lower rural consumption, and (3) more agricultural, i.e have a higher share of the labor force working in agriculture. Similarly, with regards to inequality and human capital, we expect that more famine-afflicted districts will have (4) higher inequality in terms of a higher Gini index, (5) lower upward social mobility in terms of a lower expected income percentile for sons whose fathers were at the 25th income percentile, and (6) a lower percentage of adults with a college education. Finally, by the same logic, these districts should be relatively underdeveloped in terms of infrastructure, and thus (7) lack access to power, (8) lack access to medical care, and (9) lack access to transportation services. Finally, even though our independent variable when instrumented should be exogenous, we attempt to control for geographic and climatic factors affecting agriculture and rainfall in each district, namely: - Soil type and quality (sandy, rocky or barren, etc.) - Latitude (degree) and mean temperature (degrees Celsius) - Coastal location (coded as a dummy variable) - Area in square kilometers (it should be noted that district boundaries correspond well, but not perfectly, to their colonial-era counterparts) As mentioned previously, research by Iyer and Banerjee (2008, 2014) suggests that the type of land-tenure system implemented during British rule has had a huge impact on development in the districts (10). We also argue that it may be re- lated to famine occurrence directly (for example, in that tenure systems favoring landlords may experience worse famines), in light of the emerging literature on agricultural land rights, development, and food security (Holden and Ghebru 2016, Maxwell and Wiebe 1998). Specifically, we consider specifications with and without the proportion of villages in the district favoring a landlord or non-land- lord tenure system, obtained from Iyer (2010). In fact, the correlation between the two variables in our dataset is slightly above 0.23, which is not extremely high but enough to be of concern in terms of avoiding omitted variable bias. We ultimately consider four specifications for each dependent variable based on the controls in X from equation (1): no controls, land tenure, geography, and land tenure with geography. Each of these sets of controls addresses a different source of omitted variable bias: the first, land-tenure, addresses the possibility of British land-tenure policies causing both famines and long-term development outcomes. The second, geography, addresses the possibility of factors such as mean elevation and temperature impacting crop growth while also influencing long-term development (for example, if hilly and rocky districts suffer from more famines because they are harder to grow crops in but also suffer from lower development because they are harder to build infrastructure in or access via transportation). We avoid using contemporary controls for the outcome variables (that is, including infrastructure variables, income per capita, or welfare variables in the right- hand side) because many of these could reasonably be the result of the historical effects (the impact of famines) we seek to study. As such, including them as controls would artificially dilate the impact of our independent variable. 2. Summary statistics Table I presents summary statistics of our cross-sectional dataset on the follow- ing page. One cause for potential concern is that out of the over 400 districts in colonial India, we have only managed to capture 179 in our sample. This is due chiefly to a paucity of data regarding rainfall; there are only 191 districts captured in the original rainfall data from Donaldson (2012). In addition, the changing of district names and boundaries over time makes the matching of old colonial districts with modern-day administrative subdivisions more imprecise than we would like. Nevertheless, these districts cover a reasonable portion of modern India as well as most of the regions which underwent famines during imperial rule. The small number of districts may also pose a problem in terms of the standard errors on our coefficients, as the magnitude of the impacts of famines that occurred over a hundred years ago on outcomes today is likely to be quite small. Table 1 – Summary Statistics Source : Author calculations, from Iyer (2010), Iyer and Bannerjee (2014), Novosad et. al (2018), Asher and No- vosad (2019), Donaldson and Burgess (2012). 4. Ordinary Least Squares Although we suspect that estimates of famine occurrence and severity based on recorded historical observations may be nonrandom for several reasons (mentioned in section two and three), we first consider direct estimation of (1) from section two. For convenience, equation (1) is reprinted below: As in the previous section, famine refers to the number of years that are coded 2, 3, or 4 in famine severity as described in Srivastava (1968). X is the set of con- temporary covariates, also described in section three. We estimate four separate specifications of (1) where X varies: 1. No controls, i.e. X is empty. 2. Historical land tenure, to capture any effects related to British land policy in causing both famines and long-term developmental outcomes. 3. Geographical controls relating to climatic and terrestrial factors, such as temperature, latitude, soil quality, etc. 4. Both (2) and (3). Table II presents the estimates for the coefficients on famines and tenure for our nine dependent variables on the following page (we omit coefficients and confidence intervals for the geographic variables for reasons of brevity and relevance in terms of interpretation). In general, the inclusion or exclusion of controls does not greatly change the magnitudes of the estimates nor their significance, except for a few cases. We discuss effects for each dependent variable below: Log of total absolute magnitude in the district per capita : The values for famine suggest that interestingly, each additional famine results in anywhere from 1.8 to 3.6 percent more total nighttime luminosity per person in the district. As mentioned in section three, newer literature shows that nighttime luminosity is a far more reliable gauge of development than reported survey measures such as GDP, so this result is not likely due to measurement error. Thus, as the coefficient on famine is positive, it seems that having suffered more famines is positively related to development. This in fact is confirmed by the instrumental variables (IV) estimates in Table III (see section five). Curiously, the inclusion of tenure and geography controls separately does not change the significance, but including both of them together in the covariates generates far larger confidence intervals than expected and reduces the magnitude of the effect by an entire order of magnitude. This may be because each set of controls tackles a different source of omitted variable bias. As expected, however, land tenure plays a significant role in predicting a district’s development; even a single percent increase in the share of villages with a tenant-favorable system is associated with a whopping 73-80% additional night- time luminosity per person. Log rural consumption per capita : We find evidence that additional famines are associated with lower rural consumption, albeit on a minuscule scale. This suggests that the beneficial effect of famines on development may not be equal across urban and rural areas but instead concentrated in cities. For example, there might be a causal pathway that implies faster urbanization in districts that undergo more famines. Unlike with luminosity, historical land tenure does not seem to play a role in rural consumption. Percent of the workforce employed in cultivation : As expected, additional famines seem to play a strongly significant but small role with regards to the labor patterns in the district. Districts with more famines seem to have nearly one percent of the labor force working in cultivation for each additional famine, suggesting famines may inhibit development of industries other than agriculture and cultivation. Our instrumental variables estimates confirm this. Puzzlingly, land tenure does not seem to be related to this very much at all. Gini Index : The coefficients for the number of famines seem to be difficult to interpret as both those for the specification with no controls and with both sets of controls are statistically significant with similar magnitudes yet opposite signs. The confidence interval for the latter is slightly narrower. This is probably because the true estimate is zero or extremely close to zero, and the inclusion or exclusion of controls is enough to narrowly affect the magnitude to as to flip the sign of the co- efficient. In order to clarify this, more data is needed – i.e for more of the districts in colonial India to be matched in our original sample. At the very least, we can say that land tenure clearly has a large and significant positive association with in- equality. Unfortunately, this association cannot be confirmed as causal due to the lack of an instrument for land tenure which covers enough districts of British India. However, as Iyer and Banerjee (2014) argue, the assignment of tenure systems itself was plausibly random (having been largely implemented on the whims of British administrators) so that one could potentially interpret the results as causal with some level of caution. Intergenerational income mobility : Similarly, we do not find evidence of an association between the number of famines suffered by a district in the colonial era and social mobility in the present day, but we do find a strong impact of land tenure, which makes sense to the reported institutional benefits of tenant-favorable systems in encouraging development as well as the obvious benefits for the tenants and their descendants themselves. Each one-percent increase in the share of villages in a district that uses a tenant-favorable system in the colonial era is associated with anywhere from ten to thirteen percent higher expected income percentile for sons whose fathers were at the 25th percentile in 1989 although the estimates presented in Table II are an upper bound. College education : We find extremely limited evidence that famines in the colonial period are associated with less human capital in the present day, with a near-zero effect of additional famines on the share of adults in a district with a college degree (in fact, rounded to zero with five to six decimal places). Land tenure similarly has very little or no effect. Electrification, access to medical care , bus service : All three of these infra- structure and public goods variables show a negligible effect of famines, but strong impacts of historical land tenure. Ultimately, we find that famines themselves seem to have some positive impact on long-term development despite also being associated with many negative out- comes, such as a greater share of the workforce employed in agriculture (i.e as opposed to more developed activities such as manufacturing or service). Another finding of note is that while famines do not seem to have strong associations with all of our measures, land tenure does. This suggests that the relationship between land-tenure and famine is worth looking into. The existence of bias in the recording of famines, as well as the potential for factors that both cause famines while simultaneously affecting long-term outcomes, present a possible problem with these estimates. We have already attempted to account for one of those, namely historical land tenure systems. Indeed, in most of the specifications, including tenure in the regression induces a decrease in the magnitude of the coefficient on famine. As the effect of famine tends to be extremely small to begin with, the relationship is not always clear. Other errors are also possible. For example, it is possible that a given district experienced a famine in a given year, but insufficient records of its occurrence remained by 1968. Then, Srivastiva (1968) would have assigned that district a code of 0 for that year, but the correct code should have been higher. Indeed, as described in section three, a code of 0 corresponds to a code of “not mentioned”, which encompasses both “not mentioned at all” and “not mentioned as being affected by famine” (Donaldson and Burgess 2010). While measurement error in the dependent variable is usually not a problem, error in the independent variable can lead to attenuation bias in the coefficients since the ordinary least-squares algorithm minimizes the error on the dependent variable by estimating coefficients for the independent variables. The greater this error, the more the ordinary least- squares method will bias the estimated coefficients towards zero in an attempt to minimize error in the dependent variable (Riggs et al. 1978). For these reasons, we turn to instrumental variables estimation in section five in an attempt to provide additional identification. Table 2 – Ordinary Least-Square Estimates Notes : Independent variable is number of with recorded famines (famine code of 2 or above). Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. These are more table notes. The style is Table Notes. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). 5. Weather Shocks as an Instrument for Famine Severity As explained in section two, there are many possible reasons why recorded famine data may not be exogenous. In any case, it would be desirable to have a truly exogenous measure of famine, for which we turn to climate data in the form of rainfall shocks. Rainfall is plausibly connected to the occurrence of famines, especially in light of the colonial government’s laissez-faire approach to famine relief (Bhatia 1968). For example, across all districts, mean rainfall averaged around 1.31m in years without any famine and around 1.04m in districts which were at least somewhat affected by famine (code 1 or above). Figure 2 below shows that there is a very clear association between rainfall activity and famines in colonial India, although variability in climate data as well as famine and agricultural policy means that there are some high-rainfall districts which do experience famines as well as low-rainfall districts which do not experience as many famines, as noted in section three. Figure 2: Associations between famine occurrence and rainfall trends It should be clear from the first three scatterplots above that there is a negative relationship between the amount of rainfall a district receives and the general prevalence of famine but more importantly, the total size of the rainfall shocks and the total occurrences of famine in that district. From the final plot we see that when we classify low-rainfall years by ranking the deviations from the mean, counting the number of years in which these deviations are in the bottom fifteenth percentile corresponds well to the actual number of recorded famines for each district. In order to use this to measure famine exogenously, we first estimate (2) (see below, section two and section three) where we predict the number of famines from the number of negative rainfall shocks as represented by deviation from the mean in the bottom fifteen percent of all deviations before estimating (1) using this predicted estimate of famine in place of the recorded values. Our reduced form11 estimates, where we first run (1) using the number of negative rainfall shocks directly, are presented on the following pages in Table III (11). The reduced form equation is shown as (4) below as well: Table 3 – Reduced form estimates for IV Notes : Independent variable is number of years in which deviation of rainfall from the historic mean is in the bottom fifteenth-percentile. Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. These are more table notes. The style is Table Notes. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). From Table III, it would appear that negative rainfall shocks have similar effects on the outcome variables as do recorded famines in terms of the statistical significance of the coefficients on the independent variable. There is also the added benefit that we can confirm our very small and slightly negative effects of famines on the proportion of adults with a college education: for each additional year of exceptionally low rainfall in a district, the number of adults with a college education in 2011 decreases by 0.1%. In addition, whereas the coefficients in Table II were conflicting, Table III provides evidence in favor of the view that additional famines increase inequality in a district as measured by the Gini index. However, the magnitudes of the effects of famines or low-rainfall years are pre- dominantly larger than their counterparts in Table II to a rather puzzling extent. While we stated earlier in section three that famines and rainfall are not perfectly correlated, it might be that variation in historical rainfall shocks can better explain variation in outcomes in the present day. In order to get a better understanding of the relationship between the two, it would first be wise to look at the coefficients presented in Table IV, which are the results of the two-stage least-squares estimation using low-rainfall years as an instrument for recorded famines. Table IV follows the patterns established in Table II and Table III with regards to the significance of the coefficients as well as their signs; famines have a statistically significant and positive impact on nighttime luminosity, a significant negative impact on rural consumption, and a positive impact on the percent of the labor force employed in agriculture. The results with respect to Table II, concerning the impact of famine on the proportion of adults with a college education, are also very similar. Most other specifications do not show a significant effect of famine on the respective outcome with the exception of access to medical care. Unlike in Table II and Table III, each additional famine is associated with an additional 11.2 to 12.5 percent of villages in that district having some form of medical center or service readily accessible (according to the specifications with geographic controls, which we argue are more believable than the ones without). However, this relationship breaks down at the level of famines seen in some of our districts; a district having suffered nine or ten famines would see more than 100% of its villages having access to medical centers (which is clearly nonsensical), suggesting we may need to look for nonlinearity in the effects of famine in section six. Unfortunately, unlike in Table III, it seems that we cannot conclude much regarding the effect of famines on intergenerational mobility as the coefficients are contradictory and generally not statistically significant. For example, the coefficient on famine in the model without any controls is highly significant and positive, but the coefficient in the model with all controls is not significant and starkly negative. The same is true for the effect of famines on the Gini index. One possibility is that the positive coefficients on famine for both of these dependent variables are driven by outliers as our data was relatively limited due to factors mentioned in section 2. The magnitudes of the coefficients in Table IV are generally smaller than those presented in Table III but still significantly larger than the ones in Table II. For ex- ample, in Table II, the ordinary least-squares model suggests that each additional historical famine is associated with an additional 0.5 to 0.9 percent of the district’s workforce being employed in cultivation in 2011, but in Table IV, these numbers range from 1.5 to 4.3 percent for the same specifications, representing almost a tenfold increase in magnitude in some cases. One reason for this is the possibility attenuation bias in the ordinary least-squares regression; here, there should not be any attenuation bias in our results as the use of instruments which we assume are not correlated with any measurement error in the recording of famines excludes that possibility (Durbin 1954). On the other hand, the Hausman test for endogeneity (the econometric gold standard for testing a model’s internal validity) often fails to reject the null hypothesis that the recorded famine variable taken from Srivastava (1968) and Donaldson and Burgess (2012) is exogenous. To be precise, in one sense the test fails to reject the null hypothesis that the rainfall data add no new “information”, which is not captured in the reported famine data. It is possible that our rainfall instrument, as used in equation (2) is invalid due to endogeneity with the regression model specified in equation (1) despite being excluded from it. The only way to test this possibility is to conduct a Sargan-Han- sen test12 on the model’s overidentifying restrictions; however, we are unable to conduct the test as we have a single instrument. It follows that our model is not actually overidentified (12). Table 4 –Instrumental Variables Estimates Notes : Independent variable is number of years with recorded famines (famine code of 2 or above), instrumented with number of low-rainfall years (rainfall deviation from historic mean in bottom fifteenth percentile). Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. These are more table notes. The style is Table Notes. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). We also need to consider the viability of our instrumental variables estimates. Table V on the following page offers mixed support. While the weak-instrument test always rejects the null-hypothesis of instrument weakness, for models with more controls, namely those with geographic controls, the first-stage F-values – the test statistics of interest– are relatively small. Which is not encouraging as generally a value of ten or more is recommended to be assured of instrument strength (Staiger and Stock 1997) (13). In Table IV, we show confidence intervals obtained by inverting the Anderson-Rubin test, which accounts for instrument strength in determining the statistical significance of the coefficients. These are wider in the models with more controls, although not usually wide enough to move coefficients from statistically significant to statistically insignificant. However, additional complications arise when considering the Hausman tests for endogeneity. The p-values in Table V suggest that around half of the regression specifications in Table IV do not suffer from a lack of exogeneity, meaning that the ordinary least-squares results are just as valid for those specifications. A more serious issue is that the Hausman test rejects the null-hypothesis of exogeneity for four out of nine outcome variables. Combined with the fact that the first-stage F-statistics are concerningly low for the specifications with geographic controls, this means that not only are the ordinary least-squares results likely to be biased, but the instrumental variables estimates are also likely to be imprecise. This is most concerning for the results related to rural consumption and percent of the workforce in agriculture. Conversely, the results for nighttime luminosity are not affected as the Hausman tests do not reject exogeneity for that outcome variable. While we might simply use the ordinary-least squares results to complement those obtained via two-stage least-squares, the latter are lacking in instrument strength. More importantly, the differences in magnitude between the coefficients presented in Table II and in Table IV are too large to allow this use without abandoning consistency in the interpretation of the coefficients. Ultimately, given that the Hausman tests show that instrumentation is at least somewhat necessary, and the actual p-values for the weak-instrument test are still reasonably low (being less than 0.05 even in the worst case), we prefer to uphold the instrumental variables results as imperfect as some of them may be. We argue that it is better to have un- biased estimates from the instrumental variables procedure (IV), even if they may be less unreliable, than to risk biased results due to endogeneity problems present in ordinary least squares (OLS). Table 5 – Instrumental Variables Diagnostics Notes : The weak-instrument test p-value is obtained from comparison of the first-stage F-statistic with the chi- square distribution with degrees of freedom corresponding to the model (number of data points minus number of estimands). Independent variable is number of years in which deviation of rainfall from the historic mean is in the bottom fifteenth-percentile. Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. 6. Discussion Our data suggest that there are long-run impacts of historical famines. Tables II, IV, and VII clearly show that the number of historical famines has a[72] [73] [MOU74] statistically significant, though small impact on the following: average level of economic development as approximated by nighttime luminosity, the share of the population employed in cultivation, consumption, inequality, and the provision of medical services in contemporary Indian districts. There appear to be no discernible effects on intergenerational income mobility or basic infrastructure such as electrification. The effects are quite small and are generally overshadowed by other geographical factors such as climate (i.e., latitude and temperature). They are also small in comparison to the impact of other colonial-era policies such as land-tenure systems. Nevertheless, they are still interesting to observe given that the famines in question occurred nearly a hundred years prior to the measurement of the outcomes in question. We contend that they reveal lasting and significant consequences of British food policy in colonial India. Table IV suggests that a hypothetical district having suffered ten famines - which is not atypical in our data - may have developed as much as ninety-four percent more log absolute magnitude per capita, around forty percent less consumption per capita in rural areas , 150% percent more of the workforce employed in cultivation, and a Gini index nearly ten percent greater than a district which suffered no famines. As to the question of whether or not the famines were directly caused by British policy, the results suggest that, at the very least, British nineteenth-century laissez-faire attitudes to disaster management have had long-lasting consequences for India. Moreover, these estimates are causal as the use of rainfall shocks as instruments provides a means of estimation which is “as good as random.” Therefore, we can confidently state that these effects are truly the result of having undergone the observed famines. In considering whether to prefer our instrumental estimates or our least-squares estimates, we must mainly weigh the problems of a potentially weak instrument versus the benefits of a causal interpretation. We argue that we should still trust the IV estimates even though the instrument is not always as strong as we would like. First of all, the instrumentation of the recorded famine data with the demeaned rainfall data provides plausible causal estimation due to the fact that the rainfall measures are truly as good as random. Even if the recorded famine measure is itself reasonably exogenous as suggested by the Hausman tests, we argue that it is better to be sure. Using instruments for a variable which is already exogenous will not introduce additional bias into the results and may even help reduce attenuation bias from any possible measurement error. The Hausman test, after all, can- not completely eliminate this possibility; it can only suggest how likely or unlikely it is. In this sense, the instrumental estimates allow us to be far more confident in our assessment of the presence or absence of the long-run impact of famines. Though the first-stage F-statistics are less than ten, they are still large enough to reject the null hypothesis of instrument weakness as shown by the p-values for this test in Table V. We argue that it is better to be consistent than pick and choose which set of estimates we want to accept for a given dependent variable and model. We made this choice because the differences in magnitude between the IV and OLS coefficients are too large to do otherwise. A more interesting question raised by the reported coefficients in Table II, Table IV, and Table VII has to do with their sign. Why do districts more afflicted historically by famines seem to have more economic development yet worse out- comes in terms of rural consumption and inequality by our models? This could be due to redistributive preferences associated or possibly even caused by famines; Gualtieri et al. pose this hypothesis in their paper on earthquakes in Italy. We note that districts suffering more famines in the colonial era are more “rural” to- day in that they tend to have a greater proportion of their labor force working in cultivation. This cannot be a case of mere association where more rural districts are more susceptible to famine as our instrumental estimates in Table IV suggest otherwise. Rather, we explore the possibility that post-independence land reform in India was greater in relatively more agricultural districts. Much of the literature on land-tenure suggests that redistributing land from large landowners to smaller farmers is associated with positive effects for productivity and therefore, economic development (Iyer and Banerjee 2005, Varghese 2019). If the historical famines are causally associated with districts having less equal land tenure at independence, then this would explain their positive, though small, impact on economic development by way of inducing more land reform in those districts. On the other hand, if they are causally associated with districts remaining more agricultural in character at independence, and a district’s “agriculturalness” is only indirectly associated with land reform (in they only benefit because they have more agricultural land, so they benefit more from the reform), this would indicate that famines have a small and positive impact on economic development through a process that is less directly causal. Although we are unable to observe land-tenure and agricultural occupations immediately at independence, we are able to supplement our data with addition- al state-level observations of land-reform efforts in Indian states from 1957-1992 compiled in Besley and Burgess (2010) and aggregate the district-level observations of famines in our dataset by state (14). If our hypothesis above is correct, then we should see a positive association between the number of historical famines in a state’s districts and the amount of land-reform legislation passed by that state after independence, keeping in mind that provincial and state borders were almost completely reorganized after independence. Although this data is quite coarse, being on the state level, it is widely available. However, the plot below suggests completely the opposite relationship as each additional famine across the state’s districts appears to be associated with nearly 0.73 fewer land-reform acts. Even after removing the outlier of West Bengal, which underwent far more numerous land reforms due to the ascendancy of the Communist Party of India in that state, the relationship is still quite apparent; every two additional famines are associated with almost one fewer piece of land-reform legislation post-independence. Figure 3: Historical Famine Occurrence vs Post-independence land reforms Figure 3 with West Bengal removed Therefore, there seems to be little evidence that famines are associated with land-reforms at all. This is quite puzzling because it is difficult to see how famine occurrence could lead to positive economic development while hurting outcomes such as inequality, consumption, and public goods provision. One potential explanation is that famines lead to higher urban development while hurting rural development, which would suggest a key impact of famine occurrence is the worsening of an urban-rural divide in economic development. This would explain how high er famine occurrence is linked with higher night-time luminosity, which would itself be positively associated with urbanization but is also linked with lower rural consumption, higher inequality (which may be the result of a stronger rural-urban divide), and a higher proportion of the workforce employed in the agricultural sector. For example, it is highly plausible that famines depopulate rural areas, leaving survivors to concentrate in urban centers, where famine relief is more likely to be available. Donaldson and Burgess (2012), who find that historical famine relief tended to be more effective in areas better served by rail networks, support this explanation. At the same time, the population collapse in rural areas would leave most of the workforce employed in subsistence agriculture going forward. Thus, if famines do lead to more people living in urban areas while simultaneously increasing the proportion of the remaining population employed in agriculture, then they would also exacerbate inequality and worsen rural, economic out- comes. If the urbanization effect is of greater magnitude, this would also explain the slight increase in night-time luminosity and electrification. This is somewhat supported by the plots in Figure 4, in which urbanization is defined as the proportion of a district’s population that lives in urban areas as labeled by the census. It appears that urbanization is weakly associated with famine