The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

by: Phillip Barron - April 29th, 2011   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment

The Adventures of Huckleberry FinnThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Much is made, from a critical perspective, of the improbability of a young white boy from 1840s Missouri learning to respect a black man as his surrogate father. Instead of contributing to the idea that Huck’s development of conscience is unbelievable, I prefer to interpret the story in this way: Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at just the right time, the only time which it could have been written.

No doubt, it would have been difficult for a boy in Huck’s position to see humanity in his black neighbors in pre-Civil War Missouri. Huck’s father, known only as Pap, lives just as marginalized a lifestyle as Huck. He lives off the land; coming into contact with civilization on a regular basis only to buy alcohol. His alcohol dependency and traumatic past (alluded to through his night terrors), keep Pap in a state of self-hatred, one he projects onto the slaves he encounters and the black race as a whole. In this way, Pap shares his society’s norms which support slavery and white supremacy.

But Huck is not growing up to inherit his father’s views. Because there is a difference between what Huck’s conscience tells him about Jim’s humanity and Pap’s views of slavery (and black people generally), we see that marginalized class status does not determine one’s views on slavery or racial supremacy. However, Twain makes it clear through Huck’s internal struggles (those quiet moments of precocious thinking on the raft) that Huck could not have come to recognize Jim’s humanity if he had been raised “civilized.” Rather it is Huck’s marginal status in Missouri — his outsider status — that creates the space in which Huck can develop his own conscience, his own thoughts on the morality of how to relate to Jim. Huck is aware that he is reaching anti-social conclusions, but he also consistently chooses to act according to his conscience, which is developed through personal experience, not through theory or teachings (or beatings, for that matter). His morality is more phenomenological, we might say.

The reason Twain has to create this marginal space for Huck is that Huck’s struggles with conscience represent the fumbling along that social institutions (from the church to government to businesses and society circles) had to endure in the post-abolition, post-war rebirth of the country.

Writing about pre-Civil War slavery from a post-Civil War, post-abolition point of view, Mark Twain is witnessing the white US population come to terms with the humanity of people of color. The period of shame, guilt, and growth — not to mention generational confusion — that the white population of the United States is going through immediately after the abolition of slavery is not unlike a child’s adolescence. Huck coming to terms with Jim’s humanity is a narrative that the late 19th century white population of the United States can identify with because they are going through the same moral (re)development.

Twain couldn’t have set his novel in the post-abolition present because the author needs the readers to be able to reflect, to look back on a time radically removed politically even if not yet very far removed temporally. At the same time, Twain could not have written it before slavery’s abolition because there would be no societal goal of achieving a post-slavery point of view.

Precisely because Huck does not change his mind about slavery wholesale (or, put another way, because he does not become an abolitionist), Huck’s quarrel with civilization is believable. Over the course of the novel, Huck changes his view of Jim (and his own responsibility to treat him as an equal) rather than about slavery, people of color, or even black men. He notes “human beings can be awful cruel to one another” only when he sees the Duke and the King, two white characters, being tarred, feathered, and driven out of town tied to a rail. Each time Huck decides to help Jim (by not letting him be caught by the two white men chasing escaped slaves and who approach the raft until Huck lets on that the person in the wigwam is infected with a contagious disease; by setting out to “steal Jim out of slavery again,” and even by sharing his earnings and possessions with him equally [$20 gold coins apiece]), he does so only after reflecting on Jim. He considers how kind Jim is, how Jim calls Huck a friend, how Jim works more than his share of time guiding the raft so that Huck can rest. Huck does not decide to help Jim out after reflecting on the cruelty of institutional slavery. His motivation is always personal.

And this, too, is part of Twain’s insight into the collective psychology of racism and a nation trying to heal itself after the Civil War, a war fought over slavery. If Huck’s struggles between his conscience and his perceptions of his society’s norms represent the struggles of white America after the Civil War to recognize black humanity, then Twain’s observation is that it is impossible for white America to change its mind quickly about racism. Instead, Huck (white America) changes his mind about a man.

