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Friday, August 11, 2006

Leftover business V

Whew!  Finally, the end of Leftover Business Week is here.  If you’ve read the whole thing—and even if you haven’t!—thanks for sticking around.  This blog will be taking a short break in the first half of next week while we pack up and drive Nick to college, but I’ll be back after that with the story of The Trip to Syracuse, in which Jamie and I encountered “facilitated communication” for the first time.  You think this left-liberal stuff is difficult and controversial?  Pah.  You ain’t seen nothin’ ‘til you’ve seen the debate in the education/ disability community over “facilitated communication.” (And I wanted to check it out for myself! Is that so wrong?)

I have to admit that I got the idea for this week’s posts partly from a friend in the Left Business Observer listserv, who informed me that my June posting on Chomsky and the Balkans had earned me the distinction (which I shared with some blogger named “Atrios") of being called a “halfwit punk.” But you know what?  I’m a grownup.  I can take it.  After all, sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never . . . ow! Never mind.

What really stung me, though, was being called a “Dissent lib.” Because it’s true, you know—I have indeed written for Dissent in the past, most recently in 2003, and I identify largely with the democratic left that makes up Dissent’s left wing.  The essay I wrote for Dissent was titled “Citizenship and Disability,” and unless I’m missing something, I haven’t seen many Dissent essays on disability.  In the course of the article, I took a crack at revising Nancy Fraser’s Habermasian argument that ideally, societies should be structured toward the goal of enhancing the “participatory parity” of their citizens.  (This doesn’t mean that everybody has to participate.  It means that people should not be barred from participating to the extent of their abilities and desires.) Fraser, you might recall from one of this blog’s least fun Arbitrary But Fun Fridays ever, distinguishes between “the politics of recognition” and “the politics of distribution,” and I’ve long thought that disability issues involve these two kinds of politics so intimately as to blur the distinction:

Fraser has shown convincingly that the politics of recognition and redistribution offer a productive way to think about feminism: cultural politics with regard to body images or sexual harassment, for example, are not to be understood as distractions from “real” politics that address comparative worth or the minimum wage. Rather, recognition politics have consequences for the redistribution of social goods and resources even though they cannot be reduced to their redistributive effects. And since many left intellectuals in the 1990s were all too willing to think of politics as a zero-sum game in which any attention paid to multiculturalism had to come at the expense of democratic socialism and vice versa, Fraser’s work seems to offer a way for the left to champion a progressive tax code and an end to racial profiling at the same time.

It is striking, nonetheless, that so few leftists have understood disability in these terms. Disability is not the only area of social life in which the politics of recognition are inseparable from the politics of redistribution; other matters central to citizenship, such as immigration, reproductive rights, and criminal justice, are every bit as complex. Nonetheless, our society’s representations of disability are intricately tied to, and sometimes the very basis for, our public policies for “administering” disability. And when we contemplate, in these terms, the history of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities, we find a history in which “representation” takes on a double valence: first, in that people who were deemed incapable of representing themselves were therefore represented by a socio-medical apparatus that defined—or, in a social-constructionist sense, created—the category of “feeblemindedness”; and second, in the sense that the visual and rhetorical representations of “feebleminded” persons then set the terms for public policy. One cannot plausibly narrate a comprehensive history of ideas and practices of national citizenship in the post-Civil War United States without examining public policy regarding disability, especially mental disability, all the more especially when mental disability was then mapped onto certain immigrant populations who scored poorly on intelligence tests and were thereby pseudo-scientifically linked to criminality. And what of reproductive rights? By 1927, the spurious but powerful linkages among disability, immigration, poverty, and criminality provided the Supreme Court with sufficient justification for declaring involuntary sterilization legal under the Constitution.

With that argument on board, I then insisted that disability is (or should be) central to any theory of “participatory parity”:

First, the idea of participatory parity does double duty in Fraser’s work, in the sense that it names both the state we would like to achieve and the device by which we can gauge whether we’re getting there. For in order to maintain a meaningful democracy in which all citizens participate as legal and moral equals, the state needs to judge whether its policies enhance equal participation in democratic processes. Yet at the same time, the state needs to enhance equal participation among its citizens simply in order to determine what its democratic processes will be. This is not a meta-theoretical quibble. On the contrary, the point is central to the practical workings of any democratic polity. One of the tasks required of democrats is precisely this: to extend the promise of democracy to previously excluded individuals and groups some of whom might have a substantially different understanding of “participatory parity” than that held by previously dominant groups and individuals.

