Author Name < Back The Relationship Between Education and Welfare Dependency Aiden Cliff Abstract Several studies have described the correlation between welfare dependency and factors such as welfare conditionality, gender, and high school or college graduation rates. Using Annual Social and Economics Supplement Data (ASEC) from 2009 through 2019, downloaded from sources such as IPUMS CPS, this paper crafts an OLS regression model to find the relationship that years of completed education have on welfare dependency status. This paper concludes that there is a negative correlation between higher education levels and lower participation in the welfare system, with the completion of one additional year of schooling suggesting a decrease in the probability of needing welfare by 0.1%. While this correlation is small, it is still statistically significant in the linear probability model due to a large sample size (n = 145,431). After adding other explanatory variables, such as measures for race, biological sex, and employment status to control for endogeneity, further regressions confirm that there is still a statistically significant negative relationship between education and welfare dependency. These results suggest that policymakers should focus on educational subsidies over welfare subsidies to increase social mobility. I. Introduction Education is often referred to as an essential mechanism in promoting social mobility (Haveman, 2006). However, the rising costs of education in America have forced many individuals to require more income to pay off student loans. As a result, families who are enrolled in welfare programs are spending a larger portion of their income on student debt, correlated with an increased reliance on such welfare programs and a positive feedback loop that makes it more difficult to climb out of welfare dependency (Johnson, 2019). In addition, most welfare programs have substantial requirements that, rather than helping recipients to get out of poverty, restrain recipients from escaping the welfare system (Rupp et al, 2020). This, and other societal pressures, have forced lots of students to put a pause on their education and work at low-skilled jobs with minimal pay, keeping them reliant on welfare programs (Johnson, 2019). This vicious cycle will only cause more people to remain trapped within welfare programs, preventing them from escaping poverty and improving their livelihoods. Previous studies have shown that education levels are correlated with the probability of a welfare recipient returning to welfare in the future (London, 2008). Other studies have also shown how changes in the welfare system have improved welfare recipients' education qualifications and subsequently their employment opportunities (Hernaes, 2017). London’s (2008) study focused on how attaining a higher educational degree allows welfare recipients to improve their employment opportunities, reduce their welfare dependency, and reduce their overall family poverty levels by 63%. Meanwhile, Hernaes et.al (2017) found that more conditionality in welfare programs helped Norwegian teenagers from welfare-recipient families reduce their reliance on welfare programs; and lower the country’s high school dropout rate by 21%. In addition, Pacheo & Maloney (2003) found that intergenerational welfare participation differs between genders due to family characteristics such as household size and parents’ welfare dependency. As a result, young females tend to have lower educational attainment and are nearly two times as probable of relying on welfare in the future when compared to their male counterparts (Pacheo et al, 2003). Based on the insights offered by the studies above, this paper aims to contribute to this field by investigating the hypothesis that years of schooling completed reducing the probability of receiving welfare in the future. Factors of endogeneity will also be analyzed through the implementation of explanatory variables such as race (Courtney, 1996), sex (Bakas, 2014), number of children (Arulampalam, 2000), marital status (Hoffman, 1997), hours worked (Bick et al, 2018) and employment status (Arranz, 2004) into the regression model. These variables were chosen due to past publications finding possible links between this psychographics and demographics to welfare benefits. Preliminary hypotheses predict that there will be a negative relationship between the education level attained and the probability that an individual will receive future welfare. Using simple and multi-linear OLS regression analysis and the IPUMS-CPS annual data from 2009-2019, it has been observed that individuals with more years of schooling completed are less likely to be on welfare in the future. Data was chosen from this period because the American economy was beginning to recover from the 2008 Financial Crisis during this time. This allows us to observe correlations between education levels attained by individuals and whether they ended up in welfare programs more clearly. This paper will be presented as follows: Section II will cover previous research on how welfare conditionality, gender, and education levels affect welfare dependency. Section III will present information on how this data was obtained and explain the data-cleaning process along with the types of variables used throughout this paper. This section ends with explanations of how the data is verified through the four OLS assumptions. Section IV will cover econometric methodology which includes alternate functional forms explored and additional X-Variables tested through multiple regression along with methodologies we’ve used to control the endogeneity of independent and explanatory variables to ensure the fairness of the regression model. Section V highlights the results, the sample regression line, and statistically significant information regarding the regression analysis. Section VI contains the paper's conclusions where the results are evaluated and put into context within the field. The paper concludes with section VII, the appendix, where all tables, figures, diagrams, and supporting calculations are represented for reference. II. Literature Review The literature works that are presented here serve as important foundations in the field and provide extensive insight into the relationship between welfare dependency and education levels, along with how other variables might affect this relationship. The study conducted by Hernaes et al. (2017) found that the strict welfare conditionality, linking welfare to certain characteristics or traits in Norwegian welfare programs, has reduced welfare dependency while increasing the high school graduation rate among Norwegian welfare recipients. In the process, they used a logarithmic regression model (LRM) and regressed a dependent dummy variable that identifies welfare recipients who are 21 years old onto an independent variable that consists of family characteristics such as parent’s education background and cumulative income, to control for endogeneity. The study resembles this approach because the dependent variable that they’ve used is also a dummy variable that indicates welfare recipients. In addition, the study used other explanatory variables, in particular the recipient’s parental background, to control for the endogeneity of those variables on the probability of returning to welfare. However, Hernaes et al. (2017) emphasizes how family background affects teens’ probability of returning to welfare in the future through explanatory variables that focus on family characteristics. Whereas this study focuses more on how other individual characteristics such as education level, labor condition, and family status of the welfare recipient have affected the welfare recipient’s probability of returning to welfare programs in the future. Notably, a previous study indicated that there is a correlation between welfare recipients who have obtained a higher education degree with reducing their reliance on welfare programs, but only if they receive additional financial aid to support their college expenses. London (2006) uses data such as college attendance, college graduation rate, and personal characteristics, such as extraversion and race demographics, to predict the welfare recipient’s three outcomes: employment, return to aid, and poverty status. By controlling influencing factors that change over time – such as the rate of college enrollment – and making sure all omitted variables, – such as familial culture and personal motivation – are factored into the result, the study employs instrumental variable econometric models to calculate predictions. The study found that “college attendance, more than graduation, is an important predictor of future employment. At the same time, college graduation better predicts the probability of returning to aid or being poor within five years of leaving welfare” (London, 2006, p. 491). Specifically, the study quoted “college graduation rather than enrollment without graduation has an effect on recidivism, and only in the five-year interval” (London, 2006, p. 489). Their findings support this hypothesis that the education level a welfare recipient attains is crucial to the probability of returning to welfare in the future. Despite the similarities in the use of variables to investigate the issue, predicting the probability of return to welfare using college graduation and attendance is only a part of this study’s objectives. The study also conducts an investigation into how college graduation and attendance affect employment opportunities and family poverty levels. Another earlier study showed that genders might have different levels of welfare participation and education attainment. Pacheco & Maloney (2003) learned that females “have an estimated intergenerational correlation coefficient that is more than double that for males.” (Pacheco & Maloney, 2003, p. 371). The study uses simple regression models and inputs such as the number of years in formal education completed by age 21, family background characteristics (parent’s education qualifications and the number of children in the household), and the proportion of years where parents obtain welfare benefits to produce their findings. In addition, Pacheco & Maloney (2003) found that female welfare recipients whose families have a history of welfare dependency tend to remain in welfare programs. The study uses the same regression model to offer insight into how familial and cultural forces affect male and female probabilities of returning to welfare in the future. Nevertheless, Pacheco & Maloney (2003) offered insight into how gender might have altered the relationship between education levels and probability in return to welfare. III. Descriptive Statistics All of the raw data was downloaded directly from the CPS portion of the IPUMS website, which is a reputable federal source for time series and cross-sectional data. Annual Social and Economic Supplement Data (ASEC) from 2009 to 2019 was downloaded. These years were selected to obtain the most up-to-date data while also analyzing enough observations to create the best regression analysis possible. Twenty-one variables were analyzed within these years, the most important of which were EDUC and INCWELFR, the two variables that were altered and then used for the regression analysis. These variables were raw and included nearly 150,000 observations over the 11 years. The data was meticulously cleaned before running any regressions to test the hypothesis. The first variable cleaned was EDUC. The raw EDUC variable could hold any coded value from 1 to 125. These coded values did not reflect the true years of schooling any individual had, so a new variable was created: EDUC_REV, to accurately reflect the true years of schooling each individual has completed. The values for this new variable were generated using the observations for the EDUC variable alongside the specific numeric code utilized by CPS. For example, an individual who has obtained a high school diploma through 12 years of completed education would receive a value of EDUC=73 within the CPS data set. The data was cleaned so this specific value would now be EDUC_REV=12. This cleaning procedure was used for all possible levels of education within the data set. Individuals who were too young to receive any education at all were also removed from the data set (they were identified through EDUC=1 in the original data set). The focus then shifted toward the INCWELFR variable from CPS. This variable measures the dollar value of the income an individual receives from any source of government welfare benefits. In this study, the focus is on the effect that education has on the reception of welfare at all, not the amount of welfare that was received. This means the analysis is valid if an individual receives any form of welfare payments, and not focusing on the actual dollar value of said payments. So, for this reason, another new variable was created: WELFARE. This variable is a dummy variable that gets its values from the information in the INCWLFR variable. If the individual receives no form of welfare they will be assigned INCWLFR=0 in the data set. This same individual would be assigned a value of zero for the newly created variable (WELFARE=0 when INCWLFR=0). However, if an individual receives welfare in any form, regardless of the amount, they will be assigned a value of one for the new variable (WELFARE=1 when INCWLFR>0). Any individual who was not eligible to receive welfare in any form was denoted by INCWELFR=999999. These observations, many of which were individuals under 18, were removed from the data set to generate a less skewed, and more accurate, sample. Additional variables were also analyzed for the multiple regression analysis. These variables tested the effects of not only education, but also employment status, income, hours worked, marital status, gender, and number of children on the reception of welfare. These variables were used to try and control for endogeneity within the model and are further described in Table 1 of the appendix . Before the new variables could be put through a proper regression analysis, the four assumptions of an Ordinary Least Squares Regression Line had to be tested. If all of these assumptions hold true then the estimators of b1 and b2 would be BLUE (Best Linear Unbiased Estimators) and all of the calculations done through STATA would be completely accurate. The first OLS assumption is that the expected error within a sample will be zero. This is noted as E[WELFARE_RES/EDUC_REV]=0 and this does hold true in this sample. The 95% confidence interval for WELFARE_RES does include zero so it is likely that the expected value of the error is zero and therefore the first OLS assumption is met. The second OLS assumption is that the data is homoscedastic. This is noted as Var(WELFARE_RES/EDUC_REV)=Sigma^2. However, since the dependent variable is a dummy variable, this regression takes the form of a linear probability model (LPM). By definition, every linear probability model has heteroscedastic data. Therefore, the second OLS assumption is not met. The third OLS assumption is that the data is free of clustering. This is noted as Cov(WELFARE_RES_i,WELFARE_RES_j)=0, meaning that the value of WELFARE for one value does not directly influence the value of any other observation within the data set. This influence usually occurs when two observations are within the same geographical unit. While there is no way to test if any observations are within the same geographical unit (such as the same household) due to confidentiality, the sample size is large enough and pulls from each region almost equally, so it would be extremely unlikely for any two observations to come from the same household. Therefore, for the sake of the regression, the third OLS assumption will be met. The fourth and final OLS assumption is that Y is normally distributed. This was tested by creating a histogram for WELFARE and seeing if it roughly resembled a bell curve. When this was done, it was obvious that the data was not normal. This is apparent through a multitude of factors but is most clearly shown by the high skewness, a value of over 16. Therefore, it was concluded that welfare was not normally distributed. However, since the sample size consists of 145,431 observations, the central limit theorem (CLT) is met. So, while the fourth OLS assumption failed to be met for this particular regression, it will not have a significant impact on the regression since the sampling distribution for WELFARE will still be normally distributed. In conclusion, the regression met two of the four OLS assumptions. Therefore, while the regression analysis will not be BLUE, it will still be significant since it is free of serious sampling errors. IV. Econometric Methodology While this paper mainly focuses on the linear probability model and the effect that education has on welfare dependency, other functional forms that could better fit the regression analysis were also considered to develop a more thorough analysis. This was done through the experimentation of the functional forms that the independent variable took. While the previous section discussed the linear form of EDUC_REV, exponential and logarithmic forms of this variable were also considered. The independent variable was only altered since the dependent variable is a dummy variable. Altering the value of the variable will not generate any different results since its domain is limited to {0,1}. Other explanatory variables, and the results they produced, are summarized in Table 5 of the appendix. While all of the functional forms tested would have produced statistically significant interpretations that support the hypothesis, although their interpretations would have been different, the original regression was still the most accurate for this particular data set. Other functional forms included EDUC_REV in quadratic, cubic, and log forms. These functional forms are used to emphasize the effects of EDUC_REV in order to match the data points. The original is the most accurate because it has the highest R-Squared value, a measure of how well the data points fit the linear regression line. These R-Squared values can be found in Table 5 but the linear model has the highest value of .0014. Since the linear regression between WELFARE and EDUC_REV has the most accurate regression line relative to the data set, this regression model was the basis from which all conclusions were drawn. Interaction terms were also analyzed by creating the term EDUC_UNEMP which was EDUC_REV multiplied by UNEMPLOYED. By using this interaction term, the possible effect of EDUCATION on WELFARE varying with UNEMPLOYED can be studied. The regression showed that when UNEMPLOYED is 0, the likelihood of WELFARE is constant plus b2. When UNEMPLOYED is 1 then the likelihood of being on WELFARE increases. This means that individuals who are unemployed are more likely to be receiving benefits from welfare. The motive that drives this is individuals who are unemployed do not receive any form of compensation or income outside of their welfare payments. Slope and Intercept dummy variables are additional variables added to this study. In this situation, the intercept dummy variable is UNEMPLOYED. The presence of UNEMPLOYED is represented with a 1 and causes an increase in the intercept, which translates to an increase in the probability of welfare. When describing this relationship on a graph there are two parallel lines and the difference between them is caused by the slope dummy variable. Both lines have the same slope and the probability gap of being on WELFARE remains the same at all levels. This is not the main difference between someone who is unemployed and someone who is employed. This supports the claims made through interaction term analysis in the previous paragraph. However, while the simple regression analysis supports the hypothesis, there could be other confounding variables that underlay such correlation seen between WELFARE and EDUC_REV. If these possible confounding variables are correlated with both WELFARE (controlling for EDUC_REV) and EDUC_REV, then it could make EDUC_REV an endogenous variable, indicating that EDUC_REV does not necessarily cause the decrease in the probability of an individual on welfare. To test this claim, a multiple regression analysis was run, including both EDUC_REV and a variety of other possibly confounding variables, for their possible effects on WELFARE. The results showed that the three variables with the largest effect on WELFARE were BLACK, MALE, and UNEMPLOYED. These are variables created within the data set describing an individual's race, gender, and employment status, respectively. All of these are strong contenders for possible confounding variables and the true reason the regression effect on welfare was observed, and therefore put EDUC_REV at risk of being an endogenous variable (Courtney, 1996; Bakas, 2014; Arranz, 2004). A full list of the additional X-Variables tested along with the multiple regression output can be found in Table 10 . That being said, this is not enough evidence to conclude that education levels are definitely an endogenous variable when describing the probability of receiving welfare. These possible confounding variables could be further analyzed if a more in-depth regression analysis was performed in future studies. V. Results After the data had been completely cleaned and verified for OLS assumptions, the regression of EDUC_REV on WELFARE was run. This regression showed the noncausal effect that years of completed education have on the probability of receiving welfare. If the hypothesis holds true, the Least-Squares Regression Line should have a negative slope, denoting that the more years of education an individual completes, the less likely it is that the individual receives welfare. The output for the regression analysis, as well as the full, scatter plot showing the Least Squares Regression Line for EDUC_REV against WELFARE, can be seen in Table 8 and Table 9 of the appendix. However, these figures can be summarized by the equation for the sample regression: WELFARE_hat = b1 + b2 EDUC_REV t-statistic = -14.27 WELFARE_hat = .015 - .001 EDUC_REV n = 145,431 (SE) (8.08e-4) (5.68e-5) p-value = 0 *** The most important value within the sample regression line for the hypothesis is -.001, or the slope of the regression line denoted as b2. Since b2 is a negative value, there is a negative correlation between the number of years of completed schooling (EDUC_REV) and the reception of welfare (WELFARE). While this value seems too small to have any real effect, it is still statistically significant. This is because the 99% confidence interval for b2 does not include zero because the standard deviation is extremely close to zero based on the large sample size. A hypothesis test at the critical level of .01 was also run to see if the value generated for b2 could be equal to zero. This test gave a critical value for b2 of -14.27 and a probability of B2 being equal to zero of zero. These results lead to the conclusion that it is statistically significant that as EDUC_REV increases, WELFARE decreases within the regression. In conclusion, while increases in education could have a small effect on the probability of relying on welfare, it is still a statistically significant effect. However, this does not prove that increases in education will decrease the probability of relying on welfare since ceteris-paribus does not hold true for this collected data set and a causal relationship is not established. This regression analysis supports the hypothesis that as an individual's education increases, the probability that said individual will rely on welfare as a source of income decreases (since b2 is a statistically significant negative number). By applying these findings, it was determined that as an individual’s years of completed schooling (EDUC_REV) increases by 1 year, the probability that the individual will receive welfare (WELFARE as a dummy variable) decreases by .001 or 0.1%. This is because the slope of the linear regression model, with a dependent dummy variable, is -.001 and the functional form analyzed is a linear probability model. While this relation is not inherently strong, and years of completed schooling do not have a large impact on the probability of receiving welfare, it is still statistically significant. Within the regression, b1 is also statistically significant. The value of b1 in this sample regression line is .015, or an applied .15%. By applying this value to the context of the study, it was found that the probability of an individual receiving welfare given that they have completed zero years of schooling is .15%. This number is positive so it is technically feasible and within the domain of the study. However, it is extremely unlikely that an individual has received zero years of schooling and is also eligible to receive welfare (Stephens, 2014). For this reason, the value of b1 was not a focus within these results. VI. Conclusion As stated above, this study shows a minor, yet the statistically significant, effect of EDUC_REV on WELFARE. These results indicate that there is evidence to support a possible relationship between higher levels of completed education and lower chances of an individual receiving welfare in the future. The thought process behind this regression is that individuals with higher education are more likely to land better jobs and therefore make more money, thus decreasing their need for welfare. While focusing on the simple regression model for the majority of the paper, important results when controlling for endogeneity through a multiple regression model were also found. This multiple regression analysis was performed while controlling for multicollinearity. Since none of these variables share a strong correlation (r > .8) with each other, it is okay to run a regression model with all of these X-Variables. The full correlation results can be seen in Table 11 of the appendix. AIC, BIC/SC, and R_Squared were also analyzed and are summarized in Table 12. Since the multiple regression model has more X-Variables, it has a larger potential to explain any variation in Y and is likely to be a better fit for the data. Even with the introduction of these additional X-Variables, the initial variable tested in the multiple regression analysis, EDUC_REV, was still statistically significant, as seen in Table 10 . Thus, even with controls for endogeneity, there is still a statistically significant negative correlation between the highest level of completed education and the probability of receiving welfare, only strengthening this paper’s claims. In relation to previous studies in part II, this study aligns with London’s (2006) conclusion that welfare recipients who have received a higher education degree have a lower probability of receiving welfare in the future, with the assumption that both genders fit into the conclusion. However, to what extent education attainment is beneficial to both genders and race remains questionable since the data lacked suitable information to investigate how omitted variables might have affected the relationship between the education level attained and the probability of receiving welfare. This paper has also failed to reproduce the findings that Pacheco & Maloney (2003) found. This paper did not control the age and time of welfare received by the recipient, whereas Pacheco & Maloney (2003) did. In addition, Pacheco & Maloney (2003) factors in the background of the welfare recipient’s parents, such as their income received from welfare, educational background, and race. This study, on the other hand, did not factor family characteristics into the regression model. This paper also failed to reproduce the results that Hernaes et. al (2017) produced because the nature of the data is different from Hernaes et. al (2017). First, Hernaes et. al’s (2017) dataset had the location of each welfare recipient’s municipality. The location variable allows Hernaes et. al (2017) to determine whether the welfare recipient was in a municipality that has stricter welfare policies or not. Second, Hernaes et. al (2017) was able to capture each municipality’s level of conditionality through survey responses collected in a report by a research institute. These are some of the features that the data, unfortunately, do not possess. This paper supports the theory that there is a correlation between the highest level of education completed and the probability of receiving welfare. Thus, more educated individuals are less likely to be dependent on welfare. In a broader context, policymakers could use this information to find more effective means for increasing social mobility, rather than investing heavily in welfare payments. Since there is possibly an inverse relationship between education and welfare, the federal government could create a new program to subsidize education rather than simply making payments to disadvantaged citizens. This would provide an economic incentive for individuals who were previously on welfare to attend school, making the entire nation more educated and more productively efficient as a result (Brown et al, 1991). However, while this paper could be used from a policy perspective, there are some drawbacks. The relationship between education and the probability of welfare is not proven to be causal after this analysis. This is because the ceteris-paribus condition does not hold true throughout the data and regression. In addition, this dataset has a limited scope regarding population characteristics. The dataset indicates the highest education level attained by the individual but does not indicate when they achieved that education. For example, some individuals might have dropped out of high school during their youth and returned to complete their high school degree after a long period of time. If that information is also provided in the dataset, that would open new frontiers on how education-level attainment influences the probability of receiving welfare. Before any change is enacted, especially on a governmental level, first proving a causal relationship would be recommended. This paper merely lays the framework for possible studies regarding welfare analysis in the future. This paper did support the hypothesis that as education levels rise, the probability that an individual becomes dependent on welfare decreases. Through the regression analysis, it was determined that there is a small, yet statistically significant, difference that education has on the probability of receiving welfare in the future. This trend could be utilized by policymakers to stimulate education as a means of reducing welfare dependency, creating a population that is not only less dependent on welfare payments, but more educated, and more productive as a result. Note: see "Full Editions," Volume IV Issue I for appendix. VIII. References Arranz, Jose Ma, and Muro, Juan. "Recurrent Unemployment, Welfare Benefits and Heterogeneity." International Review of Applied Economics . 18, no. 4 (2004): 423-41. Arulampalam, W. "Unemployment Persistence." Oxford Economic Papers . 52, no. 1 (2000): 24-50. Bakas, Dimitrios, and Papapetrou, Evangelia. "Unemployment by Gender: Evidence from EU Countries." International Advances in Economic Research. 20, no. 1 (2014): 103-11. Bick, Alexander, Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola, and Lagakos, David. 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The Captain and the Doctor: On the Enchantment of Modern Men George LeMieux Author Alexander Gerasimchuk Fatima Avila Editors Though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This ship is England. Introduction Modern man is lost. He is not home to himself. He lacks the longings that great men once had. While Nietzsche, Rousseau, or Burke might better articulate or explore this problem, I intend to explore how it might be remedied, a possible antidote to our modern poison. From the Western canon, I have identified three such antidotes or rather three figures who might re-enchant the modern man, the man of the democratic age. They are the vanguard of Marx, the conqueror of Nietzsche, and the disciple, which is first constituted Biblically but later in Toqueville among others. I shall conduct this search through the metaphor of a ship’s captain, in this case, Captain Jack Aubrey as depicted in the celebrated series and film Master and Commander , which I will briefly outline. Before that outline is given, I will first justify this metaphor by the virtue of captaincy itself (despite the fact I would shoehorn this favorite film of mine into anything). Then in the aftermath, I will examine these three figures as our “captains.” In this examination, I hope to reveal that modern man may only be enchanted, or at least enchanted to humanity’s benefit, by a disciple. For our captain, only the disciple offers a path that does not self-destruct and looks beyond worldly motivation. A Metaphor Since there is a long and storied history of philosophers making use of the ship and other nautical nomenclature as metaphor for their sophisticated views on man, government, and what other nonsense comes to their minds, I see no reason to deviate from the tradition. For what is better than a ship with captain and crew? She, like her nation, must suffer through trial and tribulation, storm and battle. She must adjust her sails so that she catches the wind but not let loose so much as to rip her masts apart. She must have a rigid hull built to withstand cannon and carronade, but she must also have flexibility, lest the changing temperatures and humidity crack her hull. She must be led by a captain, strong and decisive in his command. Yet he must not be a tyrant. He must court the hearts of his men so that he may win their will. If not, his men will mutiny. The uninspired crew would have no other reason to entertain the otherwise insufferable conditions of life at sea. Indeed, I do think this will be a fitting metaphor. The Captain Captain Jack Aubrey of His Majesty's Royal Navy is a man caught between two worlds, between two times. Behind him is the aristocracy of old: kings, queens, lords, ladies, and government by the few for the many, at least ideally. In front of him stands modernity: merchants, naturalists, revolutions, counter-revolutions, Napoleon, the new world, America, and democracy. Such is the world of Captain Aubrey as depicted in Patrick O'Brian's novel and Peter Weir’s film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Jack is a man of tradition. He respects the Crown. He reads his scripture. He loves his country. Jack’s hero is none other than Duke and Admiral Horatio Nelson, a brave and sturdy man who dies defending his love of king and country. And yet Jack sees his idols, his pillars crumbling. He has witnessed the chaos of the revolutions in France. He holds the Burkean sentiment that it is the modern radicals that “despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; [...] they have wrought underground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have ‘the rights of men.’” It is this modern threat with its rights and revolutionaries that is epitomized by the two foils of the film. The first foil is the Acheron —the ship of the modern age. She is at the forefront of naval technological advancement. Her hull is braced by three layers of live oak and white oak, making her near impenetrable for any ship of her class. She is the largest of any frigate built, able to carry more guns, yet also more aerodynamic, “heavier, but faster spite it” (Weir, Collee). In every way, she outclasses the H.M.S Surprise , Jack’s nimble but aging frigate. And where is the Acheron built? Boston. While Peter Weir had the financial sensibility to make the antagonist of the film French, i.e. Acheron , Patrick O’Brian’s ship was called U.S.S Norfolk . It is with this name that the dichotomy O’Brian intended is much clearer. It is the new world and the old world, His Majesty and Mr. President. And the new world is winning. The second foil is not a figure of oak and iron but of flesh and bone. Doctor Stephen Maturin is the ship’s surgeon and a savant of a surgeon he is. He is also a naturist, collecting, diagraming, and recording the various species he encounters on the ship’s voyages. Upon the ship’s travel to the Galapagos Islands, the parallels to the young Darwin are evident. More important, however, than any of this, he is Jack’s best friend. Despite sharing little common interest, much less a common worldview, Jack confides in Stephen what he confides in no one else. Stephen, in turn, voices his dissent to Jack, when no crew member nor officer would otherwise dare. He is both his greatest ally and greatest challenger. He is the check to Jack’s ambition and the prosecutor of his reason. He is the liberal to Jack’s conservatism. He echoes the voices of democracy, of the social contract, and the danger of tyrants. His respect for Jack comes not from his title or station but from how he leads, how he governs. It is Stephen who most quickly becomes the radical, the revolutionary, when Jack steps out of line. The Jack we see at the film’s beginning is willing to die on the hill of order and naval tradition. He is unable to see anything but the objective of his mission. Stephen and even the other officers are unable to go as far. To Jack’s credit, it is his daring and force of will, despite insurmountable odds, that makes him a great captain. In his pursuit of the Acheron , Jack takes risks that make his moves unpredictable and effective; his crew calls him Lucky Jack for a reason. But those risks do not come without their costs, even if Jack is lucky more often than he is not. Eventually, Jack carelessly pursues the Acheron into a storm and loses a man and a mast in the process. Still, Jack does not turn tail, despite Stephen’s pleas. He refits and refocuses. Only by the film's end does Jack reform and he does so not through reasoning but out of his friendship with Stephen. When Stephen is injured in an accident on board (a marine shoots him while aiming for a bird), Jack sends his ship ashore to one of the Galapagos islands instead of continuing his pursuit, likely to his detriment. This act of compassion, as it turns out, is the saving grace of the Surprise. Not only is the Acheron spotted on the far side of the island, but Stephen inspires Jack on how to capture her. While Jack's act of compassion does not separate him from his ideology, it reveals a complexity in his nature. In not letting his warrior-like nature subjugate the other parts of his conscience, Jack demonstrates his command of self, making him a good captain in more ways than one. His compassion for Stephen, despite their differences, allows him to occupy a middle ground between old and the new, between those of high and low station, between those conservative and radical. Despite their differences, Jack and Stephen end their days together with music, with a duet, playing the cello and violin as the Surprise sails into the sunset. Looking at this time and this day, in this new world, one must wonder if such bonding, such good feeling, such balance between the conservative and the liberal is possible. Every day the position of the radical, of the accelerationist, becomes more compelling even to the conservative. In America, the rigging and line that once held hull and sail together have frayed and torn, not in the harshest winds but in their daily use. The physical lines that once held men together are now virtual, connections in the cloud and the internet. These lines between men were once tangible things; now, there are few of these left. The conservative now must ask himself what he intends to conserve and if he is capable of such conservation. With conservatives far to the right, liberals far to the left, and a confused chasm in between, can those old ropes hold society together any longer? Perhaps, it is time to cut the rope. Perhaps, it is time for both right and left to become radical. Or, perhaps, there is faith to be had in those old ropes. Perhaps, there could be a man to renew their strength, reorganize them, and apply a fresh coat of tar to protect them. Perhaps, there might be a man who could tie new ropes without cutting away the old. Is there such a captain for this ship of modernity? Is there a Jack who can reason with the moderns, take heed of their desires but not be dragged off course? What does such a captain look like? The Captain’s Virtue Before one can talk of any mystical quality a good captain must have, one must first talk about his primary obligation, his duty, his vocation. For if this station is not sound in virtue, the metaphor is not fit for its goal. A captain, such as Jack, is the leader of a warship and of its crew. He would not be a good captain if he could not sail, navigate, or command the ship in battle. He must understand every part of his command and responsibility. It was for such reasons that those men who became captains most often started their time at sea from their early teens as Midshipmen, who were responsible for commanding gun crews of sailors twice their age. It is this good practice, of physical strain and tangible purpose, that makes the vocation virtuous. Virtue is not found in sophistry or the professing of morality but in good works and deeds. Both Rousseau and Marx recognized that the “sensible” men of the world are not the magistrates but the “workers” and the “people.” In this way, the captain is a unique station. It is a position that reaches downward to the grit and servitude that is required but reaches up toward order and inspiration. On one hand, a captain must stand amongst his sailors and with his marines facing the enemy, taking with them every shot fired, equally as likely to be impaled by shrapnel and splinter, equally as likely to take grapeshot from a swivel gun, equally as likely to take a cannonball straight through his gut. On the other hand, a captain must reach upward. He must engage in strategy, diplomacy, and negotiation. He takes his orders from admirals, parliament, and the King. He must, with his officers, stand apart and govern the crew, making sure he does not fraternize with them or become too social. He must whip those who are insubordinate. And it is he who gives the parting sermon after his men die in battle. The captain is both above and below, a man who mediates between king and country, between God and his men. Vanguard For Marx, the nature of our captain is clear. He must be a vanguard, a man who can reach from the high to the low, from bourgeois to proletariat, a man who has the means to lead the proletariat to “acquire political supremacy” and “ constitute itself the nation” (Marx 488). The vanguard can not be of the lower classes as they do not hold the means of production or own sufficient property. The vanguard will not be the bourgeois socialist who wants “all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting from them.” That man would not lead nor fight in the “impending bloody conflicts” that the revolution requires. But the captain might. He, by virtue of his practice, gains access to the epistemic standpoint of the working man. He can call his men into battle because he will be in that battle himself, because he will stand in front, with pistol and cutlass in hand, because he knows their plight and their struggle. Yes, the captain might be the perfect vanguard, if he had the disposition and the courage required to lead the revolution. But no vanguard will heal or reinspire the whole nation. He will take the radicals he agrees with and burn the rest. The ideal vanguard may be the captain, the general, or some other man of higher but not so noble station, that comes down to act on behalf of the proletariat. But the unifying captain is, in the root of his position, opposed to such a severing. More fit, would be the treasonous first officer who leads a mutiny against the captain and the remaining loyal officers. To be a vanguard is to be a “slash and burn” farmer who wreaks devastation on the present vegetation so that the soil may be made fertile again. There will be no healing, under the vanguard. Conqueror Then perhaps the captain, who must fight to re-enchant our new world, must be a conqueror. The conqueror does not require a revolution, or at least not an ideological one, for the conqueror has no need for the traditional radical who operates on moral principles. He is not the vanguard who cries out to the poor that they must liberate themselves. The conqueror only asks for good men, inspired to fight for their home and fatherland, inspired to make something more of what they have been given. The conqueror rises in rank and comes to lead a nation because of his proven success on the battlefield. This captain inspires not because of his pleasant sailing or wise words but because he sinks ships. Nietzsche asks “[m]ust the ancient fire not some day flare up [...] More: must one not desire it with all its might.” Is it not blood that would surely wake the modern man from his slumber, wake the animal instinct inside of him? Perhaps the true conservative can only believe that “antiquity incarnate” arises through a conqueror, a superman, a Napoleon. And yet one must ask of Nietzsche, what is to happen after the conquest? What is to happen after one has conquered all he can or has been defeated? What was Napoleon to do, having failed in Russia? What was Alexander to do when he lay sick and dying in his bed? What is left to hold a nation together when the expansion has stopped and the wars have come to an end? How is a conqueror to at last govern his people? If the measure of man’s vitality is only to be strength and victory, then there will be no man who finds purpose in times of peace. When the soldier again becomes the carpenter after his service is done, he must now aspire to be the superman of carpentry. He must strike down all other table builders and door makers in his path if he is to achieve vitality. He will feel not for his fellow man, now that he does not need him to protect his flank or cover his advance. He will be a frustrated and lonely man, who, in his attempted rationalization to maximize his will and vitality, will frantically look around every corner to become the carpenter of all carpenters, betraying every man who gets in his path. Nietzsche might retort that one should not care for the carpenter, for all carpenters are weak men who failed to rise to a higher station. But if one is to build a society, does one not need the carpenter? Would it not be better to be his friend so that he may more willingly and caringly craft one’s furniture? Perhaps Nietzsche thinks that forcing the carpenter to build a chair would be better to maximize the will than to engage in normal transaction or to politely ask him. Society needs carpenters; a ship needs sailors. Neither will run well if every request is made out of threat or a difference in power. Sure power may be unequally distributed among men, and men will surely wield that power to their advantage, but every interaction need not be a Melian Dialogue . No unification of society, no mending of wounds, could ever take place in such a one-dimensional existence. Even if, for but a fleeting moment, conservative and liberal may be united by the fires of war, such a state is only temporary. While the ancient fires may rise again, they may just as quickly die. For all Napoleon was, how many more revolutions and fragile republics followed? There was no remnant of antiquity to build upon. Instead, it was democratic man who, upon the rubble of Europe, raised his new throne. In his time, Tocqueville correctly surmised that democracy would be here to stay: “I think that in the long run, government by democracy shall increase the real strength of society.” While “slave” in its morality, democracy is dominant in its presence. Its practitioners are no longer just the carpenters or even the priests; they are the captains, the generals, the senators themselves. While European antiquity lay unaware, the strength and size of America, of democratic power, grew. “Something that passed unnoticed a century ago now strikes the attention of all.” Now, antiquity not only lacks the popular momentum to overcome the democratic age, but it lacks the strength. If there is to be a man who rekindles the flame of the West, he will not be a conqueror who slays democratic man. He will be a democratic man himself. And What for God? Purposely absent from the mind of Marx’s vanguard and Nietzsche’s superman is the Kingdom of God. Nietzsche and Marx are the archetypes of, as John Courtney Murray would categorize them, “the postmodern atheist”. The post-moderns not only leave God out of their government, philosophy, and science as the moderns do; they actively strike Him out, act against Him, and demonstrate how He cannot exist. The postmodern is offended that a God could exist and (in Marx’s case) allow for so much scarcity, so much evil, or (in Nietzsche’s case) deprive man of his freedom, the will, that makes man human. God, if he exists, is either a tormenter, imprisoner, or both. Nietzsche further declares that the morality man claims to have derived from God, the morality of the Christian and the Jew is the greatest perversion of the natural order: strength and weakness. Good and evil, concepts of vengeful weaklings, invert the true “morality” by which man once lived and should live again. Of Marx’s and Nietzsche’s cases, Nietzsche’s is the stronger. When one eliminates God from the worldly equation, one must also eliminate the morality that came with Him. Marx may claim scarcity is the great evil, but this concept of evil only comes through sympathy for the suffering of others. What is the evil of inequality or greed or a dominant bourgeois class if there is no concern for fellow man? From where does the humanist goodness, ascribed by Marx to the elimination of suffering, originate? Without an order, ordained above and outside by divine authority, there can be no objective good. No worldly cosmodicy is sufficient to prove an objective good. If one’s ultimate goal is “good” for the nation, one cannot look to Nietzsche for a cure; the concept of good is, in fact, part of the disease. But if one looks to Marx, one cannot find a source of good. Therein, the postmoderns are fruitless. And democratic man seems to agree. The true moral plague is that democratic man is not looking for goodness but instead assumes it. The modern atheist does not kill God but walks away from Him. In His absence, he does not search for truth or morality but merely replicates the idea of good that was passed down to him. He imitates, but his imitations, as they are not rooted in the source, are imperfect: bastardized (Murray and Nietzsche agree). He might even hold some personal religious sentiment but will not act on religious conviction. He does not mix the personal with the external world. He will work, govern, and wage war but will never do so in the name of God. He lives as if God does not exist. This … breed says in effect that, since he cannot know what God is, he will refuse to affirm that God is. But this stupidity, one may well think, surpasses that of the idolater. It is not merely an implicit refusal of God; it is an explicit denial of intelligence. The essence of God does indeed lie beyond the scope of intelligence, but his existence does not. It is this modern man—the man who does not deny God but shoves him aside—that has become commonplace. This modern man feels neither the warm light of heaven nor the scorching hellfire below. He wanders in a cold fog, blind, deaf and dumb. He lingers in the cave only seeing shadows of the truth. Because he does not see the source of the light, he assumes there is no source and does not search for it. It is this modern man who must be re-enchanted. Disciple So how is our captain to deal with the moderns, with the Dr. Maturins that now sail aboard every ship? What is he to do with those who synthesize values of democracy and the equality of man but do not acknowledge the creator who created them equally? Thankfully, the modern agnostic, despite his lack of reason in comparison to the Nietzschean, has not yet thrown off his moral yoke. In some ways, he still feels a connection to the world beyond the material. There are yet some embers left to kindle. There are yet men left to kindle them. There is hardly any human action, however private it may be, which does not result from some very general conception men have of God, of His relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and the duties to their fellows. Nothing can prevent such ideas from being the common spring from which all else originates. If man is to truly be re-enchanted—to be inspired and given lasting direction—he must look to that only thing which is transcendent, that is not merely of time and matter. If there is ever again to be unity amongst men, there must be unity with their creator. There must be disciples to show us the way. When man has been enchanted, even democratic man, it has been with and through religious spirit, fostered by disciples and prophets. These men once walked among us. These were the men in between God and humanity, Heaven and Earth, men who heard His voice and acted on His will. They were Moses and Abraham and David and Paul and Peter. God even revealed Himself to man in mortal form, in and through man’s pain and flesh. And yet, despite all of these, man’s faith remains weak. The disciples' task is never finished. He may never stop, for if he does, man is quick to forget and quick to lose his way. He will lose himself in the desert, and never find the promised land, his true home, his self. The disciple must be an ever-present and ever-constant reminder of God. The captain, disciple in his most righteous form, has some divine spark, some glint in his eye, some Promethean fire in his bosom that animates bravery and fortitude. The captain calls his men to voyage into the unknown, across the far side of the world. He calls his men to fight for a home that long disappeared behind a horizon last seen thousands of miles ago. He brings together those born across the empire, those who share little, and those who resent much. The duty the captain must call his men to cannot be incentivized with the stuff of the earth. He can promise them no amount of riches or glory among men to keep them steadfast. There is something the captain must awaken in his men that moves their spirits, their souls, guiding them toward something not here attainable. Only manna sent down from upon high can quell a spiritual hunger. And so the Captain must be like Moses, the interlocutor between man and God—newly the interlocular between conservative and liberal. He does not make the manna nor the law in the heavens, but he does transmit them. He walks down from Sinai to deliver to those below. He understands the plight of his crew, the doctor, and the common man, but he does not let them build golden calves. He has ambition but he does not raise towers of Babble; he does not push onward without cause. Where have these disciples gone? Where is Moses to be seen? Who upholds the commandments given from on high? Might it not be the lack of disciples but man who is the problem? Have there been one too many golden calves built in town squares, one too many towers of Babylon raised to the mockery of Heaven? Are there enough ears today willing to hear a sermon, enough lips willing to say a prayer? I contend there are. While the world may not be presently enchanted, there have been moments, glimpses, of enchantment. There was Reagan who stood in the way of the communist threat with his quick wit but mild manner. There was Dr. King who appealed to the heavens, preached to the masses, and marched hand in hand with the persecuted. There was Churchill who looked the devil right in the eye and spat back at him. There was Lincoln who looked over a battlefield and made a promise those men would not die in vain. There was Washington who led his soldiers, served his time, and ceded his throne. It was these disciples that reminded man of himself, of his nature, of his longings. They called upon God, evoked a higher duty, and bound men to each other. They knew that “[r]eligion [...] imposes on each man [...] obligations toward mankind, to be performed in common [...] and so draws him away from thinking about himself.” Like a captain, those disciples, who were fit to suffer, suffered in common with their men when they could have stood afar. Dr. King marched with his men, was imprisoned for them, and died for them. Reagan too took a bullet for his nation, although he fortunately survived. Lincoln, in his service and his stress, aged himself twenty years in the span of four and was assassinated shortly thereafter, giving the last full measure of his devotion. Washington lost battles for months on end in the bitter cold until he found success in a Christmas night attack. Oh, the joy nations will feel when leaders acquire such courage again when they call upon the heavens as they did not so long ago. Oh, they will know that feeling that gathered hundreds of thousands on the National Mall, that mustered the men who crossed the Delaware, that had black and white Union soldiers singing “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” as they marched surely to their deaths at Fort Wagner. Only then can man come home to himself. Conclusion Who is our captain to be? What direction would we have him take our ship? Must he not be both a man of the people and a man of the elite, a democratic man who still has a touch, a memory in him, of that antiquity, that nobility, that honor of old? Still, he is not the vanguard of the proletariat, for the vanguard is a mutineer hellbent on revolution, not a captain. Neither is he the conqueror, for the captain must govern his ship beyond the rush of battle. He must lead his crew through those many times at sea which are dull and mundane. He must care for his men beyond their use in warfare. He must be selfless because that is what God calls him to be in times of struggle, a disciple who looks upward before he looks onward. But if those fires are ever to rise again, if the trumpet must once again cry its song of battle, the captain must be ready. He must again be simply a man of his trade, a good seaman and a good officer. He must dexterously maneuver his ship, out-sail, and outsmart his opponents. And when he must call for cannon fire, he must know what to cry to his men. He must have their best, not just for him, but for their God, their nation, and their fellow man. JACK - Want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? CREW- No! JACK- Do you want to call Napoleon your king? CREW- No! JACK- Want your children to sing The Marseillaise? CREW- No! JACK- Mr. Mowett, Mr. Pullings, starboard battery! References Burke, Edmund, et al. Select Works of Edmund Burke: A New Imprint of the Payne Edition. Liberty Fund, 1999. Marx, Karl, et al. The Marx-Engels Reader. Norton, 1978. Murray, John Courtney. “The Problem of God Yesterday and Today.” Georgetown University Library, 1963, library.georgetown.edu/woodstock/murray/1964c. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1989. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Two Discourses and the Social Contract. Translated by John T. Scott, The University of Chicago Press, 2014. Tocqueville, Alexis De, et al. Democracy in America. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Weir, Peter, and John Collee. Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. Twentieth Century Fox, Aug. 2001.