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All Things Shining, review/interview on Colbert Report

by: Phillip Barron - February 3rd, 2011   Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sean Dorrance Kelly
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

In the video above (aired last night), Colbert interviews Sean Dorrance Kelly on his new book, co-written with Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. The authors discuss literature and philosophy from Homer to Jesus, Dante to Descartes, and Nietzsche to David Foster Wallace, in their quest to find what (if anything) is sacred in our age and what might be an answer to the collective nihilism they believe permeates contemporary western culture.

The authors’ reconceptualization of god is as exciting a reason as any to read the book. Their argument rests on the suggestion that our pluralist culture would be well served by embracing the polytheistic pantheon of Homeric literature. “A god, in Homer’s terminology,” Dreyfus and Kelly write, “is a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking.” With this understanding, a god, similar to Camus’s conception of the absurd, is a relationship. The relationship consists in what inspires us to right action, and right action is that which the situation calls for. I find this an exciting interpretation of Homer’s gods because it helps build a bridge between the virtues shining through Homer’s heroes and the system of ethics (later called virtue ethics) developed by Aristotle. While neither Homer (nor the authors of All Things Shining) invest much in the moderation central to Aristotle’s ethics, they all emphasize what stands at the core of any non-nihilist moral theory: that ethics is premised on shared social experiences. The authors’ diagnosis of contemporary western nihilism focuses on the dangers of shouldering the responsibility of developing life’s guidelines in isolation (i.e. without any shared, social sense of what is sacred).

Lest it sound retrograde on the religion, the book comes across not as pantheistic or even polytheistic, except to suggest that everyone will hold something(s) most sacred in their lives. In the book, the authors argue that even works of art can perform the function of gods in a society, such as the function The Oresteia served in the 5th century BC. Aeschylus uses the trilogy of plays to explain how Greek society moved from Homer’s polytheism to the city-based, earth-bound justice of which late Greek culture was so proud.

The book demonstrates what I perceive to be the strength and weaknesses of philosophy: through simple premises and logical arguments, one can reach conclusions that depart wildly from a culture’s expectations. The authors begin in an uncontroversial place — that contemporary nihilism is damaging to our culture — and end up recommending Homeric polytheism as a possible cure. But the study of philosophy trains one’s mind to be open to conclusions one doesn’t expect. I recommend the book to anyone who enjoys insightful commentary on the traditional western literary canon, thoughtful reconceptualization of religion, and the role of the sacred in an atheistic culture.

 
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Eleven days, Wikileaks, and revolutionary technology

by: Phillip Barron - December 10th, 2010   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment

Eleven days had already passed since the original disclosures [in the New York Times], and no catastrophes had occurred. Government concerns about potential national-security crises were nothing but speculation and surmise. The link between publication and consequences, [Alexander] Bickel argued, must be “direct and immediate and visible.” The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, Woodward and Armstrong

In June 1971, the New York Times began publishing articles citing a classified history of the US government’s involvement in Vietnam. “The articles were based on a massive study,” Woodward and Armstrong write in The Brethren, “commissioned by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, covering the period 1945-1967. The entire 47-volume set, called The Pentagon Papers, was considered extremely sensitive.” Two days into the series, Attorney General John Mitchell obtained an order in federal court blocking further publication, arguing that exposing the top-secret study endangered national security. The case was rushed through the courts, and by the 11th day after the initial article appeared in the Times, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in what became the New York Times vs. U.S. Notably, the Supreme Court decided the case 6-3 in favor of the NY Times — i.e. they decided against restricting the Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers — without knowing exactly what the Times had in its possession. Although each justice wrote his own opinion, the consensus on the court was that the First Amendment is not without limits. The Pentagon Papers did not cross the threshold that would justify prior restraint, but the court reserved the right to block the release of secrets, if their publication threatened imminent harm or endangered national security.

