D'accord
Via Andrew Sullivan, chin-pulling by French philosopher Jacques Derrida on the idea of "September 11":

"...For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. The telegram of this metonymy - a name, a number - points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about." [emphasis added]

I don't follow all of that, but I think Derrida is on to something there at the end. Certainly in his own case, anyway. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:49:00 PM -- |  

 
German blogger series: expatriates in America and Germany (IV)
Peter Praschl, who authors most of the posts on "le sofa blogger," is an Austrian living in Hamburg. No matter what he says, that qualifies him for "expat" status in my book, so I included him in the list of folks I e-mailed my questions about "expatriate" blogging.

Peter Praschl was the first blogger I profiled once upon a time in this occasional series on German bloggers. The story concerned Praschl's electronic pillorying by a German columnist named Willemsen, regarding Praschl's nonpacifist attitudes towards the Taliban et al, and also mentioned Praschl's reaction to 9/11.*

I've linked to a number of items of Praschl's since then, such as his reactions to a Jane Kramer piece about Germany, or a list of provocative (to me, too) questions about the looming war in Iraq, or interesting Internet finds like the New York City meta story site Mr. Beller's Neighborhood.

I've decided (with Praschl's permission**) to simply print Praschl's e-mail, to acquaint non-German speakers better with him. His (misplaced) concerns about his English notwithstanding, the "voice" is quite the same as his German commentary, so I think it's a good introduction to one of my daily reads.

Enough chitchat. Here's the e-mail, with the occasional link to some supporting item from "le sofa blogger":

Expat? Sounds way too glamorous for me. I moved from Vienna to Hamburg 16 years ago. Which of course is a move from Austria to Germany. But it was not a big step. Just happened to find a more interesting job in another city, and when you are a journalist in Vienna, the capital of a very small country, the more interesting jobs are in Munich or Hamburg, where all the media corporations are located. Think of moving from Los Angeles to New York and you get the picture. Yes, sometimes I do get homesick (the Viennese savoir vivre, the nightlife, the coolness, the art scene), yes, sometimes I do hate these bloody krauts and piefkes (their tightness, their depressions, their whining, you name it, every cliché is true...), but it is okay here. Got a girlfriend, an ex-girlfriend, two kids, a bunch of friends, some great hangouts, a gym and whatever one needs for feeling at home at a certain place. And I really do like being a foreigner: you always have the option to think "ah, that´s the way THEY are", you have the privilege to decide whether you are just a curious voyeur or you already belong to them (which one does, after 15 years). And the country you come from is distant enough not to wreck your nerves.

One thing I have to confess: I enjoy driving the love of my life crazy with calling every stupid driver, Bavaria Munich striker, talkshow host, inpolite waiter (etc. etc.) a Nazi. And giving her long rants about all the Nazis surrounding my tortured existence. And expecting her to listen to me, nodding. Which she does not. Luckily...

When I moved to Germany in 1987 there were no weblogs. There was not even an internet. So starting a blog has nothing to do with being an expat. It just began for the same reasons most webloggers know: you want to give it a try, and then you are hooked. But I do read a lot of Austrian weblogs (and weblogs by Austrians living in Germany), and it often occurs to me that a lot of them are more interesting than German weblogs: more general interest, more subjectivity, more idiosyncracies, less geekdom, less newsfeeds. Austrian culture tends to be more hedonistic, more playful than German culture, and sometimes you will notice that.

"Can you point to political or other views that have been changed or deepened by being an expatriate?"

Tough question. I really do not know. I did not like German politics before I came here, and since I came my dislikes have only grown. So, let´s say, my understanding just deepened... Before moving to Germany I always suspected them to just wait for playing a big role again, now I KNOW. And the box I would say I belong in - hedonist leftists with highbrow cultural interests, mild bourgeois manners, liberal lifestyle attitudes and a sense of taking things not too serious - is smaller in protestant Germany than it was in Vienna. And I hate the Anti-american mainstream, the moral snobbery, the moral hypocrisies here. Every day, every time I turn on T.V. But, guess what, I found out that there´s a lot of Germans who think and feel the same.

Will I ever go back to Austria? I don´t think so, but you never know. I definitely would prefer to move to Paris or to Bangkok than to either stay here or go back to Vienna, and maybe one day I will be able to. Which, after all these years, would really make me an expat.

As always, pardon my terrible English.

