When Diplomacy Joins Sports: An Overview of Sports Events Turned an IR Feast

Does it even make sense to discuss these two concepts together? Sports exist to test our physical and mental boundaries, a chance to engage in some friendly teamwork and entertain or challenge others, and diplomacy is all about fancy suites and long conversation-heavy gatherings that do not necessarily reflect the thrill and musicality of a good baseball game. The UN Assembly meetings and the Super Bowl or World Cup do not necessarily have much in common at first glance - in fact, they are as opposite as things can get. You see my point, we do not often think of sports and international relations as things that go hand in hand, and we cannot so easily envision an ambassador and a famous basketball star sipping coffee at the same table. They are just one of those pairings that simply do not exist, like the opposite of yin and yang. This explains why we seldom discuss sporting events at international relations courses, and why the Super Bowl does not necessarily revise the UN Declaration of Human Rights at halftime. 

However, are they really that different? To what extent are the goals and outcomes of sporting and diplomatic events related? As someone who had the honor to find herself in Buenos Aires for that historic World Cup final on December 18th, 2022, I can testify that watching this final in one of the central parks in Palermo and hearing the public accompany the national team in the singing of the national anthem with jumps and cries was one of the most zealous and evident portrayals of national unity and participation. Witnessing this, as someone deeply curious about the way nationalism emerges and manifests itself, and someone who during my study abroad in Buenos Aires continuously passed by posters and graffiti expressing critique about the way the public only comes together for World Cup and is not equally united in the country’s stance against the ongoing inflation and a myriad of economic and socio-political issues, I found myself thinking of the power of sporting events and their relationship to a country’s or a region’s politics and sense of self. This article is meant to provide an overview of moments in which sporting events and major diplomatic statements and action converged to create powerful messages and results. 

Sports and Diplomacy Through World Regions

Asia

Beginning with the largest, most populous region, that also happens to be the first one to face the morning sun, it is important to reflect on how regional organizations here happened to recognize and center sporting events as cornerstone of multilateral and intercultural cooperation. ASEAN, a main Asian regional body composed of 10 Southeast Asian members and in charge of facilitating political, economic, and cultural interaction and regional integration. ASEAN is also interesting due to its particular emphasis on sports. As such regional bodies are a newer, modern trend, it is enlightening to see the emphasis ASEAN has placed on sports as part of its mission towards fulfilling its pillars of integration and supporting amicable relations. ASEAN specifically recognizes the ancient roots of the practice of sports and sporting events and tournaments across the region, with an understanding of the intersection of sports and race, gender, religion, age, ethnicity, and nationality and ways that these identities manifest and interact through sports, as well as the sports’ ability to instill and promote the values of “respect, inclusion, fairness, and duty” as a way to contribute to a sense and prosperity of the ASEAN Community. ASEAN has come to facilitate football (soccer) and chess regional associations as part of its role as a regional body, which is unique and not observed to the same extent in other regions. 

Sports have also played a key role in breaking up tension between warring countries or countries in dispute. The case of a ping pong tournament organized in 1971 as a way to allow for lessening of tension and first official interactions in Cold War between China and the US serves as a great example, to the point that this initiative known sometimes as ping pong diplomacy, was also featured in popular culture masterpieces such as Forrest Gump. More recently, however, we were able to bear witness to a historic merger of North and South Korea at 2018 Winter Olympics following days of talks between the two countries. While the degree to which interactions and exchanges occurred was limited in time and scope, fans from both sides of the 38th parallel could join in the celebrations and cheering together, and athletes marched side by side at the opening ceremony, with some additional future collaboration being planned and later materializing to a degree, such as a unified Korean women’s hockey team for that season. While the Olympics also feature some well-known and continuous tensions such as disputes over Taiwan’s name and flag, and more recent controversy over national attire, national dishes, and their promotion, these cases still show the impact of sports on the regional and international  psyche and their contribution to our meaning making and positionality of modern nation states. 

On the other side of the continent, Turkey and Armenia, still at crossroads due to Ottoman colonial heritage and subsequent disputes over acknowledgement of genocide against the Armenian people, managed to get their presidents to sit together and see visa regulations relaxed thanks to the 2008 World Cup qualifying match. This event even contributed to kickstarting additional diplomatic channels and, albeit arguably for only a very limited window of time, the two countries saw a potential to make amends and deepen their diplomatic interactions. 

Australia and Oceania 

The Australian Government has an entire 2030 Sports Diplomacy Strategy, with its goals being to affirm and deepen the ideals of sports diplomacy “to bring people together, generate goodwill and cultivate partnerships for Australia across the world.” The Plan also recognizes and lists the exact economic contribution of sports to Australia annually and outlines the competencies of Australian industries in competition and participation as much as in hosting, opening additional facilities, and being engaged in sports-related innovation. This attitude centers investment in sports and allows Australia to explicitly rely on sports in its diplomatic efforts.

Over in New Zealand, a unique node to Native culture has been expressed precisely through the haka dances, a traditional Māori ceremonial dance, performance of which went viral during the 2014 Basketball World Cup game against the baffled US. While the internet and modern culture led to the popularity of the New Zealand basketball team, it is important to note that the practice actually dates back to the New Zealand Native football team of the 1880s and has continued on through rugby and basketball associations for over a century. While this is celebrated as a way to honor the ways of the Native people of New Zealand, the practice has also been seen as controversial when performed erroneously by non-Native members of New Zealand’s society. New Zealanders with Māori origins historically and presently greatly contribute to the country’s sports culture, but it is crucial to ensure these sporting tributes to them and their culture are not purely performative and that they are accompanied by a proper way to honor and contribute to the communities these cultural practices come from in order to ensure the dance’s intended purpose of unifying the country and celebrating Native culture. 

Oceania famously joins New Zealand in its focus on rugby as a national sport, although there are increasingly many efforts to honor traditional sports and associated ceremonies unique to this part of the world. Still, the focus remains particularly strongly on sports such as rugby, football, cricket, and basketball. It is the Olympics that are at play once again here as the Tongan sports sensation Pita Taufatofua represented his country three times so far and has famously done so with his shirtless walks in various traditional outfits, both as the country’s first taekwondo player and also even in the Winter Olympics where he was a sole representative of his country, having qualified for the cross-country skiing category. A fellow regional representative rower Rillio Rio Rii of Vanuatu joined in the showcase of traditional outfits. While critique can be placed here as well due to global gaze and objectification of these athletes that ensued, these all represent important potentials, when done and observed properly, to celebrate world traditions but also amplify knowledge about these countries living in a particularly unique and increasingly vulnerable part of the world. 

Africa

Africa, the birthplace of humanity and forever a hub of great sportsmanship, both through talent and sports virtue, continues to impress the world with its many top-notch athletes, who defiantly win against all odds following centuries of colonial oppression and continued global inequality in earnings, which is of course also dangerously and tragically reflected in sports. The Olympic Games have bestowed a number of medals going to African athletes, with South Africa, Nigeria, and more recently Botswana reaching for the stars. However, it is also important to note that, while records have been broken and consistent medals received in longer distance running, with brilliant anecdotes about winning under excruciating circumstances such as Kenyan Kip Keino winning a 1500-meter race, while hurt and even after running for 2 miles in order to arrive on time for the competition when his bus was caught in traffic in Mexico City. In spite of this, the lack of proper investment, infrastructure, and necessary preparation and equipment that requires continuous funding and lifestyle that African athletes cannot always afford back home often prevents these exceptional athletes from reaching their full potential - and this is best manifested in the fact that African short distance sprinters are less likely to break records, with short distance running being a discipline where consistent prior preparation and very specific infrastructure is required. These complexities show how sports results may be impacted by inequalities of the global setting, albeit sports and athletes still often find ways to overcome neo capitalist competition and allow raw talent and hard work to shine. 

Sports, however, can also be used to not only push our limits and always reach for a higher, faster, and stronger achievement, but also break the social mold and help us move beyond stereotypes. Movies such as the Egyptian Maye Zayed’s documentary Lift Like a Girl can help break the stereotypes and showcase true potential that sports have to offer for everyone, including girls and women that are often cut off from investment and support of male counterparts in the sporting world. 

When it comes to brilliant results by African athletes, one cannot overlook the incredible advancement of African football (soccer) showcased throughout team games as well as in the World Cup, with the most recent World Cup featuring Morocco at the forefront of action and reaching 4th place thus breaking African records, and countries like Cameron and Ghana boasting incredible strategy, power, and true love of the game, not to mention the strength of the fans themselves and their dance moves and sportsmanship. While this helps position Africa as a force to be reckoned with in world football (soccer), it is important to note that this attention that African players receive on such big events also invited the corporations’ gaze and has facilitated the buying and selling of African players, which erodes development of local clubs as players are invited elsewhere, though this practice still brings fame and recognition to Africans and can help diversify the world of football (soccer). However, looking further into the outcomes of commercialization of sports, it should be noted that this phenomena also provides platform for a lucrative business of clandestine trafficking of young African talent where young athletes, especially boys, are promised jobs as players in Europe only to be left at mediocre clubs or made to essentially engage in forced labor as poverty and lack of protections at home are being exploited to trick young talents with false promises of success. Thus, the sporting world remains intricately connected with the globalized world and finds itself in constant interaction with the global development policies and current disparity. 

Europe 

Making our way westward, Europe comes with some important examples from recent history, showing just how powerful and influential sporting events can be. The event that is a more widely known case but that cannot be left out of any analysis of this type is the uncomfortable decision to allow the 1936 Summer Olympics to be organized by Hitler’s Third Reich. Having won the bid in 1931 to organize the Games in 1936, Berlin proudly assumed the role of an internationally-savvy host. Hitler and his Cabinet worked hard to outmaneuver records of the previous Olympic Games hosted in Los Angeles, ensuring larger track fields, bigger stadiums, and more gymnasiums, all the while sprinkling, and usually not at all subtly, the now painfully known elements of Nazi propaganda. Visitors were welcomed by the Nazi eagle and insignia, and, after the US and its allies came out of heated debates agreeing to not boycott the Games but rather send their representation and compete, the 1936 Games came to showcase almost 4000 athletes and 49 teams competing in 129 events. 

While this event dangerously contributed to glorification of Hitler’s regime and deepened the influence of contemporary Nazi propaganda, painting the image of the Third Reich as a tolerant and peaceful nation, some events that were impossible for Hitler to predict went down in history as some of the biggest challenges to the Nazi ideology. Most notably, the biggest star of the games was Jesse Owens, an African American who captured four gold medals and was constantly on the podium. In fact, African Americans tended to dominate the popular track and field events and were welcomed with cheers by the German audience, demonstrating the ability of sports to uniquely bring people together and break the societal molds. The censorship prevented offensive remarks for the duration of the game, but it became obvious that Nazi publishers and thinkers were struggling to process the event, and this certainly threatened to shake up the dubious ideology of the Third Reich. Obviously, this sadly could not prevent the bloodshed that was to ensue with the onset of WWII, as Jewish athletes and citizens had already been prosecuted and excluded by this time. A great irony also comes from the fact that Jesse Owens and his compatriots had to return to a deeply segregated society that rejected them and never properly compensated for their successes despite calling itself a free country and supposedly being a perfect foil to Nazi Germany. While the sporting world cannot function as a peace treaty in its own right, the events of these Olympic Games allow us to see the ability of sports to showcase socio-political irony and once again help us to think critically and beyond stereotypes, although it cannot be ignored that the influence of sports has been used in this case to promote the opposite - a dictatorial regime with grotesque, horrifying policies looking to justify itself through sports. 

Since we inevitably reach the topics of the two World Wars when talking about Europe, it is also important to note that, although sports are sometimes seen as a “war minus the shooting”, it is sports that often assisted in normalization of relations and at least brief truces, as well as means to support the troops’ sanity during the toughest of times. It is on European soil stained by blood and tragedy during the horrendous conflicts of the 20th century that some of the most curious truces have been established, with sports events used as an excuse for ceasefire and brief moments of joy and camaraderie. In fact, while the threat of an air attack made it impossible to do so in WWII, the Football Association (FA) allowed football (soccer) matches to continue as normal in WWI, boosting the morale of everyone involved, and this served as continuous recreation throughout the war. In WWII, the armed forces still retained the rights from FA to organize matches, and women working in munition factories formed their own teams, which shows the reach and inclusionary potential of sports in spite of societal challenges. While sports can be used to motivate competitive spirit not dissimilar to that which leads to conflict and war, sports also allow us to conceive a world in which we all come together to play and treat each other fairly and respectfully, showing the potential of sports towards in fact ending the conflict when appropriately organized and facilitated.  

The Americas 

Last but not least are the Americas. People say that football (soccer) is the world’s favorite pastime, and as someone who has had the utmost pleasure of witnessing a World Cup while in Latin America, I would be lying if I said that this statement can be truer anywhere else. The sport has fascinated the region ever since its first arrival with European fans in the Southern Cone. It has spread from the port of Buenos Aires, a city which today holds America’s record for the greatest concentration of football (soccer) stadiums per capita, and today it encompasses a large part of regional identity of Latin America, to the point where countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, to name just a few regional representatives, use this sport essentially as part of the nation-building processes.

It is important to note that here too we see some less-than-ideal conditions that sports are exposed to. Football (soccer) in particular is often associated with the hooligan culture, also known as the barra bravas in many countries of the region. These groups are not always the same as traditional street gangs and their cliques, and they oftentimes in fact find themselves in conflict with other violent groups/gangs. However, in many parts of Latin America and Europe, they are also known to consistently engage in violence both inside the stadiums and on the streets, often themselves participate in the selling and distribution of drugs and other illicit deals as a way to attract and organize youth and attain more earning for their activities, and have more recently been observed performing the function of paid protestors and rioters that catalyze corrupt political aims, once again revealing the power and socio-political reach of sports. The groups started with the supposed intent to support the club, and the fervor for the club is still there through impressive percussion and energy they always bring to the stadiums, but in some cases, and this happens all too often, these groups’ behavior goes out of hand and this becomes detrimental to other fans’ presence at the stadium, leading to some clubs and entire countries, as is the case with Argentina, to ban stadiums from hosting both competing teams’ fans just to avoid clashes of the barra bravas at the expense of sportsmanship-loving fans’ ability to follow their club to each game.  

However, the relationship that clubs retain with their supporters and neighborhoods is impressive. I saw that some of the clubs I had the honor of interacting with in Central America and the Southern Cone function essentially as non-profits where all, or a significant portion, of additional profits are used to finance the building of sporting infrastructure for the youth of the neighborhood, and they also provide educational opportunities in their own facilities or through educational programs or school supplies they help finance. This is just one example of how football (soccer) remains the sport of the people and is able to retain its neighborhood spirit and local appeal as much as it has also presently become a lucrative business investment and a part of the system of multinational corporations. It is also, as previously mentioned, crucially used for the process of nation-building and a form of symbol for national identity, hope, persistence, and unity. Uruguay is a great example as it is the glorious host of the very first World Cup, an event that also coincided with the celebration of the centennial anniversary of the country’s first constitution and led to construction of Uruguay’s national stadium. It was a great struggle and honor to receive the title of host for the inaugural competition, and Uruguay is now working with partners from across the region to bring the World Cup back to its initial hosts for the World Cup 2030 bicentennial celebration of Uruguayan first constitution and centennial anniversary of the World Cup itself. Later renditions of the World Cup in the Americas have both been praised for infrastructure projects they brought in and a focus on increased security and social cohesion, but also critiqued as a distraction from national issues ranging from debt to dictatorial governance, again revealing the complexity of the world of sports and its influence on political matters, willingly or not, stretching all the way to present-day World Cup history.

It is again revealed that corrupt and power-hungry gangsters, officials, and even political leaders manage to successfully manipulate the world of sports, with football (soccer) in particular even having been used as a supposed prelude and an instrument to support wartime efforts in the infamous example of the 1969 conflict between Honduras and El Salvador, with the war even being referred to as “The Soccer War” as much as root causes of exactly zero examples of international warfare in the world are actually due to any sporting event. Better understanding the impact that sports and the rhetoric and feelings surrounding sports is necessary for policy makers to delegate the world of sports appropriate thought and protections, keeping in mind that sports are also a means of supporting one’s patriotic pride as well as a way to nurture the spirit of sportsmanship, fair play, and proper treatment of rivals, and facilitate infrastructure projects and community development efforts. Sports thus become a key issue of governance and the people’s trust in sports must be carefully cultivated and protected through proper policymaking. 

Conclusion

Sports are inevitably connected to issues ranging from nation-building, global trade, and development to issues of governance, peacebuilding, and transnational crime, and, with their power having been recognized by those in leadership positions, sports have been used to meet both noble and corrupt goals in each world region. For the world of sports to not be corrupted and exploited but rather retain its significance as an honest, productive, and unifying pastime and fulfilling activity for people of all walks of life, it is necessary to ensure proper policymaking is applied. Sport disciplines and athletes, across gender, age, nationality, and bodily ability divisions, should be properly celebrated and rewarded. Issues such as inequity and impact of global inequality on the world of sports and trade in athletes should be examined. Comments made by FIFA higher-ups claiming that “less democracy is sometimes better for organizing a World Cup” should not be taken lightly so that fans around the world, myself included, and hopeful hosts do not have to suffer through the controversies that continue to surround the World Cup. Finally, sports should be seen as a way to celebrate humanity’s competitive spirit and need for teamwork and group association, but in a purely constructive manner that cherishes the spirit of cooperation and respect for rivals. One way to begin addressing these issues is to revive the UN Office on Sport for Development and Peace (UNOSDP) with a greater emphasis on monitoring mechanisms, possibly through sustained cooperation with the International Olympic Committee which currently completely overtook UNOSDP’s mandate as a cost-saving measure. This is all just the beginning and apparently a lot to ask, but if those in positions of leadership in the international political scene do not recognize and always keep the impact of sports in the back of their minds and at the forefront of some of the policymaking, we can amplify the positive impact of sports, which in one way or another reach and impact every human being on this planet. This article serves to be the catalyst of change.

The Limitations of ‘Universality’

The dominant idea of ‘universality’ is a product of Western philosophical tradition whose most extensive accomplishment, at least in this regard, has been to universalize the heteronormative, white male experience. There are no doubt far more comprehensive accounts of the evolution of universality, or the universal experience, as a concept, yet perhaps one of the most well-known examples of its propagation was the French Revolution and the Enlightenment that preceded it. These historical moments arguably serve as an inaugural moment within ‘modern history,’ that the Western man became the basic, individual unit of life and its experiences; where, within the Western canon of philosophical thought, Western political and socioeconomic structures also became the universal norm. While colonialism had been well underway by the French Revolution’s inception, the development of the ideal (e.g. universal) Western man added a new dimension to colonial power dynamics: it seemingly provided a justification to “universalize” certain political norms and, of course, racial capitalism through the occupation and control of territories inhabited by non-white peoples. 

Though colonialism formally ended in the mid-20th century, the concept of the universal continues to not only be weaponized against states, as well as people and communities, in the Global South, but more broadly non-normative, non-white individuals who occupy the Global North. Universality was arguably the foundation for the rhetorical justification for the foreign policy initiatives of Western countries, specifically the US empire, in the 20th century that carried out various coups, sanctions, wars, etc to ensure the dissemination of liberal democracy, or at least the appearance of it, and, above all, capitalism. The problematic nature of the universal is also arguably apparent in bioethics and other epistemic frameworks due to its disregard, and even denigration, of non-white and/or Indigenous knowledge and experiences that fall outside of the basic unit of life- the Western (white) man.  In regards to epistemic and political structures, the concept of universalism is harmful as it not only perpetuates colonial power dynamics, but it also limits one’s ability to engage with non-Western, non-white experiences and knowledge in a reciprocal, non-exploitative manner and ultimately undermines the ability to protect biocultural rights. It is deeply important to not only remain critical of the ‘universal,’ but to actively seek out non-white and Indigenous knowledge, structures, and experiences related to bioethics. 

Various epistemic frameworks, particularly bioethics, are constructed within the context of the landed, white male and his seemingly universal experiences and approaches to life. The dichotomy between Foucault and Mbembe highlights this marriage of the so-called universal and whiteness. In “Right of Death and Power over Life,” Foucault situates the individual within the context of the French Revolution: “Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner” (142). Here is an example of the Western man, presumably white and able-bodied, being cast as the basic unit of all life; the relationship between human and life has been cast in a specific context that has been univeralized- thus scholars such as Foucault ignore the plethora of ways in which such an intimate relationship can be configured. Furthermore, Foucault’s notion of biopower, while useful in some contexts, demonstrates its limitations as it is only contextualized with uniquely Western experiences. For example, Foucault argues that biopower was crucial to the development of capitalism for its labor, but makes no mention of the forced extraction of labor from enslaved peoples. Additionally, Foucault primarily discusses violence within the context of interstate warfare that encompasses entire populations, especially with the advent of atomic weapons, without mention of the violence inherent to colonial projects. Of course, these observations are arguably true to a certain extent, yet they are limited in scope as they rely on the idea of the universal experience. 

Mbembe challenges Foucault’s biopower and its omission of the experiences of formerly colonized states and peoples. He says: “Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery, which could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation” (Mbembe 21). Mbembe subsequently argues that the enslaved person is kept in a perpetual state of injury where they have lost their home and rights over their body, which is another extreme type of violence. Foucault’s notion of the universal experience poses epistemic issues as it is extremely limited and lacking in imagination, despite its insistence on being universal and/or all-encompassing. When one ignores non-Western, non-white, non-male experiences, one is doing a disservice to knowledge production as it immediately limits the applicability of certain ideas and, in general, prevents the creation of a truly robust knowledge framework. Beyond the basic epistemic framework, Foucault’s insistence that the Western, white man and his knowledge are synonymous with universality ultimately upholds whiteness; it not only continues to marginalize Indigenous or other non-Western forms of knowledge, it allows for whiteness as an institution to remain above accountability. 

In terms of political practice, the prevalence of universality, particularly within the liberal international order, perpetuates colonial dynamics in real time. Mgbeoji discusses the concept of biopiracy which can be understood as “...commercial use of plants and TKUP without compensation and/or without the acknowledgment of the intellectual inputs in the improvement of the plants or in the creation of TKUP, and without gaining the prior informed consent of the owner(s) of the plants or practitioners in question” (90). Mgbeoji also argues that biopiracy is “part of the cultural war with non-Western peoples, cultures, and epistemological frameworks” (87). Indigenous epistemological frameworks are devalued and labeled as “unscientific and inherently inferior to those of Western empiricism” (Mgbeoji 87). This is insidious for a multitude of reasons: Indigenous peoples have been stewards of their local environments and biodiversity for an inconceivable amount of time; the fact that their epistemic approaches are labeled as inferior is arguably a justification of the Global North’s political practices which involve stealing Indigenous resources. Mgbeoji points out that biopiracy is framed within the idea of a “common heritage” which both the Global North and South use to fulfill certain political interests, yet the difference is that while the Global South actively seeks to control their own resources, the Global North seeks to undermine these efforts by “...proclaiming that this concept [common heritage] applies to plant genetic resources, which are found mainly in the South” (98). This not only demonstrates the ways in which universality is weaponized against Indigenous knowledge, but it also highlights how the idea of a universal experience or “common heritage” are employed to reinforce the political objectives of the Global North which are rooted in (settler) colonialism and racial capitalism, thus undermining the biocultural rights of various Indigenous groups whose objectives are antithetical to political and economic elites. 