Over the last few days, the Pentagon Papers — the leak, the New York Times publication, and the resulting Supreme Court case — have served as a moral and legal touchstone for examining the Wikileaks case.

The release of more than a thousand diplomatic cables, the exposure of which mostly just embarrasses the United States government by confirming the closed-door candor we all expect anyway, comes across not unlike a prank. Compared to some of the information released by Wikileaks in years past, leaks that earned Julian Assange honors from Amnesty International among other human rights groups, it has been difficult to determine whether the value of the information leaked to the press measures up to the justificatory claims Assange makes in a 2006 essay on why Wikileaks does what it does. In it, Assange claims that since conspiratorial and authoritarian regimes will resist pressure to change, one of the most effective strategies (if not the only effective strategy) to combat conspiracies is to steal and share the regime’s secrets. The conspirators then have two options: be more transparent (i.e. stop conspiring) or seize up with distrust. Leaking a group’s secret information makes it difficult for that group to work in secret. But, as a friend of mine said to me in conversation about this particular Wikileaks information dump, it is “hard to see this latest act as more than information vandalism or mischief (i.e., we leaked ’cause we could).”

And I think that it is the “because we could” part that’s got the U.S. government scared, not necessarily what’s in these cables.

In 1971, the Pentagon Papers literally were papers. Bound to (and in) a physical medium, they required a publisher to distribute the information contained within them. Publishing costs in the 1970s, like most of history, were high enough to require a significant investment of capital in the means of production. That is, not many people owned the means to reproduce a 47-volume set of documents. Neither — and perhaps more importantly — did many people have at the ready a capacity to distribute the documents even if they could reproduce them. Even the newspapers with whom the Pentagon Papers had been shared (the New York Times and the Washington Post among others) did not have the means to reproduce the documents in their entirety. Instead, the newspapers published articles written about the Papers and used the Papers as source material for exposing clandestine and deceptive operations within the federal government. It wasn’t until months later that the average person could read the papers for themselves, and even then Beacon Press published only the selections that Senator Mike Gravel had entered into the public record. When publication is limited to physical media, the information contained within the leaked documents is bound to the limits of what can be shared physically. Physical sharing — duplication and distribution — comes at a high cost.

The difference between the technology used to publish the Pentagon Papers and the Wikileaks cables is astonishing.

Fast forward to November 29, 2009 (eleven days ago). A stateless organization (that is to say, an non-governmental organization with no home country) called Wikileaks shared hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables with a handful of news organizations, and the New York Times starts publishing them. As the Times says in its online archive,

A mammoth cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the last three years, provides an unprecedented look at bargaining by embassies, candid views of foreign leaders and assessments of threats. The material was obtained by Wikileaks and made available to a number of news organizations in advance.

How did this happen? An Army Intelligence officer, SPC Bradley Manning, used his clearance and access to classified documents and a CD-RW, a writable CD on which his co-workers assumed he was listening to Lady Gaga, to smuggle secrets by the megabyte. Manning, with a professed desire to “do the right thing” and shed light on nefarious covert operations, turned over the smuggled data to Wikileaks. [DailyTech]

As David Samuels argues in an article critical of professional journalists who have used their spaces for public discourse to disparage Assange, “The true importance of Wikileaks — and the key to understanding the motivations and behavior of its founder — lies not in the contents of the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies and defend human rights.” In this case, while Senator Joe Lieberman, Attorney General Eric Holder, and other prominent politicos claim that Wikileaks is endangering national security, the consensus in the media is that the 1,000+ cables released so far amount to more embarrassment than threat. [UPDATE: While Wikileaks has more than 250,000 cables in its possession, only 1,606 have been released to the press. See this NYTimes article on Julian Assange's release from custody for more.]

There are more than 250,000 more classified documents in Wikileaks’ possession. They have been encrypted and released via Bit Torrent to ensure their distribution. The encryption key, however, is not yet public, and it is unknown whether Assange and/or others at Wikileaks will release it. The encrypted 1GB+ file is referred to by some media critics as “insurance,” but we still don’t know exactly what it is meant to insure. Because of the widespread distribution of the files, if and when the encryption key is released, it will be the equivalent of instantaneous worldwide publication.