All the best, Peter [links added]

The long-simmering Austro-German feud bubbles to the surface! One of Praschl's pet peeves is about Germans listing Austrians like Mozart as German, and generally acting as if Austria is a mere extension of Germany. As Praschl says, he enjoys being a foreigner; being involuntarily defined as a countryman is understandably irritating.

Americans often don't realize the strong national and regional differences within Germany, let alone German-speaking Europe -- just as Europeans can be wrong to try to shoehorn Americans into a one-size-fits-all portrait of a country featuring New Orleans, West Virginia, New York City, the South, the North, Maine, Los Angeles, and on and on.

Given the shared language and overlapping culture, and the long time Praschl has spent in Germany, it's not surprising that being an expatriate has less to do with Praschl's blog than the others I've profiled. However, the "foreigner's privilege" applies: Praschl tweaks German conventional wisdom and politics regularly. Whether because of, despite, or unrelated to that, his blog is one of the German language "A-list" blogs, i.e., it's one of the most widely blogrolled German language blogs.

I thought I might be able to synthesize some non-trite Grand Unified Theory of Expatriate Blogging from my various e-mail correspondences, but I haven't been up to that challenge. As I wrote earlier, I think the bloggers I've profiled combine the adventurousness needed to pull up stakes and move to a new country, often a certain detachment about any countries or their cultures, and a desire to write -- just not necessarily about the ex-pat experience or cultural differences.

I suppose I respond to them because I've been -- however briefly -- an ex-pat myself, living in Germany for two years as a boy (Juelich) and two more at college age (Tuebingen). Though long ago, those times are still precious to me, and I can only wish I'd written more -- indeed, that I'd written much of anything -- while I was living them. So once again, this blog isn't about you, dear reader, it's about me. Me, me, me.

Anyhow, thanks for the e-mail, Peter. Take care!


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* All of which would be worth reading in the original -- once they're available again. Some kind of mixup with the old "digitalien.org" files has resulted in "403" errors when I try to view them. They're not lost; the plan is to move them all to the new "arrog.antville" site. But there's a second problem, a Blogger glitch that turned umlauts into "?"s, so that a great deal of repair work is needed.
** Throughout this expatriate series, I've given each person being profiled a chance to read and comment about the piece before I published it. The result has been a lot more pleasant for me than my usual practice of sweating bullets about whether I've misunderstood someone. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:42:00 AM -- |  

 
Virtues of their own? Eugene Genovese and the slaveholding South
Ever since reading it, I've gone back to it time and again, partly baffled, partly intrigued, partly annoyed. It's a recent article in The New Republic -- God Without Thunder -- a book review by Eugene Genovese of America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, by Mark A. Noll.

Genovese gets to his point early on:

America's God features a civil war between "proponents of alternate versions of the same ideology made up of evangelical religion, republican political principles, and commonsense moral reasoning." Yet Noll acknowledges that the South remained closer than the North to "the deferential, class-stratified, and socially organic" republicanism of the eighteenth century. Southerners tended to view "commercial individualism as the enemy of republican liberty." Noll's acute recognition of "alternate versions" trips over his reservations. The problem arises from his acceptance of Lincoln's grand but historically dubious assertion that Northerners and Southerners "read the same Bible, and pray to the same God." Southerners did not think so [...] they charged liberals with espousing an essentially different religion. [link added]

The paragraph illustrates all that is interesting but ultimately misleading about Genovese's argument. Lincoln's assertion may have not taken the doctrinal differences of Northern and Southern churchgoers into account. But such differences presumably didn't have the power to change heaven itself; Northerners and Southerners themselves had to believe that they prayed to the same God, regardless of differing understandings of what that belief required of them. Genovese’s own description of the theological dispute as a “civil war” doesn’t contradict Lincoln’s point -- it underlines it.


Thou shalt not condemn slavery
The prevailing antebellum Southern view of Christianity was that the Bible was ambivalent on the subject of slavery, if not downright supportive of it. Again, Genovese:

The pro-slavery arguments were straightforward. Nothing in the Old Testament condemns slavery. The great patriarch Abraham and other of God's worthies held slaves with God's blessing. Solomon built the Temple with slave labor as well as a corvée. Jesus drove moneychangers, not slaveholders, from the Temple. Every church mentioned in connection with the Apostles included slaves and slaveholders. Neither Jesus nor the Apostles uttered a word against slavery, much less declared it sinful.