Could anything make this clearer than the politics of disability? Imagine a building in which political philosophers are debating the value and the purpose of participatory parity over against forms of authoritarianism or theocracy. Now imagine that this building has no access ramps, no Braille or large-print publications, no American Sign Language interpreters, no elevators, no special-needs paraprofessionals, no in-class aides. Contradictory as such a state of affairs may sound, it’s a reasonably accurate picture of what contemporary debate over the meaning of democracy actually looks like. How can we remedy this? Only when we have fostered equal participation in debates over the ends and means of democracy can we have a truly participatory debate over what “participatory parity” itself means. That debate will be interminable in principle, since our understandings of democracy and parity are infinitely revisable, but lest we think of deliberative democracy as a forensic society dedicated to empyreal reaches of abstraction, we should remember that debates over the meaning of participatory parity set the terms for more specific debates about the varieties of human embodiment. These include debates about prenatal screening, genetic discrimination, stem-cell research, euthanasia, and, with regard to physical access, ramps, curb cuts, kneeling buses, and buildings employing what is now known as universal design.

Leftists and liberals, particularly those associated with university humanities departments, are commonly charged with being moral relativists, unable or unwilling to say (even after September 11) why one society might be “better” than another. So let me be especially clear on this final point. I think there’s a very good reason to extend the franchise, to widen the conversation, to democratize our debates, and to make disability central to our theories of egalitarian social justice. The reason is this: a capacious and supple sense of what it is to be human is better than a narrow and partial sense of what it is to be human, and the more participants we as a society can incorporate into the deliberation of what it means to be human, the greater the chances that that deliberation will in fact be transformative in such a way as to enhance our collective capacities to recognize each other as humans entitled to human dignity. As Jamie reminds me daily, both deliberately and unwittingly, most Americans had no idea what people with Down syndrome could achieve until we’d passed and implemented and interpreted and reinterpreted a law entitling them all to a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. I can say all this without appealing to any innate justification for human dignity and human rights, and I can also say this: Without a sufficient theoretical and practical account of disability, we can have no account of democracy worthy of the name.

Do pardon me for all the self-citation, but I’m summing up a big long week here and I have to unload all my cards.

So, then, in What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? (which should be out real soon), I argue that even though I don’t see the utility of arguing for “innate” rights, I do agree that the idea of universal human rights, as Gandhi once said of Western civilization, would be a good idea; and I write that all humans born should be considered to have equal claim to basic rights such as food, shelter, education, health care, and political representation, and that we should endow each other with these rights, knowing full well that they are alienable and that we must work to interpret and to sustain them.  And that none of the above is self-evident, and never has been.  My proposal, then, is that these human rights, as enshrined in the 1948 United Nations Declaration, should accrue to every human born, such that our entitlement to food, shelter, education, health care and political representation is not contingent on our ability to pay for such things.  And that every form of discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability constitutes a violation of the principle of participatory parity. 

Now, I know that I don’t live in such a society myself.  No society that lacks universal health care can plausibly be said to consider medical treatment a human right.  But this framework is a useful regulative ideal, I think, shaky and contingent as it is.  It entails a defense of progressive taxation of income and investments, of course, both to prevent the accumulation of great wealth in few hands (and the consequent degeneration of democracy into plutocracy, ahem) and to create a social welfare state whose task it is to ensure that the life chances of individuals are not radically dependent on mere accidents of birth.  On foreign policy, it entails a liberal internationalism—including the kinds of liberal internationalist thinking about war that brought you the Geneva Convention and “just war” theory, and the liberal internationalist thinking about peace that brought you “The Responsibility to Protect.” But here’s where things get difficult (really! they’ve been easy up to this point), because it’s one thing to oppose violent, fundamentalist, patriarchal, homophobic, and theocratic forces abroad as at home, and it’s quite another to try to figure out what to do in parts of the world, like Iraq, where all the available options seem to be bad ones. As Harold Meyerson notes, after shredding Peter Beinart’s A Fighting Faith into little teeny bits in the most recent issue of Dissent,

But as with Vietnam, the question of how to end the war doesn’t just divide liberals. It divides liberal internationalists, because liberal internationalism doesn’t guarantee a common set of responses, because liberal internationalism is an incomplete guide at best to how the United States should conduct itself in the world. I have liberal internationalist comrades of long standing at both this magazine and at the New Republic who, swept along by the moral claims of Kanan Makiya or the moral repulsiveness of Saddam Hussein, abandoned their political judgment to back a war that has led to predictable catastrophe. (I say “predictable” because a number of liberal internationalists predicted it.) We agree, my liberal warhawk friends and I, on the importance of liberal internationalism. Apparently, we don’t always agree on what it means, or even, at times, what it is.