In the context of plant resources, the idea of a common heritage implies that such resources are approached and utilized in the same way within the international community and that every individual will benefit. However, that is simply not true: different cultures approach natural resources in different ways and to obfuscate that fact is not only an epistemic failure, but a practical one too. Furthermore, under the pervasive forces of colonial politics and racial capitalism, the utilization of plant resources and their potential benefits are intentionally made to benefit various public and private actors who uphold such structures. A key example of this is the Khoikhoi’s relationship with Rooibos and how that has been exploited. The Khoikhoi are an African Indigenous peoples from Southern Africa who believe that “land is a sacred gift from nature, rather than an economic commodity” and that they “...shared commitment of a sacred duty to care for nature, as it cared for them” (Jansen and Sutherland 221-222). In terms of Rooibos, which is endemic to Southern Africa, the Khoikhoi have passed down their knowledge of the plant through generations; their traditional knowledge has long understood the physical benefits of Rooibos (Jansen and Sutherland 222-223). However, the Khoikhoi were subjected to the mechanisms of settler-colonialism, Apartheid, and, later, a new government that still did not recognize them as a legitimate group within South Africa. These processes have resulted in the theft of their land and criminalization of their traditional practices. In 2010, Nestle applied for patents to the use of Rooibos without consent of South Africa, who is the technical resource provider; however, neither of these two actors asked and/or received consent from the Khoikhoi and the San, another Indigenous group, who both are considered the traditional knowledge holders of Rooibos (Jansen and Sutherland 231). While traditional involvement of the Khoikhoi and the San were ultimately recognized, which resulted in them receiving some compensation from the marketing of Rooibos, this example highlights the ways in which Indigenous people and their traditional forms of knowledge are not recognized as legitimate actors in knowledge production, yet public and private actors extract traditional knowledge for the purposes of accumulating more profits. 

There are many ways in which we can expand the limits of our epistemological frameworks, alongside the practice of upholding and protecting biocultural rights of Indigenous communities and other marginalized groups, we must arguably abandon the idea of the universal, which includes the notion that an individual, or a series of them, can account for the experiences of everyone. The Western man cannot serve as the basic unit of life and the ways in which we understand it due to the fact that this subject has been formed by certain political, economic, and social contexts that have ultimately been replicated at a detriment to others. Instead, bioethicists should actively be seeking out the experiences and knowledge structures of Indigenous peoples, and other non-white communities, to better formulate our relationship to nature and knowledge, as well as each other. For example, the Khoikhoi have stated that they “‘have a transgenerational link to the transmission of the traditional knowledge and that this is evident in the knowledge that [they] hold and share’” (Jansen and Sutherland 223). Here the Khoikoi are expressing knowledge as something that connects community members and that it is something to be shared- not extracted. Not only does this expand the horizon of epistemology, but it also serves to create and implement more robust and respectful political practices that recognize Indigenous relationships to life and bioethical practices. 

References

Foucault, Michel. “Part Five: Right of Death and Power over Life.” The Birth of Biopolitics , St Martin's Press, 1979, pp. 135–165. 

Jansen, Lesle, and Rayna Sutherland. “The Khoikhoi Community's Biocultural Rights Journey with Rooibos.” Biocultural Rights, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, edited by Fabien Girard et al., Routledge, London, UK, 2022, pp. 221–240. 

Mbembe, J.-A. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, Translated by Libby Meintjes, vol. 12, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11–40.

Mgbeoji, Ikechi. “The Appropriative Aspects of Biopiracy .” Biopiracy: Patents, Plants, and Indigenous Knowledge, UBC, Vancouver, 2002, pp. 87–118. 

Understanding the Core Values Of Pre-modern Shari’a Law as Appropriated by the Canonical Nation-State in the Late 20th Century: Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, and Indonesia

Islamic law, namely shari’a, has been misconstrued by outside groups for centuries. Features that initially informed the law such as the Qur’an, hadith, fatwa, madhabs, the madrasa, waqf, and primary legal personnel, like the mufti and qadi, are not as common across Muslim legal institutions as they once were as a result. Figures in the original Islamic court had initially been responsible for the emergence of shari’a law in the Muslim world as an academic, legal and social institution. However, the pervasiveness of the law as a multidisciplinary institution, upon the establishment of the nation-state, cannot be described as a conventional shari’a legal system with mufti and qadi legal figures, among others. Under nation-state development, “re-Islamization trends” occur, as Wael B. Hallaq suggests in An Introduction to Islamic Law. After 1970, post-Muslim nation-states were subject to re-Islamization (Hallaq 140, 2011)-- an incursion created on the basis of a misunderstanding of shari’a law by the state. The emergence of the state’s presence in the shari’a legal structure impeded the legal, social, and academic superstructure of shari’a law. This article will explore cases of the re-Islamization trends from the 1970s onwards in the nation-state contexts of Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, and Indonesia. It will argue that shari’a law as conventionally understood in pre-modern Islamic societies informed by the key actors mentioned– is undermined by the nation-state in these post-1970 contexts.  

Upon analyzing the operations of shari’a law, it is crucial to understand the social and political environments in which shari’a is rooted. Hallaq emphasizes the lack of an established sovereign state amidst the emergence of Islamic law, and specifically how this had implications for Muslim legal personnel. Pre-modern Islamic societies were comprised of minimal all-encompassing governance over societies. Hallaq highlights that bureaucracy and state administration were few and far between. When found, bureaucratic and administrative centers were primarily confined to urban areas. Thus, there was no tangible way to associate people and groups with regions in pre-modern Islamic society. Moreover, paperwork signifying citizenship did not exist, rendering nationality or “geographical fixity” of state borders murky (Hallaq 7-8, 2011). As a result, pre-modern Islamic societies resorted to “self-rule,” so governing factors that informed pre-modern Islamic law were not subject to the authority of the state, and self-rule was implemented (Hallaq 7-8, 2011). In understanding the structure of pre-modern Islamic societies and the law, shari’a cannot be understood as a product of the state; however, upon the establishment of the state, an abundance of intervention occurred, making the essence of shari’a law different from what it once was before modernization.   

In terms of the key legal personnel that informed pre-modern Islamic law and were not subject to state authority, the mufti was a legal specialist tasked with making a non-binding, but heavily-relied-upon settlement for a dispute, or fatwa, in his community (Hallaq 9, 2011). To conclude a fatwa, the most sacred source and text of the law was utilized to inform this: the Qur’an (Hallaq 15, 2011). An additional major source behind the Qur’an is the hadith, which is everything the Prophet Muhammad has ever said or done (Hallaq 16, 2011). It is important to note that hadith has adopted narratives over time since the Prophet’s death in the seventh century. Moreover, one can only imagine how much hadith has changed regarding rhetoric since its inception. A primary element of Islamic law is the emphasis on rationality and its influence on life in shari’a society. Hallaq indicates that rationality is determined by God, which is advised by both the Qur’an and the Prophet. Ultimately, notions of reason and revelation derived from the Qur’an and the Prophet work to reinforce Islamic law and feed to its rationality (Hallaq 15, 2011).  

Further, the qadi, or Muslim judge, mediated disputes– often involving disputes outside of the courtroom. For instance, the qadi may have been seen settling a dispute between a husband and wife in their home (Hallaq 11, 2011). An essential part of the qadi’s role is to be a community member and overseer. In terms of how the legal personnel became versed in the law or became a part of the ulama, was due to a heavy emphasis on academia and scholarship, specifically among legal personnel. Morality and the embrace of knowledge through scholarship were important values and aspects of early Islamic law. Under madhabs, or legal schools where ideas and opinions could be collectively adopted, those studying to be a part of the Islamic legal personnel studied in study circles, or madrasas when the law became more established in academia during the tenth century to earn their titles (Hallaq 31-32, 2011). These madrasas were educational, financial, and political institutions that allowed for hierarchy among professors and students, but also allowed for waqf endowments, which dedicated spaces for Islamic law to be studied, specifically within mosques (Hallaq 38, 2011). This conveys the importance of academia that has reinforced early Islamic law as education institutions manifested into financial institutions to become an academic and financial superstructure–fused into both.

Consequently, shari’a law, in several cases, when applied in the contemporary, does not resemble shari’a in a pre-modern context. In part, this is due to how shari’a has been misconstrued, misrepresented, and therefore undermined by governance structures upon being placed in the hands of the western, hegemonic nation-state. This is enshrined in Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, and Indonesia. Consistent misrepresentation has created discourse on shari’a law persisting into the 21st century. One example of a case in which shari’a law is prevalent is in the present day (21st century) nation-state of Zamfara, northern Nigeria, as conveyed in the documentary, Inside a Shari’ah Court. The synopsis of the film is comprised of the following: a narrator that is a Muslim woman from Britain, where shari’a law is not practiced. In the film, she travels to Zamfara to investigate, in an ethnographic vein, the operations of shari’a law and better understand the questions many bring into the overarching discourse: the inclusion of shari’a law in British juristic practice. The documentary conveys similarities between the juristic practices embraced in Gusau and those during pre-modern Islamic society, specifically the community fashioned orientation of legal personnel and community members, the role of the judge, and the importance of knowledge to inform the law. Upon her arrival to the village of Gusau, Zamfara, the narrator approaches Judge Isah, the Muslim judge of the community, with her questions about the operations of shari’a law in this community, many of which are combative. 

The narrator of the documentary provides a thick description through what I have denoted as an anthropological and ethnographic process. Here, she qualitatively observes and inquires about the juristic practices of shari’a law in Gusau. However, a key question that emerges from the work done in this film is the symbiotic relationship between power and knowledge; is it fair for the knowledge and experiences shared in this documentary by the residents of Gusau to be thickly described and expertly accounted for by BBC? Ultimately, the film reveals shari’a as backward, oppressive, and uncivilized. This conveys shari’a as a very misrepresented practice, not only by non-Muslims but outside groups that do not practice shari’a law (BBC, 2007).  Ultimately, a contemporary film like this enshrines how systems of coloniality has further unfolded through more nation-state agendas like western research and documentary as these structures reinforce a claim of expertise, knowledge, and control by westerners.

Furthermore, though shari’a law is present in modern-day Nigeria, there are many Muslim states in which the circumstances are not the same. The modernization of the law in conjunction with state intervention has made it so that the legal system appears vastly different than it did before the end of the first World War. The hands of the Nationalist elites took over Muslim societies through implementing modern technology, cultural institutions, among western nuances that align with the emergence of global capitalism (Hallaq 135, 2011). Even before this, Hallaq suggests that the earliest forms of pre-modern governance perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth-century set the stage for the modern transformations that occur from the 19th century onwards. In part, this is due to the sovereign’s implications for shari’a law. The Circle of Justice established by the sovereign saw the military as inextricably linked with sovereignty and became laced into shari’a law. Additionally, the transformation of the qadi under the Ottomans was made to be appointed and dismissed by the sovereign (Hallaq 72-73, 2011). The Ottomans were also responsible for constructing the largest Muslim empire by the end of the sixteenth century, responsible for both Egypt and Iran. 

Persisting into a further period of modernization, the colonization of the law has also enabled the modernization of shari’a law that occurs during the latter half of the 20th century. The Ottomans could not keep up with the rapid modernization of their European counterparts, so they were less successful by the 17th century. One example of European colonization of Islamic law is Dutch Colonial rule in Indonesia and the establishment of adat to apply “normative” law practices in the legal system with the intent to “unify the law,” which is eventually embraced by the state of Indonesia in the late 20th century (Hallaq 90, 2011). I will soon convey the Indonesian state’s application of colonized Islamic law in the late 20th century and how it does not result in a unified legal system.

But, the codification of the law under nationalist regimes during the early 20th century established an ultimate shift towards modernization that differs from the governance happening in pre-modern Islamic societies: the shift from a more collective approach to the law, to one that strives towards individualism and treats families as individual “units” existing “on their own,” under the law, aligning with the capitalist system that was rapidly emerging (Hallaq 135, 2011).  This modernization of legal structures is further enshrined in the post-1970s “re-Islamization trends” that Hallaq describes, which are primarily state doings that worked to mold Islamic societies in Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, and Indonesia. In essence, the laws applied in these contexts cannot be described as shari’a law as it once was recognized in a pre-modern, stateless society.  

Hallaq identifies Egypt as one of the longest experiments in legal modernization and ideological secularization. Specifically, two groups from the mid-nineteenth century onwards were established in Egypt, one being the Azharis. The Azharis strongly identified with the ulama and conventional visions of shari’a law. Another religious group that was even more prevalent in Egypt during this time was the “Muslim Brothers,” or better denoted, Islamists, which spread beyond the confines of Egypt to other countries in the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia (Hallaq 143-144, 2011).  

These similarities between pre-modern shari’a legal societies and those of the Islamist majority with an Azhari minority in Egypt, pressured the government to consider using shari’a as their legal system. Largely, this required compliance to nationalism from the Azharis, which was implemented. It also included suppression of Islamist political formations under the Nasser regime at the time. In turn, the subordination of both groups on behalf of Nasser’s regime made it so that the implementation of shari’a in the first place could be disregarded by the state. In 1971, the SCC (Supreme Constitutional Court) was established to “curb infringements” by the legislative and executive branches. However, the impacts of the SCC were ambiguous, lacking a definition of what shari’a law was until 1993. Even so, the SCC took a rather ignorant and audacious stance in its definition of shari’a law, ignoring hadith and suggesting that any judge versed in national courts could interpret shari’a. Though the state of Egypt during the late 20th century had agreed to implement shari’a law, this is merely their misinterpretation of what had been established in pre-modern Islamic society: the sacred and fundamental superstructure of shari’a. So, key ideas that initially informed shari’a law have been ignored. For instance, the SCC did not regard hadith or the value of the ulama because they suggested that any judge educated about the national court was qualified to adjudicate in a shari’a context. This suggests fewer exclusive qualifications for legal personnel, namely Muslim judges, that are defined in pre-modern shari’a societies (Hallaq 145-147, 2011).  

Comparatively, in post-1970 Pakistan, state intervention to implement shari’a juristic practices was nationalized and misunderstood. Pre-modern shari’a practices were not implemented to their fullest extent. An example of this is under the Objectives Resolution of 1949, which initially was included as a Preamble to the Constitution in Pakistan. This resolution intended to expunge all laws contradicting the traditional laws of shari’a. In turn, it was intended that each High Court would have a “Shariat Bench,” but this was codified into a single FSC (Federal Shariat Court) in 1980. Hallaq accentuates the impediments faced by the FSC in court: The Supreme Court could deny the FSC’s decisions and the FSC could not adjudicate the Constitution, fiscal, procedural, or personal status laws. Additionally, the five judges in the FSC were from national courts rather than the ulama class, so they were not versed in the same juristic practices that synthesize knowledge and scholarship with the law. This is similar to the nationalization of judges in the Islamic courts perpetuated by the SCC in Egypt around the same period. The case of Egypt also worked to devalue the importance of knowledge about shari’a across the ulama. In this way, it is made clear that traditional shari’a law was subordinated by the state of Pakistan (Hallaq 150-151, 2011).  

During this time frame, Iran was experiencing the prodigious Iranian revolution of 1979. As a result, this had vast implications for the structure of Islamic law. Ayatullah Khomeni, leader and theorist of the Iranian revolution and Pahlavi state of Iran, emphasized that the “Marja-Taqlid, or Jurist-in-Charge,” must fulfill the role of the Imam, or leader of the prayer if the Imam is not present. Formally, this was embedded in the 1979 Constitution of the new Republic, where Article 5 indicates such specifically. Khomeni also emphasizes the notion of itijihad, or Islamic legal mastery, and how it must be embraced by an Islamic state complying with shari’a law. To ensure this, the Marja-Taqlid will supervise the activities of the Islamic state and render things ‘Islamic’ or ‘un-Islamic.’ Khomeni theorized how he felt Islam should operate in Iran and suggested a rather paradoxical theory: “Islamic governance grounded in the shari’a’s rule of law was gradually fading away in favor of a modernist perception of governance.” (Hallaq 153, 2011)  

However, the reality of his regime cultivated a modern state and modern perceptions of governance, hence its paradoxical nature. This is perpetuated by the state in practice under the Pahlavi legal system. For example, according to Article 167 of the 1979 Constitution of the new Republic, court judges are required to adjudicate cases utilizing codified law. Upon the absence of codified law, their decisions rely on a fatwa given by a qualified jurist -- to the state’s standards and construction. The codification of the law by the state here conveys a modernized form of shari’a law that does not resemble the initial facets of pre-modern shari’a. As a result, the state was granted the ability to pronounce what is and is not Islamic. Further, any vague law requires the court to make a fatwa based on the principles of Islamic law, or even the judge himself can exemplify itijihad. As seen in Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan, the ulama is undermined here when the qualifications to legal mastery are made less exclusive upon modernization on behalf of the state (Hallaq 154-156, 2011).  

In Indonesia after 1970, shari’a law was held to a similar standard. Hallaq identifies Law No. 14 of 1970 as a law that reinforced the judicial powers of shari’a courts, thus allowing them to be mediators of disputes before the level of adjudication, which assumes a courtroom setting with a case decision being determined. This is important to consider because it undermines shari’a law in that it was not emphasized as a law appropriate to make an adjudication. Rather, shari’a jurists mediate outside of the court in this context and are not given access to the courtroom. Likewise, the new Compilation of Islamic Law in Indonesia, which had the objective to foster unification of Islamic law across the country, drew on a more modernized version of the law. This resulted in many counterintuitive impacts that were exacerbated by the state (Hallaq 161, 2011).  

For instance, after the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998 via the operation of “decentralization” (aka Otonomi Daerah), laws No. 10 and 32 established in 2004 under the new Compilation, acknowledged the “relative autonomy” of the districts in Indonesia. This gives the federal government powers over both domestic and global policies while leaving domestic affairs up to the individual districts themselves. As a result, the residual impacts of this have caused a lack in a unified ideology of shari’a practiced across sixteen districts in Indonesia, unification being an imperative aspect of the pre-modern structure that informed shari’a. With that said, upon Indonesia’s decision to give powers to the state, it diminishes early objectives to achieve a unified ideology (Hallaq 162, 2011).  

Fundamentally, the misconceptions concerning Islamic law have merely been upheld by the actions of the nation-states in the cases of Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, and Indonesia. The contents of this paper have analyzed the modernization of Islamic juristic practices in the latter part of the 20th century and only one isolated 21st-century context examined through a thickly described lens. With that said, extrapolation beyond the 20th century would further strengthen the assessment of whether shari’a law is prevalent and resembles its pre-modern structure. Seeing as the political context of four of these nation-states has fluctuated in time, perhaps Islamic law has been even further modified and resembles pre-modern shari’a structure even less than it did in a post-1970s context before the twenty-first century.  

References

Hallaq, Wael B. An Introduction to Islamic Law. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 

2011.

Hamid, Ruhi. Inside a Shari'ah Court. BBC, 2007.

Private Property is Antithetical to Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was the foremost document of its kind. When it was ratified by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, it was the first international standard for human rights. It enshrined the idea of universality, which proclaims that every individual has innate rights that must be protected by and from various institutions that are both private and public in nature. However, while the UDHR is a significant accomplishment, it is very much a product of its post-WWII era. The Cold War was in its early stages and the need to protect the ideals of Western capitalism against the various strains of socialism and communism was paramount. Furthermore, the process of formal decolonization had just begun; governments representing formally colonized peoples were just beginning to have a modicum of power within the newly formed United Nations (UN). This historical context is arguably of the utmost importance when considering the contents of the UDHR: Western countries, who were formative in the creation of the UN and its mission, were interested in upholding settler-colonialism and capitalism in order to protect their economic and political interests which were threatened by decolonization and the rise in anti-capitalist ideology. Nowhere is this more evident than in Article 17 which states: “Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.” Private property is arguably antithetical to the human rights project as not only is it inherently exclusionary, it explicitly violates the rights of Indigenous peoples and creates the basis for extractive relationships with the land that are ultimately harmful. 

What is Property?

It should be noted that the contemporary understanding of property is rooted in the microcosm of Western philosophy. The West’s conceptualization of property deliberately occludes the reciprocal relationship to land that is an inherent part of Indigenous beliefs and customs. Property, as is currently understood, is a fairly general term- it typically connotes ownership over something tangible or intangible. For the purposes of this article, property will be used to refer to land and its material resources. Private property specifically refers to a “system that allocates particular objects, like pieces of land, to particular individuals to use and manage as they please, to the exclusion of others and to the exclusion of any detail controlled by society.”  It is worth mentioning that private ownership in Western countries does not directly translate to total ownership over the land; it typically entails rights to the land. However, these rights still have extensive consequences. Ownerships may entail the following: exclusion of others, renting, leasing, or selling land, and the decision to use or not to use it. Private property also does not exist in isolation; its existence still depends on public justification; without the acknowledgment of public institutions, it would be difficult to enforce laws pertaining to private property rights. 

While private property is currently the predominant system, it is not the only iteration of property that has been implemented. Common property is used to govern resources that are available to all; any sort of restriction on its use is meant to guarantee fair access to everyone. This idea of common property is deliberately meant to prevent any sort of exclusion. In a similar vein, collective property is where the whole community determines how important resources are to be utilized; such determinations are based on social interest and are meant to ensure the well-being of the community. While common and collective property differ in their specific mechanisms, they are both rooted in democratic processes that consider the interests of the community rather than the individual. 

The History of Private Property: How Did We Get Here?

Early agricultural societies “concentrated” the relationship between land and people as farming necessitated permanent settlements thus meaning that communities had to directly invest in the care and maintenance of the land. However, property was not seen as a private entity that is used to extract natural resources and accumulate capital; these early settlements cultivated intimate relationships to the land. In many Western cultural contexts, the land was seen as a “sacred mother.” The idea of land being utilized as a source of wealth and power simultaneously arose with the emergence of the nobility, who pushed for greater legal recognition of their land rights. Given this general overview, it is important to consider its particular evolution as a philosophical concept. Ancient philosophers in the Hellenistic tradition speculated on the relationship between property and virtue. Plato espoused the idea that collective ownership promoted common pursuit of the common interest; he believed that organizing property in a collective manner would prevent social division. Aristotle was in direct opposition with this idea- he suggested and defended the idea that private ownership would help cultivate virtues such as “prudence and responsibility.”  Additionally, Aristotle’s ideas would lay the foundation for the notion that private property has an inherent relationship to liberty and freedom. This supposed relationship between private property and freedom was very much a product of Aristotle’s historical circumstances: freedom was defined in contrast with slavery. In other words, to be free meant that one exercised ownership, while the opposite was natural enslavement. In the Medieval period that followed, Thomas Aquinas believed that virtue and property have a relationship. Yet Aquinas further argued that the rich have a moral obligation to be generous with their wealth, while the poor have rights against the rich. While Aquinas’ approach to private property differs from typical attitudes, it can arguably be seen throughout strains of “progressive” approaches to property, albeit they still operate within the framework of capitalism. 