Kyu-hyun Jo Cause, Causation, and Multiplicity: A Critique of E. H. Carr’s “Causation in History” Kyu-hyun Jo Abstract This paper will assess three central components of Edward Carr’s lecture ‘’Causation in History’’ in What is History? First, Carr does not show causation’s real function of distinguishing between various types of history; the kinds of causes a historian employs describes the nature of their historical inquiry. Second, Carr’s notion of “accidental causes” is oxymoronic because accidents are unpredictable for any historical actor. There is no logic to explain why unexpected accidents had to happen for historical actors from their viewpoint. Therefore, its contrast with ‘’rational causes’’ is misleading. Finally, however important causes are in formulating historical interpretations, causes do not determine a historian’s interpretation. 1. An Outline of the Main Arguments The explanation of causes in historical phenomena—explaining how historical events occurred by examining and describing the reasons behind their occurrence—is perhaps the signature hallmark of History as a Social Science. Yet, how does a historian know what a cause is and how should he or she explain the cause? This paper will provide a critique of Edward Carr’s methodology in his lecture “Causation in History,’’ collected in his seminal book, What is History? I will first assess Carr’s discussion of determinism, then discuss his distinction between accidental and rational causes, and finally, analyze how examples function throughout the lecture to highlight his arguments. From such examination, I will emphasize the function of historical causality within Carr’s framing of History as a scientific process. After examining Carr’s logic on historical causality, I will conclude with three main arguments. First, while Carr shows the necessity of causal explanations in historical analyses, he does not crucially show that the real importance of causes in historical explanation lies in their power to determine subdivisions in fields of historical research. Second, Carr’s distinction between “accidental causes’’ and “rational causes’’ is misleading because “accidental causes’’ is an oxymoronic concept. Accidents occur unpredictably and unexpectedly from a historical actor’s perspective, and it is impossible to accurately judge why an accident had to occur, unless a historical actor involved in an accident should miraculously resuscitate to directly inform the historian of the accident’s details. Moreover, if the fundamental purpose of a historical cause is to provide a logical explanation to the occurrence of historical phenomena, Carr, in conceiving “accidental’’ as an opposing concept to “rational,’’ is basically comparing illogical and logical causation in history. However, if “illogical’’ means “that which cannot be explained logically,’’ then it is questionable how an “illogical cause’’ is actually an explanatory cause. It is possible to explain that an accident became an accident, even if it is much harder to determine why an accident exactly occurred. Insofar as there is an explanation, however unsatisfactory the quality of the explanation may be, explaining how an accident came to be called as such, still qualifies as being logical, or having the capability to be explained with reasonable statements. In other words, the contrast between accidental and rational causes in historical explanation is misconstrued because “accidental causes’’ is an oxymoronic concept. Finally, while Carr may be correct in emphasizing the importance of causes in historical interpretation, he is mistaken in assuming that causes alone dictate the structure and content of historical analysis. The search for historical causes is only necessary for the sake of providing diverse angles of historical analyses; historical causes are not so important to exclusively determine and decide the entire content of a historian’s interpretation. It is the historian’s liberty to interpret facts about an event and then determine what the important causes of an event may be, but historical causes alone do not possess the great power to determine the direction of the historian’s interpretation. Rather, it is interdisciplinary historical analysis, which provides a rationale, a justification for why certain causes have better explanatory causes for a certain historical event than others, which ultimately in- forms the direction of a historian’s logic. The art of performing meticulous and exact historical interpretations involves adopting interdisciplinary methods, and only after the invocation of interdisciplinary methods to provide a rationale for establishing a hierarchy between causes can a historian perform interpretations. 2. A Brief Literature Review and the Significance of “Causation in History” A close analysis and an examination of Carr’s conception of causality and his ideas is necessary because there has yet to be a systematic study of Carr’s “Causation in History.” The majority of the secondary literature on What is His- tory? are book reviews that concentrates on commenting on the book’s overall structure and its main argument that History is a dialogue between the past and the present. This literature either mentions Carr’s discussion of historical causality solely in relation to his main argument, or ignores it altogether (1). For example, in the most recent comprehensive discussion of philosophies of History and historiography, the author closely analyzes Robin Collingwood’s emphasis on human ac- tions as the subject of historical inquiry is closely analyzed as a conditional theory for historical causation. Though Carr was a major critic of Collingwood’s views of History in general, neither Carr’s “Causation in History” as an independent work nor What is History? is given sufficient attention (2). Critical studies of Carr’s ideas regarding History have concentrated on his pursuit of objectivity and positivism, or his conceptualization of History as a study of causes. Ann Frazier (1976) argues against an absolute positivist view of History. She asserts that insofar as a historical narrative is a “reconstruction from present experience of what might have happened in the past,” it is impossible to absolutely determine what “actually happened in the past” (3). In other words, Carr’s vision for an objective and a pure History devoted to verifying past events with exactitude is untenable and impossible to realize. Geoffrey Partington (1979) criticized Carr’s “moral positivism and moral futurism” in favor of replacing them with relativism to better account for differences in time and place in which a historical event occurred when making a historical judgment (4). Most recently, Ann Talbot (2009), while comparing Carr’s view of chance and necessity with that of Leon Trotsky, concluded, “History is no longer a study of causality but is determined by the propensities of the historian” (5). In short, the secondary literature has engaged with various aspects of Carr’s view of History and concentrated on how historians write about the past and how recent interpretations of History have abandoned Carr’s concern for causality. However, the secondary literature, in particular Talbot, does not explain why Carr’s search for the role of causality in the writing of History is outdated, missing the central value of “Causality in History” as Carr’s most definitive statement on what History is as a science, for it is in this lecture where a truly scientific and methodical answer to the title of Carr’s book actually appears. A critical examination of Carr’s conception of historical causality is necessary to show why it is outdated or, as I noted earlier, there are three major deficiencies in Carr’s logic about historical causality. In “Causation in History” Carr develops the most methodological and structural argument about the nature of historical causality and criticism against historical determinism, which taken collectively, is actually devoted to explaining why History is a science, rather than explaining causality’s place in History for its own sake. Carr’s views about causality in History are essentially concerned with how causality functions in History to give its scientific character, not whether History’s entire academic identity is simply a study of causation. It is in this particular lecture where Carr’s understanding of History as a science in terms of approaches and methodology is most clearly expressed and where a genuinely structural analysis of History as a science—how historical causation reflects the scientific nature and essence of History—is most lucidly given. In short, this particular lecture deserves a close analysis because it explains why and how History functions as a science: by ordering facts through causality to transform historical fact into historical knowledge. How History becomes under- stood as History to a historian is perhaps the best method to know how history be- comes transformed into professional History. This paper intends to highlight the importance of causation within the question, “What is History?,” later evaluating Carr’s ability to frame historical inquiry as a scientific process through causation and causality. 3. Carr’s Main Ideas on Historical Causality Carr opens his discussion about historical causation with the observation that the historian “commonly assigns several causes to the same event’’ (6). However, the historian is bound by “a professional impulse to reduce it to order, to establish some hierarchy of causes which would fix their relation to one another’’ to decide which cause should be “the ultimate cause, the cause of all causes’’ (7). In other words, Carr believes that a multiplicity of causes serves a secondary function of letting the historian rationally prioritize a single cause that produced an event. From this discussion of the historian’s need to identify an order to historical causes, Carr argues that “historical determinism’’ and “chance in history’’ are “red herrings’’ which obstruct the logical flow of historical causation and proceeds to show how they are not part of a proper historical logic. “Historical determinism’’ is “the belief that everything has a cause or causes, and could not have happened differently unless something in the cause or causes had also been different’’ (8). In other words, “historical determinism’’ assumes that the occurrence of every phenomenon in life is dependent on a single cause unique to that particular phenomenon such that even the slightest alteration in the cause would necessarily produce a different phenomenon. However, Carr sees “historical determinism” as both unsatisfactory and un- realistic because it does not recognize the unpredictable vicissitudes of human behavior and actions According to Carr, the choices people make defy strict classification as either a matter of free will or logical determinism. He believes that various forms of human behavior and actions can arise from both free will and determined causes, arguing that historians are flexible in understanding human actions to arise from both sources (9). From this reasoning, Carr does not entertain the view that historical events occur “inevitably,’’ unless “inevitably’’ is qualified to mean that antecedent causes would have to be different for an event’s outcome to be radically different from what was expected (10). Since Carr is uncomfortable with the notion that historical events occur in a vacuum, it is unsurprising that he also finds explanations relying on “chance’’ or “accidents’’ unsatisfactory. Not only are accidents unexplainable through “historical determinism,’’ but accidents are also causal interruptions to a string of events which a historian wishes to investigate. In other words, the occurrence of an accident is not a license with which a historian can argue that there was no clear cause for an event to occur; an accident is merely an obstacle preventing the historian from focusing on a chain of causality which clearly awaited the historian’s discovery. Of course, Carr is aware that it might be possible for accidents and chance events to happen in history, for such occurrences are not only minor, but are continually compensated by other accidents or chance events, and “chance” might be a “character of individuals’’ (11). In other words, the randomness of accidents is possible because an accident is by nature an unexpected event and the forms in which it may occur are varied and diverse, and may be influenced by the unpredictable variety of personalities of every individual. Yet, Carr finds these apologetic defenses of accidents and chance events unsatisfying because accidents and chance events are often “seriously exaggerated,’’ or perceived to “accelerate or retard’’ historical progress, a sentiment which Carr dismisses as mere “juggling with words’’ (12). Moreover, he thinks that “chance events’’ are “natural occurrences’’ which complement each other is merely an euphemism to claim that there are events in life we cannot comprehend. Carr believes that those who use accidents in their theories have granted themselves the undeserved liberty to excuse themselves from the tedious business of rigorously investigating causes of an event. Such a person, in Carr’s view, is “intellectually lazy’’ or possesses “low intellectual vitality’’ (13). In other words, because accidents are also induced via human activity and actions, Carr does not believe that accidents truly occur unexpectedly or without any causation. Insofar as accidents can be caused by some faults in human personality or will, these faults, however inherently various, deserve to be studied as causes behind the accidents they create. The historian must observe and analyze accidents just as he or she would investigate any other “normal’’ political, social, or cultural event and ponder on why the accident occurred or whether it could have been avoided or prevented at all. So how does a historian pay proper attention to historical causes and formulate a causal relationship between historical facts? For Carr, it begins with the realization that there is little to distinguish between “historical’’ and “unhistorical’’ facts such that it is always possible for the latter to become the former (14). For example, someone living in 1066 and directly witnessing the Battle of Hastings might record that the battle “is taking place,” but once a historian agrees with the witness who claims that it was important that the battle occurred, the historian preserves the fact that the battle occurred in the past and has historical importance by simply stating the same fact in the past tense: “The Battle of Hastings clearly occurred in 1066.” Yet, the murkiness of the distinction does not mean that all causes are to be treated equally, for Carr believes that there are “rational’’ and “accidental’’ causes. The former can be applied to diverse countries, eras, and conditions, which warrants generalizations. By contrast, “accidental’’ causes, which have to be specifically devoted to explaining how an accident as a particular event in a specific time, location, and circumstances, cannot be generalized. An accident occurs under particular conditions and is fundamentally a result derived only from the particular conditions and therefore “teach us no lessons and lead to no conclusions’’ (15). In other words, rationality for Carr is synonymous with generality, while “accidental’’ causes are limited in their generality because they can only be comprehended only within the specific contexts they had occurred. The more important point is that “rational causes’’ have purposes borne from human motivations, whereas “accidental causes’’ do not have an objective. With that said, such a distinction does not mean “accidental causes’’ can be dismissed. Regardless of the type of cause, Carr believes that insofar as historians are expected to make interpretations about them, they are issuing value judgments, and causality is “bound up with interpretation,’’ for the act of assigning causes is itself a judgment. Moreover, because history is a purveyor of tradition, history is obligated to be a record of “past habits and lessons of the past’’ for future generations (16). Due to the arbitrary and selective nature of historical time, Carr concludes by arguing that historians must habitually ask “whither’’ along with “why?’’ (17). The audience for whom the historian writes is as important as personal and private reasons for which the historian writes history. Carr believes that the historian’s search for causation necessarily implies a search for an ultimate cause which can clearly answer why a phenomenon occurred, and insofar as a historian is searching for the ultimate cause, “historical determinism’’ is unsatisfactory because it disregards the importance of multiple causality in ac- counting for the unexpected and unpredictable nature of historical events. Carr also finds the treatment of “chance’’ or “accidental causes’’ as synonymous with “no causation’’ as unsatisfactory, because they are just masking a historian’s laziness or unwillingness to scrutinize historical events very closely to find a logical causation between them. Finally, regardless of whether a cause is “rational”—has the ability to be generalized—or is “accidental’’—happens by pure chance or as an outcome of unexpected events—distinctions between them are not very important because causality in general must inform a historian’s interpretation, which, in turn, is a form of value judgment. The possibility of a “subjective’’ causality is not an excuse to not treat “accidental causes’’ or “rational causes’’ unequally, for the division of time, which is the basic element of a historian’s thinking, is a subjective category which is bound to change depending on the nature of a “future’’ a historian is interested in addressing. As long as the future is subject to change, so will the perception of “past’’ and “present,’’ which is why a historian must be well aware of the purpose for which he or she desires to write history and the audience for whom the historian wishes a work to have a lasting influence. Logic is important to maximize the delivery of rhetorical clarity, for it is the essence of an argument’s organization. Yet, because logic is a general description of a reasoning’s supposed trajectory, logic needs to be supplemented with proper examples to illustrate and convince others that the trajectory is an accurate and rational one. This section has shown how Carr’s logic about historical causation could probably be considered rational; the next section will examine and analyze Carr’s use of examples to determine whether there is sufficient rhetorical strength in the logic to convince the reader that the logic is traveling on its proper and designated route. 4. Carr’s Use of Examples and Their Logical Compatibility with His Main Points This section evaluates Carr’s usage of historical examples in illustrating his main themes and arguments, offering a critique about the propriety of the examples in relation to the points they are making. In particular, it will concentrate on Carr’s examples drawn from the Russian Revolution and the accident of Robinson. This section will conclude that while his use of these examples is sound because he effectively illustrates the importance of unpredictability in historical causation to a historian’s thought process, the Revolution and the accident of Robinson do not greatly support Carr’s main theoretical argument because they do not show how and why a particular hierarchy of causes is necessary for one example but not the other. Carr uses episodes from the Russian Revolution to illustrate his opposition to historical determinism. There are several problems with Carr’s use of the Russian Revolution as an example to counter the assumptions of historical determinism. Fundamentally, the example does not show how Carr would be able to choose his “ultimate’’ cause behind the Revolution’s origins. While it is clear that multiple causes must be considered to establish the complexity of the event and there- by highlight its importance, Carr does not show how a hierarchy of causes can be derived from a consideration of multiple causes. What he actually wishes to show by discussing the Russian Revolution is that “historical determinism” is not a proper historical logic because it essentially engages in counterfactual reasoning, which is not germane to the historian’s critical aim of determining the past as it is. Against historical determinism’s charge that a historian may not consider other alternatives while focusing too much on one cause, Carr argues that supposing that Stolypin had completed the agrarian reform or that the Bolsheviks did not win the Russian Revolution are not relevant to historical determinism, for the determinist would simply look for causes other than ones which actually occurred to argue that different causes would have different outcomes. Hence, Carr suggests that the suppositions have “nothing to do with history,’’ because counterfactual assertions cannot be proven with any certainty with documented evidence and are non-historical (18). The problem is that Carr never really identifies the precise kind of historical interpretation for which his example from the Russian Revolution is meant to offer support. If the suppositions he made are not “historical,’’ then the real question is, which suppositions should be deemed “historical?’’ Refutation by negation does not necessarily lead to clarity; it only serves as a proof of what an opposing argument cannot be, rather than proving the essence of the opposing argument. More- over, because the basic theoretical argument against “historical determinism’’ is that historical events have multiple causes and do not occur in a vacuum, Carr’s example should have shown how a genuine historical argument can be fruitful by considering multiple causes. After all, the real problem Carr has with “historical determinism’’ is that it assumes that historical events were bound to happen with- out any particular value ascribed to the events’ circumstantial causes. Since Carr is uncomfortable with the unscientific and unhistorical nature of the philosophy, it would have logically made more sense for him to show how historical logic operates in a coherent and powerful manner such that it could not be easily dismissed by proponents of historical determinism. Hence, it would have sufficed to show how causation and causes operate in a historical analysis rather than a proving how “historical determinism’’ has a faulty logic, since the fact that there is a deficiency in an opposing logic does not necessarily imply that an alternative logic must be better simply because it does not have that deficiency. The other problem with Carr’s use of the Russian Revolution is his assumption that the supposed currency of the Russian Revolution as a “modern historical’’ problem has greater importance than “older’’ events such as the Norman Con- quest or the American Revolution. Carr believes that there is a greater desire to remember “options’’ still available for a more recently concluded historical event than much older ones. Carr claims that the expression of diverse passions from non-historians makes it hard for them to accept conclusions of a historian who merely recounts an event as it happened (19). Carr does seem to show why “historical determinism’’ is popular, but his analogy does not necessarily prove why “historical determinism’’ is an unhistorical logic. All events eventually get forgotten to certain degrees in which some facts are going to be better known than others, but it is primarily a historian’s scholarly curiosity which determines the importance of a historical event. Since every historian must have different reasons for believing that a historical event is important, the only impediment with regard to time would be the availability or lack of primary sources rather than a poverty of a historian’s imagination or will to realize innovation. “Older’’ events were once “modern’’ and therefore, importance is inherently a subjective standard which arises from the question of how well individuals remember events. People do remember events which are closer to their immediate memories better than older ones in terms of general details, but squabbling over how alternative causes behind an event might have changed the actual outcome is not necessarily the only reason for which a “modern event’’ must be remembered better than an older event. Christopher Columbus died believing that he had discovered “India” instead of the Caribbean, but the fact that the person might engage in a “historically deterministic’’ debate about how the course of history might have been different had Columbus really landed in North America does not necessarily mean that the person would not engage in historical determinism about other historical events, especially if the person has a passionate interest about them. Chronological distance has no definite correlation with interest because the latter is not necessarily dependent on time but rather on this person’s intellectual curiosity regardless of the event’s currency to the immediate present. Furthermore, thinking historically is a capability, not a matter of predilection. Even if that person remembers the IMF Crisis better than Columbus’s discovery of the Caribbean, it does not follow that “unhistorical’’ suppositions such as “if Columbus had set sail for Africa instead, he would have never discovered the Caribbean” are not relevant to historical thinking. A “cause’’ is not some given concept or model; one has to think through a selection of reasons behind an event to determine which reasons were essential and which ones were merely auxiliary or unimportant in precipitating the occurrence of a phenomenon. Counterfactual reasoning can help a historian think through a rationale for why a supposed cause is actually a noteworthy one; the only caution is to only think through counter- factual claims, not write them down as part of the actual historical reasoning. In other words, the clarity of memory does not necessarily lead to more “historically deterministic debates’’ because logical clarity is independent from the question of whether that logic is “historically deterministic.’’ It is perfectly logical to assume that if Columbus had not been adept at sailing when he was young, then he would have not made the voyage to the Caribbean, for one is only thinking about the causal logic of actions in a given situation and time period without describing the historical consequences of those actions. Thinking about historical events does not always have to imply that one is only thinking about history in terms of chronology, for situational logicality is also important to fathom causality in action, which is what gives contextual meaning and significance to time. Moreover, “historical determinism’’ is an attitude about a particular event or a specific set of events for which a different outcome would have been likely had causes been also different from ones which were originally suggested. Why assume that a desire to adopt such an attitude is stronger with a modern event than a more chronologically distant one? The expression of a particular attitude is not necessarily dependent on how new or old an event is, and chronic difference between a historical event and the individual who is remembering the event may vary ac- cording to the individual who decides to remember it. Yet, emotional attachment to a particular event need not inversely relate with chronological distance because reasons for recollection are far too varied to summarize merely as a function of time. As long as “modern’’ is a relative term expressed from the viewpoint of certain individuals and groups, there will be no rigid standard to determine which memories constitute “modern history.” Moreover, if the historian’s task is to select an “ultimate cause’’ of a particular event, how can a historian be so sure that there is an “ultimate cause’’ without ranking a supposedly “historically deterministic’’ cause? The danger of falling into “historical determinism’’ is not a good reason to avoid considering hypothetical claims, because a historian can always change hypotheses into positive statements by searching for relevant primary and secondary sources to test whether or not there is sufficient evidence to prove its validity. The suitability of a historical cause’s use as part of a historical argument is first and foremost dependent on how reliable that cause is. Carr’s other main concern about historical causality is the disturbing use of the concept of “accidents’’ in history as synonymous with the idea of “no causation.’’ The primary example that he uses to illustrate his critique is “Robinson’s accident.’’ Carr gives a hypothetical example of Robinson, who was crossing the street to buy cigarettes but was unexpectedly struck and killed by an oncoming car. However, if the driver was intoxicated, was driving a car with defective brakes, and hit Robinson in a dark alley where barely anything was visible, what was the actual cause of the accident—Robinson, the defective brakes, the dark alley, or the drunk driver? Instead of answering his own inquiry, Carr states that if two passers-by were to give the opinion that Robinson was killed because he was a heavy smoker, and that had he not gone out to buy the cigarettes, there would have been no accident, they would be employing a “kind of remorseless logic found in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass .’’ Carr concludes by remarking that such hypothetical reasoning is not a mode of thought appropriate for history (20). The main deficiency he finds in the concept of “accidents’’ is that an “accident’’ is also an historical event. It is therefore subject to a historian’s analysis of preceding causes leading to the occurrence of the accident. In other words, “accidents’’ cannot escape a historian’s scrutiny just because they seemingly occur without any single clear cause. However complex an accident may be, Carr believes that there is still a hierarchy amongst causes behind an accident which allows the historian to discern between primary causes and auxiliary or negligible ones. The historian’s ability to discern “relevant facts’’ from “irrelevant facts’’ until there is a “rational quilt of knowledge,’’ represents an approximation of a historian’s working mind (21). Unfortunately, Carr does not give a clear answer to the critical question, how does this discernment actually work in practice? There are two ironic errors that Carr commits in telling this narrative. First, despite Carr’s attempt to show why “accidents’’ are still valid elements to consider in historical thinking, he chose the wrong type of example; his example is purely unhistorical. We are only present- ed with a sequence of actions within one ‘historical’ moment rather than several different yet interconnected events across a wide span of time. When historians consider an accident and its causes, they always consider the accident’s relative importance to other events, figures, or conditions. To declare that an event is “historical’’ is to designate a relational quality which suggests that an event has a “historical significance’’ which can describe the event’s relationship or value by connecting with other events, figures, or conditions. If one is ever inclined to declare that a single event alone is historically significant, it can only happen because one presupposes that the event is already well-known because of its relationship with preceding or simultaneous events. For example, from Archduke Ferdinand’s viewpoint, his assassination by Gavrilo Princip was an accident. However, before investigating the causes of the assassination, the historian must establish a rationale to explain why studying the assassination is important. In the case of Archduke Ferdinand, the historian, using a bit of hindsight, can argue that the assassination began a massive wave of violence which rattled across the European continent and ignited the sparks of World War I. By contrast, in Carr’s example, we are not given a reason to believe that studying Robinson’s accident is historically worthwhile. In other words, because Carr did not explain the “historicity’’ of Robinson’s accident, we are not presented with a credible reason to believe that this is a historical event. Carr’s second error is that if we consider Carr’s reason for invoking Robinson’s accident as an example, the example does not illustrate a necessity or method to find multiple causes in historical analysis. If a historian’s prime objective in search- ing for multiple causes is to search for an ultimate cause for a historical phenomenon, then Carr ought to have shown how a historian might approach Robinson’s case as a historical phenomenon. His conclusion that a historian engages selectively with causes is not actually a literal answer to any of his two-part question: 1) How does a historian choose multiple causes? and 2) How does a historian actually select an “ultimate cause’’ from those multiple causes? This is because there is no reason to assume that there must be a single cause for Robinson’s accident at all unless Robinson himself or the driver told the police that there was actually one cause to the accident. Even if the driver had told the police that there was only one cause, it is purely the driver’s own opinion which may or may not be corroborated by other witnesses or circumstantial evidence. From an unassuming observer’s point of view, there is no exact means to verify a sequence of events and pinpoint a singular cause because the observer did not encounter Robinson’s accident in real time along with Robinson. Insofar as this difference between an observer and Robinson exists, there will always be a gulf between speculations and the actual truth. Indeed, because of this gulf, the real moral of Robinson’s accident ought to have been that searching for multiple causes is necessary for a historian to account for every possible explanation of a phenomenon, since the point of finding possible causes of an accident is to establish that an accident can be explained to convince people that the accident can be perceived as an accident. Carr’s argument that one should establish a “hierarchy of causes” implies that there is a particular cause which outranks others in terms of importance. However, there is no such thing as an absolute verification of a truth’s minute details for the historian, unless, very rarely, absolute verification is a necessary condition to prove the soundness of his or her main arguments. A historian is obliged to consider as many aspects of a past event, but no one can know every single detail to get a complete and impeccable picture of an event. The historian has the right to exercise a liberty of imagination based on primary sources and eye-witness accounts, but the historian must also understand that his or her tools to unearth historical facts also delineate the parameters of epistemological certainty. Moreover, Robinson’s example also poses the question of how a historian deter- mines a cause of an accident as an accident, a process that is limited by the quantity and quality of evidence one can find. Since the parameter of what constitutes historical knowledge is bound to change depending on which sources this historian can find, Carr is actually unable to answer the first part of his question. Further- more, because the parameters of knowledge are at the mercy of the availability of historical sources, an attachment to the belief that there must be an ultimate cause is both unrealistic and false, which is why Carr is never able to give a clear answer to the second part of his question. Historical causes are not tangible and therefore cannot be visually compared with each other. Of course, if a historian is writing an autobiography and writes a history of his or her life from what he or she remembers, then, there might be some liberty for the historian to rank causes and choose the ultimate one. In such a case, there is no basis from which another historian can ask why the causes were ranked in one way but not another, because every mind has but one master. The absence of a hierarchy among causes does not imply an absence of certain- ty or that historians ought to be skeptical about everything they encounter. To the contrary, there are undeniable truths in history such as the Holocaust or Russian pogroms of the 19th century. Rather, acknowledging a multiplicity of causes al- lows for a holistic consideration of multiple dimensions of a historical event from which causal explanations can be drawn, which actually prevents a historian from engaging in “historical determinism.” If the objective of studying a historical event is, as Carr claims, to search for one cause with absolute explanatory power, then the historian is actually engaging in ‘historical determinism’ because such an objective reflects the idea’s actual essence. Hence, Carr’s opposition to “historical determinism,’’ which was precisely because he believed in the multiplicity of causes, does not logically follow from invoking Robinson’s example. Furthermore, the witnesses in Robinson’s accident were actually reflecting Carr’s faith in the multiplicity of causes, so the next task was for Carr to show how he could select his ‘ultimate cause’ for explaining why Robinson died. Instead, Carr vaguely suggests that the historian has to be selective about his causes without explaining the end to which this selectivity has value. Hence, Robinson’s example is actually a Straw Man argument because the original purpose for which the example was mentioned does not become clear until Carr supplies a rationale for justifying a hierarchy of causes. As for how and why the hierarchy fundamentally exists, Carr never gives a clear answer. Therefore, Robinson’s death merely illustrates an argument about an element which is not extant in any of Carr’s arguments prior to his discussion of Robinson’s death. 5. Three Central Problems with Carr’s Methodology in “Causation in History’’ In this concluding section, I will identify three central problems with Carr’s method which will serve as a summary of this paper’s main arguments. First, Carr’s notion of a hierarchy of causes and its importance in historical explanation is unfortunately quite nebulous because he never specifies the purpose be- hind the existence of the hierarchy, ignoring the true function of historical causes as a form of scientific processing. Second, Carr’s distinction between “rational” and “accidental” causes is not valid because regardless of an event’s nature, multiple causes are necessary to account for inherent complexities in any historical event and such causes ultimately serve as evidence for a historian’s claim, which means that the more causes a historian can find, the more reliable and believable a historian’s account becomes. On the one hand, multiple causes are necessary to describe different facets of a phenomenon; a historian will summarize his or her main arguments to show readers how those facets constitute the “wholeness’’ of a historical fact. On the other hand, there needs to be a multiplicity in the kinds of causal analysis a historian uses to approximately position arguments within a given subfield of History. Finally, Carr is wrong to suggest that causes determine a historian’s interpretation because the former is just a means for which the historian has the freedom to determine an end. Causes are merely building blocks with which a historian constructs an independently designed interpretation. With regard to Carr’s questions about how a historian chooses multiple causes and selects an “ultimate cause” among them, I argue that the only certainty a historian can have comes from ascertaining that the nature of a cause aligns with the field in which it must be accurately used. When a historian asks the question, ‘Why was Archduke Ferdinand assassinated?’ the historian implicitly means that, in general, he or she is looking for political causes specifically related to nationalist motivations behind the assassination and its impact on the outbreak of World War I, rather than cultural or social causes behind the rise of nationalism in a general sense. An argument can be made that such distinctions can be interchangeable, since Gavrilo Princip’s association with the Black Hand was a culturally motivated expression of a desire to express Serbian nationalism. However, “political’’ and “cultural’’ cannot be so liberally applied in an interchangeable manner because they are merely generic labels conceived under the assumption that historians and the general public know that such a distinction can exist. A historian may find out that Gavrilo Princip preferred Serbian circuses to Austrian ones, but one does not use this cultural fact to describe anything with sufficient certainty about Princip’s personal decision to assassinate Ferdinand, even if there is nothing mentioned in primary sources about it. The transformation of a fact into a cause is actually a fixed relationship, in which a fact can become a cause, but a cause alone can never become a fact. The historian’s designation of an occurrence as a cause reflects a personal belief that an element within a historical figure’s character or a historical event has some reasonable degree of explanatory power. History is, in general, filled with facts, but it is the conditional possibility of several facts turning into believable causes of a historical phenomenon which truly excites the historian. Causes are essentially facts whose relationship amongst themselves and the phenomenon which they wish to explain is firmly and convincingly established by a rich array of primary sources. Facts which hardly need any source-based proof are not likely to become causes because they are generic and mundane enough to be independent of any historical situation. In short, what Carr really means by “a hierarchy of causes’’ is that not all causes are created equal. The real problem is that Carr never really demonstrated what a hierarchy of causes is. While it may not be possible to definitively identify which types of causes matter more than others, Carr ought to have at least shown how a hierarchy among causes can be conceived. Yet, the real heart of the matter is that Carr could not actually show his audience that a hierarchy among causes exists because there is no singular standard of a “hierarchy,’’ other than what a scholar perceives through a meticulous reading of the relevant historical literature. That Carr could not provide a concrete hierarchy strongly suggests the impossibility of doing so because different hierarchies of causation matter for different subfields of History. Movement of capital, markets, and industrial structure in the early 18th century matter more as direct causes be- hind the Industrial Revolution than as causes behind the death of the Avant Garde in the late 20th century. The difference in subfields also translates to differences in particular “states of the field,” or the variance in the levels of academic discourse about various historical topics, leading to different developments in varying facets of historical inquiry. The nature of primary or secondary sources a historian must search for necessarily depends on the questions the historian wishes to answer in relation to how certain historical topics have been addressed in the existing scholarly literature. In other words, a search for primary or secondary sources is a dependent variable of “current’’ historical scholarship because the main function of amassing historical information is to facilitate a productive and meaningful scholarly debate. This debate, in turn, will invite future generations of historians to construct new angles and roads along which the debate must continue. Moreover, because proving causality in historical analysis can only be done through a meticulous examination of primary and secondary sources, it follows that the richness in illustrating historical causality is dependent on the availability of sources. In short, ascribing a strict sense of a hierarchical notion of historical causality is impossible because of three main variables: multiple causes and multiplicity in the kinds of causes, a rigid relationship between facts and causes, in which only the former can transform into the latter, and finally, differences in subfields and varying conditions in historiography, which imply that a historian must pragmatically conceive of a hierarchy of causes which reflects the availability of primary and secondary sources and their ability to cogently deliver a progressive view or methodological contribution to the existing scholarship. The second major problem with Carr’s method is his misconstrued distinction between “rational’’ and “accidental’’ causes. An “accidental’’ cause is a misnomer because no cause can arise without a reason. Even the most unexpected events have clear causes because searching for causation is essentially identical to search- ing for reasonable connections previously ignored or overlooked. Furthermore, if Carr himself acknowledged that ‘accidental’ causes need to undergo strict academic scrutiny as much as “rational’’ causes, then what he really means is that a scholar must have the same approach and attitude toward “accidental’’ causes as he or she has toward “rational’’ or normal causes. Yet, Carr does not illustrate how a historian actually investigates “rational’’ causes because he is interested in comparing “accidental’’ causes with “rational’’ ones rather than demonstrating how a historian uses each type of cause to con- struct a historical analysis or make an observation. In practice, Carr did not have to make a distinction between the two causes. A historian can propose rational explanations for supposedly accidental causes, and once this is done, there is no difference between “rational’’ and “accidental’’ causes. I will illustrate my point by comparing Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon as a “rational’’ event, and Pierre Curie’s carriage accident as a literally “accidental’’ event. I will show how these two events deserve equally serious scholarly attention because they all involve the same process of investigation, regardless of an event’s nature. Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon would be a rational event because the crossing itself is a “reasonable’’ action in that a man mounted on horseback can cross a river because he has the will and means to do so. Such an action can be expected, for regardless of what the Roman Senate thought, Caesar only had two choices: defy the Senate by crossing the river or obey the Senate and let them limit his actions. Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon was not “surprising’’ as an action in itself; neither would the decision not to cross be surprising, unless Caesar somehow died for reasons unrelated to the crossing. By contrast, Pierre Curie’s carriage accident is not a rational event because the exact circumstances are open to much speculation. We do not know so many de- tails about how Marie Curie’s husband died, but it would hardly matter whether the driver of the carriage or Pierre Curie was drunk or whether Curie was jogging when the driver lost control of the carriage and hit Curie at break-neck speed. What remains true independent from causes is that it was an accident because neither Curie nor the driver would have expected to run into each other, for they were no mutual acquaintances. According to Carr, the rationality of a cause does not affect its historical investigation, making both “rational” and “accidental” causes garner the same approach. Although Carr never defines what a “rational’’ event is, since human beings are responsible for creating events, it follows that what is rational is what can be expected within the realm of reasonable human behavior and thought. If the primary function of historical causes is to explain why a phenomenon, regardless of its nature, occurred, then identifying how an accident became an accident is in itself an explanation, no matter how unexpected or unforeseeable the accident must have been to the people involved in it. However, regardless of how much we know or do not know about Caesar or Pierre Curie, the principles of research remain identical. A historian must first amass all records on the crossing of the Rubicon and Pierre Curie’s accident, gather any witness testimonies to corroborate on controversial or obscure aspects of each case, perform a theoretical analysis of causes and speculations, and finally, arrive at reasonable conclusions based on the existing evidence. The rationality of the research process which is common to both events is what makes a study of the two events rational, for the nature of an event does not necessarily reflect or dictate the nature of the means with which one ought to study each event. If accidents, like rational events, also have causes, then Carr ought to have shown how “accidents’’ could be considered the antithesis of rational events. An accident is unexpected, but is not irrational, for every cause of an accident is borne from actions which the individuals involved consider rational. If two speeding cars collide, it could be an accident borne from the drivers’ disregard for the speed limit, or from one driver’s inebriation. Still regardless of whether it is due to mis- handling the car or personal flaws, none of the causes are irrational. Disregarding the speed limit or drinking heavily may have been a mistake, but neither of these activities are incapable of having a logic ascribed to them, for a historian can still argue that committing these mistakes, regardless of their severity, contributed to the occurrence of the accident. Insofar as all actions have causes and motives in their creation, the historian is obliged to study them with an eye towards collecting all relevant facts, an action unrelated to how rational or irrational a historical event may seem. It is because, as I argued through the example of Caesar crossing the Rubicon and Pierre Curie’s accident, no elements are beyond the reasonably expected scope of human behavior. Regardless of whether an event was planned or turned out to be an accident, what remains constant in both cases is that there are various actions a person can take at a particular time, and every action will have a distinct set of reasons. Carr’s distinction between rational and “irrational’’ causes is therefore, a faulty comparison, for there is no clear reason given to believe that accidents are inherently “irrational,’’ and because historians can also surmise about causes behind accidents insofar as accidents are human-induced events. The final point of this paper is that a historian’s personal selection of causes does not dictate a singular direction of interpretation. Establishing causation and providing interpretation are independently creative activities conjoined by the necessity to give coherence to a historian’s general argument. Carr seems to believe that a historian is reflecting private opinions through a selection of causes, but the selection is only the means to the ultimate end-to generate a unique interpretation which does not necessarily reflect what the causes themselves have to say about a topic. Causes in and of themselves reflect no emotions; until the historian judges the causes to be positive or negative in nature in relation to the argument he or she wants to make from the causes, causes are merely guidelines and building blocks to the overall argument which gives the essential structure to the historian’s logic. Causes merely reflect a historian’s judgment about a possibility in believing that a phenomenon happened in one direction. The real essence of the historian’s argument lies in what the historian thinks about the phenomenon, not the causes. The historian’s attention must not be limited to understanding how a car’s assembly line malfunctioned, but be extended to observe how the car as a finished product qualitatively suffers as a result of faults in the assembly line. Carr’s argument about causes might be feasible if a historian is trying to find out the causes behind a historical tragedy, but even in this case, the historian’s real argument is about proving one can see that it was a tragedy. For example, if the sinking of the Titanic was truly due to a crash into an iceberg, and a historian proves that indeed it was so, the moral of the research is not just that “a ship hit an iceberg and sank.” Rather, the moral is that because of this linkage, one can conclude that it was a terrible accident and a tragedy. Even if a historian should conclude with identifying the iceberg as the cause of the tragedy, the identification of the cause does not dictate the interpretation of the phenomenon because interpretation is not about identifying what or why something happened. Instead, interpretation is concerned with what one should observe from the structure of a historical phenomenon that emerges from identifying the cause behind the phenomenon. Identifying causes alone does not make the study of History interesting; one needs to show how causes function to produce original observations about a holistic phenomenon that emerges from showing a causal relationship between or within a series of linked phenomena. Once a general picture of a historical phenomenon emerges, every historian can have a glimpse into how the phenomenon got concluded, no matter how many diverse facts about it are unearthed. Yet, the most interesting question in historical research is not what happened, but how an event unfolded to produce a particular result. In answering “how,’’ every historian is bound to focus on diverse and specific causes to explain the general outcome. Most historians will not focus on what the importance of a particular cause is simply by analyzing the cause in its own terms but on what that cause means in relation to a web of other multiple causes. Furthermore, since a cause is but one element in a historian’s interpretation of relations between phenomena; what are termed “causes’’ were actually phenomena happening in real time for historical actors. Therefore, the originality of historical interpretation does not arise simply from cherry-picking elements from a single phenomenon to serve as “causes’’ but in linking multiple phenomena into one grand narrative. In creating this grand narrative, the historian’s goal is to show how the phenomena relate to each other, and therefore to produce an original view about how to understand the relationship. What Carr’s arguments do show is that a search for causes and causation is worthwhile because every historical cause originally begins from ascertaining historical facts, which in turn, helps a historian discover and rationally explain new discoveries. Moreover, historical causes need to delineate boundaries between various subfields in History to assure that each field employs appropriate causes which best explain a phenomenon under scrutiny. Furthermore, a proper search for historical causation must not engage in a distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘accidental’ causes because all causes are valuable insofar as they serve the primary function of explaining what happened and why an event occurred. Insofar as the historian’s duty to tell the true sequence of actions behind an event remains valid for all rational or accidental incidents, a historian must concentrate on finding causes to fulfill a cause’s fundamental purpose. Finally, causes are building blocks to facilitate an original and interesting interpretation of a historical event, but causes alone do not possess the power to determine the entire direction of an interpretation. An incisive eye for finding accurate explanations must combine with a historian’s unique imagination and vision to recreate a believable “image’’ of a reality that corresponds closely to the truth which the historian found. The combination can only come about smoothly if a discovery of causes and an original analysis of the significance of the discovery are independent and not concurrent activities of an inquisitive scholarly mind. A respect for a cause’s individuality that is distinct from a historical fact, a respect for a cause’s explanatory prowess rather than its rational or accidental nature, and a separation between the discovery and interpretation of causes are essential to the pursuit of History as a rigorous, liberal, and original science. Endnotes 1 Bernard Barber, “Review of What is History? by Edward Hallett Carr,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 68, No. 2 (September, 1962), 260-262; Seymour Itzkoff, “Review of What is History? by Edward Hallett Carr,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 2 (June, 1962), 132-134; Jacob Price, “Review of What is History?: The George-Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, January-March 1961 by Edward Hallett Carr,” History and Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1963), 136-145; Patrick Gardiner, “Review of What Is History? by E. H. Carr,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 73, No. 4 (October, 1964), 557-559. 2 Aviezer Tucker, “Causation in Historiography,” in Aviezer Tucker ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography (Chichester, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 101. 3 Ann Frazier, “The Criterion of Historical Knowledge,” Journal of Thought, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January, 1976), 66-67. 4 Geoffrey Partington, “Relativism, Objectivity, and Moral Judgment,” Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (June, 1979), 125-139. 5 Ann Talbot, “Chance and Necessity in History: E. H. Carr and Leon Trotsky Compared,” Historical Social Research, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2009), 95. 6 Edward Hallett Ibid (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 116. 7 Carr, What is History?, 117. 8 Ibid, 121-122. 9 Ibid, 122-123. 10 Ibid, 126. 11 Ibid, 133. 12 Ibid, 137. 13 Ibid, 134. 14 Ibid, 135. 15 Ibid, 141. 16 Ibid, 142. 17 Ibid, 143. 18 Ibid, 127. 19 Ibid, 136. 20 Ibid, 138. In the actual passage, he calls it the “Dodgsonian mode” after the author of Through the Looking Glass. 21 Ibid, 136. References Barber, Bernard, “Review of What is History? by Edward Hallett Carr,” American Journal of Sociology , Vol. 68, No. 2 (September, 1962), 260-262. Edward Hallett Ibid (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961). Frazier, Ann, “The Criterion of Historical Knowledge,” Journal of Thought , Vol. 11, No. 1 (January, 1976), 60-67. Gardiner, Patrick, “Review of What Is History? by E. H. Carr,” The Philosophical Review , Vol. 73, No. 4 (October, 1964), 557-559. Itzkoff, Seymour, “Review of What is History? by Edward Hallett Carr,” History of Education Quarterly , Vol. 2, No. 2 (June, 1962), 132-134. Partington, Geoffrey, “Relativism, Objectivity, and Moral Judgment,” British Journal of Educational Studies , Vol. 27, No. 2 (June, 1979), 125-139. Price, Jacob, “Review of What is History?: The George-Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, January-March 1961 by Edward Hallett Carr,” History and Theory , Vol. 3, No. 1 (1963), 136-145. Talbot, Ann, “Chance and Necessity in History: E. H. Carr and Leon Trotsky Compared,” Historical Social Research , Vol. 34, No. 3 (2009), 88-96. Tucker, Aviezer, “Causation in Historiography,” in Tucker, Aviezer ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of History (Chichester, United Kingdom: Wiley-Black- well, 2011), 98-108. Previous Next