But if this sounds like wrestling a fog bank, well, welcome to the world: liberal internationalism is no more or less stable a term than liberal democracy.  It has to be argued over.  (Among other things, at the moment this requires liberal internationalists to argue, as Meyerson does, that the war in Iraq did great damage to, among other things, the ideals of liberal internationalism.) As I write in Liberal Arts about my universal-rights state,

We have not yet devised the political means to realize this utopian vision, and perhaps we never will:  utopia, to date, is a place we know only by way of speculative fiction.  But over the years, as we’ve developed family/clan relations, city-states, empires, kingdoms, caliphates, constitutional monarchies, theocracies, military dictatorships, communist autocracies and liberal democracies, we’ve come to learn that liberal democracies stand the best chance of realizing some approximation of that ideal, and—just as importantly—the best chance of changing their collective minds, so to speak, about how to approximate the ideal as they go along.  Because they allow for plural, disparate, multiply competing political constituencies and modes of advancing political argument, liberal democracies seem best suited to realizing the kind of social self-reflexivity necessary for any significant political—or personal—change of understanding with regard to human rights.

But universalism with regard to rights and liberal internationalism with regard to foreign policy will perform a very useful function for any useful left: they will absolutely prevent you from expressing even the slightest degree of “solidarity” with Hezbollah, or the Iraqi resistance, or Slobodan Milosevic, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, simply on the grounds that they are opposing the Hegemon, the Empire.  And it will save you from the contortions involved in blanket defenses of guys with very mixed records, like Castro: you don’t have to say, “Castro improved the quality of life for the poor and for racial minorities, so I defend Cuban political repression and homophobia as revolutionary anti-imperialist political repression and homophobia as opposed to reactionary imperialist political repression and homophobia.” You can simply use the single universal-rights standard and apply it everywhere—even (or especially!) at home, wherever your home may be.  Societies in which women are educated are that much better than societies in which women are barred from attending school.  Societies that repress (or execute) gay men are that much worse than societies that do not.  You get the idea.

And you can apply it to all the multiple orthogonal axes you like: employment and labor law, transportation policy, taxation, education, and of course disability in all its many guises.  For environmental protection, you have also to consider our obligations to future human generations as well as nonhuman entities, but I’ll turn that one over to Chris Clarke.

And so, friends, Romans, countrymen, just to tie off one last loose end, this is why I got upset with that Mr. Chomsky last June, even though I’m well aware that he’s OK with things like participatory parity.  In his June 19 New Statesman interview, he’d said, in re the massacre of thousands of civilians at Srebrenica,

not only did Milosevic not order it, but he had no knowledge of it.

Lately I’ve been reading a great deal of Chomsky’s recent work, so this little item came across the transom at just the wrong time, and I went after it with all the frustration and sense of dismay with which I’d been perusing his writings on the Balkans (this time, with the help of some real live experts on the Balkans).  For someone like me who just loved the way Chomsky would take down apologists for U.S.-supported death squads and proxy fascists in Central America twenty years ago, reading the Balkans stuff has been a depressing experience.  And yet, the myth persists that people like me take exception to Chomsky at such moments only because, as one of my commenters suggested in June, we’re missing some internal organs:

A lot of faux lefties hate Chomsky, because Chomsky says the things they want to say, but are too gutless to.

Well, as I hope I made clear on Wednesday, I don’t hate Chomsky.  Not at all.  I just think he’s been wrong about the Balkans, being mortal and all, and that he’s lately fallen into a curious habit of exaggerating U.S. actions, from the 1998 bombing of al-Shifa (a crime for which there should have been a U.N. investigation and U.S. reparations, as Ken Roth argued, but not really far worse than 9/11, as Chomsky repeatedly insists) to the brief interruption of Pakistani aid convoys to Afghanistan, beyond the point at which a serious moral accounting of such things is possible.

And now that this week is over, I hope there isn’t anyone out there who thinks that somewhere inside my progressive-left body there is a hidden Bérubé yearning to breathe free and say, “Milosevic never knew about Srebrenica, and he was horrified when he heard about it,” and all that’s preventing his emergence is my candy-assed faux-left superego.  Because to date, I have refrained from saying such things not because I am too timid to do so but because I have absolutely no desire to do so.

It really is that simple.

Chomsky, I will note, is not a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic.  However, when Chomsky says, “Milosevic didn’t know about Srebrenica, and was horrified when he heard about it,” I do object, and I think you should too.  Quite apart from the fact that this is a speculative remark that takes Milosevic’s report at face value (something we would never do with Bush or Cheney, I would hope), it is completely gratuitous.  As many readers pointed out to me, Chomsky was making the larger point that if Milosevic can be tried for war crimes, so too can recent U.S. presidents.  Very well, then!  There are lots of good ways to make that point.  You can, for instance, say

if Milosevic can be tried for war crimes, so too can recent U.S. presidents.

That’s straightforward and to the point, and it doesn’t involve any poor-innocent-Slobodan noises. 