The early modern period, which includes the Enlightenment, is where one begins to see the inception of contemporary notions of private property. While Hobbes and Hume promoted the idea that property is the creation of the state, it was Locke who formulated the most widely-accepted ideas related to private property. Whereas Hobbes and Hume believed that private property existed solely within the context of a sovereign state, Locke propagated the idea that property could also exist in a state of nature without any political decisions cementing its conception. Locke essentially believed that private property is a naturally occurring phenomenon and due to its existence within nature, it stands to further reason that to claim ownership over it is an inherent right- thus one can clearly recognize the lineage of Article 17 in the UDHR. Furthermore, Locke did not adhere to the idea of universal consent; unlike common or collective property, which emphasizes democratic procedures, Lockesian private property defends the idea of  “unilateral appropriation.”  Additionally, it was important to Locke that land be used in a productive manner; considering that he did not believe that Indigenous or nomadic peoples could be regarded as owners in this capacity, one can assume that “productive” relates to industry. 

A Rebuttal Against Locke’s Private Property

Firstly, it should be noted that, by definition, private property is exclusionary. This is harmful for multiple reasons. The dividing of land between individual actors for private control inevitably produces a barrier to accessing resources. Privatization of land often leads to the privatization of natural resources on said land thus turning them into commodities to be bought and sold. The specific issue is that some within the proverbial “community,” though this occurs on both a local and global scale, are not able to afford the commodification of these resources. The exclusivity of resources inherently produces inequality- some will be able to access these resources through a monetary exchange, while (many) others will struggle. Furthermore, turning land into an exclusive entity, i.e. property, creates a distorted mainstream relationship to nature. The parcelling up and division of land eclipses the idea that we can have a reciprocal relationship where the land takes care of us and we take care of the land. Instead it becomes another object where its primary purpose is to extract natural resources and produce commodities. 

The justification for exclusionary practices is that people are “better off” when resources are governed by a private entity. It is believed that under private property, resources can be utilized to satisfy a greater set of needs than under any alternative system, such as common or collective property. This is commonly referred to as the “Tragedy of the Commons,” an idea proposed by Garret Hardin. However, the “Tragedy of the Commons” is arguably more of a personal projection on Hardin’s part than it is an accurate reflection of reality as it operates on the basis that everyone is motivated by personal greed or self-interest. The problem with this position is that the privatization of resources has not been able to satisfy “the greater set of needs;” in fact, 72 percent of people currently do not have access to the resources they need. Additionally, the “Tragedy of the Commons” completely ignores the Indigenous ways of life which ensure that resources are respected and well-distributed to satisfy everyone’s needs. Ultimately, the exclusionary nature of private property is antithetical to the human rights project, especially as it contradicts other articles within the UDHR. For example, Article 3 states: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.” Yet if we operate under the supremacy of private property, how can everyone fulfill their right to life and security when marginalized cannot access the necessary resources to survive? How can Indigenous peoples fulfill their right to life when their land has been divided for capitalist modes of production? 

Lockesian private property is arguably another tool for settler-colonialism which is defined as “an ongoing system of power that perpetuates the genocide and repression of indigenous peoples and cultures.” Firstly, Locke’s idea that land should be unilaterally appropriated is explicit support for colonialism. Not only does it undermine basic democratic governance over land, it violates the sovereignty of Indigenous nations as it condones the violent seizure of land by settlers. This violence is not only wrought upon Indigenous peoples, but also on the land itself which is exemplified by contemporary ecological degradation. Secondly, Locke’s concept of productivity is an unimaginative way of life that is very much rooted in racism. Locke argued that land must be cultivated to be productive i.e. it had to conform to a sedentary agricultural standard to be legitimate; he voiced his doubts that Indigenous peoples could be regarded as owners since his definition of productivity is related to industry. Productivity in Lockesian terms denigrates Indigenous ways of life. However, it should also be noted that something does not have to be productive to be useful. The land is useful, not because of Western notions of productivity, but because it is the land: it is abundant in life, including human life. 

A New Approach?

Private property is contradictory to human rights: it perpetuates settler-colonialism and is part of exclusionary economic practices. It is necessary to reorient ourselves and implement an approach that respects the land, especially in the face of worsening ecological conditions and climate change, and its people. Common and collective property models are worth considering, however it is always possible to conceive of new ideas, new paths, and new futures. In order to create a new world free of settler-colonialism and exploitative economic models, we should look to Indigenous communities. Indigenous beliefs are diverse, however there seems to be a common theme: life is sacred and must be protected. It is important to cultivate a relationship with the land that is based on reciprocity and respect. The land can sustain us and we can sustain it. The needs of both must be met; abundance must be shared between both.

Narcoculture as a Crisis of Dignity: A Somatic Solution and the Limitations of 'Practical Philosophy'

Conclusions of Three Indicators: Fitting Narcoculture in Somatic Dignity Model

To recap the analysis of this case study, by abstracting from these illustrative qualities of Narcoculture, we generalize the source of this movement of conflict in two ways. The first is from a traditional environmental or circumstantial analysis, which could certainly be applied to discourses of psychology and sociology, but is much more grounded in the particulars than a philosophical narrative. The second, through this conceptual ‘practical philosophy,’ as demonstrated by this series of articles’ application of a Somatic Dignity framework, is through the lens of broader questions about the tendencies of human nature and its interaction with institutional forces. Alberto-Sánchez, a philosopher himself, supports a sort of synthesis of the two, demonstrating how policy analysis and historical inquiry can collaborate with philosophy for a directly applicable use of its narratives to generate meaningful change. He notes that “the history of narcoculture is wrapped up with the history of America’s War on Drugs…the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, which regulated the sale and distribution of opiates and coca products and continues to do so to this day…[and] American (or US) intervention in the dismantling of the Colombian drug-trafficking infrastructure- namely, with the fall of Pablo Escobar in 1993. More impactful to its continual survival and evolution is its reactionary relationship with US antidrug (and border) policy, a relationship that forces narco-culture to continuously change, morph, and evolve with every new regulation US lawmakers invent to curb or combat the sale, consumption, and trafficking of illegal or illicit drugs. As drug use and sales are further criminalized in the US, thereby pushing consumers and producers alike further an further past the periphery of legality, Mexico narco-culture flourishes and becomes mainstream, turning ‘Mexico at the dawn of the twenty-first century into a bloodbath that has shocked the world.’” (Alberto- Sánchez, 2020, 2-3).

And yet, Alberto-Sánchez simultaneously describes how “As a historical event and social fact, narco-culture and the violence that frames it reveal a human crisis.” Seeing his utilitarianly motivated responsibility to employ philosophy, he notes that this is a question about violence and death, and thus, best understood through the methodology of phenomenology and existentialism, connecting the “violent terrorism,” of narco-culture with the same phenomena we have seen in Naziism and fascism, which as we know, parallel just as simply Enlightenment vs. Religious violence as Hegel observed in the French Revolution. For Alberto-Sánchez, and certainly historicist philosophers comprising the foundation of my Somatic Dignity theory, these iterative, violent identity-based conflicts cannot be understood from the perspective of the individual. Rather, “Within the violent terrorism of narco-culture, moreover, the ‘individual’s impotence’ is, in fact, absolute; individuals are swallowed up by the culture of violence itself, defined in their identity by a cultural ethos, by an ideology that is greater than themselves- so much so that they can no longer think beyond the immediacy of their station and believe themselves impotently tied to their circumstances,” (Alberto-Sánchez, 2020, 4). He agrees, then, that it is philosophy which is uniquely equipped to breakthrough these particulars of the situational crisis and place them within larger frameworks to understand the propaganda and violence, or the true sources of the seeming absurdity of the terror (Alberto-Sánchez, 2020, 4-5). This is what we see demonstrated through not only his own work, but the application of Somatic Dignity here.

Somatic Practices as Alternative to Mastery: Case Study of Marisela Escobedo’s movement against Narcoculture’s Femicide

Seeing that narco-culture phenomenologically overlaps strongly with Hegel’s framework of cultural mastery, and therefore, the character of a historical crisis over a deprivation of the recognition of dignity, it follows that there might be promise in the Somatic Dignity framework of providing a solution to this and related conflicts. Returning to the original proposal of Somatic Dignity, we must then consider if mastery is the harmful psychological response, how can we scale the transcendentally powerful habits of the slavish consciousness, who performs embodied work, and thus, learns to transform his own character alongside that of the world around him? By searching for parallels between the Somatic Dignity proposals and the movement of Escobedo in the documentary as well as Alberto-Sanchez’s practical philosophical solution, this series of articles will both provide an extended defense of the previous proposal, and demonstrate how it can and has been successfully applied to an acute case example. As such, it will provide a foundation for the original argument that we have an ethical responsibility toward practical philosophy particularly with regard for these historical iterative identity-based conflicts, due to its unique capacity for human-nature/institutional analysis, not simply because of the destructive degree of conflicts.

By responding to the death of her daughter by engaging in the imagination and construction of a social movement to raise consciousness around femicide and make a call for justice, Marisela Escobedo embodies something akin to this Hegelian slavish consciousness. We can call the death of Escobedo’s daughter the initial existential crisis, or instilling of existential fear that melts away the slave’s stability of identity or perception of the world. This existential crisis or fear is renewed with each threat posed to Escobedo or her family in her efforts, which were frequent and serious. Following the moment of threat, Escobedo dropped her usual activities within her family, or her former “social role” within the Family as a mere being for herself, and entered a more dynamic shared role of Family/Citizen in her public engagement so as to achieve justice for her daughter. This hybrid social role, or challenging of the usual Hegelian borders of ethical institutions suggests the creation of an already more fluid space as a result of the adoption of this transcendentally powered consciousness.

Now having all of the norms of her previous life shattered through the existential crisis, Marisela Escobeda began to engage in a process of imagination, trying to analyze the roots of injustice so as to imagine a better future and chart a path of tangible, working steps to actualize that vision. This ability to imagine and create a new future is a clear example of transcendental consciousness. At first, Escobedo tried standard institutions; searching for her daughter’s remains and the answer to what happened to her by hand, and then pursuing the legal/court system, and appealing to the government. She went to the streets and asked other people for answers, put clues together, and dug through landfills examining bones. She learned the law around the case, gathered and presented evidence, and experienced the emotional toil of expressing all of this at the mercy of a higher authority obsessed only with maintaining their mastery, which involves the cartels and normalization of femicide. She is, in other words, performing embodied, physical work at the will of the consuming, cultural mastery.

 In doing so, that melting down process of all norms and stability of her identity recurs as each institution fails to grant Escobedo justice. This fluidity is what allows her to see the world through new eyes, and set different priorities as to what must be done about it, as seen in her switching ethical roles in the Hegelian system, dropping previous activities, and launching a broader movement. Laws no longer mean anything to her, nor respect for or trust in political authority, so she is forced to come to a new understanding of this subversive, systemic mastery and what power really is. She does not, however, want to be like the Masters, as looking upon narco-culture from the slavish perspective, she can see it is not fulfilling. She can see the perpetrator constantly on the run, and now stuck in that violent life- alive, with power, but not really living for himself. She chooses, thusly, to not share the desire for Mastery, but rather, to transform the world for a higher purpose.

When constructing the movement to raise consciousness around femicide, Escobedo included several key aspects that align with the Somatic Dignity model. First, she channeled person-based narratives through mass media, such that she was not spreading an abstract ideology, but an embodied story that connects with a broader problem, that hinges on an empathetic resonance to have power. Second, she undid the dignity deprivation that occurred for victims of femicide by seeking honor for her daughter and, with others who had lost particular individuals, performed rituals of honor such as holding vigils, leaving flowers and holding faces up so as to give these women a being-for-themselves again within their families, but also meaning within a collective somatic consciousness that is rooted in an emotional, dynamic recognition of the dignity of persons, rather than an abstract notion. She observed that this dignity was intrinsic, but also failing to be recognized by institutions, and through the process of consciousness raising, worked to help individuals and small groups engaging generate empathy and pressure institutional change/ shatter faith and expose corruption of institutions such that there was hope for shifting the historical needle of recognition for women in a positive direction, rather than focusing on her own particular actions.

This follows the Critical Theorist tradition of generating movements, as seen in Martin Luther King Jr.’s influence on the Civil Rights Movement, where it is clear a particular embodied, engaged consciousness has to develop within individuals to allow for imagination, innovative collective action and institutional reform that is responsible rather than a complete overhaul taken by violent force. This is different than an antagonistic use of nonviolence, which aims still to make an impact through some show of force that puts pressure on existing institutions, as Judith Butler points out can be a typical social foundation of movements of non-violence, as in the case of Ghandi (Butler, 2020). It puts a heavier emphasis on cultivating an embodied, transcendental recognition of an individual’s own dignity within themselves which they will then scale in an ethical responsibility to preserve the now perceptible dignity of others. This does not pit two opposing forces, but simply breaks down prior norms and opens someone’s capacity for empathy on a revolutionary scale which will be reflected in accordingly shifted institutions as a result of such a movement. This organically scales because it is dignity deprivation which is the mistaken root of binary, polarized social tensions in these moments of conflict, or to put more simply, that leads to two abstract forces, old institutions and new, fighting by force in the mastery dialectic. As such, fulfilling recognition of dignity will be something, when presented with, many will be thirsty for and receptive of.

In fact, it is Butler’s central claim that to pursue nonviolence “plainly” to solve these problems, or in other words, to understand “non-violence” as a “dialectical opposite to ‘violence,’” as they are often mistaken by our institutions, is often more detrimental. As put by Saswat Samay Das and Dhriti Shankar, two reviewers of Butler’s latest book, when the institution sets up a rigid non-negotiable categorical divide between what it calls violence and nonviolence rather than treating them as divergent yet overlapping processes arising out of expressing and affecting each other, it lays the scope for their partisan manipulation and exploitation for “the purposes of concealing and extending violent aims and practices” (Samay Das, Sawat, Shankar, Dhriti, 2021, 102; Butler, 2020, 5). To instead pursue this transcendental formulation of embodied consciousness of dignity is to move out of the binary polarized space into a dynamic engagement with others to carefully imagine gradual institutional reform according to a particular issue, not the force of an ideological “side” claiming to deem a person holistically good or evil through their loyalty to it.

For Butler, nonviolence with integrity is founded on a radical acknowledgement of the social relatedness of the subject. She views the supreme act of nonviolence as the act of registering the “grievability” of certain lives. Unlike the Masters of Narcoculture or the Reign of Terror, who inflict unimaginable brutality so as to dehumanize, nonviolence is Escobedo, again, giving those who lost their lives to femicide dignity, or value for their lives within themselves, through the practice of grieving together. It is this grieving together that builds an engaged movement to reconstruct their world as one of greater justice and recognition of dignity that can translate into institutional shifts without force in the way of abstract revolution (Samay Das, Sawat, Shankar, Dhriti, 2021, 103; Butler, 2020, Chapter 1).

Limitations in Impacting Institutional Shifts: The Individual vs. Historical Narrative, and a Return to the Ethical Responsibility towards ‘Practical Philosophy’

The biggest limitation of the Somatic Dignity approach which should be noted is rooted in the inherent dynamic of individuals versus institutions in cultivating a shift of the historical needle. Embedded in the larger movement of German Idealism, Hegel grapples with this question head on. However, we can also see it illustrated in Marisela Escobedo’s efforts to counter the historical movement of narcoculture, and related feminist or social justice movements. Through a brief synthesis of these two frameworks in the spirit of the Somatic Dignity proposal, we will examine how important those limitations are in discouraging the push for institutional spreading of Somatic Dignity, and in some ways, other efforts of ‘Practical Philosophy.’

Beginning with Hegel’s interaction with German Idealism, the large movement of German Idealism ventured to fill a logical gap Kant’s framework of transcendental philosophy, such that Kant’s project would not only provide an explanation for how it is we can have knowledge of how we can have knowledge, but be self-explanatory, and explicate how it is we can have knowledge of how it is we can have knowledge. In doing so, they have to understand how it is the self can both be a universal, self-determining thing which possesses freedom, and therefore dignity, but that same self can also posit itself as a finite being which is therefore limited, rather than fully free, by other beings via moral law. In this way, the construction or conception of the self and dignity is directly related to the source and content of ethical obligations.

The first major thinker to take up this project following Kant was Fichte, who asserted that we ought to understand the self as a paradox between this universal, Absolute self, which could fully determine itself, and the finite self posited by the absolute self, this being the tangible, particular being in the world (Fichte, 1994). He understands freedom to be the mechanism by which individual selves are able to fulfill their moral obligations. However, he also argues that freedom is something which we can never fully attain or understand, but only move towards asymptotically across the course of history, thus creating a massive limitation for individual selves in generating historical change or ever fully recognizing dignity.

Schelling, the next major contributor to the Idealist project, critiques Fichte for practicing a “one-sided Idealism,” and argues that the self cannot be understood without its relationship to the objective, or independent unconscious world- Nature (Schelling 1800). Schelling instead understands Nature and the Self to be united under an shared telos or end purpose- this being the fulfillment of moral duty. Nature, he argues, is self-determining insofar as it determines itself so as to allow for conscious selves to have and be able to exercise freedom, and freedom, or the self-determination of the conscious subject is the mechanism by which to fulfill moral duty. In this way, they are individually self-determining but unified concepts that limit each other due to their subordination to an ultimate cause. Because the exercising of freedom can only happen when the self-determining subject is manifested as a tangible, finite being on Earth, Nature self-determines the self as a finite being, answering Fichte’s question without the contradiction. 

Schelling believes, however, that this conception of the self and freedom, and therefore dignity, can only be uncovered through the philosophy of art, rather than formal discursive logic, or precise formulation (Schelling, 1800). Art, he believes, epitomizes the relationship between the conscious self-determining self, and the unconscious self-determination of Nature unified in one task. The artist, in creating a piece, exercises conscious intent in the subject matter and its representation, thereby contributing meaning. The natural materials they work with, however, such as the paint, canvas and so forth, also contribute unconsciously to the meaning of the final product. As such, philosophizing about their unification, he believes, is one way of understanding the relationship between the self and Nature so as to learn about the historical process of fulfilling moral vocation. This is, again, exceptionally limiting for individuals trying to understand freedom so as to exercise their moral duty, as it is ultimately imperfect.

Hegel, then, agrees with Schelling’s latest contribution that such a project cannot fall into a one-sided idealism as Fichte proposed, as this does not consider Nature, or an objective sphere that exists independently and determines itself separately from Subjectivity, nor the proper relationship between Subjectivity and Objectivity (Hegel, 2010). He also maintains Schelling’s argument that in order to evade this trap, transcendental philosophy must focus on the Absolute, or what exists prior to the subject vs. object distinction, and thus acts as a source for each. Hegel provides a critique, however, of Schelling’s assertion that the Absolute cannot be understood through consciousness or discursive thought, (this being understanding the Absolute through logic or language), and instead can only be grasped through art, and the philosophy of art. This happens particularly through a critique of Schelling’s claim that the Absolute is the ‘absolute indifference point’ in the System of Transcendental Idealism.’

According to Hegel, the Absolute cannot be something which exists prior to any difference, the most fundamental being Subjectivity and Objectivity, because to think any concept of the Absolute, including a particular unity between these through the teleological orientation of both towards moral vocation, involves generating a negation between the two things so as to make them cognizable, (this thing is what it is because it is not this other thing) and therefore, includes difference. Instead, the Absolute, Hegel believes, must be an identity of identity and difference themselves, because this is the most abstract indeterminate point, and it is indeterminacy which allows us to affirm concepts without negation. Hegel proves this indeterminacy point as a resolution to the contradiction still present in Schelling’s account through the framework of the Dasein, or the finite, conscious, determinate being, which is able to offer a determinate negation of Being that allows Being and Nothing, which Hegel argues are the most indeterminate and therefore legitimate starting point of the task of understanding the Absolute, to be understood as distinct things, and therefore not be contradictory to one another but provide a solid starting concept with no internal difference.

In other words, for Hegel, there is a pathway by which we can formally understand the nature of our freedom or dignity. However, it is not through discrete, or brute facts about dignity. Rather, it is through the logical movement of resolving contradictions between finite beings and their absolute, eternal character (complete freedom or dignity). Fichte and Schelling both try to resolve contradictions in the self through discrete logic. Hegel says that instead, logic has infinite movement through a finite pattern, and that pattern of movement, a dialectical pattern, is what reveals the character of dignity. Individuals, then, may make certain resolutions of contradictions of their own historical circumstances, which move institutional change in favor of wider recognition forward, but ultimately this is a broader historical task, as outlined in the intro to Somatic Dignity.

In this way, the individual is a necessary mechanism for historical change in favor of fulfilling our moral duty, and widening dignity recognition. However, particular individuals will never fulfill that full vocation on their own. In this way, historically scaled change, or institutional impact that shapes the habits and prejudices of all individuals is the most important form of moral engagement, and it starts with the movement of the individual’s psychology out of the tendency for mastery and into the dynamic, transcendentally powered slavish consciousness. Movements which help to cultivate those psychological shifts and use them to civically engage in movements that spread these habits are the most equipped for fulfilling ethical obligations.

Because philosophy, as demonstrated through the case study of Somatic Dignity theory as applied to narcoculture, is the most equipped, and uniquely so, to understand this relationship of the individual to history, and this moral vocation is the broad telos of the human species, it is not a mere discrete utilitarian ethical obligation to participate in practical philosophy, or applying these patterns to the contradictions and conflicts of our time, but a deeper responsibility. Without it, we have no framework by which to determine what movements for historical change are constructed with a positive benefit, and which will land us in another contradiction and spiral of immeasurably brutal violence. We need philosophy to see the transcendental power and importance of movements like Escobedo’s and the broader way in which those habits apply to other global conflicts, if we are to move the needle in our own time, and not go back into the same easy misunderstandings of our past. As Butler points out, it is easy to label a cause with something everyone can agree is good, as well as with a moral quality like “non-violence,” and in fact foster more aggression and dehumanization. Philosophy offers a sophisticated historical analysis of psychology that allows us to move into a truly impactful shift of our own habits, and ultimately, our historical condition of recognition such that we can live truly more fulfilled lives, rather than delusions of mastery.

What Foucault Can Teach Us About COVID-19: Understanding the Effects of the Pandemic Through Philosophy

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended daily life for the majority of people around the world and brought about dramatic changes in our living habits and the ways we can conduct ourselves in our day to day lives. Despite the prolonged and devastating nature of this pandemic, the rise in vaccinations and increase in effective treatments for the disease have finally allowed us to look to the future with some optimism. However, as we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, it is important to now understand the different ways in which the pandemic can be explained and analyzed through a more theoretical and scholarly lens. Much has been written about the pandemic, but the majority of COVID-19 written material has consisted mostly of news sources simply offering information about cases, new breakthroughs in research, and official government updates. 