Neither the simultaneous sharing of a quarter-million documents nor the world-wide distribution of 16 million more was possible in 1971. At least, not for an organization the size of Wikileaks. But by reducing the cost of publication and distribution to as close to zero as possible, the Internet has revolutionized the business of leaking secrets.

Similarly, the business of safeguarding them has grown more complicated. In 1971, while the Pentagon Papers were an exhibit in the case before the Supreme Court, the state’s secrets were protected by armed Pentagon security guards posted outside the Supreme Court’s conference room.

Today, many of the state’s secrets are hosted on a website, available to the public to download and read at its leisure. In his infinite wisdom, Senator Joe Lieberman encouraged Amazon, who had been hosting Wikileaks website on one of its servers, to drop the controversial client. And ever since then, the resulting back and forth between corporate entities pulling the rug out from under Wikileaks and hackers responding to the corporate/political bullying has been a fascinating digital tennis match. First Amazon boots Wikileaks from its servers, then Mastercard stops processing transactions that would send money to Wikileaks’ accounts, then PayPal suspends its role in processing donations. The response: anonymous distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) brought down Mastercard, VISA, and PayPal for brief periods of time on Wednesday, no small feat. And even though the Wikileaks.org address was shut down, Wikileaks’ presence on the web is stronger than ever. Facebook and Twitter have been dragged into the fray for continuing to allow Wikileaks to use accounts, through which supporters distribute information about how to find their websites. On the one hand, the two social media giants have been pressured to close down Wikileaks’ official accounts, which as of yet they have refused to do. On the other hand, they have suspended accounts that were being used by hackers to organize the DDOS strikes. Thus, safeguarding secrets is, because of the nature of the Internet, a game of Whack-a-mole. Dump Wikileaks.org from its DNS registrar, and Twitter becomes a human DNS, pointing people to the server holding the forbidden fruit they are looking for. [Rebooting the News #75] [Slate explains the DDOS attacks]

Lost in the geek’s obsession with who’s turning its back on whom is a latent question: is Wikileaks a press organization? At stake is whether the freedom of the press is relevant to its activities.

In The Atlantic, David Samuels writes, “even as he criticizes the evident failures of the mainstream press, Assange insists that Wikileaks should facilitate traditional reporting and analysis. ‘We’re the step before the first person (investigates),’ he explained, when accepting Amnesty International’s award for exposing police killings in Kenya. ‘Then someone who is familiar with that material needs to step forward to investigate it and put it in political context. Once that is done, then it becomes of public interest.’” Even if Wikileaks does not see itself as a press organization, the question remains. If the Pentagon Papers are any guide, what the Supreme Court seems to be saying is that while stealing secret documents is criminal, publishing them is not. The question that didn’t come up in the New York Times vs. U.S. is whether you or I have the right to publish, or is this right reserved only for corporate entities that self-identify as the press? Samuels stops short of calling Wikileaks a press organization. He says, instead, that the press should be defending and embracing Wikileaks because

it is a fact of the current media landscape that the chilling effect of threatened legal action routinely stops reporters and editors from pursuing stories that might serve the public interest – and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying… Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly suffocating the American press.

What Samuels is arguing is that the press is not something that can exist in a vacuum. The press is as much a relationship between ideas and community as it is the formal corporation and its employees. New media, through the equalizing power of low/no cost publication, has brought this point into sharp relief.

In 2008, I attended a conference for bloggers organized by the Society of Professional Journalists, a “citizen journalism academy.” The day was partly dedicated to giving bloggers some familiarity with the ethical and legal responsibilities of publishing and partly dedicated to training on how to organize a blog around a research and publication workflow that might otherwise be taught in journalism school. The information was invaluable, but there was a tone in air resonating with bitterness over sharing professional secrets with a bunch of amateurs. I don’t want to revive the “blogger vs. journalist” debate of the last decade as much as point out that it was never resolved.