occurrence (especially when using rainfall shocks) and positively associated with nighttime luminosity and inequality while negatively associated with rural consumption and agricultural employment as hypothesized above. However, instrumental estimates of urbanization as a result of famine detailed in Table VI only weakly support the idea that famine occurrence causally impacts urbanization as only the estimation without any controls is statistically significant. Figure 4: Urbanization Rates vs. Famine occurrence and Development outcomes Notes : The first two plots (in the top row) depict urbanization against famine occurrence and negative rainfall shocks. The rest of the plots depict various outcomes (discussed above) against the urbanization rate. Table VI –Urbanization Vs. Famine Occurrence Notes : Independent variable is percent of a district’s population that is urban as defined in the 2011 Indian census. Control specifications: (a) no controls, (b) land-tenure control (proportion of villages with tenant-ownership land tenure system), (c) geographic controls (see section three for enumeration), (d) both land-tenure and geographic controls. Source : Author calculations. *** Significant at the 1 percent level or below (p ≤ 0.01). ** Significant at the 5 percent level (0.01 < p ≤ 0.05). * Significant at the 10 percent level (0.05 < p ≤ 0.1). Nevertheless, this represents a far more likely explanation for our results than land reform, especially since the land reform mechanism implies that famine occurrence would be associated with better rural outcomes. In other words, if famines being associated with land-reform at independence was the real explanation behind our results, because the literature on land-reform suggests that it is linked with improved rural development, we would not expect to see such strongly negative rural impacts of famine in our results. Therefore, not only is the explanation of differential urban versus rural development as a result of famine occurrence better supported by our data, it also constitutes a more plausible explanation for our findings. While we do not have enough data to investigate exactly how famine occurrence seems to worsen urban-rural divides in economic development (for example, rural population collapse as hypothesized above), such a question would certainly be a key area of future study. Conclusion In this paper, we have shown that famines occurring in British India have a statistically significant long-run impact on present-day outcomes by using both ordinary least-squares as well as instrumenting for famine with climate shocks in the form of deviated rainfall. In particular, the occurrence of famine seems to ex- acerbate a rural-urban divide in economic development. Famines appear to cause a small increase in overall economic development, but lower consumption and welfare in rural areas while also worsening wealth inequality. This is supported by the finding that famines appear to lead to slightly higher rates of urbanization while simultaneously leading to a higher proportion of a district’s labor force remaining employed in the agricultural sector. Even though our ordinary-least squares measures are generally acceptable, we point to the similar instrumental variable estimates as stronger evidence of the causal impact of the famines. Ultimately, our results demonstrate that negative cli- mate shocks combined with certain disaster management policies, such as British colonial laissez-faire approaches to famine in India, may have significant, though counter-intuitive, impacts on economic outcomes in the long-run. Endnotes 1 One can essentially understand this technique as manipulating the independent variable, which may not be randomly assigned, via a randomly assigned instrument. 2 The Gini index measures the distribution of wealth or income across individuals, with a score of zero corresponding to perfectly equal distribution and a score of one corresponding to a situation where one individual holds all of the wealth or earns all of the income in the group. 3 The Durbin-Wu-Hausman test essentially asks whether adding the instrument changes bias in the model . A rejection of the null hypothesis implies that differences in coefficients between OLS and IV are due to adding the instrument, whereas the null hypothesis assumes that the independent variable(s) are already exogenous and so adding an instrument contributes no new information to the model. 4 Attenuation bias occurs when there is measurement error in the independent variable, which biases estimates downward due to the definition of the least-squares estimator as one which minimizes squared error on the axis of the dependent variable. See Durbin (1954) for a detailed discussion. 5 Classical growth theory, such as in the Solow-Swan (1957) and Romer (1994) implies long-run convergence and therefore that districts would have similar outcomes today regardless of the number of famines they underwent. However, this is at odds with most of the empirical literature as discussed previously, in which there are often measurable long-term effects to natural disasters. 6 A Poisson process models count data via a random variable following a Poisson distribution. 7 Although we use the term damage, the impact to the economy need not be negative – indeed, we find that some impacts of famine occurrence are positive in sections four and five, which we attempt to explain in section seven. 8 Normally, OLS assumes that the variance of the error term is not correlated with the independent variable(s) i.e the errors are homoscedastic. If this is not true, i.e the errors are heteroscedastic, then the standard errors will be too small. Robust least-squares estimation calculates the OLS standard errors in a way that does not depend on the assumption that the errors are homoscedastic. 9 So, for example, if this value is 25, then there is on average no mobility on average, as sons would be expected to remain in the same income percentile as their fathers. Similarly, if it is less than (greater than) 25, then there would be downward (upward) mobility. A value of 50 would indicate perfect mobility, i.e no relationship between fathers’ income percentiles and those of their sons. 10 For a brief overview of the types of systems employed by the East India Company and Crown administrators, see Iyer and Banerjee (2008), or see Tirthankar (2006) for a more detailed discussion. 11 While reduced form estimates–that is, estimating the outcomes as direct functions of the exogenous variables rather than via a structural process–are often not directly interpretable, they can serve to confirm the underlying trends in the data (for example, via the sign of the coefficients), which is why we choose to include them here. 12 The Sargan-Hansen test works very similarly to the Durbin-Wu-Hausman test, but instead uses a quadratic form on the cross-product of the residuals and instruments. 13 To be precise, this heuristic is technically only valid with the use of a single instrument, which is of course satisfied in our case anyway. 14 To be clear, the value of famine for each state is technically the average number of famines in the historical districts that are presently part of the state, since subnational boundaries were drastically reorganized along linguistic lines after independence. Bibliography Agbor, Julius A., and Gregory N. Price. 2014. “Does Famine Matter for Aggregate Adolescent Human Capital Acquisition in Sub-Saharan Africa?” African Development Review/Revue Africaine de Développement 26 (3): 454–67. Am brus, Attila, Erica Field, and Robert Gonzalez. 2020. “Loss in the Time of Cholera: Long-Run Impact of a Disease Epidemic on the Urban Land- scape.” American Economic Review , 110 (2): 475-525. Anand, R., Coady, D., Mohommad, A., Thakoor, V. V., & Walsh, J. P. 2013. “The Fiscal and Welfare Impacts of Reforming Subsidies in India”. The Inter- national Monetary Fund, IMF Working Papers 13/128. Anderson, T.W. and Rubin, H. 1949. Estimation of the parameters of a single equation in a complete system of stochastic equations. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 20, 46-63. Asher, Sam, Tobias Lunt, Ryu Matsuura, and Paul Novosad. 2019. The Socioeconomic High- Resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Dataset on India. Asher, Sam and Novosad, Paul. 2019. “Rural Roads and Local Economic Development”. American Economic Review (forthcoming). Web. Bakkensen, Laura and Lint Barrage. 2018. “Do Disasters Affect Growth? A Macro Model-Based Perspective on the Empirical Debate”. IMF Workshop on Macroeconomic Policy and Income Inequality. Bannerjee, Abhijit and Lakshmi Iyer. 2005. “History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India”. American Economic Review 95(4) pp. 1190- 1213. Besley, Timothy and Burgess, Robin. 2000. Land reform, poverty reduction and growth: evidence from India. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115 (2). pp. 389-430. Bhatia, B.M. 1968. Famines in India. A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India (1860- 1965) London: Asia Publishing House. Print. Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal. 2004. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (2nd ed.) Routledge. Brekke, Thomas. 2015. “Entrepreneurship and Path Dependency in Regional Development.” Entrepreneurship and Regional Development 27 (3–4): 202–18. Burgess, Robin and Dave Donaldson. 2010. “Can Openness Mitigate the Effects of Weather Shocks? Evidence from India’s Famine Era”. American Economic Review 100(2), Papers and Proceedings of the 122nd Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association pp. 449-453. Carlyle, R. W. 1900. “Famine Administration in a Bengal District in 1896-7.” Economic Journal 10: 420–30. Cheng, Wenli, and Hui Shi. 2019. “Surviving the Famine Unscathed? An Analysis of the Long-Term Health Effects of the Great Chinese Famine.” Southern Economic Journal 86 (2): 746–72. Cohn, Bernard S. 1960. “The Initial British Impact on India: A case study of the Benares region.” The Journal of Asian Studies. Association for Asian Studies. 19 (4): 418–431. Cole, Matthew A., Robert J. R. Elliott, Toshihiro Okubo, and Eric Strobl. 2019. “Natural Disasters and Spatial Heterogeneity in Damages: The Birth, Life and Death of Manufacturing Plants.” Journal of Economic Geography 19 (2): 373–408. Davis, Mike. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World . London: Verso. Print. Dell, Melissa, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken. 2012. “Temperature Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century.” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics , 4 (3): 66-95. Dell, Melissa. 2013.“Path dependence in development: Evidence from the Mexican Revolution,” Harvard University Economics Department, Manuscript. Donaldson, Dave. 2018. “Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure.” American Economic Review , 108 (4-5): 899-934. Drèze, Jean. 1991. “Famine Prevention in India”, in Drèze, Jean; Sen, Amartya (eds.), The Political Economy of Hunger: Famine prevention Oxford University Press US, pp. 32–33. Dutt, R. C. 1902, 1904, 2001. The Economic History of India Under Early British Rule. From the Rise of the British Power in 1757 to the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 . London: Routledge. Durbin, James. 1954. “Errors in Variables”. Revue de l’Institut International de Statistique / Review of the International Statistical Institute , 22(1) pp. 23-32. Ewbank, R. B. 1919. “The Co-Operative Movement and the Present Famine in the Bombay Presidency.” Indian Journal of Economics 2 (November): 477–88. FAOSTAT. 2018. FAOSTAT Data. Faostat.fao.org, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Fieldhouse, David. 1996. “For Richer, for Poorer?”, in Marshall, P. J. (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 400, pp. 108–146. Goldberger, Arthur S. 1964. “Classical Linear Regression”. Econometric Theory . New York: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 164-194. Gooch, Elizabeth. 2017. “Estimating the Long-Term Impact of the Great Chinese Famine (1959-61) on Modern China.” World Development 89 (January): 140–51. Gualtieri, Giovanni, Marcella Nicolini, and Fabio Sabatini. 2019. “Repeated Shocks and Preferences for Redistribution.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 167(11): 53–71. Henderson, J. Vernon, Adam Storeygard, and David Weil. 2011. “A Bright Idea for Measuring Economic Growth.” American Economic Review. Hochrainer, S. 2009. “Assessing the Macroeconomic Impacts of Natural Disasters: Are there Any?” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4968. Washington, DC, United States: The World Bank. Holden, Stein T. and Hosaena Ghebru. 2016. “Land tenure reforms, tenure security and food security in poor agrarian economies: Causal linkages and research gaps.” Global Food Security 10: 21-28. Hoyle, R. W. 2010. “Famine as Agricultural Catastrophe: The Crisis of 1622-4 in East Lancashire.” Economic History Review 63 (4): 974–1002. Hu, Xue Feng, Gordon G. Liu, and Maoyong Fan. 2017. “Long-Term Effects of Famine on Chronic Diseases: Evidence from China’s Great Leap Forward Famine .” Health Economics 26 (7): 922–36. Huff, Gregg. 2019. “Causes and Consequences of the Great Vietnam Famine, 1944-5.” Economic History Review 72 (1): 286–316. Lima, Ricardo Carvalho de Andrade, and Antonio Vinicius Barros Barbosa. 2019. “Natural Disasters, Economic Growth and Spatial Spillovers: Evidence from a Flash Flood in Brazil.” Papers in Regional Science 98 (2): 905–24. Maxwell, Daniel, and Keith Daniel Wiebe. 1998. Land tenure and food security: A review of concepts, evidence, and methods . Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998. McKean, Joseph W. 2004. “Robust Analysis of Linear Models”. Statistical Science 19(4): 562–570. Nguyen, Linh, and John O. S. Wilson. 2020. “How Does Credit Supply React to a Natural Disaster? Evidence from the Indian Ocean Tsunami.” European Journal of Finance 26 (7–8): 802–19. Pinkovsky, Maxim L. and Xavier Sala-i-Martin. 2016. “Lights, Camera, ... In- come! Illuminating the National Accounts-Household Surveys Debate,” Quarterly Journal of Economics , 131(2): 579- 631. Li, Q. and J.S. Racine. 2004. “Cross-validated local linear nonparametric regression,” Statistica Sinica 14: 485-512. Riggs, D. S.; Guarnieri, J. A.; et al. (1978). “Fitting straight lines when both variables are subject to error.” Life Sciences . 22 : 1305–60. Romer, P. M. 1994. “The Origins of Endogenous Growth”. The Journal of Economic Perspectives . 8 (1): 3–22. Roy, Tirthankar. 2006. The Economic History of India, 1857–1947 . Oxford U India. Print. Ruppert, David, Wand, M.P. and Carroll, R.J. 2003. Semiparametric Regression . Cambridge University Press. Print. Salibian-Barrera, M. and Yohai, V.J. .2006. A fast algorithm for S-regression esti- mates, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 15(2): 414-427. Scholberg, Henry. 1970. The district gazetteers of British India: A bibliography. University of California, Bibliotheca Asiatica 3(4). Sharma, Ghanshyam, and Kurt W. Rotthoff. 2020. “The Impact of Unexpected Natural Disasters on Insurance Markets.” Applied Economics Letters 27(6): 494–97. Solow, Robert M. 1957. “Technical change and the aggregate production function.” Review of Economics and Statistics. 39 (3): 312–320. Srivastava, H.C. 1968. The History of Indian Famines from 1858–1918 , Sri Ram Mehra and Co., Agra. Print. Staiger, Douglas, and James H. Stock. 1997. “Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments.” Econometrica 65(3): 557-586. Thompson, Kristina, Maarten Lindeboom, and France Portrait. 2019. “Adult Body Height as a Mediator between Early-Life Conditions and Socio-Economic Status: The Case of the Dutch Potato Famine, 1846-1847.” Economics and Human Biology 34 (August): 103–14. Varghese, Ajay. 2019. “Colonialism, Landlords, and Public Goods Provision in India: A Controlled Comparative Analysis”. The Journal of Development Studies , 55(7), pp. 1345-1363. Wang, Chunhua. 2019. “Did Natural Disasters Affect Population Density Growth in US Counties?” Annals of Regional Science 62 (1): 21–46. World Bank. 2011. “India Country Overview.” Worldbank.org Previous Next