Michel Foucault

Analyzing the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic through a philosophical lens can provide insight and discovery into the new ways of looking at this momentous year. In particular, the work of famous French philosopher, Michel Foucault, can provide theories and explanations towards understanding the effect of things such as mass vaccination and government intervention within a population. Foucault (1926-1984) dedicated his life to understanding the ways in which humanities struggle with power, control, and knowledge. More specifically, Foucault focused on the role that societal institutions played in influencing and controlling society. His study of historical events and ancient institutions revealed new ways of understanding power and force. 

Biopolitics

Taking a Foucauldian lens to the COVID-19 pandemic requires using Foucault’s theories and concepts to apply them to our modern era. Foucault’s famous concept of ‘biopolitics’ from his book, The History of Sexuality, is the first concept that can be applied to this pandemic. Foucault defined biopolitics in his book as a way "to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order." However, more simply put, biopolitics is a way of understanding how society exerts control and dominance over the creation and maintenance of human life. Foucault explained that this was a new type of power, created in the nineteenth century by the rise in modern medicine and technology, which allowed governments and societal institutions to view society as one grand body, and allowed it to enforce regulations and mandates for the whole of the state body or population. There are many examples of biopolitics in society, but common examples include ways of regulating human life and the importance of sustaining it. Anti-abortion laws, health mandates, eugenics, and scientific racism are all examples of this concept, as they explain how society had progressed enough to control the reproduction of a population. However, with that ability to control reproduction came a need and requirement: society had to ensure that the population stayed healthy and continued to grow, and to do this, they provided institutions with the power to do so.

Biopolitics within the coronavirus pandemic appear in a variety of ways. Mask mandates and distancing regulations at a minimum of six feet apart are just two examples of Foucault’s theories at work. Both of these requirements have been enforced by the government as a way to prolong human life and ensure the safety of the population by preventing the state body from becoming ill and dying in huge numbers. Vaccination represents a specific form of biopolitics, in which a government can actively gain control over their population through guaranteeing the ability of their population to survive. Vaccines represent an intense form of institutional power, as the government gains power to decide who lives or dies, as they make choices about groups within society that must be vaccinated first. Within the United States we have witnessed vaccinations to the weakest members of society, the elderly and those with chronic health conditions, as these individuals are at the greatest risk of dying. Essential workers were also prioritized within the vaccine rollout, due to their need to care of others and their proximity to the disease. 

However, vaccine rollout has also been harshly criticized for not being equitable enough. The COVID-19 vaccine offers the promise of safety and the ability to remain alive, but other factors such as racism and poverty play a role in who can access the vaccine. Individuals who lack technological resources find it harder to make vaccination appointments, and similarly, communities of color within the United States are reported to have received less vaccinations than communities with primarily white people, a sign of systemic racism within the medical field. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics allows us to understand that unfair, racist distributions of the vaccine rollout are quite literally leading to the deaths of people of color at the hands of the government. Public health experts have declared that vaccine disparity results from struggles to make appointments and lack of resources and education provided. Here, we witness biopolitics in its worst form, in which a state has the power to provide for its united body, but fails due to internal and systemic issues. 

Governmentality 

The work of COVID-19 contact tracers and public health officials to track the origins of outbreaks can also be better understood through Foucault’s theory of ‘Governmentality.’ Foucault’s theory of governmentality can be defined as the unity of two forces: government and rationality. Foucault wrote that this combination of the two terms is what allows governments to guide and shape the behaviour of their citizens; through utilizing his concept of governmentality, Foucault hoped to gain insight into the ways in which governing occurs and how it is understood in society. Foucault viewed his concept of governmentality and government in a broad sense, analyzing smaller subsections of society as a government as well. 

Thanks to Foucault’s broad definition of this concept, we can understand governmentality as a term that applies to other organizations and systems of power within society. The scientific and medical community, such as the CDC or WHO can be defined as actors that greatly influence human conduct and behaviour since the start of the pandemic. Individuals learned from the CDC about the benefits of mask wearing and the importance of being aware of one's overall health and possible symptoms for signs of infection. The culture of awareness and protection promoted by these actors thus influenced a change in human behavior, as we as a society were forced to become more aware of the overall wellbeing of our bodies. 

Analyzing the nation’s mindset early on in the pandemic versus now allows us to understand the process of governmentality and how it slowly takes hold. The rise of mask mandates proved difficult for people to understand at first, and many protested against these new measures, unwilling to sacrifice their “personal freedoms” and unwilling to believe in the scientific benefits of wearing masks. Yet now, thirteen months into the pandemic, the majority of Americans have accepted mask mandates, and while they may not personally enjoy nor support them, people understand that the mandates are now a part of daily life. Tracking the rise of the mask mandate and individuals' views on them over time allows us to understand governmentality as a whole, and how organizations in power can change societies’ conduct.   

Disciplinary Power

The pandemic has forced us to restructure the everyday fabric of our lives. We have become accustomed to the routine of online school, of restaurant capacity, of hand sanitizer stations, and being unable to visit our loved ones in the hospital. Humanities' sudden change in behavior can be seen in the most minute details, but also in larger societal issues that regulate the actions and thoughts of groups of individuals. Foucault’s creation of the concept of ‘disciplinary power’ is another aspect of his philosophy that can explain phenomena resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In his works, Foucault explains that disciplinary power is a newer form of power in recent history that resulted in a change from the sovereign power demonstrated by monarchies to the rise of the surveillance and a government’s ability to watch and track its people, which required technologies and human effort not available until the 18th and 19th centuries. Foucault’s primary intention with this new concept of disciplinary power was to demonstrate how discipline and control are a form of power. Foucault believed that discipline regulates the thoughts and actions of actors, therefore a government that could control its citizen’s behaviors through the ever present nature of discipline had achieved a new level of power. 

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed governments use the concept of disciplinary power to alter their citizens’ behavior and help stop the spread of the pandemic. The normalization of masks and standing six feet apart from everyone at all times are examples of this power at work. Foucault believed that disciplinary power was a subtle force, not easily recognizable. Instead, disciplinary power permeates a society through its institutions and the power that specific institutions, such as prisons, schools, and hospitals might hold. Throughout the pandemic, we have also witnessed the power institutions hold in determining the outcome of our lives and our manner of behavior. School districts have individually decided to shut down or restart at certain points, dramatically changing children’s educational experiences. Above all, Foucault believed that this form of disciplinary power seeks to “increase the utility of the body.” Institutions have established norms and conditions that keep us safe and in turn protect the national body as a whole, allowing us to continue maintaining our population and our society. The success of disciplinary power throughout the COVID-19 pandemic is seen in our smooth adjustment to these new ways of life. When individuals no longer protest mask mandates or engage in expected social distancing practices without thought or question, we can then acknowledge the success of disciplinary power, as citizens will have become disciplined and adhere to the expected behavior promoted by institutions. 

Using Foucault’s theories and philosophies alongside events and changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic is not to critique our new behavior or government actions, nor is it to pass judgement on Foucault’s own theories and his views on government and society; it is merely to provide greater insight to how and why society has changed in the way that it has, and to show the role that power and knowledge have played throughout this pandemic. Despite the success of America’s vaccine rollout and the promise of a “normal” summer, we should not forget the lessons and observations that Foucault’s teachings reveal to us, particularly in our understandings of human behavior and institutional action during a time of crisis and illness. 

Narcoculture as a Crisis of Dignity: Reframing Our Responsibility towards the Emerging Field of ‘Practical Philosophy’

Reframing Our Responsibility towards the Emerging Field of ‘Practical Philosophy’: A Defense of the need for Somatic Dignity and Related Synthesis of Abstract Theory with Contemporary Crises           

‘Practical philosophy,’ or the application of philosophical theory and pedagogical techniques to everyday problems, has been identified as school of thought since the Ancient era. Aristotle explicitly identifies this branch of philosophy in the first book of the Metaphysics, but it is certainly also captured in the spirit of the Platonic dialogues and Thucydides’ reflections on political psychology, as well as Eastern conceptions of moral duty towards one’s community. In recent years, however, particularly with the decline of employment prospects within the academy, ‘practical philosophy’ has been transformed from a thing of theoretical speculations to a serious, emerging field of its own. Political philosophers, such as Daniel Allen and Yuval Levin, have used philosophical frameworks to support specific policy initiatives in civics education and electoral institutions through initiatives like the Our Common Purpose Report. Political philosophy, while containing an inherent bridge with the interests of public service, has colloquially often been regarded as too abstract for the fast-paced, white-paper world of policy. Allen has remarked the difficulty that one faces on an individual level trying to persuade leaders in both politics and the academy that such a collaboration is a worthwhile venture. However, efforts have clearly expanded in the last couple of decades particularly with high level officials taking seriously these studies produced by philosophical minds as deeper, wiser, characterizations of and solutions to contemporary political crises.

Outside the classically relevant political philosophy, there has been a simultaneous surge of new applications for practical philosophy. Philosophers are being increasingly employed as consultants on bioethics within medical environments, business ethics (as we see in a growing number of ethics certificates for corporate leadership learning programs within universities), and legal consulting. Within education grows a new pedagogical tradition of Philosophy for Children, now being taken up by large organizations such as the National High School Ethics Bowl as a way to cultivate sustainable, healthier modes of civic dialogue. Gone are the days where philosophy acts as a mere abstract inspiration or rationale for psychotherapy- today, we see clinical studies developed around embodied behavioral techniques to support psychological integration that were formerly disregarded as only spiritual or religious practices.

While all of these examples illustrate pragmatic applications of philosophy to earthly problems, some philosophers have now ventured toward a more radical argument, not of ‘Practical Philosophy’ as something to be explored only for the sake of comparative causal efficacy with other problem-solving disciplines, but out of a moral obligation on the part of the philosopher. In his recent book, A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy After Narco-Culture, Carlos Alberto Sánchez takes practical philosophy, and rather than merely bestowing a sort of promise or persuasion of its benefit, asserts the responsibility philosophers have to employ their reflections on human nature to understanding and solving violent or otherwise destructive conflicts (Alberto-Sánchez, 2020, 2). He argues that this responsibility has been demonstratively felt by philosophers during events such as 9/11, where literature exploded in an effort to unpack the causes of terrorism and prevent hate attacks in the future. He then identifies narcoculture, or the culture of violence associated with the surge of drug trafficking throughout the Americas, as another crisis which philosophers hold a duty to help solve. He substantiates this not only with the precedent of 9/11, but the marked more than a quarter of a million lives that have been loss since 2006 at the hands of narcoculture.

Having substantiated his argument for the responsibility philosophers hold to participate in ‘practical philosophy’ through a quantification of the devastation posed by these particular violent conflicts, Alberto-Sánchez seems to see the origin of this duty from a sort of utilitarian ethical lens. To spend such time both noting statistics of lives lost or severity of brutality as a reason for feeling a moral imperative, and particularly do so through a comparative discussion of two conflicts implies that these examples are being chosen “as opposed to” others, relative to the degree of the danger or destruction they pose. I would argue that while the scale of a conflict and the consequences it leaves in its path are relevant to the decision of philosophers to get involved, there is a deeper, stronger root of our obligation. This source can be best generalized as philosophy’s unique capacity to unpack broad historical patterns of conflict, and particularly identity-based, cultural or ideological conflict, as in both of the examples offered by Alberto-Sánchez.

Where other social science methodologies are confined to the consideration of just a few causal variables per theory, philosophy is naturally oriented towards generating more complex, authentic narratives that consider relationships between institutions and psychology over historical fluctuations, rather than discrete moments in time. While philosophy too can ask particular questions about individuals and their circumstances, its central focus has often been a more general conception of human nature and the consequences that follow from those passions or tendencies. In the case of many similarly natured divisions arising in communication around the globe, but each within different particular circumstances, philosophizing thus seems a uniquely appropriate tool.

In this series of articles, I will make a case for the responsibility to engage in ‘practical philosophy’ as a particular result of this unique capacity philosophy holds for generating meaningful frameworks that unpack broader historical causes of our most existentially debilitating or destructive. I will do this by applying the framework of Somatic Dignity to Alberto-Sánchez’s selected case study of Narcoculture, as I argue this framework’s historical character will clearly illuminate the deeper source of our moral responsibility to engage in ‘practical philosophy’ as a result of its unique power to overcome systemic conflicts. If the framework can place Narcoculture in conversation with other conflicts that, while embedded in different environments, might all relate to the same natural human and institutional tendencies, it may also be able to find that they respond to similar solutions. This could scale the positive impact of a philosophical solution to movement of the historical needle, demonstrating a power unseen by most particular social studies.

Crisis as Clarity: Iterative Historical Brutal Conflicts as Indicators of the Deprivation of Somatic Dignity

As introduced a previous article, Somatic Dignity: The Bridge Beyond the Global Communication Crisis, philosophical literature around radical questions of the construction of human identity has unfolded alongside the evolution of communications technology, such that each time institutional shifts lead to an alteration of social dynamics, and particularly, more abstract communication behaviors, we have encountered an existential crisis, and subsequent return to the question of what is human dignity? In political or institutional assertions of dignity, however, Kant has typically been the source of its ontology as he discusses it most explicitly through his conception of moral law, which aligns very well with the idea of drafting “rules” within human rights law. I argue, however, that the Hegelian notion of dignity is more useful for understanding dignity in a way that relates to contemporary conflicts, such as narco-culture, as he articulates the consciousness of dignity as something that we don’t have full access to, but which unfolds across history alongside the reform of institutions. When our consciousness of our dignity no longer matches that recognized by institutions, we go through an existential crisis from the contradiction, reform institutions, and move forward. This is done, as will be detailed later, through an embodied consciousness, such as that supported by Eastern philosophical practices of mindfulness and integration, and used by critical theorists to raise consciousness for social justice and generate institutional change. I label this conception of dignity uncovered through somatic practices “Somatic Dignity,” and declare it is the deprivation of this, and instead assertion of shallow notions of dignity from abstract authorities that leads to violence, as it usually happens through a process of othering or dehumanization, as we again will come to later.

This series of articles will use the Hegelian understanding of moments of contradiction in institutional recognition and individual consciousness of dignity, or conflict, as a model by which to understand narcoculture as a crisis resultant from a deprivation of dignity- and thus, one of a larger historical process, not a mere discrete conflict to understand through simple social science methodologies. Similarly, having shown an alignment of the Hegelian crisis model and narcoculture, it will offer solutions that fit that conflict by alleviating the deprivation causing the conflict. Finally, it will explore the limitations inherent to such methods, and assert why practical philosophy is the uniquely suited, and therefore ethically obligatory pathway by which we should work to generate solutions to these existential crises.

Narcoculture as a Crisis of Dignity: The Nature of Brutality

Indicator 2 of Dignity Deprivation: Incomprehensible Brutality

The second defining characteristic of narcoculture, already alluded to through the sublime authority and its necessary reign through terror discussed in the previous section, is its quality of brutality, which is not mere violence, but a particularly grotesque, sensational kind of violence. As interviewees in the documentary discussed, victims of cartel crimes are murdered in exorbitant numbers, but also often in performative fashions, particularly if that victim was a notable threat to the cartel’s authority. For example, Escobedo, by launching a movement against femicide that informed the masses of the cartel’s link to government corruption was a threat in its exposure of the authority which was meant to be this sublime subversive sort of control. As such, she was shot in clear view of the government, where it was known no justice would be served for the crime in the symbolic, hoped ultimate ironic failure of her protest. Others who posed a threat often had their eyes dug out, bodies dismembered, heads shoved on stakes, burning to the flesh, graffiti on bodies, acid damage, were tossed in landfills, or other stark kinds of brutality that led to the perception of a “bloodbath” rather than mere out of control violence.

Alberto-Sánchez calls the phenomenon a “spectacle of death,” and describes how images of this sensational violence have been normalized to mainstream culture by broadcasting through television and the internet scenes of “dead bodies strewn across dirt roads, riddled with bullets to the head, chest, stomach, face; headless corpses left inside abandoned cars, heads atop the car’s roof, in the trunk, or missing from the picture altogether; the noticeable profile of human bodies wrapped with black trash bags or blankets leaning lazily against walls or fences. In many cases, written confessions accompany these crimes, detailing the reasons for the executions, decapitations, or dismemberments and the person or groups responsible,” (Alberto- Sánchez, 2020, 5). These confessions are a custom of narco-culture, and meant again, to establish a formal show of power from this sovereign entity, such that their power appears calculated and insurmountable. Sometimes, in the case of Escobedo’s daughter, perpetrators would simply admit to random people on the street what they had done, and still get off in court, having to face no consequences under the protection of the corrupt, truly sovereign power. Alberto-Sánchez argues that what is notable about this excessive level of brutality is its ability to dehumanize its victims.

He says when we read headlines like “5 Decapitated, Hearts Left in the Mouths of Severed Heads,” we cannot comprehend the violence, and in this inability to comprehend, we are unable, also, to imagine these victims as people. Often, bodies are dismembered to the point where they cannot be identified at all, but are simply piled in mass graves. Similarly, unable to identify an origin for or explanation for such violence, and not wanting to accept the fear we should feel for such a reality, as Susan Brison points out of the difficulty of understanding trauma, and Hannah Arendt, among others, observes, the brutality simply is absorbed as a cultural norm, such that it cannot disrupt our stability (Alberto- Sánchez, 2020, 17; Brison, 2014). The brutality is absorbed so easily because Narco-culture is a rational extension of the excess and disregard for dignity that comes with the mores of hyper-capitalist economic social consciousness (Alberto-Sánchez, 2020, 17). This capitalist ethical and political culture of individualism fosters a psychology of mastery, as we will come to later, that harbors an aggressive neurotic obsession with domination that dissolve the self as one among a dynamic social body, and posit it as a violent force that stands against “others.” (Butler, 2020) In other words, the narco-culture treatment of the dead in this unintelligibly violent way such that they become just drops in the bucket of so many dead at the hands of this phenomenon is no accident, but again, a necessary piece of the mastery framework, and indicator of a shortage of dignity recognition. It is an inevitable consequence of the historical crisis resultant from human nature interacting with institutions of the particular moment in a contradiction of the consciousness of dignity, not specific to the particular demographic or sociological topology of Mexico. To abide by such a misconception would only aggravate the need for recognition more, leading to building prejudice rather than solutions.

Hegel concurs with this argument through the illustration the analogous brutality of the Reign of Terror of his time which he analyzes through the mastery framework. Here again, there was an unimaginable level of brutality in the killing of religious leaders, or those who pose the greatest threat to the new authority of the Enlightenment regime. They were often drowned in groups through a twisted appropriation of “Baptism” as murder. Heads were again, shoved on pikes, and mass graves dug. Formal orders of crimes, the charges of course, being their religion, were issued by the sovereign authority, just as in the case of the narco-banners, or confessions. For all those who were simply “suspected” of not being on board with the new regime, numbers which were inflated in a culture of accusation with no real justice so as to demonstrate the weight of the power and terror of the administration, they were killed in the most efficient way possible with the introduction of the publicly shown Guillotine. “Being suspected, therefore, takes the place,” he says, “or has the significance and effect, of being guilty; and the external reaction against this reality that lies in the simple inwardness of intention, consists in the cold, matter-of-fact annihilation of this existent self, from which nothing else can be taken away but its mere being.” (Hegel, 1977, §591).

Hegel describes how the Guillotine was a physical manifestation of the rule of “Reason” created through the Enlightenment-based French Revolution that shows how contorted, shallow, and brutal these fervent pushes for abstract ideologies that replace overnight all old institutions can be. What was defended as a “more humane, efficient” and therefore “rational” instrument of death of the regime was in fact killing more people as a public demonstration of power than one could possibly wrap their head around. Just as in the case of the cartel killings, Hegel describes the dehumanization of the victims that resulted from this practice using the metaphor of a “head of cabbage” that would roll from its blade to express how devoid of all dignity was this practice of death. “The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water [in the case of mass drownings.]” (Hegel, 1977, §590). “…All social groups or classes are abolished…the individual consciousness that belonged to any such sphere, and willed and fulfilled in itself, has put aside its limitation; its purpose is the general purpose, its language universal law, its work the universal work.” (Hegel, 1977, §585). “In this flat, common place monosyllable is contained in the wisdom of the government, the abstract of the universal will…” (Hegel, 1977, §591). None of these victims were identifiable individuals, but instead, were indistinguishable parts of the collective.

The result of submitting these individuals to the domination by this collective power, however, does not, as pointed out in the previous contradiction in the psychology of mastery, lead to the recognition of dignity of the master. Rather, this abstract dynamic of control between powers only works to deny the dignity of those it kills. “All these determinations [honour, wealth, language, etc.] have vanished in the loss suffered by the self in absolute freedom; its negation is the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive, nothing that fills it with a content. At the same time, however, this negation in its real existence is not something alien… on the contrary, it is the universal will which is in this its ultimate abstraction nothing positive and therefore can give nothing in return,” this being the fulfillment of recognition (Hegel, 1977, §594).

Alberto-Sanchez explicitly agrees with this situation of the framework. He argues that “Narco-culture, in its material structure- one constituted by a politics and economics of competition and excess- is thus that form of life where the other can be reduced to an object, where killing him is legitimated under its own rules. Allowing the other [the victim] to be more than a “sensible datum’ would imply a recognition and acceptance of one’s own moral obligations to that other, a recognition that has no place in a culture of violence where the goal is the conspicuous consumption of resources, be they money or people,” (Alberto Sanchez, 2020, 84). He supports this with feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s analysis that “Violence…becomes necessary for an Ego that in the vulnerability of its being exposed seeks to guard itself from murder [threats to power.]…To the extent that we commit violence, we are acting on another, putting the other at risk…threatening to expunge the other,” (Alberto Sanchez, 2020, 83). What Hegel’s analysis is particularly helpful in contributing is the historical setting which has created a lack of dignity through contradiction of its institutions and consciousness of dignity, then, is what creates this thirsty cry for recognition that creates a defining, existential crisis and mores that tend toward violence and brutality or dehumanization rather than a soothing of that problem. It is not, as Alberto-Sanchez fears the misconception of, anything particular to this conflict.

To pursue, again, the question of dignity that will solve the need is an arduous task that leaves people vulnerable in their desperation to the easy answers provided by abstract authorities in a way that defines a historical moment, through what Hegel calls Spirit. “Just as the realm of the real world passes over into the realm of faith and insight, so does absolute freedom leave its self-destroying reality and pass over into another land of self-conscious Spirit where, in this unreal world, freedom has the value of truth,” (Hegel, 1977, §594). “This is just the skepticism [disillusionment with current institutions in historical moments of dignity-based contradictions] which only ever sees pure nothingness in its result and abstracts from the fact that this nothingness is specifically the nothingness of that from which it results. For it is only when it is taken as the result of that from which it emerges, that it is, in fact, the true result; in that case it is itself a determinate nothingness, one which has a content. The skepticism that ends up with the bare abstraction of nothingness or emptiness cannot get any further from there, but must wait to see whether something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss,” (Hegel, 1977, §79).