I prefer to think of the press as a loose assemblage of publishing technologies, groups, and individuals. The press includes professionals and amateurs, newspapers and blogs, Fox News and the Huffington Post, even Twitter when it is used for certain ends. So, why not also include an organization that is committed to exposing secrets, who uses wiki technology as its vehicle of publication? And if Wikileaks is part of the press, then does it not enjoy the same rights (and responsibilities) that fall under the rubric of the freedom of the press? I realize that Wikileaks is neither a US-based organization nor is it necessarily subject to US law. Thus, I am appealing to a more global sense of the importance of a free press.

The threats posed by the release of the remaining 250,000 documents, currently encrypted and controlled by Wikileaks, may justify prior restraint. It is, and should be, more difficult to justify censorship of what amounts to embarrassing private correspondence. The threats to national security by making diplomacy more difficult are not so immediate. Governments carry the burden of justifying the prior restraint. Has Joe Lieberman demonstrated any rationale, or is he just bullying? And is his example the model of leadership the US wants to put forward on the global stage?

 
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Fair Trade’s Narrative

by: Phillip Barron - October 14th, 2010   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment
bosque nuboso

An Ecuadorian cloud forest is not so different from a temperate rain forest in North Carolina. To live in either means the chance to wake up each morning to beautifully thick swaths of life-carrying mist. To farm in either is to understand what makes mountain forests unique. The soil, the weather patterns in mountain climates, the effects of altitude on temperature all determine what crops can grow sustainably in a given region.

The slopes of North Carolina’s Appalachians grow ornamental evergreens and fruit trees. The slopes of Ecuador’s Andes grow ornamental ferns and coffee. Really, these alpine farmers’ lives are not so different. Yet without some connection, one may never know anything about the other.

It is the power of narrative that brings these two lives together. But where a writer’s narrative brings them together in word only, Fair Trade’s narrative materially connects people on opposite ends of the world.

The industrial agricultural model distances the consumer from the producer. Grocery store shoppers won’t know the plight of coffee farmers in Latin America as long as we coffee drinkers buy from big-corporate coffee conglomerates. That’s because big-corporate coffee collects its beans indiscriminately from fazendas throughout the world; the farmer does not matter as an individual, but only as a lowest-possible-cost cog in the machinery of supply.

The Fair Trade standard, on the other hand, certifies that coffee’s production is both economically sustainable and morally responsible. By establishing livable standards for coffee workers, Fair Trade rehumanizes food growth and distribution. It renders an otherwise opaque process transparent and empowers coffee farmers by offering a business model alternative to the exploitative corporate juggernauts.

By reshaping the coffee industry, Fair Trade rewrites coffee’s story from dirt to cup. The Fair Trade certification guarantees workers fair wages for labor, safe work environments, health care, and participation in a democratic co-operative. Fair Trade advertises its product by announcing the humane conditions its seal requires. It lets consumers know that they will not be party to human rights abuses, land grabs, and mistreatment of workers.

In this way, Fair Trade itself is a narrative. It is a mechanism for replacing the stories of abuse, corruption, and corporate exploitation surrounding coffee with stories of empowerment, self-determination, and respect. On these grounds, Fair Trade coffee is tackling poverty in Latin America.

One of the reasons that consumers are willing to pay more for Fair Trade products than big-corporate products is not just that single-origin coffee tastes better, but also that Fair Trade connects consumers’ lives with farmers’ lives. The traditional corporate model, shrouded in secrecy, diverts consumers’ attention to either the low cost of the product or its universal availability. This diversion is strategic; it obscures the miserable working conditions of the laborers who are exposed to dangerous chemicals, denied health care, and denied access to education.