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. February 23, 2012. https://www.cnn.com/2012/02/23/world/asia/china-nanjing-row/index.html. Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Bazin, André. What is Cinema. Berkley: University of California Press, 1967. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “The Secret Histories of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful.” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1, 2001: 253-266. Berry, Michael. “Cinematic Representations of the Rape of Nanking.” East Asia 19, no. 4 (2001), 85-108. Brown, Stephanie. “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: 527-537. Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Basic, 1997. Cheng, Qingsong and Huang, Ou. My Camera Doesn’t Lie (in Chinese). Beijing: Zhongguo Youyi, 2002. Choi, Chungmoo. “The Politics of War Memories towards Healing.” In Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), edited by Takashi Fujitani, Lisa Yoneyama and Geoffrey White, 395-410. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Dai, Jinhua. “I Want to Be Human: A Story of China and the Human.” Social Text 29, no. 4 (2011): 129-150. Feng, Zongxin. “Fictional Narrative as History: Reflection and Deflection.” Semiotica 170, no. 1, 2008: 187-199. Fujiwara, Akira. “The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview.” In The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38, edited by Bob Wakabayashi, 29-54. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. Ginzburg, Carlo. “Just One Witness.” In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, edited by Saul Friedlander, 82-96. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Goldberg, Amos. “The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History.” History and Theory 48, no. 3 (Oct 2009): 220-237. He, Xi. “Nanjing! Nanjing!’s Sichuan Connection” (in Chinese). April 24, 2009. http://www.cinema.com.cn/YingYuTianXia/2245.htm. He, Yinan. “History, Chinese Nationalism and the Emerging Sino-Japanese Conflict.” Journal of Contemporary China 16, no. 50 (February 2007): 1-24. He, Yinan. “Remembering and Forgetting the War: Elite Mythmaking, Mass Reaction, and Sino-Japanese Relations, 1950-2006.” History & Memory 19, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 43-74. Honda, Katsuichi. The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. Horeck, Tanya. Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film. New York: Routledge, 2013. Hua, Yu. “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. Huang, Martin. “The Inescapable Predicament: The Narrator and His Discourse in ‘The True Story of Ah Q’.” Modern China 16, no. 4, October 1990: 430-449. Jiang, Wen. Devils on the Doorstep, 2000. Jones, Andrew. “The Violence of the Text: Reading Yu Hua and Shi Zhicun.” Positions 2, Winter 1994: 570-602. Lee, Haiyan. The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Lee, Kevin. “City of Life and Death.” Cineaste 35, no. 2, Spring 2010. https://www.cineaste.com/spring2010/city-of-life-and-death/. Lee, Vivian. “The Chinese War Film: Reframing National History in Transnational Cinema.” In American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows, edited by Lisa Funnell and Man-Fung Yip, 101-115. New York: Routledge, 2014. Li, Jie. “Discolored vestiges of history: Black and white in the age of color cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, no. 3 (2012): 247-262. Li, Yue. “Dancing with the Camera: A Special Interview with Nanjing! Nanjing!’s Cinematographer Cao Yu” (in Chinese). May 11, 2009. http://old.pkuhall.com/WYPPZZ.aspx?id=456. Lu, Chuan. Nanjing! Nanjing!: City of Life and Death, 2009. Lu, Xun. “The True Story of Ah Q.” In Call to Arms, 141-212. Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2010. Mitter, Rana. “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History, and Memory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987-1997,” China Quarterly 161, March 2000: 279-293. Mitter, Rana. “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, edited by Sheila Miyoshi Jager & Rana Mitter, 172-191. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Morgan, Daniel. Forgotten Ally. London: Penguin Books, 2013. Morgan, Daniel. “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics.” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 443-481. Nedostup, Rebecca. “City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing! 2009) and the Silenced Nanjing Native.” In Through a Lens Darkly: Films of Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, edited by John Michalczyk and Raymond Helmick, 62-66. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. Rabe, John. The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe. Translated by John Woods. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Shao, Yan. “In the film we have kept our integrity: Exclusive interview with Lu Chuan” (in Chinese). Dianying shijie, April 2009: 24-29. Silbergeld, Jerome. Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Tam, King-fai, Tsu, Timothy, and Wilson, Sandra, eds. Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War. New York: Routledge, 2015. Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1992. Vautrin, Minnie. Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Voci, Paola. “The Light out of the tunnel: Re-thinking Chinese cinema’s war film realism.” Parol XXVII, no. 25, 2014: 81-101. Wang, David. The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in TwentiethCentury China. Berkley: University of California Press, 2004. Wang, Fanghua. “Devils on the Doorstep’s Black and White Emotions through a Color Filter” (in Chinese). Dianying Pingjie, August 2013. Ward, Julian. “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: 107-118. Weiss, Amanda. “Contested Images of Rape: The Nanjing Massacre in Chinese and Japanese Films.” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 433-456. White, Hayden. “The Modernist Event.” In The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, edited by Vivian Sobchack, 17-38. New York: Routledge, 1996. Wiesel, Elie. “Foreword.” In Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, xi-xii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Xia, Yun. Down with Traitors: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. Xu, Gary. Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Yang, Daqing. “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections on Historical Inquiry.” In The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, edited by Joshua Fogel, Chapter 4. Berkley: University of California Press, 2000. You, Fengwei. From ‘Survival’ to ‘Devils on the Doorstep’ (in Chinese). Beijing: Beijing Publishing House, 1999. You, Fengwei. “Survival.” In Life Channel (in Chinese). Beijing: Renmin Wenxue, 2005. Yu, Tian. “From Red Sorghum to Devils on the Doorstep: Conceptual evolution in Chinese film adaptations,” Postscript 23, no. 3, Summer 2004. Zhang, Keen. “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. Zhu, Yanhong. “A past revisited: Re-presentation of the Nanjing Massacre in City of Life and Death.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, no. 2 (2013): 85-108.

Schedule F And The Future Of Civil Service Protections Sasha Bonkowsky Author Abstract Civil service protections in the United States, such as merit-based hiring, employee tenure, and the dismissal appeal , have come under attack in recent years, most notably from former president Donald Trump’s proposed Schedule F that would strip those protections from many federal employees. Under Schedule F, thousands of federal positions would become political appointees who could be dismissed at-will. This paper examines the history and justifications for exempting positions from traditional civil-service protections, as well as the feasibility for Biden’s Office of Personnel Management to forestall Schedule F. I conclude that Schedule F would likely have negative effects on government performance and morale, but that the OPM may not be able to effectively prevent implementation of Schedule F in the event of Trump’s re-election. Word count: 4,059 Introduction Throughout President Donald Trump’s administration, he frequently attacked the federal bureaucracy for what he saw as its inefficiency or refusal to enact his policies. He was elected on promises of “draining the swamp” in American government; after the 2016 election, he repeatedly attacked a supposed “deep state” of insider operatives within federal agencies and departments who were ideologically opposed to him and used their positions in the bureaucracy, from which it was hard to dismiss them, to hamstring and block his agenda. Where Trump had appointment power, such as with agency heads or other political appointees, he was quick to remove those he saw as disloyal. However, many of his attacks were limited to mere invective. In the vast American civil service comprising more than two million employees, only 4,000 of those are political appointees that the president can remove at will. And in comparison to other democracies like the UK, France, or Japan, which all have similar civil service systems,, the US actually has many more political appointees. The rest are career employees. Career civil servants are usually hired using a merit-based, competitive examination system, in which all prospective employees are given the same exam, and those meeting or exceeding a particular score are hired. Once in the federal bureaucracy—and after a probationary period of several months to a year—employees usually cannot be dismissed unless they are found to be significantly derelict in their duties, and they can appeal a firing to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which can investigate and reinstate an employee if they have been unlawfully dismissed. There are certain exceptions to this process, known as Schedules A through E, but they are only used when the usual processes are deemed “impractical.” In October 2020, Trump signed Executive Order 13957, which would have significantly increased the number of political appointees. It created a new category of positions within the federal bureaucracy—known as Schedule F positions—that would be exempted from regular civil service hiring procedures. Instead of the examination process, the president would be able to handpick employees for positions that fell under Schedule F and dismiss them at will without worrying about an appeal to the MSPB, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in its analysis of the order. President Biden repealed the executive order during his first days in office, writing that it “undermined the foundations of the civil service and its merit system principles.” But such an action is hardly permanent—after all, another future president could easily reissue the executive order. To avoid that, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a proposed rule in late 2023 that would prevent career employees from being excepted under Schedule F or a similar order. The proposed rule also stated that any employee who was reclassified as political appointee would still possess the same protections from being fired and could appeal any dismissal to the MSPB. However, it’s unclear if this proposal will take effect before the 2024 election and a possible transition of power. This paper first examines civil service protections and common exemptions—especially those for current political appointees—in more detail, before turning to the possible effects of Schedule F and attempts to block it. Data from the past 10 years of OPM rulemaking demonstrates that, on average, rules take about a year to be finalized, meaning that if this civil service rule follows the usual timeline, it may be too late to go fully into effect before a Republican president or Republican Congress could repeal it. Civil Service Exceptions The US civil service already allows certain positions to be excepted from the competitive service in five categories: Schedules A, B, C, D, and E. Typically, prospective civil service employees must take a general exam, from which the highest scorers (and those with veteran’s preference) can be selected for hiring. However, this process can be slow, and does not cover specialized knowledge that an agency might require. Positions excepted under one of these schedules can be hired without this usual examination process when it is determined that the exam would make it impractical to recruit adequate numbers of students from qualifying institutions, (under Schedule D), when urgency is required (under Schedule A), or when selecting for particular experience (under Schedule B), among others. Only one schedule deals with political appointments—Schedule C—and it functions most similarly to the proposed Schedule F. Schedule C allows excepted hiring for “positions which are policy-determining or which involve a close and confidential working relationship with the head of an agency or other key appointed officials”. These are often positions like press secretaries for individual bureaus within agencies, White House liaisons, or confidential assistants to secretaries and undersecretaries. There are usually between 1,500 and 1,800 Schedule C appointments at any given time, with 1,725 at the end of the first Bush administration, 1,538 at the end of the Obama administration, and 1,566 at the end of the Trump administration. These political appointments within the civil service didn’t always exist, and like the present-day Schedule F, Schedule C was the subject of significant controversy when it was first carved out in 1956 under the Eisenhower administration. One Democratic senator decried Schedule C as “an attempt to turn the civil service into a Republican grab bag” on the Senate floor, and the Democratic Party platform of 1956 stated that the Eisenhower administration’s policies “reflect prejudices and excessive partisanship to the detriment of employee morale”. The director of the Civil Service Commission defended them in the New York Times , writing that “the American people in 1952 expected your Administration to put into effect your announced policies…it is of the most vital importance that…policy-determining officials should be subject to change with any change in political administration”. Yet despite this public criticism, the Democratic-controlled Congress passed no legislation curtailing or ending Schedule C, and presidents of both parties have made use of Schedule C’s hiring authority. Several restrictions are placed on Schedule C positions and the ways in which they can be assigned. There are no “vacant” Schedule C positions which may be filled at will by the President—instead, any Schedule C positions must be approved by the director of OPM, and OPM’s authorization for those positions is automatically revoked when an employee leaves. Additionally, when requesting Schedule C exception, the head of the requesting agency must submit a statement to OPM that the position was not created in order to detail the employee to the White House—that is, assign them to work in the White House while still being paid by their original agency. This requirement was added after a 1990 GAO report found that Schedule C appointees were being inappropriately detailed to the White House rather than performing the specified duties of their positions. Though Schedule F and Schedule C may appear similar in their creation of low-level, politically appointed positions, the proposed Schedule F category would carve out much broader exceptions to the competitive service. Schedule C restricts its exceptions to appointments of a “confidential or policy-determining” character; Schedule F would allow exceptions to the competitive service for positions of a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy -advocating character.” Policy-making or policy-advocating are much broader terms than merely policy-determining, and their definitions are statutorily vague, meaning they could be applied to a much greater number of employees. The executive order drew its legal basis from Section 7511 of Title 5 of the US Code, which excludes employees “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character” from competitive examination procedures and protection from dismissal. Determination of whether an employee’s job fits these requirements are made by the President and required to be authorized by the head of OPM. This exception, however, had never been put into practice before. The effects of Schedule F implementation are unclear. The executive order was issued in late October 2020, directing that agencies should submit a list of positions that would fall under Schedule F and their reasons for selecting those positions within 90 days (on January 19, 2021). Agencies were also directed to submit petitions to the Federal Labor Relations Authority to determine whether excepted positions under Schedule F would also be excluded from collective bargaining authorities. Few agencies—15 in total, out of over 400 federal agencies—submitted information to OPM, many claiming that they needed more time. Of those, just four agencies submitted names and lists of positions for conversion: the International Boundary and Water Commission proposed converting just 5 employees of its 234, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed 579 employees of its 11,000, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed 836 of its 1,166 employees, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed 436 of its 527 employees. One issue is these agencies are not particularly representative of the bureaucracy as a whole—the IBWC and FERC are independent commissions, and OMB is deeply embedded in the White House—and so it remains unclear exactly how many employees would be affected by a future implementation of Schedule F. However, the authors of Schedule F have definite intentions for its use and assumptions of how many employees it might affect. The executive order was largely crafted and written by James Sherk, a member of the Domestic Policy Council focusing on labor policy. In 2017, he submitted a memo entitled “Proposed Labor Reforms,” in which he argued for the possibility that “Article II executive power gives the president inherent authority to dismiss any federal employee. This implies civil service legislation,as well as other protections for federal employees, (such as preventing their dismissal for joining a union) are unconstitutional. If so, the President could issue an Executive Order outlining a streamlined new process for dismissing federal employees”. Three years later, he would see that executive order realized in the creation of Schedule F. At a panel discussion for the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) in 2023, he continued to argue in favor of this proposition, saying that “every federal employee should serve at the pleasure of the president”. Given the limited data submitted by agencies, there’s no set number of employees Schedule F might affect. Experts, and Sherk himself, have estimated around 50,000, although Sherk noted the number as a low estimate., In the same NAPA seminar, he said that “I think there's ways you could broaden the scope of the order…I think you could expand it beyond 50,000. Say to like, 200,000. 