Ezekiel Vergara Punishment: Human Nature, Order, and Power Ezekiel Vergara Legal punishment has become a pervasive phenomenon in society, affecting millions of individuals worldwide and encompassing police practices, prison systems, and medical professionals. However, the practice of punishment often overshadows its theoretical goals. This paper attempts to highlight the theoretical aims of punishment through a genealogy of punishment as it relates to human nature. The theory of punishment demonstrates the primacy of order as tied to human nature. In addition to order, punishment is shown to have secondary aims, such as moral desert, rehabilitation, and revenge. These primary and secondary goals of punishment are then compared to the modern practice of legal punishment. Unsurprisingly, punishment in theory differs greatly from punishment in praxis. Instead of fulfilling its theoretical aims, punishment functions as a locus of power that strips agency from the offenders. In an attempt to ameliorate this theoretical-practical difference, various solutions are provided to make practical punishment more congruent with the adopted theory. In the analysis and critique of punishment, authors from various fields are cited, ranging from seminal works by Michel Foucault to modern works by William Connolly and Didier Fassin. While the first instance of punishment remains unknown, punishment has permeated all aspects of life — in prisons, schools, and at homes. However, this paper will be limited only to “legal punishment,” or the activities of punishment that are conducted by states, courts, and police (1). To examine punishment, this paper will theoretically examine the institution and nature of punishment. The first section of the paper will seek to answer the question “what is punishment?” A brief genealogy of punishment and human nature will be presented. Proceeding from this analysis, the second portion of this pa- per will juxtapose the theoretical outline of punishment—as derived from human nature—with the actuality of modern punishment. Notably, it will be argued that the presence of asymmetric power relations distinguishes theoretical punishment from actual punishment. In response to the discrepancy between theoretical and practical punishment, a possible improvement to punishment will be proposed: al- lowing offenders to propose their own punishment. Finally, the paper will consider challenges to this proposal. In order to present a thorough and convincing analysis, each section of this paper will refer to a variety of authors, mainly political theorists and jurisprudential scholars, while also referencing some empirical data. Likewise, this paper will operate within the paradigm of the current debate on punishment and focus on punishment in the United States (2). I. Human Nature and Punishment Punishment is related to human nature; it seems impossible to divorce the two. Through a genealogy of punishment, it will be shown that these two concepts are heavily intertwined, with the human desire for order serving as the impetus for punishment. “Punishment,” then, refers to “an attempt to reestablish order through sanction on the offender, in accordance with human nature.” A few clarifying statements should be made before this relation is demonstrated via genealogy and analysis. First, the term “human nature” is an amorphous concept. Among theorists, there is debate on whether a unique “human nature” exists (3). Moreover, even if a human nature does exist, there is no consensus on the nature of this concept (4). Hence, this paper will present a thorough analysis of human nature that draws upon various authors. However, it is recognized that other conceptions of human nature may lead to the same conception of punishment. Second, the fact that punishment is related to human nature does not mean that human nature involves punishing. This paper does not preclude the hypothesis that human nature itself desires punishment, yet the link between punishment and human nature supported by this paper is more derivative, in that punishment arises from the human want of order (5). Presently, this paper will provide a genealogy of punishment that begins with human inequality (6). This inequality, which is natural to man, leads to conflict over similar wants. Namely, some individuals are better suited to achieve their wants, while others are less capable. When two or more individuals want a good that cannot be divided, the most capable is able to acquire the good. Oftentimes, this zero-sum game leads to conflict as the weaker party seeks retribution (7). In the face of this conflict, man desires order, which is the primary impetus for punishment. Because of this conflict, man seeks to establish a type of order, an order that can allow individuals to pursue their ends without the threat of violence (8). Ultimately, this order is established by a superior individual, family, tribe, or group that exerts control and establishes rules in a certain region. Originally, these rules are simply based on custom—or the norms of fair expectations in common-life. Due to their historical underpinnings, these customs are obeyed by the people (9). Over time, though, customs become binding in a certain area or jurisdiction (10). Customs, founded on fair expectations, seek to apply an objective, ordered standard of conduct to human behavior. However, because customs are not universally followed, a mechanism is needed to maintain order and ensure adherence to these expectations. Primarily, to increase the level of norm adherence, sanctions serve to increase the costs of deviance. Eventually, with the creation of the state and morality, punishment began to be exercised by centralized legitimate authorities that monopolize violence (11). Important to the monopolization of violence is the codification of norms or general maxims, allowing the state to determine when punishments, such as monetary and physical punishments, should be applied. For instance, in the early United States, many crimes were accompanied by a fine and those convicted suffered harms from forced labor to capital punishment. Thus, a legal system came into existence. As punishment evolves over time with the expansion of the state, the economy also plays an important role related to order-based punishment. Namely, monetary payment can be used as a sanction on offenders, as a way to reestablish order (12). The creditor-debtor relationship serves as the basis for punishment in the Nietzschean account (13). The Nietzschean account highlights the relationality and inequalities of punishment. Namely, the asymmetry of Nietzsche’s power relations requires two or more parties, illustrating that power is something relational among individuals (14). As such, the penal relationship presents a distinct power dynamic, derived from the creditor-debtor relationship. Plainly, the creditor exercises an asymmetrical amount of power as he has something that the debtor needs or wants. On the other hand, the debtor has little power to resist, especially if he is in need of the creditor’s good. An asymmetry, then, exists between the creditor and debtor. Such inequality is mirrored in the punisher-punished relationship where the former exercises power over the latter, given that a good must be compensated. Given the desire for order—seen through the state and the economy—three points on human nature and punishment should be addressed here. First, the emergence of the state may simply be a “pleasure, delighted in the promised blood,” a mechanism that legitimizes infliction of suffering (15). Thus, instead of producing order, the state may simply serve as a means of exacting revenge on other individuals through a legitimized relationship. For example, police violence is legitimized and allowed to persist by the law (16). Second, the desire for punishment appears as a type of desire satisfaction, which signals that humans desire order. Simply, there is pleasure in order and reestablishing order through suffering. Rather than repaying money in the creditor-debtor relationship, the loan is replaced by suffering. Third, there seems to be a degree of rationality in punishment. For example, adults are sanctioned more severely than children for criminal offenses. Thus, it seems that punishment operates on a scale of rationality, as it is supposed that children have not completely developed such faculties, or what is generally accepted amongst individuals, whereas adults do (17). In short, then, punishment is derived from the desire for order, due to inequality and competing wants. Punishment reestablishes order when a standard—originally custom, presently law—is broken. Through a genealogy of punishment, certain aspects of human nature become readily disclosed. As such, punishment appears multifaceted, but likewise contained within a certain paradigm, that of history and custom. Thence, “punishment” appears to be “an attempt to reestablish order through a sanction on an offender, in accordance with human nature.” II. How to Punish This section of the paper will discuss a theory of how punishment should be practiced, as derived from human nature. Human nature appears to want order through punishment or sanction, but punishment appears to have secondary aims. Nietzsche identifies a list of secondary aims, besides the primary aim of order. For example, punishment also seeks revenge, deterrence, and reformation (18). This pa- per will now explicate the primary and secondary aims of punishment and analyze their current practice. In this way, it will be illustrated how punishment based on human nature would be conducted and how current practices deviate from these theoretical ideals. Order—the primary goal of punishment—is crucial to the practice of punishment. The basis of order is fair expectations, as has already been discussed. The notion of order, when tied to fair expectations, illustrates two aspects about how to punish. First, punishment requires a relationship of two or more individuals, most clearly seen with Nietzsche’s creditor-debtor example (19). A relationship between two individuals allows for a good to be extracted and a sanction to be applied, which releases the offender from his duty or debt. Thus, punishment must establish a relationship between individuals, thereby allowing order and therefore human nature to exist among them. Overall, this phenomenon is both practiced and disregarded in modern punishment. The modern offender engages in various relationships—with the warden, with the judge, with the prison-worker, with the doctor, with the criminologist— that allow for a good to be extracted and a duty absolved (20). However, this is not always the case. Solitary confinement is readily practiced in the modern penal system, undermining punishment’s goal of reestablishing order between individuals. Namely, by isolating an offender, it is impossible for the offender to form and maintain a given relationship, thereby disregarding a fundamental necessity of order (21). Moreover, even if it is the case that solitary confinement is not permanent, the relationships in question are disrupted (22). This not only limits the goods that can be extracted from the offender, but also creates an unequal power dynamic that further forestalls the absolution of the offender’s duty. That is, by confining the offender, he is rendered more unable to adequately engage in the relationships required by order-based punishment. Moreover, this power asymmetry strips the offender of his agency, which is of value, and contributes to disorder. Ultimately, to improve punishment, such an unequal power dynamic must be remedied. Second, in regard to order, is the notion of fair expectation. Fair expectations highlight the proportionality of a claim, as illustrated in the creditor-debtor relationship. The debtor and the creditor have an agreement on how much money should be returned to the creditor. While there exists an asymmetrical power dynamic among the creditor and the debtor, the agreement itself is fair (23). Thus, punishment requires a level of proportionality, due to the fairness of the original agreement. The proportionality of a sanction establishes a reasonable duty that is imposed on the offender, as a means to reestablish order. However, fairness as it relates to order is rarely practiced. Punishment in the United States is far from proportional, affecting minority and low-income individuals at a much higher level. These disparate impacts violate the original agreement of fairness and call into question the validity of the original agreement. Similarly, the modern penal system often places a burden on individuals, aside from the actual punishment. The offender often faces the prospect of losing his job, his family, and his friends (24). Hence, disproportionality is endemic to modern punishment. Aside from order, punishment also aims to exact revenge, deterrence, and reformation. In theory, these secondary aims support the primary goal of order. However, when improperly executed, these secondary goals actually subvert the primary end of order. Through an analysis of all three secondary aims, it will become clear that there are grand discrepancies between the theory and practice regarding punishment. The idea of revenge being an aim of punishment is grounded in Nietzsche’s work, namely the “slave morality” and his creditor-debtor relationship (25). Unable to alter the past, a wronged individual seeks to will the present and the future. To do so, punishment deprives the offender of future possibilities. Simply then, the offender must repay for his actions in sufferings that occur in and possibly over time (26). Revenge, then, desires that the offender suffers, requiring a unique relation- ship between a victim and an offender. However, in practice, revenge deviates from its theoretical framework. First, it is forbidden by modern law; second, it is expressive (27). As for the former, revenge is viewed negatively, seen by many as a type of desire to be suppressed. Only the law can punish, not private individuals. Nevertheless, the law appears to be a façade for this vengeful desire, concealing this vengefulness in its legitimacy (28). Although not always physical retribution, the law legitimizes the unsupervised and unwarranted violence of the few, seen in modern police practices (29). Moreover, punishment as revenge is expressive. Mainly a part of the retributivist framework, revenge is an expressive punishment that allows for the symbolic expression of disapprobation (30). Punishment creates a new social stratum of the delinquent (31). This social stratum unites society by providing a scapegoat that can be examined, questioned, and blamed. Thus, revenge is cathartic, creating a unified relationship between members of society against the delinquent population, as seen in Connolly’s discussion (32). Therefore, practical punishment should inflict warranted suffering on an offender and create an offender-victim relationship. However, in practice, revenge inflicts unwarranted violence that scapegoats the offender to unite large groups, perverting the aforementioned relationship. For instance, unwarranted violence against Black Americans, under the guise of punishment, has long served to unite whites around ethno-national identity. Yet, such unity under the guise of punishment is actually counterintuitive, given that through these means, the primary goal of order is subverted. Indeed, this prevents the creation of a legitimate, properly-ordered system. Deterrence is another aim of punishment, secondary to that of order. The idea of deterring crime suggests that individuals wish to live in an orderly society and have the ability to project into the future. Put simply, individuals can posit future relationships or possibilities where crime affects them. Thus, punishment deters other possible offenders from committing similar crimes in the future. However, deterrence supposes two connected ideas. The first is that individuals act rationally; secondly, it supposes that punishment is the appropriate means to deter crime. Deterrence, in theory, supposes the rationality of possible offenders and their ability to make cost-benefit analyses. The thought goes that by increasing the punishment for a given offense, individuals will be less willing to commit the crime as the benefit of committing an offense is overshadowed by the punishment for that offense. Notwithstanding this consideration, deterrence is very different on a practical level. Didier Fassin notes that the punishment used to deter crime is often aimed at humiliation and shaming, aimed at emotion, instead of rationality and cost-benefit analyses (33). Therefore, the theory behind deterrence, which is based on the conception of rationality among individuals, is overshadowed by irrational practice that subverts the primary goal of order. Deterrence, in practice, supposes not the rationality and dignity of humans, but rather exploits the social relations of individuals. Through such exploitation, the creation of a proper order is forestalled. This may partly answer why punishment aimed at deterrence fails, failing to support the primary goal of order (34). Finally, punishment has the secondary aim of rehabilitation. The idea of re- habilitation is important to maintaining the primary goal of order through punishment. In theory, rehabilitation has two key aspects: temporality and relational existence. Temporality is crucial to human nature and is tied to the goal of rehabilitating an offender. The idea of rehabilitation supposes that an offender remains the same responsible agent over time and likewise that the offender can change and adopt the laws and norms of a society (35). By attempting to reform an offender, the offender is forced to face the past and reflect upon the offense that was committed. During such a reflection, part of human nature is unconcealed, in the sense that the individual can gain understanding about himself (36). With this reflection, the offender is prompted to project into the future, where he will not commit the offense, drawing off the present insight, which is provided by the reflection on the past. As a result, the offender recognizes his own temporality, his possibility aside from crime and the temporality of the penal system. Relationality is also tied to rehabilitation. The notion of rehabilitation requires that an individual is aided by another individual. Usually, this takes the form of an offender and an authority figure, such as a therapist, a teacher, or a doctor. Although the offender-authority relationship is originally based on an asymmetry of power, the rehabilitation process diminishes the asymmetrical power dynamic as the offender reforms. Theoretically, over time, punishment serves to help the offender regain his standing in society, having “paid his debt to society.” Due to this symmetrical relationship of rehabilitation, the offender can understand his human nature and his past, knowing that the future will be based on relationships with other individuals in a given society. In short, rehabilitation awakens an of- fender to his human nature and diminishes the asymmetry between offender and non-offender. However, modern punishment falls short of rehabilitating offenders. Instead of engaging offenders with their temporal and relational being, punishment urges recidivism (37). Those who are punished by the modern system are disempowered and hardened in their ways. Rather than operating on the notion of individual responsibility, offenders are maligned; offenders are made out to be “[monsters]” beyond rehabilitation (38). Likewise, instead of turning offenders to the future and their possibility, the penal system focuses on the past and the asymmetrical power relations created by the past. This is best seen in Fassin’s ethnographic work, as prisoners are punished simply due to their past (39). For example, without the ability to secure adequate jobs or housing, many offenders turn back to crime, leading to high lev- els of recidivism. By limiting the opportunities available to former offenders, and contributing to recidivism, order-based punishment is undermined. Rather than a properly ordered system, offenders are thrust towards further crime and disorder. Offenders are neither rehabilitated nor empowered; offenders are trapped in the past, which forestalls their ability to recognize and to contribute to order. Punishment, namely how to punish, seems complex but grounded in human nature. Focusing on order, the ideas of relationality and fairness are clearly espoused. In regard to the other aims of punishment, the unique ideas of temporality, suffering, and rationality are clearly presented. However, the goals of penal theory are far from the actuality of penal praxis. Instead, the modern penal system perpetuates asymmetric relationships that alienate offenders and highlights the desire to faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire (40). In such practice, human nature is blatantly disregarded, necessitating reform in punishment. III. Improving Punishment Punishment, as has been discussed, is based on a relationship and can thereby be described as just or unjust. As a concept, justice entails what should be given or done to others. Here, justice has a multiplicity of characteristics, yet one characteristic seems crucial to justice and is tied to human nature: relationality. Notably, justice defines the obligations and rights between individuals (41). Since relationality is an aspect of justice—which is paramount to reducing the discrepancy between theory and practice—reformation regarding relationships appears crucial to im- proving punishment. Practical punishment, as based on a power asymmetry, appears unjust. This power asymmetry is unjust because it strips the offender of his agency, which is of value. Therefore, the task of justice, regarding practical punishment, is reducing the power asymmetry between the offender and others. By reducing this asymmetry, offenders will better understand their nature, creating a proper order that is respective of the offender’s agency. Moreover, a more symmetric power dynamic would intuitively reduce the problems created by practical implementations of revenge, deterrence, and rehabilitation. That is, by having a more symmetric power relationship, not only will offenders be more capable to oppose these practical injustices, but punishers will be less likely to commit such injustices. To be more just, the penal systems must reduce the asymmetry of power relations by highlighting the agency of the offender. Instead of passively going through the penal system, the offender must exercise his unique human agency. The root of this aforementioned asymmetry arose from the penal process. Both Connolly and Fassin underscore the asymmetry of the modern penal system in their work. In regard to the former, the rhetoric surrounding the offender dehumanizes him, making the offender equivalent to an animal, one that needs to be tamed (42). In regard to the latter, the individuals are at the mercy of the penal system, unable to exercise their human capacities (43). This is further seen in the strict penal regiments of prisons and the rigid punishments of statutes. To reduce this asymmetry, I argue that offenders should be allowed to propose their punishment for the crimes in cases where a judge or jury has found the offender guilty. To illustrate this proposal, I draw from Plato’s and Xenophon’s renditions of the ancient Athenian penal system during the trial of Socrates (44). Unlike the modern penal system, where the offender plays a passive role, in the trial of Socrates, Socrates is prompted to give his own defense and cross-examine witnesses. Moreover, when Socrates’ is found guilty, he is required to propose a punishment that would serve as recompense for the offense in question. The Athenian jury, in Socrates’ case, then votes to choose between the offender’s proposed punishment and that proposed by the prosecution. By doing so, Socrates is able to exercise his agency, despite the fact that he is sentenced to drink the hemlock. In the modern penal system, the offender is able to defend himself if he wishes, but often defers to an attorney. Most times, the offender defers because he does not have a strong, functional knowledge on the intricacies of the law. Hence, a lawyer—an expert on the law—is brought in to compensate for the offender’s lack of legal knowledge. This process strips the offender of his agency to directly affect the legal proceedings and thereby creates an asymmetric power relationship between the offender and others. I propose that offenders should be allowed to propose their punishment for crimes in cases where a judge or jury has found the offender guilty. To ensure that all offenders can propose their punishments, all citizens should be required to take some course on the law, so that offenders can have more agency during the trial’s proceedings and in sentencing. In the wise words of Plato, “if law is the master [...] then the situation is full of promise and men enjoy all the blessings that the gods shower on a state” (45). By allowing the individual to present a possible punishment, the offender is forced to assume responsibility for his actions. Here, the offender exercises his agency and presents himself as a responsible agent before the court. Hence, the offender will create a more symmetric power relationship with others, including those of authority in the penal system. The result of this symmetric relationship will be a more just penal system, with individuals capable of exercising their unique human capacities. A few brief words should be said on this suggestion. First, the prosecution would also propose a penalty, like in the Athenian system. Penalty proposals would allow for the judge or jury to decide the punishment of a case, while also maintaining the symmetry of the offender-authority relationship (46). Similarly, this method does not sacrifice any of the goals of punishment as it allows order and punishment’s secondary goals to be pursued. Finally, the idea of permitting the offender to have a choice in his punishment is not completely unsupported. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord argues that individuals should choose amongst various punishment plans to repay for an offense (47). Such a penal structure allows individuals to take responsibility and reimburses society with a proportional penalty. However, one may take issue with this potential solution on the grounds that such a solution has two counterintuitive implications: sentencing and asymmetric power relationships (48). As for the former, one might think that offenders will always choose the minimal possible punishment for their crime. Or even worse, drawing from the trial of Socrates, the offender may go as far as to argue that he should be rewarded, not punished. As for the latter, one might contend that an asymmetric power relationship still maintains within this proposal. Namely, it seems to be the case that the judge or jury in question is still more powerful than the offender because the former have the final say on the punishment. To salvage this proposal, it is necessary to assuage these concerns about sentencing and asymmetric power relationships. To each concern, there are two considerations that ought to be considered. With the concern of sentencing, two factors are worth considering. First, the proposal is pragmatically worthwhile because it leaves open the possibility that one chooses a punishment that is unlike a minimum sentence and is actually more beneficial. Here, instead of spending time in prison, an offender may choose to engage in public work programs. The possibility of a punishment that differs from the minimum sentence, but is actually beneficial, is an upshot of this view. Second, extreme sentencing is rejected. For example, take the case where a serial killer proposes the punishment of a $20 fine. In this case, it is reasonable to suppose that either (1) the prosecutor in the given case would propose a much more reasonable punishment for the crime or (2) that the judge and jury would consider the reasonableness of the proposal in question when making their determination (49). As a result, extreme sentencing would rarely occur. Rather, a domain of reasonable alternatives to punishment would become socially acceptable, perhaps including minimum jail time and participation in public work projects. Therefore, regarding sentencing, there are pragmatic benefits and reasonable constraints that bolster this proposal against challenges. A more concerning objection presses on the power dynamics of sentencing, given that the judge or the jury still hold a degree of power over the offender. Here, two considerations are important. First, while it is the case that the judge or jury exercises power over the offender, the degree of asymmetry in the relationship is noteworthy. Notably, according to the proposal herein defended, judges and juries exercise less power over the offender than they currently do. Although the proposal does not completely rid itself of this asymmetry, the proposal should pragmatically be adopted, given its upshot of reducing the current asymmetry. Second, in an ideal world, judges and juries would be benevolent and strive to engage in symmetric relationships. However, in practice, there is a concern that judges and juries would overly exercise this asymmetric power. With this in mind, it is questionable whether the concern over asymmetry solely hinges on the proposal herein defended. Rather, it seems that the quality of judges and juries is important. Thus, it may not be the case that the asymmetric power dynamic completely hinges on the account of punishment that has been offered; rather, in addition to this proposal, it seems that work should be done to reform judgeships and juries, so as to further eliminate the asymmetric power relation. Aside from these concerns regarding details of this proposal, one could argue that the solutions offered to ameliorate punishment are impractical in regard to the modern penal society. Such a claim can be based on concerns with the current structure of the penal system or on larger societal concerns. In regard to the former, it could be argued the modern penal system is incapable of adjusting to the recommended changes. For example, an institution—most likely schools—would be required to teach courses on the law, requiring an overhaul of the current curriculum. Similarly, preparing authorities to engage in discourse with offenders may require training and some type of incentivization. However, both of these challenges are easily refuted. Namely, these solutions could be gradually incorporated into the penal system over time, thereby allowing for individual and institutional adjustment. Rather than implementing a radical change, change over time would ease the economic burden incurred by improving the penal system and also allow for individuals to change their biases towards offenders. Moreover, schools alter their curriculum as they incorporate new requirements, such as physical education. Hence, instituting a minimum requirement for knowledge of the law appears feasible. A greater practical concern is the need for societal change as the penal system reforms. It would seem paradoxical if the penal system reduced the asymmetry of the offender-authority power relationship, but society still stigmatized offenders. The ongoing stigmatization takes on various forms: increased policing, reduced housing opportunities, or reduced employment opportunities (50). While this is indeed a legitimate concern, it misunderstands the aims of this paper. I believe that these changes are without a doubt necessary when addressing the issue of punishment, however, this paper only seeks to examine the legal penal system. These societal concerns—while important to improving punishment—appears outside the bounds of this paper. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that the entirety of punishment, beyond the legal penal system, must be examined to create a more just society and to ensure that there is no asymmetry between the offender and society after the former has repaid for his offense. IV. Conclusion According to Michel Foucault, “western man has become a confessing animal” (51). Perhaps, however, it is better said that man has become a “punishing animal.” While this paper has only addressed legal punishment—that conducted by police, judges, and prisons—punishment is a societal phenomenon. From schools, to homes, to prisons, punishment is everywhere in society. The genealogy of legal punishment that was presented at the beginning of this paper illustrates that punishment is a fundamental derivation of man’s nature. While punishment may not be natural to man, it is a result of his nature. As such, a summary on the conclusions of this paper will help delineate the human nature that influences penal practice. The ideal of punishment was shown to have both primary and secondary goals. The most important of these goals is order, yet punishment aimed at order requires relationality. The nature of relationships, in the ideal penal theory, were shown to be fair and symmetric. However, when juxtaposed to the realities of modern punishment, it became evident that practical punishment was heavily based on the creation of asymmetrical relationships between the offender and penal authorities, thereby devaluing the human nature of the offender. A combination of increased agency and increased discourse was proposed as a means to reduce this inherent asymmetry. By empowering the offender, the penal system appears to become more just. These solutions seem promising and feasible, withstanding refutations that challenge the accounts provided. Although this paper has addressed punishment, some changes are needed beyond punishment, regarding the social and economic burden that punishment places on the offender and those associated with the offender. Moreover, work must be done to examine the effects of this paper’s paradigm on innocent individuals that have been convicted of an offense. However, legal punishment has been addressed in these pages. This is only one step towards this more just society. Such reforms are possible, among intellectuals and society-at-large: the ideal is not out of sight. Endnotes 1 The list of those involved in “legal punishment” that is provided above is non-extensive. From here on, “punishment” will refer to “legal punishment,” unless otherwise specified. 2 The United States is used as the case study of this paper for two reasons: the prevalence of punishment in the United States and the author’s familiarity with the American punishment system. 3 See the post-modern and post-structural schools of thought. For the former, see Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra . For the latter, see Gilles Deluze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . 4 See the difference between Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Nietzsche. For the former, see Aquinas’ On Law, Morality, and Politics . For the latter, see Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra . 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 41. 6 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1969), 123; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Discourse and Other Early Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 131. 7 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 75. 8 Augustine, City of God (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1958), 452-453. 9 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 10 Carter, James, Law, Its Origin, Growth and Function (London: Forgotten Books, 2018), lectures 1-5. 11 The idea of “monopolization of the means of violence” comes from sociologist Max Weber. 12 Fassin, Didier, The Will to Punish (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 47-51. 13 Nietzsche, Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality , 40. 14 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 93-4. 15 Rabinow, Paul, Truth and Power: The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 85. 16 Fassin, Didier et al., At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions (London: Pluto Press, 2015). 17 Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 322-323. 18 Nietzsche, Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality , 53-54. 19 Ibid, 40. 20 Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 256. 21 Fassin, The Will to Punish , 76-77, 83. 22 I thank Sotonye George for the point. 23 The need or want of the debtor creates this asymmetry. The asymmetry can also be produced due to natural inequality or dire circumstances. However, within this dynamic, the agreement is fair as both parties reasonably agree to it within the asymmetric relationship. 24 Feeley, Malcolm, The Process is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1979), xv; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 268. 25 Nietzsche, Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality , 20, 40. 26 Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 232. 27 Revenge on the individual level is prohibited, but modern law does not preclude the idea of institutional vengeance. 28 Rabinow, Truth and Power , 85. 29 Fassin et al., At the Heart of the State . 30 Fassin, The Will to Punish , 69. 31 Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 170-184, 266-268. 32 Ibid, 53. 33 Fassin, The Will to Punish , 72-74. While it may be possible that these emotional pathways have or include some rational content, appealing to emotions deviates from the original appeal to strict rationality associated with deterrence. 34 Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 261. 35 Fuller, Lon L., The Morality of Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 162. Modern legal systems seem to suppose human responsibility in punishment. This seems to be a key tenet of rehabilitation. 36 Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland, 1977), 35. 37 Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 265. 38 Connolly, William E., The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1995), 45. 39 Fassin, The Will to Punish , 75-77. 40 Nietzsche, Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality , 41. 41 See Scanlon, Thomas M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998); Rawls, John, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5-6; Miller, David, “Justice” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017). 42 Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization , 45. 43 Fassin, The Will to Punish , 72-77. 44 See Plato, Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), and Xenophon, Xenophon: Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Symposium, Apology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). One might argue that the trial of Socrates is the pinnacle of injustice. Yet, not only is such a position disputed, but my proposal solely attempts to schematically draw upon this example. I thank Tianyu Zhou for pushing me on this point. 45 Plato, Plato: Complete Works , 1402. 46 By allowing the judge or jury to decide between the punishments proposed by the prosecution and defense, the convicted offender is still punished if he proposes a reward as his punishment, as was the case in the trial of Socrates. 47 Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, “Criminal Justice and Legal Reparations as an Alternative to Punishment,” Philosophical Issues no. 11 (2001), 505-506, 509. 48 I thank Morgan Cutts for pressing me to address this objection. 49 Note that this is an inclusive disjunction. 50 This list is not extensive but attempts to highlight some of the scenarios that affect offenders due to their offender-status. 51 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1990), 59. References Aquinas, Thomas. 2002. On Law, Morality, and Politics. Kindle Edition. Edited by William P. Baumgarth and Richard J. Regan. Translated by Richard J. Regan. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition . 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1968. Between Past and Future . New York, NY: The Viking Press. Aristotle. 2014. The Complete Aristotle . Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Bollingen Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. http://www.feedbooks. com/book/4960/the-complete-aristotle. Augustine. 1958. City of God . New York, NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. Carter, James. 2018. Law, Its Origin, Growth and Function: Being a Course of Lectures Prepared for Delivery Before the Law School of Harvard University . London, UK: Forgotten Books. Connolly, William E. 1995. The Ethos of Pluralization . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1964. The Division of Labor in Society . Translated by W.D. Halls. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Fassin, Didier. 2018. The Will to Punish . Edited by Christopher Kurz. The Berkeley Tanner Lectures. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190888589.001.0001/oso- 9780190888589 Fassin, Didier, Yasmine Bouagga, Isabelle Coutant, Jean-Sébastien Eideliman, Fabrice Fernandez, Nicolas Fischer, Carolina Kobelinsky, Chowra Ma- karemi, Sarah Mazouz, and Sébastien Roux. 2015. At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions . Translated by Patrick Brown and Didier Fassin. Anthropology, Culture and Society. London, UK: Pluto Press. http://library1.nida.ac.th/termpaper6/sd/2554/19755.pdf. Feeley, Malcolm. 1979. The Process Is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court . Russell Sage Foundation. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . Translated by Alan Sheridan. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction . Translated by R. Hurley. London, UK: Penguin Books. Foucault, Michel. 1977. “Intellectuals and Power.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews . Edited by Donald Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fuller, Lon L. 1964. The Morality of Law . 1st ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays . Translated by William Lovitt. New York, NY: Garland Publishing, Inc. Hobbes, Thomas. 1994. Leviathan . Edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Locke, John. 1960. Two Treatises of Government . 1st ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Miller, David. 2017. “‘Justice.’” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition) . Moore, Michael. 1987. “The Moral Worth of Retribution.” In Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology . Edited by Ferdinand Shoeman. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra . Edited and translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New York, NY: Penguin Books. ———. 2007. Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality . Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Plato. 1997. Plato: Complete Works . Edited by John M. Cooper. Associate editor D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Rabinow, Paul (Ed.). 1984. Truth and Power: The Foucault Reader . Pantheon Books . Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism . 1st ed. The John Dewey Essays in Philosophy. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ———. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement . Edited by Erin Kelly. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1997. The Discourse and Other Early Political Writings . Cam- bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey. 2001. “Criminal Justice and Legal Reparations as an Alternative to Punishment.” Philosophical Issues , no. 11: 502–29. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/3050612%0A. Scanlon, Thomas M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other . 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1984. “Foucault on Freedom and Truth.” Political Theory , no. 12(2): 152–83. http://www.jstor.org/stable/191359. Xenophon. 2013. Xenophon: Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Symposium, Apology . Edited by Jeffrey Henderson. Translated by E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Previous Next

The Imagined Isle Irish Catholic Identity in the Restoration Era Nathan Mainster Brown University Author Matthew Dowling Armaan Grewal Kara Huang Shreya Raghunandan Rudra Srivastava Editors Fall 2018 This essay explores to what extent an Irish Catholic nation formed in the Restoration Era. The Bleeding Iphigenia, written by Nicholas French, Bishop of Ferns, in the early 1670s and published in 1674, informs the reader of the principal metaphor which governs the tract: “The author hath drawne another Iphigenia of the body of a noble, ancient Catholic Nation clad all in red Robes.” He then claims to speak on behalf of said nation, writing that he, “presents to the view of our gracious King Charles the second a Catholic People, his faithful subjects wounded by thieves, and left half dead.” His request is also spelled out: “I beseech you, gentle Reader, pray to God for my afflicted Country, and for the Catholic Religion therein persecuted.”[1] The confidence with which French asserts the existence of a Catholic nation is striking; most scholars, including Joseph Leerssen, Tom Garvin, and Jim Smyth, maintain that neither an Irish Catholic nation nor a concept of nationalism appeared until the eighteenth century. The inherent social and political complexities of the Restoration era (1660-88), originating from a gaping ideological and power vacuum following the frenetic confusion of the Interregnum, coupled with the self-interested imperative of rebuilding of pre-Cromwellian life, effectively forestalled religious or national coalescence. Experiences of the war and of the post-war settlement did not fall neatly along confessional lines; in many cases, Protestants and Catholics of certain classes or political persuasions had more in common with each other than with their co-religionists. However, in the discursive realm, the confusion of the Restoration era provided fertile ground for the unification of the Irish Catholic interest. By the time of the Glorious Revolution, Protestant lawyer Richard Cox claimed that, “the Old English...are now so infatuated and degenerated, that they do not only take part with the Irish, but call themselves Natives.”[2] Protestants and Catholics clashed bitterly over a multitude of issues, and the politics of memory ensured that battles fought during the 1640s were replayed in an intellectual context. In an attempt to justify their positions during the Interregnum, Irish Protestants aggravated the memory of the 1641 rebellion, focusing on the epoch wherein Catholic loyalty to the crown may have been called into question. New pamphlets emphasizing the barbarity of the Irish Catholics during said revolt proliferated, and old ones, such as Sir John Temple’s famous 1646 account, enjoyed consistent reprintings. The Irish parliament indirectly participated in these politics of paranoia by forming a “committee for the preservation of the rights of Protestants” in Ireland, in response to falsified reports of another rebellion.[3] Combined with the bitter realities of mass dispossession, political disenfranchisement, and marginalization, one would think that the volatile Restoration period would foster an atmosphere conducive for Catholic nationhood. However, such a notion was not fully-fledged during the Restoration. Instead, the time period laid the ideological framework for such a concept by embedding the notion of Ireland as a Catholic nation in propagandistic discourse, thus recognizing Catholic unity as a desirable goal. Though Irish Catholic nationhood did not develop in a visible sense, it became a standard theme of contemporary political dialogue, in which several complex versions of unity were promulgated to support the view of individual authors. The idea of nationhood emerged from the fray, guaranteeing that following the Restoration period “Ireland” became a decidedly Catholic entity. The Divisions in Catholic Irish Society The disappointing reality of Catholic Ireland in the Restoration period was one marred by entrenched intra-communal conflict. The ancient divisions between the Old English and Gaelic ethnicities, the two major Catholic groups, were far from obscured. Though intermarriage and centuries of interaction had helped to diffuse certain quotidian cultural distinctions, sentiments of prejudice, distrust, and alienation overwhelmingly predominated.[4] State-sponsored discrimination, even by the likes of Catholic heroes such as the Earl of Tyrconnell, and mutual animosity, served to definitively prevent Catholics from cooperating across ethnic lines.[5] Irish Catholics were no more unified by the experience of the land settlement. On 23 October 1641, sources suggest that Irish Catholics possessed 69 percent of Ireland’s profitable land; during the Interregnum, this figure was reduced to 10 percent. However, when the Stuarts were restored to the throne, Catholic land ownership increased significantly to 30 percent due to the briefly-operational court of claims, which rather clumsily attempted to restore unjustly dispossessed Catholics, royal sympathy, and access to patronage.[6] This rather arbitrarily orchestrated and haphazard process ensured that Catholic experiences with the settlement were myriad. Spokesmen for dispossessed Catholics such as Sir Nicholas Plunkett and Richard Talbot, and later the Earl of Tyrconnell, spent much of the 1660s at Whitehall lobbying for the restoration of their co-religionists. They asserted that the 1648 peace entitled Irish Catholics to full restoration of property of which they had been stripped by Parliamentarians, and as such undermined the legitimacy of the Cromwellian claims.[7] Perhaps the greatest single effort occurred in 1670, when 52 dispossessed Irish Catholics and their supporters sent Talbot to present a petition to the King and parliament for full Catholic restoration. Delivered in the name of the King’s, “Most distressed subjects of your kingdom of Ireland who were outed of their estates by the late usurped government and are not yet restored,” the petition claimed that under the terms of the 1648 peace treaty, most, if not all, Catholics were entitled to repossession, and requested an “Act of Indemnity” and fair revision of the settlement act. The argument was underscored by a narrative of unwavering Catholic loyalty from the Interregnum to the present in the face of Cromwellian temptation. This argument fell on deaf ears: the Crown rejected the proposal, citing the material and political benefits already wrought by the land settlement.[8] The land settlement meant that 20 percent of dispossessed lands did return to Catholic hands. Patronage or sound political connections proved to be of paramount importance in procuring articles of restoration, and men such as Viscount Muskerry, the Marquis of Antrim, the Talbots of Malahide, and the Earl of Carlingford found their estates restored or expanded thanks to covert political machinations.[9] Consequently, a powerful minority of “new interest” Catholics emerged and effectively stonewalled any legislation altering the settlement throughout the Restoration period. Indeed, they wholeheartedly endorsed bills to confirm their titles at the expense of their unrestored co-religionists. In 1678 and 1680, Lord Lieutenant Ormond unsuccessfully attempted to call a parliament to pass legislation which would fully complete the land settlement. Under the proposed acts, the dealings of the court of claims were to be formalized and a commission was to be entrusted to investigate uncertain titles. In other words, further possibility of restoration would be curtailed. Predictably, responses to the bill polarized around the experience of the settlement; restored Catholics such as Colonel John Fitzpatrick and Nicholas Taaffe, Earl of Carlingford actually traveled to London to support the legislation and to counter the claims of unrestored Catholics or their advocates who simultaneously pleaded their case at Whitehall. The legislation was eventually killed in its crib due to the unstable political climate resulting from the so-called popish plot, but the similarly difficult experience of James II in attempting to overturn the land settlement provides equally illuminating insight. Upon his accession, distraught Catholics rejoiced over the prospect of a co-religionist as their sovereign and hopes for a reversed land settlement ignited anew. Yet once again the vocal minority of restored Catholics consistently and forcefully lobbied against any alterations. In 1689, the Earl of Tyrconnell, new Lord Deputy of Ireland, fulfilled his dream of the past two decades and called a parliament to overturn, or at least drastically transform, the land settlement. His efforts were met with immediate opposition. A petition presented to James composed by “new interest” Catholics and Old Protestants warned of the inevitable downturn the Irish economy would face should land be confiscated from the settlement’s beneficiaries. It rejected the disaffected Catholics’ contentions that the court of claims did not operate for sufficient time to evaluate the Irish situation effectively, and affirmed the conservative Declaration for Ireland of November 1660 as the basis for the settlement. The petition ended with a cautionary warning of desertion from the Jacobite camp if the land settlement was overturned: “Suffer me to make one step more, and query: Whether the Catholic Purchasers now to be turned out of possession, will join heartily with those that enter upon them?” This faction aligned themselves with Old Protestant representatives in the House of Lords to block the legislation. In the end, those in favor of repeal represented the larger interest, and James, forced to choose between war funding and bankruptcy, conceded to their demands and began to repeal the settlement. Even religion itself proved to be a divisive force. Questions of the monarch’s role in ecclesiastical structures and Irish Catholics’ often contradictory obligations to Rome and London precipitated not only acrimonious debate, but also persecution and bitterly vindictive conflict. These debates found their visible manifestation in the proposed 1661 remonstrance. This petition, attempted to reconcile the dissonance in Catholic theo-political theory created by their dual loyalty by affirming the supremacy of secular loyalty to the crown. The petition was also a political document responding to contemporary Stuart policy, whose ultimate object was to assert the right of Catholics to participate in a political society which increasingly appeared to cater solely to Protestant interests.