French press

Fair Trade’s power is in its explanation. By telling a coherent story, the world learns more about where coffee comes from, under what conditions (environmental and labor) the beans grow, and what the political lives of growers are like. Fair Trade companies are not afraid to remind consumers that people grow coffee. These people have hopes, families, and principles just like anyone else. The demand for Fair Trade coffee indicates, I think, that when consumers have more information, we make better decisions.

As a writer, I believe in the power of reason and dialogue to change the world. The Fair Trade movement, including but not limited to the economy of coffee, is an example of this power. Fair Trade makes sense. In many ways, Fair Trade is the common sense of global business: by paying farmers a fair price for products, consumers contribute to both a humane business model and a stable supply of goods.

In the wake of state sponsored violence in Quito, Ecuador or contentious elections in Venezuela, Fair Trade’s success is newsworthy simply because it represents economic stability and political empowerment. Fair Trade tells the palatable story of another Latin America. This is a Latin America where the change we all hope for is happening. This is a Latin America where farmers are able to employ themselves — to own their own land and care for it in a way that preserves the cultural history and ecological diversity of the region. This is a Latin American rising out of poverty.

Fair Trade takes those brave and necessary steps toward redistributing global wealth in a responsible, sustainable way by empowering farmers with small operations to compete in a global industry. And besides, doesn’t your coffee taste better when you know that it has a part in moral and financial liberation?

(This article originally appeared at OpeEdNews.com)

 
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Traffic as art

by: Phillip Barron - May 7th, 2009   Filed under: Uncategorized 4 Comments

The self-righteous tone of the comments aside, Good Magazine’s blog has a nice photo show of traffic in Los Angeles. I realize that this collection of aerial photographs of mostly single-occupant smogmobiles is probably intended to be a critique of LA’s (and thus the USA’s) automobile dependence, but these photos are visually stunning and, dare I say, beautiful.

It’s amazing to me that I’ve been to LA exactly once, and that I recognize just from sight and memory several of these interchanges — the Los Angeles National Cemetery, the Getty, Elysian Park, downtown — and most of which I saw from the seat of a bicycle.

Years ago, the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt got comedian John Cleese to record a series of PSAs about philosophy. Some are on ethics, some on metaphysics, some on meaning-of-life questions. I’ve thought for some time that it would be fun to use those PSAs as the audio track for a series of videos. So, consider the video below the first in a series.

 
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“death by veganism” — letter to the editor

by: Phillip Barron - June 6th, 2007   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment

I’m posting below a letter to the editor written by a friend. This is her letter to the Opinion page editor of the New York Times for running Nina Planck’s ridiculous op-ed, “Death by Veganism,” which contains such gems of research and argumentation as

I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.

and

The fact remains, though, that humans prefer animal proteins and fats to cereals and tubers, because they contain all the essential amino acids needed for life in the right ratio. This is not true of plant proteins, which are inferior in quantity and quality — even soy.

While other letter writers let Planck have it on the grounds that she can’t get her facts straight, Nancy’s response is, I think, more to the point.

How convenient – not to mention trite – it is to defend humanity’s right to exploit animals in the name of the survival of the human race (“Death by Veganism,” Nina Planck, May 21, 2007). I could not argue with well-made facts about health and nutrition, even if they had been tendered here. But why the relentless campaign against conscious living? Cannot the intelligent resources available to science and the media serve to advance our ability to meet our needs without appealing to speciesist superiority? Is our craving for universal domination so beyond our control that we would rather condemn devastated parents, by whom reasonable risks were taken in the absence of earned community support, than invest in solutions that can protect human life without demanding the misery, suffering, and death of others? Contextualizing this tragedy in the vegan diet does nothing to solve our pandemic public health problems, in a resource-rich nation where children raised on junk food suffer the most. No matter how tempting are the sacrosanct declarations of a benevolent pregnant woman, our survival does not depend on the subordination of animals. Only our hideous arrogance does. An arrogance that has claimed so many lives that it shamefully buries its responsibility for them in the despised, compassionate lives of the forward-thinking vegan in order to survive.

nancy o. gallman

 
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Industries of Cruelty

by: Phillip Barron - March 6th, 2007   Filed under: Uncategorized Add Comment

Less than a week after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals employees in North Carolina faced charges of cruelty for performing anesthetized euthanasia on unwanted animals, then tossing them in dumpsters, the state’s council of commissioners had to vote on whether North Carolina’s method for disposing of unwanted citizens is properly antiseptic. While PETA’s employees were cleared of cruel and unusual behavior, it’s not clear whether the State’s death penalty will be.