300,000.” Former Trump administration officials have reportedly “saved lists of previous appointees…as well as career officers they viewed as uncooperative and would seek to fire based on an executive order to weaken civil service protections”, although such lists have not been made public. But having the ability to fire employees, or doing so, doesn’t necessarily mean the administration would be able to fill the positions. The Trump administration was slower than other administrations to nominate officials to key positions, other civil servants rated Trump appointees as less competent than previous Republican administrations or career civil servants, and the Trump administration faced difficulties finding even officials to fill top-level positions. While the Trump administration was able to authorize and fill about as many Schedule C positions as previous administrations, that doesn’t necessarily mean they would be able to fill Schedule F positions given the vastly larger number of them. Besides the numerical scope of its effects, Schedule F was also defended as necessary to improve the efficiency of the federal bureaucracy. The text of the executive order itself cited “long delays and substandard-quality work for important agency projects” as part of its rationale, and stated “agencies need the flexibility to expeditiously remove poorly performing employees”. Many stakeholders that GAO interviewed acknowledged that the speed of federal hiring should be improved, and that Schedule F would streamline that process; one also told GAO that “employees in Schedule F positions should be…more motivated to quickly and effectively implement the President’s policy agenda”. Criticism of a slow-moving and unresponsive bureaucracy, in which onerous hiring procedures and strict removal protections hamstring the agencies themselves, has been long-standing. Presidents and agencies alike have bipartisanly seen problems in the hiring process and sought to reform it: the US National Performance Review in 1993 wrote that “hiring is complex and rule-bound” in the civil service; a Bush-era report from the Merit Systems Protection Board wrote in favor of reform that would “provide agencies the flexibilities they need to effectively manage” and recommended that OPM should “speed the process” of federal hiring; and the Obama administration in turn issued guidance on simplifying and overhauling the civil service hiring process. The picture is little better in terms of firing underperforming employees: it’s long been understood that civil protections reduce the power of incentives, such that employees in government see little connection between performance and job security. But Schedule F seems unlikely to accomplish these reforms in a way that benefits government performance. Several of the stakeholders which GAO spoke to said that Schedule F could make recruitment of federal employees more difficult, as potential applicants might be leery of taking a Schedule F position if they believed they could be removed after a change in administration or for other political reasons. This is in line with the theory advanced by Gailmard and Patty, which states that civil servants are incentivized to build expertise when tenure provides them the stability to make such an investment. David Lewis writes in his book The Politics of Presidential Appointments, drawing on the example of the OPM in the 1980s and 1990s, that, while “politicization helped change policy,” it came at the expense of “long-term agency capacity and reputation…experienced career professionals left the agency and it was hard to replace them [or] recruit bright young people to work in the agency.” New meta-analysis of the meritocratic civil services on government performances found that associated practices such as tenure or merit-based hiring are broadly associated with stronger government performance and lower corruption. With an eye towards a potential future reissuing of the executive order, authors conclude that “converting career employees to Schedule F and removing their civil service protections is likely to degrade government performance”. Rulemaking To Prevent the Reinstatement of Schedule F The Biden administration and Democrats more broadly share similar concerns about Schedule F’s potential impact on the federal government were it to be reinstated by Trump or another future administration. Congressional Democrats have attempted multiple times to pass bills which would prevent Schedule F’s reinstatement or add amendments blocking Schedule F to must-pass defense appropriation bills. However, their efforts have been blocked by Republicans. Bypassing the legislative method, Biden’s OPM released on September 18, 2023, a proposed rule entitled “Upholding Civil Service Protections and Merit Systems Principles,” aimed as a regulatory method to prevent future administrations from reissuing Schedule F. The rule would: allow employees moved from the competitive service to the excepted service to retain their civil service protections unless the employee voluntarily relinquishes them. redefine “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating”—the language which Sherk and the Trump White House relied on to craft the executive order—to mean only non-career, political appointees. allow employees moved from the competitive service to the excepted service to appeal the move to the MSPB. This would, in essence, cut out the heart of Schedule F: removing its legal basis and specifying that converted employees retain tenure protections, such that converting their positions to the excepted service does not make them at-will employees. OPM draws its authority to make these changes from Chapter 75 of Title 5 of the United States Code, specifically 5 U.S. Code § 7514 and 5 U.S. Code § 7504, both sections which give OPM broad discretion to regulate civil service protections for federal employees. OPM also asserts its authority based on 5 U.S.C. 1103(a)(5) and 5 U.S.C. 1302 to make specific regulations about the procedures of moving employees between the competitive and excepted service, pointing out that OPM has repeatedly exercised that authority in the past (and indeed, regulated that movement in the implementation of Schedule F). The proposed rule closed its 60-day comment period on November 17, 2023, during which time it received 4,096 comments. With the strong support of the Biden administration and the leadership of OPM behind it, the rule is expected to move forward. However, the proposed rule has been the target of criticism by Republicans and people associated with the Trump 2024 campaign—which gives OPM a potential impending deadline. Almost certainly, if Trump wins the 2024 election and the rule is not finalized by his inauguration, he will direct the OPM to drop it; and even a finalized rule could be subject to overturning by a potential Republican Congress under the Congressional Review Act. The Congressional Review Act (CRA) is a tool that Congress can use to overturn federal regulatory actions, which was enacted as part of the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act in 1996. The CRA requires that agencies submit finalized rules to Congress and the GAO 60 legislative days before they take effect: if Congress passes a resolution of disapproval of the rule within that time period and the President signs it, or if Congress passes such a resolution over a presidential veto, then the rule cannot go into effect. Because of the threat (and exercise) of presidential veto power, rules have been overturned under the CRA only immediately following a change in presidential administration, in 2001, 2017, and 2021. However, the deadline for finalized rules to avoid CRA review by a potentially hostile Congress or President is not just 60 days before a new president could be inaugurated (that is, late November). Congress has 60 legislative days to consider rules—and if Congress adjourns sine die during that period, the 60-day period resets in its entirety beginning on the 15th day of the new legislative session, in what’s known as a “lookback” period. In 2017, that meant that the Republican Congress was able to disapprove of rules finalized as far back as May 2016. Thus, in order to be certain that it will go into effect, OPM must finalize its rule by mid-2024. But the question is if it will be able to do so by then. In the 2023 Fall Unified Agenda, published by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), OPM specified that it is targeting April 2024 for publication of a final rule. Based on historical precedent, this would provide the rule enough time to avoid reconsideration and potential disapproval from the next Congress. But OPM’s projected timeline may be overly optimistic, given its past timelines in publishing final rules. I collected data on finalized OPM rules between 2023 and 2013 in the Federal Register and examined how long it took between publication of the proposed rule and publication of the finalized rule. Since OPM’s proposed rule at hand of upholding civil-service protections has been defined as “significant” under Executive Order 12866 (likely due to its potential to “raise novel legal or policy issues arising out of legal mandates [or] the President’s priorities”), I restricted my search to only those rules which were similarly deemed significant, as they require a full review by OIRA that lengthens the rulemaking process. I also did not include OPM rules that were issued only as interim final rules rather than undergoing a full notice-and-comment period. The full list of all OPM rules meeting these criteria and their timelines can be found in Appendix A. Below are the summarized results: FIGURE 1: OPM RULEMAKING AVERAGE TIMELINE Notes: The timeline of OPM rulemaking is defined as the number of days between OPM’s publication of a proposed rule and the publication of a final rule. Several outlier rules took more than three years to be finalized. Data sourced from the Federal Register, 2013-2023. FIGURE 2. OPM RULEMAKING TIMELINE BY YEAR Notes: OPM published no significant final rules in 2017. Data sourced from the Federal Register 2013-2023. On average, it took 473 days between OPM issuing a proposed rule and OPM issuing a final rule. Even after eliminating the major outlier rule that took nearly 6 years to finalize, the data still suggests that it generally takes over a year to finalize a rule after it is proposed. Though the timeline varies slightly year by year, there is no clear pattern that would allow us to infer that the OPM of 2023-2024 finalizes rules significantly faster or slower than the OPM of, say, 2013-2014. If this timeline holds for OPM’s rule undercutting Schedule F, we can project that OPM will finalize the rule sometime in December 2024—too late to avoid a potential disapproval under the CRA. However, one case study of similar civil-service rulemaking demonstrates that potential CRA review is not the same as certain CRA review. On September 17, 2019, the OPM under Trump issued a proposed rule that would more strictly enforce the probationary period before employees were accepted to a competitive service position and sought to streamline civil service removal procedures. In many ways, this rule was a precursor to Schedule F, drawing on the same language and reasoning about an ineffective federal government that couldn’t remove underperforming employees. The rule was finalized on October 16, 2020, a timeline which would have allowed the 117th Congress under unified Democratic control to review and disapprove it. They didn’t. It’s not entirely clear why not: congressional disapproval of rules cannot be filibustered in the Senate, and 20 days after their proposal can be discharged for a floor vote by a minority of 30 Senators. More likely, the Democratic Congress preferred to let rollback occur through the agency processes: there were only three rule disapprovals in total in 2021 of Trump-era rules, but many more were overturned by agencies’ new leaders. But that process takes time, and so it was only in November 2022 when OPM finalized its rollback, meaning the Trump-era changes were in place for almost two full years of the Biden administration. The OPM’s proposed anti-Schedule F rule would likely follow a similar track. An OPM under Trump would certainly seek to undo it, even if the rule is successfully finalized and put into effect without disapproval—but as in the case above, it would likely take them months or years to do so. A rule undoing this one would also be open to legal challenges that an executive order would not be, and the Trump administration faced significant challenges in successful rulemaking. Previous administrations succeeded in roughly 70% of challenges to agency actions, while the Trump administration had a dismal 23% success rate in legal challenges due to bypassing procedural requirements, providing incomplete analyses of policy effects, or taking action which exceeded an agency’s statutory authority. Conclusion Whether or not OPM manages to finalize its rule and put it into effect successfully, the fight over the structure and protections of the civil service is unlikely to end in 2024 or beyond. In recent years, long-held civil service practices of non-politicization and tenure protections that were largely taken as established have come under increasing attack, largely from Republican officials and presidential candidates. In recent years, it’s the executive branch which has been most involved in determining the structure of federal civil service, from the Schedule F executive order to OPM’s proposed rulemaking, and attempts for similar legislation have been blocked or stalled out before making major progress, and research has largely focused on the president’s and agencies’ influence. But Congress has historically been the instrument of major changes to the civil service, from the Pendleton Act to the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978—and it’s only recently that Congress has ceded that power to the executive. While research such as this examining the direction, scope, and timing of executive influence over civil service is certainly beneficial given the political context, one potential direction for further research could be an examination of Congress’ role in civil service in the past, and what potential legislative actions would be beneficial in future. References “5 U.S. Code § 7504 - Regulations.” LII / Legal Information Institute , https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7504 . Accessed 14 Dec. 2023. “5 U.S. Code § 7511 - Definitions; Application.” LII / Legal Information Institute , https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7511 . Accessed 13 Dec. 2023. “5 U.S. Code § 7514 - Regulations.” LII / Legal Information Institute , https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7514 . Accessed 14 Dec. 2023. “116th Congress Legislative Calendar.” Ballotpedia , https://ballotpedia.org/116th_Congress_legislative_calendar . Accessed 14 Dec. 2023. Arnsdorf, Isaac, et al. “Trump and Allies Plot Revenge, Justice Department Control in a Second Term.” Washington Post , 6 Nov. 2023. www.washingtonpost.com , https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/05/trump-revenge-second-term/ . Bellini, Jason. “Trump’s Tool for Undoing Obama-Era Regulations.” WSJ , 18 Feb. 2017, https://www.wsj.com/video/trumps-tool-for-undoing-obama-era-regulations/DA82F16D-2ED0-47F0-984B-A9A873E2F9A0 . Carey, Maeve P., and Christopher M. Davis. “The Congressional Review Act (CRA): A Brief Overview.” Congressional Research Service , Feb. 2023. Davis Noll, Bethany. ‘Tired of Winning’: Judicial Review of Regulatory Policy in the Trump Era . 