By contrast, as Genovese notes, some Northern clergymen were declaring that if the Bible could be shown to sanction slavery, it should be discarded as the devil's own book. That sounds about right to me, but it's a bridge too far for Genovese, who continues:

By the 1830s abolitionists were leading the war against Christian orthodoxy. They unfolded an interpretation of higher law that played the Spirit of the Bible against the Word and then transformed the Holy Spirit, as objectively manifested in the Word, into the subjective spirit or opinion of every man. Thus they transformed conscience from being the impress of the Holy Spirit on men's minds into a higher standard than the Word. Noll, his verbal restraint notwithstanding, demonstrates that rejection of the letter for the spirit undermined belief in Christianity itself.

At first I was tempted to dismiss this as so much hocus pocus, but the theological issues are similar to familiar political ones. Awkwardly put: does the trajectory of political or theological growth matter as much as the holy or founding words we acknowledge as the basis of our beliefs, or the basis of our politics? Even if the Bible doesn't condemn slavery at every possible turn, isn't the growing emphasis on love and mercy to all mankind within its pages more persuasive than details about Abraham's household? How do "Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him," "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," or "whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them" rank in Genovese's view of the Bible -- just a handful more words to be weighed against those describing Solomon's work crews?

Similarly, if the Constitution doesn't directly address, say, homosexual rights, or even once enshrined slavery as a given, can't founding principles like those in the Declaration of Independence or evolving standards of human dignity prompt reinterpretation of the nation's purpose and direction? As Garry Wills writes in Lincoln at Gettysburg, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address accomplished -- or at least midwifed -- a revolution in Constitutional understanding, grafting the assertions of equality in the Declaration to the enlightened pessimism of the Constitution. Aren't such re-evaluations at least as necessary as orthodoxy to an enduring nation?


Genovese's long strange trip
Obviously, I think so. Genovese, on the other hand, seems to favor a very "strict constructionist" approach to human affairs; he's certainly scathing about what he sees as dishonest attempts to reinterpret Scripture.* His conservatism is surprising if you, like me, only know Genovese superficially as the author of Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. The book was a groundbreaking look at the culture of American slaves, documenting in detail how vibrant, multifaceted, and pragmatically resistant to slavery that culture was. But because Genovese was a thorough historian of American slaves, he was necessarily also a historian of their 'owners,' and somewhere along the line, a self-avowed Marxist who abhorred slavery still found himself sympathizing with some of the arguments (some would say contortions) the slaveholding class used to justify and defend their way of life. As Genovese wrote somewhat defensively in the preface to "Roll, Jordan, Roll":

And if I have tried to present the slaveholders not as monsters but as human beings with solid virtues of their own, my intention has hardly been to spare them condemnation for their crimes.

Elsewhere in the book, he elaborates:

The slaveholders' pretensions accompanied their counterattack on free labor as wage slavery, their increasing rejection of egalitarian doctrines, and their defense of the subordination of class to class in all societies. [...]

If [the slaveholder's ideology] was ... self-serving and radically false in its fundamental philosophical content, so is every other ruling-class ideology. [emphases added]

In the respectful but critical essay Right Church, Wrong Pew, Alex Lichtenstein considers Genovese's career, and writes:

...Genovese insisted that his readers take the southern defense of slavery seriously as an authentic expression of class rule, rather than as a hypocritical pretense designed to paper over naked human exploitation and greed. Further, in the pro-slavery ideology he detected a marked hostility to the emergent market-based bourgeois society of the antebellum North: in short, a constellation of values that developed in self-conscious opposition to the world-view associated with the expansion of modern capitalist social relations. [...]

Genovese recognized that slavery, even at its most patriarchal, always rested on physical compulsion. In its complexity, historicity, and sheer dialectical power Genovese's account of how a ruling class did in fact rule in a markedly unjust system proved compelling. Nevertheless, even among his admirers, there was always a nagging doubt that he was somehow letting the slavocracy off the hook just a little too much. Even then he claimed that slaveholders "stood for a world different from our own that is worthy of our sympathetic attention" and that "the values they held still have something to offer." [...]

Much of this early work now can be reread in light of Genovese's recent repudiation of Marxism, his turn to the right, and his excoriation of his comrades on the left. I suspect he might actually deny the first two charges, while gladly pleading guilty to the third. [...]

As Genovese sees it, the personal liberation championed by sectors of the New Left and the tradition this has bequeathed to today's social movements, is nothing but the other side of the false coin of radical individualism embedded in the market-oriented capitalist society radicals claim to abjure.