For a state that condones such agricultural practices as crating pigs during breeding, forced insemination of dairy cattle to keep them lactating and debeaking chickens to bring charges of cruelty against PETA rings hollow. Nonetheless, the case focused unusual attention on an organization that sees itself as the champion of animal rights. While democratic governments ought to be the champions of their citizens’ right, the charges against the State of North Carolina aren’t flavored with the same twist of irony. Perhaps that’s because the State government has demonstrated its investment in cruelty, to both animals and people.

The singularity of the human species is ingrained in our minds from birth. One thing on which creationists and scientists can agree is that in the chain of being there is nothing else like us. Whether we descended from apes or gods, we’re special. Because of the implicit self-importance in that claim (that we, humans, are either the pinnacle of evolution or the chosen few), there is room in human consciousness (and conscience) for hierarchy. The room for hierarchy among species is what makes room for hierarchies within human society.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. We could interpret our uniqueness as just a collection of attributes which says nothing about our relationship to other species. Or, if we are the pinnacle of evolution, we might see our place in the chain of being as benevolent care-takers of the earth. Instead, we interpret our phylogenetic achievements as the basis of a ranking system where we come out on top. We see ourselves as masters with dominion over all other species. Instead, we are superior, and our superiority justifies the degree to which we discount the interests of non-human animals.

The stratification of species with which we’re so comfortable creates room in our consciousness for treating people disparately based on their behavior. If people behave a certain way, if they violate norms or act objectionably, then those people forfeit their place in the chain of being, leaving them worthy only of the respect due to lesser animals.

Murder is unacceptable, whether it is carried out by an individual or the state. In either case, murders are often derivative of human imperfection. We refuse to accept that frustration, helplessness, panic, and other common feelings sometimes precipitate the most egregious interpersonal violence. And we refuse to admit that the death penalty is merely a legitimized form of retribution. Instead we say that the state is balancing the scales of justice while the incarcerated murderer is a deviant whose aberrant conduct is less than human. The state relies on its claim to superiority, which in this context is called authority, to distinguish its acts of killing as legitimate. Murderers are worthy only of our disrespect, marginalization, and dismissal. Since murderers have acted like animals, so the thinking goes, we can treat them like animals — locked in pens, waiting for slaughter.

Every way that the criminal justice system is unethical is mirrored in our industrial agricultural practices. Prisons are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated people whose executions are often botched. Factory farms are overcrowded places filled with penned-in, drugged-up, poorly treated animals whose slaughters are often botched.

Some will resist the comparison between the prison industrial complex and the agro-industrial complex, but rejecting the comparison is premised on unfamiliarity with one or both of the industries. That we allow ourselves to be unfamiliar with our past and present industries of cruelty characterizes the limits of our compassion.

We would rather not know how hamburger is made, so not many of us visit factory farms. We would rather not know that we, a civilized people, have a death penalty, so we hold our executions at night and bury them deep in the bowels of labyrinthine cinder block structures.

Some say it’s time to move on and bury our sullied past in the wake of our progress. But the wake of progress smells more like diesel fumes in the wake of inmate transfer buses and is as blinding as the wake of feathers swirling behind poultry trucks.

The change has to begin somewhere. It’s exciting to see Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation spend time on bestseller lists. Perhaps these books can change our conception of food, challenge some of the policies that make factory farming profitable, or turn some hearts. They won’t do it alone, however. Our investments in cruelty are too tangled for any meaningful change to result from tackling symptoms instead of causes. We have to see that we will never treat cattle or hogs or chickens any better until we see that there’s something objectionable about the way we imprison people.