[10] The remonstrance emphasized the Catholic duty of, “being entrusted by the indispensable Commission of the King of Kings with the Cure of Souls...and teaching the People that perfect Obedience...they are bound to pay to your Majesties Commands,” yet they still found themselves, “loaden with Calumnies, and persecuted with severity.” They lamented that they could not “with freedom appear to justify [our] Innocence, all the Fictions and Allegations against them are received as undoubted Verities;” and thus seek to “humbly beg your Majesties pardon, to vindicate both by the ensuing Protestation” their loyalty. The petition claims that, “These being the Tenets of our Religion, in point of Loyalty and Submission to your Majesty’s Commands, and our dependence of the See of Rome no way intrenching upon that perfect Obedience...we are bound to pay to your Majesty,” and elaborates on these “tenets”: "We do acknowledge and confess your Majesty to be our true and lawful King, supreme Lord, and rightful Sovereign of this Realm of Ireland, and of all other your Majesties Dominions. And therefore we acknowledge and confess our selves to be obliged...to obey your Majesty in all Civil and Temporal Affairs ... as the Laws and Rules of Government in this Kingdom do require at our hands. And that notwithstanding any power or pretension of the Pope... or by any Authority, Spiritual or Temporal, proceeding or derived from him, or his See, against your Majesty, or Royal Authority, we will still acknowledge and perform, to the uttermost of our abilities, our faithful Loyalty, and true Allegiance to your Majesty."[11] The remonstrance prioritized temporal loyalty over spiritual, denied the pope any tangible jurisdiction over monarchs, and implied that the pope’s role in secular affairs was an advisory one devoid of real political power if the monarch opposed his judgment. It was signed by 98 Catholic peers and sent to Ormond in 1661. The document immediately provoked rancorous debate. Most Catholic clergymen, who necessarily relied on Rome for patronage without a legal, state-sponsored episcopate of the Gallican variety, followed the lead of their backers and refused to sign the document for its judgments regarding papal power.[12] Bishops Anthony MacGeoghegan of Meath and Nicholas French of Ferns pamphleteered vociferous opposition to what they considered religious treason. Peter Walsh, one of the few clergymen who backed the remonstrance, who was also a supporter and confidant of Ormond’s, defended the document in various written works throughout the Restoration period. Formal protests were submitted, and a synod of Catholic clergymen in 1666 meant to resolve the issue only further retrenched animosity.[13] The movement collapsed and no remonstrance was ever submitted to the Crown.[14] Yet the ideological divisions within the Catholic community by no means ended with the defeat of the remonstrance. Not only did the questions it raised dominate clerical discourse for the remainder of the Restoration period, but the internal debate it generated also had concrete implications for the shape and character of the Restoration church. The appointments of the fervently anti-remonstrant Peter Talbot to the Archbishopric of Dublin and Oliver Plunkett to that of Armagh in 1669 fundamentally transformed the politics of Catholic ecclesiastical structures. Encouraged by the death or marginalization of many of the remonstrant clergy, Talbot embarked on a campaign of vindictive persecution against the remainder. They were relieved of official positions and denied material support. He was reported to have proudly proclaimed that the remonstrant clergy “would all hang” and ruthlessly purged them of all offices within the church.[15] Furthermore, the pamphlet debate continued in full fury well into the 1670s and did little to mend fissures in Catholic ecclesiastical ideology. Given these firmly-rooted ethnic, economic, and spiritual divisions, any claims that a common Irish Catholic nation made itself visible in the Restoration would be extremely difficult to substantiate. Yet, do these fissures necessarily mean that no Irish Catholic nation developed at all? Contemporary pamphleteers did not think so. Nicholas French’s The Bleeding Iphigenia was by no means the only tract which referred to the Irish Catholics as a “nation.” In fact, every side of Irish Catholic discourse in the Restoration era over the aforementioned issues of the land settlement and the Remonstrance often addressed “All Irish Catholics,” either described a coherent Irish Catholic nation or called for one, compartmentalized all Catholic experiences into one which fit their theses, and denounced efforts to divide the Irish Catholic polity in a tract which was contributing to just such a phenomenon. Though each version of history, each founding memory, and each sense of what “Irish Catholic” meant was distinct, all tracts contended that their prescribed formula could create this new idea or explain its existence. How is this difference between discourse and practice possible? Perhaps the issue arises from how the modern reader perceives nationhood. Instead of conceptualizing it concretely, as manifested in a coherent body of united individuals with a common ethnicity, culture, or interests, it may be more accurate to conceive of it as Ernest Renan did: as a people unified through common experiences and shared memories.[16] If we conceptualize it as such, it becomes evident that the idea of Irish Catholic nationhood appeared constantly in written work of the time, not as one singular, exclusively-defined identity, but as a fractured concept which agreed on little more than the fact that such an idea existed or should exist. As we have seen, Irish Catholic experiences varied widely in the Restoration era. Yet, discourse often attempted to ignore entrenched complexities in order to impose upon reality a set of homogenous experiences which all Catholics ostensibly suffered together. The reconstruction of history – over the recent war as well as more distant moments – provided the memorial basis for Catholic unity in the discursive realm. In using historical memory as a propaganda tool, each author to be examined asserted that their treatises could bring or explain Catholic unity under their terms, which often sought to justify or persuade the legitimacy of a short-term ambition. * * * The rhetoric of unity regarding the land settlement will be examined first. As Danielle McCormack has noted, the success of Catholic lobbying for restoration in this period was principally predicated upon proving the legitimacy of the 1648 peace, whose indemnity clause would directly contradict the Restoration policy of inordinately limiting the potential of Catholic innocence.[17] To support their positions, Catholic advocates of restoration simplified the 1640s into an era of nationalized, confessional conflict of English Protestant versus Irish Catholic. Yet, though the search for material interests undeniably acted as the principal imperative for this type of language, the effects of its presence took on quite a different form. Pamphleteers employed discourse as a bandage to patch up undeniably present acrimony by framing the past as an era of unity, and thus implied either that unity still existed or could be attained, and affirmed the image of Ireland as a state closely associated with Catholicism. The anonymously written pamphlet Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland from 1668 articulates the obdurate, oppositional position taken by Catholics such as Nicholas French and Oliver Plunkett, espousing a view of history wherein Irish Catholics since 1641 had displayed indefatigable, flawless loyalty, yet nevertheless had been betrayed in the land settlement by Ormond, the king’s ministers, and self-interested, land-grabbing Protestants.[18] This ideological history is intended to lump all Catholic experiences into a single, inflexible memory so as to purge the discourse of the complexities of the social reality and Catholic culpability for wartime atrocities and subsequently affirm the validity of Catholic claims to land. The opening line of the tract states that the author’s intention is to recount, “the sad and deplorable state of the Irish Nation, and the apparent injustice, and inequality used in the present Settlement of that Kingdom.”[19] He substantiates this claim of extant Irish nationhood by claiming the existence of a force which binds them all together: “It cannot be denyed, but that the Roman Catholicks of Ireland have infinitely suffered, during the late Usurped Government.”[20] A few sentences later, he entirely omits the qualifier of Catholicism, believing it instead to be implicit in the statement wherein he simply describes the sufferers as “the Irish alone,” thus conveniently ignoring the significant portion of Irish Catholics (and Protestants) whose experiences differed from those of his vision of a unified Catholic community collectively double-crossed by the settlement, and retrenches the link between Irishness and Catholicism.[21] Having thus postulated the existence of an Irish Catholic nation indivisibly united by the universal experience of dispossession, and casually conflated Irishness with Catholicism in a manner which inextricably and exclusively binds the two identities, the author then recounts a historically revisionist understanding of the past to defy Protestant land claims. As the antithesis to his purportedly unified Catholic body, he conceives of the enemy as one equally monolithic Protestant beast, fueled by greed, vengeance, and unfaltering support of Cromwell, blurring all nuance present in the equally complex reality of Irish Protestantism. He claims that the land settlement was legislated and supervised entirely by Protestants, and transmuted into law by, “a Parliament, which met on the 8th. day of May 1661. The Lower House of this Parliament was all composed of Cromwellists, and but very few of the Irish Peers were admitted to sit in the House of Lords, under the pretence of former Indictments. This Parliament made the first Act of Settlement...This Act decides all the doubtful expressions of the Declaration in favour of the Cromwellists, and to the disadvantage of the Natives, it allows only a Twelve-months time for the tryal of Innocents; But those Irish Gentlemen who served His Majesty abroad, together with the generality of the Nation pretending to Articles, (half a score persons only excepted, who were particularly provided for) are forever debarred by this Act, to recover their Estates without previous Reprisals, which is a thing not to be had in nature.”[22] Several important rhetorical devices are present in this passage. First, the word “Catholic” is never uttered. It is implicit in the word “Irish,” which is placed in direct opposition with a “Cromwellist” interest. The pamphlet, whose object is a searing takedown of former Protestant royalists such as the Earl of Clarendon or the Duke of Ormonde, erases their monarchist credentials by portraying them as greedy post-Cromwellists attempting to deprive loyal Irish Catholics of their land much like the Lord Protector did. Thus “Cromwellist,” in this context, does not necessarily refer to political leanings; rather, it likely denotes any Protestant beneficiaries of the land settlement regardless of their political affiliation during the war. This statement confessionalizes not only nationality, but also political loyalties during the war in an attempt to invalidate Protestant claims under accusations of treason. The essentialist implication that Protestants by nature are inherently inclined towards parliamentarianism is a cogent reduction of the historical narrative meant to promote the author’s vision of the Irish Catholic: resolutely royalist yet deferentially shocked at the loss of their lands to the “enemy.” The author underpins his position with a host of ethical and legal arguments. Morally, he claims that the: “parties pretending are the Irish Proprietors, and the London Adventurers: The first enjoyed it for so many ages...and they lost it at length upon the account of Loyalty, fighting for the Kings Interest against the Murderers of his Royal Father: the last...have no other Title but what they derive from the Ordinance of an usurped Government, for having disbursed vast sums of Money to countenance Rebellion, to pull down Monarchy, and put up a pretended Commonwealth. And yet the Land is adjudged for them, and confirmed to them and their Heirs forever...”[23] Furthermore, Cromwellian settlers, he asserts, are not technically entitled to their land until the 1641 Catholic, “rebels be declared by the two Houses of Parliament to be wholly conquered; until a Commission….[examines] who are the Rebels, and who are Innocents.”[24] Oftentimes, the distinction between logos and ethos are blurred. The author laments that the “Duke of York should now enjoy all that Land, by no other Title but that of the Regicides. The Land was given them by a Tyrant, for murthering the King, let the World judge of the goodness of their Title.”[25] This rather incisive averment insinuates that James’s land claim is illegal precisely because of its immorality; it was acquired through the crime of regicide. Implicit in this statement, of course, lies the contention that all Protestant claims to land are void by virtue of their ostensible parliamentarian and thus regicidal tendencies. Yet, according to the author, Protestants alone controlled the outcome of the settlement and ensured that Catholic capacity for reinstatement was minimal. First, the Catholic gentlemen in exile with the King were never reinstated. Next, the Protestants made it so difficult to “qualifie an Innocent, that it should be Morally impossible to find any such” in Ireland.[26] In a final, devastating act, Parliament in 1664, “decreed, that no benefit of Innocency, or Articles, shall be allowed... to any of the Irish Natives.” [27] The King is absolved of all culpability in this grand Protestant conspiracy, and blame instead is placed on the greedy minister Clarendon and the Earl of Orrery, who, “assured to the King, that there was a sufficient stock of Reprisals to, “satisfy all interests” and thus maintain the loyalist credentials of the Catholics.[28] The Protestants, furthermore, are motivated by lustful material concerns, not love for the king. This passage is worth quoting at length: ...the first Minister of State...telling, as for a final reason, that the Protestant English Interest cannot be maintained in Ireland, without extirpating the Natives…. True Religion was ever yet planted by preaching and good example, not by violence and oppression: An unjust intrusion into the Neighbours Estate, is not the right way to convert the ancient Proprietors...And as to the present Settlement of Ireland, it is apparent to the World, that the Confiscation of Estates, and not the Conversion of Souls, is the only thing aimed at. If by the English Interest we understand the present Possession of the London Adventurers, and of Cromwell's Soldiers, there is no doubt it is inconsistent with the restoration of the Irish, neither can the New English Title to Land be well maintained, without destroying the old Title of the Natives; even as the Interest of the late Commonwealth was incompatible.[29] In this version of history, divisions within the Irish Protestant community are effectively erased. They are replaced instead by an immutable bloc of irreligious, selfish, politically radical colonialists labeled the “English interest” who use the cover of missionary work to ultimately destroy the Catholic Irish--or the natives, as the author would say--for the worldly sake of appropriating their property. The Catholic experience is presented with an equal lack of nuance. Ignoring the existence of legally restored Catholics, the author maintains that Ormond “is gone with all his Greatness, and the miseries of the poor Irish do still continue” and laments the state of “that Nation, who are deprived of the Benefit of Law, Justice, and public Faith,” of course referring to the Catholic nation.[30] Furthermore, this narrative of history does not stop with the Restoration. The author sees the struggle between Irish Catholic royalism and English and Scottish Protestant radicalism as ongoing, and uses the memory of the attempted Presbyterian coup by Colonel Thomas Blood and the English Civil War, as sufficient justification for promoting Catholic interest in Ireland: For that the true Interest of England (as relating to Ireland) consists in raising· the Irish as a Bulwark, or balance, against our English and Scotch Presbyterians….when the Presbyterian practises and Covenant began to disturb these Kingdoms, the Papists and Prelatiques in Ireland (as well as in England) joined their hearts and hands against Presbytery for the King. [31] Thus, in arguing for the overturn of the land settlement, the author of A Narrative constructs his vision of an Irish Catholic nation: a unified, loyal polity, whose history consists of having fought heroically during the war yet being tragically betrayed by the king’s selfish ministers and their Protestant and imaginably Cromwellian or neo-Cromwellian supporters. Though egregiously misrepresenting the actual experience of the war, the nature of the land settlement, and the complex character of confessional identity in Ireland, it serves as adequate foundational history for his equally distorted vision of a unified Catholic nation. His conflation of “Irish” and “Catholic” further embeds the image of the entity of “Ireland” as fundamentally Catholic, and ignores the serious ethnic, social, and theological distinctions of the population. This position, however, was met with backlash from other members of the Old English community. Archbishop of Dublin and celebrated anti-remonstrant Peter Talbot’s 1674 Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects is an essential piece to examine, not only because its message differs vastly from that of A Narrative, but also because its purpose is slightly different and adds a complex element to the debate.[32] This text was not written with the purpose of obtaining anything material, and grounds its arguments in theological rather than political justification. Just like the author of A Narrative, Talbot uses the concept of Catholic unity, justified by the common experience of 1641, to accomplish a distinct goal: to end what he sees as immoral and heretical practices. Talbot follows the lead of the author of A Narrative and addresses the pamphlet to all of the “Roman-Catholics of Ireland,” thus implying that he believes Catholic unity exists, and sets out to prove it on his terms.[33] His main area of concern is the ostensible Irish Catholic obsession with property, decidedly sinful in his eyes. He affirms, “that the Happiness of Man in this present state consists more in possessing the riches of a good Conscience than the conveniences of this world.”[11] Yet he recognizes that, “Tis the depraved condition of human nature which makes us affectionately covet...such paltry trash.”[34] The “paltry trash” referred to is property confiscated by the land settlement, and his treatment of the incident manages to be wholly out of touch with both the new interest Catholics and the dispossessed faction. Again, what is an Inheritance? A parcel of land whereof our Ancestors were Masters as long as they liu'd; which term of Life (the only interest any of them could pretend to) is valued but at seven years purchase: Is it reasonable then think you, to fix your hearts so…passionately upon that earth, as if your Souls were to turn into it as well as your Bodies? Poor Souls! After a mans death hee has no expectation of any good for his Temporal Estate, being quite out of all circumstances of enjoying the least convenience from it.[35] Talbot here makes the oft-vaunted religious claim that acquisitive interests are inherently sinful. Such a belief carries additional weight in the phrenetic context of the Restoration era and the politics surrounding the land settlement. His call for salvation to, “be your comfort, not that empty one of possessing estates already disposed” was an unequivocally bold statement, because the tract aims to unite Irish Catholics on its terms.[36] As we have seen, the land settlement polarized Irish Catholics along lines of the repossessed and the dispossessed. Talbot’s argument essentially claims both sides to be reprehensible. Talbot spends several lengthy paragraphs asserting that, “Disobedience to our King necessarily implies disobeying God,” and denounces rebellion, “against His Majesty’s Government, Person, or Subjects,” as religiously and politically unforgivable.[37] He then supplements his contention with a more political rationalization for the deleterious essence of material concerns: they lead to rebellion. He asks, “how can it be imagined that [God] will allow of so great a crime as rebellion upon any score….much less upon that meer Temporal motive of saying or regaining an Estate?”[38] Challenging the land settlement, if not explicitly an act of revolt, can easily lead to one. Thus, “Let not the vain hopes of better Times, or the desire of passing a short Moment something more commodiously plunge you into the intolerable miseries of Hellfire for all Eternity... You have lost your real Estates, let not Imaginary ones fool you...”[39] His principle over which Catholics could find unity is one of collective responsibility: either to stop pressing for restoration, or to ensure that their Catholic brethren lay down their claims. And the shared experience which provides the imperative for such collective responsibility? The war. Talbot’s idealized understanding of 1641 stands in direct opposition to the view espoused by the author of A Narrative, who argues that, “ The Irish insurrection...hath not been accompanied with that Insolence and Malice in the beginning...which...some Pamphlets have charged the Irish with.”[40] His view is more in agreement with the Protestant narrative which emphasizes Catholic atrocities and greed instead of monarchical loyalty. He writes: You have had experience of...Preachers who pretend great zeal to God and the King’s service, and yet, at the same time Rebellion, and Murders were proou'd against them. These are the men you must not give ear to, nor converse with, lest you be infected with their Doctrine and perverted by their Example….And yet if either these, or I, or an Angel from Heaven should go about to persuade you that it is lawful to molest your Protestant neighbors, or defraud them of their goods, or enter upon their possessions by any means or method which the Law of the Land doth not allow, give them no credit...[41] This theologically-underpinned incarnation of Catholic unity is derived from a necessity of repentance. Like that of the author of A Narrative, Talbot’s vision of a united Catholic Ireland is prescriptive rather than descriptive; a means to an end rather than a factually accurate statement. Old English discourse over the land settlement, then, engendered several iterations of an Irish Catholic identity, none of which were reconcilable with each other nor with reality. Yet there are striking methodological parallels: both tracts assume the existence of a united Catholic Ireland as a critical element of their rhetorical strategy. Such a rhetorical strategy was a conscious choice and the considerations that went into it should not be taken lightly. One may assume that claims of unity would be the most effective way to convince others of their point; unity was evidently an ideal that appealed to much of the literate Old English community. A Gaelic perspective on the land settlement and memory of the Cromwellian wars is essential to any comprehensive assessment of the extent to which Catholic Irish identity formed in this period. The relative paucity of surviving Gaelic sources for everyday native Irishmen renders any evaluation of their contribution to Catholic discursive identity problematic. Yet one does remain which can offer insight into the way the Gaels constructed their version of Ireland: Gaelic poetry. Historical memory in Gaelic poetry was a familiar concept by the time of the Restoration. For centuries, Irish poets evoked the names of legendary heroes, battles, and kings to draw a firm line connecting their patrons to extant days of Irish glory.[42] During the Restoration period, however, a salient change took place. Gaelic poets began to treat the Irish heroic past as more self-consciously legendary, and presented it in stark contrast with recent memories of English conquest. Every element of English culture, society, and politics was acrimoniously criticized with relentless vigor and poetic wit. As such, Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, the most renowned poet of the era, claims in his poem “Thou Sage of Inanity” that the English historical pedigree pales in comparison to that of the Irish.[43] He derides a defender of Ormond who claims, “That his father or himself or any offspring of that race E'er performed such deeds as those,” performed by the Irish, as having, “been hoaxed by thy conceit.”[44] Shameful, cowardly Englishness is placed in direct dialogue with powerful, resplendent Irishness. This theme is expanded into the cultural realm and the traditionally English conception of civil and moral superiority is shrewdly reversed. The Restoration-era poems of Ó Bruadair depict a cultured, refined Gaelic Ireland ruined by boorish English brutes representing Cromwellian plantation and the Restoration settlement. Ó Bruadair laments this tragic state, writing in his 1674 poem “Woe Unto Him Who Hath Failed”: Every prayerful, faultless, noble, charming chieftain of the flock, Scattered through the land of Fionntan, growing with no lowly growth, Who hath been compelled to part with state and wealth and native nook...”[45] These “Noble-born, cultured, and high-minded chieftains” have been replaced by “ignorant dullards” and “ostentatious upstart[s] swollen high with pompous pride” whose pastimes include “plundering maids, single, defenceless, in delicate health.”[46] The title of the poem from which the last excerpt is taken, “Proud as a Chief is the Bailiff,” embodies the contempt with which the Gaelic poets treated the English upstarts who believed that they represented the rightful, moral and political governing class of Ireland. As Joseph Leerssen has noted, the English language was often used as a signifier in Gaelic-language texts for Saxon incivility. Restoration-era poems often contained Gaelicized loanwords from English--such as “clóca” or cloak, “cóta” or coat, sbuir or spurs, buat or boot, sdocaidhe, or stockings, locaidhe, or curls, ráipéar, or rapier, and sgarfa, or scarf, which were deliberately employed to disrupt the rhythm and rhyme scheme of the poem; these intentionally painful interruptions easily communicated to the reader or listener the invasionary nature of the English settlers.[47] Ó Bruadair explicitly treats with the contamination of the Irish language in his 1675 “I Shall Put a Cluáin On Thee,” where he writes, “Now the Béarla Teibidhe is the language which Ó Lonargáin used to talk...on account of the excessively silly bombast of the poets in Freamhain.'' Béarla Teidbidhe, the dialect of Irish which more liberally utilized loanwords from other languages, functions as a literary device signifying the degradation and decline of the Irish language by “silly bombast.”[48] From a confessional perspective, theologian Francis O’Molloy printed a comprehensive overview of the Irish language in 1677, which contained a lengthy tract lamenting the seemingly concurrent decline of the Gaelic nobility and language, writing: Pity the people for want of literacy after the destruction of their letters...Ireland has fallen under the shower against the host of its ancestors. The music of tunes has not remained, nor proper instruction, nor learning. The Irish do not even understand the Irish language, they speak it carelessly, they do not read it with any propriety; they abandon it, and leave honour behind….If you ask them to read verses in their own sweet mother tongue...they cannot. This is what happened to the Irish from Ireland.[49] The use of language as a symbol for not only cultural, but also national distinctions, is essential to note here for two reasons. First, it places the bardic poet, master of the Irish language, at the center of Gaelic national identity. Gaelic poetry in this time was something of a moribund cultural relic, existing in a world that had long considered it a vestigial curiosity. Indeed, Ó Bruadair died hopelessly impoverished, and much of his later poetry focuses on this destitution.[50] Ascribing language a primary role in the formation of Irish identity assigns the poet a relevance which he had most certainly lost. Second, by linking language and idealized history, Gaelic poets implicitly grounded Irish national identity in both ancient and recent historical memory: the glorious past, the apex of Irish linguistic hegemony and its cultural byproducts; and the depressing present, wherein language is under threat of extinction thanks to an influx of English colonialists bent on aggressive acculturation of the Gaels. Such perceptions of English savagery are reflected in Gaelic poetic treatments of social class. Gradually, the English of all classes replaced the lower classes of all ethnicities as the paradigm of boorishness and stupidity. Prior to the Restoration period, foreigners were categorized with poorer Gaels in criticisms of the uncultured and barbaric enemies of refined Gaelic Ireland. It was a classist—as opposed to a nationalist—distinction. Yet, Restoration poetry increasingly defined the brutes as distinctly English “boors” whose humble patrimony did not warrant their wealth and status, and whose rough, bumbling language and contemptible manners stood in stark opposition to those of the refined, well-spoken Gaels.[52] This conflation of ancient and recent memory also featured heavily in political rhetoric surrounding Gaelic perspectives of James II and their high expectations for his rule. Leerssen affirms that Gaelic poets rejoiced upon James II’s accession, due to his heritage and Catholic faith; thus, poems from the period were tinged with an arrogant optimism. Diarmaid Mac Carthaigh, for example, writes, “Behold there the Gaedhil in arms...they have powder and guns, hold the cities and fortresses; the Presbyterians, lo, have been overthrown, and the Fanatics have left an infernal smell after them,” thus drawing on a recent memory of conquest. Several lines later, he remarks, “Prophets and saints in great numbers have prophesied that Erinn would sure get help at the promised time; by Thy wonderful power, O Christ, and thy nurse’s prayer, everything they predicted shall certainly come to pass.”[53] James II’s accession was lauded in both recent and ancient terms; it was an event foretold by ancient Irish history to relieve the Gaels of their more recent suffering.[54] By contextualizing the often disconnected quilt of Gaelic history within a framework grounded in fresh experiences of collective trauma sustained by a vaguely-defined group of people in “Erinn” devoid of very present internal distinctions, these Gaelic poets implicitly “nationalized” a confederated Ireland in opposition to “Fanatics”; Protestants. This concept of unity is underpinned by the trajectory of the word “Éire,” which underwent linguistic signification during the Restoration period from a term denoting specific dynastic regions to one which conveyed the entire island.[55] Furthermore, the Irish side of the dichotomy between English and Irish is not necessarily exclusive to the Gaels. In fact, it lended Gaelic history a quasi-democratic character; in defining Irishness as a set of cultural and linguistic practices in opposition to Englishness, anybody who agreed with this contemporary critical assessment of Englishness and indulged in or sympathised with Gaelic customs could subscribe to the ancient legacy of old Gaeldom. Whether this happened or not is not relevant; what matters is that this poetry laid the basis for Irish Catholic national identity. Like Old English discourse, its artificial construction of a Catholic Irish memory had serious implications for Irish nationalism; Joseph Leerssen notes that the rise of Irish nationalism in the eighteenth century was characterized by a fascination with and appropriation of Gaelic culture which crossed confessional boundaries, emphasizing the importance of a language, culture, and history in direct opposition with that of the English.[56] Yet there is one important caveat: Gaelic discourse surrounding the land settlement did not explicitly address unity transcending ethnic boundaries as much as it laid out the historical and cultural groundwork for an ostensible common experience. Gaelic writers erased dynastic distinctions, spoke of common experience, and denigrated English language, manners, and history while touting their Gaelic counterparts, thus permitting unity. It was not clear from this literature who could participate in this unity and how qualified it would be. This will be discussed in the next section, focusing on Gaelic religious discussions. * * * As has been shown, the Irish Catholic clergy—and much of the laity—were irreconcilably factionalized throughout the Restoration period, with the initial split precipitated by the proposed 1661 remonstrance which would have subordinated the pope’s jurisdiction to the king’s. Internal acts of vindictiveness by squabbling Catholics in positions of authority, combined with Ormond’s deliberate rehashing of the issue in order to weaken Catholic political activity, served to isolate his Catholic allies from enemies based on who subscribed to the remonstrance, and allowed him to persecute the identified foes, ensuring that Catholics could not even appeal to their common religious beliefs for unity well after the remonstrance failed.[57] But, as with the land settlement, polemicists attempted to surmount these obstacles through discourse by either denying the reality of conflict, or attempting to impose unity artificially through their tract. And once again, as with the land settlement, the context of the topic to be dealt with dictated the experiences used to found this unity. The land settlement was a direct result of recent conflict; thus, memories of the 1640’s were evoked and framed so as to suit the agenda proffered. The remonstrance debate took place within the context of centuries of constantly evolving Catholic theology. Accordingly, the time frame for memories evoked was significantly enlarged. Father Peter Walsh’s mammoth-sized 1673 tract History and Vindication of the Loyal Formulary, or Irish Remonstrance is the first text to be examined.[58] Walsh, a Franciscan monk, was one of the earliest defenders of the remonstrance when the conflicts first began in the 1660s; he notably convinced Ormond to let the clergy summon a synod to ratify it. Walsh’s advocacy of unity is more subtle than that of some other tracts analyzed in this essay. Its implicit, rather than explicit, nature likely derives from the nature of the work. It is intended to defend a coherent set of principles and the man who constructed it from accusations of treachery rather than accomplishing anything concrete through mass support. Remonstrant Catholicism was a significant theo-political departure from orthodox Irish Catholicism, and should be treated as a micro-identity within a larger Catholic body with its own ideological history to ground it. In this case, instead of attempting to forge an Irish Catholic identity out of the shards left behind by its bitter internal conflicts, this tract attempts to construct a wholly new paradigm parallel to the defunct alternatives. As such, unity is implicit insofar as the memories evoked attempt to justify subscription to a piece of reformatory legislation so large it can more or less be considered a separate sect of Catholicism. In short, this tract is purely ideological; unity was the express goal. It does frame the remonstrance as an end to dissolve the penal laws, but that is not the priority. The end of the penal laws is another justification for the benefits of the remonstrance. So how was a “Remonstrantist” identity fashioned? Walsh envisioned the remonstrance model as an acceptable, patriotic manifestation of Catholicism in an increasingly hostile Stuart state which would affirm monarchical loyalty while simultaneously foregoing certain unsavory papal principles in the process. Due to the increased crackdown on Catholicism in the early 1670s, “the old and fatal Controversy” was rehashed in public debate and called into question the loyalty of all Catholics.[59] Walsh explained his remonstrance as, “ a conscientious, Christian...and satisfactory profession of the duty which by all Laws... they...owe His Majesty against all pretences of the Pope to the contrary.”[60] Walsh does not blissfully ignore the existence of deep divisions which may prevent adherence to his vision; instead, he embraces them, writing that soon after the drafting of the Remonstrance it was, “impugned by sundry Ecclesiastics of the Roman Communion and chiefly by many of those Irish who had received most benefit by it.”[61] The reason behind this open admission of failure is twofold. One, it is easier to deny Catholic divisions when there is no public referendum on the issue by which one can concretely gauge the extent of conflict. The synod provided such a referendum and thus its failure was historically impossible to deny. The second reason is that this embarrassment substantiates one of his key arguments: the steady degradation and increasing corruption of Rome over the last several hundred years. Crafting the narrative of his history as a constant, descending slope from Pope Gregory VII to the present, Walsh paints a picture of a corrupt, tyrannical institution which generates political instability by presenting itself as a parallel power structure to secular hierarchies. He claims that over the past six hundred years, Rome has been operating under a set of principles which, “many Thousands of the most Learned, Zealous; Illegible word Godly Illegible word, Priests, and Doctors, as well as [the laity], who never approved... but always reproved, condemned, abhorred, detested; and protested against them both, as not only heretical, but tyrannical.[62] Chief amongst these he names the unchecked, absolute power of the papacy. He enumerates specific examples of malevolent papal authority intended to evoke contemporary politics in such a way as to galvanize support for his ecclesiastical program against Rome which may eliminate differences between Irish subjects. He writes: That by divine right...the Bishop of Rome is Universal Monarch and Governor of the World, even with.... spiritual and temporal authority over all Churches, Nations, Empires, Kingdoms, States, Principalities; and over all persons, Emperors, Kings, Princes... and People...and in all things and causes whatsoever, as well Temporal and Civil, as Ecclesiastical or Spiritual….That He is empowered with lawful Authority, not only to Excommunicate, but to deprive, depose, and dethrone (both sententially and effectually) all Princes, Kings, and Emperors; to translate their Royal Rights, and dispose of their Kingdoms to others, when and how He shall think fit…. That whoever kills any Prince deposed or excommunicated by Him, or by others deriving power from Him, kills not a lawful Prince, but an usurping Tyrant; a Tyrant at least by Title, if not by Administration too: and therefore cannot be said to murther the Anointed of God, or even to kill his own Prince.[63] Tyranny, usurpation, and regicide were all terms typically lobbed at the Cromwellian regime in Catholic discourse. By framing these crimes as inherent to the Catholic Church, and not to the inevitable outcome of radical Protestantism, Walsh accomplishes several discursive feats. One, he sets familiar terms of objective abjectness within a new context and places the blame on a supposedly friendly institution, therefore forcing Catholics to make a choice between loyalty to their beliefs and loyalty to Rome. Two, he implies that his prescription is the only feasible path for Catholics who wish to remain loyal, and thus forces a second introspective confrontation regarding royal or papal allegiance. Three, he maintains that said tendencies are inherent not in the religion but in the institution, implying that following his example will not change liturgy or customs but will simply purge ecclesiastical structures of institutionalized corruption. Four, he constructs a narrative that renders a, “System of Doctrines and Practises... contrary to those...manifestly recommended in the...Gospel of Christ... in the belief and life of the Christian Church universally for the first Ten Ages thereof,” entirely culpable for the, “misfortunes and miseries whatsoever of the Roman-Catholics in England, Ireland, Scotland.”[64] Thus, in Walsh’s world of untenable Church institutions which act as the source of all present Catholic suffering, the only viable way forward lies in subscribing to remonstrance principles. These “misfortunes and miseries” are embodied in the penal laws. Following his affirmation of Rome as the cause of all Catholic tribulation, he expands upon the statutes as a shared traumatic experience to encourage unity over the remonstrance. He affirms that: All Roman-Catholics... without any distinction of Sex, or Age...from the most illustrious Peer, to the most obscure Plebeian...lie under all the rigorous Sanctions, and all the severe Penalties of so many incapacitating... Laws...And your Predecessors, before you, have well nigh a whole Century of years been continually under the smart or apprehension of the severity of them.[65] Such an evaluation of the present state was not entirely true. Irish Catholics often circumvented the penal laws which were rarely enforced during the Restoration period. Yet it is important to remember that this tract was published in 1674, and likely written two years before, at which time the indulgence controversy in England had ushered in a period of harsher persecution and a crackdown on Irish Catholics.[66] Using the aberrational reality of the contemporary political climate, Walsh seizes the opportunity to affirm that such experiences were the normative standard. Yet instead of using shared experiences of oppression to galvanize resistance to the crown, he contextualizes them within his own narrative of uniquely Catholic culpability. Thus, he contends that only Catholics can change their own situation, making subscription to the remonstrance an absolute necessity for any Catholic who wished to ameliorate their present struggles. Within this discourse, that would be all of them. One final point that is necessary to fully illustrate Walsh’s utilisation of memory to craft a remonstrant identity is his claim that the blame for the seemingly never ending cycle of Irish rebellion can be entirely attributed to the pope’s corrosive influence. This counters the oft-articulated English and Protestant claim that the Irish, or Catholicism, for that matter, are inherently rebellious, and supplements his assertion that loyalty to the crown was not only of paramount importance for Irish Catholics, but is also possible under the proper ecclesiastical leadership. Here, Walsh describes a Catholic Ireland forced into repeated rebellion against the Crown by malevolent Roman overlords. And Pope Pius V, His Declaratory Sentence...against Queen Elizabeth. And the Bull or Breve of Gregory XIII...granting to all the Irish that would join and fight in the Rebellion of the FitzGeralds of Desmond against Queen Elizabeth, even the same plenary pardon and remission of all their sins, which is granted to those engaged in a Holy War against the Turk...And that other of Clement VIII...of the like tenor and direction to the Irish Nation in general, animating them to join unanimously in Tyrone's Rebellion against the self-same heretical Queen... And lastly...that Bull or Breve of Plenary Indulgence...given yet more lately to all the Roman-Catholics of Ireland, who had join'd in the Rebellion there begun in the year 1641...witness in the second place all the no less unchristian, than unhappy effects of these very Bulls, Breves, Judgments and Indulgences.[67] Significantly, Walsh fails to add that many Catholics in all conflicts listed refused to rebel, and thus makes this history, just like his other narratives, available to all Catholics. It also skirts around the complicated question of Catholic culpability and the extent to which they acted illegally in the 1640s by affirming that Rome was the reason for any malicious action. Thus, Walsh’s defense of the remonstrance should really be considered a formulation of a specific brand of Catholic identity, just like those of the other authors. He draws on a range of memories, constructing various histories intending to support his argument, and connects these histories to contemporary politics in such a way as to provide a direct catalyst for unification. Catholic nationhood is rarely mentioned explicitly; it functions in this tract not as a means to an end but instead as the ultimate objective. The end goal is a new brand of Catholicism, loyal to the king over Rome, freed from the shackles of forced insurrection, and instead fully integrated, and presumably welcomed, into the Stuart political nation. Yet not everyone approved of such a radical restructuring of Catholic theo-political doctrine. Peter Talbot, Archbishop of Dublin and self-appointed nightmare of remonstrants, produced a pamphlet the following year in 1674 titled The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh: His New Remonstrant Religion. It thoroughly excoriates Walsh and his perceived treason, spends an undue amount of time examining laws regarding public whipping and the extent to which they apply to Walsh.[68] Even when he is not indulging his fantasies of subjecting Walsh to corporal punishment, the rage in Talbot’s writing is still palpable. He accuses him, perhaps correctly, of intending to found a “new religion” and becoming, perhaps incorrectly, the “Pope of this new Remonstrant Church.”[69] He labels him a traitor, and maintains that by accusing, “all Bishops, and by consequence the Representative Roman Catholic Church, or...its supreme Pastor together with all the other Bishops of the said Communion, of holding and swearing the lawfulness of Treason,” he has become the “greatest Rebel...of the Irish nation.”[70] It is significant, of course, that the Irish nation means Catholicism, and we shall see that in this tract, as in his The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects, Talbot constantly portrays Ireland as a categorically Catholic nation. This conflation of Ireland with Catholicism is intended to explain the reason why Walsh’s church failed in Ireland. Just as Walsh attempted to create a distinct, remonstrant Irish Catholic identity, so too does Talbot attempt to claim the existence of an opposing number which interprets history and shared Catholic experiences differently. The bulk of Talbot’s evidence for Walsh’s treachery lies in his accusations that Walsh’s remonstrance articulates nothing more than Anglican Protestantism. He argues that the remonstrance affirms that the, “King is the only supreme Governor of England, and of all other his Dominions, as well in all Spiritual or Ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal,” religious authority is duly denied to the pope, and thus the King is given, “all the spiritual power and authority in his own Dominions.”[71] He draws an immediate parallel with Protestantism, noting how, If you will read the Statutes 1. Eliz. 1. & 8. Eliz 1. You will find that the Kings of England’s supremacy, is so spiritual and sublime, that there needs no changing the signification of the word spiritual into temporal, and that a King of England (if he should think fit) may, according to the principles of the Protestant religion, established by the lawes of the land, giue power by letters patents, to any of his lay subjects to consecrate Bishops and Priests… [72] Thus, in practice, Walsh is, “the greatest Traitor and Rebel that breathes,” to the Catholic faith, stemming from his attempt to create a separate Protestant Church to make himself its pope rather than out of a genuine reforming impulse.[73] However, Talbot does not limit the scope of his argument to legal queries over the separation of temporal and ecclesiastical power. He uses the notion of collective memory and a constructed Catholic identity to prove that Walsh is truly operating contrary to the interests of all Irish Catholics. His selection is a curious one: the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered on King Henry II’s (unintentional) orders in 1170. The reasons for this choice are twofold. First, Talbot needs to formulate a narrative honoring Rome for the same period of time that Walsh did to provide a viable opposition model. Thus, he claims, “it’s much better….to justify…. doctrine of...the whole Roman Catholic Church, ever since S. Thomas his Martyrdom, then the fancies of a dull ignorant Friar.”[74] Walsh, however, objects against it the Martyrdom and Miracles of S. Thomas of Canterbury; it being evident out of all Histories, both sacred and profane; that S. Thomas suffered, was canonised and declared a Martyr, for defending the immunities of the Church, and particularly that of Churchmen from the coercive supreme power of secular Courts.[75] Becket’s murder is the founding moment for Irish Catholics because of its contemporary relevance; he died defending the ecclesiastical court’s integrity and independence from a crown increasingly attempting to encroach on spiritual authority. Yet there is something else implicit in such a choice, something far more salient. By claiming that Walsh, who has become a Protestant, has succeeded in bastardizing the memory of saint Thomas Becket, Talbot further retrenches the Irish Catholic and English Protestant worldview. Though Henry II was a Catholic, he was the English king who conquered Ireland, and as we have seen, Talbot’s criteria for Protestantism is predicated on how one perceives the divisions (or lack thereof) between temporal and spiritual power as vested in the monarch. Thus, Talbot ahistorically assigns to Henry the faith of Protestantism to define the Irish Catholics in opposition to the English monarch who, like those of the Restoration, desired for himself ecclesiastical supremacy. Having described a common experience to unite all Catholics, Talbot thus claims that a pan-Catholic identity already exists, with a rich history of papal loyalty and devoted to the separation of secular and ecclesiastical authority dating back to the martyrdom of Becket. He again claims that as Walsh believes, “that the oath of supremacy may be taken with a good conscience by Roman Catholics,” the entire, “Roman Catholic Church belives, and tells vs the contrary,” thus Walsh has, “no reason to be angry with Catholics, if they do not rely upon [his] word in any point that concerns their conscience or religion.”[76] By describing Walsh as a Protestant, Talbot attempts to unite all Catholics against him and avoid afracturing Catholic unity; Walsh is no Catholic. Yet unlike Walsh, Talbot is not attempting to create unity. He is attempting, like the author of A Narrative or himself in The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects, to justify its existence. As such, he isolates Peter Walsh as a lone figure in a defunct movement attempting to combat centuries of Catholicism. By what authority, he asks, may Catholics subscribe to the Remonstrance? None but your own authority; nothing but your saying, that the Roman Catholic Church hath err'd rashly and obstinately for these 600. last years, because it admitted not a Spiritual Supremacy in temporal Soueueraigns. Really Mr. Walsh, I do not believe your sole authority is a sufficient argument to prove the Church hath erred. To proue so rash an assertion you would fain make us mistrust the testimonies of holy and learned Authors of the Church History, as Baronius, Bellarmin, and others…[77] Talbot invokes the concept of nationhood to counteract Walsh’s ability to create a separatist Church. He even explicitly refers to it; he asks whether Walsh would “disgrace [his] own nation” by “promoting protestancy... and dividing...Catholics by his Remonstrance.”[78] Thus his crime extends beyond religious heresy into the secular sort; it also consists of attempting to divide his version of the Catholic nation. This division is a conditional one, however, in the subjunctive tense. It does not exist, of course; it is only the foolish attempt of a deranged traitor. Yet it is not enough to deny Walsh the privilege of support. To claim a united nation in opposition to Walsh, Talbot needs to deny his blatant persecutions of remonstrants. As we have seen, Talbot, in his position as Archbishop of Dublin, gleefully tormented the few remonstrant clergy remaining in his diocese. Yet he instead baldly lies about it: “I neuer persecuted, him nor any of his...Friars Remonstrants, in whose behalf he petitioned.”[79] Talbot, then, uses memory to controvert and invalidate Walsh’s construction of identity and instead articulates an iteration of Catholic identity that he claims as not only a viable alternative, but perhaps more importantly, already the reality. *** How did the Gaels perceive the remonstrance? Clues can be discerned from poetry. As we examined in the last section, the land settlement produced a wealth of tracts chronicling a collective set of experiences for all of Ireland; yet the question of who is included is left rather ambiguous. That question will be answered in this section. In his 1670 poem “O God of the Universe,” Ó Bruadair laments, Dark is the light of the sun and the heavenly elements, And rent is the covering surface of earth's grassy countenance, I deem it no wonder that they should then wholly extinguished be, Seeing that clerics transgressing their oaths into treason fall.[80] The decidedly critical outlook of the remonstrants – or rather, “The corrupt and un-Irish conceits of this renegade forger-clique” – finds a scapegoat in Peter Walsh.[81] In his 1670 tract “‘Tis Sad for Erin’s Fenialí Bands,” Ó Bruadair condemns Walsh as “guilty of the wounds inflicted on the land of Fál, Whicli lies to-day beneath his hand all powerless to act or stir.”[82] Yet such criticisms raise important questions. If the remonstrant clergy and Walsh are traitors, who are they betraying? The Catholic religion, or Ireland itself? Either way, the implications are massive. If Walsh is betraying Catholicism, then Ó Bruadair is claiming the existence of another vision of Irish Catholicism more in line with Talbot’s thinking. If the answer is Ireland, then by consequence all Catholics must be counted as Irish. In examining Ó Bruadair’s treatment of Catholicism as it relates to his already-discussed perception of a Gaelic Ireland, a mostly coherent, yet at times contradictory, vision of who Ó Bruadair considers Irish emerges. His 1680 work “Those Who Once Knewest The Law” sheds some light on these queries. The poem is written in response to the news that one Master Verling, a lower Gaelic nobleman, converted to Protestantism for admittance to Trinity College, Dublin.[83] The poet writes: Those who once knewest the law of the flock that cleaved closest to Christ, And who therefore have let themselves be by the cruellest slavery oppressed, Reflect in thy mind on thyself and observe how accursed the deed To yield to the heart's base desires and sell heaven for a short spell of life.[84] Verling’s treachery is not to Gaeldom but to Catholicism as a whole, and the oppressed peoples mentioned are all Catholics, not just ones of a certain ethnic persuasion. These few short lines reveal a startling conclusion: what Joseph Leerssen mistakenly considers an exclusive, Gaelic identity developing in the Restoration period should really be understood as an Irish Catholic identity.[85] Yet still, this issue is complicated by the fact that the culture and history of Ireland Ó Bruadair espouses is very much a Gaelic one. It is thus necessary to examine his perception of Old English eligibility for this collective memory. Paradoxically, in his rather exclusionary language which separate Gauls from Gaels, he lumps Catholics of all persuasions into a de-ethnicized confessional identity. As reverend Mac Erlean notes, Gauls is a complicated term. It may designate Gauls, Vikings, Normans, or English. Until the seventeenth century, Gauls were characterized and distinguished by different physically descriptive terms such as “fair,” or “bright.” Yet, as the social upheaval of the seventeenth century introduced various new settlers into Ireland, words such as “old” or “new” began to be used, and physical descriptions such as “fair” or “black” became transmuted so as to solely convey moral judgements.[86] Thus “Gall” by Ó Bruadair’s time was a decidedly ambiguous term. As such, we find various pieces praising them, even though they are not Gaels: Many daring soldiers, many swords and volumes, Many masts and currachs, Did that fleet's crew bring across the sea from Britain, Everlasting radiance. The diploma of these Galls is Christ's religion And their prince's patent, The prescription of five hundred years' possession. 'Tis no living falsehood.