As I tried to make clear in my initial post, I don’t think Chomsky himself has gone around the bend on this one, the way Michael Parenti, Diana Johnstone, and Ed Herman have.  But because of Chomsky’s iconic status on one wing of the left, I worry that over the next couple of years, we’re going to hear thousands of good-hearted, well-meaning people saying, “As Chomsky pointed out, Milosevic didn’t even know about Srebrenica, and was horrified when he heard about it,” in the belief that this constitutes the One True Left position on the matter.  And you know what?  I have good reason to worry about that.  I have, in fact, already come across people on blogs saying, “turns out they never did have any evidence with which to prosecute Milosevic.” That’s just how these things tend to work.

And yet, I have to admit that I am not a very good Chomsky critic.  I just keep messing things up.  I keep thinking that people will see what’s wrong with trying to clear Milosevic’s name here and there—or, more accurately, with merely quoting sources that try to clear Milosevic’s name here and there—and I proceed accordingly, sometimes too breezily.  Personally, I just don’t see the point of the Milosevic-never-knew argument at all.  There are all kinds of reasons, procedural and practical, why people on the left might have opposed NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo, none of which involve any attempt to downplay or deny Serbian atrocities in the 1990s.  (It did, after all, lead one set of liberal internationalists to try to make a “humanitarian intervention” argument for war in Iraq, and even though Ken Roth smacked that one down hard, it must be factored into, cough, any serious moral accounting of the consequences of Kosovo.) And I thought Ian Williams covered most of those reasons quite well (and quite fairly, given his own qualified support for the intervention) in the review I cited in June.

But when I came upon those remarks of Chomsky’s that seemed to downplay or deny Serbian atrocities in the 1990s, I charged that he was peddling “a pack of lies.” This was an especially stupid mistake on my part, rhetorically speaking, because it pretty well insured that some people wouldn’t read any further, or that they would place me squarely in the Obsessive Chomsky-Bashers Camp alongside all manner of foul right-wing apologists for thugs as bad as Milosevic or worse (David Horowitz the Pinochet apologist included).  I’ve been around this block once or twice before, and I should have known better.  For the record, then, for “a pack of lies” I will substitute “a series of misleading claims that leave a very mistaken impression of the conflict in the Balkans since the breakup of Yugoslavia” (other language can be found here), and I’ll refer those of you who are interested in such things to a detailed and thoughtful review to which Chomsky has never really responded adequately, except to note its author’s “depravity” and “really impressive level of vulgarity and disciplined subordination to power.”

In the meantime, I’ll repeat what I said six weeks ago: I would be so much happier if Chomsky were to take a moment to criticize the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic.  I think that would be just great.  Because, in my humble opinion, the left should have no part in such an enterprise, any more than we would take part in the International Committee to Defend Augusto Pinochet.

Or the International Committee to Defend Henry Kissinger.

Or the International Committee to Promote the Triumph of the Iraqi Maquis.

Or the International Committee to Point Out that Osama Bin Laden is Higher on the Moral Scale than Bush/Cheney.

Or the International Committee to Assert That We Are All Hezbollah Now.

Because that’s not the kind of thing a universal-rights, liberal-internationalist left does.  For people who think that “the left” consists of opposing the Empire and supporting anyone or anything who does likewise, the argument of this week’s series has been just this: another left is possible.

_____________

Postscript

I promised in Monday’s comments that I would end this series with an example of a time when someone to my left was right and I was entirely wrong.  It’s a small example, but a telling one.  Because the occupational hazard of democratic lefties like me is that sometimes, we hop on the bandwagon of potentially charismatic Democrats before we know where they’re taking us.

Barack Obama, for example.

People who’ve been reading this blog ever since it was a young newsie yelling “extra!” on the corner of Main and Elm will remember that it once dreamed of the Obama / Bérubé Democratic ticket, so intently that at one point in 2004, some blog entries consisted of nothing but “Obama + Bérubé” written over and over again in different styles of handwriting.  (This is before they discovered “kerning” and proportional spacing on blogs.)

Well, after Obama’s keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, Paul Street at Z was kind of skeptical about the guy, and just over two years ago, I got all huffy at Mr. Street, largely because he said things like “the world view enunciated in Obama’s address comes from a very different, bourgeois-individualist and national-narcissist moral and ideological space.” At the time, I said I would have preferred something more like “Obama’s speech had its moments, and was clearly meant to represent the progressive wing of the Democratic party, but before everybody swoons too hard, let’s remind ourselves that there were a few passages in there that merit criticism from the left,” and I thought Street’s response smacked of lefty purism.  I think the “bourgeois-individualist” line got me.

But you know what?  Paul Street was right to be skeptical about Obama, and I was wrong to give him grief.  If he’ll accept my apology, great.  If not, so be it, but I offer it sincerely nonetheless.

Posted by Michael on 08/11 at 09:33 AM
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