Indicator 3 of Dignity Deprivation: Contrasting Care for Dead Leadership

This works in complete contrast to the final characteristic; the treatment of dead cartel leaders. This treatment in some ways falls under the culture of excess previously discussed, I narrow in on it not only because of the defining quality it has for the movement, but for the place of importance it holds in the Hegelian phenomenological model of dignity. Within cartels, it was noted by the documentary that dead leaders are honored with sophisticated rituals and placed in temples that emulate the glory of Egyptian pharaohs. They are buried with their immeasurable wealth, guarded after death. As described by Alberto Sanchez, they die like a king (Alberto Sanchez, 2020, 152). Where the treatment of victims serves to dehumanize them in response to their threats to the collective power, the treatment of cult leaders does the opposite, and instead, works to recognize them as powerful, “dignified” masters, or individuals with value in their own right. In order to fully understand the significance this has in serving as an indicator of dignity deprivation being the underlying cause of this historical conflict and its character, we must first understand Hegel’s argument around the phenomenological character of death rituals.

Hegel’s historical view argues that social relations occur on two levels; one relating to the construction of particular, temporally contingent individuals which exist in their peculiar circumstances for themselves, and one where individuals exist only as part of a larger whole or universal. Institutionally, Hegel attributes the construction of an individual which exists as a particular being for itself to the Family, and the individual which exists only as part of a larger universal to the Citizen, or the person which is defined by their subservience to the larger Nation. Each of these institutional beings, Citizen and member of the Family, are defined through their activities in ethical life. For Hegel, Ethical life can be understood as the set of social norms or habits which one realizes and carries out because of their role in a particular structure, this being an institution such as the Family or the Nation. As such, the Family and Nation both have ethical norms unique to themselves which define their character as an institution. In a family, or blood relation, this is a set of habits which add onto the natural relationship that exists due to biological connection, but feel as natural as that biological connection. They are not intentional in the same way as chosen love, as we find in romantic, emotional love. Rather, they are obligations set forth from birth, or the origin of a blood connection. A key defining example of such obligations are the care a Family will exhibit for their dead. We do not choose out of a particular love for our blood relations that we should honor their death and perform rituals or care around it. It feels like a naturally bestowed duty upon us, even though it is really a socialized custom of the institution of the Family. This is the work of the True Spirit, or Ethical Order for Hegel. Relative to Narcoculture, we can think of the Family as being the inner circle of the elite leadership of cartels, where citizens are the masses subject to being victims. Their “biological bond” is simulated by membership, and the hierarchical order of intelligence.

Care for the dead is particularly relevant to defining the institution of the Family as that which exists for the individual to uncover a being for itself, rather than being for a universal whole. This is because Death, for Hegel, as something Natural of which we have no choice whether or when to experience, is the ultimate thing which subordinates our lives to the power of Nature. It condemns us to a realm of the ultimate universal where we are one in an infinite collective of the dead, and the experience of our lives becomes an indistinguishable droplet in that sea, rather than meaningful within itself. Yet, we are able to transcend that identity as nothing but indifferent powerless pieces of that collective through the Family, which remembers us as the particular beings we were, and retains that memory through the care for the dead. We remain beings for ourselves through the power of Spirit expressed in these customs. The Family can only do this, however, by actually recognizing or performing the death, this being “taking the act of destruction [death]” onto itself, such that it transforms that event into the meaningful part of the particular individual’s life and part of the broader work of Spirit, rather than only the immediate consequence of Nature’s irrational course. While the customs feel obligatory, they are still conscious actions which give Substance to that consciousness of the meaning of an individual’s life. In this way, it interrupts the natural process and adds to it this conscious meaning.

In other words, where the narcoculture brutality of throwing others in acid and mass graves, totally making them unidentifiable, and analogous Guillotine of the French Revolution are ways of rewriting death as for the collective or as a dehumanization of an individual outside the family ethical life institution, the inner Cartels building temples for their dead leaders is a way of, through the institution of their inner circle, or “Family,” maintaining dignity and personal value of that particular individual. In this way, they transcend death as being something which takes away their dignity, and pose a stark inequality to the lower masses. This, again, falls directly into the psychology of mastery. As such, it fits the model as an indicator of a crisis of dignity.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves: A Platonic Analysis of Political Rhetoric

Today, one would be hard-pressed to find a news source that provided information to the public without a perceived twist on the narrative. Websites such as AllSides have brought attention to this notion of partisan reporting and compiled various articles from “the left,” “the right,” and “the center” to cover the same event from differing perspectives. Whether the news comes from social media celebrities, radio hosts, or mainstream cable television broadcasters, their stories contain an element of subjectivity ranging from blatantly opinionated assertions to near-invisible suggestions that only become apparent in hindsight through careful analysis and discourse. Furthermore, technological advances such as the internet have provided platforms for more opinionated individuals to post articles so laden with subjective claims and speculations that their narratives become more based on imagination than good-faith effort journalism. This becomes problematic when many individuals trust these sources to provide them with easy-to-digest, concrete reporting on what to believe, and any conflicting narrative is quickly chalked up as “fake news.”

This idea of building agreeable narratives to support social or political goals is not new. Indeed, Plato identified a similar issue over 2,000 years ago. Techniques of communication involving what Plato defined as “poetry,” when applied to the masses, have proven problematic because of the likelihood and risk that such techniques will be used for destructive purposes. While the form of communication in itself is neither inherently constructive nor destructive, it does have a high potential to be abused for personal or political gains at the expense of compassion and civil discourse.

While Plato discussed the nature and consequences of poetry, he failed to provide any concrete solution to mitigate the potential negative effects. A more contemporary political philosopher emerging from the progressive movement, John Dewey, suggested that a potential defense against divisive poetry lies in educating the people on how to process this information rather than relying on government legislation. In this article, I will define Plato’s understanding of “poetry” in order to better explore his concerns about the misuse of poetry as applied to political stability and individual wellbeing. Next, I will apply Plato’s understanding of poetry to contemporary divisive rhetoric. Finally, I will discuss John Dewey’s suggestion to decrease an individual’s overreliance on single-sourced news.   

The Platonic Definition of Poetry and the 1776 Report

To the modern reader, poetry is usually perceived as a particular genre of written literature that utilizes rhythm and rhyme to convey ideas through imagery and analogy. Yet Plato’s conception of poetry was much broader than the aforementioned definition and is distinguished by four key elements. First, poetry uses mythologies or stories, typically written about significant past events, to build a common narrative and unite a group of people. Second, poetry is written to appeal to its audiences’ emotions. This could be an appeal to both positive emotions, such as happiness and compassion, or negative emotions, such as fear and anger. Third, poetry is written for a specific purpose, such as outlining an accepted framework for morality, to inspire an audience to action. Finally, poetry is made to be desirable and to entertain a mass audience.

This Platonic definition of poetry can be applied to many political documents today, such as the recent 1776 Report released by the former Trump administration. The 1776 Report’s stated intent is to present “the history and principles of the founding of the United States” and educate the masses in a way that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.” However, the content of the report was widely seen as a false and inaccurate representation of historical events with the true intent of promoting specific Republican talking points and crafting a very specific narrative of what constitutes a “true American.” This report may have spoken to and united a select group of individuals on their common understanding of America, faith in the Trump administration, and their anger against people with opposing political opinions. In fact, the narrative presented in this report may have increased and legitimized their hostile feelings toward these groups. Furthermore, this report gives the impression that the Trump administration and similarly minded politicians are the only people who can protect those American values.

Potential Problems with Poetry

Although poetic rhetoric can be misused, poetry as a means of communication is not in itself problematic. Indeed, Plato even proposed using a form of poetry to unite the citizens in his idea of a perfect city during his first discussion on poetry. Specifically, he included a discussion of whether poetry can be used to facilitate just and virtuous behavior by crafting stories of heroic people worthy of emulation. The hope would be to lay the foundation for citizens to emotionally connect with these characters and then strive to embody and display the same characteristics. Plato also raises the possibility of poetry as a basis for imitation such that it can be used as a positive measure to promote just practices and unite citizens under a common truth. His conception of justice in the city is used synonymously with the idea of the “common good,” which constitutes a form of social cohesion that allows for political stability where individuals are best able to meet their maximum potentials.

However, Plato’s main focus remained potential problems with poetry stemming from its appeal to human emotions and capacity to inspire a large audience to action. He feared that these consequences would ultimately destabilize the government and stop people from reaching their fullest potentials. One danger Plato notes relates to the propensity for individuals to idolize poets and take their stories to be a representation of absolute truth. If the audience is presented with a story that appeals to their desired or traditional assumptions about a given topic, then it is likely that they are predisposed to agree with the story proposed by the poet. If the narrative is geared toward social unity and individual flourishing, it may be beneficial. However, if it attacks and alienates others, it can make people less likely to listen to dissenting opinions or question the given narrative. In Plato’s opinion, poetry and idolization usually result in the latter.

Returning to the contemporary example of the 1776 Report, one can liken Trump, along with his administration, to a modern-day poet. The sentiments expressed in this report may resonate with many Trump supporters and fuel their confidence to speak out against any perceived liberal-biases in school curriculums. This aggressive call for action to restore “American values” further demonizes anyone who does not adhere to their specific ingroup. Additionally, individuals who idolize Trump are likely to refuse to acknowledge anyone who contradicts him, which will make it much more difficult to engage in civil discourse.

While Plato identifies potential issues with poetry, he does not provide a concrete and realistic solution to these problems. Ultimately, he concludes one of his dialogues suggesting that poetry does not belong in an ideal city. Poetry as a method of communication is so powerful that it could easily destroy the balance of the city, and he believed the poetry created by his contemporaries was more harmful than beneficial to the public good. That said, he does concede that if poetry could be used to support the common good in a way that justifies the high potential for misuse, it may be worth the risk to reintroduce it into the city.

The Problem of Poetry Today and Potential Solutions

In today’s age of globalism with populations having access to seemingly unlimited amounts of information through the internet, the notion of eliminating poetry from the polity seems impossible. The perception of poetry as a simple means of entertainment and artistic expression, however antiquated relative to modern social media, is fundamentally interwoven into our modern-day globalized society. Yet when considered from the Platonian perspective, technological advances such as television, the internet, and social media platforms have simply given rise to modern “poets” who can quickly and easily influence thousands of individuals worldwide.

Moreover, Plato’s admonition to maintain strict censorship of poetry may not be possible in a country like the United States which strives to promote the principles of free speech, which provides a large platform for people to espouse poetic rhetoric that is both for and against the public good. Yet the ramifications of not being able to control the flow of information provide a space for the divisive poetic rhetoric that Plato predicted could have disastrous consequences for the state.

Over a thousand years after Plato, an American political theorist, John Dewey, proposed a potential solution to help decrease the potential negative consequences of poetic rhetoric. Dewey was part of the American progressive movement and felt that the justification for social inequality was based on a mythic understanding of the past that was created to serve the rich’s interests. While he agreed with Plato insofar as seeing the powerful impact poetry can have on people’s actions, he did not think that a ban on poetry was the solution. Instead, Dewey emphasized the importance of public education as a proper function of the state to enable individuals to have the necessary “knowledge of the facts” to better address their common needs without regard for traditional norms. In doing so, the individual would be less likely to fall victim to adverse poetic rhetoric.

This sort of education could manifest itself in a myriad of ways. For example, public education could focus on interacting with multiple types of content and opinions in order to gain a more balanced view of a certain event. Additionally, individuals could also be given direction on how to analyze or consider information “sources” and the potential for bias, accuracy, and rational messaging. Finally, it might help to encourage heightened scrutiny of messages that appeal to emotions.

The consideration of “poetry” as a means of mass communication is a seemingly timeless discussion. While it is not likely, or even desirable, to eliminate poetry in its entirety, it does seem worth encouraging and enabling the populace to identify poetic rhetoric and to consider listening to a diverse range of poets and poetry.

Dignity: The Bridge Beyond the Global Communication Crisis: Part 1, A Historical Recharacterization

The world stands at a distinct crossroads. In the face of a global pandemic and subsequently fragile economy, looming environmental collapse, systemic identity-based division and political upheaval, we find ourselves rooted in patterns of aggression, overwhelmed by feelings of fear and isolation. Academics, policy makers and advocates across the globe have contentiously debated where we are to go from here. They see the planet on fire, the bloodshed, and the daily struggle of so many to survive brewing increasing resentment towards widening inequality and the institutions that create it. Some see how these feelings are exploited and exacerbated by the opportunistic power and profit seeking polarization industrial complex. With division so steeped, we fail to collaborate and implement sustainable solutions to these critical issues, and instead become apathetic, made to believe we have no power to overcome these barriers. Numerous theories have been developed to pinpoint the source of these deep divisions, but their intersectionality provides no clear path to healing beyond this continued quest for knowledge, hoping that at some point our self-consciousness will re-activate the apathetic abandonment of civic engagement, and inspire an equitable reform of our institutions.

The truth, however, is that these proliferating theories, communicated through language, fail to transcend the sociopolitical bubbles which create them, and thus, scale into collective action. They are often observational or descriptive of symptoms of our current state, glossing over all deeper psychological causality. They trace the histories of political parties and voting behavior, discuss the historical roots of poverty or the conflict between two religious sects. They sometimes consider what emotions are fostered by intersectional oppression, or are used to manipulate human behavior into engagement or disengagement in one’s community, radicalism, political violence, etc. Some even ask which emotions determine one’s partisan identity or cultural sorting into a more disciplined versus loose society. However, almost all social science research focuses on drawing causality between demography and survey answers or measurable behaviors, describing broader patterns from a distorted metric of the way things are right now. This moment, in that it is not the first existential global crisis, but the latest iteration faced by humanity, cannot be genuinely understood in a vacuum constructed by the influence of these contextual particulars. Rather, we need to zoom out, and reconsider the interaction of human nature with the wider historical narrative. We need to ask not where this particular division comes from, but what is psychologically necessary for shifting away from this human tendency. We need to critically think about what our better future looks like, reimagining our relationships from that lens, if we are ever to effectively strategize a path to getting there.

This series of articles will offer a reframing of the historical narrative and specifically the history of philosophy to illuminate not what is driving these particular divisions, but allows for the mentality of division, aggression, and fear more broadly. This recharacterization will also draw out a timeless path of human inquiry into our fundamental psychological needs for moving past these clearly unsustainable tendencies, the continuation of which can provide a critical standard for the reform of institutions and human relationships that will allow for more inclusive and vigorous civic engagement and human flourishing. This will ultimately take the form of an ontological discussion of human dignity, in relation to recognition, and the somatic reconnection of mind and body offered by spiritual practices of Eastern philosophy.

Historical Recharacterization

Previous historical recharacterizations which aim to unpack the catalyst behind the systemic exacerbation of human division have centered around conflict- especially caused by material and power-based inequity. Thucydides in his Archaeology, social contract theorists, Freud, Karl Marx, Fukuyama, etc. each derived a new framework contingent on material human existence being the force which determines human behavior and turns the wheel of history. Their realities suggest that if a certain equality of outcomes were made possible, there would be an end to conflict. Even if material consciousness is one of the prime factors behind human identity formation and therefore division, we cannot be certain, without a more serious inquiry into human nature, if the tendency for conflict transcends economic interdependence. Perhaps human relationships would exist without material dependence, and all of these conflicts are connected on a deeper level. Perhaps what moves the wheel of history along is something less tangible, and more innately emotional. If this is the case, the solution to our polarization crisis would require an entirely different institutional reformation.

What is clear is that all human relationships are fundamentally perceived through communication, whether it’s rhetorical, or occurs through physical or aesthetic signals, from body language to architecture, arts, or advertisements. Communication has evolved across history alongside technology, which often takes center-stage in conflict-based materialist historical narratives. The birth of language, tools, civilization, the arts, architecture, telephone radio, television, and now social media have changed not only how we communicate, but something about the psychology of our relationships. Debates have circled throughout historical narratives about where human life began, whether in a brutal state of nature and a struggle to survive or the immediate presence of connection drawn from maternal or paternal bonds, for example. However, what is consistent across historical narratives is that at some point, coalitions were built between individuals, creating a pivot from a life as individuals to relationships between people, culminating in the formation of tribes, or the first iteration of community. Eventually, these relationships got more complex with the Neolithic Revolution, and the rise of civilization to the point of polities, regimes, empires, and so on. It’s also widely acknowledged that the development of technology is largely what facilitated each of these stages.

Historical narratives centered around materialism as the root of conflict have demonstrated that technology certainly made an impact on human psychology in this sense, and to some degree talk about deep virtues or shifts in moral consciousness which are fostered by it. However, they focus far less on the metaphysical shift in human consciousness established by technology, which ultimately uncovers not just activated tendencies, but our full range of psychological capacity. If we continue to think about the shift in human relationships caused by technology through the lens of communication, we start to draw out this primordial image.

Think for a moment, about the interaction of two people communicating in simplest terms- the closest we can imagine to an origin of human psychology, prior to the development of artificially manufactured subconscious bias. These two people interact in a physical space where they can plainly see each other. This allows for the perception of a person’s emotional response to the other’s communication, and therefore, connects both actors directly to any ethical obligation which humans may inherently feel toward each other. The relationship exists entirely in the realm of particulars. They get to know each other more from physical actions and responses than through historically shaped assumptions about each other’s opinions. While scholars disagree over the presence of moral agency at this origin point, we can see the situation is open to, rather than destructive of the potential for empathy, for example. This could be complicated by innate judgements about characteristics such as physiology, which are often connected to the psychology of material conflict. However, even these judgements would be made relative to the person observed in the present. This does not substantiate a claim that the development of a divisive material order is inevitable, nor irreversible. Both are communicating from emotions, even if those emotions include fear, which may create a persuasive or intimidating dialogue, but a dialogue directed at this contingent being, nonetheless, rather than at a wider group through the objectification of that being and the associations being made with it.  

The evolution of technology, as we know, distorts this model of communication by allowing the formation of human relationships across larger geographic distances and levels of specialization. An ever-increasing proportion of our connections to other people are with those we do not regularly interact with face to face. In fact, across history, relationships have evolved to where most of the people we are connected to we never meet in real life. As such, identity becomes defined increasingly by abstractions, or communities which are not physically interpersonal, but are defined by other joint characteristics or needs, which we can understand conceptually. Within these abstract relationships, we do not see the immediate consequences of our actions on those we are connected to. In other words, without physical presence, we cannot directly observe the emotional response to our words, or the other consequences of our behaviors. We might see backlash through written word or recordings, but we don’t catch the details of facial expression or shifting body behavior, the sad glimmer of an eye, or catch of the voice. This distances us from our immediate ethical instincts, or perceptions of moral obligations towards each other. As such, unprecedented transgressions unfold into an escalation of conflict through the normalization of dehumanizing divisions between communities or identities.

This pattern unfolds in an iterative fashion, with each major jolt technology causes to the formation of human relationships. The Neolithic, Scientific, and Industrial Revolutions, for example, have all been marked by previous historical narratives. as moments where technology reshaped human relationships and ultimately led to an existential crisis over our new reality. Each one of these represented a new level of abstraction within human relationships, and therefore, communication. To illustrate the ramifications using just one example, we will zoom in on the jolt caused by the Industrial Revolution, now referred to as the crisis of the mid-twentieth century, in which globalization and industrial powers culminated in the World Wars. Globalization, enabled by the industrial revolution, was the distinctive benchmark in the evolution of human relationships towards far-reaching connections on the basis of abstraction. Allies and enemies formed under overlapping national goals, as well as value systems and ideologies, not through interpersonal community formation of neighboring peoples. As such, connections were felt in a distanced, intellectual, and therefore strategic rather than emotional way. Yet, prior to the first World War, the world had not fully confronted what globalization would mean for human relations, including the unintended, far-reaching domino effects of ally and enemy distinctions in times of conflict resulting in bloodshed of unimaginable proportions, and devastating poverty for many countries.

 These dark ramifications are infamously what laid the ground work for radical political leaders to emerge and triumph racist, xenophobic and dangerous overhauls of existing governments. Germany saw the rise of Hitler and the tragedy of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union led millions to their deaths. Outside Europe, other movements of genocide paralleled these transgressions. Even the United States, who asserted their role as the moral hero to the devastation of Germany and victor against the U.S.S.R. helped facilitate the research on eugenics used by the Nazi movement, and later accepted no blame for that role in their historical narrative. Further, they spent these years constructing Japanese internment camps, hysterically creating the witch hunt of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, and in the early throughs of violence responding to what was becoming the civil rights movement. Ultimately, the world was thrust into a forced confrontation with the question of what had allowed these mentalities and choices to unfold, and how to prevent it from happening again.

Philosophers developed a deluge of theories working to untangle the events of this historical moment. Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger, each of whom had a role in supporting radical political projects which ultimately influenced much of this turmoil in varying degrees, all saw the role of technology in turning the wheel of historical conflict. They believed that the crisis of the century had been caused by the abandonment of philosophy alongside this evolution, thus allowing dogmatic leaders to control the trajectory of society, rather than a philosophical understanding of good. They believed that without philosophy, the lifestyle offered by this technological development was one of alienation from the self, a sense of purpose or meaning, and that it was these emotions which led people to dark and sadistic behaviors, or apathy towards them. Arendt discussed the moment as a crisis of isolation, or loneliness. Together, these resonate with the idea of the abstraction of relationships, and the unintended but very real ethical apathy that comes with these, without a conscious effort to foster empathy or a respect for what was to come as the political “solution” to the World Wars upon their conclusion- dignity.

Following the collapse of the Nazi regime, the world, lost in the devastation, was determined to articulate a preventative solution to future iterations of this moment. The United Nations was formed, and it, along with Germany as one of only three countries in the world to do so, adopted human dignity as a universal and politically protected human right. The idea was to assert that communities which exist as oppressors to other identities by material means would not be tolerated. However, it became clear quickly, as with the vague policy still debated in care bioethics, that dignity was a difficult thing to quantify and enforce. Thus, these declarations and constitutions were largely symbolic, or acts of soft power. Yet, they opened up an entire field of literature in international relations, attempting to understand the concept outside philosophical methods.

Parallel Causal Evolution of the History of Philosophy

This attempt of philosophers to produce literature which could unpack and reconcile the existential crisis brought shift in relationships by technology is not unique to the mid-twentieth century. Instead, if we recharacterize the history of philosophy in the same way as the wider historical narrative, it becomes clear that with each iteration of this pattern of increasing abstraction, philosophers in some sense return to the question of dignity. When abstraction makes us feel further from what was familiar about our humanity, we are reunited with a burning desire to reassert our value by asking what is intrinsically good about us, to assure ourselves that what was good was not lost in this reformation of human being. Thus, with each technological “benchmark,” philosophy gives us two things; a new historical framing which makes sense of the shift, and another contribution towards understanding the ontology of dignity, whether directly or through related concepts. When examined in this sense, each historical reframing and era of philosophy doesn’t, in fact, reject or undermine the previous paradigm completely, but rather, connects to and builds on it from this common thread.