[87] Thus, the Anglo-Irish conquerors of the twelfth century are distinguished from the Cromwellians of the 1640’s because of their religion. Though their religion does not make them “Gaels,” it does establish a bond with them, symbolized in this particular poem by the marriage between the “Choicest wheat of Erin's Gaels and Galls.”[88] Catholic Gauls are included in the land of Erin, and as we have seen in the previous section, are also included in the land’s Gaelic past which was founded for this united island. The most important Gaelic-language work in forging a discursive Catholic union between Gaels and Gauls is Ó Bruadair’s poem “Love of Sages,” written in praise of John Keating, the Old English Chief Justice of Ireland who acquitted the Gaelic noblemen accused of complicity in the supposed 1682 “Popish Plot.”[89] In the poem, Ó Bruadair identifies two types of Galls. One includes the, Royal champions for the king’s cause murdered Made these sons of malediction proud; Soon the frauds of sullen, hateful scoundrels Flourished fierce without a spark of shame.[90] This classification refers to the Protestant English officials who poisoned the king’s ear with fantasies of Catholic rebellion. The other group – or as Ó Bruadair writes, it, “Galls like these” – including Keating, “shield of our protection/Against the wicked tramp’s perfidious snares.”[91] This second category comprises the Catholic Galls of Ireland, or the Anglo-Normans, to whom the Gaels “owe allegiance.”[92] To further complicate this conception, Ó Bruadair makes several bold statements in his praise of Keating which seem to contradict the notion that these Gauls are even foreigners. First, he lauds the “the chivalrous blood of that generous true Irish Gall,” a seemingly blatant linguistic paradox.[93] Several lines later, he similarly praises him for bringing “comfort to your oppressed Countrymen.”[94] Thus, the distinction between Gael and Gall persists, yet the Galls seem to count as Irish. How so? Catholicism, of course, unites them. The Irish nation conceived by Ó Bruadair and the other Gaelic poets reviewed in the Restoration period is one not of Gaels, as Joseph Leerssen maintains, but of Catholics. As we have seen, Gaelic language, culture, and history were touted with characteristic fervor in these thirty volatile years. Yet these were defined not in opposition to the Old English, but to the English Protestant invaders. The memories that were drawn upon were indeed Gaelic, yet they were memories to which all Catholics could subscribe; thus his praising of Keating for appreciating the Gaels for who they were.[95] In uniting them in the present as one Catholic force, Ó Bruadair further implies that they also should subscribe to this history, as all of Ireland increasingly became united as one single geographic, religious entity. Thus, just as the Old English pamphleteers attempted to resolve economic and ecclesiastical animosities by professing some sort of unified Irish Catholic identity (implicitly surmounting ethnic differences), the Gaelic poets, in their quest to comprehend the transformed society around them, smoothed over ethnic differences and the complexities of recent experience to articulate a coherent version of Ireland. This Ireland which was Gaelic in culture, language, and history, was now also available to Catholic Gauls as a result of supposedly shared recent experiences. Like those of the Old English writers, such affirmations had little grounding in reality. Yet their existence is vital to understanding how Irish nationalism, in the eighteenth century, took place within a context of “cultural-political osmosis” wherein even the English-speaking, Protestant population adhered to this vision of Ireland in direct opposition to England. In conclusion, an Irish Catholic nation did form in the Restoration period, insofar as it appeared in discourse as an appealing alternative to confusing and oftentimes depressing social realities. It transcended ethnic, economic, and theological bounds, yet never appeared in the same form more than once. Irish Catholic identity can only really be described as a rhetorical chameleon, used constantly – in many more works than just the above discussed – yet changing to adapt to the circumstances of the propaganda. Gaelic poetry and the remonstrance discourse, more or less devoid of ulterior motives other than asserting the continued role of the poet in society and formulating a remonstrant versus anti-remonstrant identity, respectively, came the closest to articulating a clear, ideologically-founded Catholic nation. Yet all of the tracts examined, and several more which I have not had the space to assess here, have one common theme: the discourse is massively disconnected from reality. Any development of Irish Catholic identity in this period was purely rhetorical and was not reflected by any actual events. This is not to say these tracts have no importance in posterity. They certainly do. Nationhood as defined by the parameters set out in this particular essay, is inherently both rhetorical and practical; it must originate in articulations of experience and a call for unity before this actually happens. Rhetorical unity is necessarily anticipatory of actual nationhood; Restoration articulations of nationhood may be considered, with the benefit of historical hindsight, to have anticipated what Tom Garvin deems, “Irish separatist nationalism as a popular political creed,” that originated in the eighteenth century.[96] The seventeenth century provided the rhetorical framework and memorial precedent; the eighteenth century, with its mass persecutions of all Catholics and economic and political imperialization of Ireland, provided the immediate impetus to subscribe to the memory.[97] We should be careful not to rely too heavily on hindsight, however, and should focus equally on the immediate impact of the discourse within the context of the Restoration era. The literature of the 1660s, 70s, and 80s had the immediate effect of enforcing the image of Ireland as a Catholic nation, and in describing Ireland in opposition to English Protestantism, it became an inherently, if unwittingly, subversive entity. This discourse also offers one more important revelation, alluded to earlier in this essay: given that Irish unity was employed in such a myriad of tracts from this period, one may assume it was an effective rhetorical tool and appealed to broad swaths of the Catholic population. Thus, though they could not agree on how they should unite, it appears that many Irish Catholics did agree that indeed they should. Given the Protestant ascendancy, increasing imperialization, and marginalization of Catholics in political life, the fact that this was the case is not surprising. Yet it is also not surprising that unity did not happen: the brunt of this oppression was not felt by the entire population. The Stuarts did not perfect the art of confessional, economic, and political persecution in Catholic Ireland. The Hanovers, however, did. Endnotes [1] Nicholas French, The bleeding Iphigenia or An excellent preface of a work unfinished, published by the authors frind, [sic] with the reasons of publishing it.] 1675. 2, 3, 6 [2] Tim Harris, “Restoration Ireland: Themes and Problems” in Restoration Ireland: Always Settling, Never Settled, edited by Coleman A. Dennehy (Hampshire, England, 2008). 13 [3] Danielle McCormack, The Stuart Restoration and the English in Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016). 35-8 [4] Danielle McCormack, The Stuart Restoration and the English in Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016). 11-14 [5] Tim Harris, “Restoration Ireland: Themes and Problems” in Restoration Ireland: Always Settling, Never Settled, edited by Coleman A. Dennehy (Hampshire, England, 2008). 13 [6] Tim Harris, “Restoration Ireland: Themes and Problems” in Restoration Ireland: Always Settling, Never Settled, edited by Coleman A. Dennehy (Hampshire, England, 2008). 10 [7] Danielle McCormack, The Stuart Restoration and the English in Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016). 87 [8] Ann Creighton, “Grace and Favour: The Cabal Ministry and Irish Catholic Politics, 1667-1673” in Restoration Ireland: Always Settling, Never Settled, edited by Coleman A. Dennehy (Hampshire, England, 2008). 152 [9] Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Making Ireland Modern (Gill and MacMillan: Dublin, 2006). 235 [10] Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Making Ireland Modern (Gill and MacMillan: Dublin, 2006). 237-8; Danielle McCormack, The Stuart Restoration and the English in Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016). 98 [11] Peter Walsh, P. W's Reply to the Person of Quality's Answer: Dedicated to His Grace, the Duke of Ormond. Paris: [s.n.], 1682. 88-80 [12] Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Making Ireland Modern (Gill and MacMillan: Dublin, 2006). 238-9 [13] Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Making Ireland Modern (Gill and MacMillan: Dublin, 2006). 239 [14] Danielle McCormack, The Stuart Restoration and the English in Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016). 96-98; Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Making Ireland Modern (Gill and MacMillan: Dublin, 2006). 239 [15] Ann Creighton, “Grace and Favour: The Cabal Ministry and Irish Catholic Politics, 1667-1673” in Restoration Ireland: Always Settling, Never Settled, edited by Coleman A. Dennehy (Hampshire, England, 2008). 144-6 [16] Ernest Renan, What is a Nation? (Lecture at Sorbonne, 11 March 1882 in Discours et Conferences, Paris, Caiman-Levy, 1887). 277-310 [17] Danielle McCormack, The Stuart Restoration and the English in Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016). 87 [18] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland: Whereby the Just English Adventurer Is Much Prejudiced, the Antient Proprietor Destroyed, and Publick Faith Violated : to the Great Discredit of the English Church, and Government, (if Not Re-Called and Made Void) As Being Against the Principles of Christianity, and True Protestancy. Lovain: [s.n.], 1668 [19] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 1 [20] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 1 [21] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 1-2 [22] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 7, [23] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 12 [24] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 11-12 [25] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 17 [26] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 5-6 [27] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 8-9 [28] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 10 [29] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 16 [30] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 25 [31] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 25 [32] Talbot, Peter, The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects. Represented by Peter Talbot In a Letter to the Roman-Catholiks of Ireland, Particulary Those of the City and Diocese of Dublin. [Douai: s.n., 1674.] [33] Talbot, Peter, The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects. 1 [34] Talbot, Peter, The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects. 1 [35] Talbot, Peter, The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects. 1-2 [36] Talbot, Peter, The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects. 7-8 [37] Talbot, Peter, The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects. 10 [38] Talbot, Peter, The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects. 2, 13 [39] Talbot, Peter, The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects. 13 [40] Talbot, Peter, The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subjects. 9 [41] Anonymous, A Narrative of the Settlement and Sale of Ireland, 18 [42] Talbot, Peter, The Duty and Comfort of Suffering Subiects. 15 [43] Joseph T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986). 198 [44] Joseph T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986). 220; Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Poems of Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Part I, CONTAINING POEMS DOWN TO THE YEAR 1666, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by REV. JOHN C. MAC ERLEAN, S.J. (London, 1913). 206 [45] Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Poems of Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Part I, CONTAINING POEMS DOWN TO THE YEAR 1666, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by REV. JOHN C. MAC ERLEAN, S.J. (London, 1913). 207 [46] Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Poems of Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Part II, CONTAINING POEMS FROM THE YEAE 1667 TILL 1682, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by REV. JOHN C. MAC ERLEAN, S.J. (London, 1913). 33 [47] Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Poems of Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Part I, CONTAINING POEMS DOWN TO THE YEAR 1666, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by REV. JOHN C. MAC ERLEAN, S.J. (London, 1913). 197, 203; Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Poems of Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Part II, CONTAINING POEMS FROM THE YEAE 1667 TILL 1682, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by REV. JOHN C. MAC ERLEAN, S.J. (London, 1913). 21, 39 [48] Joseph T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986). 204 [49] Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Poems of Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Part II, CONTAINING POEMS FROM THE YEAE 1667 TILL 1682, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by REV. JOHN C. MAC ERLEAN, S.J. (London, 1913). 62-3 [50] Joseph T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986). 205 [51] Joseph T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986). 220 [52] Joseph T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986). 251 [53] Joseph T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986). 224-5 [54] Joseph T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986). 227 [55] Joseph T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986). 225 [56] Joseph T. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986). 248-252 [57] Danielle McCormack, The Stuart Restoration and the English in Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016). 96 [58] Peter Walsh, The History & Vindication of the Loyal Formulary, Or Irish Remonstrance ... Received by His Majesty Anno 1661 ..: In Several Treatises : with a True Account and Full Discussion of the Delusory Irish Remonstrance and Other Papers Framed and Insisted On by the National Congregation At Dublin, Anno 1666, and Presented to ... the Duke of Ormond, but Rejected by His Grace : to Which Are Added Three Appendixes, Whereof the Last Contains the Marquess of Ormond ... Letter of the Second of December, 1650 : In Answer to Both the Declaration and Excommunication of the Bishops, &c. At Jamestown. (London, 1673). [59] Peter Walsh, The History & Vindication of the Loyal Formulary. ii [60] Peter Walsh, The History & Vindication of the Loyal Formulary. ii [61] Peter Walsh, The History & Vindication of the Loyal Formulary. ii [62] Peter Walsh, The History & Vindication of the Loyal Formulary. xiii [63] Peter Walsh, The History & Vindication of the Loyal Formulary. xvii-xviii [64] Peter Walsh, The History & Vindication of the Loyal Formulary. xvi [65] Peter Walsh, The History & Vindication of the Loyal Formulary. iv-v [66] Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Making Ireland Modern (Gill and MacMillan: Dublin, 2006). 265 [67] Peter Walsh, The History & Vindication of the Loyal Formulary. xi-xii [68] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh: His New Remonstrant Religion : the Articles Whereof Are to Be Seen In the Following Page : Taken Out of His History and Vindication of the Loyal Formulary .... Printed at Gant: [s.n.], 1674. 9 [69] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh. 11, 13 [70] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh. 10, 57 [71] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh. 28 [72] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh. 28 [73] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh. 67 [74] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh. 17 [75] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh.13 [76] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh. 40 [77] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh. 41 [78] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh. 44 [79] Peter Talbot, The Friar Disciplind, Or, Animadversions On Friar Peter Walsh. 78 [80] Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Poems of Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Part II, CONTAINING POEMS FROM THE YEAE 1667 TILL 1682, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by REV. 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Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986). 252 [86] Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Poems of Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Part II, CONTAINING POEMS FROM THE YEAE 1667 TILL 1682, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by REV. JOHN C. MAC ERLEAN, S.J. (London, 1913). 50 [87] Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Poems of Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Part II, CONTAINING POEMS FROM THE YEAE 1667 TILL 1682, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by REV. JOHN C. MAC ERLEAN, S.J. (London, 1913).83 [88] Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Poems of Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Part II, CONTAINING POEMS FROM THE YEAE 1667 TILL 1682, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by REV. JOHN C. MAC ERLEAN, S.J. (London, 1913).83 [89] Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Poems of Daibhi Ó Bruadair, Part II, CONTAINING POEMS FROM THE YEAE 1667 TILL 1682, Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by REV. 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Author Name < Back Shoring Against Our Ruin: An Investigation of Profound Boredom in Our Return to Normal Life Virginia Moscetti Returning to campus after what felt like a lifetime of virtual schooling, quarantining, and all the other cheerful aspects of living and studying during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was thrilled to finally return to a normal college experience. And yet, it has been anything but normal. Besides the fact that the pandemic continues to drag on indefinitely, bringing with it certain indispensable COVID prevention strategies, like mask-wearing and bi-weekly testing, there is something more obstructing my return to the normal, pre-pandemic college experience I had so eagerly anticipated. My old routines now feel empty, and my previous passions and interests have fallen flat. I trudge about daily life listlessly, keeping up with my academic and extracurricular commitments simply because I don’t want to royally screw up the rest of my life. In short, I am bored, and I’m not the only person to feel this way. According to a recent article by Times Magazine, approximately 12 million Americans quit their jobs last summer. For Americans between the ages of 20-34, 14 million have either resigned or neglected to join the traditional workforce. While some resigned in pursuit of higher wages and better working conditions, a significant portion of Americans sought non-traditional jobs or simply reveled in “funemployment”. This phenomenon, informally termed “The Great Resignation,” is deeply connected to the pandemic and our recent quasi-return to normal. During the initial stages of the pandemic, everything came to a standstill. Going to work, walking to class, living in a dorm, and frequenting friends and family was no longer possible. Daily routines, as a result, altered substantially. We became accustomed to working, studying, and interacting through screens from the relative comfort of our homes. We developed hobbies to pass the time. Our relationships changed, for the better and also for the worse. Ultimately, everyone desperately looked toward a final return to normal, but with the semi-normal return that came, we were strikingly confronted with how much had changed within the world and within ourselves. With so much change, a return to pre-pandemic existence seems impossible. What one did then is not the same as what one does now, and, by extension, our possibilities for individual meaning-making in the world are not the same as our previous ones. Unable to authentically recreate past forms of meaningful doing and acting in the world as they used to exist, the attempt to do so in our quasi-post-COVID life becomes pervaded with a sense of meaninglessness. Going to work a specific job because that is what one used to do is no longer a sufficient justification for working it now, especially since, with so many people quitting their jobs or taking untraditional work trajectories, the structure of a working life has substantially, perhaps even normatively, changed. Unless that work continues to generate meaningful fulfillment, reenacting old ways of performing one’s daily life can produce a diffuse sense of indifference or boredom. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics , 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger describes the boredom resulting from a confrontation with a sense of meaninglessness in our actions and routines as the phenomenon of “profound boredom.” Heidegger argues that in profound boredom, we are exposed to the structures of our existence and, through that exposure, can newly discover meaningful ways to project ourselves into the world. In this paper, I will investigate the extent to which Heidegger’s profound boredom is reflective of the form of boredom playing out in contemporary society and how his solution might offer a productive remedy. In order to do this, I will reference T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” a poem which copes with widespread disillusionment in modern society following the devastation of World War I and the increased technological advancement in the Second Industrial Revolution. Examining both Eliot’s and Heidegger’s representations of boredom, I will demonstrate (1) how boredom can take on existential proportions, (2) how globally disruptive experiences can instantiate this boredom, and (3) how this boredom may be resolved by acknowledging our own facticity and our own freedom to choose how we want to act within our world by meaningfully repeating past possibilities of doing and acting. Comportment, Dasein, and The One According to Heidegger, all individuals have a particular style or way of interacting with the features of the world. This style, which Heidegger terms comportment, is structured by an individual’s goals and projects. In short, what they find meaningful. For instance, entertaining the ultimate goal of becoming a philosopher, I am oriented and disposed towards the world accordingly: I choose to undertake an undergraduate major in philosophy, I dedicate myself to my philosophy courses, and I choose to attend graduate school all for the sake of this goal. As I do so, I develop a particular manner of comporting myself toward (i.e., a particular way of acting in) the world. This comportment, while it pertains uniquely to each individual, is superimposed upon the individual’s “Dasein”. According to Heidegger, human beings are a particular type of entity which he terms “Dasein” – it can be loosely translated from German to mean “being-there”. Dasein interacts with the features of the world to advance its own particular goals and projects which illuminate a certain “style” or way in which Dasein approaches the world. As Heidegger describes, Dasein performs its actions and activities (i.e., its being) according to this particular style or comportment. Reciprocally, Dasein’s actions and activities reflect the comportment through which it approaches them. For example, if I entertain the ultimate goal of becoming a philosopher, I comport myself and am disposed toward the world accordingly: I choose to major in philosophy, I dedicate myself to my philosophy courses, and I choose to attend graduate school all for the sake of this goal. In pursuing certain projects and goals, I develop a particular manner of comporting myself toward (i.e., a particular way of acting in) the world. Additionally, the way that I act and do things (my comportment) both reflects and constitutes my understanding of myself. As I perform the actions that reflect the goal of becoming a philosopher, they also inform and constitute how I understand myself to “be” or act within the world as this particular individual which finds such and such projects meaningful. Thus, by attending my philosophy classes, I reinforce my understanding of myself as someone who loves philosophy and aims to become a philosopher. Of course, I can do things that would seemingly be “out of character” or at odds with my regular comportment, but in designating such an instance as “out of character,” I directly make reference to a contradiction between how I understand myself to act and a particular action or instance. Thus, to use Heideggerian terminology, as Dasein performs its being according to a particular comportment, it relates that comportment to the understanding of itself as itself, so that the mode in which it enacts its being is synchronized with how it understands itself to be. While, being in the world according to a particular comportment, I do, act, and choose things that reflect a particular understanding of myself, what I do, how I act, and what I choose is invariably subject to what is available to me within my world. Just as I could not build a house without the tools to do so, I could not pursue a career in philosophy if philosophy were not an established (or at least an existent) field of study. Accordingly, Dasein’s involvement in the world is structured by the features and beings present and accessible to it within that world. Dasein’s being in the world is also a ‘being-with’ others. Being-with becomes especially apparent in the manners in which Dasein interacts with objects and other features of the world through historical and culturally contingent social norms. For Heidegger, these conventions are exemplified through “what one does.” For example, one shakes hands when meeting a new person, one places one’s napkin on one’s lap at the table prior to beginning a meal, one drinks with a glass and eats with forks, knives, and spoons. While “one” does not designate any one particular individual, it designates an abstract collection of us (in which we are all included) that Heidegger terms the “They”. Insofar as I do as “one” does, I participate in the “They”, so that my actions reflect the larger social conventions of my community rather than what is meaningful and particular to me. By adopting these social conventions and rooting the “meaningfulness” of my actions within a contingent social order, I simultaneously flee the responsibility and accountability for my actions (as things which “I” rather than “They” elect to pursue) and relinquish my inherent freedom to pursue actions that are meaningful to me. Still, doing and knowing what one does fundamentally configures my “everyday” being-in-the-world (i.e., the way I act and relate to the world). As Mark Wrathall writes in How To Read Heidegger , “in the first instance and most of the time, we relate to others in the mode of ‘the one,’ which means that we understand ourselves in terms of what one says about the way one should live, that is, in terms of what one ordinarily does in situations that confront us”. Therefore, Dasein’s everyday existence (i.e., the typical or common way in which it is, both in terms of what activities it enacts and how) is, to some extent, immediately structured by what one does. For example, I go to the grocery store or the farmers market because that is what one does to purchase food in my community. At the grocery store, I acquire ham and other meats at the deli because that is what one does. My decision to go to the grocery store and my entire experience within that grocery store is organized by what one does. And this same structure applies to most of Dasein’s other everyday activities. Because Dasein’s “everydayness” is, to some extent, fundamentally structured by what one does, Dasein is never entirely inextricable from the “They.” Still, it is important to reiterate that “what one does” is not intrinsically meaningful in and of itself but a way of acting that reflects our socio-historically contingent norms and conventions. During our pre-pandemic existence, departing to work or school, completing errands outside of the home, and visiting and engaging with others in physically close proximity was simply what one did and, as such, characterized our “everyday” existence. In enacting these doings and activities of “what one did,” we became oriented toward and learned to relate to the world in terms of the pre-pandemic “one.” Consequently, the pre-pandemic understanding of what one did formed part of our self-understanding, or understanding of our everyday they-selves which, in turn, undergirded those particular selves we claimed to be or exist as. For example, a college student understands his everyday they-“self” as a college student (at least partially) in terms of what one does in college. In the pre-pandemic world, this meant attending classes within a classroom, studying in a library alone or amongst friends, securing internships, discovering a potential career path, perhaps occasionally partying. As he performs these things, he relates them back to his self-understanding as a “college student.” During the seemingly interminable months of quarantine, daily life underwent a fundamental transformation. Everyone, to some extent, conducted their social, academic, and work lives on various virtual platforms. Thus, what one did and how one worked altered drastically during quarantine. For our anonymous college student, virtual schooling and socializing became integrated into his everyday existence, and thus formed part of his everyday “self,” or how he acted and understood himself to be as a college student. Now, emerging out of quarantine with our quarantine beards and unshaven legs, we are tasked with what feels like the Herculean feat of “returning-to-normal” pre-pandemic life and what one did in that life. And yet, because we established a new normal and thus a new definition of what one does during quarantine, that “return” implies reproducing a performance or rehearsal of oneness that is, after such significant change since the onset of the pandemic, no longer applicable or even existent. As a result, the prevailing expectation of a return to normalcy confronts us with a conflict of “oneness” in which what one did and how one understood oneself to be as a college student, as a software engineer, doctor, or librarian is no longer what one does or how one understands oneself to be as such in our current world. In other words, the pre-pandemic “one” no longer determines our performance of “oneness.” However, here we are confronted with another problem: what does one do now? And by extension, how does one even understand oneself to be in the world? Is our college student still a college student within the pre-pandemic social definition and understanding of the term after spending close to a year in a virtual social and academic environment? Does he even understand himself to be the same college student that he once was before the pandemic? If not, is he left without anything to refer to in order to devise meaning and intelligibility from the strange, anomalous current life-experiences he must undergo? And, what if his goals and projects changed during quarantine? Must he now rehearse, along with all of us, what one did in the pre-pandemic life with those same goals and projects despite their inability to cohere with his current way of relating to the world? What are the implications of this rehearsal of pre-pandemic one-ness for Dasein who, after so much time understanding itself, relating to the world, and, as it were, devising meaning of its existence through the social conventions and modes of being associated with quarantine, must now adopt a performance of one-ness that is no longer meaningful to it; that no longer reflects how it understands itself to “be?” Published in 1922, six years after World War I and approximately fifty years after the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution, T.S Eliot’s modernist poem “The Waste Land” appears to cope directly with the implications of meaninglessly rehearsing “what one did.” In Part II of the poem, A Game of Chess , a man and woman are having a disjointed conversation. The woman anxiously exclaims “What shall we do? What shall we ever do?” to which the man responds cryptically: “ The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.” In asking what they will do, the woman expresses an existential concern for meaningful, fulfilling “doing” or action. The man, however, suggests that no such doing is possible and that they are instead condemned to a life of listlessly repeating old routines until death or some other existential “knock upon the door” delivers them from it. The poem famously purports to diagnose the catastrophic ills and pains of modern society in the post-war period. With the unprecedented violence of World War I and the increased mechanization of modern society following the Second Industrial Revolution, the profound and diffuse listlessness that Eliot describes appears to be symptomatic of the failure of traditional values and certainties such as religion, family life, and canonical forms of art and literature to infuse human life with meaning in this new context. As the poem describes, religion, challenged by the immense loss of human life and the increase of sexual promiscuity in the war, could not save, family and domestic life could offer no sanctuary, and traditional art forms could no longer accurately depict or reflect human life. While their failure to create meaning implies a kind of fracturing between a pre-war and post-war society in which the modern individual now found itself situated, this failure also discloses the fundamental contingency of socio-cultural norms, values, and traditions. If these values and certainties were inherently meaningful in and of themselves, they would continue to be meaningful irrespective of the contexts and conditions in which they were applied. However, because these values and certainties somehow seemed to lose their meaning for those subjects in the poem and the larger modern society confronted with a sense of meaninglessness and boredom in daily life, they were forced to recognize that their presumed meaningfulness was a self-contrived illusion, or, perhaps, ask themselves “what is wrong with me that these things have lost their meaning?”. Since these traditional values and certainties structured how one (to an extent) related to the world, and by extension, what one did, their failure to create meaning likely produced a sense of boredom in those daily routines which revolved around “oneness” (which might have included, going to church, honoring traditional marriage, relationship, family, or other such dynamics in the domestic sphere, reading Shakespeare, etc.) and configured the “everyday” self. Because what became boring and meaningless was what one did, life was not boring to Dasein as this or that particular individual, but to Dasein as “one-self,” or the everyday self that acts, understands itself, and relates itself to the world in terms of the “One” and what one does. While the “one-self” may not be the particular, subjective self, because it informs, at least in part, how that particular self acts, the boredom encountered through the meaninglessness of Dasein’s everydayness problematizes how Dasein projects both its particular “self” and its they-“self” (as two, essential prongs of one and the same self) into the world. This is distinct from other forms of boredom (such as boredom with a specific object, social setting, event, etc.) in that it overwhelms Dasein’s every action in the world. As such, it can be understood within Heidegger’s notion of “attunement.” Attunement describes a state of mind that disposes us toward the world in a particular way. In order to explain this notion, consider the following hypothetical situation: while sitting in my room, I suddenly hear sirens blaring, people shouting and running, and see smoke leaking out from under my door. I become wholly overwhelmed with fear and alertness, leading me to scour the room for the closest exit or something with which to extinguish the imminent flames. My fear has completely altered the landscape of my environment so that certain objects become alternatively relevant and irrelevant to me depending on how they could be used. The pencil, for example, becomes irrelevant to me while a blanket by my bedside and an open window are relevant insofar as they might serve me in extinguishing the fire or escaping the room. As a result, my fear, as well as any other type of attunement, discloses that I must accept the circumstances of my world as they are revealed to me and what actions may be possible within those circumstances. While I submit myself to these circumstances, they also disclose opportunities for action or ways of utilizing certain objects that “matter” to me, or are significant to me to the extent that they help me extinguish the fire or escape the room. As a result, attunement constitutes how I am disposed toward the world and reveals my disclosive submission to that world. Like fear, profound boredom is a type of attunement in that it reveals our “disclosive submission [to the world], out of which we can encounter something that matters to us.” According to Heidegger, the confrontation with meaninglessness in Dasein’s everyday self can instantiate profound boredom (in which it is “boring for one”). In and through this confrontation Dasein is left “pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door” and is attuned to the world through profound boredom. Let us explore what this means through Jonathan Caballero, a 27 year old software developer who decided to join millions of Americans in quitting their traditional, pre-pandemic jobs. As a software developer, we can assume that in his pre-pandemic office space, Caballero may have perceived chairs, computers, conference rooms, telephones, among other things. He also had access to the different meanings implicit in these objects and the setting as a whole; the chairs, in the context of the office, may be for clients or co-workers to sit in, the computers to conduct programming with, respond to emails, type, etc, the telephone to communicate with, the conference rooms to host important office or client meetings, etc. In addition, we can assume, insofar as Caballero worked in this office in the pre-pandemic era, he comported himself in a particular way toward this office; a comportment that was structured by and made manifest a certain self which he (1) understood himself to be and, thus, (2) projected into the world. Thus, he was invested in the office space and its equipmental totality (i.e., the telephone, the computer, the conference room) as this particular self and for the sake of the projects, interests, and passions that are, to some extent, prescribed by the “one” but also reflect his own particularity as an individual. Each object, then, is meaningful to him through what they make possible toward advancing his multiple projects as his understood self which he understands himself to be. The telephone may be meaningful as a vehicle through which Caballero secures clients who may then elect to employ his services and, in doing so, secure the promise of a paycheck, and thus, fulfill his project of acquiring financial stability, the computer may be meaningful as the site of his work-activity in which he practices and improves his craft toward fulfilling his additional project of being an exceptional software programmer, and so forth. Additionally, the way in which Caballero came into contact with these objects, and by extension, the meaningful possibilities they imply, was in a nine-to-five, traditional working time-frame and environment. In other words, Caballero’s work, for which he was paid, did not simply consist of interacting with a certain kind of equipmental totality toward doing the work (in this case, software programming), but, because that work existed in a larger socio-cultural working structure, consisted of physically going to an office and being in that office space for a set period of time. Why? Because that is what one did as a member of certain sectors of the American labor force. One went to work, one spent time at a specified working location, and one returned home after the work day. Therefore, while his multiple projects (such as securing financial stability and being an exceptional software programmer) were made possible by the fact that those objects in his setting were used, and thus, could be used by one toward advancing these projects, these projects were also made possible by what one did, or more specifically, how one (within this particular sector of the American labor force) worked. Consequently, while they were made possible by how one worked, insofar as Caballero continued to work in terms of this oneness, his projects were also constrained to it. Caballero, then, projected himself meaningfully (to the extent that these projects are meaningful to him as that particular self which he understands himself to be) into the office space in terms of how one worked. This was his “everyday self.” Inevitably, during quarantine, Caballero began working virtually along with most other Americans. For him, this may have meant working from home, zooming into meetings fresh out of bed and still in his pajama pants, and spending what would have been his daily forty-five minute commute to and from the office by instead jumping in his pool and discovering new hobbies and interests. Assuming that the majority of his social community underwent a similar, if not identical, experience, not only did what he did change, but also what one did changed. Thus, one began to act in and relate to the world in a new way, ultimately leading each of us to understand ourselves in terms of this new, quarantine-generated way of being and relating to the world. Being a software engineer, or a college student, no longer implied physically occupying a particular location in physical proximity with others, but implied instead working, communicating, and socializing remotely. Returning to the pre-pandemic work life in this context, Caballero is tossed suddenly back into performing certain features of what one did, such as commuting to work, leaving the comfort of the home, and engaging with people face to face. His routine is now at odds with what he did and, by extension, what one did during the quarantine months. Because quarantine introduced a new performance of oneness and, thus, a new way of relating to the world, how Caballero presently understands himself to be, not simply as a software engineer but as a member of the socio-cultural world in which he exists, conflicts with the daily routines, or performance of everydayness, imposed upon him through the collective return to regular, pre-pandemic work life. Thus, these new routines, because they do not reflect how he understands himself (both as that particular self and as the one-self- which undergirds and gives rise to his particular self) are no longer meaningful to him. In addition, while this collective return strives toward pre-pandemic normalcy, this return breaks down as remnants of the pandemic continue to structure everyday existence. His current routines, while similar to pre-pandemic work life, ultimately fail to mean to him as such because they are, in a literal sense, not the exact same. In sum, then, Caballero cannot fully relate to the re-introduction of old, pre-pandemic routines into his daily life, and the performance of oneness they imply, because (1) what one does currently in these same routines is still somewhat different from what one once did, (2) quarantine changed his community’s performance of oneness, and thus, how he relates to the world in general, and (3) he understands himself, both as a particular self and as member of socio-cultural world in which he exists, differently than he did before the pandemic. Unable to relate to his routines as he once did, they fail to create meaning for him in the way that they had in the past, and he finds himself rehearsing a set of routines and performances that are meaningless to him (i.e. do not mean to him as in the way that they once did). Thus, he may exclaim to himself, staring at his computer in his old office space with his mask slipping beneath his nose, “What shall I do? What shall I ever do?” To which the One replies, “a lunch break at 12:00, a commute home at 4:00, and we shall try to know each other through our masks, pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.” Like Eliot’s speakers, a profound boredom may pervade his entire approach to his office setting, his social life, and his entire rehearsal of a one-ness that no longer corresponds to his particular interests, goals, and passions as a particular self or his self-understanding within the socio-cultural framework in which he exists. Answering the phone, commuting to work, sitting in an office, these actions no longer mean to him as they once did. He feels profoundly bored. And, in feeling profoundly bored, he is attuned to his equipmental totality (i.e., the objects that are contained within his environment) and the settings in which they occur in terms of this boredom. However, because Caballero is bored with the rehearsal of a past one-ness and a past version of himself implicit in and made possible by this one-ness, his boredom extends beyond the confines of the office. Going to lunch with friends, returning home, cooking his dinner, he is progressing listlessly through the motions of old routines. While working from home may have been a situation particular to Caballero and his social community, most Americans, to some extent, experienced fundamental changes in their routines and daily life during the quarantine periods in the peak of the pandemic. Thus, the phenomenon of profound boredom that I address in this paper, while it varies widely in its causes for each individual, remains a seemingly wide-spread experience in our “return-to-normal” life. As Heidegger writes, in profound boredom “we are not merely relieved of our everyday personality, but elevated beyond the particular situation in each case and beyond the specific beings surrounding us there. The whole situation and we ourselves as this particular subject are thereby indifferent... Indeed this boredom does not even let it get to the point where such things are of any particular worth to us. Instead it makes everything equally great and equally little worth.” “Being relieved of our everyday personality” here means no longer going about our lives as either one does, or as the particular self (which is inevitably, to some extent, structured by “oneness”) that, through its comportment, Dasein understands. For example, instead of attentively picking up phone calls, quickly responding to emails, and meticulously conducting his work (and thus meaningfully re-enacting “how one worked” toward the realization of some particular project as that particular self), Caballero, in this boredom, is detached from and indifferent to the office environment, what one would do, and what he once did (as his past, pre-pandemic self) in that particular environment. In other words, he is indifferent to how objects in that environment may serve the realization of the projects that are meaningful to him. However, he is not only indifferent to what one does, but what one does becomes indifferent to him. The equipmental totality of his world and the beings included in that world (that designate, through “how one worked,” how that totality might or should be utilized) no longer offer him any possibility of acting out his project, which has become meaningless; they “refuse” him meaning. As Heidegger writes: There is a telling refusal on the part of beings for a Dasein that… in the midst of these beings as a whole comports itself toward them (toward them, toward those beings as a whole and their now telling refusal) and must comport itself toward them, if it is indeed to be what it is. Dasein thus finds itself delivered over to the being's telling refusal of themselves as a whole. As Dasein, Caballero inevitably comports himself toward the world as the particular self which he understands himself to be. However, because this “self” has fallen flat, or is no longer meaningful to him, he comports toward a world without meaning or possibilities in that comportment. Therefore, beings as a whole which once created and gave rise to new meaningful possibilities for him as that self, now “refuse” him those meaningful possibilities. This “telling refusal” by beings as a whole constitutes the first essential, structural moment of profound boredom: being-left-empty, being without meaning to be discovered in beings as whole. However, in telling refusingly, beings as a whole also highlight the possibilities for meaning-making that Dasein has exploited and are no longer meaningful to it. Sitting in his office or his home, his computer, his clients, his pens, his telephone, his friends, and his dinner table all refuse Caballero meaning as objects and beings through which he can act out his “self-hood.” In his profound boredom, the interaction with these beings and objects signals to him that they cannot be employed toward meaningful action because they imply a commingled performance of one-ness and a particular “self-hood” that are not meaningful to him. For example, his dinner table is no longer meaningful for him as something which one now, in our quasi-post-pandemic world, uses again (and thus makes possible) to dine amongst friends, but an object, which, in his profound boredom, points to his incapacity for meaning-making by continuing to exploit the possibility of “how one now uses” a dining table. Because using the dining table as such involves rehearsing a performance of pre-pandemic oneness that no longer corresponds with how Caballero understands himself (perhaps because he has since become uncomfortable with hosting dinner parties or having people over in general), his interactions with the dining table disclose (or “point to”) his inability to find meaning by continuing to exploit the possibilities involved in what one did before the pandemic. In revealing his exploited possibilities (i.e. the doing as both one and he once did) “ .. .there occurs the dawning of the possibilities that Dasein could have, but which are left unexploited precisely in this “it is boring for one,” and as unexploited, leaves us in the “lurch”. In other words, confronted with the meaninglessness of his own rehearsal of what one used to do before the pandemic (and consequently, the rehearsal of his particular, pre-pandemic self which understood itself in terms of a pre-pandemic oneness) and the possibilities for acting within that oneness, he becomes aware of other unexploited possibilities for acting. As a result, the telling refusal of possibilities carries, by association, a telling announcement of the possibilities he has not yet exploited. This telling announcement does not point to any one unexploited possibility for meaning-making, but rather points (arbitrarily) to the fact that there are possibilities that he has not yet explored. However, because these possibilities are left unexplored in Caballero's total and complete boredom with the world in general, he does not take up meaningful action and is thus, as Heidegger writes, “left in the lurch” or entrapped in a kind of limbo of inaction. This “being-left-in-lurch” or “being-in-limbo” in which Caballero is confronted with but does not act upon unexplored possibilities comprises the second structural moment of profound boredom: because “being-left-in-limbo” precludes a kind of meaningful moving forwards, it has a certain temporal feeling. When beings and the possibilities they create for meaning-making (i.e., a doctor makes possible the use of a scalpel as a medical tool, and thus, a meaningful tool for particular purposes) refuse themselves to Caballero, they refuse themselves as a whole: they refuse themselves in every respect, or in every respect, retrospect, and prospect, such that every past possibility that he exploited becomes meaningless to him as the version of his “self” he enacts has fallen flat. Likewise, any future, to-be-exploited possibility toward projecting that version of himself is also meaningless to him. But to whom do these possibilities refuse themselves? Not to Caballero as Caballero the particular, subjective individual, but to Cabellero as that self which acted in and related to the world in terms of a pre-pandemic one. As such, it is not boring for Caballero as the individual person, but boring for him as “One” or insofar as he continues to rehearse a kind of oneness that is no longer meaningful to him. But in the context of his own boredom with that pre-pandemic self that causes his possibilities as that self to recede, that pre-pandemic-self does not lose its determinacy, “but rather the reverse, for this peculiar impoverishment which sets in with respect to ourselves in this ‘it is boring for one’ first brings the self in all its to nakedness to itself as the self that is there and has taken over the being-there of Dasein. For what purpose? To be that Dasein”. In other words, in his profound boredom, as the meaningful possibilities for acting are refused to him as a pre-pandemic-self, he becomes aware of this refusal of the pre-pandemic self, and consequently, becomes aware of the self itself, or the self which he has chosen to project over his existence (i.e., “being-there” or Dasein) in the world. In becoming aware of that pre-pandemic self, he becomes aware of (1) the fact that he has chosen to be or act as that self, (2) rehearsing what one does or what one did is not inherently meaningful, and (3) that, as a result, in his existence as Dasein he has the possibility to choose other selves that do not adhere to the “one.” For example, it is possible for him to take advantage of new socio-cultural possibilities that are becoming available such as: the emergence of partially or fully virtual employment, the shift toward smaller in-person social circles, and the new, national emphasis on self-care and mental wellbeing. Thus, his boredom discloses to him that he must accept the circumstances of his world as they are revealed to him and what actions may be possible within those circumstances. The circumstances, and by extension, the world itself, thereby determines how he can act. Since he must accept the world’s determinations as to how he can act, he necessarily submits himself to the world. Still, this submission is not entirely passive. Instead, because his boredom reveals that he is capable of enacting a self (in this case, his pre-pandemic self), he becomes consequently aware of the possibility of enacting other selves and other ways of performing “oneness” that are gradually being made possible to him and to all of us in general. As a result, his boredom reveals the originary capacity of Dasein to make-possible other selves and the fact that he can choose to make-possible other selves that are meaningful to him. Confronted with the immensity of Dasein’s capacity to make-possible, without any definite direction as to what self or possibility he should enact, he is “held-in-limbo.” The phenomenon of “being-held-in-limbo” also involves a unique form of temporality. Refused any meaning by rehearsing the pre-pandemic one-self by beings as a whole, Caballero is refused meaning in every respect, retrospect, and prospect, or in the past, present, and future. In this way, beings-as-a-whole are no longer open to him along a temporal horizon, and the possibilities that they present along this horizon are closed off to him as him self because he is no longer interested in them as future possibilities for meaning-making nor finds his past actions and exploited possibilities meaningful. But, if beings as a whole refuse themselves in terms of a temporal horizon, such that Caballero cannot move forward meaningfully in time alongside them (or, in recollecting, conceive of past instances of action as meaningful to him), then they also make manifest those possibilities which he has not yet exploited in terms of a temporal horizon. The unexploited possibilities are things which he may have done in the past (retrospect) or can do in the future (prospect). Confronted with Dasein’s capacity for making-possible in the past and future, he is not only held-in-limbo at the immensity of the unexploited possibilities available to him, but entranced in time insofar as these possibilities remain unexploited. For example, thinking back to his past experiences in the office or in his training to become a software developer, he may discern