4426370, 22 Apr. 2021. Social Science Research Network , https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4426370 . Dawsey, Josh, et al. “In Trump’s Final Days, a 30-Year-Old Aide Purges Officials Seen as Insufficiently Loyal.” Washington Post , 14 Nov. 2020. www.washingtonpost.com , https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-white-house-purge/2020/11/13/2af12c94-25ca-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html . Drezner, Daniel W. “Perspective | How Hard up Is President Trump in Staffing His Administration? Pretty Hard Up!” Washington Post , 19 June 2019. www.washingtonpost.com , https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/19/how-hard-up-is-president-trump-staffing-his-administration-pretty-hard-up/ . “Employment and Trends - September.” U.S. Office of Personnel Management , Sept. 2013, https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/employment-trends-data/2013/september/ . Forum on Schedule F and the Future of the Public Service . Directed by NAPA WASH, 2023. YouTube , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSUY9ito9TM . Friedman, Drew. “Democrats Revive Anti-Schedule F Bill, with a Few Tweaks and a New Name.” Federal News Network , 14 Feb. 2023, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2023/02/democrats-revive-anti-schedule-f-bill-with-a-few-tweaks-and-a-new-name/ . Gailmard, Sean, and John W. Patty. Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch . University of Chicago Press, 2012. GAO. Civil Service: Agency Responses and Perspectives on Former Executive Order to Create a New Schedule F Category of Federal Positions | U.S. GAO . 28 Sept. 2022, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-105504 . Lewis, David E. The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance . Princeton University Press, 2008. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7rnqz . Lewis, David E., and Mark D. Richardson. “The Very Best People: President Trump and the Management of Executive Personnel.” Presidential Studies Quarterly , vol. 51, no. 1, 2021, pp. 51–70. Wiley Online Library , https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12697 . Makita, Jun. “A Study of the Functions of Political Appointees from a Comparative Perspective.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics , vol. 7, no. 1, Mar. 2022, pp. 146–61. SAGE Journals , https://doi.org/10.1177/20578911211036943 . Moynihan, Don. “A Tangible Thing You Can Do Today to Fight Trump’s Takeover of the Federal Government.” Can We Still Govern? , 15 Nov. 2023, https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-tangible-thing-you-can-do-today . Moynihan, Donald P. “Public Management for Populists: Trump’s Schedule F Executive Order and the Future of the Civil Service.” Public Administration Review , vol. 82, no. 1, 2022, pp. 174–78. Wiley Online Library , https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13433 . MSPB. “Reforming Federal Hiring - Beyond Faster and Cheaper.” Office of Policy and Hiring , 2006. OIG. “Evaluation of the Department of State’s Use of Schedule B Hiring Authority.” OIG , 2018. OIRA. “View Rule: Upholding Civil Service Protections and Merit System Principles.” Reginfo.Gov , https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202310&RIN=3206-AO56 . Accessed 14 Dec. 2023. Oliveira, Eloy, et al. “What Does the Evidence Tell Us about Merit Principles and Government Performance?” Public Administration , vol. n/a, no. n/a, June 2023. Wiley Online Library , https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12945 . OPM. “Probation on Initial Appointment to a Competitive Position, Performance-Based Reduction in Grade and Removal Actions and Adverse Actions.” Federal Register , 17 Sept. 2019, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/09/17/2019-19636/probation-on-initial-appointment-to-a-competitive-position-performance-based-reduction-in-grade-and . ---. “Upholding Civil Service Protections and Merit System Principles.” Federal Register , 18 Sept. 2023, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/09/18/2023-19806/upholding-civil-service-protections-and-merit-system-principles . Peters, Gerhard, and John Wooley. “1956 Democratic Party Platform.” The American Presidency Project , https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1956-democratic-party-platform . Accessed 12 Dec. 2023. Rainey, Hal G. “Perceptions of Incentives in Business and Government: Implications for Civil Service Reform.” Public Administration Review , vol. 39, no. 5, 1979, pp. 440–48. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/3109918 . Rein, Lisa, et al. “Trump’s Historic Assault on the Civil Service Was Four Years in the Making.” Washington Post , 24 Oct. 2020. www.washingtonpost.com , https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-federal-civil-service/2020/10/23/02fbf05c-1549-11eb-ba42-ec6a580836ed_story.html . “SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS 1956.” CIA FOIA , 5 May 2010, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp63t00245r000100180018-2 . Swan, Jonathan, et al. “Biden Administration Aims to Trump-Proof the Federal Work Force.” The New York Times , 15 Sept. 2023. NYTimes.com , https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/us/politics/trump-biden-schedule-f.html . Swan, Jonathan, and Maggie Haberman. “Heritage Foundation Makes Plans to Staff Next G.O.P. Administration.” The New York Times , 20 Apr. 2023. NYTimes.com , https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/us/politics/republican-president-2024-heritage-foundation.html . Thompson, James R. “Civil Service Reform Is Dead: Long Live Civil Service Reform.” Public Personnel Management , vol. 50, no. 4, Dec. 2021, pp. 584–609. SAGE Journals , https://doi.org/10.1177/0091026020982026 . Trump, Donald. “Executive Order on Creating Schedule F In The Excepted Service.” The White House , https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-creating-schedule-f-excepted-service/ . Accessed 13 Dec. 2023. Ungar, Bernard L. “Details of Schedule C Employees to the White House.” GAO , 1992. https://www.gao.gov/assets/t-ggd-92-28.pdf United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions (Plum Book), 2016 . U.S. Government Publishing Office, 1 Dec. 2016. DGPO , https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2016 . United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions (Plum Book), 2020 . U.S. Government Publishing Office, 1 Dec. 2020. DGPO , https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2020 . Wagner, Erich. “Schedule F Architects Say the Plan’s Critics Are ‘Hyperbolic.’” Government Executive , 29 June 2023, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2023/06/schedule-f-architects-plans-critics-hyperbolic/388118/ . ---. “Year of the Living Dead: How Schedule F Continued to Threaten to Upend the Civil Service in 2022.” Government Executive , 28 Dec. 2022, https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/12/year-living-dead-how-schedule-f-continued-threaten-upend-civil-service-2020/381257/ . Young, Philip. “Civil Service and Eisenhower Texts.” The New York Times , 1 Oct. 1956, p. 14. Tables Table 1: OPM Significant Rules, 2013-2023 Rule Name Date Finalized Date Proposed Time Passed (Days) Appointment of Current and Former Land Management Employees 12/6/23 5/15/20 1300 Fair Chance to Compete For Jobs 9/1/23 4/27/22 492 Federal Employees' Retirement System; Present Value Conversion Factors for Spouses of Deceased Separated Employees 9/28/23 7/14/23 76 Retirement: Members of Congress and Congressional Employees 5/17/23 11/16/22 182 Access to Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) for Employees of Certain Tribally Controlled Schools 4/13/22 9/3/21 222 Enhancing Stability and Flexibility for the Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program (FLTCIP)-Abbreviated Underwriting, Applications for FLTCIP Coverage, and Technical Corrections 11/16/22 6/3/22 166 Probation on Initial Appointment to a Competitive Position, Performance-Based Reduction in Grade and Removal Actions and Adverse Actions (repeal) 11/10/22 1/4/22 310 Temporary and Term Employment 12/1/22 9/14/20 808 Opportunities To Enroll and Change Enrollment in the FEHB Program During a Lapse in Appropriations; Continuation of Certain Insurance Benefits During a Lapse in Appropriations 4/2/21 7/20/20 256 Promotion and Internal Placement 6/8/21 12/16/19 540 Representative Payees Under the Civil Service Retirement System and Federal Employees' Retirement System 10/8/21 3/8/21 214 Federal Employees Health Benefits Acquisition Regulations: Self Plus One and Contract Matrix Update 3/25/20 4/2/19 358 Federal Employees' Group Life Insurance Program: Clarifying Annual Rates of Pay and Amending the Employment Status of Judges of the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims 9/24/20 6/29/18 818 Probation on Initial Appointment to a Competitive Position, Performance-Based Reduction in Grade and Removal Actions and Adverse Actions 10/16/20 9/17/19 395 Compensatory Time Off for Religious Observances and Other Miscellaneous Changes 4/29/19 8/30/13 2068 Examining System 5/3/19 10/29/18 186 Federal Employees Dental and Vision Insurance Program: Extension of Eligibility to Certain TRICARE-Eligible Individuals; Effective Date of Enrollment 6/7/19 11/19/18 200 Federal Employees' Retirement System; Present Value Conversion Factors for Spouses of Deceased Separated Employees 9/23/19 5/28/19 118 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program Flexibilities 4/27/18 12/19/17 129 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: Removal of Eligible and Ineligible Individuals From Existing Enrollments 1/23/18 12/1/16 418 General Schedule Locality Pay Areas 12/7/18 7/9/18 151 Veterans' Preference 12/7/18 12/27/16 710 Weather and Safety Leave 4/10/18 7/13/17 271 Career and Career-Conditional Employment 12/8/16 1/6/14 1067 Family and Medical Leave Act; Definition of Spouse 4/8/16 6/23/14 655 Access to Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) for Employees of Certain Indian Tribal Employers 12/28/16 8/31/16 119 Special Rights for Transferred Employees Under the Dodd-Frank Act Regarding Federal Employees' Group Life Insurance 9/1/16 1/6/14 969 Personnel Management in Agencies 12/12/16 2/8/16 308 Recruitment, Selection, and Placement (General) and Suitability 12/1/16 5/2/16 213 Designation of National Security Positions in the Competitive Service, and Related Matters 6/5/15 12/4/10 1644 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program Self Plus One Enrollment Type 9/17/15 12/2/14 289 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: Enrollment Options Following the Termination of a Plan or Plan Option 10/8/15 1/7/15 274 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: FEHB Plan Performance Assessment System 6/30/15 12/15/14 197 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program; Subrogation and Reimbursement Recovery 5/21/15 1/7/15 134 Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program Eligibility Changes 10/30/15 11/13/14 351 Managing Senior Executive Performance 9/25/15 12/10/14 289 Solicitation of Federal Civilian and Uniformed Service Personnel for Contributions to Private Voluntary Organizations 10/23/15 8/17/15 67 Collection by Offset From Indebted Government Employees 1/6/14 5/2/11 980 Nondiscrimination Provisions 7/29/14 9/4/13 328 Phased Retirement 8/8/14 6/5/13 429 Electronic Retirement Processing 11/18/13 3/5/13 258 Excepted Service-Appointment of Persons With Intellectual Disabilities, Severe Physical Disabilities, and Psychiatric Disabilities 2/22/13 2/7/12 381 Garnishment of Accounts Containing Federal Benefit Payments 5/29/13 4/19/10 1136 Federal Employees Health Benefits Program: Members of Congress and Congressional Staff 10/2/13 8/8/13 55 Expanding Coverage of Children; Federal Flexible Benefits Plan: Pre-Tax Payment of Health Benefits Premiums: Conforming Amendments 10/30/13 7/20/12 467 General Schedule Locality Pay Areas 1/24/13 11/26/12 59 Programs for Specific Positions and Examinations (Miscellaneous) 12/2/13 9/7/10 1182 AVERAGE: 473 days

Submissions The JPPE accepts written works by undergraduate, graduate, and recent postgraduate students from all over the world. The JPPE looks for pieces that are well-written, original, well-argued, well-researched, and timely. Possible contributions include, but are not limited to, research papers, literature reviews, critical comments, interviews, theses, PhD summaries, and articles written independently or for a class. There is no specified page requirement for any submission. We evaluate every submission entirely on merit. Articles can now be submitted in the link below and will be considered for our review in Spring, 2026. JPPE Spring 2026 Submissions Guidelines All submissions must be in Microsoft Word .doc or .docx format, and must include footnotes and a works cited section in Chicago full note format. Remove your name from your submission document to ensure anonymity. Please see our style guide for more information. Open Access: The Journal is committed to supporting maximum access in order to maintain quality, legitimacy, and open discourse. The entire contents of every issue are permanently and universally available online without subscription or monetary barriers. Copyright: Authors retain copyright over their work published in the Journal. Authors grant the Journal a perpetual but non-exclusive license to publish the official version of scholarly record of their article. After publication, Authors are free to share their articles, or to republish them elsewhere, as long as the original publication in the JPPE is explicitly cited. Selecting Articles By submitting to the Journal, Authors declare that: Their article displays original thought and thinking, clearly distinguishable from ideas and claims developed by others. Their article is not substantively similar to an article previously published, or presently under consideration of publication by another journal. Their article adheres to standards of academic rigor. They have complied with all relevant legal obligations (copyright, sourcing, etc.). The Editors may reject a submission without further justification if any of these declarations is proven false or incomplete. The Journal will take no legal responsibility if the author fails to comply with necessary legal obligations. The Journal undertakes to evaluate submissions on the basis of their academic relevance, coherence, scholarship, significance and without regard to such characteristics of the Author as institution affiliation, nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender, or political views. All submissions go through a rigorous name-blind review and referee process as described below. If the work passes the process and showcases original and creative thinking, the piece will be published. Outline of Review and Publishing Process Submissions reviewed by Editorial Board: Broadly, is this something worth considering? If yes, the piece is distributed to the most relevant section(s). If no, the piece is rejected outright. Submission reviewed (name blind) by multiple student section editors of different sections. Reviewing editor provides a comprehensive referee report. Submissions reviewed (name blind) by faculty expert. Editorial Board reviews reports and makes final decision. In case of acceptance: Editors make clarification and coherence edits, and conduct missing info and fact checks. Copy Editors make final stylistic edits. Editorial Board collectively organizes accepted pieces into a cohesive edition of the journal. If there are pieces that are accepted but cannot fit in the current edition, they should be postponed to the next available spot in a future edition. Final decisions of acceptance, rejection, or request for revision are made by the Editorial Board. Open Submissions Form Submissions can be submitted at any time for future issues here.