As these ideas percolate, perhaps we will be as discomforted by our habit or throwing away people and non-domestic animals as we were by PETA employees throwing away dogs and cats.

This piece originally appeared at OpEdNews.com and was published as an Op-Ed in the Herald Sun under the title “Institutionalizing Cruelty to Animals.”

 
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Gender Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty System

by: Phillip Barron - December 18th, 2006   Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment

Abstract: Although the demographics on male versus female death-row prisoners suggest that males are the criminal justice system’s primary targets, I argue that the system also discriminates against women. Utilizing contemporary feminist theories of gender, I argue that female prisoners are punished primarily for violating norms of gender correctness.

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moral habits

by: Phillip Barron - August 9th, 2004   Filed under: Uncategorized 2 Comments

Over lunch the other day, I was talking with a friend about habits. We were talking about food, about why I’m vegan, and I was saying that at this point it’s easier for me to just keep on eating vegetarian than it would be to think about how to integrate meat and dairy back into my diet. That’s because I’ve cultivated the habit of eating vegetarian… just like anyone else, there are things I know I eat, and when I make decisions about eating, I go for what I know. This is why eating vegetarian doesn’t feel as restrictive to me as my diet sounds to everyone else.

It was helpful to talk this through, because it helped me see that being a vegetarian is just one way of developing a morally relevant habit. I believe, as Aristotle did, that your moral character is just the constellation of the morally relevant habits you have. Fleshing out what makes a “morally relevant habit” may be where Aristotle and I depart. I argue that a morally permissible habit is the tendency to perform a justifiable action that contributes to your happiness. An action is justifiable when, if asked, you can produce a reason or reasons that others accept. A reason justifies an action when it explains why you performed (or plan to perform) the action in terms acceptable to others.

Well, this raises some questions. Answering these kinds of questions in full detail and developing bullet-proof counterarguments is part of my past life, when I was working on a PhD in philosophy. It’s not part of my present life, so I don’t pretend to have all the answers. However, finding answers to the questions raised by a moral theory matter more to me now. Academia tends to trivialize the importance of questions of morality because ultimately nothing matters in the academic world. Academic stakes are as artificial as end-of-semester deadlines, but the concerns of morality are real… they extend beyond the ivory tower into the stomachs of starving children, the habits of the wealthy, and the procedures of the execution chamber. I don’t think I’ve got moral theory figured out, but at the same time, I’ve got to have something to live by. Duty-bound Kantianism and the calculations of utilitarians always seemed too cold to me. Something like Aristotle’s flavor of virtue ethics is a little warmer. So, this is why I’m concerned with habits.

Why should whether something is right or wrong depend on whether someone else accepts your reasons? I think morality is essentially a social institution. The limits of morally acceptable behavior are defined by people, not history, not duties, not gods. If you’re all by yourself, and you’re trying to decide to what to do, but whatever you do will affect no one (or no other sentient being), then I don’t think it really matters (morally) what you do. It might be honorable in some other, some non-moral, sense that you stop to consider how you should act. But, in order for your actions to be morally relevant, they have to affect people (or other sentient beings) and you have to perform those actions for reasons.

Whose acceptance of your reasons matters most? Reasons justify actions when they explain to those affected by your action why you did (or are doing or plan to do) that action. So, who has to accept your reasons? The person or people affected by your action. When you do something, and you have a reason for doing it, and the people affected by your action accept your reason for doing it, and doing that thing contributes to your happiness, then that action is a morally right action.

 
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The Nature of Violence

by: Phillip Barron - December 19th, 2003   Filed under: Uncategorized

Written when I was a wee lad of 19, I had all but forgotten about this piece until I recently stumbled upon a college friend’s website where he is hosting archives of an online journal project he and I were involved with. While I’m certainly not impressed by my writing (almost embarassed by it, really), this piece is still important to me because it reflects some of my younger thoughts on non-violence.

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