other opportunities that he did not take up such as, perhaps, working in a satellite location in New York City or South America, working at a different corporation, or becoming a doctor, engineer, or astronaut,. Conversely, thinking toward his future, he may discern possibilities that are available to him in the here and now. And yet, insofar as he does not take up these possibilities, he remains entranced in time such that he remains indifferent to his past, present, and future and cannot move meaningfully forwards or backwards in time. He breaks this entrancement and transcends his boredom by experiencing “the moment of vision.” As Heidegger writes in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics , “the moment of vision is neither chosen as such nor reflected upon and known. It manifests itself to us as that which properly makes possible, that which is thereby intimated as such only in being entranced in the direction of the temporal horizon and from there, intimated as what could and ought to be given to be free in Dasein’s proper essence as that which makes it most intrinsically possible, yet now in the entrancement of Dasein is not thus given.” The moment of vision is not experienced as a dramatic, transcendental instance, but as a kind of realization of the fundamental, originary properties of Dasein (i.e., “what properly makes Dasein possible”). As a being-there which comports itself understandingly toward that being, Dasein’s capability to enact a self and comport itself as that self in the actions and choices it undertakes is fundamental to its existence as Dasein. Thus, the moment of vision involves a “resolute disclosure of Dasein to itself,” or an awareness of Dasein’s own freedom to choose which self it wants to enact and then enacting that self that it chooses. Because Dasein’s self-enactment occurs along a temporal horizon (i.e., Dasein understands itself to be its “self” through past actions and choices taken as that self, enacts that self in the present, and projects that self in the future), its entrancement in time during profound boredom intimates, in its being refused meaningful action and doing in every retrospect, respect, and prospect, Dasein’s capacity to engage in meaningful action and doing within a temporal horizon. Thus, the instance in which Caballero resolutely discloses his own freedom to choose a self he wants to enact to himself, he experiences a kind of “moment of vision.” Soon after returning to his regular pre-pandemic job, Caballero quit and started looking for jobs with better remote work options. Now, we can assume that Caballero has time to jump in his pool in-between meetings and pursue those hobbies and interests that were otherwise impossible with his daily, pre-pandemic commute. By quitting his job and choosing to explore an alternate possibility of post-pandemic one-ness that is meaningful to him (in that this possibility enables him to engage with aspects of his life that became important to him during the pandemic), Caballero has exercised his essential freedom as Dasein and altered his comportment toward the world in a way that enables him to engage in meaningful doing and action in every retrospect (i.e., his past experiences have given way to his new self-enactment and are thus meaningful to him) respect (i.e., his current choices and actions now harmonize with what is meaningful to him), and prospect (i.e., his future choices will be meaningful to him insofar as he continues to enact that self which enables him to realize those projects which are meaningful to him). In sum, by altering his comportment toward the world, Caballero enacts a new self within that world, one that authentically (insofar as this new comportment reflects what is meaningful to him) incorporates and utilizes “oneness” toward realizing and fulfilling himself meaningfully. Importantly, this transformation in how he comports himself toward the world involves a meaningful repetition of “what one did.” While Caballero, as a member of a particular socio-cultural framework which requires some degree of financial stability in order to continue participating within that same socio-cultural framework, continues to work, he does so in a way that enables him to pursue his other interests and passions. Thus, he repeats or rehearses oneness (i.e., the socio-cultural emphasis on financial stability) in a way that is meaningful to him as a particular self. Reciprocally, how he comports himself toward the world (i.e., rehearses oneness) as that particular self manifests that which is meaningful to him (i.e., those projects, interests, and passions that comprise his “for-the-sake-of-which”) as that self. While T.S. Eliot and Heidegger were distinct writers and thinkers, they both seem to proffer the meaningful repetition of one-ness as a solution to profound boredom. In Eliot’s work, his meaningful repetition of “oneness” is exemplified by the structural fragmentation within his poem “The Waste Land . ” Throughout the poem, Eliot includes miscellaneous fragments of Dante, Shakespeare, Greek myths, as well as ancient languages such as Sanskirt. On a superficial level, these fragments produce a sense of disorientation and confusion within the reader who must now assemble these fragments toward a cohesive interpretation of the poem. While the reader’s sense of disorientation parallels modern society’s confrontation with meaninglessness and subsequent inability to ground existence in meaningful forms of doing and action in post World War I society, the fragments also illustrate how aspects of past, traditional pieces of literature can be assembled or “repeated” in a way that allows them to meaningfully reflect the modern experience. In the final section of the poem “What The Thunder Said,” Eliot begins by describing an apocalyptic scene in which “there is no water but only rock” and Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London, all descend into “unreality.” Here, Eliot describes the literal and spiritual devastation of Western civilization. The downfall of Jerusalem, Athens, and Alexandria all represent the inability of Ancient Western religion, art, literature, and history to salvage modern society from its ruinous apocalypse of meaningful action and doing by grounding that doing and action in the traditional values and certainties that characterize them. Instead, the downfall of London and Vienna, describes the devastation of a modern society unable to meaningfully ground itself in its Western socio-historical traditions and values. Thus, London, Vienna, Alexandria, Athens, and Alexandria, become “unreal;” they no longer possess or provide a meaningful reference point for real modern life to guide itself. Following this apocalyptic scene, Eliot writes at the end of the poem: I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih. Sitting upon the cusp of the poem’s conclusion and fishing for meaning within the “arid plains” of the apocalypse looming behind him and before him, Eliot attempts to reinvigorate fragments of canonical pieces of literature by “organizing his lands” or assembling them together in new ways. The line “ Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina ” is an allusion to Canto 26 of Dante’s “Purgatorio”, meaning “then he hid in the fire that refines them.” According to Sussex University Professor Cedric Watt’s explication of these last ten lines, “the ‘he’ is Arnaut Daniel, the medieval Provençal poet. He has just told Dante that he repents the sins of his past and looks forward to the heaven that he will eventually reach after suffering the purgatorial flames.” The following line “ Quando fiam uti chelidon ” from the anonymous Latin poem ''Pervigilium Veneris” means “when shall I be like the swallow.” In this poem, “the raped Philomela has undergone a healing metamorphosis into a songbird, making her complaints sound as joyous as a song. The next line, “O swallow swallow,” refers to Alfred Tennyson’s lyric in “The Princess” in which “a swallow is flying south to warm lands, away from the earthbound poet.” Finally, “ Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie ,” a line from Nerval’s ‘El Desdichado’, meaning “The Unfortunate or Disinherited Man,” a French poem with a Spanish title, means “The Prince of Aquitaine at the ruined tower.” According to Watts, “the gist of the poem is: ‘I’ve been through hell, but I’ve survived to tell the tale, I’ve known loss and grief, but I’ve had my dreams and can make songs of my experiences.” Independently, each of these lines refer back to larger poetic works, and thus refer back to the traditional literary structures, styles, and modes of human experience embedded in and advanced by these works. However, by separating these fragments from their larger poetic totality and compiling them together in a new structure, Eliot alienates them from the poetic works and traditional literary structures and meanings to which they pertain. By alienating them from their original works and compiling them together, Eliot also re-appropriates them in a creative way. Through this creative re-appropriation or repetition of these fragments, they ultimately produce a new narrative, one that neither of them originally pertained to or advanced. Essentially, this new narrative suggests that repentance or self-forgiveness will enable the grieving post-war civilization to transcend its own purgatorial limbo toward a kind of recuperation of meaningful doing and action in modern life. Because this narrative reflects and diagnoses the post-war human experience, Eliot’s creative repetition of past literary fragments enables him to meaningfully describe and reflect human life as it is, thus re-invigorating literature’s capacity to invoke human experience overall. As a result, the fragments “shore against his ruins,” or act as a buffer against his destruction as a poet in a dying artistic field and as a modern individual confronted with the meaninglessness of the traditional values and certainties implicit in socio-cultural norms. Eliot concludes the section ironically with “Why then Ile fit you, Hieronymo’s mad againe,” the subtitle of Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy meaning “why then I’ll fix it for you, Hieronymo’s mad again.” While the line acknowledges that his atypical poetic structure may induce readers to think him insane, Eliot’s “I’ll fix it for you” reaffirms us of his craftsmanship and ability to “fix” literature’s inability to capture and resolve modern society’s post-war sense of meaninglessness. The poem ends with the repetition of “shantih, shantih, shantih”, a Sanskrit word meaning peace or inner peace prayed at the end of the Upanishad in the Hindu religion. Pointing ambiguously toward Eastern modes of spirituality, Eliot leaves us to “fish” our own individual meaning out of his fragments. Because the poem incorporates a creative repetition of past canonical forms of literature toward developing a form that can meaningfully reflect the modern human experience, it attempts to restructure how “one” relates to and understands these canonical forms of literature. Instead of writings that can no longer invoke what it means to be human, Eliot’s fragmentation gives them a new applicability to the modern experience. Thus, Eliot’s creative repetition of how one related to canonical works makes those works newly meaningful to the post-war reader as a compilation of fragments, both within the poem (i.e., as resolving the poem’s central conflict) and as suggesting ways to transcend their own confrontation with meaningless and profound boredom in post-war society. Similarly, by creatively repeating and reassembling aspects of what one did in the pre-pandemic world with what one did during quarantine, we compile together a structure akin to Eliot’s fragmentation. Assembling these fragments of “oneness” in a new montage that authentically expresses how one, and how we each individually, relate to the world in the context of enormous crises, anxiety, and change, we can enact new possibilities of being and acting that are meaningful to us and, thus, shore against our own ruinous experiences with profound boredom and meaninglessness. While Heidegger’s “moment of vision” describes the instance we are disclosed to our own freedom to choose which selves we want to enact, Eliot’s fragmentation demonstrates how we can enact that self through meaningful repetitions of our oneness. While Caballero experienced a meaninglessness rehearsal of oneness in his return to the pre-pandemic work-life structure because it invoked a self that he no longer felt or understood himself to be, by quitting his job to pursue remote working options, he creatively assembles a performance of pre-pandemic one-ness (in that he continues to work) with a performance of quarantine one-ness (in that he begins to work virtually and make time for his other interests and passions) that reflects how he understands himself to “be” in the world. As such, the creative repetition of past possibilities seems to offer a productive solution to the post-pandemic phenomenon of profound boredom. As we each reevaluate our current rehearsal of oneness, quit our jobs, change our career or academic tracks, tighten our in-person social circles, restructure our relationships, and travel the world in pursuit of new possibilities for meaningful doing and action, we create new ways of understanding ourselves and relating to the world in general. Perhaps, a new performance of one-ness may be gradually unfolding before us. References Heidegger, Martin, and Edward Robinson. “Chapter 4, The They.” Essay. In Being and Time , translated by John Macquarrie, 149–68. Harper Perennial, n.d. Heidegger, Martin, William McNeill, and Nicholas Walker. Essay. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude , 136–52. Bloomington, Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995. Wrathall, Mark A. “Everydayness and The One.” Essay. In How to Read Heidegger , 47–70. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2006. Chapters 5-6 Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation. Accessed February 12, 2022. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land . Watts, Cedric. “The Last Ten and A Half Lines of the Waste Land.” The Last Ten and a Half Lines of the Wasteland . Poets.org.Academy of American Poets, May 20, 2004. https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-modernism . Hsu, Andrea. “As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'.” NPR , NPR, 24 June 2021. Bruner, Raisa. “Why Young People Are Quitting Jobs-and Not Going Back.” Time, Time, 29 Oct. 2021. Fontinelle, Amy. “The Great Resignation.” Investopedia. Investopedia, May 5, 2022. https://www.investopedia.com/the-great-resignation-5199074 .

Author Name < Back Unwitting Wrongdoing: The Case of Moral Ignorance Madeline Monge Should we blame and praise people for actions which they are ignorant of performing or which they take to be morally neutral? There are two competing theories for the moral assessment of ignorant agents. Capacitarianism focuses on whether an agent could have to have done something to not be ignorant but instead acquire moral knowledge. Valuationism determines an ignorant agent’s blameworthiness by looking at their values. Someone is blameworthy if they act within their values and still commit the harmful act. My paper makes three points. First, I examine how thought experiments revolving around moral issues are either written in support of, or as counterexamples to, the two theories of moral responsibilities. The description of these thought experiments causes the reader to lean in favor of what the theorist is trying to argue. In other words, these thought experiments function as intuition pumps. Second, reflection on the thought experiments used in support of the two theories of moral responsibility reveals that these theories, rather than being rivals, are two sides of the same coin. In this paper, I presuppose ignorance is a lack of knowledge. Knowledge I take to be a composite state that consists at the very least of three necessary conditions: truth, belief, and justification. This view, which can be traced back to Plato’s Theaetetus , claims that what distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief and lucky guessing is that it is based on some form of justification, evidence, or supporting reasons. The truth condition of the justified-true-belief analysis of knowledge states that if you know that p, the p is true. The truth condition need not be known; it merely must be obtained. The belief condition claims that knowing that p implies believing that p. Finally, the justification condition demands that a known proposition is evidentially supported. he justification condition prevents lucky guesses from counting as knowledge when the guesser is sufficiently confident to believe their own guess. Given that ignorance is the lack of knowledge and given that knowledge has at least three necessary conditions, there are many different sources of ignorance: lack of belief, lack of truth, and lack of justification. There are numerous psychological factors that can give rise to each of these three conditions. Among these psychological factors are forgetting, cognitive biases, miseducation, or lack of exposure. I presuppose this ignorance to be lacking knowledge. There is not only one type of ignorance, rather, there are two main classes of such: factual ignorance, and moral ignorance (Rosen, 64). There are various sources of ignorance from where factual and moral ignorance arise. When someone does not know, forgets, is lacking exposure to, is miseducated, does not retain, or misunderstands a given fact that cannot be disputed under any circumstance, they can become either factually or morally ignorant. These sources can be relieved with conscious effort, or by external involvement (Rosen, 302). Ultimately it is up to the agent to recognize errors that result from their ignorance. A debate surrounding the exculpating factors of moral or factual ignorance is important to understand. It is generally thought that immoral actions can only be exculpated by factual ignorance, but not moral ignorance. Factual ignorance hinges around objects of descriptive facts. I will be using an example of slavery in ancient slave-times to illustrate this concept. Let’s suppose someone lives next door to someone who has slaves but also does not know they are living next door to slaves. This would be a situation of factual ignorance because the neighbor does not know the fact that there are slaves living next door (Rosen, 72). It could be because they are unobservant, or because the slaveholder does a good job of keeping the slaves quiet; there is also the chance that the neighbor doesn’t care, is distracted by their own life, or denies their worry of believing that there are slaves. The slaveholder hiding slaves is an objective/descriptive fact that cannot be disputed. Even if they deny it, the slaveholder would still have slaves, and the descriptive fact would not change. On the other hand, moral ignorance arises when someone is ignorant of a moral fact. Moral facts are normative, and they prescribe courses of actions that are true simpliciter (Rosen, 64) . If the neighbor to the slaveholder knows that they are living next door to slaves, but does not know the slaveholder is harming them, this wouldbe moral ignorance. It is morally impermissible for the slaveholder to have and harm slaves. The neighbor should know the slaveholder is acting immorally by keeping and harming the slaves. Moral ignorance does not stop at the fact that the neighbor does not know it is morally wrong to harm people, but they may also not know they should do something about the harm. This ignorance of harm can be defined as, not knowing that an action may cause pain (harm) when one should know it does so. They also ought to know that, without good reason, harming people should be avoided at all costs because it is morally impermissible (Biebel, 302). Should the neighbor be exculpated because of factual or moral ignorance? If the neighbor does not know that having and harming slaves is morally impermissible, this could not be factually exculpated. This is a case of moral ignorance. The neighbor would be morally exculpated for their ignorance in this scenario because they are unaware that having and harming slaves is impermissible by moral standards (Rosen, 66). There is no opportunity for the neighbor to be factually ignorant. What prompts this type of ignorance? Perhaps the neighbor does not care that the slaves are being harmed, is distracted by other events, or is afraid of the repercussions that will incur because of speaking out against the moral injustice. The most important aspect of moral ignorance is to remember that it is prescriptive, and not descriptive. The argument of moral ignorance and blame revolves around what should or shouldn’t be done because of lacking knowledge. This is largely in part to the distinction between factual and moral ignorance. Factual ignorance may sometimes exculpate an immoral action, but it is ultimately moral ignorance that will exculpate an individual (Sliwa, 6). I. Capacitarian and Valuationist Assessments of Moral Responsibility: There are now several theories that concern moral ignorance: volitionist, attributivist, capacitarian, valuational, parity, and pragmatic. While all differ from one another in how they attribute blame to cases of moral ignorance, capacitarian, parity/pragmatic, and volitionism share a disposition of blame that focuses on someone’s capacity of knowledge (Biebel). Valuationalism and attributivism respond to blameworthy actions as being dependent on the personal volition of the agent. I’d like to classify these two categories as capacitarian and valuational. I will occasionally refer to specific points that individual theories make, but with the example of the slaveholder, I will continue the conversation with the two main theories. The capacitarian theories revolve around the counterfactual capacity that an individual has when deciding which action to take in a morally relevant situation that could’ve been prevented. They look at situations where someone is blameworthy. They want to know if it was in the agent’s capacity to correct or avoid being ignorant, and if this would have prevented them from performing the immoral action. Capacitarians consider people responsible for their actions if they are responsible for their capacity of behavior. People who lack the capacity for knowing what is morally permissible, say children, or people who are mentally incapable of retaining information relevant to moral standards, are not culpable for their immoral actions. They can be corrected, and may learn afterwards, but they are not blameworthy. They lack the ability to retain vital moral considerations. Capacitarians do not skip over the fact that people’s ignorance may be the reason they are acting immorally. If someone believes from their ignorance that what they did was the most rational and correct method of handling a situation of moral relevance, then they may be exculpated. However, this justification is only one part of the knowledge needed to have an accurate and knowledgeable conclusion. How a morally significant situation should be handled depends on someone’s capacity to know whether they had the opportunity to do something differently. This difference in choice may have changed someone’s ignorance into knowledge and prevented the immoral action. When someone is not aware why they are ignorant, they are also unaware of how they can resolve their lack of knowledge. This is the way capacitarian’s view moral ignorance to be exculpable, and encapsulates much of capacitarians’ concern. How can someone be blamed for not knowing a moral standard if they have never been socially conditioned or taught what the moral standard is? When I go over the varying vignettes that hone in on how the capacitarian theory can be utilized I will be able to further demonstrate the degrees of internal and external factors that influence moral ignorance, conveying how someone might come into the position to remedy their ignorance but lack the awareness or determination to do so. Arguing against the capacitarian theory is the valuationist theory. Valuationism responds to capacitarianism with a specific criticism. Capacitariansim uses immoral ignoramus as a clear reason to excuse someone from an immoral action, but valuationists believe that the capacitarian theory is too easily applied to every case of immorality. They do not think it is wise to exculpate someone who has forgotten or is unknowledgeable about morality. Valuationism approaches the topic of blame and exculpation surrounding immoral actions by looking at omission and forgetfulness. The theory considers omission and forgetfulness to lead to potentially harmful instances of ignorance. Harmful ignorance is when someone consistently shows blameworthy immoral actions. Valuationists trace the value systems and the past actions of agents to see what led them astray towards immoral actions. They look at recidivism rates, as well as values and virtues. Valuationalism investigates how people are held accountable for their actions and believe someone is only deserving of moral praise if they have reason to act morally. Moral responsibility is the condition of whether someone is praiseworthy, blameworthy, or excused from the former two because of their involvement in a moral act. Someone could also fail to act or omit an action. This is potentially why someone deserves a moral reward or punishment. Valuationists agree that psychological states may affect someone’s behavior to act accordingly during a moral situation. They see this as one component in the person’s link to act or neglect to act. Therefore, valuationists think it can only serve as a partial excuse for someone and is not a strong enough argument to exculpate them from a morally relevant situation. Psychological states in a valuationist framework does not make someone incapable of moral knowledge, nor does someone’s emotional attachment serve as a reason for someone to act immorally. Whether someone cares about an action does not render them more or less blameworthy. It may affect how much or little they will react, but it should not affect their moral assessment. Therefore, valuationalist’s believe that most people are, more often than not, blameworthy for their moral ignorance. If they have not responded in a morally kind manner to a situation, it’s because their values align with preconceived notions of their background. These preconceived notions are often the fundamental reasons for why someone acts immorally. Capacitarians avoid looking at an agent’s value system because they want to know if the immoral act could have been avoided, and if the agent could have prevented themselves from being ignorant in the first place. When we look at somebody's capacity to act, we are tracing their past actions and whether or not they had the ability to change their moral knowledge. Capacitarians rely on a history of someone’s actions. The values that arise from somebody's capacity to act are decided through the person's past actions from the moment they are born. Capacitarians look at past actions carefully because the culmination of them sets up the targeted subject that a valuationist uses to counter their argument. Values are deeply seated through someone’s past actions. The more they are reinforced through choice of action and external influences, the more established they become. The deeply seated beliefs that someone has grown into values are important for evaluating the response a person has to a morally loaded situation. We saw examples of this in the altered versions of the vignettes. Without the added context, a reader wouldn’t have been able to tell what the characters valued, nor what their guiding principles were. When we manifest actions as guiding principles, we are acting from a result of our values. These have been established by our capacities to act in the past. The values we are focusing on in this paper are intrinsic. For example, valuing education leads to being more productive in helping your children with their schoolwork and helping them improve when they need it. Valuing health means you likely eat a balanced diet and exercise regularly. These specific examples of intrinsic values provide a foundation for readers to rest on when making their own evaluative judgments. These intrinsic values lead to other good things, like, your children getting into a good school, and you living a life with bountiful opportunities because of your health. The Valuationist Theory focuses on such intrinsic values, and are meant for the valuationist to rationally conclude whether the characters in the vignettes are blameworthy or not. Values directly shape what people do and say. Their actions are subsets of behavior, and their behavior is a combination of capacities for potential action and values. Action is intentional behavior. Guiding principles of values will manifest as actions. The way we act is a subset of our values and that action is intentional. Each subset, whether planned or an unconscious reaction, is a value in disguise.Our actions are mostly intentional and based on our values, but sometimes they can be accidents due to forgetting. They may also be from a lack of capacity to change behaviors in the past and potentially due to a lack of values. II. Perspectives on the Assessment of Moral Responsibility with Respect to Capacitarian and Valuationist Approaches: In this next section, I will review various vignettes that scholars have introduced into the conversation of moral ignorance, discussing how our theory of moral responsibility will change depending on how the stories are described. I will be using a vignette from Alexander A. Guerrero’s 2007 article, “Don’t Know, Don’t Kill: Moral Ignorance, Culpability, and Caution”, which discusses the moral ramifications of poisoning someone with cyanide. I will also incorporate a recent, original vignette about the moral culpability of leaving a dog in a hot car. Both cases convey how the same set of events may be narrated in a way that supports the C or the V theory. . The support from these different theories is not derived from the event themselves but in how their contexts are described. Omitting and highlighting certain features will change which theory best explains whether someone should be blamed or praised. It is impossible to give a complete account of these theories in these vignettes, but we will be careful in fully describing each theory and embellishing. This will show which theory best explains each vignette. Both what could have happened and what is described will show whether one is morally blameworthy in the capacitarian sense. If a vignette lends itself to the capacitarian theory, it will focus on possible actions that could have changed depending on the capacity of the protagonist’s acknowledgement to do something differently. If the vignette falls towards the valuationist perspective, it is because of the protagonist’s present character traits and values. A. Case One: Guerrero’s Poison Let’s consider the case of Anne, who poisons Bill by spooning cyanide into his coffee. Anne believes she is spooning sugar, and she is blameless for her false belief. Is Anne blameless for poisoning Bill? Rosen concludes that an action done from ignorance is not a locus of original responsibility. This means Anne is only responsible for poisoning Bill if she is responsible for her ignorance about the fact that she is poisoning Bill. Guerrero has constructed a vignette that partially supports a theory where ignorance can be morally exculpated. What happens when details of the character’s capacities and values are introduced? I’m going to reintroduce Guerrero’s story with these details added to demonstrate the effectiveness of manipulating the story so the capacitarian or the valuationist theory provides a better explanation and justification of our natural inclination to blame the protagonist. B. Case Two: Guerrero’s Poison (modified) Let’s consider again the case of Anne, a single mother who is Bill’s girlfriend. Bill regularly comes over in the morning to share a cup of coffee because he has been dating Anne for a few months. After a long night of helping her children prepare for an important exam, Anne believes she is spooning sugar into Bill’s morning coffee and is unaware that she is poisoning him with cyanide. Anne does not know that last night after she went to bed exhausted from tutoring her children, she had a sleepwalking incident where she mistakenly poured out the sugar in the sugar dish and replaced it with cyanide. Afterwards, Anne went back to bed and did not remember what she did in the middle of the night. That morning while Anne was spooning poison into Bill’s coffee, he innocently read the morning news on his phone and did not give the sugar a second thought. Was it in Anne’s capacity to make sure she was spooning sugar and not cyanide into Bill’s coffee? If Anne does not regularly sleepwalk then we cannot expect it to be within her capacity to know that she ought to check the sugar dish just in case she had tampered with it the previous night. What about Anne’s values? We know that Anne values relationships and caring for others, as well as education. This is why she stayed up to help her children prepare for an exam, and also why she regularly invites her boyfriend over for coffee. Here Anne is not blameworthy for her ignorance, nor has she acted within a set of immoral values that would prompt her to poison Bill. This has never happened before to Anne. Anne has never sleepwalked a day in her life and has a consistent record of showing Bill hospitality and care. Under a valuationist’s account of moral blame, Anne would not be considered blameworthy because her actions do not align with her values, and after the incident, she continued to grieve and disapprove of her ignorance. She did not intend to cause suffering, nor does she value suffering. Anne unfortunately is the cause of Bill's death because she had a momentary lapse in her sleep routine which caused her to act involuntarily on account of ignorance. In this case, Anne would not be blameworthy by capacitarian standards, nor by valuationist standards. Anne is not originally responsible for poisoning Bill, and she would be considered morally exculpated. Based on what the story tells us about Anne’s character traits and values, one can see that she did not act with malicious intent. It was an honest mistake, and a serious accident. Even though Anne has never sleepwalked before, would it be reasonable to expect her to check her sugar before she gives it to Bill? I think it would be considered unreasonable for anyone to expect Anne to check her sugar because Anne does not have a past history of swapping out her sugar with other substances. If it were the case that Anne has sleepwalked before, and she has a past history of replacing her sugar with other substances, like salt, powder bleach, or baby powder, then it would be reasonable to expect her to check. If Anne had a history of swapping substances, then her negligence to check on the sugar dish would be an involuntary act in ignorance. In this vignette, how a capacitarian and a valuationist consider someone to be morally blameworthy or exculpated is revealed through the protagonist’s capacity and character traits. This example shows us that the capacity of memory to prevent a potentially harmfully ignorant situation is a mitigating factor in someone’s judgment of immoral behavior. Anne did not willfully act immorally and is not blameworthy for her involuntary action done out of ignorance (Alvarez & Littlejohn, 8). Both theories attribute a small degree of responsibility to the harm Anne has done, but not enough to judge her as being willfully ignorant nor morally culpable. Capacitarian and valuationist theories agree with each other in how they assess this vignette due to Anne’s isolated incident. Let us take another vignette to compare capacitarian and valuationist theories. In this next scenario we have the unfortunate event of a dog dying after being left in a hot car unattended for some time. C. Case Three: Hot Dog Imagine Mrs. Crawford is out running errands with her medium sized cocker-spaniel in the back seat. The dog is in good health, well-groomed and fed, and Mrs. Crawford sees to it that he is well taken care of. Today of all days Mrs. Crawford pulls into a parking lot with no shade to block out the sun from her car. There is no breeze, and it is ridiculously hot outside. Instead of bringing her dog into the store with her, Mrs. Crawford decides to leave her dog in the car with the windows rolled up. She reasons that the air-conditioner was on during the drive to the store, so the car is not muggy or hot. She also reasons that she will not be in the store for a long time because she has a list of things she wants to purchase. At this point in her decision, Mrs. Crawford locks the car and leaves for the store. Suppose Mrs. Crawford is making good time in the store. She is almost done picking out everything on her list and is careful not to get sidetracked. However, Mrs. Bailey sees Mrs. Crawford in the aisle over and makes her way to talk to her about some important matters. Mrs. Crawford is delighted to see and talk to Mrs. Bailey, and easily becomes swept up in her conversation. She remembers her dog is in the car but does not remember how hot it is outside because the store is well air-conditioned, aiding to Mrs. Crawford’s choice to talk to Mrs. Bailey for longer than expected. Now the dog is still outside in the hot car, and because it is not properly ventilated or shaded, the car quickly becomes extremely hot inside. The dog is soon unable to withstand the heat and becomes sick and passes out in the back seat before Mrs. Crawford returns from the store. Mrs. Crawford is mortified. She had no idea that leaving her dog unattended for as long as she did would result in its sickness. She quickly takes her dog to the vet. Here we have a vignette that sets up Mrs. Crawford to be morally exculpated by her ignorance if we are not considering her values or capacity to have made changes in favor of the dog’s life. We are now going to see another representation of this vignette with both capacity and values of Mrs. Crawford included. Within this next vignette, I will provide more background information that will show how someone's capacity can prevent ignorance from occurring or may cause someone's ignorance to flourish. I will also be including Mrs. Crawford's values, which will show whether-or-not by the valuation as to perspective that Mrs. Crawford is in fact acting in line with her values. D. Case Four: Hot Dog (modified) Imagine Mrs. Crawford is a steady workaholic. Mrs. Crawford decides to skip her dog’s walk and bring them to the store with her. She is alert, and well aware that bringing her dog with her might be a hinderance, but she does it anyway. Today of all days Mrs. Crawford pulls into a parking lot with no shade to block out the sun from her car. There is no breeze, and it is ridiculously hot outside. Instead of bringing her dog into the store with her, Mrs. Crawford decides to leave her dog in the car with the windows rolled up. She thinks she is doing the right thing by leaving her dog behind in the car and reasons that the air-conditioner was on during the drive to the store, so the car is not muggy or hot. At this point in her decision Mrs. Crawford locks the car and leaves for the store, confident that her decision was the right one. Suppose Mrs. Crawford is making good time in the store. She is almost done picking out everything on her list and is careful not to get sidetracked. However, Mrs. Bailey sees Mrs. Crawford in the aisle over and makes her way to talk to her about some important matters. Mrs. Crawford suddenly forgets about her need to complete her shopping trip in a timely manner. She forgets her dog is in the car, nor does she remember how hot it is outside because the store is well air-conditioned. Now Mrs. Crawford’s dog is still outside in the hot car, and because it is not properly ventilated or shaded the car quickly becomes extremely hot inside. The dog is soon unable to withstand the heat and becomes sick and passes out in the back seat before Mrs. Crawford returns from the store. When she returns, Mrs. Crawford is mortified. She had no idea that she had been talking to Mrs. Bailey for so long. She did not even think about her dog, or the possibility that leaving her dog unattended for as long as she did would result in its death. She quickly takes her dog to the vet. What can we understand about this scenario that is different from the original? With this new perspective, we can see that Mrs. Crawford was completely forgetful in the care of her dog. While she is a workaholic with a one-track mindset, her decision to bring her dog along seems out of the ordinary and not in line with her normal character traits. We can tell by this story that Mrs. Crawford values social relationships, which is why she stopped to talk to Mrs. Bailey, independence, which is why she went out to the store in the first place, and the well-being of others, hence her decision to leave her dog in the car. Did Mrs. Crawford have the capacity to change her course and make sure she took measures that would secure the safety of her dog? I believe so. She was not tired; she was not overcome with thoughts of work that would normally cause her to forget other obligations. She was distracted, but by something that she had the capacity to say no to. Here I would like to point out that Mrs. Crawford was in her right mind and within the right capacity to know that talking to Mrs. Bailey would disrupt her schedule of running errands. This change of schedule had the potential to possibly upset or cause extreme distress to her dog that she left in her car. Mrs. Crawford ought to have known that the dog in the car was the most precedent of her concerns. She knows that by moral standards her dog has moral worth and is a moral responsibility that she has tasked herself with. Mrs. Crawford is someone that knows the difference between morality and immorality, and she is fully aware that her dog has a right to life. By placing her own dog within harm's way, Mrs. Crawford showed not only ignorance of fact but moral ignorance as well. Since she did not know that she was possibly harming her dog by talking to Mrs. Bailey and staying within the store for an extra length of time. Mrs. Crawford would be considered morally blameworthy. She knew that her dog was in the car. Even though she may not have known that by leaving them in the car she was potentially endangering her animal, this shows moral ignorance because she did not consider her dog’s life to be worthy enough to take extended measures that would have ensured survival. From the capacitarian theory she is considered blameworthy, but considered innocent from the valuationist perspective. III. Capacitarianism and Valuationism are Two-Sides of the Same Coin: Before we start to cut deeper into each of the theories independently, I would like to point out that these vignettes show us how different theories about moral ignorance are more accurate attributions of blame, depending on how the story is told. The way an author prescribes a vignette will directly affect the way a reader chooses to apply a theory. The author’s choice to write objectively or subjectively will also affect whether a reader will approach the ignorant action with a mind of blame or exculpation. This mode of thinking is something we see in moral realism. There are two positions in moral realism that we might be able to categorize the capacitarian and valuationsist theories under. First, normative realism posits that ethical sentences describe positions that are grounded in objective features. Some of the objective features may only be true in that they report the descriptions accurately, such as “killing someone is bad”. These descriptions do not contain subjective opinions, which aids in their accuracy and helps to establish moral truths. Second, the version of metaethical realism that can be used to look at these theories states that, in principle, it is possible to know about the facts of actions that are right and wrong, and about which things are good and bad (Copp, 2007). This position depends on the subjective opinions of others to determine these aforementioned facts. Metaethical realism takes a more common-sense approach to ask questions like “should we reasonably expect someone to check the sugar dish before serving sugar?” The reason why we need to keep moral realism in mind while assessing capacitarianism and valuationism is because it directly affects our assessment of them. We can see that assessments about moral responsibility are sensitive to additions and omissions of information regarding capacities and values of the agents. With the incorporation of certain details about an agent’s past actions and value systems, a reader can be swayed to agree or disagree with certain theories of moral assessment. Certain details require someone to be objective or subjective in their interpretation of the events (Baumann, 2019). This can greatly affect how a story is understood by various readers. However the story is told, whether narrow or elaborate, the rationale behind omitting and adding detail will always have a direct effect on the reader’s intuition of the story. Depending on how the vignette is written, the reader can be manipulated to believe that certain events will result in one theory being more conclusive than another. What this shows us is that the philosophers who wrote the vignettes wrote them in a way to prove the point of their own theories. These vignettes function as intuition pumps. Anything the philosopher wants to say activates a reader’s intuitive approach to assessing a situation. While the capacitarian and valuationist theorists may focus on different characteristics of someone’s motivation, their approaches to assessments of moral responsibility are similar. Both look at the contexts in which the act was performed; however, they differ in which part of the context they think to be relevant in their assessments. Capacitarians consider the most relevant point of context of behavior and compare it to be the behavior leading up to the harmful act. The capacity of the agent is also dependent on their knowledge of their wrongdoing. Capacitarians ask whether or not agents could’ve done something differently in the past to prevent their immoral act from taking place. If they engage in a harmful immoral act, then it is a result of their ignorance. Whether to attribute blame to the agent who acted out of ignorance would depend on their capacity to know that there was some way they could have prevented themselves from doing so. If they did not have the capacity to know they were acting immorally, or that they could’ve prevented themselves from acting as such, then they would not be considered blameworthy. Thus, an agent acting out of ignorance without the capacity to know they are doing so would be morally exculpated. Valuationists choose not to look at the behaviors preceding the events and instead examine the value system of the agent. They do this because they think the value system of a person should be considered the relevant context of the moral assessment of an act (Arpaly, 2004). The community of moral theorists has situated these two theories in contexts of past actions or value systems. Up until this point, we have discussed these two theories independently, however, I would like to show how they are closely related. If a vignette focuses on the capacity or the value system of a person, then readers will be persuaded to agree with the theory that provides a better explanation of moral judgements concerning actions. For instance, the more detailed the information regarding the context of the agent, the easier it will be for us to apply a theory that best suits the framework. The information needs to highlight either the agent’s value system or the agent’s past actions. If the information in the vignette does not include any context for the reader, then it is natural for them to assume and fill it in themselves. The various assumptions that arise from different readers’ perspectives have the ability to lead to a deep disagreement about the moral assessments of actions. An under-described thought experiment gives you inconclusive information to fill in gaps that a narrow story leaves out. Without enough information, a reader must add their own information. When a reader substitutes the information missing in the vignette, it can pull people into a deep disagreement about the moral assessment of the agent. This makes it easy for a reader to feed into their own thoughts. A reader is then foolish for reading into the story what they hope to get out of it. This creates circular reasoning on the reader’s part. In all cases, different people will have different assumptions while reading the under-described thought experiment, which will inevitably lead to problems applying certain theories to each one. Unfortunately, there is no way to halt varying interpretations because it is unreasonable to expect anyone to be able to provide every possible angle that a situation can have. In other words, there is no way for the author to close the room for interpretation entirely. If a deep disagreement arises, then this must be a result of an author’s manipulation of the vignette. For a deep disagreement to form, the vignettes would need to have an unclear description of an agent’s past actions and capacity or an unclear description of their value system because this would pin the capacitarian and the valuationist standpoints against each other. When the contexts of the past actions and value systems are clear and detailed in a vignette, it is unlikely that a deep disagreement will occur. Rather than finding a clash of theories, the verdicts would be expected to converge due to their connection. Throughout this paper I have been providing a route to view the literature of moral assessment to show how the valuationist and the capacitarian approaches are in competition with each other. However, I think this view wrongly pins the two theories against each other. The values that a person has will manifest itself in their actions, likewise, their actions are guided by their values, whether consciously or unconsciously. When we lay out this connection, we can see how someone’s past actions and value system are actually connected. With that said, I think it would be in our best interest not to play the two against each other, and instead show they are dependent on one another. This holistic/detached perspective demonstrates how these two theories are two sides of the same coin. IV. Conclusion: The more a vignette spells out a history, the more we get a sense of the value system of the person involved. Any value system shapes how people perceive information and influences their decisions. This means it also influences their intuitions and builds peoples’ overall foundations for actions. How a person has acted up to the point of the scenario usually tells us the story of the person's value system. Here we get a better sense of how they would act in future situations based on how they have acted prior. If a vignette is written in detail, spelling out a person’s capacities, values, or both, then the competing theories proposed by valuationists and capacitarians will likely converge. However, if it's sparse with little to no information, then the two rival theories may clash. They will seemingly work against each other because the readers are left to fill in the details. Without an established history or value system described, readers do not have anything prescribing their thoughts. Clashing is due to the under-description of the vignette and not used to interpret theories. I think this is where a lot of the deep disagreement stems. In this conversation about the moral assessment of blame, we have two theories that are seemingly different but work in tandem. They have a great opportunity to change the way that we, as philosophers, attribute blame, especially since wishful thinking does not give moral valence. If readers can speculate the history and the potential for a person based on their capacity to potentially act out their value systems, then they will not need to speculate on what the author meant. After all, it is not the job of a reader to fill in the blanks, it is up to the author/philosopher to explain a thought experiment in full to establish their theory (Baumann, 2019). Any description that influences a perspective is an important factor, but we need to decide whether someone is or is not morally culpable in a particular situation. To do this, it is necessary to know all the past relevant information. Swapping things around, omitting necessary information, and changing the context to fit someone else’s narrative of events is not an effective way to correctively assess the morality of an agent, nor is it conducive to figuring out whether they are morally exculpable. Withholding information is one way to prevent knowledge, and if we are concerned with knowing whether someone has performed an immoral action, then the truth is of utmost importance (Baumann, 2019). This is the way things become known. When looking back at the argument between the valuationist and capacitarian, knowledge of the subject’s past is necessary for determining if someone should be considered morally blameworthy. For determining both a person’s capacities and values in the present, it is vital to investigate their past. A person’s past determines their values just as much as it determines their capacities. A person’s past values can be written off due to their present capacities; likewise, a person’s past capacities can be written off because of their present values. The present moment is a culmination of all the previous values an agent has upheld. Valuationists point out how a person’s values are a result of what they did or didn’t do in the past. These values are determined on the agent’s capacity to understand and act on those values. Similarly, capacitarians see capacities as manifestations of value systems. The key to finding out someone’s capacities and values is buried in their past. What is the difference between these two theories if they both require knowledge of the person’s past behavior? Are they distinct theories that have similar foundations, or are they two sides to the same theoretical coin? Since both theories require the past to determine their present conditions, it’s possible that proposing these two ideas as distinctly different theories does not hold up to scrutiny. This is because values are conditions that people think should be upheld and reinforced, while capacities are behaviors of what people are capable of doing. Values are conditions that people strive for, give people numerous filters for actions, and are considered valuable in the social world. Once someone has a set of values, their subsequent actions are determined. When capacitarians look at capacities of individuals, they are looking at what actions would have been expected to perform given their capabilities. These actions are expected to be performed because of individual values. This is where we see the two theories speaking a similar language. If we need to know as much information about an individual’s past to form a coherent judgment of blame, then it’s possible these two theories are derived from the same theoretical foundation grounded in the past. The past is important to these two theories as a person’s past actions are suggestive of their values, and the person’s past values are suggestive of what actions someone can do based on their capacities. At this point, to look further into this topic I think it is indispensable to ask, how do we know what someone’s past values or capacities are, and how can we tell if they have led to present conditions? References Aristotle. 2011. Nicomachean Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arpaly, N. 2004. Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry Into Moral Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baumann, M. 2019. "Consequentializing and Underdetermination" Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 511-527. Bernecker, S. 2011. The Epistemology of Fake News. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Biebel, N. 2017, October 12. Epistemic justification and the ignorance excuse. Retrieved from Springer Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11098-017-0992-4 Copp, D. 2007. "Introduction: Metaethics and Normative Ethics" The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory . Harmen, E. 2011. "Does Moral Ignorance Exculpate?" Ratio, XXIV , 443-468. M. Alvarez, &. C. 2017. "When Ignorance is No Excuse" Responsibility: The Epistemic Condition , 1-24. Rosen, G. 2003. "Culpability and Ignorance" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 103 , 61-84. Rosen, G. 2004. "Skepticism About Moral Responsibility" Philosophical Perspectives, 18 , 295-313. Sliwa, P. 2020. "Excuse without Exculpation: The Case of Moral Ignorance" Oxford Studies in Metaethics , 72-95.