Vermont Act 46 Implications for School Choice Quinn Bornstein Brown University Author Danai Benopoulou Mike Danello Phillip Squires Editors Fall 2018 This paper analyzes Vermont Act 46, an education policy passed by the state legislature in 2015 that seeks to reduce rising public education costs by consolidating the state’s many small, rural school districts into larger unified districts Introduction Vermont is the second-smallest state in the United States, with a 2014 population of around 626,500. Compared to the country as a whole, Vermont has a smaller percentage of residents under the age of 18: 19.4% compared to the 23.1% nationwide average (US Census Bureau, 2014). Even though this number might appear to be trivial, the difference illustrates a dire issue that the state is facing. The number of children in the state’s K-12 public school system has declined from 103,000 students in 1997 to 78,300 in 2015 without a significant reduction in school sites or personnel. This, in turn, has led to a sharp increase in education spending. Since 2009, Vermont’s per-pupil expenditure has been among the highest nationwide.[1] The budgetary expansion is exacerbated by the changing demographics of students who are enrolled in the school system, including a 47% increase in the number of students who qualify for free and reduced lunches through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.[2] A heavy burden of this spending increase is placed on residents’ income taxes. Vermont’s school-aged population decline and the accompanying spending hikes are not expected to improve in the coming years. Therefore, state lawmakers have been searching for a way to provide the best opportunities to students while simultaneously decreasing the educational budget. A possible policy solution is Vermont Act 46, which was signed into law in June 2015 by former Governor Peter Shumlin. The act provides three school district consolidation styles and offers tax incentives to towns that merge to create districts that contain at least 900 students.[3] If successful, the act aims to increase educational opportunities through the curricular and extracurricular programs offered by larger districts, and decrease budgetary inefficiencies caused by Vermont’s underutilized school facilities and personnel. But what will guarantee Act 46’s success in implementation? As written, the law is poised for success in its high-visibility and symbolic appeal to community unity as well as its use of monetary inducements as a policy tool to increase district cooperation. In addition, its mixed top-down and bottom-up structure appeals politically to a wide range of constituencies including conservatives, liberals, the governor, and school board members. However, Act 46’s success is threatened by the controversy surrounding whether districts that merge will have to give up their school choice rights. Leading education policy analyst Rick Hess argues that one of the biggest impediments to policy implementation is political controversy around the topic.[4] School choice is a longstanding attribute of the Vermont public education system. Because of the state’s mainly rural population, 82 out of 97 school districts do not have the capacity to operate their own high school.[5] Thus, inhabitants of those districts are free to choose a high school, rather than be assigned one. The ability to attend a school outside of the district is highly valued among Vermont communities as it allows for local control, parental freedom, and increased educational opportunity. Due to the community’s investment in school choice, the implementation of Act 46 will only be successful if it is revised and clarified by the Vermont legislature in order to preserve school choice. Vermont Act 46 Explained Vermont Act 46 operates on two axes: budgetary efficiency and increasing student opportunity. Legislators and the governor believe that both policy issues can be addressed through school district consolidation. Currently, the state contains 13 different types of school district structures. This diversity has resulted in a lack of cohesion and flexibility to share curricular resources, administrative models, and extra-curricular opportunities.[6] Because of Vermont’s low population density—an average of 68 residents per square mile—the smallest Vermont elementary school contains 15 students, and the smallest high school a mere 55.[7] These schools are not anomalies: out of the state’s 300 public schools, 205 enroll fewer than 300 students.[8] On the one hand, small classroom sizes and low student to teacher ratios offer many benefits, such as individualized attention. However, small schools often do not have the ability to offer a diverse range of educational opportunities and have higher per-pupil costs than larger schools. Research on economies of scale by Bruce Baker of Rutgers University and Wendy Geller of the Vermont State Agency of Education finds that nationwide, “district-level per pupil costs tend to level off as district enrollments approach 2000 pupils.” This means that moderately sized districts, those enrolling 2,000-4,000 students, can have an efficient per-pupil expenditure without sacrificing individualized teaching practices that result in optimal student performance. However, only four out of the 97 Vermont districts contain over 2,000 students.[9] To feasibly balance the optimal district population (according to national literature) with Vermont’s rural demographics, legislators compromised and decided on 900 students as the optimal district size under Act 46. On the side of economic efficiency, Act 46 seeks to rein in educational spending by setting allowable spending increases per district; citizens are taxed doubly for every dollar amount exceeding this limit. This sanction is balanced by the positive tax incentives to induce districts to consolidate. Act 46 outlines three paths to consolidation with varying deadlines, with the inducements being higher the sooner a district consolidates. Districts who follow the first path and merge by the 2017 deadline receive a 10-cent tax break per $100 of residential property within the district. This amount decreases by two cents annually over the next five years, greatly incentivizing districts to merge before 2022.[10] Inducements are a powerful policy tool for implementing rapid change, for districts will want to maximize their tax break potential. This method operates under the assumption that monetary measures are the best way to prompt change.[11] Since the main goal of Act 46 is to counter the heavy spending pressures that districts face, the use of inducements is well founded. Districts will be fiscally motivated to consolidate as they face the opportunity to save money in the short term while implementing a policy that will also help them save money in the long run. However, this policy tool presents a controversy because the allowable spending increases, tax benefits, and sanctions are top-down inducements. Stowe Representative Heidi Scheuermann, who staunchly opposes Act 46, argues that the law erodes the traditional power of local policymakers and school board members, impeding their ability to monitor their districts’ educational budgets. She states that the consolidation of budgetary power in the hands of legislators in the state’s capital moves the schooling system further away from providing for the diverse needs of individual students in Vermont’s varied districts.[12] It is natural for Scheuermann, as a Republican member of the state legislature, to be wary of increased state power over traditionally local matters. However, Act 46 is “designed to encourage and support local decisions and actions.”[13] The legislation balances the top-down economic inducements by providing district autonomy over which of the three phases of consolidation to enact. It also allows the districts autonomy on how to undergo the actual restructuring process. Furthermore, consolidation is neither mandated nor does the Act require districts to have over 900 students. The language merely states that the “state’s educational goals are best served” by this number.[14] The top-down voluntary size standards and fiscal inducements coupled with the bottom-up local control on how to meet these standards is reminiscent of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This 2001 policy operated on a “horse-trade” structure of a federal call for state authority on setting certain standards and designing teaching and testing practices to meet them.[15] Act 46 follows this federalism-preserving structure, but differs from NCLB in its focus on restructuring as the key to educational reform, instead of altering student and teacher standards. The restructuring movement, which emphasizes individual school-level administrative practices such as site-based-management (SBM), is popular with local school administrators and school board members, for it returns power to the local level. Often, school board members are proponents of the status quo in education policy; that is, they want to maintain the current policy monopoly that the majority of school districts nationwide have their budgets and administrative processes decided by a democratically elected school board.[16] School redistricting clearly differs from Vermont’s status quo, and the decreased number of districts will result in fewer school board positions and therefore a lower number of Vermonters who will have control over the educational system. However, because of the bottom-up autonomy that districts retain under Act 46, the Vermont School Board Association director, Nicole Mace, supports the law.[17] On the other hand, the Act’s top-down aspects appeal to powerful individuals in Montpelier, the state’s capital, who benefit from the increased state control. These individuals, such as Jeff Francis, who is the head of the Vermont Superintendents’ Association (VSA), are crucial to the law’s implementation. They have access to the media and can thus raise public awareness of the law. They also have leadership roles with state bureaucratic agencies such as the Department of Education and authority over local superintendents.[18] The VSA is also a proponent of Act 46 because superintendents statewide are expected to receive increased public approval for taking initiative in implementing a reform that touts both fiscal responsibility and educational opportunity. However, Act 46 could contribute to what Hess calls “policy churn” due to its support from the VSA. Since superintendents often have short tenures, averaging around three years, the results of the reforms they put in place but are often reaped once they out of office.[19] Even before the first phase of district consolidation goes into effect in 2017, the next governor or legislative body could decide that merging would not solve the state’s education budget concerns. Therefore, to ensure its full implementation over time, it is important that Act 46 is supported by the public, not just the policymakers and bureaucrats. The latter individuals could be more concerned with furthering their own personal political agendas rather than ensuring student welfare. The law is successful at garnering bipartisan support among Vermont voters and taxpayers. Although conservatives like Rep. Scheuermann are concerned with the increase in state power that comes with implementation, others would support the law’s primary aim of fiscal responsibility. On the other side of the aisle, liberals would tout the possibilities for increased student opportunity that comes with redistricting, especially for those on free and reduced lunch who may otherwise not have access to extracurricular enrichment opportunities. In 2015, a student had to turn down the opportunity to attend the University of Vermont under its full-ride Green & Gold merit scholarship because her high school did not offer the curriculum required for her to apply to the university.[20] Under Act 46, larger districts would be able to offer more specialized instruction, such as Advanced Placement, vocational education, and arts courses. This means that all Vermont students would have a more level playing field; achievement will not be limited to those who happen to live in districts with large high schools. Act 46 also succeeds in gaining widespread public support because of what Hess calls high visibility. Community awareness of the law is important because it impacts not just families with school-aged children, but every Vermonter due to the effect that the law has on their property taxes. The act’s high profile on the state agenda is evident in the community forums that supervisory unions have held across the state in the past year to explain the law’s contents. St. Johnsbury Academy, a high school in Caledonia County that serves students from more than 14 local districts, explained to taxpayers, through its community forum, that the school’s allowable tuition increase would be 1.95% (which is the average of all the sending towns’).[21] These opportunities for resident input and learning are important to foster support for a complicated economic bill that could have appeared to be the product of disassociated Montpelier politicians. Hess explains that another aspect of increasing visibility is symbolism: this new law gives the impression of grand change.[22] Even if residents do not fully understand the intricacies of the three phases of consolidation or the economic inducements, they can support the act’s ideals of opportunity, equality, local authority, fiscal responsibility, and unity despite geographic isolation. The Issue of School Choice Despite the law’s many benefits, one deeply-rooted Vermont ideal does not have a place in Act 46: school choice. In other areas, Act 46 is poised for success in implementation: it addresses an important fiscal issue, utilizes inducements as a policy tool, provides opportunities for student achievement, garners wide-ranging bipartisan support, and is highly visible. Yet Hess argues that successfully implemented policies should not only have high visibility, but also low controversy.[23] Granted, there is some disagreement as to Act 46’s success in the aforementioned areas. The conservative interest group Campaign for Vermont argues that the tax write-offs for residents in districts that merge will actually lead to higher educational spending, not lower.[24] Conservatives like Rep. Scheuermann are also concerned with the possible erosion of local control. However, the larger danger of losing local control does not come from Montpelier’s top-down mandates and inducements. The major source of controversy is the legislation’s unclear language about whether former choice towns that merge with non-choice towns will still provide tuition to allow families to send their children to schools outside the new district. Act 46, as currently written, states it will not change the way a district pays students’ tuition.[25] Many legislators and schools, such as St. Johnsbury Academy, interpreted this to mean that choice is only given up if the school board of a sending town chooses to mandate that all their resident students attend the new district schools.[26] However, the State Board of Education ruled that school choice towns cannot maintain their choice if they merge with a district with schools that offer those grades.[27] Therefore, there is a vast gulf between how the law was written and envisioned, and how it would be implemented. Act 46’s chances of success are greatly reduced if school choice is not maintained and the Vermont state legislature does not revise and clarify the law’s language to overturn the State Board of Education’s ruling. The preservation of this 140-year-old Vermont educational practice is essential because of its bipartisan support, symbolism, and educational opportunity. Vermont’s school choice system is designed so that school boards in towns that do not offer all K-12 grade levels must pay tuition for students to attend a public or approved secular, independent school outside of the town or district for those absent grades. It could be the case that a town has such a designated “sending school,” but a child is better served by attending a different school, for geographic or curricular reasons. In this situation, the parents can petition the school board to have the child’s tuition follow them to the other school.[28] This flexibility for students to move across districts is important because many schools are too small to offer a wide range of Advanced Placement or language courses.[29] Furthermore, Vermont is practically exempt from the provision of the federal No Child Left Behind act, that allows students to attend another school in the same district if their designated school does not meet the standards of adequate yearly progress toward excellence for two years. There are very few school districts in Vermont containing more than one school offering the same grade levels.[30] Without school choice, parents would have to change their place of residence to save their child from attending a failing school, putting families in a difficult situation. Choice also promotes community control; school boards are in charge of allotting tuition to the various sending schools and deciding if a town has a designated high school. Finally, choice connotes freedom and individualism; this symbolism appeals to both conservatives who value local government and family values, and liberals who want to provide equal opportunities. During the 2016 gubernatorial race, in the first debate between Republican Phil Scott and Democrat Sue Minter, both candidates expressed support for school choice, despite their differing views on Act 46 and the necessary steps needed to enhance the state’s public education system. Minter stood by the existing school choice system, but would counter its expansion. Scott, on the other hand, promised to expand school choice and lamented the fact that Act 46 curtailed a key Vermont value.