By way of demonstrating a quick overview, Ancient philosophers, from, once again, Thucydides’ Archaeology within the History of the Peloponnesian War, as well as the Platonic and Aristotilean narratives of the development of civilization illustrate a clear understanding of the influence alterations of human relationships have on the development of human psychology. They fixate on questions of what characterizes human being, what is meant by human flourishing, and thus, ultimately, what is human dignity. They see the path to the human telos as analogous to the path from the family to political regime because these are the institutions which shape relationships and therefore human behavior, including communication. This is mirrored in Eastern tradition, which also focuses on determining the virtues and community relations which are intrinsic to and are best for the development of human nature. Then, with the influx of monotheistic religion and shift into a new political world order, came the birth of the Medieval Era. Here, particularly Christian philosophy in the west worked to once again reinterpret the historical narrative through religion, re-confronting and building on Ancient concepts of human dignity and morality. Amidst the Medieval Era also came the Renaissance. Some abstraction occurred here with tensions fostered from its artistic and technological innovation, clashing ideologies of pagan and Christian religion, as well through escalating class consciousness with increasing inequality.

However, the clear iterative shift came with the fall of the Medieval era and launch of the Early Modern period, first with the birth of the Scientific Revolution, where the upheaval of the Christian metaphysical reality with heliocentric theory and questioning of religious institutional power combined with huge leaps in technological innovation that put human reason in a newfound state of power. Because human reason, again, was seen as the characteristic human element within Ancient and sometimes Medieval philosophy, and therefore the foundation of dignity, this was really just another alteration in exploring the ontology of the concept in order to reconcile the overwhelming changes to present reality. Scientific and Religious philosophers, including Descartes, Spinoza, Bacon, Martin Luther, Newton, were both fully conscious of the stakes of this movement, each feeling their personal value as bound to their ideology and methodology, which would be lost if a contradictory historical narrative replaced their own. This fear is reflected, once again, in the horrors of burnings at the stake and introduction of subversive communication, later coined esoteric writing, necessary for each side to survive with the other.

This was continued with the escalation of the Enlightenment through the modern period. Eventually, this shift boiled over into the fusion of the new philosophic paradigm with political theory, where social contract theorists and democratic reformers sprung up in America and France, most infamously, advocating for their dignity, represented by reason, to be recognized by the state through avenues for active political participation, or participation in rational governance, and economic mobility-meaning compensation for their skills and thoughts. This was a new peak of abstraction in which individuals, and in fact entire governments, were boiled down into a representation of certain principles which were either good or bad, signaled by coded language and their participation or lack of engagement in populist revolutions. Violence was unforgiving, because this was not a fight or dialogue between people, but of principle. Suddenly, the masses were willing to die and to kill for ideas on an unprecedentedly extreme scale.

 As such, philosophers everywhere attempted to reconcile the existential crisis through unpacking the emotions responding to the lapse in dignity received from institutions and a historical reinterpretation to carve a path forward. Burke, Paine, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, among others throughout western Europe, all came together to reinterpret human dignity, and ultimately cast this as a framework for a new political order. Intimate details of human nature were explored. Burke, for example, through an examination of the ways in which our physical senses respond to different phenomena, determined a mode of analysis for human responses to broader political norms and transitions, which led to him supporting the American Revolution, but not the French, due to the French being so abstracted from interpersonal human, emotional communication and history that they had no ethical responsibility mediating their violence, where he saw the Americans as engaging in a dialogue of peoples on some level, and saw their revolution as inevitable. Part of his reasoning included the geographic distance between the American colonies and British mainland, which would preclude true emotional dialogue, or recognition of dignity across each sides to prime the debate for collaboration in finding a sustainable solution.

Soon after, this focus on human nature and historical understanding was mirrored through the intellectual prowess, unmatched since the Ancient Era, of German philosophers Hegel and Kant, who continue to directly supply a framework for contemporary conceptions of dignity. Naturally, the ethical consequences of previous abstractions within human relationships meant this framework was inherently racist and patriarchal. Nevertheless, it was a confrontation along the same thread of this history of the abstraction of communication. This brings us back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and the crisis of the mid-twentieth century, our original example, which led to the collapse of this Modern Era of philosophy, and the birth of Contemporary Thought.

There are many other parallels to this historical reframing throughout Eastern and Middle Eastern philosophies. Ultimately, however, we can use this as a starting point for interpreting our current moment of crisis, and determining how to build on these previous contributions for an understanding of both history and dignity which do not propel us into another divisive era, but instead, ask us to see this as the exacerbation of one tendency of human nature, and consider what would it look like to shift ourselves in the opposite direction to a kind of institutional structure and set of communication habits that allow us to innovate sustainably and be brought closer together? In other words, how can we use this pattern to craft a more ontologically serious project of understanding dignity?

Epistemological Benefits of a Historical Ontological Understanding of Dignity

Making use of a historical examination of the evolution of theory on the ontology of dignity in some ways holds the potential to circumvent the epistemological limitations of examining dignity analytically, trapped within the bounds of our language and sociopolitical influential context. More acutely, it allows for the synthesis of all previous observations of the limits to our access of the ontology of dignity, illuminating what, if anything, is within our philosophical grasp and worthy of serious study. As with all historicist methods, this is imperfect to the degree that we cannot escape the ways in which we are being influenced throughout this historical recharacterization. However, to be introspective to the extent we are able is better than to ignore the patterns which brought us here altogether.

In other words, because the concept of dignity has repeatedly been tied to autonomy and reason, the phenomena which we have deemed characteristically human, it would be a mistake of dangerous proportions to ignore that each of these iterations of literature around the theory of dignity have occurred in the wake of an epistemological paradigm shift, and thus, are tied to deep political pressures, while occurring in the territory of fresh, unprecedented and therefore unexplored logic. This kind of confrontation with human nature is overwhelming, and its unfamiliarity both leads us to make grave decisions, and to allow familiar biases to take over, interpreting autonomy, for example, in an exclusionary sense, even when we can’t see that in the foundation of our philosophy. Strauss’ famous critique of Heidegger, demonstrating his lack of political consciousness when trying to examine human nature via introspection as the root of his participation in the Nazi regime, as well as the notorious racism embedded in Hegel and Kant, are all demonstrative of this.

However, there is promise in continuing the quest for dignity despite our inability to fully reconcile our own contextual limitations. Hegel, for example, saw each shift in what he called “categories” of human thought, which includes our perceptions and relations to each other, as becoming more intimate with our intrinsic human freedom, or value, and saw this as an opportunity for the positive rebuilding of institutions. It is here we will pick up in the following segment, infusing these epistemological benefits and possibility for turning around this wider narrative to healthier communication practices that bring out our empathetic, rather than aggressive and divisive tendencies into the beginning of a new exploration of our dignity. It is here we mark a path forward for philosophical inquiry and human healing.

What’s in a Story?: The Role of Narrative in Polarization

Humans are storytellers by nature. Through narratives, we obtain knowledge, develop our morality, and understand the order of the world, including our role and expectations. Neuroscientists, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, and others are continuously grappling with the question of why we seem so attracted to this form of communication. Post-modernists have even raised the idea that perhaps stories are so prolific in human life that they are the only force behind the development of our realities and identities, and our entire conscious beings are merely products of socialization. So what is it that is so powerful about stories? 

Shaping Knowledge and Conception of Being

Perhaps one of the earliest and most infamous philosophers to analyze the power of the story was Plato, who recorded Socrates’s allegory of the cave. The reality and knowledge of humanity and conception of our being, according to Socrates, is shaped by the stories we are told by those who have more information, agency or power than we do. In the story, Socrates illustrates people in a cave staring at the wall where shadows are being cast by those standing behind them, telling them the stories which become their only reality. The people watching the shadows cannot turn around, so they do not realize who is behind them, nor that they are trapped in a cave. Socrates then digresses and paints the philosopher as someone who can perhaps transcend the cave. He says, however, that because the being of the people is defined entirely by the shadows, if a philosopher were to tell them about life beyond the cave, they would be defensive and not want to believe it, as it would destabilize their entire reality. This seems indicative of what we see in contemporary politics when someone shares a story that undermines our currently controlling narratives or prejudices.  

This thought is continued within many thinkers later in the era of modernity. The birth of modernity came with Machiavelli, who, in his most famous work The Prince, talked about how the virtue of statesmanship can be learned perhaps best by examining the lives of virtuous leaders before them. He also reiterates a multitude of times the distinction between the narrative a political leader must maintain for their constituents and what principles or influences should actually be guiding them. In other words, Machiavelli says that virtuous princes are putting the shadows on the wall and use stories as a powerful tool to manipulate, and this is a good thing because it sustains their power, even when it isn’t the truth.

Edmund Burke raises a similar view of stories and language in his Philosophic Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, where he says that emotion is far stronger in human passions than knowledge. Additionally, he writes that language has the power to elicit emotions and human passions more than art or stimuli of other physical senses such as sight and touch. Language allows us to be drawn both into the sublime, or that which causes awe and pain, and the beautiful, which causes relaxation and pleasure. Further, language is the medium through which we have conscious thought. He digresses a great deal on poetry, but circles back to a similar view of storytelling as a way of persuading a group of people. He also examines the importance of soft power and cultural synthesis in his writings on politics, where he outlines his theory of prudence. He explains that change and reality shifts are more persuasive, taming, and effective when introduced gradually than when they are forced. This is fusing two peoples’ overall narrative-based realities into one cohesive arc. 

Philosopher Martin Heidegger, many years later, poses the question of how human reality is shaped by meditating on the following: how one might extract the a priori understanding of being of the Dasein, or the introspective, self-aware, existentialist person who is aware of their being but who can’t answer the question of being. He suggests that, in order to formulate a question that can reach this natural understanding so that we might articulate it, one must consider everything which is persuading or shaping our understanding that is separate from nature. This he designates as historicity. While he never publishes the finished project as part of Being and Time, Heidegger says that the second part of his thesis will unpack the theories of Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle on being because these thinkers built on each other to try to answer the question. These thinkers are now the foundation of his own conscious understanding of being, so to get back to his natural thought, he has to rule out what is coming from this historicity of his thought. In other words, Heidegger says that the stories and narratives of being which are passed to us through history in some way hide from us our true being, which seems fairly in line with the post-modernist and platonic ideal that we are a product of the narratives we are socialized to adopt.

 In sum, each of these thinkers paints stories as a powerful force. They comment very little on whether they are good or bad, but describe their significance and utility in communications and politics, whether their function is to divide or bring people together. Stories, for these thinkers, are a means to an end, but a means of the highest force.

Stories and Polarization

In being the most powerful tool, stories have caused a lot of trouble. More seriously, stories have been a major force escalating polarization, politically and otherwise, within human communication, as seen in the polarization of contemporary politics. Humans have crafted their realities from stereotypes, generalized narratives, and assumptions because they are so deeply ingrained in how we think and view the world. However, the truth is that many of these persuasions are implicit in our psyches and we don’t even realize when they are the cornerstones of our decisions. 

Political parties, partisan ideology, and political stances, as a key example, have become entrenched in narratives crafted by the media and campaigns of opposite parties. These stereotypes include labeling liberals as urban “snowflakes” who are over-educated with no common-sense, rich, and engage in giving back to make themselves feel good, among other narratives. In terms of Republicans, those stereotypes include claims that they are backwoods, backwards, white supremacists who force their religion and nostalgia for a less inclusive time on everyone, among other narratives. On both sides, these narrative stereotypes have completely dehumanized people. 

In many ways, narratives can also put restrictions on civic political agency via self-censorship. When people believe that we are “less than” because of a narrative and don’t trust us or our abilities, or when we don’t see our own true strength or capacity for change because of that burden we are less likely to engage or demonstrate leadership. Narratives, in many ways, compromise our civic integrity and democratic value as a voice at the table in political discourse. Sometimes, because we are so afraid of falling into a narrative, we simply don’t speak at all. In other words, we mask our identities and live our lives feeling desperate for but unable to achieve authenticity, often making us more resentful of our opposition, or perceived opposition, and therefore, more defensive in all conversations, and less able to find allies, supporters, common ground or collaborators even if we wanted to engage despite alienation.

Stories as Path to Depolarization: Finding Common Ground

While storytelling can clearly have negative consequences in pushing people apart, is there a way in which it can have a positive effect, even in undoing trends like polarization? Reaching into the heart of someone’s humanity, and influencing their emotions doesn’t have to alienate them. It can also be used to share a commonality, and from that, find the principles and values which bring us together, and can get us to cooperate as a community and as a species. For example, several months ago when given the opportunity to speak with Fran Townsend, the former Homeland Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, we discussed the current division in politics and the importance of depolarization efforts to the stability of American democracy. She shared with me a story that she has shared with many others, and believes defines the philosophy and success of her career.

Once, when on a trip to Saudi Arabia, Townsend found herself caught in a tense meeting between President Bush and Saud al-Faysal over a 9-11 negotiation. When it seemed like endless division was going to keep them from getting anywhere, Townsend heard Abdullah playing with something in his pocket. She asked what it was, and he revealed he had been jiggling his Islamic prayer beads. Despite the dangerous risk of violating Saudi Law, Townsend immediately revealed her own Catholic rosary in her own pocket, to demonstrate they were not so different. At this point, they were able to move forward in the discussion and work together. Upon parting ways, Abdullah gifted her his prayer beads as “a symbol of trust to give to President Bush” to signify that he saw Townsend as honest and was grateful to have her as a partner. While not a story directly, religion, and symbolic religious objects, imply a narrative of a person and their beliefs, and therefore, are still connected to the means of story-telling. Common ground has since become a hallmark of her career.

If you’ve had the opportunity to meet American University’s 2020 Sine Fellow Alphonso Jackson, you’ll hear him tell share story upon story about his childhood as the youngest of many siblings with parents who he greatly admires, and an incredible life that has taken him everywhere from marching in Bloody Sunday to serving in the cabinet of the White House. The first time we met, I shared with Alphonso my dedication to depolarization, and he gave the room one of his most central kernels of wisdom. The three rules to live by, he said, were to (1) speak without being offensive, (2) listen without getting defensive, and to (3) always leave people with their human dignity. He then proceeded to share a number of stories about when he used these rules to find common ground, sharing stories and little pearls of wisdom from his parents and anecdotes about learning lessons in life. It was clear that for Alphonso, stories were not just a way to persuade, but a way to stay grounded, learn, bring people together, and cure division. He and Townsend share remarkably different stories and worked in different parts of the world, Townsend in foreign affairs and Jackson in domestic policy and civil rights activism, but both used stories to surpass even the most turbulent times dividing humanity.

Outside of the world of politics and policy, a dear friend of mine, Daryl Davis, has been using stories for deradicalization of KKK members for years and has since become a worldwide activist for civil discourse on top of being a famous black blues musician. Daryl and I have talked for hours, sharing stories about how he has listened to the stories and opinions of others in order to establish trust and dignity, as Townsend and Jackson did so that he might then share his own story and bring them out of a life of hate. By then sharing these stories of disengagement around the world, and demystifying and depowering symbols of the narrative of hate by keeping robes of former members and allowing people to touch them, Daryl has been able to soften people to the idea of redemption and humanity not being immoral even when someone has gone down the wrong path. It is not that you should condone their hate, or feel the weight of that call to action burden, for him. It is that you recognize that narrative has shaped them also, and by demystifying likewise the narrative of those they have been persuaded to hate through proximity, or contact theory as sociologists sometimes like to call it, the propaganda or conceptual narrative unravels.

I had the opportunity to speak to one of the reformed members, Scott Shepherd, and he explained to me that before joining the Klan, he had tried to join the Mafia and a number of other extremist groups because he was simply looking for purpose. He had a mentor and guardian who was black, but the narrative which provided him inclusion he jumped at, and now looks back in horror about how he let this power of story-based persuasion steer him away from those he loved into a force of evil. He now lives his life warning others about this power of narrative and encourages them to focus on Daryl, Jackson and Townsends version of storytelling of the now, of common ground, and of humanity, rather than depolarizing stories which focus on difference and drive us apart.

Better Angels, the grassroots depolarization nonprofit, has realized the power of stories for some time now. One of their hallmark marketing strategies at the founding of the organization was the television of a friendship that occurred between a Republican and Democrat where they took a road trip together and realized where they could find common ground. Those who work for the group, including James Coan, founder of his own depolarization group some time ago, have conceptualized the power of this through emotional theory, where like Townsend said, stories of humanity and commonality are able to take us from disgust to the other end of the axis towards trust and mutual respect, or feeling dignified and therefore seeing dignity in others.

The truth is, the longer you work in the world of depolarization, the more you realize that there are institutional, structural strategies, but an overwhelming heart of the work is centered around stories, representative of shared humanity and a bridge to collaboration rather than separation. I could share the stories of an endless number of people I’ve met all over the world who have used this method for depolarizing work, each as inspiring as the last. But it’s important to note that in each of these cases, what was really at work was stories against stories. Broader narratives, constructed by mass social forces from media to political propaganda and other manufactured stereotypes, countered by personal anecdotes that hit on a deeper human emotion than pure resonation with a vague trend. Stories, as such, are not holistically good or bad in communication. Anecdotal evidence is not comprehensive or representative seems to be the trouble behind why it can be used to drive people apart.

This has become a wider and wider talking point within academia and political discourse especially. It is often looked down on because of its focus on the particular or overgeneralization which is not representative of reality. However, while other evidence, such as quantitative seems important for that reason, it cannot replace all anecdotal evidence and be totally superior, as it leaves out a deeper element of information that can not be conveyed in numbers, and statistics can be just as misleading. Rather, the balance of evidence seems to be the takeaway, and stories, are simply one powerful tool. Philosophically, argued as perhaps the most powerful tool. And with that, we should wield them thoughtfully.

Moscow’s Mad Monk: Aleksandr Dugin and Eurasianism

When referring to the most influential figures within Russia, one would be hard-pressed to ignore the exploits of Grigori Rasputin. An infamous mystic, Rasputin’s esoteric allure would grant him unparalleled influence over the royal family, allowing him to fill ministerial positions with sycophants aligned with him at whim. A person prone to a similar charisma and cryptic prose of equal indirect power in contemporary Russia is that of Aleksandr Dugin, a man who has earned himself the monikers of “The Most Dangerous Man In The World,” “Putin’s Brain,” and, indeed, “Putin’s Rasputin.”

Beginning his political career with a prominent position in the nativist neo-Nazi group Pramyat from 1987 to 1989, Dugin would continue to augment his ideology with the anti-bourgeois rhetoric fostered by Soviet thought, eventually founding the National Bolshevik Party with novelist Ėduard Limonov in 1993. National Bolshevism, an ultranationalist strand of Marxism described by the Communist Party’s Young Left Front as “a bizarre mixture of totalitarian and fascist symbols, geopolitical dogma, leftist ideas, and national-patriotic demagoguery,” served to represent the synthesis of Dugin’s ultranationalist sentiments with his influence from the former Soviet Union’s Marxist and anti-bourgeois rhetoric. This set the stage for the Eurasian ideology and its distinctly chauvinist and illiberal nature.

Eurasianism, as posited by Dugin, argues that the twenty-first century will be defined by a conflict between the Atlanticists, referring to the thalassocratic liberal hegemony and world order espoused by the United States and its allies, and the Eurasianists, referring to the land-based powers, primarily referring to Russia, who reject such an order. This narrative of conflict has differed greatly from classical proponents of Eurasianism who have traditionally portrayed Romano-Germanic Europe as a unifying threat. Such a plan involves stoking anti-American nationalism among Japan, Germany, and Iran, the last of which is of particular interest with renewed Iranian-American tensions in the wake of Qasem Soleimani’s death. Additionally, a geopolitical issue integral to Eurasianism is that of Russia’s claim to Ukraine, a belief which had served to bolster Dugin’s following in the wake of Russia’s actions in Crimea and the Donbass. 

When directly countering the American liberal world order, Dugin’s Eurasian doctrine directs its followers “to provoke all forms of instability and separatism within the borders of the United States,” mentioning historical racial divisions as a promising wedge. To cement Eurasianism as a universally appealing alternative to liberalism, much of the Eurasian doctrine is rooted in elements of both Fascist and Communist thought due to neither “belonging to the spirit of modernity” and thus are free of its supposed corruption at the hand of liberal thought. In his primary ideological work, The Fourth Political Theory, Dugin summarizes this ideology as the rejection of “socialism without materialism, atheism, progressivism, and modernism,” instead focusing on the concepts of intense religious, ethnic, and national pride. These are the criteria by which Dugin believes facilitate “Dasein,” a term in Heideggerian existential philosophy used in the context of individual identity and personhood. Whereas the Eurasian movement allows Dugin appeal to the more hawkish of the Russian elite, the integration of the Fourth Political Ideology at its foundations has served to rapidly grow his following of the disillusioned through its incorporation of all radical fringes of the political spectrum. 

While the tenets of such an ideology and its revanchist ambitions might lead one to believe such a movement exists solely on the fringes of the Russian public and political spheres, many Russian figures prominent in such realms have offered Dugin’s philosophy not only acceptance but praise. During a 1999 interview, former Chairman of the State Duma and prominent early supporter of President Putin, Gennadiy Seleznyov, publicly advocated for Dugin’s work to be made compulsory reading in Russia’s school curriculum. Though the popularity of Dugin’s work has yet to make an impression on the Russian economic elite, one may also notice exceptions to this phenomena, such as the man’s amicable ties to retail mogul President of Russian Gold, Alexander Tarantsev, who greatly helped Dugin finance the publication of new editions of his work. 

Beyond the public sphere, the works of Dugin and the Eurasian movement have also made a lasting impression within one of the Russian government’s most formidable assets: its military. Lectures based on what would become Dugin’s magnum opus, Foundation of Geopolitics, have according to an uncontested claim by Dugin himself, been used as required reading for Russia’s General Staff Academy, one of Russia’s premier military learning institutions. This lasting impression of this Eurasianist Il Principe on Russia’s policy makers has not been lost on prominent scholarship. John Dunlop, a leading figure on the topic of post-Soviet Russian nationalism, further affirms this popularity by stating that there has “not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period that has exerted an influence on Russian military, police, and statist foreign policy elites.”

Whilst the ideological characteristics of the Eurasia Movement and the Fourth Political Theory have made a relatively small impression on the Russian political and military sphere, the aforementioned geopolitical doctrine espoused by the movement have been viewed with great interest by Russian policy makers, helping carry both its military and ideological aspects into the mainstream. With this in mind, the threat of a successful execution of the Eurasian geopolitical philosophy by the Russian government would pose a twofold threat to the democratic ideals of the United States’ government and its people, and should thus be a priority for United States policymakers. 

One such area of which action is recommended to be taken is the countering of the aforementioned Eurasian strategy of sowing discontent through “encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements-- extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S.” This policy has seen itself come to fruition through the actions of entities associated with Russian soft power, the most infamous being the pro-Russian Internet Research Agency. The organization’s skill at dividing and conquering was made apparent in the U.S. Senate Select Committee On Intelligence’s Report On Russian Active Measures And Interference In The 2016 Election, where a plethora of attempts were made by the group to incite racial hatred among Americans. In fact, 66 percent of Internet Research Agency Facebook ads mentioning race in an inflammatory manner and one of the group’s proxy accounts designed to galvanize black police retaliation, titled “Blacktivist,” garnered a total of 11.2 million engagements on Facebook before promptly being taken down by the U.S. government after its Russian ties were revealed. The Eurasianist’s efforts to galvanize identity politics in the U.S. is not restricted to Black Americans, however, as figures such as Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon have both worked with and drawn inspiration from Dugin and his nativist vision. 