Two Forms of Environmental-Political Imagination: Germany, the United States, and the Clean Energy Transition All Power to the Imagination Radical Student Groups and Coalition Building in France During May 1968 and the United States during the Vietnam War Calder McHugh Bowdoin College Author Alexis Biegen Sophia Carter Editors Fall 2019 Download full text PDF (26 pages) Abstract Student-led social movements in May of 1968 in France and through the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States captured the attention of each nation at the time and have had a profound impact on how Americans and French understand their respective states today. Both movements held the lofty goal of completely reshaping their respective societal structures but the vast differences of the cultures in which they were carried out resulted in distinct end results. In France, student protests sparked mass mobilization of the nation and, at their height, were seen by most of the country in a positive light. The broader movement that involved worker participation as well also won material gains for workers in the nation. Across the Atlantic, on the other hand, student protests were met with mostly ill will from the American working class. This work will particularly focus on the ways in which a history of strikes and a popular Communist Party in France both allowed for mass mobilization and stopped the students from pursuing more radical change. It will also work to challenge dominant narratives in political science around coalition building. I. In mid-May, 1968, as 10 million people marched in demonstration through the streets of every major French city, student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit sat down for a wide-ranging interview with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Bendit cogently articulated his goals for the student movement as well as its potential challenges. “The aim is now the overthrow of the regime,” he said. “But it is not up to us whether or not this is achieved. If the Communist Party, the [general confederation of labor union] CGT and the other union headquarters shared it… the regime would fall within a fortnight.” Six years later and across the Atlantic Ocean, the Weather Underground, a militant leftist organization in its fifth year of operation which was composed of young radicals, published a book entitled Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. The Weather Underground wrote, “Our intention is to disrupt the empire… to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.” II. Radical social movements aimed at the overthrow of capitalism and capitalist-based governments existed throughout the Western world through the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Italy, West Germany, France, and the United States, these movements were particularly wide ranging and distinctly impacted each society, causing momentous political and cultural upheaval. This work will focus on the latter two nations. The mass mobilization that shook France was confined largely to one month: May, 1968. In the middle of March, France’s leading newspaper Le Monde called France’s citizens too “bored” to protest in the same manner that was occurring in West Germany and the United States. A mere six weeks later, after the occupation of the University of Nanterre on March 22nd sparked conversation about collective action around the country, French students occupied the University of Paris at the Sorbonne, in the Latin Quarter of Paris, sparking nightly clashes with the police. Streets were barricaded, all transportation was shut down, and worker mobilization reached a height of 10 million on strike. Notably, students’ grievances were separate from those of the workers. The students rallied around a popular slogan of the time, “all power to the imagination,” which captured their collective interest in enacting changes to the educational system that would allow for a more free and accepting university structure. Comprised of Trotskyites, Maoists, anarchists, and others on the Left, many also believed in the violent overthrow of the 5th Republic of France and the complete reshaping of society. As Suzanne Borde, who in May, 1968 had recently left her childhood home for Paris, said, “Everything changed [in May, 68], my way of thinking, everything… My favorite expression at the time was “La Vie, Vite” (Life, Quickly)! I wanted to change the usual way of life.” The workers, who made up the lion’s share of the protestors but had fewer public clashes with the police, were concerned less with political ideology or societal restructuring than with material gains that would make their lives better, such as wage increases. Their protests ran in conjunction with the students’, but their union was a tenuous one: the French Communist Party (PCF) and its associated labor union Confédération Général du Travail (CGT) controlled much of the political action amongst the workers and was deeply suspicious of the goals of the student movement from its nascent stages. Ultimately, two central events led to the movement’s demise. Maybe ironically, the first was originally interpreted as a success: the protests led to governmental upheaval and President Charles de Gaulle’s temporary departure from the country. After weeks of uncertainty, representatives of de Gaulle’s government negotiated what came to be termed the Grenelle Agreements with the leadership of the CGT. Resulting in more bargaining power for unions as well as a 35 percent minimum wage increase and a 10 percent increase in average real wages, these concessions pacified many workers, leading them back to the factory floor. Second, upon returning to the country on May 30, Charles de Gaulle organized a significant counter-protest on the Champs-Elysees, dissolved the legislature and called for new legislative elections that took place in late June. De Gaulle’s party, the Union of Democrats for the Republic (UDR) won a massive victory and went back to being firmly in control of the nation, while the PCF lost more than half of their seats. Social protest in the United States was not so neatly circumscribed into a few months. Anti-Vietnam War protests took many shapes over numerous years. For the purposes of this work, analysis will be confined to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organization, its offshoot groups, and their respective impacts on the broader movement. Launched with the Port Huron Statement in 1962 before the official beginning of the American War in Vietnam in 1965, the organization purposefully did not couch its goals in traditionally communist or Marxist rhetoric, because unlike in France, there was no appetite for it in the United States. Rather, they argued quite persuasively, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least moderate comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” While fewer than 100 people signed the Port Huron Statement, by 1965, the SDS organized the “March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam,” which 15,000 to 25,000 people from around the country attended. This march both attracted a degree of attention and trained future organizers of better-coordinated marches on Washington, including the November, 1969 Moratorium March on Washington, which had over 250,000 attendees. While SDS remained a strong political force through the late 1960s, by its 1969 convention in Chicago the group had moved significantly to the left ideologically and had developed political differences amongst itself that detached it from the unified spirit of the Port Huron Statement. As SDS gathered in Chicago, by the end of the weekend of June 18-22, three separate factions had emerged. One, calling itself the Progressive Labor Party (PL), argued for Maoist and worker-oriented solutions to what they perceived as the ills of America. Another, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), became the foundation of what was eventually called the Weather Underground—they advocated for a radicalization of SDS to fight American imperialism alongside the Black Panthers and revolutionary groups around the world. Finally, the Revolutionary Youth Movement II (RYM II) agreed with RYM on most substantive issues, but believed in a more traditional Marxist approach to solve them. According to sociologist Penny Lewis, none of these groups, including the PL whose entire revolutionary strategy was based on cross-class alliance with workers, enjoyed any significant support from the working class. She writes, “The obvious reason for this was the near-unanimous embrace of Cold War anticommunism in the ranks of labor and the collapse of Communist Party influence within the class.” Left without the possibility of even a tenuous connection between young radicals and the broad working class, the Weather Underground began to participate in militant action to attempt to bring the Vietnam war home. In March of 1970, Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn anonymously recorded a transmission and sent it to a California radio station on behalf of the group. She warned, “The lines are drawn… Revolution is touching all of our lives. Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks… within the next 14 days we will bomb a major U.S. institution.” While her timeline was a bit optimistic, the group bombed the Capitol in March of 1971 and the Pentagon in May of 1972, all the while intending not to injure anyone (these two actions had no deaths associated). Their most famous (and infamous) deed was an accident—also in March of 1970, two members (Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins) accidentally detonated a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse while assembling homemade explosives, killing themselves and a third “Weatherman” who was walking into the house (Ted Gold). The Weather Underground did continue action after the conclusion of American involvement in Vietnam in 1975, but paired down much of its more violent activities. The group, whose members found their way to the FBI’s Most Wanted List, eventually disbanded; many now work as professors, educating and informing new generations of American thought. III. The outgrowth of the fragile connection between student protest and worker protest in France, as well as the lack of any significant worker mobilization in the United States, has a lot to do with the way each nation developed in the wake of World War II. During the altercations in May, 1968 in France, President Charles de Gaulle and the PCF represented two opposing poles of influence. This, in many ways, defined the conflict: de Gaulle’s fairly centrist (by modern standards) regime was forced to contend with a popular Communist Party facing a radical push from student activists combined with a wellspring of support from French workers. Interestingly, both De Gaulle and the Communists found much of their legitimacy from their actions a quarter-century prior, during World War II. De Gaulle and his supporters, along with the PCF, were the two most significant resistance forces to the collaborationist Vichy government. As such, in the first legislative election after the War in 1945, the PCF won a plurality of the vote, with 26.1 percent, and controlled the most seats in the legislature. De Gaulle did not participate in these elections. By 1967, while the PCF’s support had diminished, it remained a powerful force: they held 21.37 percent of the vote, a slight drop, but were able to build a governing coalition with fellow Leftist parties Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left (FGDS) and the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). Together, the three received 53.43 percent of the vote. The revolution in 1968, then, did not come out of nowhere. Not only could the PCF count on at least 20 percent of France’s support throughout the 1950s and 60s, it also organized strikes. Significant agrarian protests led by the PCF occurred in 1959 and 1960, and in 1963 strikes reached a zenith of the era before 1968, as the number of days that workers were on strike was the highest in 10 years. As Kenneth Libbey, who is both a scholar of and an advocate for the PCF, argues, “the belief in the ability of a mass movement to sweep aside obstacles to its success is a dominant theme of the party. Its acceptance makes the arguments about the transition to socialism at least plausible.” By May of 1968, significant differences existed between the often anarchist, Maoist, or Trotskyite student groups and the Stalinist PCF and CGT. However, these disagreements on ideology were not significant enough to halt the cross-coalitional movement—at least at first. In the case of Leftist groups in the United States, whether they marched under the Maoist banner of coalition-building with the working class (in the case of the PL movement) or had more anarchist tendencies as well as interest in engaging with black revolutionary groups such as the Black Panthers (in the case of the Weather Underground), they had very little historical precedent or organizational support upon which to draw. Even at its relative peak in 1944, the Communist Party in the United States (CPUSA) only had a confirmed membership of 80,000. In the context of the Cold War, it became impossible to be an avowed Communist in public life. In a period often called the “Second Red Scare” or “McCarthyism,” the United States Congress convened the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in order to attempt to find and punish Communists whom they believed to be working for the Soviet Union. In 1954, the United States government formally outlawed the CPUSA. While in the French case the Communist Party was associated with brave resistance to World War II, politicians in the United States were able to successfully present the CPUSA as a subversive group intent on aiding the Russians in the Cold War. As an ideology, McCarthyism faded through the 1950s and was eventually seen for what it was: a witch-hunt. However, in the Cold War context, a genuine Communist Party in the United States would have been something of an anachronism at best. Thus, radicals in the United States had to both divorce themselves from any extremely weak institutions that did exist and strive to create their own culture and identity. The divergent histories of France and the United States shaped not only the popularity of social movements in the late 1960s, but also the strategies and tactics employed by student radicals in both nations. IV. A shared characteristic of the radical students in France and the United States was their distaste for slow-moving, marginal improvements. In fact, French radical students had been preaching this ideology since the early 1960s. Trotskyite dissidents, many of whom were engaged in the leadership of the 1968 movement, submitted a manifesto to the socialist publication Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1961 outlining many of the same principles as the Weather Underground did eight years later. They argued, “One hundred and fifty years of ‘progress’ and ‘democracy’ have proved that no matter what reforms are applied to the capitalist system they will not change the real situation of the worker.” As is typical of the French case, revolutionary politics are more wrapped up in the labor movement than in the United States. The manifesto continues, “The workers will not be free of oppression and exploitation until their struggles have resulted in setting up a really socialistic society, in which workers’ councils will have all the power, and both production and economic planning will be under worker management.” Fredy Perlman, a student who aided in the shutdown of the Censier Annex of the Sorbonne, believed in a direct connection between the actions at the Universities and the larger strikes. He saw the main contribution of the students at the Censier to be the formation of worker-student action committees, in which the two groups coordinated actions together. Perlman, who published a booklet entitled Worker-student Action Committees, France, 1968 in 1970, wrote, “The formation of the worker-student committees coincides with the outbreak of a wildcat strike: ‘In the style of the student demonstrators, the workers of Sud-Aviation have occupied the factory at Nantes.” For Alain Krivine, the founder of one of the most influential activist groups for youth during 1968, Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, increased rights for workers were essential to the success of the movement. However, he did not believe that leaders of the unions or the Communist Party best represented the workers’ interests. He says, “For me [leftwing political leaders Pierre] Mendès-France and [François] Mitterand were shit… Mendès-France and Mitterand could be an alternative, but for us it was a bad one.” Student demonstrator Isabelle Saint-Saëns largely agrees. “When we marched with the workers we felt united with them, but it remained theoretical as well,” she said. Nevertheless, the students did see the workers as the key to their success, because they were willing to mobilize and they held such tremendous political power because of their sheer numbers. As opposed to the situation in France, protest in the United States was based largely around denouncing the imperialism inherent within the conflict in Vietnam. In the shadow of the SDS convention in June of 1969, student radicals who formed the leadership of the splinter group of the Weather Underground sprang into action. Leadership of the organization included many young radicals who had been involved in the demonstrations against the Vietnam War at Columbia University the year before, including Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd, who famously wrote in a letter to Columbia President Grayson Kirk: “You call for order and respect for authority; we call for justice, freedom, and socialism. There is only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.’” The Weather Underground’s first major action,termed the “Days of Rage,” was scheduled to take place from October 8-11, 1969 in the streets of Chicago. The action’s specific purpose was to protest the trial of the “Chicago Eight,” a group on trial for antiwar activism during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. While they hoped for the participation of around 50,000 militants they got only a few hundred. The action, which included the looting and burning of downtown Chicago appeared not to have a particularly cogent mission, was panned by the mainstream media, but also by many fellow Leftist organizations, who argued that the organizers were alienating the broader public from their cause. The Weather Underground itself, though, argued that the “Days of Rage” were part of a larger effort to “bring the war home.” At this point in the antiwar fight, the Weather Underground had decided that they could not count on the participation of workers because of their lack of any significant socialist or communist sympathies. As such, they planned demonstrations and militant actions to raise the consciousness of the greater populace to the horrors of the war abroad. Friends and siblings who were drafted, sent to Vietnam, and often killed in action particularly galvanized American youth. Partially to announce the formation of the Weather Underground, the group released a manifesto entitled “You Don’t Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows.” A subsection of this argument, “Anti-Imperialist Revolution and the United Front,” states, “Defeating imperialism within the US couldn’t possibly have the content, which it could in a semi-feudal country, of replacing imperialism with capitalism or new democracy; when imperialism is defeated in the US, it will be replaced by socialism- nothing else. One revolution, one replacement process, one seizure of state power- the anti-imperialist revolution and the socialist revolution, one and the same stage.” Student radicals in the United States saw the need to engender violent revolution in order to move to a state willing to accept socialism as a rational political ideology. The stated aims of the two movements, then, were quite similar. Each believed that their government was not truly democratic, and that there was a distinct need to expel the ruling elite from power. The two groups framed the issue using a shared language of the Left that dealt primarily with expressing solidarity with the oppressed. Divergence in the movements appeared in each group’s understanding of their own role in society. In France, while students were suspicious and sometimes downright dismissive of the PCF and the CGT, they believed they needed the participation of the workers (many of whom were members of those organizations) to succeed. The split at the SDS convention in June of 1969, on the other hand, further alienated the Weather Underground even from fellow Leftist organizations. While the Weather Underground hoped to gain more support for its cause amongst the general populace, the group also understood the nature of the political system in the United States and made the conscious decision to exist outside of it. In “You Don’t Need a Weatherman…” they wrote, “How will we accomplish the building of [a Marxist-Leninist Party]- It is clear that we couldn’t somehow form such a party at this time, because the conditions for it do not exist in this country outside the Black Nation.” Much of the reason for both the divergent outcomes as well as the divergent tactics and framing of the student movements in France and the United States have to do with the political opportunity structures that existed in each nation during the late 1960s. These are broadly rooted in the historical differences in the treatment of Communism as an ideology in both nations. V. Many scholars have argued that the character of the revolution of May 1968 was defined by the youth and, to a lesser degree, intellectuals in the nation. Maybe more important for mass mobilization in France, though, was the history of strikes in the nation. According to French historian Stéphane Sirot, while in other nations strikes are often the result of failed negotiations, in France they frequently occur either during or before negotiations with labor bosses. Strikes are such successful tactics of negotiation because they work on two levels. First, they have an offense element through mass demonstrations that attract the attention of the media. Second, they work defensively in that by refusing to work, they put pressure on bosses to find a quick solution. In their paper, “The Shape of Strikes in France, 1830-1960,” published in 1971, scholars Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly argue that French strikes, while fairly prevalent throughout this period, changed fairly significantly in character in this time period. This, according to Shorter and Tilly, has largely to do with the significant expansion of industrial unionism at the end of the 1930s around the European continent. They use measurements of size, duration, and frequency to calculate the shape that these strikes took. Below is an example of their model: Table 1.1 This table shows two distinct strike scenarios. What Shorter and Tilly refer to as “Industry X” represents a scenario in which strikes are long but small and occur fairly infrequently. “Industry Y” has strikes that occur more frequently and with a larger size, but do not last for as long. By the 1960s in France, the model for strikes looked quite a bit more like “Industry Y” than “Industry X.” Below is, once again, Shorter and Tilly’s graphic explanation of this phenomenon, based on the historical cataloguing of strikes: Table 1.2 This is significant in that massive, short demonstrations, while not necessarily more successful than those that are smaller and play out over a longer period of time, are wont to receive more attention from the public and the media due to their dramatic nature. The sheer mass of strikes through the 1960s made it easier for workers to mobilize around issues that ran adjacent to the concerns of the students, such as rights to self-management in any workplace, but were certainly not the same. Conversely, in the United States before 1968 there were few examples of large scale strikes. Other than the steel workers’ strike in 1959, which included around half a million participants, frequent general strikes had not existed in the nation since the 19th Century. Additionally, while union activity was certainly stronger in the 1960s in the United States than it is today, the protests of the 1960s were more focused on the antiwar effort than the rights of workers. VI. Likely due at least partially to their comfort with general strikes and mass mobilization, the French populace largely supported the students and their efforts to protest, expressing ire for the police force when they clashed. On May 10, 1968, in what has since been termed the “night of the barricades” (because of barriers that students constructed to slow down police), French police and students clashed violently in the streets of Paris. 80 percent of Parisians, though, supported the students and believed fault in escalating the violence lay with the police. Nevertheless, cultural differences between the youth and both the ruling class and worker allies persisted in France as well, which manifested themselves in the priorities of the students. Before the revolution of 1968, the French schooling system was extremely restrictive. Students could not voice their own ideas in the classroom and the gender and sexual politics of the university were also extremely conservative—men and women were often divided. Thus, in considering how all of French society should change, the University system was at the front of many students’ minds. As Perlman argued about the revolutionary movement, “What begins [when the Universities are occupied] is a process of collective learning; the "university," perhaps for the first time, becomes a place for learning. People do not only learn the information, the ideas, the projects of others; they also learn from the example of others that they have specific information to contribute, that they are able to express ideas, that they can initiate projects. There are no longer specialists or experts; the division between thinkers and doers, between students and workers, breaks down. At this point all are students.” As might be expected, while many supported the broad protests of the students and their right to do so, concepts like the total change in University structure, for which Perlman argued, were less popular or important to much of French society. Thus, the French students created their own political ideology and culture that was often separate from that of the more institutionalized labor movements. However, while their culture and their priorities often separated them from the workers, the French students also believed the workers to be necessary to their success. When the Grenelle Accords were signed and a majority of the workers agreed to go back to work, students quickly demobilized. As scholar Mitchell Abidor argues in the introduction to his oral history May made me, “For the workers, it was not the qualitative demands of the students that mattered, but their own quantitative, bread-and-butter issues.” Ultimately, French students were incapable of understanding or accepting this. Abidor continues, “The ouvriérisme—the workerism—so strong on the French left led the students to think the workers were the motor of any revolution, which left the vehicle immobile because the engine was dead.” So, after the workers returned to work, the students also quite quickly demobilized. The alliance between the students and the workers in France was further complicated by the students’ tenuous relationship to the PCF and CGT, organizations which were active participants in the society that students were striving to upend. The PCF and CGT, naturally concerned with their parties’ success, framed their arguments and made agreements based on the existing political opportunity structure in France. Many student radicals, on the other hand, saw it as their charge to revise those very structures. The PCF was thus forced to walk a fine line between maintaining its own institutional legitimacy and representing the more revolutionary elements of its own party. According to Libbey, French Professor Georges Lavau thus argues, “[the PCF] has assumed the role of tribune: articulating the grievances of discontented groups as well as defending the gains of the workers against attempts by the bourgeoisie to undermine them. The PCF has thus become a legitimate channel for protest, protecting the system from more destructive outbursts. This protection failed in 1968, of course, but Lavau contends that the party’s role of tribune nonetheless coloured its response to the crisis.” Lavau and Libbey’s contention that the PCF lost the role of tribune in May of 1968 is worth noting because although the CFDT and the CGT were the ones to negotiate with de Gaulle’s government, they had lost control of the situation. They were able, ultimately, to demobilize the workers, but they lost significant support, which showed in the elections of June, 1968 where they lost half of their seats. The Grenelle Accords in many ways crystallized the differences between the gauchiste students and the institutionalized, Stalinist political parties. These differences, which existed throughout the movement, were momentarily put aside as everyone took to the streets. After most workers returned to the factory floor, though, student radicals, as well as radical elements within the Communist Party, discussed their disappointment with the limited scope of the Grenelle Accords. Prisca Bachelet, who was helped to organize the nascent stages of the movement during demonstrations at the University of Nanterre on March 22, 1968, said of the leaders of the CGT, “they were afraid, afraid of responsibility.” Éric Hazan, who was a cardiac surgeon and a radical Party member during 1968, argued the Communists’ actions at the end of May and their negotiations with the government amounted to “Treason. Normal. A normal treason.” Student Jean-Pierre Vernant argued, “The May crisis is not explained and is not analyzed [by the Party]. It is erased.” The students and their allies had good reason for frustration. They believed the Party theoretically meant to represent them betrayed many of the principles for which they were fighting. Members of the Communist Party also quite obviously held distaste for many of the student radicals. In a very obvious reference to the student movement, Communist Party leader Roland Leroy said at the National Assembly on May 21, 1968, “The Communists are not anarchists whose program tends to destroying everything without building anything.” For their part, the students’ significant miscalculation, was that they believed Party leaders like Leroy did not speak for the interests of the workers. Hélène Chatroussat, a Trotskyite, argued at the time, “I said to myself, [the workers] are many, they’re with us… so why don’t they tell the Stalinists [the PCF] to get lost so we could come in and they could join us?” To the contrary, many of the workers who went on strike in the factories were uninterested in broader political change or politics in general. They simple hoped for a positive change to their material conditions. As Colette Danappe, a worker in a factory outside Paris, told Mitchell Abidor, “The students were more interested in fighting, they were interested in politics, and that wasn’t for us.” Danappe continued about the Grenelle Accords, “We got almost everything we wanted and almost everyone voted to return… Maybe we were a little happier, because we had more money. We were able to travel afterwards.” At first glance, it would appear that the situation in the United States and the goals of antiwar demonstrators would have made it easier to mobilize a broader cross-section of the population. By mid-May of 1971, 61% of Americans responded “Yes, a mistake” to the Gallup poll question, “In view of developments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S. made a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam?” However, a larger segment of the older population in the United States was against the war than the younger generation. These older Americans did not support the war, but largely did not support protest movements either. The lasting images of social movements in the United States in the 1960s all include what came to be referred to as “the counterculture.” The counterculture is depicted, stereotypically, as young men and women with flowers in their hair, listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival, and holding radical aspirations for the dawn of a new age in America. This group was generally maligned by significant portions of older generations of Americans in particular, who believed the youth movement to be related more to drug use than to any serious concern. While the counterculture’s goals of promoting peace and community were in many ways quite sincere, with the fear of the draft adding to their outrage, an older generation of Americans refused to take their style of protest seriously. Table 1.3 This table explains mobilization. The situation in France in May of 1968 can be found in the bottom-right box: the broad-based grievances of students were largely supported and they found political allies in the labor and Communist parties. In the United States, mass mobilization did not occur on the same scale, because although the popularity of the grievance was high (as support for the American War in Vietnam was low), no significant political allies (who could have been found in the older generation of anti-war Americans) existed. This situation can be found in the top-right box. This disdain for the youth movement was made obvious in the way that Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather covered clashes at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Members of the counterculture movement, calling themselves “Yippies” (included in this group were many members of the SDS), descended onto Chicago to protest the Vietnam War and the lack of democracy inside the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination selection. Cronkite had already argued on air that the Vietnam War had become unwinnable, but when he and Rather covered the 1968 DNC together, their attention was focused on normative politics as a whole—and they quite obviously had very little respect for the protestors. Each argued that it was the Yippies who provoked a bloody confrontation with the police, with Rather stating that, “Mayor Richard Daly vowed to keep it peaceful, even if it took force to keep the peace. He was backed by 12,000 police, 5,000 national guardsmen, and 7,500 regular army troops. But the Yippies succeeded—they got their confrontation.” Through the 1960s, many protest and counter-culture groups (including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Americans for Democratic Action, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, to name a few) created and sustained significant cultural differences from much of American society. Members of the Weather Underground, despite some of their uniquely militant positions, dressed and spoke in a language that was common to the broader counterculture movement. They did so largely because they felt themselves unable to work within the boundaries of a political system that, even on the left, did not come close to representing their political ideology. In forming their own cultural identity, Leftist groups in the United States did manage to catch the attention of the masses, even if that attention was largely negative. In this way, their issues and demands were placed at the center of the conversation, causing a fraught societal debate. VII. The legacies of the social movements of the late 1960s in the United States and France are hotly debated. Historian Tony Judt, holding an unmistakable disdain for the student movement in France, wrote, “It is symptomatic of the fundamentally apolitical mood of May 1968 that the best-selling books on the subject a generation later are not serious works of historical analysis, much less the earnest doctrinal tracts of the time, but collections of contemporary graffiti and slogans. Culled from the walls, noticeboards and streets of the city, these witty one-liners encourage young people to make love, have fun, mock those in authority, generally do what feels good—and change the world almost as a by-product… This was to be a victimless revolution, which in the end meant it was no sort of revolution at all.” On the other hand, scholar Simon Tormey wrote about the events of May of 1968, “1968 represented a freeing up of politics from the congealed, stodgy and unimaginative understandings that had so dogged the emergence of an oppositional politics after the second world war. It unleashed a wave of joyous experimentation, evanescent and spontaneous efforts to challenge the dull routine of the repetitious lives that had been constructed in and through advanced capitalism.” As we can see, this duality of point-of-view about revolutionary movements existed both in France and the United States. While the Weather Underground, without any significant political allies and carrying a negative media portrayal from the press, has mostly been portrayed negatively in the years since, some scholars believe that they altered a broader American consciousness. As Arthur Eckstein writes, “Thousands of New Leftists agreed with the Weathermen’s analysis of what had gone awry in America… the last 50 years have seen remarkable progress in black rights, women’s rights, gay rights, Hispanic and Asian rights… Weatherman’s violence... did not impede that progress.” Although Eckstein certainly does not offer a ringing endorsement of their militant tendencies, he does argue here that the group spawned social progress in a way that they did not expect they would. Interestingly enough, these more positive interpretations from historians and political scientists contradict the feelings of the student radicals themselves. Neither group had an exact moment of demobilization, but it became increasingly clear to young leaders throughout the early 1970s that they had not fomented the change for which they had hoped. In France especially, a growing frustration existed towards the Communist Party and its Labor wing, which points quite obviously to the dangers of coalition building. Students’ purported political allies came to be thought of as traitors by many of the student radicals. These frustrations and divisions that were born in 1968 proceeded, if not directly led, to the French Communist Party’s long slide into irrelevance during the 1970s and 80s, as Abidor argues. He writes, “Once it lost the PCF as the mediating force to represent its grievances, the French working class fulfilled Herbert Marcuse’s 1972 warning that “The immediate expression of the opinion and will of the workers, farmers, neighbors—in brief, the people—is not, per se, progressive and a force of social change: it may be the opposite.” The PCF understood this latent conservatism in the working class of 1968. Not so the New Left student movement.” The coalition was successful very briefly in May and resulted in positive material gains for workers—through pay raises, France became a little bit more equal. The most significant legacies of movements in France and the United States, though, were separate from any coalition. The French and the American students, each galvanized to be part of the revolutionary vanguard and inspired to change their societies, felt a deep sense of disappointment after the events of the late 1960s. Broken alliances and dashed goals led to the perception that they had let themselves and their ideals down. Measured this way, revolution failed, and Judt is right to argue that in this context, “it was no sort of revolution at all.” A middle ground perspective is well-explained by May ’68 protestor Suzanne Borde, who noted, “It made it possible to change the way children were educated, leading many teachers to reflect and to teach differently. Experimental schools opened... But it had no consequences on political life and failed to changed anything real.” Holding a completely different interpretation of the outcome, Maguy Alvarez, an English teacher in France, told New York Times journalist Alissa Rubin, “Everything was enlarged by 1968; it determined all my life.” Rubin titled the article “May 1968: A Month of Revolution Pushed France Into the Modern World.” So, maybe “these witty one-liners [that encouraged] young people to make love, have fun, mock those in authority, generally do what feels good,” did change France as a byproduct. The kicker of Alvarez’s quote is that she told it to Rubin not as she was deeply examining the political consequences of the era, but as she was walking through an exhibition of posters and artworks from the period. During his interview with Borde, Abidor noted towards the end of the discussion, “May ’68 didn’t result in anything concrete, then.” Borde responded, “Sure it did. It completely changed the way I live.” VIII. Much of the existing literature in the field of social movement theory is concerned with the ways in which social groups successfully frame their movements to a broader public in order to increase popular support, political allies, and best take advantage of existing political opportunity structures. This work, although not formatted with a traditional structure of similar systems design, is concerned with the comparison of a social movement that attempts to tap into public support (French student movement) with another that appears to at times actively avoid building coalitions (the Weather Underground). More than anything else, the historical differences in France and the United States led to vastly different political opportunity structures for each social movement in the late 1960s. Yet neither group compromised their idealistic political ideology, and for this reason both groups failed to achieve their ultimate goals. Nevertheless, both did change cultural aspects of the societies in which they operated. The conclusion of these movements’ cultural success, despite their political failure, challenges existing social movement literature that argues that successful social movements should attempt always to build broad support. French student radicals found cultural success not because of their coalition with the working class but often despite it. In the United States, much of the lasting memory of the SDS occurred after it split into the Weather Underground. Certainly, a degree of this remembrance is negative—French student radicals with their “power to the imagination” are remembered in a much rosier light than the Weather Underground, which is often considered a terrorist organization in the United States. However, the Weather Underground and its writings continue to inspire generations of young activists, who do not necessarily ascribe to their militant tactics but are inspired by its political ideology. Coalition building can without a doubt aid in the success of a social movement. However, it can also at times minimize its impact. As we examine these two distinct approaches to creating change, our analysis shows that coalition building might support the historical imagination, but it can hinder change. IX. Since the financial crisis of 2008, questions of the value of coalition building have continued to roil activists, in particular in the United States, which precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis and now exists in a period of unstable economic and political development that scholars have called a “crisis of neoliberalism.” Current social protest movements have faced some of the same issues confronting protestors in the 1960s and early 1970s—the Occupy Wall Street movement presents a worthy case study. In many respects, the Occupy movement is the closest analog in recent history to the May 1968 movement in France. Sparked by young people, the protests were concerned with income inequality and were able to create an entirely new language to talk about money in this country through popular slogans—“we are the 99%.” Branding itself a revolutionary movement, Occupy eschewed traditional leadership structures and declared an “occupation of New York City” on September 29, 2011 which resulted in a series of clashes with the police and ended in the protestors being forced out of their home base of Zuccotti Park on November 15 of the same year. Protests continued for months afterwards around the world, but did not maintain the same sort of zeal as they did in September, October, and November of 2011. While the Occupy movement quickly burned and petered out in a similar way to May 68, its results are of a somewhat different character than those in France and are thus worth examining here. Most significantly, the United States government was never forced to come to the bargaining table with Occupy, and their leaderless movement has been criticized for never laying out concrete demands. Additionally, though, the amorphous nature of the group allowed it to buck trends of significant splintering along ideological lines—post-Occupy activism has simply dispersed to campaigns like #AbolishICE and protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline. Its greatest success has likely been the proliferation of discussion of income inequality in the United States, which has led to campaigns for an increased minimum wage. However, in a similar way to the student protestors in France, questions remain as to whether “we are the 99%” has been honored or coopted. Hillary Clinton launched her 2016 presidential campaign in Iowa with the statement “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.” Ted Cruz highlighted in the lead-up to 2016 “the top 1% earn a higher share of our income nationally than any year since 1928” and Jeb Bush said “the income gap is real.” The rhetoric is well and good, but each of these politicians has, according to Occupy, aided in the widening of this gap. There are positive messaging lessons to be learned from the Occupy movement for other protest groups, but in many respects Occupy lost control of the narrative—the shrinking 1% now speaks for the 99%. Bibliography: Abidor, Mitchell. May made me: an oral history of the 1968 uprising in France. Chico: AK Press, 2018. Abidor, Mitchell. “1968: When the Communist Party Stopped a French Revolution.” New York Review of Books. April 19, 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/19/ . 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Neti Linzer Can Pascal Convert the Libertine? An Analysis of the Evaluative Commitment Entailed by Pascal's Wager Neti Linzer While Pascal’s wager is commonly approached as a stand-alone decision theoretic problem, there is also a crucial evaluative component to his argument that adds oft-overlooked complexities. Though we can formulate a response to these challenges by drawing on other sections of the Pensées, an examination of an argument from Walter Kaufmann highlights enduring difficulties with this response, leading to the conclusion that Pascal lacks the resources to convincingly appeal to the libertine’s self-interest. I. Introduction Pascal’s wager, an argument due to the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, is generally analyzed as a self-contained, formalizable problem, embodying one of the first applications of decision theory (1). In short, it calculates the expected utility of believing in God against that of not believing, and concludes that, inasmuch as rationality entails maximizing expected utility, i.e. making the decision that will most likely lead to the most preferable outcome, it is rational for us to believe in God (2). This is a “wager” insofar as we cannot know with certainty that God exists, and the most we can do is gamble on the fact that He does. But what I will argue is that the wager argument presupposes a certain evaluative commitment, which Pascal’s targeted audience, the ‘libertine,’ notably lacks (3). The libertine is someone who does not believe in God, and whose value system is instead oriented towards earthly, bodily, happiness. I claim that for someone thus constituted, Pascal’s wager fails to be convincing. The wager, however, is only one part of Pascal’s never-finished apologetic project, the preliminary notes of which are organized in the Pensées, meaning ‘Thoughts.’ I will show that if we examine some of the other arguments Pascal makes throughout the Pensées, then we can formulate a response to this objection on Pascal’s behalf. As Pascal describes her, the libertine is deeply unhappy when she thinks about the contingencies of the human condition, and she therefore values activities which entertain her and divert her from these disturbing thoughts. In his description of the libertine’s condition, Pascal p erforms something of a Nietzschean style ‘revaluation’ of this approach to life: it includes a destructive phase—in which Pascal argues that the libertine’s values are based on false p resuppositions—followed by a constructive phase—in which Pascal presents the libertine with a more attractive evaluative framework. Once she is in this new cognitive space, the libertine is p repared to be persuaded by the wager. I argue, however, that inasmuch as there are alternative ways for the libertine to revalue her mortality, Pascal fails to make an argument that will necessarily appeal to her self-interest. Drawing on the work of the 20th-century philosopher Walter Kaufmann, I argue that the libertine can instead revalue her mortality by embracing it, by recognizing the way in which the fact of her death is precisely what makes her life worthwhile. And while Kaufman’s approach certainly might also fail to be convincing it at least offers a viable alternative, and has two advantages over Pascal’s: (i) it draws on known facts (our mortality) rather than theoretical possibilities (an immortal soul), and it does not require any kind of wager. The upshot is that, while thedestructive phase of Pascal’s ‘revaluation’ may have been successful, the success of the constructive phase is dubious. As an appeal to the libertine’s self-interest, the wager falls short. The first section of this paper presents the objection to Pascal’s argument, the second section develops a response on Pascal's behalf, and the final section presents enduring difficulties with Pascal’s argument by introducing Kaufmann’s alternative approach. II. The Libertine’s Objection to Pascal’s Wager Crucially, Pascal’s wager is written in a language that the libertine will understand—the language of self-interest. We can summarize Pascal’s argument by saying that the libertine’s current lifestyle can, at most, offer her finite happiness: “what you are staking is finite.” If she gambles on belief in God, however, then the libertine opens herself up to the possibility of gaining infinite reward, and, as Pascal puts it, “all bets are off wherever there is an infinity.” As long as there are not infinitely greater chances that God doesn’t exist, than that God does exist, then, Pascal urges the libertine that, “there is no time to hesitate, you must give everything.” Pascal thereby appeals to the libertine’s instrumental rationality by identifying what it is that the libertine intrinsically desires—namely, her own “beatitude” (4)—and then by arguing that in order to truly satisfy this desire, the libertine must wager on belief in God (5). But there is a catch: the infinite happiness guaranteed by God is incomparable to any form of finite happiness that the libertine now enjoys. This is certainly true after the libertine accepts the wager, since belief in God demands that the libertine radically transform her lifestyle, substituting the dictates of her own will for the dictates of God’s. But I will argue that choosing to accept the wager requires the libertine to undergo what is arguably an even more dramatic transformation: she must transform her value system. This is because the wager does not just promise the libertine more happiness, but rather, it promises her qualitatively different happiness. And the wager only works if the libertine values this sort of happiness. It is true that Pascal never specifies what he means by “an infinite life of infinite happiness,” but inasmuch as he believes that it is the result of a life of faith, we can assume that he is referring to a traditional Catholic conception of heaven. Consider, then, the following reply in the mouth of Pascal’s libertine: an infinite life with God sounds absolutely miserable! First of all, inasmuch as my happiness is derived, at least in part, from the enjoyment of bodily pleasures, I cannot imagine being happy without my body. Happiness means hunting expeditions, games of cards, lavish feasts, and good company—where can I find those in heaven? Moreover, God promises to unite with believers in heaven. But why should I want to unite with God? You are offering me something that satisfies absolutely none of my desires. My life would not be better if God existed, even, (and this is crucial), if God rewarded me as a believer! Pascal’s wager works by presenting the libertine with a gamble: if God exists, there will be infinite happiness for those who believe and infinite misery for those who do not. This is because God promises to reward believers by uniting with them in heaven, and punishing non-believers by burning, or otherwise punishing them, in hell. But from the libertine’s perspective, there is no gamble: the prospects of heaven and hell are both unattractive, and since we are dealing with infinite amounts of time, they are both infinitely distressing prospects. There is therefore nothing worth gambling on. We might try to assure the libertine that once she is a believer, she will desire eternal life in heaven. We often persuade people to do something by promising that they might enjoy it, even if right now they cannot understand why. To take a mundane example, you might happily follow the recommendation of a friend to try a new food, even if you cannot imagine what it would be like to eat it. True, the stakes of this decision are qualitatively lower, but the same epistemic uncertainty seems to be at play: you cannot know whether you appreciate this food until you taste it, and you also cannot know whether you value a relationship with God until you attempt to build one. Inasmuch as wagering on the food does not involve any sort of evaluative transformation on your part, wagering on God might be the same way. But, there is a disanalogy between the two cases. Pascal is presenting the libertine with a certain decision matrix in which Pascal assigns an infinitely positive value to heaven and an infinitely negative value to hell (6). In order for the libertine to assign the same values to the given outcomes in the matrix, she must transform her evaluative framework, so that this-worldly happiness is no longer her highest value. The case of the new food, however, does not require a transformation of this sort. You know that you will either like or dislike the food, and you know that you value eating food that you like and disvalue eating foods that you do not like. Of course, there is still a gamble involved in trying the food since it is impossible to know how you will feel about its taste (7).But crucially, this puts you in a position that is analogous to the libertine considering Pascal’s wager only provided that she has already made the necessary evaluative transformation. It does not put you into the position of a standard libertine, who values her current happiness above all else, and therefore does not see anything to gamble for. Let’s describe a case that would be more analogous to the wager. Henrietta is a principled ascetic, meaning that she values abstention from earthly pleasures to whatever extent possible. As such, she adheres to a strict diet of only bread and water. She has sworn off earthly pleasures and adheres to a strict diet of bread and water. Suppose that her cousin, Henry, a food connoisseur, wants to convince her to try some caviar. He knows that he has never tasted caviar before, but he argues that, given her expected utility calculations, those who eat caviar enjoy it so much that he stands to gain more than lose from trying the caviar. But of course, even if Henrietta thought that Henry’s calculations were correct, they would be meaningless to her. As a matter of principle, she does not value the sensual pleasure provided by eating delicious food. Therefore, the experience of enjoying the food might be even more negative for Henrietta than the experience of disliking it, inasmuch as she has moral disdain for sensual pleasure. Henry’s calculations will only be persuasive if Henrietta abandons her current ascetic values and adopts a more hedonistic lifestyle. This is similar to the situation that the libertine finds herself in when presented with Pascal’s wager. Just as it would be meaningless to convince Henrietta to eat caviar by convincing her to abandon her ascetic lifestyle, to suggest that the libertine will desire heaven if she is a believing Christian is to reformulate the challenge rather than to address it. By formulating the libertine’s challenge this way, we realize just what Pascal’s wager requires: before the libertine can decide to wager on God’s existence, she must first revolutionize her evaluative framework, performing what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would refer to as a “revaluation of values,” i.e. a complete reversal of her normative commitments. At present, a religious lifestyle is not in the libertine’s self-interest; the libertine’s conception of happiness is tethered to her physical existence in this world, and therefore she will not be moved by promises of her soul being rewarded in another world. Now that we have established that the libertine must be induced to reassess her values before she can be persuaded to wager on God’s existence we must ask: does Pascal present the libertine with such an argument? III. Pascal’s Revaluation There is an inherent challenge in trying to influence someone to “revalue their values”: namely, identifying which values one can appeal to in formulating the argument. Generally, pragmatic arguments like Pascal’s wager take the agent’s values as a starting point, and then proceed to demonstrate that a certain action will do a better job at furthering the agent’s values. But if we use values as a starting point, how can we cogently provide someone with practical reasons to adopt a wholly new evaluative framework, without invoking the very values that they do not yet possess? To see how we might formulate a “revaluation” without recourse to other values, we can draw inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophical undertaking was just that: a revaluation of all values. In his work, Nietzsche’s Revaluation of Values: A Study in Strategies, contemporary Nietzsche scholar, E.E. Sleinis, analyzes the various strategies that Nietzsche uses to achieve his evaluative revolution. One strategy that he discusses, “destruction from within,” undermines a certain value by revealing that it is internally inconsistent (8). This undermines the value on its own terms. There are a few different permutations of this strategy. One, which Sleinis refers to as “false presuppositions,” aims to show that “the value requires a fact to obtain that, as it turns out, fails to obtain.” In attacking the factual, rather than the evaluative component of the value system, Nietzsche is able to undermine it from within, without recourse to other values. For example, Nietzsche devalues “disinterested contemplation as the ideal of aesthetic contemplation” by arguing that humans are simply incapable of disinterested contemplation. We cannot disengage from our passions, emotions, and other interests when we contemplate works of art. “We can put this point in more graphic terms,” explains Sleinis, by arguing that “the pure aesthetic contemplator is a fiction" (9). In what follows, I will demonstrate how Pascal launches a similar attack on the libertine’s value system by arguing, in a parallel manner, that the happy libertine is a fiction. As mentioned, the wager is merely a part of Pascal’s broader apologetic project, and it is within this broader project that Pascal employs this Nietzschean revaluation strategy. There are many notes in the Pensées devoted to bemoaning the wretchedness of the libertine’s condition, and arguing that man simply cannot be happy without God. And while we do not know where Pascal would have placed these ideas (if at all) in his final work, we can still argue that, Pascal’s intentions aside, they do an excellent job preparing the libertine to be receptive to the wager. Once Pascal convinces the libertine that her approach to life was premised on a false presupposition, he is able to urge her to gamble on a new one. Pascal undermines the libertine’s approach to life—happiness derived from entertainment or diversions as the ideal of happiness—in the same way that Nietzsche undermines disinterested contemplation as the ideal of aesthetic contemplation: he shows that humans are incapable of achieving happiness through their diversions (10). While traces of this argument are evident throughout the Pensées , Pascal’s most sustained argument for it appears in his section “Diversions.” After examining this argument, we will turn to the possibility of an alternative response on behalf of the libertine in the spirit of philosopher Walter Kaufmann. Pascal presents us with an imagined dialogue, presumably between a believer and a libertine, in which the libertine explains her approach to life: “is not happiness the ability to be amused by diversion?”(11). For the libertine, to be happy is to be entertained. We can understand some of the more perplexing behaviors of people if we realize that their underlying motivation is to divert and entertain themselves: “those who philosophize about it, and who think people are quite unreasonable to spend a whole day chasing a hare they would not have bought, scarcely know our nature.” People do not hunt because they want the kill, but rather, because hunting provides them with entertainment. Pascal argues that all men, even kings who are in “the finest position of the world,” are miserable, “if they are without what is called diversion” (12). The reason that we value diversion, explains Pascal, is because it allows us to avoid confronting all of the unpleasant features of our condition. We do not seek “easy and peaceful lives,” because those would force us to think about “our unhappy condition” (13). The “unhappy” quality of our condition is delineated in the believer’s reply to the libertine; the libertine asks whether happiness is not the ability to be amused by diversions, to which the believer replies, “No, because that comes from elsewhere and from outside, and thus it is dependent, and subject to be disturbed by a thousand accidents which cause inevitable distress” (14). All of the activities with which the libertine happily amuses herself are all highly contingent, and are made easily inaccessible by any number of factors that are necessarily out of the libertine’s control. Moreover, all of the libertine’s amusements are necessarily ephemeral, so that even if they are miraculously undisturbed by illness or accident, they will inevitably be disturbed by death. This is the primary source of the libertine’s inconsolable misery in Pascal’s conception—no matter how much happiness she derives from her activities in this world, her impending death constantly threatens to rob her of everything. As Pascal puts it, man “wants to be happy, wants only to be happy, and cannot want not to be so. But how will he go about it? The best way would be to render herself immortal, but since he cannot do this, he has decided to prevent himself from thinking about it” (15). Thoughts of mortality thwart the libertine’s ability to enjoy the world around, and so the libertine blocks out these thoughts with diversions. In Pascal’s example, the libertine hunts vigorously for a hare that he would never buy, because while “the hare does not save us from the sight of death...the hunt does” (16). All of this explains how Pascal can argue, in the spirit of Nietzsche, that valuing the happiness derived from diversions as the ideal of happiness falsely assumes that humans can find happiness in diversions. Pascal demonstrates that they cannot. Our diversions are inevitably “subjected to be disturbed by a thousand accidents, and this causes inevitable distress” (17). Crucially, the distress is inevitable ; even if we spend most of our time completely amused by diversions, the fact that our source of happiness is external and contingent puts us in a constant state of instability. We are rendered eternally dependent on factors beyond our control and are therefore powerless to console ourselves in the face of adversity unless the universe conspires to offer us diversion. We might wonder if Pascal’s case is overstated. Couldn’t the libertine seek happiness through something more substantial than a mere “diversion,” like, for example, self-fulfillment? I think that for Pascal the answer is no. This is because death robs any pursuit–even the pursuit of self-fulfillment–of enduring meaning. As Pascal puts it: “the final act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. In the end, they throw some earth over our head, and that is it forever” (18). The libertine can only be satisfied if she does not think about the “final act” that will undermine “the rest of the play,” and because of this, all of her pursuits, even those that appear most meaningful, are really attempts to distract herself from this sobering fact. Pascal suggests that if the libertine actually confronted the truth of her condition, she would desist from all of her pursuits–even her desire for self-fulfillment–because they would no longer mean anything. That the libertine seeks to distract herself from the contingency of her condition with something that is itself contingent, is, I think, sufficient to undermine the libertine’s approach to life. But Pascal goes even deeper in exposing the problems with the libertine’s approach. He writes that, “The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is mainly what prevents us from thinking about ourselves, leading us imperceptibly to our ruin” (19). The libertine’s pursuit of diversions makes genuine self-knowledge impossible—if she is always distracting herself, she will never take the time to understand herself and her condition, and search for a more reliable and stable form of happiness. How can we say that someone is happier the more diverted they are, if someone who is diverted is also wholly alienated from herself? (20). It is this consideration that motivates Pascal’s famous observation that, “man’s unhappiness arises from one thing alone: that he cannot remain quietly in his room” (21). As Pascal sees it, diversion as source of true happiness–much like Nietzsche’s detached contemplation–is, indeed, a fiction. Pascal has induced a value crisis in the libertine by rendering what she previously valued—the amusements of earthly life—fundamentally meaningless. So what now? Left to live without diversion, Pascal explains, “we would be bored, and this boredom would lead us to seek a more solid means of escape” (22). I will argue that Pascal asking the seeking libertine to consider the possibility of an immortal soul is, in a certain sense, similar, to Nietzsche’s imagined demon presenting the possibility of eternal recurrence–i.e the doctrine that our live will be repeated infinitely many times into the future. Nietzsche presents this as a mere possibility , the consideration of which is nonetheless capable of inspiring an evaluative transformation in his readers (23). Entertaining the possibility of eternal recurrence hopefully inspires us to seek meaning in the lives that we are living on earth, rather than placing all of our hopes on a life after death. Analogously, before the wager, Pascal does not expect the libertine to believe in the immortal soul as a metaphysical fact , but he nonetheless presents it to her as an attractive possibility, powerful enough to reorient her life. If the possibility of an immortal soul isn’t even on her radar, then the wager argument cannot even get off the ground. But Pascal believes that considering this possibility will induce the libertine to seek God, the wager will then point out that doing so maximizes her expected utility, and eventually she will be certain of God’s existence (24). What makes the libertine’s condition so unhappy are all of the external threats that face her at every moment, the most debilitating of which is her own death (25). The libertine’s old approach was to avoid confronting this reality. As Pascal puts it, “as men are not able to fight against death...they have it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.”What Pascal offers the libertine is a solution that is truly sustainable: instead of valuing distractions from our mortality, we can value that which denies it altogether . We can reject that part of us that gets piled with dirt, since it can only make us unhappy, and instead we can embrace our immortal soul (26). Pascal presents this as a dazzling, metamorphic possibility, writing that “the immortality of the soul is something so important to us, something that touches us so profoundly, that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent to knowing the facts of the matter” (27). Inspired by the possibility of an immortal soul, we are primed to be receptive to the wager, which tells us that if we want to maximize the expected outcome for our soul, we must gamble on God’s existence (28). If we now believe that it is through taking care of our immortal soul that we can transcend the misery of our bodily condition, the wager will indeed have a powerful pull on us. Inasmuch as the libertine’s challenge is escaping the misery of her contingent condition, Pascal presents the possibility of the immortal soul as a powerful alternative to the use of amusements and diversions. But is this alternative persuasive? The weakness in Pascal’s argument is noted by Sleinis in his analysis of Nietzsche’s parallel argument: “pure possibilities may have some capacity to exert pressure on our choices, but this capacity can in no way be equal to that of known actualities” (29). There is, however, a limit to how influential a mere possibility can be. If you know that a certain consideration that is motivating you to act, is only possibly true, then you won’t feel like you have a decisive reason to act. Pascal is confident that if we take the possibility of an immortal soul seriously, then we will eventually be led to believe it as an actuality. The problem, however, is whether we can take it seriously enough for this epistemic transformation to occur. This doesn’t mean that Pascal’s argument can not work at all, it just means that its practical success will likely be limited to libertines with certain psychological constitutions (i.e. it will be more persuasive to someone with a credulous disposition than to someone with a skeptical disposition). IV. Walter Kaufmann on Our Misery So far, we have seen that Pascal’s wager requires a certain evaluative shift on the part of the libertine, and that certain sections of the Pensées can be read as making an argument for that shift. But there is a weakness to part of this argument, namely, the plausibility that a mere possibility can inspire a dramatic revaluation. What I would like to consider, therefore, is an alternative response to the libertine’s crisis of value that would allow her to retain her current theoretical framework, but nonetheless allow her to transcend the apparent miseries of the human condition. We can read Kaufmann as addressing the libertine at the same stage that Pascal is—once she has accepted the futility of her diversions but does not know how else to cope with her unhappy condition—and arguing that the libertine can embrace her mortality rather than try to escape from it. Examining Kaufmann’s argument helps us to appreciate the way in which Pascal’s wager falls short as a straightforward appeal to the libertine’s self-interest. At most, the wager offers the libertine one way to escape her misery, but the libertine may find Kaufmann’s ideas more persuasive. While for Pascal, the libertine is unhappy if she is left to ponder her mortal condition, Kaufmann argues that this is not so; in fact, it is our mortality that renders our lives here worthwhile. The libertine considers herself miserable because she will not live in this worldforever, but Kaufmann urges her to consider how miserable she would be if she did . It's true that death is frightening for those who “fritter their lives away,” but “if one lives intensely, the time comes when sleep seems bliss” (30). Meaning, that if the libertine embraces all that this-life throws at him, then she will welcome death as a much-needed rest. One cannot live intensely forever. This argument might seem a bit problematic. After all, it is not clear why a simple good night’s sleep (or two) would not suffice for the one who lives intensely—why should she crave eternal sleep? The answer to this lies in the second argument that Kaufmann makes, namely, that without an eternal deadline we would not be able to live our lives as meaningfully. Our impending death offers a perspective that would otherwise be impossible. Kaufmann describes the way in which the threat of death motivates us to live vigorously: “the life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome.” Death “makes life worthwhile” b ecause it encourages us to carve out lives that are indeed worthwhile. For example, “love can be deepened and made more intense and impassioned by the expectation of impending death,” meaning that our desire to be with someone we love is made all the more acute by our knowledge that we cannot be with them forever. When the libertine worries about the fact that she may one day lose her beloved, she need not retreat from these thoughts—either by seeking diversion or by entertaining the possibility of an immortal soul—but rather, as Kaufmann advises, she should embrace them. The fact that she may never see her beloved again is all the more reason for the libertine to express her love more eloquently and fervently than she ever would have if she was not worried about losing her beloved. It is not just that such intensity and p assion would be impossible to sustain in an infinite life, but rather that in an infinite life we could never achieve it in the first place. Death offers a perspective on life that, contrary to what Pascal argues, makes our lives in this world vibrant and precious. Pascal writes that, “As men have not been able to cure death, wretchedness, ignorance, they have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about those things” (31). But Kaufmann argues that it is precisely by thinking about her own death that the libertine can be inspired to live in a way that makes her happy. Perhaps this is why Ecclesiastes muses that “it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting”—proximity to death provides the living with an invaluable lesson to truly “take to heart” (32). The libertine desperately avoids confronting her mortality, when in fact, thinking about death makes her life better right now: “one lives better” says Kaufmann, “when one expects to die,” and takes advantage of the time she has (33). This is not to deny the tragic reality that death often visits too early, but rather, to suggest that inasmuch as this is not always the case, we are, as philosopher Bernard Williams puts it, “lucky in having the chance to die” (34). Pascal might still counter that even if contemplating our death imbues our lives with urgency and significance, belief in the Christian afterlife also accomplishes this inasmuch as our conduct in this life determines how we fare in the next. But this argument will have no sway over the libertine at the stage of the argument at which we are now encountering him—when she does not yet believe in God. And what Kaufmann’s argument has demonstrated is that the libertine does not need to wager on God’s existence in order to live life meaningfully and passionately. While the Wager asked the libertine to revalue her values–which, as we have seen, is a non-trivial requirement–Kaufmann speaks directly to the evaluative commitments that the libertine already has. In a way, Kaufmann uses mortality in the same way that Pascal uses immortality: to redeem us from our misery by impressing upon us the urgency and significance of our lives. It’s true that Kaufmann and Williams don’t consider the possibility of an afterlife that is equally as exciting–if not more exciting–than earthly existence. There is, after all, no reason to assume that when we die we lose our ability to exercise agency. But the point is simply that they offer a way of seeing life on earth as meaningful regardless of what comes afterward. This is in sharp contrast with Pascal’s picture in which life on earth is miserable unless it is redeemed by belief in the afterlife. This is not to say that Pascal is wrong per sé; it is possible that Kaufmann would have lived a better life had he sought God and embraced religion. It is possible that he is currently b urning in the depths of hell, wishing his philosophical reasoning had taken a different turn. But this is of no consequence. What I am arguing is that Pascal is wrong to assume that the libertine’s mortality leaves her irredeemably miserable; Kaufmann offers an alternative perspective, whereby the libertine’s mortality is precisely what redeems her life and makes it worthwhile. Crucially, Kaufmann’s argument does not ask the libertine to entertain any theoretical p ossibilities like Pascal’s does, and it never requires that she make a wager of any sort. The libertine might still prefer Pascal’s argument, and therefore choose to see “the final act” as “bloody.” But as we have seen, she might choose to welcome death as a “blissful sleep.” And if Pascal cannot convince the libertine that mortal life is miserable, then he cannot get her into the evaluative mindset to be receptive to the wager. V. Conclusion The success of Pascal’s wager as an appeal to the libertine’s self-interest depends on his ability to convince the libertine to change her evaluative framework. At least at the outset, the possibility of an infinite life with God in heaven will repel rather than attract the libertine, giving her no reason to “wager all she has” (35). If we study the wager against the backdrop of Pascal’s broader apologetic project, however, we find the resources to persuade the libertine to “revalue her values.” This argument takes place in two stages. First, Pascal shows the libertine that the premium she places on amusements and entertainment falsely presupposes that they can truly make her happy. Pascal argues that they fail to do so, both because they are external—and therefore “subject to a thousand accidents”—and because they alienate the libertine from herself, making it impossible for her to discover what might truly make her happy. With the libertine’s evaluative framework thus dismantled, the inherent unhappiness of her condition becomes even more acute. Without diversions, she must confront the miserable fact of her mortality head-on. It is in this evaluative vacuum that Pascal offers her a new value that can save her from the misery of mortality: the immortal soul. At this stage of the argument, the libertine will not believe in the immortality of her soul as a metaphysical fact, but in considering this marvelous possibility, she will be encouraged to investigate it. And when Pascal tells her that her soul will fare best if she gambles on God’s existence, she will eagerly oblige. But this need not be the only way to save the libertine from the misery of mortality: Kaufmann suggests that the libertine should embrace and cherish her mortality because it is through the prism of her own death that her life becomes urgent and precious. This approach does not require an epistemic leap of faith like Pascal’s did; it simply requires the libertine to look at the fact of her life in a new light. The upshot is that for those who find themselves moved by Pascal’s polemic against diversions, but unmoved by her appeal to dubious metaphysical facts, there might be a more attractive solution. After he presents the libertine with her wager, Pascal urges that “there is no time to hesitate!” From what we have seen, however, there might be far too much of it. Endnotes: 1 This insight is due to Ian Hacking, quoted in: Hájek, Alan. “Pascal's Wager.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Stanford University, 1 Sept. 2017, plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/. 2 While, as Hajek notes in her article, Pascal actually presents three different wager arguments, for the purposes of this paper, I will not discuss the correct interpretation/presentation of the wager. This is because my paper is not so much about the mechanics of the wager, but about the wager as a general strategy to inspire pragmatic commitment to God. 3 For the purposes of this paper, I adopt Pascal’s use of the term “libertine” to refer to his intended audience. This is partially for convenience, and partially meant to underscore that Pascal’s argument is addressed to a specific target audience and is not necessarily applicable to anyone who does not believe in God. As we will see throughout this paper, Pascal’s libertine has a very specific set of values and concern, which at times may even seem unrealistic. Inasmuch as Pascal sees himself as addressing this sort of person, however, this paper will assume that his observations are accurate, and analyze whether Pascal’s argument is successful on Pascal’s own terms. 4 All quotations in this paragraph come from: Pascal, Blaise, and Roger Ariew. Pensées. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co., 2005 pg. 212-13 (S680/L418). 5 Pascal actually argues that there are two things that the libertine desires: the true and the good. However, Pascal argues that we cannot know whether God exists, and therefore “your reason is no more offended by choosing one rather than the other.” Since the libertine only stands to gain in the realm of happiness, and not in the realm of truth (or at least not yet), I focus, for brevity, only on this claim. 6 This is a simplification. Pascal does not mention exactly how we ought to quantify the harm that will come to a non-believer if God exists. It is certainly possible that the harm will be infinite. And since this is the strongest way to formulate Pascal’s wager, I choose to present it this way. 7 The case of trying a new food is interesting in its own right. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to analyze this case, it is worth noting that it is unclear how one might weigh the value of trying a food and disliking it against the value of trying a food and liking it, since there are also different degrees of liking and disliking a food. But I think it is fair to assume that, having had the experience of eating foods that you’ve liked and disliked, you can have a rough sense of the maximum and minimum amount of pleasure that can be derived from eating a food. I would venture to say that trying a food that you love more than any food you have ever eaten, is still not a qualitatively different type of pleasure than eating a food that you really love. 8 Sleinis, E. E. Nietzsche's Revaluation of Values: A Study in Strategies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994, pg. 168. 9 Ibid. 10 As Ariew notes in his translation, “the word ‘diversion’suggests entertainment, but to divert literally means: “to turn away” or to mislead.” By using this word, Pascal makes his critique implicit from the beginning. 11 Pascal, S165/L132. 12 Quotations in this paragraph come from Pascal, S168/L136. 13 Ibid. 14 Pascal, S165/L132. 15 Pascal, S166/L134. 16 Pascal, S168/L136. 17 Pascal, S165/L132. 18 Pascal S197/L165. 19 Pascal, S33/L414. 20 The libertine says something in this spirit in Pascal, S165/L132. 21 Pascal S168/L136. 22 Pascal, S33/L414. 23 In some interpretations of Nietzsche, the eternal recurrence is actually presented as a metaphysical truth that we must believe in. Inasmuch as I am looking for an example that will parallel Pascal, however, I have chosen to discuss the interpretation that sees it as a pure possibility. 24 Evidence that Pascal believes those who are inspired by the possibility of an immortal soul and genuinely seek God as a result will come to have sure knowledge of her existence can be found in S681/L427. 25 This is not intended to summarize Pascal’s nuanced account of why we are wretched, but rather to encapsulate what it is that the libertine recognizes as “unhappy” about her condition: that is, all of the external factors that threaten her ability to enjoy diversions, the most intractable of which is death. 26 This might seem almost like a pre-wager-wager: wager on belief in an immortal soul, since it provides the potential for immortality rather than on the belief in a mortal soul, since this will lead to a life of misery. 27 Pascal S681/L427. 28 Of course, it is possible that there are other belief systems which include the notion of an immortal soul in an equally attractive way. This is similar to the well-known “many Gods objection” to Pascal’s wager, and while addressing it is not the subject of this paper, it is worth noting its presence. When I argue later on that the argument can work, I mean that, leaving other considerations such as this objection aside, it can work. 29 Sleinis, pg. 173. 30 Kaufmann, Walter, and Immanuel Velikovsky. The Faith of a Heretic. [1st ed.] Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1961 , pg . 386. 31 Pascal S168. 32 Ecclesiastes 7:2. 33 Quotations in this paragraph come from Kaufmann, pg. 386. 34 Williams, Bernard. “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.” Chapter. In Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972 , 82–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. 35 Pascal, S680/L418. Bibliography: Kaufmann, Walter, and Immanuel Velikovsky. The Faith of a Heretic. [1st ed.] Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1961 . Pascal, Blaise, and Roger Ariew. Pensées. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co., 2005. Sleinis, E. E. Nietzsche's Revaluation of Values: A Study in Strategies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Williams, Bernard. “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.” Chapter. In Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972 , 82–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Previous Next

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

Mission Statement Julian D. Jacobs '19 Daniel Shemano '19 Advisory Board Frequently Asked Questions CENTER FOR PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, AND ECONOMICS Join jppe! The Brown University Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (JPPE) is a peer reviewed academic journal for undergraduate and graduate students that is sponsored by the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Brown University. The JPPE aims to promote intellectual rigor, free thinking, original scholarship, interdisciplinary understanding, and global leadership. By publishing student works of philosophy, politics, and economics, the JPPE attempts to unite academic fields that are too often partitioned into a single academic discourse. In doing so, the JPPE aims to produce a scholarly product greater than the sum of any of its individual parts. By adopting this model, the JPPE attempts to provide new answers to today’s most pressing questions. Five Pillars of the JPPE 1.) Interdisciplinary Intellectualism: The JPPE is committed to engaging with an interdisciplinary approach to academics. By publishing scholarly work within the disciplines of philosophy, politics, and economics, we believe we are producing work that transcends the barriers of any given one field, producing a sum greater than its individual parts. 2.) Diversity: The JPPE emphasizes the importance of diversity in the articles we publish, authors we work with, and questions we consider. The JPPE is committed to equal opportunities and creating an inclusive environment for all our employees. We welcome submissions and job applicants regardless of ethnic origin, gender, religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation, or age. 3.) Academic Rigor: In order to ensure that the JPPE is producing quality student scholarship, we are committed to a peer review process, whereby globally renowned scholars review all essays prior to publication. We expect our submissions to be well written, well argued, well researched, and innovative. 4.) Free Thinking and Original Arguments: The JPPE values free thinking and the contribution of original ideas. We seek excellent arguments and unique methods of problem solving when looking to publish an essay. This is one way in which JPPE is hoping to contribute to the important debates of our time. 5.) Global Leadership: By publishing work in philosophy, politics, and economics, we hope the JPPE will serve as a useful tool for future world leaders who would like to consider pressing questions in new ways, using three powerful lenses.

Rebecca Berman Predictive Algorithms in the Criminal Justice System: Evaluating the Racial Bias Objection Rebecca Berman Increasingly, many courtrooms around the U.S. are utilizing predictive algorithms (PAs). PAs are an AI that assigns risk [of future offending] scores to defendants based upon various data about the defendant, not including race, to inform bail, sentencing, and parole decisions with the goals of increasing public safety, increasing fairness, and reducing mass incarceration. Although these PAs are intended to introduce greater objectivity to the courtroom by more accurately and fairly predicting who is most likely to commit future crimes, many worry about the racial inequities that these algorithms may perpetuate. Here, I scrutinize and subsequently support the claim that PAs can operate in racially biased ways, providing a strong ethical objection against their use. Then, I raise and consider the rejoinder that we should still utilize PAs because they are morally preferable to the alternative: leaving judges to their own devices. I conclude that the rejoinder adequately, but not conclusively, succeeds in rebutting the objection. Unfair racial bias in PAs is not sufficient grounds to outright reject their use, for we must evaluate the potential racial inequities perpetuated by utilizing these algorithms relative to the potentially greater racial inequities perpetuated without their use. The Racial Bias Objection to Predictive Risk Assessment ProPublica conducted research to support concerns that COMPAS (a leading predictive algorithm used in many courtrooms) is unfairly racially biased. Its re- search on risk scores for defendants in Florida showed: a. 44.9% of black defendants who do not end up recidivating are mislabeled as “high risk” (defined as a score of 5 or above), while only 23.5% of white defendants who do not end up recidivating are mislabeled as “high risk.” b. 47.7% of white defendants who end up recidivating are mislabeled as “low risk,” while only 28% of black defendants who end up recidivating are mislabeled as “low risk” (1). Intuitively, these findings strike us as an unfair racial disparity. COMPAS’s errors operate in different directions for white and black defendants: disproportionately overestimating the risk of black defendants while disproportionately underestimating the risk of white defendants. In “Measuring Algorithmic Fairness,” Deborah Hellman further unpacks the unfairness of this kind of racialized error rate disparity: First, different directions of error carry different costs. In the criminal justice system, we generally view false positives, which punishes an innocent person or over-punishes someone who deserves less punishment, as more costly and morally troublesome than false negatives, which fails to punish or under-punishes someone who is guilty. The policies and practices we have constructed in the U.S. system reflect this view. Defendants are innocent until proven guilty, and there is a high burden of proof for conviction. Because of this, the judicial system airs on the side of producing more false negatives than false positives. Given the widely accepted view that false positives (punishing an innocent person or over-punishing someone) carry a greater moral cost than false negatives (failing to punish or under-punish- ing a guilty individual) in the criminal justice system, we should be especially troubled by black defendants disproportionately receiving errors in the false positive direction (2). A black defendant mislabeled as “high risk” may very well lead judges to impose a much longer sentence or post higher bail than fair or necessary, a cost that black defendants would be shouldering disproportionately (in comparison to white defendants) given the error rate disparity produced by COMPAS. Second, COMPAS’s lack of error rate parity is particularly problematic due to its links to structural biases in data used by PAs. Mathematically, a calibrated algorithm will yield more false positives in the group with a higher base rate of the outcome being predicted. PAs act upon data that suggest a much higher base rate of black offending than white offending, and this base rate discrepancy can reflect structural injustices: I. Measurement Error: Black communities are over-policed, so a crime committed by a black person is much more likely to lead to an arrest than a crime committed by a white person. Therefore, the measured difference of offending between black and white offenders is much greater than the real (statistically unknowable) difference in offending between black and white offenders, and PAs unavoidably utilize this racially biased arrest data (3). II. Compounding Injustice: Due to historical and ongoing systemic racism, black Americans are more likely to live in conditions, such as poverty, certain neighborhoods, and low educational attainment, that correlate with higher predicted criminal behavior. Therefore, if and when PAs utilize criminogenic conditions as data points, relatively more black offenders will score “high risk” as a reflection of past injustices (4). To summarize, data reflecting unfair racial disparities are necessarily incorporated into COMPAS’s calculations, so unfair racial disparities will come out of COMPAS predictions. For all of these reasons—the high cost of false positives, measurement error, and compounding injustice—lack of error rate parity is a morally relevant attack on the fairness of COMPAS. By being twice as likely to label black defendants that do not end up re-offending as “high risk” than white defendants, COMPAS operates in an unfairly racially biased way. Consequently, we should not use PAs like COM- PAS in the criminal justice system. Rejoinder to the Racial Bias Objection to Predictive Risk Assessment The argument, however, is not that simple. An important rejoinder is based on the very reason why we find such tools appealing in the first place: humans are imperfect, biased decision-makers. We must consider the alternative to using risk tools in criminal justice settings: sole reliance on a human decision-maker, one that may be just as susceptible, if not more, to racial bias. Due to historical and continuing forces in the U.S. creating an association between dark skin and criminality and the fact that judges are disproportionately white, judges are unavoidably in- grained with implicit or even explicit bias that leads them to perceive black defendants as more dangerous than their white counterparts. This bias inevitably seeps into judges’ highly subjective decisions. Many studies of judicial decision-making show racially disparate outcomes in bail, sentencing, and other key criminal justice decisions (5). For example: a. Arnold, Dobbie, and Yang (2018) find, “black defendants are 3.6 percentage points more likely to be assigned monetary bail than white defendants and, conditional on being assigned monetary bail, receive bail amounts that are $9,923 greater” (6). b. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “between 2005 and 2012, black men received roughly 5% to 10% longer prison sentences than white men for similar crimes, after accounting for the facts surrounding the case” (7). Consequently, the critical and challenging question is not whether or not PAs are tainted by racial biases, but rather becomes: which is the “lesser of two evils” in terms of racial justice: utilizing PAs or leaving judges to their own devices? I will argue the former, especially if we consider the long-term potential for improving our predictive decision-making through PAs. First, although empirical data on this precise matter is limited, we have reason to believe that utilizing well-constructed PAs can reduce racial inequities in the criminal justice system. Kleinberg et al. (2017) modeled New York City pre-trial hearings and found that “a properly built algorithm can reduce crime and jail populations while simultaneously reducing racial disparities” (8). Even though the ProPublica analysis highlighted disconcerting racial data, it did not compare decision-making using COMPAS to decisions made by judges without such a tool. Second, evidence-based algorithms present more readily available means for improvement than the subjective assessments of judges. Scholars and journalists can critically examine the metrics and their relative weights used by algorithms and work to eliminate or reduce the weight of metrics that are found to be especially potent in producing racially skewed and inaccurate predictions. Also, as Hellman suggests, race can be soundly incorporated into PAs to increase their overall accuracy because certain metrics can be distinctly predictive of recidivism in white versus black offenders. For example, “housing stability” might be more predictive of recidivism in white offenders than black offenders (9). If an algorithm’s assessment of this metric were to occur in conjunction with information on race, its overall predictions would improve, reducing the level of unfair error rate dis- parity (10). Furthermore, PAs’ level of bias is consistent and uniform, while the biases of judges are highly variable and hard to predict or assess. Uniform bias is easier to ameliorate than variable, individual bias, for only one agent of bias has to be tackled rather than an abundance of agents of bias. All in all, there appear to be promising ways to reduce the unfairness of PAs—particularly if we construct these tools with a concern for systemic biases—while there currently does not appear to be ready means to better ensure a judiciary full of systematically less biased judges. The question here is not “which is more biased: PAs or judges?” but rather “which produces more racially inequitable outcomes: judges utilizing PAs or judges alone?” Even if improved algorithms’ judgments are less biased than those of judges, we must consider how the human judge, who is still the final arbiter of decisions, interacts with the tool. Is a “high risk” score more salient to a judge when given to a black defendant, perhaps leading to continued or even heightened punitive treatment being disproportionately shown towards black offenders? Simultaneously, is a “low risk” score only salient to judges when given to a white defendant, or can it help a judge overcome implicit biases to also show more leniency towards a “low risk” black offender? In other words, does utilizing this tool serve to exacerbate, confirm, or ameliorate the perpetuation of racial inequity in judges’ decisions? Much more empirical data is required to explore these questions and come to more definitive conclusions. However, this uncertainty is no reason to completely abandon PAs at this stage, for PAs hold great promise for net gains in racial equity because we can and should keep working to overcome their structural flaws. In conclusion, while COMPAS in its current form operates in a racially biased way, this factor alone is not enough to forgo the use of PAs in the criminal justice system: we must consider the extent of unfair racial disparities perpetuated by tools like COMPAS relative to the extent of unfair racial disparities perpetuated when judges make decisions without the help of a tool like COMPAS. Despite PAs’ flaws, we must not instinctively fall back on the alternative of leaving judges to their own devices, where human cognitive biases reign unchecked. We must embrace the possibility that we can improve human decision-making by using ever-improving tools like properly crafted risk assessment instruments. Endnotes 1 ProPublica, “Machine Bias.” 2 Hellman, “Measuring Algorithmic Fairness,” 832-836. 3 Ibid, 840-841. 4 Ibid, 840-841. 5 National Institute of Justice, “Relationship between Race, Ethnicity, and Sentencing Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Sentencing Research.” 6 Arnold, Dobbie, and Yang, “Racial Bias in Bail Decisions,” 1886. 7 Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Federal Sentencing Disparity: 2005-2012,” 1. 8 Kleinberg et al., “Human Decisions and Machine Predictions,” 241. 9 Corbett-Davies et al., “Algorithmic Decision Making and the Cost of Fairness,” 9. 10 Hellman, “Measuring Algorithmic Fairness,” 865. Bibliography Angwin, Julia, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, Lauren Kirchner. “Machine Bias.” Pro- Publica. May 23, 2016. https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bi- as-risk-assessments-in-criminal- sentencing. Arnold, Savid, Will Dobbie, Crystal S Yang. “Racial Bias in Bail Decisions.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133 , no. 4 (November 2018): 1885–1932. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjy012. Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Federal Sentencing Disparity: 2005-2012.” 248768. October, 2015. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fsd0512_sum.pdf. Corbett-Davies, Sam, Emma Pierson, Avi Feller, Sharad Goel, and Aziz Huq. “Algorithmic Decision Making and the Cost of Fairness.” In Proceedings of the 23rd acm sigkdd international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining , pp. 797-806. 2017. Hellman, Deborah. “Measuring Algorithmic Fairness.” Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper, no. 2019-39 (July 2019). Kleinberg, Jon, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mul- lainathan. “Human Decisions and Machine Predictions.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 1 (February 2018): 237–293. https://doi. org/10.1093/qje/qjx032. National Institute of Justice. “Relationship between Race, Ethnicity, and Sen- tencing Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Sentencing Research.” Ojmarrh Mitchell, Doris L. MacKenzie. 208129. December, 2004. https://www. ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/208129.pdf. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor Frick and Masny for teaching the seminar “The Ethics of Emerging Technologies” for which I wrote this paper. Thank you for bringing my attention to this topic and Hellman’s paper and for helping me clarify my argument. I would like to thank my dad for helping me talk through ideas and providing feedback on my first draft of this paper. Previous Next