Genovese seemed to hold that slaveholders were admirable to the extent that they assailed that other evil, market capitalism -- regardless of the essentially paternalistic, feudal, racist vision that was the true heart of their philosophy, and that enriched so many so handsomely.

Moreover, far from accusing such people or their apologists of cherrypicking Judeo-Christian lore, Genovese -- although reportedly an atheist -- sees this as a principled defense of orthodoxy. That may betray an ex-Marxist's continued sympathy for infallible, detailed authority. It may also signal impatience with the possibility that not just the clash of economic forces, but ideologies -- including interpretations of the Bible more legitimate than Genovese is willing to concede -- might have accounted for much opposition to slavery.

Lichtenstein writes that

Genovese's recent work [chokes off] southern conservative thought from its material base in the defense of racial inequality and the exploitation of black labor. ... "If this is a Marxist," crowed the reviewer of The Southern Front in The American Spectator, "then we really must have more of them." [link added]

I would say if anticapitalism or theological orthodoxy could be employed in defense of slavery (and its Jim Crow followons), we should give such positions less respect, not more.


Adams and Calhoun: one ruling class debate
William Lee Miller, in his excellent book Arguing About Slavery, recounts an 1820 discussion John Quincy Adams recorded he had with John Calhoun** that provides a firsthand look at such contortions:

...I said that this confounding of the ideas of servitude and labor was one of the bad effects of slavery: but he thought it attended with many excellent consequences. It did not apply to all kinds of labor -- not for example, to farming [...] It was only manual labor -- the proper work of slaves. No white person could descend to that. [...]

And it was the best guarantee to equality among the whites. It produced an unvarying level among them. It did not excite, but did not even admit of inequalities, by which one white man could domineer over another. [...]

I told Calhoun I could not see things in the same light. It is, in truth, all perverted sentiment -- mistaking labor for slavery and dominion for freedom. [...]

In the abstract, they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim all participation in the introduction of it, and cast it all upon the shoulders of our old Grandam Britain. But when probed to the quick on it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen who labor for subsistence. [...] It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice...

In one short passage, Adams' common sense skewered what Genovese's historical analysis relativizes and sifts for useable parts; Adams saw two hundred years ago that there was nothing there. Moreover, Adams belonged to an American political dynasty; clearly, not every ruling class ideology was equally "self serving and radically false."


Final thoughts
Genovese doesn't need any excuses for his break with communism. It's odd, though, that he looks to Southern conservatism to oppose the excesses of American capitalism. Lichtenstein, I think, is on firmer ground in looking to Southern institutions like the Highlander Center, or, say, SOCM (Save Our Cumberland Mountains), for this kind of inspiration. Personally, I would add populist, nonracist -- and admittedly fallible -- people like LBJ, Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton and their supporters to the honor roll of decent Southern politics.

That is to say, there are honorable moderate and/or progressive Southern histories, too. But other than occasional flashes of insight, or exceptions that prove the rule like Mary Chesnut or the Grimke sisters, you're not going to find such history leafing through the diaries of slave holding plantation owners. Genovese seems to confuse their self serving, 19th century spin on slavery with a principled stand worth taking seriously. It's easy to forget that injustice is wont to say "it was ever thus," present the status quo as the will of God, and urge us to prefer the ease of inaction to the challenge of reform.



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* I haven't read Noll's book, but judging from Genovese's review, Noll shares Genovese's concerns about some abolitionist clergy arguments, although he ultimately agrees with Lincoln's Second Inaugural summation.
** At the time, both were in President James Monroe's cabinet, Adams as Secretary of State and Calhoun as Secretary of War. Adams would become the sixth President of the United States, while Calhoun would go on to become a Senator from South Carolina, and the chief antebellum spokesman of the slave states.

EDIT, 9/28: Added section titles. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:40:00 PM -- |  

 
Amina Lawal update
The New York Times reports that Amina Lawal, a Nigerian woman facing execution by stoning for adultery under Islamic Shariah law, will go free. An international petition drive had been mounted to protest her case. But the Nigerian appeals court's decision was made on the basis of the details of the case, and not on general principles:

The Islamic appeals panel ruled the conviction couldn't stand because Lawal wasn't given enough time to understand the charges against her; only one judge, instead of the required three, presided at her trial; and she was not caught in the act of sex out of wedlock.