As Putin’s geopolitical maneuvers in Ukraine and Georgia continue to mirror one another, the United States must look towards another former Soviet territory at high risk of hybrid warfare with Russia frequently mentioned as an invaluable prospect for satellite states under “special status” under a Russo-Eurasian hegemony: the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In fact, defense strategists working on behalf of the United States Armed Forces have concluded that these Baltic nations are “vulnerable to low-level, hybrid, and full-scale attacks by Russian special operations and regular military forces deployed close to their borders,'' with little preventing increased Russian military and diplomatic pressure in the region. 

There indeed exist factors that facilitate such acts, such as the traditional cultural divides that also render the United States and Ukraine vulnerable to Russian soft power. This is especially dangerous in the case of the Baltic States due to their respective Russophone population “[relying] primarily on Russian origin media for information and entertainment,” rendering them susceptible to online information manipulation. Additionally, the impact of the Baltic States’ Russophone population losing faith in their government institutions would greatly shift public opinion and, eventually, the Baltic governments themselves away from NATO. This would effectively prevent direct American intervention in the event that the three countries withdraw from the military alliance. If the Baltic States allow Russia to alienate their native Russophone population, the latter would “not require a major effort to provide a pretext for Russian intervention should Moscow desire one.”

With this in mind, it is highly recommended that policymakers urge the social media industry to adhere to the solutions offered by the aforementioned Committee, which involve the promotion of increased interindustrial cooperation through the creation of “formalized mechanisms for collaboration that facilitate content sharing among the social media platforms in order to defend against foreign disinformation” as well as the offering of “notifications to individual users [that] should be clearly stated, device neutral, and provide users all the information necessary to understanding the malicious nature of the social media content or accounts they were exposed to.” This will allow those using such online platforms to know where the information they consume is coming from and identity possibly malicious intent. However, while social media companies have agreed to cooperate “on an ad-hoc basis,” it will take continuous and sensible cooperation if the IRA or its like are to be mitigated in the United States’ political system in the future.

In regards to an all-too-possible situation in which Putin will continue to mirror the Eurasian geopolitical agenda and eye the nations of the Baltic with pragmatic interest, Stephen Flanagan of the Rand Corporation recommends that the American Armed Forces work in cooperation with NATO personnel in the specialized training of the Baltic militaries. This includes in the fields of  “crisis management, civil defense, and countering … and ‘grey zone’ attacks,” areas of which the quantitatively diminutive Baltic militaries must excel in if they are to prevent Russian engagements in hybrid warfare. 

Taking note of the prospective problems concerning Russian manipulation of media, Ulrich Kuhn of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg believes that Russian hybrid warfare can be primarily mitigated through the funding of Russophone media within the Baltic States as opposed to Russia, spanning from traditional media outlets such as newspapers, television, and radio… [to] social media and internet resources.” This would effectively provide the Baltic States’ Russian-speaking population an alternative to complete dependence on Kremlin-influenced media, an alternative that presents itself as more cost-effective than an increase in NATO defense funding. 

Artificial Intelligence and Ethics: An Exploration of Machine Morality

Since the Industrial Revolution, nations across the globe have brought on waves of technological innovation that have drastically altered the global economic landscape. From the steam engine to the telephone to the widespread use of electricity, technology has served a pivotal role throughout history in advancing the capabilities of the human race. Today, the world faces its next great hurdle along the path of technological progress, possibly its largest one yet; artificial intelligence. Our current socio-economic systems trend towards increased automation; by the early 2030s, roughly 38% of US jobs are expected to be at risk of automation, with more than 85% of customer interactions projected to be managed without a human. Although integration of machines into the global economy is no new concept, the notion of machine learning and consciousness presents policymakers with a host of new social, political, and ethical concerns. To better explore and address these concerns, one must first ask; what exactly is artificial intelligence, and what steps should we take to control it? This article will argue in favor of programming AI with normative philosophy in order to benefit the future of the human race, focusing on German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s theory as a starting point for AI ethics.

We have seen the use of touch-screen soda dispensers and ATMs for years, but the more modern term, “AI”, describes the study and design of intelligent agents, which is a “system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success”. Otherwise referred to as computational intelligence or rationality, put simply, AI is a blanket term used to describe any form of intelligence demonstrated by a machine. The majority of existing AI technology takes the form of simple AI, or machines that rely on decision trees, or a predetermined set of rules and algorithms for success. Machine Learning, however, is distinct in that it allows machines to learn without being explicitly programmed. This type of technology allows for machines to improve their decision-making process by incorporating and analyzing swaths of data pertaining to a particular task and the success rate of certain actions. Often referred to as complex AI, deep learning machines work by picking out recognizable patterns and making decisions based on them. Thus, the more data you feed it, the smarter it becomes, and the better it works. In today’s society, we can already see the positive benefits of machine learning in many of our most innovative technologies, such as the predictive analytic machines that generate shopping recommendations or the AI used in security and antivirus applications worldwide. The drawbacks, however, are far less evident.

Despite Terminator-esque representations of a war-torn future dominated by robots, the potential dangers of the advancing field of AI research lie in the fundamental lack of control at the heart of the development of autonomous machines. For many experts in the field, the question of whether or not AI will yield beneficial or harmful results for the human race is simply the wrong one; instead, the focus falls on determining the degree of control with which we execute this line of progress. Most notably, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk remains outspoken in his belief that AI’s development will outpace our ability to manage it in a safe way. Musk even went as far as to claim that AI development poses a greater threat to humanity than the advent of nuclear weapons, citing the machine intelligence that defeated the world champion in the ancient Chinese strategy game, “Go”. Although much of the AI that is used in the status quo has yet to cross this intelligence threshold, the increasing development of neural networks for complex AI has opened the door for an exponential uptick in the rate of machine learning. Once the cat is out of the bag, warns Musk, the intelligence in question will be unstoppable, and has the potential to wreak havoc on all of society. Autonomous drone strikes. Release of deadly chemical weapons. Violent revolution fueled by mass media propaganda campaigns. When one considers the degree to which we rely on machines for public health, global military operations, and political communications, the necessity for control over the activity of AI becomes abundantly clear. Therefore, the solution to the dangers of AI development lie in our ability as humans to control its behavior past a certain threshold of growth, through whatever means necessary.

As outlined above, policymakers have a clear incentive to avoid a scenario in which the rate of AI learning exceeds our ability to control it. However, as can be seen in the status quo, leading governments have failed to adequately regulate their respective tech industries, causing them to be caught in a game of catch-up with AI developers. As evidenced by the 2018 Congressional hearing questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the government has allowed the tech industry to exceed its reach, with no major value shift or policy agenda in sight. The question now becomes, what should policymakers do to maximize the chance that an AI outbreak would yield positive consequences for society? The answer lies in the study of philosophy, or ethics. At its most basic level, philosophy, or the debate over morality, is a question of what an agent ought to do. This question is especially relevant when applied to AI; after all, an AI with an intelligence level greater than that of humans would be able to rewrite its own code, effectively making itself anything it wants to be. Yet, there is much uncertainty as to whether an AI would want to rewrite itself in a hostile form, or a peaceful one. This is where ethics comes in. If AI developers could program machines with ethics that morally prohibited them from harming humans, then the scenario in which they utilize their neural capabilities for harm becomes much less probable. In this sense, ethics comes into view as the primary method of control, potentially the last one, that humans could bear over their creations.

Next, we are tasked with determining which system of ethics would yield the best outcome for humanity in the event that AI exceeds our ability to regulate it. Before making this determination, it is important to understand some core distinctions between various branches of philosophical thought. Normative philosophy is divided into two major categories: consequentialism and deontology. Consequentialism dictates that the morality of an action be determined by looking purely to the consequences of said action, and that an ethical agent ought to seek to achieve the maximal state of affairs. Deontology, on the other hand, is a system of ethics that uses universal rules to distinguish right from wrong. A deontologist would not be concerned with the consequences of an immoral action, even if the consequences were positive, since the action is deemed immoral by its very nature. Similarly, a consequentialist would not care if an action is intrinsically immoral or violates certain rights, insofar as the action produces good consequences down the road. Put simply, consequentialists are concerned with ends, and deontologists are concerned with means. In the context of AI decision-making, this distinction could make all the difference; for example, a consequentialist AI might decide that killing one particularly evil human would amount to thousands of lives saved down the road, thus justifying the practice of murder on the part of AI for the greater societal good, despite the intrinsic wrongness of such an act. Conversely, a deontological AI would disregard the future benefit of killing the evil individual for the sake of avoiding committing a violation of that individual’s fundamental rights. A third, less prominent branch of normative philosophy, known as virtue ethics, offers an alternative to the more rule-based approaches listed above. Conceived by Aristotle, virtue ethics is an approach to normative ethics that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character of an agent, rather than the duties and consequences involved in an agent’s action. Under this theory, an AI would be considered “ethical” if it took actions that were reflective of intuitively desirable character traits, such as honesty, courage, or wisdom.

Insofar as the goal of programming AI with a system of ethics is to preserve the future wellbeing of the human race, then any attempt at formulating a normative theory upon which to program AI must center around the value of humans as moral agents. Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming an obstacle in the way of the machine’s progress. Created by enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant, “Kantianism” is used to refer to the deontological theory derived from universal principles of human worth. This section will lay out the primary arguments for adopting a Kantian system of normative ethics for AI, by explaining the theory’s applicability to AI and various advantages this approach holds over alternatives.

First and foremost, Artificial Intelligence must be programmed with a rule-based (deontological) system of ethics, instead of the more calculative and character-based approaches of consequentialism and virtue ethics. Robotics expert Matthias Scheutz argues that the need for a “computationally explicit trackable means of decision making” requires that ethics be grounded in deontology. Since AI have the potential to make incredibly complex moral decisions, it is important that humans are able to identify the logic used in a given decision in a transparent way, so as to accurately determine the morality of the action in question. This necessitates deontology, as theories that rely on valuation of consequences or judgements of character are far more subjective and difficult to track in an ordered manner.

Furthermore, Kantianism is uniquely suitable to AI programming because of its prioritization of the self-determination and rational capacities of other moral agents. While attempting to formulate a moral theory, Kant began his inquiry by drawing a distinction between the moral status of rational agents, and non-agents. According to Kant, humans are morally distinct from other beings in their ability to use their rational capacities to set and pursue certain ends. This status would also apply to AI. Dr. Ozlem Ulgen, member of the UN group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, claims that technology may be deemed to have rational thinking capacity if it engages in a pattern of logical thinking from which it rationalizes and takes action. Although Kant’s concept is reserved for humans, the capacity aspect may be fulfilled by AI’s potential for rational thinking. Not only does this prove the suitability of Kantian ethics to AI, but it also provides built-in advantages when it comes to protecting human interests. As Kant identifies the source of moral value as individual reason, the rules that follow accordingly seek to protect that same capacity. For example, Kantian ethics prohibits harming others, as doing so would fundamentally contradict the capacity for reason within other moral agents. In this sense, a Kantian AI would be far less likely to do harm unto humans, as the core tenet of their philosophy would be tied to our shared rational capabilities. Thus, Kantian ethics provides a human-centric approach to formulating moral rules.

Lastly, the subjectivity at the heart of consequentialist and virtue ethical approaches to morality provide a comparative advantage to Kantian ethics. Consequentialist theories, on one hand, mandate that we maximize the probability of good consequences, but don’t inform us of what those consequences are. Thus, consequentialist theories are incomplete in that they leave it up to the agent in question to determine what they consider to be a “moral good”. This poses potential problems when applied to AI, as they could very well decide that the extermination of the human race is a good consequence, and thus act to achieve it. Similarly, virtue ethics relies on the notion of “good character”, or the idea that we ought to inculcate certain character traits within society. This commits the same error as consequentialists often do, as it fails to provide a comprehensive account of the “good person”, leaving room for AI to drum up their own conceptions of virtuous character in order to suit their own needs. Kantianism, however, avoids this pitfall, as it sources “the good” within the agent itself. To a Kantian, actions are good insofar as they respect the right of other moral agents to set and pursue ends, thus further helping to create a human-centric system of ethics.

In answering the question of which system of ethics would be most suitable for programming AI, a variety of other questions arose, all of which demand further investigation. Evidently, reaching a definitive conclusion on the issue of AI ethics is no easy task; after all, humans have been debating back and forth between different philosophies and modes of thought for hundreds of years, and the conversation doesn’t seem to be ending any time soon. The one thing we, as a society, can agree on despite differences in perspective is the idea that morality is fundamentally subjective. If history is any example, it is clear that the ethical systems by which people choose (or attempt) to live their lives is heavily contingent on their individual point of view. As such, the mission of determining how to program an ethical AI is problematized by the reality that we, as humans, do not operate under a perfect ethical framework to begin with. According to virtual reality developer and CEO Ambarish Mitra, this concern is easily surmountable, as he argues that AI could help us create one.  Referred to as “super morality”, many in the field of AI development believe that the potential for AI to reach a level of consciousness “beyond” that of humans gives them the potential to reach the sort of higher ethical truth for which we have been searching for so long. If moral truth is to be discovered through reflection and deliberation, machines with higher rates of learning and cognition than that of humans would have a better shot at discovering that truth than we ever will.

Strategic Political Inaction: The New Norm for the Republican Party

As the 2018 Congressional midterms approach, election observers will once again fixate on survey research and public polling figures. Of course, these factors are the easiest variables to measure within electoral politics, ironically becoming the one constant aspect of an unpredictable political climate. The 2018 midterms are overshadowed by President Trump’s publicly unpopular and controversial policies. Ultimately, the upcoming midterms are primed as a rebuke of the Trump administration.  Though the Republican Party retains a majority in both congressional chambers, many lawmakers remain silent or refuse to publicly condemn the Trump administration’s controversial policies. This behavior reveals an interesting dynamic in today’s highly polarized electoral politics: it is more advantageous for lawmakers to default to political inaction in unpredictable situations than to challenge party leaders - especially President Trump. This is the new norm within Republican Party politics.

The Trump administration ushered in an era hostile to establishment party politics. Among Republicans, many rank-and-file party members fall in line with the President, while those with substantial political capital, like Senator John McCain and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, vocalize their dissent towards the party’s emerging anti-establishment and anti-elitist platform. As the Trump administration prioritizes issues like trade and immigration, policies championed by the establishment wing of the Republican Party, like health care and tax reform, are pursued haphazardly. This sudden political shift isolated Republican incumbents, ranging from moderate budget-balancers to mainstream conservatives, forcing many into retirement. The majority of Republican incumbents intent on running for reelection opt to remain silent and avoid taking controversial stances that would show opposition to President Trump.

Survey research and public polling indicate an up-and-coming rebuke of the Trump administration’s policies in the 2018 midterms. For Republicans, there has been widespread scrutiny regarding the accuracy of survey research and public polling as a result of the 2016 election. The risk and uncertainty in gauging President Trump’s grassroots support creates a difficult political situation for Republican lawmakers running for reelection. Even with generally high approval ratings, the President’s party typically loses seats in midterm House elections. President Trump’s historically low approval rating, with an average of 39% over his entire term, should incentivize Republican incumbents to distance themselves from the Trump administration, in order to expand majorities within their districts. Instead, Republican incumbents are strategically choosing to remain silent, refusing to publicly condemn the Trump administration. The perceived threat of public shaming through President Trump’s frequent attacks on members of his own party retains a hollow loyalty and political complacency.

Indeed, the Trump administration fosters a certain unpredictable political climate by pigeonholing Congressional Republicans into reluctant obedience. This revives ideas of risk and uncertainty associated with game theory politics in international relations.  For instance, the “madman theory,” coined in the 1960s by military strategist Herman Kahn, describes the act of making a threat credible by convincing an opponent of one’s own instability. Realist international theory often notes examples of this concept, specifically with world leaders like former President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The Trump administration has seemingly adopted this risk-based tactic both in international diplomacy and domestic politics, especially as it pertains to his campaign-style governance. For instance, Trump has created an atmosphere of uncertainty for those who publicly oppose his administration’s agenda by targeting lawmakers and journalists through Twitter, campaign rallies, and press briefings.  The effectiveness of this tactic has yet to be measured, it effectively subdues dissidents within the Republican Party.

Under the Trump administration, game theory and risk factors largely dictate behavior in Washington. President Trump’s abrasive behavior amplifies Washington’s uniquely polarized and partisan climate, creating an ambiguous pressure for key players to fall in line with Trump’s agenda. Given Trump’s background as a real estate tycoon and a reality TV star, it was expected that his administration would operate like a business or even a reality-television show. As it turns out, the Trump White House is essentially an unraveling prisoner’s dilemma, with factionalism perpetuating a standoff between self-interest and the goals of the administration. Empty administrative positions, sudden resignations, and the frequent leaks characterize the administration’s dog-eat-dog culture. Such a chaotic administration is unprecedented, which further complicates the policymaking process in a tense political climate.

As the 2018 midterms approach, the Trump administration’s influences on an already unique political climate cannot be dismissed. It is foreseeable that President Trump’s footstep in Washington will be one of acute partisan division. Fear of becoming a target of the administration and the unpredictability of President Trump’s core base is forcing Republican political actors into complacency. Democratic opponents are becoming more ideologically radical in seeking polarizing candidates rather than moderate ones. Though partisan interests are growing increasingly distinct, the Trump administration creates obstacles for those with intentions of returning to a predictable process of legislation and executive action. That said, Trump may have fulfilled his campaign promise of bringing an end to establishment politics, as risk and uncertainty hold Washington in a stall.

Transhumanism and Critical Theory as Alternatives to Liberalism

From where does political theory’s contemporary opposition to the dominant Liberal political order arise? Surely few would deny the rise of alternative philosophical opinions in recent decades. Post-structuralism, postmodernism, neo-Marxism, and further schools of thought suggests the limits of our traditionally held views. To make a long story short, our current politics’ validity was sold to us on such grounds as constitutionalism, human rights, and the rule of law, and now certain critical scholars simply aren’t buying it.

Different alternatives to Liberalism vary in their emphasis on human conceptions from the top (e.g., the powerful, wealthy elite) or from the bottom (e.g., the powerless, impoverished multitude). Here, I attempt to provide a cursory sketch of these two alternatives and ultimately argue in favor of the latter.

Liberalism Who?

Mostly, we accept that the world’s current political order consists of various different arrangements of Enlightenment-inspired premises that we might characterize as “Liberal.” At least four major premises make up this view of politics. First, any good Liberal firmly believes in human rights. Human rights are, most basically, those things to which we are entitled because of the fact of our humanity. The concept of human rights first arose as a prominent Liberal ideal during the Enlightenment in the work of philosophers like John Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government issued modern politics’ familiar claim to “life, liberty, and possessions.”

Second, Liberals argue that the state’s constitution best separates the government into different branches to prevent abuses of power. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argues in favor of a republican, constitutional order based on a love of virtue—in contrast to monarchs, who love honor, and despots, who thrive off of fear. Montesquieu’s work subsequently formed much of the basis for the American legal system; even today, “courts generally acknowledge his influence on the Constitution” and separation of powers. After all, what good are human rights if the state can revoke them at will?

Third, citizens within a Liberal state are considered equal. John Rawls claims in A Theory of Justice that, if you were placed behind a “veil of ignorance” that removes all social contexts like race, religion, sex, and nationality from a person’s decision to whom rights should be granted, any rational person would choose equality. Because any other person theoretically behind the veil of ignorance could choose my share of rights just as I choose another’s, I face an incentive to minimize the differences between the rights afforded to me and those afforded to another. On the Liberal view, not only can the government not prevent you from exercising your rights, it must provide those rights equally to all its citizens.

Fourth, Liberal states opt for market capitalism over socialism’s emphasis on state-owned enterprise. Adam Smith, arguably the founder of economic Liberalism and the ideological basis of the modern market system, wrote in The Wealth of Nations that the “invisible hand” of the market directs producers and consumers toward positive outcomes. By harnessing individuals’ self-interest and leaving the market up to its own devices—e.g., a small public sector and a large private sector—we create competition, which in turn creates positive economic conditions like lower unemployment and higher wages.

This combination of human rights, separation of powers, equality, and capitalism forms the foundation of the modern world order. Countries strive to adopt all four of these premises or are pressured into doing so. In pundits’ terms, liberal democracy is the “price of admission” to the international community. Transhumanism, however, does not square with at least one Liberal premise: equality.

The Transhumanist Alternative

Transhumanism is a philosophy that posits that individuals and governments can and should use technology to surpass innate human potential. Their principal assumption treats humans as deficient in one way or another. Transhumanists might say, “We don’t live long enough, we don’t prevent enough natural disasters, we are susceptible to disease, we don’t help refugees, we start wars and commit genocides, we cause climate change.” Essentially, humans “have a lot of [unnecessary] limitations,” in this view.

For example, Julian Savulescu advocates for transgenesis as an acceptable bioethical practice, claiming that we can and should manipulate human genomes because we face a moral imperative to correct such genetic deficiencies for future generations, even if we make them non-human in the process. In fact, making humans into non-humans presents itself as one of the main goals of transhumanism’s political project (literally, we should transcend humanity). Therefore, governments that limit and regulate practices like cloning and transgenesis can be seen as morally corrupt. “[W]e should,” Savulescu argues, “allow [genetic] selection for non-disease genes [in embryos] even if this maintains or increases social inequality.”

I want to briefly note that I only highlight the more extreme forms of human enhancement which propose to alter society’s genetic composition. Using, for example, a notebook to augment one’s memory capacity differs inordinately from replacing one or more genes in select embryos. I don’t focus here on human enhancement, but rather on transhumanist human enhancement.

Transhumanism directly opposes the Liberal premise that all citizens merit equal treatment from the state because of the random distribution of talents qualities by nature. As Francis Fukuyama put it, “[t]he first victim of transhumanism might be equality.” According to a Liberal worldview, whatever rights we are due from our government must be due equally to all. But, through biomedical processes like transgenesis and eugenic embryo selection, transhumanism seeks to (1) identify superior genetic traits, and (2) increase the proportion of those traits in society. If Liberalism proposes to reduce social inequalities, transhumanism accepts those inequalities, implying first off that they have less value to society than human enhancement, and second off that inequalities are such a low priority that they can be rooted into humans’ genes without significant consequence.

Transhumanism’s problem is not so much that it can’t establish a principled typology of desirous and non-desirous genetic traits, nor that it can’t or define the value those traits. Whether or not it remains “silent on the value” of people’s lives with non-desirous traits, transhumanism proposes to alter the biological definition of humanity and create a new, elite class of super-humans. That elite class then could easily claim to be entitled to more state benefits, rights, seats in Congress, and so on than natural humans. As an alternative to Liberalism, therefore, transhumanism supposes a vastly different political subject, where talents, strengths, and weaknesses are not distributed randomly by nature, but rather purposefully by individuals through the use of technology.