[31] In the first year of implementation, residents of 55 school districts voted on merging into larger districts. The results varied, with several districts on the western side of the state in Chittenden County touting successful merger votes. John Castle, superintendent of the North Country Supervisory Union, explained that this success, which came from the most densely populated section of Vermont, is due to its “different ethos and cultural disparities” compared to other, rural areas of the state. He cites a fear among residents of rural districts like Orleans Central and Franklin Northeast, a particularly isolated district along the Canadian border, that a merger will bring with it a sense of loss of community identity and history.[32] Three districts have defeated the proposal entirely. However, the majority of districts remain at an irresolute intermediary stage, while merger study and exploratory committees try to decide how best to balance the needs of taxpayers and students with the district’s budget.[33] The unification study committee report for the Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union, a district that ultimately failed to pass the Act, outlines the changes to school choice that the merger would entail. Students from the three districts who are currently enrolled in grades 9-12 for the 2016-17 school year would be “grandfathered”: their tuition dollars would follow them and allow them the choice to attend their current school, even if it is out of district. However, successful passage of Act 46 would bring an end to choice at the close of the 2019-20 school year.[34] Including those in Franklin Northeast, four out of fifteen towns that have rejected merger proposals offer school choice.[35] Members of the State GOP, led by House Minority Leader Don Turner, have called for a reconsideration of the bill to permit “communities the ability to keep their school choice and still merge with non-school choice towns.” While this would be the best solution for constituent support and educational opportunity, not all actors find this feasible. Nicole Mace of the Vermont School Boards Association and Jess Francis of the Vermont Superintendents Association argue that the state will face an added cost by providing tuition for choice while also operating all K-12 grade levels within the same district.[36] They believe this will exacerbate the problems of the high education budget that Act 46 seeks to repair. Apart from the argument to not amend Act 46 as currently written, skeptics could also look to test scores to argue in favor of rescinding the law entirely. Vermont’s scores on the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test continue to rank among those of the top 10 states in the country. The only state higher in 4th grade reading is Massachusetts (with no state topping Vermont in 8th grade reading) and the achievement gap between students on Free and Reduced Lunch and those who are not is much lower in Vermont than the national average.[37] One of the main goals of Act 46 is to enhance student achievement. However, students are already successful. So, why change the system? However, school district consolidation under Act 46 is concerned with a different kind of success - not the kind that can be measured through standardized test scores. The law allows for districts to provide extra-curricular and advanced curricular opportunities—the arts, sports, foreign language, Advanced Placement courses—to isolated, rural students who may not otherwise have access to academic enrichment. While Act 46 is an economic policy and its main goal is to rein in the education budget, lawmakers and constituents must not forget that the primary aim of any policy affecting schoolchildren and their families is to provide students with the best educational experiences and opportunities for success. School choice is an essential component of widening rural children’s academic and social experiences. Milton Friedman writes that school choice promotes a “healthy intermingling” of students from varied racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.[38] At St. Johnsbury Academy, students from the more than 14 sending districts in Vermont and New Hampshire[39] attend classes with hundreds of domestic and international boarding students. If Act 46 were to discontinue school choice, local students from one town could be arbitrarily designated to attend an inferior or less diverse secondary school, merely because of the way the redistricting lines were drawn. While the Vermonters arguing for school choice are mainly fueled by tradition and desire for educational opportunity, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos supports school choice as a way to limit federal involvement in education.[40] The Trump administration’s position on school choice differs from that of the Obama and Bush administrations. The former sees it as a way to flee struggling public schools while the latter focus on increasing accountability and raising test scores for public schools. This past concentration on improving public schools is logical—even though 37% of students in 2012 had school choice available to them, the vast majority of parents (77%) reported that the public school assigned to their neighborhood or school district was their first choice of school.[41] Despite the fact that the majority of Americans favor their local public school, Vermont’s low population density, history of school choice and disparity in classes and programs offered, places the state in a very different position. This highlights the importance of maintaining school choice in Vermont, even if the majority of Americans don’t utilize the option. As the VBSA and VSA debate the fiscal difficulties of the mutual coexistence of choice and district merging, they must remember that the success of Act 46 depends on its low controversy among its constituencies. If parents cannot preserve choice for their children, Act 46 will be nearly impossible to implement statewide. Endnotes [1] Baker, Bruce D. and Wendy I. Geller. 2015. “When is Small Too Small? Efficiency, Equity & the Organization of Vermont Public Schools.” Vermont Agency of Education & Rutgers University. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/EDU-bbaker-vtconsolidation-march2_20152.pdf . [2] St. Johnsbury Academy. 2015. SJA and Act 46. Retrieved from http://www.stjacademy.org/page.cfm?p=238&newsid=2773&ncat=11,10,9,4,7,12 [3] Vermont Agency of Education. 2015a. Act 46 of 2015 Fact Sheet. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/edu-act46-fact-sheet.pdf . [4] Hess, Frederick M. 1999. “A Political Explanation of Policy Selection: The Case of Urban School Reform.” Policy Studies Journal, 27 (3), 459-473. [5] Vermont Department of Education. 2013. Town and Unified Union School Districts Tuitioning One or more Grades. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/EDU-Town_and_Unified_School_Districts_Tuitioning_One_or_More_Grades.pdf [6] St. Johnsbury Academy. 2015. SJA and Act 46. Retrieved from http://www.stjacademy.org/page.cfm?p=238&newsid=2773&ncat=11,10,9,4,7,12 [7] United States Census Bureau. 2014. Vermont Quickfacts. Retrieved from http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/50000.html . [8] St. Johnsbury Academy. 2015. SJA and Act 46. Retrieved from http://www.stjacademy.org/page.cfm?p=238&newsid=2773&ncat=11,10,9,4,7,12 [9] Baker, Bruce D. and Wendy I. Geller. 2015. “When is Small Too Small? Efficiency, Equity & the Organization of Vermont Public Schools.” Vermont Agency of Education & Rutgers University. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/EDU-bbaker-vtconsolidation-march2_20152.pdf . [10] Danitz Pache, Tiffany. 2015a. “Campaign for Vermont Calls for Repeal of Act 46.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2015/09/07/campaign-for-vermont-calls-for-repeal-of-act-46/ . [11] McDonnell, Lorraine M., and Richard F. Elmore 1987. Getting the Job Done: Alternative Policy Instruments. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 133-152. [12] Kinzel, Bob and Rick Cengeri. 2015. Getting Act 46 Together. Vermont Edition [Radio Broadcast]. Montpelier, VT: Vermont Public Radio. [13] Vermont Agency of Education. 2015a. Act 46 of 2015 Fact Sheet. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/edu-act46-fact-sheet.pdf . [14] Vermont Agency of Education. 2015b. Clarification on Act 46 Size Requirements. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/edu-act46-size-requirement-clarification.pdf . [15] Fuhrman, Susan H. 2003. Ridings Waves, Trading Horses: The Twenty-Year Effort to Reform Education. In Gordon, David T. & Graham, Patricia A., A Nation Reformed: American Education 20 Years After A Nation at Risk. (pp. 7-22). Cambridge, Ma: Harvard Education Press. [16] Papay, John. 2015. The Role of Research in Educational Politics and Policymaking [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from https://canvas.brown.edu/courses/1018282/files/folder/Class%2520Slides?preview=53833383 . [17] Danitz Pache, Tiffany 2015b. “State GOP Leaders Call for Clarification of Act 46 Impact on Private Schools.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2015/10/26/state-gop-leaders-call-for-clarification-of-act-46-impact-on-private-schools/ . [18] Danitz Pache, Tiffany. 2015a. “Campaign for Vermont Calls for Repeal of Act 46.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2015/09/07/campaign-for-vermont-calls-for-repeal-of-act-46/ . [19] Hess, Frederick M. 1999. “A Political Explanation of Policy Selection: The Case of Urban School Reform.” Policy Studies Journal, 27 (3), 459-473. [20] Kinzel, Bob and Rick Cengeri. 2015. Getting Act 46 Together. Vermont Edition [Radio Broadcast]. Montpelier, VT: Vermont Public Radio. [21] St. Johnsbury Academy. 2015. SJA and Act 46. Retrieved from http://www.stjacademy.org/page.cfm?p=238&newsid=2773&ncat=11,10,9,4,7,12 [22] Hess, Frederick M. 1999. “A Political Explanation of Policy Selection: The Case of Urban School Reform.” Policy Studies Journal, 27 (3), 459-473. [23] Ibid. [24] Danitz Pache, Tiffany 2015b. “State GOP Leaders Call for Clarification of Act 46 Impact on Private Schools.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2015/10/26/state-gop-leaders-call-for-clarification-of-act-46-impact-on-private-schools/ . [25] Vermont Agency of Education. 2015a. Act 46 of 2015 Fact Sheet. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/edu-act46-fact-sheet.pdf . [26] St. Johnsbury Academy. 2015. SJA and Act 46. Retrieved from http://www.stjacademy.org/page.cfm?p=238&newsid=2773&ncat=11,10,9,4,7,12 [27] Danitz Pache, Tiffany 2015b. “State GOP Leaders Call for Clarification of Act 46 Impact on Private Schools.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2015/10/26/state-gop-leaders-call-for-clarification-of-act-46-impact-on-private-schools/ . [28] School Choice Vermont. 2015. Tuitioning and School Choice, and Access to Independent Schools in VT. The Legal Basics. Retrieved from http://www.schoolchoicevermont.com/choice-in-vt.html . [29] Kinzel, Bob and Rick Cengeri. 2015. Getting Act 46 Together. Vermont Edition [Radio Broadcast]. Montpelier, VT: Vermont Public Radio. [30] School Choice Vermont. 2015. Tuitioning and School Choice, and Access to Independent Schools in VT. The Legal Basics. Retrieved from http://www.schoolchoicevermont.com/choice-in-vt.html . [31] Danitz Pache, Tiffany. 2016a. “In First Debate, Minter, Scott Clash on Act 46 and School Choice.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2016/08/23/in-first-debate-minter-scott-clash-on-act-46-and-school-choice/ . [32] Danitz Pache, Tiffany. 2016b. “Act 46 by the Numbers: Merger Votes are In.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2016/08/14/act-46-by-the-numbers-merger-votes-are-in/ . [33] Vermont School Boards Association. 2016. Act 46 Map. Retrieved from http://www.vtvsba.org/act-46-map . [34] Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union Study Committee. 2016. Study Committee Report Franklin Northeast. Vermont Agency of Education. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/sites/aoe/files/documents/edu-study-committee-report-franklin-northeast.pdf . [35] Danitz Pache, Tiffany. 2016b. “Act 46 by the Numbers: Merger Votes are In.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2016/08/14/act-46-by-the-numbers-merger-votes-are-in/ . [36] Danitz Pache, Tiffany 2015b. “State GOP Leaders Call for Clarification of Act 46 Impact on Private Schools.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2015/10/26/state-gop-leaders-call-for-clarification-of-act-46-impact-on-private-schools/ . [37] Vermont Agency of Education. 2015c. Reading and Math Scores Remain Among Best in the Nation. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/edu-press-release-naep-scores-2015.pdf . [38] Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [39] St. Johnsbury Academy. 2015. SJA and Act 46. Retrieved from http://www.stjacademy.org/page.cfm?p=238&newsid=2773&ncat=11,10,9,4,7,12 [40] Strauss, Valerie. 2017. “What ‘school choice’ means in the era of Trump and DeVos. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/22/what-school-choice-means-in-the-era-of-trump-and-devos/?utm_term=.b998a14bff38 [41] U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2018). Digest of Education Statistics, 2016 (NCES 2017-094), Table 206.40 . Works Cited Baker, Bruce D. and Wendy I. Geller. 2015. “When is Small Too Small? Efficiency, Equity & the Organization of Vermont Public Schools.” Vermont Agency of Education & Rutgers University. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/EDU-bbaker-vtconsolidation-march2_20152.pdf . Danitz Pache, Tiffany. 2015a. “Campaign for Vermont Calls for Repeal of Act 46.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2015/09/07/campaign-for-vermont-calls-for-repeal-of-act-46/ . Danitz Pache, Tiffany 2015b. “State GOP Leaders Call for Clarification of Act 46 Impact on Private Schools.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2015/10/26/state-gop-leaders-call-for-clarification-of-act-46-impact-on-private-schools/ . Danitz Pache, Tiffany. 2016a. “In First Debate, Minter, Scott Clash on Act 46 and School Choice.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2016/08/23/in-first-debate-minter-scott-clash-on-act-46-and-school-choice/ . Danitz Pache, Tiffany. 2016b. “Act 46 by the Numbers: Merger Votes are In.” Vermont Digger. Retrieved from http://vtdigger.org/2016/08/14/act-46-by-the-numbers-merger-votes-are-in/ . Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union Study Committee. 2016. Study Committee Report Franklin Northeast. Vermont Agency of Education. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/sites/aoe/files/documents/edu-study-committee-report-franklin-northeast.pdf . Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hess, Frederick M. 1999. “A Political Explanation of Policy Selection: The Case of Urban School Reform.” Policy Studies Journal, 27 (3), 459-473. Fuhrman, Susan H. 2003. Ridings Waves, Trading Horses: The Twenty-Year Effort to Reform Education. In Gordon, David T. & Graham, Patricia A., A Nation Reformed: American Education 20 Years After A Nation at Risk. (pp. 7-22). Cambridge, Ma: Harvard Education Press. Kinzel, Bob and Rick Cengeri. 2015. Getting Act 46 Together. Vermont Edition [Radio Broadcast]. Montpelier, VT: Vermont Public Radio. McDonnell, Lorraine M., and Richard F. Elmore 1987. Getting the Job Done: Alternative Policy Instruments. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 133-152. Papay, John. 2015. The Role of Research in Educational Politics and Policymaking [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from https://canvas.brown.edu/courses/1018282/files/folder/Class%2520Slides?preview=53833383 . School Choice Vermont. 2015. Tuitioning and School Choice, and Access to Independent Schools in VT. The Legal Basics. Retrieved from http://www.schoolchoicevermont.com/choice-in-vt.html . Strauss, Valerie. 2017. “What ‘school choice’ means in the era of Trump and DeVos. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/22/what-school-choice-means-in-the-era-of-trump-and-devos/?utm_term=.b998a14bff38 . St. Johnsbury Academy. 2015. SJA and Act 46. Retrieved from http://www.stjacademy.org/page.cfm?p=238&newsid=2773&ncat=11,10,9,4,7,12 Vermont Act No. 46: An act relating to making amendments to education funding, education spending, and education governance. Vt. Gen. Assemb. B. 46 (2015). Vermont Agency of Education. 2015a. Act 46 of 2015 Fact Sheet. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/edu-act46-fact-sheet.pdf . Vermont Agency of Education. 2015b. Clarification on Act 46 Size Requirements. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/edu-act46-size-requirement-clarification.pdf . Vermont Agency of Education. 2015c. Reading and Math Scores Remain Among Best in the Nation. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/edu-press-release-naep-scores-2015.pdf . Vermont Department of Education. 2013. Town and Unified Union School Districts Tuitioning One or more Grades. Retrieved from http://education.vermont.gov/documents/EDU-Town_and_Unified_School_Districts_Tuitioning_One_or_More_Grades.pdf . Vermont School Boards Association. 2016. Act 46 Map. Retrieved from http://www.vtvsba.org/act-46-map . United States Census Bureau. 2014. Vermont Quickfacts. Retrieved from http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/50000.html . U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2018). Digest of Education Statistics, 2016 (NCES 2017-094), Table 206.40 .