That third item presumably makes stonings in Nigeria any time soon in Nigeria unlikely -- but not impossible. But for now, one woman has escaped that fate, and that will have to do. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:40:00 AM -- |  

 
Reproductive cloning update
Andy Coghlan of the New Scientist reports that leading scientific academies support banning reproductive cloning (bringing a cloned baby to term), but not therapeutic cloning (harvesting cloned stem cell tissue for medical use):

... 'Human reproductive cloning is unsafe, and no responsible scientist would attempt it given the huge health risks that are involved,' said Yves Quéré of the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues, which launched the joint declaration in Trieste, Italy on behalf of the 63 academies. [...]

Richard Gardner, chair of the Royal Society's recent studies into stem cell research and cloning, said that all species cloned so far had suffered problems. "In all these studies, we see fetal attrition, overgrowth, and poor survival after birth," he says.

"The most striking problem is that of abnormal development of the placenta," said Gardner, adding that in women this could trigger a life-threatening form of placental cancer. [link added]

I've argued that reproductive cloning should be banned: the research involved would necessarily involve experimentation on nonconsenting humans -- humans developed well past any reasonable argument about their status. From the IAP statement:

Scientific research on reproductive cloning in other mammals shows that there is a markedly higher than normal incidence of fetal disorders and loss throughout pregnancy, and of malformation and death among newborns. There is no reason to suppose that the outcome would be different in humans. There would thus be a serious threat to the health of the cloned individual, not just at birth but potentially at all stages of life – without obvious compensating benefit to the individual bearing this threat. Moreover, death of a fetus late in pregnancy could pose a serious threat to the health of the woman carrying it.

The news here for me is that people in the field appear to agree, and that specific medical risks are becoming apparent. Among the signatories are the National Academy of Sciences (US), the Royal Society (UK), and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

I also agree, however, that research on "therapeutic cloning" should proceed; that position is unfortunately not shared by the U.S. delegation to the UN. A Costa Rican measure calling for a global ban on both kinds of cloning may be considered by a UN legal committee this week or next. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:58:00 AM -- |  

 
Darth Vader's Theme
Via Gary Farber, a USC Daily Trojan account of John Ashcroft's visit to Boston University:

Ashcroft was bombarded by cries of 'Shame!' and the sound of the 'Imperial Death March' from the movie 'Star Wars' as he entered a meeting with law enforcement officials in Faneuil Hall.

Gary's title is excellent, the force was with him.

Incidentally, thanks to one Ginger D., I now know that the actual title is "Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme)," and it was played in 'The Empire Strikes Back,' not 'Star Wars.'


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UPDATE, 9/24: Both .wav sound files are now via the entertaining Star Wars enthusiast site Mos Eisely. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:56:00 PM -- |  

 
Worth reading...
A few items from around BlogWorld and beyond:

Andreas Schaefer -- profiled in these pages earlier this month -- has posted a piece about his weekend jaunt to Las Vegas to take in Blue Man Group (known to most of us as those mute, blue Intel creatures) and Second City. Read it if you're interested in the seedy side of Sin City, and/or in an enthusiastic review of the blue people, and/or in a nice snapshot of a weird place. Interestingly, the post is in English; I may get to take a little credit for that.

The Democratic National Committee is publishing a blog called "Kicking Ass." It's actually pretty good.

Via Matthew Yglesias, "Reassigning Tim Russert," an oldie (2001) but goodie Washington Monthly forum featuring journalists' suggestions on improving the quality of press coverage in D.C. Featured: Timothy Noah (Slate), Jon Rowe (W.Mthly), Scott Shuger (Slate), Matthew Cooper (Time), and much, much more -- all of it worth reading. Especially Rowe.

Also via Yglesias, a Todd Gitlin piece on "national greatness" and "Bobo" discoverer David Brooks that closes:

It will be enjoyable to read Brooks over the coming years, urging conservatives to cut loose from the Saudi Wahhabites' oil. But it would be instructive to see him try to draw the line between greatness and smugness.

Doug Turnbull has two good posts on Paul Berman's "Terror and Liberalism" book. In the second one, he suggests that Qutb's ideas by themselves aren't enough to explain the rise of Islamism-fascism. The classic tensions of modernization, between urban and rural populations, may be the real story:

I believe that [...] economic nostalgia is an undercurrent in all the appeals of Qutb and other Islamist scholars for a return to the Caliphate. It is not so much the explicit religious appeals to the past that drive their popularity, but their implicit economic ones.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:30:00 PM -- |