The Critical Alternative

The critical alternative is one that one could characterize as a broad mélange of different ideologies sharing the same ultimate premise: the modern Liberal paradigm perpetuates and sometimes exacerbates political, economic, and social inequalities.

Consider, for instance, Homo Sacer by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Homo sacer—as opposed to someone like Homo politicus—is a person stripped of his or her political life, or the life of the citizen and reduced to bare life, or the life of one outside the state, who therefore enjoys no guarantee on his/her individual rights, and can therefore be killed by the state. Agamben uses the ancient Greek terms bios and zoē to distinguish between these two forms of life. Practically, Hitler reduced people to bare life forms by removing Jewish and other “undesirable” members from the body politic both legally (by taking away citizenship rights) and physically (by sending “undesirables” to concentration camps). For Agamben, laws that reduce people to zoē represent a “state of exception” that dangerously violate human rights and characterize both modern authoritarian and democratic regimes. In other words, as legal entities, Auschwitz and Guantánamo Bay prison differ only in form, not essential character, since the latter hides behind a Liberal, democratic façade.

In the past, dictators survived because their states’ existence depended on territorial integrity. However, leaders of modern Liberal states depend more on public opinion than on territorial integrity, meaning that—according to the critical alternative to Liberalism—Liberal states have to sell their laws and policies under the guise of protecting or promoting Liberal values, even if those laws and policies further distance the world’s state of affairs from a Liberal state of affairs.

Slavoj Žižek echoes this sentiment. Liberals soften many of today’s problems, framing them as problems of ignorance or intolerance rather than problems of injustice, inequality, or exploitation. According to Žižek, because of the “multiculturalist’s basic ideological operation;” namely that “political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation, etc., are naturalized/neutralized into ‘cultural’ differences […] which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, but merely ‘tolerated.’” In other words, Liberals’ view of toleration simply glosses over modern forms of injustice and indeed assumes that anyone labelling injustice as such is simply ignorant of other worldviews. This then obfuscates the distinction between good and evil. In fact, it means the Liberal paradigm is that much more dangerous for the critical alternative because prolonging and indeed remaining complicit in acts of injustice can be justified under such well-intentioned efforts at “tolerance.”

If Agamben claims that Auschwitz and GTMO prison are essentially the same, Žižek might argue that the disparate state of inequality between the global North and South differ only in form—not essential character—from colonial times. A modern Liberal economic system doesn’t alleviate that problem, it just sweeps it under the rug.

Forks in the Road

At what ontological premise(s) do the two alternatives to Liberalism diverge? Beyond their shared enemy, the two schools of thought seemingly share nothing in common, with the latter claiming there is too much inequality in the world and the former claiming that there is too little.

Transhumanism represents a top-down political power structure, whereby elites decide policy and administer it down to the masses. The transhumanist alternative begins with an aristocratic premise—individual citizens able to do so should be given the choice to correct their human deficiencies and become a member of a superior, super-human class. The state should then sanction policies that allow (1) experiments to determine the specific areas in which humans require enhancement, and (2) the biomedical enhancement procedures themselves. Even arguing that we should enhance humans to be more moral beings does not solve this. Such a solution reflects, on the one hand, an aristocratic premise now as we must decide which moral code will rule society or, on the other hand, an aristocratic premise later as the new super-humans must decide which moral code to rule society. Either way, transhumanism represents a top-down view of politics.

The critical alternative begins from the opposite perspective of oppressed classes. Individuals should pursue emancipation through political activism or “even armed struggle” because one class of people ruling another invariably leads to inequalities and injustice; and remaining passive or complicit in those instances is just as bad as committing them in the first place. Any viable body politic, therefore, must relinquish any theoretical, legal, or other capacity to implement a “state of exception” for one reason or another. Therefore, if transhumanism allows for—even if it doesn’t necessarily advocate for—a state of exception for its class of super-humans, it doesn’t just accept today’s injustices, it enables them, according to the critical vein.

It is this fork in the road that seems to most fundamentally separate these two contemporary alternatives to Liberalism. Transhumanism pursues an aristocratic political future while critical scholars pursue a radically egalitarian one. Transhumanism emphasizes helping those at the top while critical theory emphasizes helping those at the bottom.

Conclusion

The alternatives to Liberalism are not limited to post-structuralism, postmodernism, neo-Marxism, and other leftist schools of thought. Of course, we should remain wary of any ideology that purports to have all the answers. However, we should also remain wary of ideologies that root inequality in human genetics. As it stands now, human inequality is limited to socially significant factors such as income, wealth, race, religion, and so on. Most contemporary political theory no longer attempts to defend aristocracies based on people’s heritage. And while the modern Liberal system may not be perfect, the transhumanist alternative which allows for the creation of a new class of elite super-humans potentially deepens social inequality, on the one hand, while certainly creating biological inequalities on the other. Rather than more inequality, critical theory rightly views things from the bottom-up and strives to end oppression and injustice, not enable them.

What’s Wrong with Liberty?

Or, as a former professor of mine phrased it less presumptively, is anything wrong with liberty? Specifically, I should ask what—if anything—is wrong with the libertarian conception of justice. Robert Nozick’s emblematic libertarian argument in Anarchy, State, and Utopia posits liberty as a sure-fire means of achieving justice. Nozick ultimately argues for a “minimal state” that does not infringe on individual property rights, thereby protecting its citizens’ liberty as a result. However, Nozick assumes that liberty results primarily, if not exclusively, from individual action. In excluding consideration of our liberties which depend on others’ actions for their fulfilment, Nozick wrongly conceives of the state as the principal violator of people’s freedoms. Rather, the state can also enable people to be freer than they would otherwise be without its influence.

In order to arrive at his conclusion, Nozick draws on classical state of nature theory. In the state of nature, Nozick suggests that “several different protective associations or companies” arise in order to enforce individuals’ rights. With the help of an invisible hand, a dominant protective association enters into the business of selling its protective services, crowding out all other competitors and becoming what he calls the minimal state. The minimal state is that protective association which retains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and imposes taxes only to the extent required to maintain the infrastructure that prohibits individuals’ from limiting the freedoms of other individuals. In other words, the minimal state is justified in taxing its citizens at the lowest rate that will fund a military, police, courts, and other similar such institutions.

But how are individuals justified in owning and making decisions about their property? Philosopher Will Kymlicka identifies three explanations for this in Nozick’s theory. First is the principle of transfer, where individuals are allowed to freely transfer whatever they acquire legitimately. Second is the principle of just initial acquisition, which accounts for how people originally come to own things. Third is the principle of the rectification of justice, dealing with the things that may have been unjustly acquired or transferred. In essence, these principles amount to the following: as long as individuals acquire goods justly in society, then Nozick’s minimal state would be unjustified in coercively redistributing goods from some people to others. If Jordan stole Pamela’s blowtorch, then Jordan did not acquire that blowtorch legitimately and therefore has no legal right to own it, let alone decide what to do with it. Thus, the minimal state has a right to confiscate Pamela’s blowtorch and return it to her using the bare amount of force necessary to do so.

Nozick’s theory relies, moreover, on the primacy of individuals’ rights as Kantian self-owners that represent ends in themselves. Individuals are said to be “inviolable” because they possess existences independent of other people. According to Nozick, there is no social entity that undergoes sacrifice for its own good; there are only people within the bounds of the state. Therefore, because there are “only individual people, different individual people,” each person is entitled to his or her individual rights, which may not be sacrificed as means for another person’s ends. Kymlicka suggests that, while the premise that individuals are ends in themselves is valid, Nozick’s property-ownership conclusion does not necessarily follow. Instead, Kymlicka argues that the goods that result from the exercise of self-owned powers cannot adequately be traced to a reliable position whereby they were initially acquired legitimately, thus violating either the premise that individuals are self-owners, or that individuals legitimately owning property means they necessarily obtained that property legitimately in the first place. For instance, land was—for the most part—initially appropriated by force. Generals of olden times, bullies, bandits, barbarians, and so on raided, pillaged, and stole land from people long ago. Thus the assumption that buying land means that that land was initially acquired legitimately does not hold. One could easily claim that, if Alex legitimately bought a plot of land that was stolen from John’s family long ago, then John’s descendants also deserve that land. In other words, any transfer of that land is illegitimate to some degree since that land was not acquired legitimately in the first place. So, true enough that individuals are ends in themselves, but that does not imply their absolute right as property owners.

At least two kinds of freedom constitute liberty, although Nozick accounts for only one. Liberty consists of simple freedoms (what Nozick’s conceptualizes as the entirety of liberty) and complex freedoms. Simple freedoms are, essentially, the freedoms people enjoy from others’ restraint on their actions. In other words, I can freely study in the library because no one stops me from doing so. But liberty also consists of a series of complex freedoms that depend on the actions of other people for them to take shape in the real world. I am free to study in the library not just because no one stops me, but also because someone built the library in the first place. As consisting of both simple and complex freedoms, liberty results from both top-down constraints such as society’s laws and rules, as well as society’s bottom-up structures and public works.

Nozick assumes that liberty only results from top-down, simple freedoms. Take his argument for minimal taxation, for example. According to Nozick, just uses of tax revenue include maintaining the police to prevent against theft, a judicial system to enforce contracts, a military to protect the state’s external borders, and so on, because these uses protect individuals from other people’s attempts to restrain their freedom to transfer their (supposedly legitimately acquired) property as they see fit. In contrast, government expenditures on public works like roads, hospitals, or schools “involve coercive taxation of some people against their will.” Nozick famously gives the example of Wilt Chamberlain to illustrate how, as long as an individual acquires his or her property legitimately, the state is unjustified in anything more than minimal taxation.

Wilt Chamberlain’s contract pays him twenty-five cents for every ticket sold in a home game. Chamberlain, in Nozick’s example, ends up with a hypothetical $250,000 after the season. Nozick argues that any tax on Chamberlain’s income unjustly violates his absolute property rights if it pays for anything except the infrastructure required for protecting others from stealing Chamberlain’s money, or otherwise causing him to transfer it to another person against his will. However, Chamberlain’s freedom to spend his income however he deems fit does not just depend on the state minding its own business; it depends on fans paying tickets to come see him play. Fans who, presumably, drove to games on government-funded roads, or became fans by playing varsity basketball while attending government-funded high schools. Without Nozick’s so-called “coercive” taxation, Chamberlain’s freedom to spend his income is contingent upon market forces—as opposed to state protection—to generate a fan-base through private high schools’ basketball teams and private toll roads that bring people to the stadium. Whether or not the private market would build enough roads and high schools to supplement Chamberlain’s hypothetically lost income through “coercive” taxation is unexplored here, though my hunch is that it is highly unlikely. What I believe confidently, though, is that when the model of liberty consists of both simple and complex freedoms, people’s ability to acquire and transfer wealth freely expands greatly.

Furthermore, in conceptualizing liberty merely as a set of simple freedoms, Nozick glosses over violations of liberty by individual market actors and downplays the validity of people’s complex freedoms. Consider Kymlicka’s example of hypothetical individuals Ben and Amy’s land-owning relationship, which he gives in the context of Nozick’s Lockean proviso. (Nozick’s Lockean proviso states that people can legitimately acquire property rights over a disproportionate share of the world’s material resources as long as no one is left worse off.)

Ben and Amy work a plot of land collectively. Amy, however, appropriates so much of the land that Ben can no longer live off the crops produced by his share. Thus, Ben comes to rely on Amy to provide a wage to compensate him for working a portion of the land for her. This satisfies Nozick’s Lockean proviso because both Ben’s and Amy’s shares of the land’s crop increases through the division of labor, though his increases less than hers. Despite the widening inequality, no one is worse off than they were before. For Nozick, the logical conclusion of the Lockean proviso stipulates a free market of labor and capital in order to protect both individuals’ private property rights. Nozick’s free market conclusion assumes the state to be the primary violator of individual property rights as Amy, a private market actor, fairly compensates Ben through consensual wage labor. According to Nozick, if the state were to regulate either Ben’s ability to contract with Amy or Amy’s willingness to provide a minimum wage, this would infringe upon both parties’ absolute property rights. However, by emphasizing the state’s violation of property rights, Nozick ignores Amy’s illegitimate appropriation of Ben’s land rights. Moreover, Nozick takes Ben’s consent to the wage-labor arrangement as given. More likely, Ben is left with two options: sign the contract and take Amy’s buy-out, or die of starvation since he has no land upon which to grow crops, nor any money to buy food—hardly indicative of freely given consent. In terms of simple freedoms, Nozick’s justification of free market capitalism only protects against violations of freedom committed by the state, not violations that occur amongst individual market actors.

In addition to this tacit legitimation of simple freedom violations by individuals, Nozick’s theory endangers complex freedoms. In the libertarian view, the minimal state is unjustified in coercively taxing citizens in order to redistribute wealth from rich people to poor people. As in Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain example, individuals’ self-ownership leads to ownership over their talents and, by extension, the fruits of their labor. However, individuals only own themselves to the extent that their liberty depends on simple freedoms. Individuals’ freedom also depends more or less equally on the actions of others. Chamberlain’s income depends on publicly funded roads that brought fans to his games. Therefore, the taxation required to build public infrastructure contributes to Chamberlain’s ability to make money rather than detracts from it.

If we are to accept Nozick’s view that the state is never justified in taxing people for things like roads, then we have to accept that our complex freedoms cannot be guaranteed, but only hoped for. Simply put, the endangerment of complex freedoms represents the legitimation of non-minimal state in contrast to libertarians’ viewpoint. Humans’ lives depend on certain freedoms that depend in turn on someone to provide them, but which have no guarantor in a totally free market. For example, a family living in northern Alaska depends on heating, which requires someone (whether the government or an energy company or whomever) to take active steps to ensure that the family’s need is fulfilled. If Chamberlain plays a basketball game in northern Alaska, then the family’s freedom to see his performance relies on their not freezing to death. If an energy company charges a higher price because they cornered the market on heating in northern Alaska, then individuals face potential hypothermia and cannot freely see Chamberlain play, let alone live. Not to mention that now, because the family’s lack of heating limits their ability to see Chamberlain play, Chamberlain’s own freedom to spend his money is limited as he has just lost paying customers. Ultimately, the libertarian reliance on simple freedoms undermines their own premise that the state should not intervene in the individual transfer of property lest it infringe upon such freedoms—without the state, both our simple and complex freedoms may be in jeopardy in an unregulated free market.

Nozick, as a libertarian, privileges simple freedoms and private property rights in a free market system unregulated by a minimal state. People who hold the preponderance of wealth and influence in society are justified so long as they acquired both honestly. Therefore, government regulation, including things like coercive taxation, baseline health and safety standards, or publicly funded infrastructure unjustifiably forces the wealthy to give their property to those in society who have supposedly not earned their fair share. However, simple freedoms make up only one element of liberty, with complex freedoms making up another. Ironically, libertarians ignore at least half of what liberty means.

By claiming that complex freedoms violate individual property rights, libertarians apologize for a system that denies some members of society the freedom to attain even simple freedoms. Libertarian philosophy crucially implies a system where rights and freedoms founded on the rational, self-interested part of humanity triumph, while those founded on empathy and altruism enter into consideration as distinctly subordinate. Under libertarian assumptions, we remain subject to a narrow and dangerous view of freedom predicated on our baser instincts towards individual self-interest. In modern society, these primal instincts no longer hold as we have developed empathy and recognized our role in promoting others’ liberty.

The United States’s Uninvited Guest: Legal Pluralism

The United States has found itself on a cultural breaking point. Currently, two major opinions are coexisting—and clashing heavily—in political society. The first is that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the establishment of an official religion, and in larger interpretation the establishment of the U.S. as a “Christian nation”; the second is the prospect of expanding normative and legal pluralism in the U.S., in favor of legislation determined by Christian values. The issue is more complex than it might initially seem; does the installation of Christian laws make a nation Christian, and did the Founding Fathers want such a thing at all? Although the Fathers forbade an established religion, some politicians argue that this does not negate the presence of Christianity in the government overall. This work argues that expansive legal pluralism in general family law has no place in the United States, not only because of the diverse and non-Christian population of the nation, but also because language in the Constitution and philosophical background of the Founders indicates it was not their intention or desire to found a Christian nation, either officially or informally.

It is important to first determine precisely what legal and normative pluralism mean. Norbert Rouland defines legal pluralism as, “the multiplicity of forms of law present within any social field”. In extension, John Griffiths defines the term as:

[O]ne in which law and legal institutions are not all subsumable within one ‘system’ but have their sources in the self-regulatory activities which may support, complement, ignore or frustrate one another, so that the law’ which is actually effective on the ‘ground floor’ of society is the result of enormously complex and usually in practice unpredictable patterns of competition, interaction, negotiation, isolationism and the like.

A functional example of a culture with recognizable legal pluralism is a country with active Sharia Law. An example discussed here will be Jordan. Now, in the most simplistic of terms, Jordan operates with both Sharia and civil courts. Sharia courts have jurisdiction over personal and familial matters such as Diya and matters concerning Islamic Waqfs. The Personal Status Law of 1976, still enforced today, is also based on Sharia law. However, the Sharia courts are meant for the Muslim population of Jordan; a non-Muslim party can only be taken to court in the Sharia system if he or she consents to submitting to the jurisdiction. Non-Muslim Jordanians subscribe strictly to the civil court, unless they choose otherwise.

Normative pluralism simply dictates “a plurality of bearers of value”. The idea is that there is ultimately one primary value; in the case of the U.S., the likely goal of normative pluralism for some lawmakers and citizens is that that value is Christian morality.  Although everyone can be Christian in different ways, and to varying degrees, ultimately that single religion, or single value, prevails amongst a plurality. While normative plurality works clearly within demographics, it is not so easily applied to the entire United States.

In October of 2010, Delaware U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell questioned the presence of a separation of Church and State being mandatory in the U.S. Constitution. Of course, she was not entirely misled in her questioning: the specific language of “separation of Church and State” does not actually appear in the founding document. In fact, the concept wouldn’t be realized for several years later by Jefferson in a letter. What the First Amendment does say is that the government shall make no law “respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. So, if one only considers this particular line from the First Amendment as representative of the Founders’ full opinion, then it is reasonable to assume that while the United States cannot declare an official religion, the inclusion of religious principles, Christian in particular, are not by any means forbidden.

However, this singular reading would be a mistake. The First Amendment is essentially a written guarantee that the government may not compel nor prohibit the exercise of religion in its state. It is as important to note this distinction, as it is to note that the Founders likely did not intend an atheistic nation. Rather, that men and women would practice their religion of choice in their private lives, without the interference, guidance, support, or opposition of the government. After all, the original Puritans of North America had fled religious persecution of a similar nature in England only a century or two prior.

If the value of private practice is maintained, then, normative and legal pluralism in family law cannot reasonably exist in the United States. For while individual households are free to worship at their leisure, protected by the United States, they cannot also be free to dictate the practices of others by legal declaration. The difficulty is two-fold, of course. First, that the U.S. has become vastly more diversified in culture and religion since the Founding Fathers first wrote down their ideas on the conceptualization of their new nation. The second, that it seems rather unlikely that the Founders, spurred on by hopes of religious and economic freedom, and inspired by the ideology of the Enlightenment, would have condoned Christian superiority and dominance at the expense of others.

Attempting to interpret the will of the Founding Fathers is a risky and elusive effort. To guess the wills and opinions of men who cannot be directly asked is a perilous endeavor, but perhaps it is a venture worth pursuing. After all, there is no doubt that the Enlightenment influenced the Fathers—Jefferson alone, in his devotion to the philosophies of John Locke, is evidence enough of it. In one correspondence, John Adams wrote, “Every Species of these Christians would persecute Deists, as soon as either Sect would persecute another, if it had unchecked and unbalanced power. Nay, the Deists would persecute Christians, and Atheists would persecute Deists, with as unrelenting Cruelty, as any Christians would persecute them or one another. Know thyself, Human Nature!”

Adams’s letter, then, returns us to the religious and political speculations of Senator O’Donnell. In her turn with Democratic opponent Chris Coons, she likely thought she was being clever—for Coons could not reasonably argue that the Constitution claimed a separation of Church and State. But that was 2010. Today, although the sentiment of the Christian nation remains, the discourse surrounding that ideal has morphed. In Rafael Cruz’s A Time for Action: Empowering the Faithful to Reclaim America, Rafael’s son, Ted Cruz, wrote the following in his epilogue to the work: What we are really seeing is an increasing hostility to religious liberty, and to Christians in particular”. Given the lack of significant anti-Christian terror in the U.S., it can be largely assumed that this ‘hostility to religious liberty’ may well be the backlash to the assumption that U.S. law should be dictated by Christian religious platforms.

It is worth noting that many of the issues in the U.S. can be summarized by a lack of precision of language. If violation of religious liberty is defined by an inability to dominate U.S. law with that same religion, then the concept of liberty itself has been deeply misconstrued. Religious liberty in the U.S., after all, is the right of individual and private practice. There is, in fact, an argument to be made that the religious liberty of non-Christians is violated when Christianity dictates the decisions of lawmakers concerning the masses.

A separation of Church and State is not demanded by the Constitution, but it is an implied necessity. As evidenced by lawmakers concerning the legislation surrounding abortion, many find it difficult to disassociate their faith from their authoritative powers. In January of 2016, Ted Cruz attended a pro-life rally, accompanied by many other pro-life leaders, including Iowa conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats. At the event, Vander Plaats said, “I don’t know about you, but I know about me, and 2016, this country hungers and thirsts for a spiritual revival. To turn our hearts back to God, his principle and his precepts”. Cruz himself stated, “Every human life is a precious gift from God and should be protected from the moment of conception until the moment of nature death,” which wouldn’t be such a complicated thing—he is, of course, entitled to hold any given opinion—except that he is also running for one of the most authoritatively powerful positions in the entire world. Cruz and Vander Plaats hold similar opinions to many in the pro-life crowd; their collective voice seek to eliminate Planned Parenthood as an accessible health center for women, and more importantly, to eliminate abortion as a legal medical procedure for those in the U.S. seeking the service.

Politics aside, the issue here is not one of opinion, religion, or even autonomy. It is an issue of language. Private practice is no longer private when one seeks to eliminate the right to choice of other individuals because of their personal prerogatives. An argument exists that the very legality of abortion violates the religious liberty of some Christians—however, this position is not without its fallacies. The primary one of interest here is that this sentiment does not fundamentally align with the nation that the opinion exists in. If the possession of certain rights violates one’s sense of personal liberty, and only nationally enforced laws of religious foundation can right one’s sensibilities, then the United States cannot be a nation of contended residential choice.

Legal plurality in the U.S. simply does not align with the language of its foundations, whatever the current interests of contemporary Christians may be. Even if the Fathers did not declare a separation in those precise words, the first Amendment is not vague on its demands concerning a limitation of religious imposition on others. If legal decisions such as abortion and the institution of marriage are determined based predominately on the religious values of a demographic, then those legislators are in violation of the intentions of the Constitution. The religious prerogatives of politicians cannot determine the lives and decisions of the masses, particularly if there is not a normative pluralism amongst the entire population in favor of such a trend.