Saturday, August 25, 2007

Political Corruption and Incompetence in New Jersey, Torricelli and Milgram.

Raymond Hernandez and David W. Chen, "Now a Lobbyist, Ex-Senator Uses Campaign Money," The New York Times, August 24, 2007, at p. A1.
Kareem Fahim and David W. Chen, "Police Voice Concerns Over a Directive on Immigrants," in The New York Times, August 24, 2007, at p. B5.


"When he was running for the United States Senate from New Jersey in 2002, Robert G. Torricelli collected donations from thousands of people who apparently wanted to see him re-elected. They might be surprised to see how he spent a portion of their money."

"Mr. Torricelli, a Democrat who was one of the Senate's most flamboyant personalities and prodigious fund raisers, abruptly quit the 2002 race amid allegations of ethical misconduct and became a lobbyist. Since then he has given $4,000 from his campaign fund to Puerto Rico's non-voting member of Congress, $10,000 to Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois and more than $40,000 to Nevada Democratic Party organizations and candidates linked to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid."

Torricelli was (and is) reputed to be a saint compared to Menendez. Is Harry Reid the Jersey Boys' protection in the U.S. Congress? I hope not.

"All of those politicians had one thing in common: influence over Mr. Torricelli's, or his client's, business interests."

"In early 2006, for instance, Mr. Torricelli contributed $10,000 from his Senate account to the mayor of Trenton and his slate of City Council candidates, just as city agencies were reviewing an ultimately successful proposal by the former Senator to develop retail and office space in the city."

Torricelli's application was successful? What a surprise. The article hints at an unsavory alliance between Mr. Torricelli and Mr. Doria, a well-known political enforcer in Hudson County, New Jersey -- which is home base for mob activity in the U.S., allegedly. I wonder why things are so cozy for the mob in New Jersey? Badda-bing, badda-boom!

The rest of this long front page article is a depressing litany of examples of Torricelli purchasing personal business advantages with political contributions through a loophole in the laws allowing for candidates to make political contributions with campaign money, but prohibiting use of that money for personal expenses. The campaign funds are spent on buying the influence that translates into filthy lucre for Torricelli and his clients.

What else is new?

Menendez gets his buddies jobs with big developers who are benefitting from federal generosity, then some of that generosity probably comes back to papa under the table or through some legal rubric that preserves the letter of the law while violating its spirit. "I'm for all the people," Senator Bob said.

Meanwhile, New Jersey's baby attorney general (Anne Milgram) is losing what little respect she had with law enforcement professionals through incompetence, as in her recent immigration notice proposal: "One local police chief called it a publicity stunt. In a sheriff's office, the directive was passed out at roll call, by officials anxious to quickly comply. [Irony?] Another chief -- one of many who spoke on the condition he not be named for fear of ruffling the feathers of the state's top law enforcement officer -- said it seemed like a recipe for racial profiling."

Intimidation of persons considering whether to make use of their Constitutional rights is also routine in the Garden State.

"A day after New Jersey's attorney general, Anne Milgram, ordered local law enforcement agencies to start inquiring about the immigration status of the people they arrest, local officials and advocates for immigrants across the state began grappling with how the edict would change the already complicated relationship between the authorities and immigrants on the streets they patrol."

My guess is that cops will not be pressured to worry about the immigration status of people from, say, Norway. Probably, it is only brown and black people who will get the magnifying glass treatment.

"... Many expressed particular concern about the consequences for victims of domestic violence, who are often already reluctant to report their partners to the police."

The rest of this article contains no surprises and offers little that had not been expected by police officers who regard this attorney general, Anne Milgram, as yet another political hack and well-educated moron, placed over them for "show" purposes, who is (and will remain) mostly irrelevant to the realities of law enforcement in New jersey. (Alterations and insertion of "errors" in this essay will help prove my point.)

Unless Anne does something quickly to dispel this notion that she's an idiot with a nice degree, this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy for Ms. Milgram, who will someday be the next Nadine Strossen -- if she's lucky. My fear is that residents will wind up with yet another mediocre or worse judge on the Superior Court bench. Is Corzine also increasingly irrelevant to real power in New Jersey? I suspect so. You can say what you want about Speaker Roberts, Senator Codey, or "Prince of Darkness," Norcross -- those guys ain't stupid.

"Whatever, duh." Ms. Milgram said to a passing microphone.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Is Science the Last Religion?

August 18, 2007 at 4:51 P.M., letters began to be deleted as I was working on this draft, frustrating attempts to make progress on this essay. I do not believe that a person can refute my arguments by obstructing and frustrating my efforts to set them down in writing. This continuing censorship and psychological torture through frustration efforts (combined with so much worse) is the opposite of the scientific and philosophical spirit of inquiry. It may be a kind of admission of intellectual bankruptcy.

Spacing in this essay has been affected by hackers. Over the past 336 days 73,631 viruses have been aimed at my computer. Close to 1,000 intrusion attempts per day have been made during some weeks over that same time period, nearly all of them coming from New Jersey, some from government computers, perhaps assigned to judges or justices. The same "errors" have been inserted and corrected by me in some essays as many as forty to fifty times.

The goal of these efforts is not only to discourage writing efforts by me -- after torture and rape makes such efforts essential to emotional survival -- but to destroy a set of opinions challenging a false and pernicious world view that is dominant among America's so-called "educated class." These censorship efforts will be combined with forced impoverishment (an "embargo"?) and slanders intended to destroy personal and professional life. Objections to such treatment will allow for labelling me as "antisocial" or "in denial" and "hostile." A desperate effort will be made to discover or create offenses against political correctness by me that will serve to legitimate these crimes and atrocities.

August 31, 2007 at 9:24 P.M. numerous attempts to enter my msn account have been obstructed by hackers. I am blocking:

http://view.atdmt.com/MON/iview/msnnkss07600
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001160x600
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90

What are you afraid of? There is never a guarantee that I will be able to write again. If I am unable to do so -- if my computer or access to any other computer becomes a problem -- then I will do my best to write somewhere, somehow, even if it is only on a brick wall. I live in a society that, publicly, guarantees freedom of expression and human rights to everyone, where political and legal officials nevertheless, secretly, use psychological techniques, technology, and mass marketing "methods" to manipulate and control persons -- preferably without their realizing it -- and sometimes, in the worst places, they do much more terrible things.

I believe that these dangers to American liberties are every bit as worrisome as international terrorism. They are a kind of terrorism, even when corrupt officials happen to be Democrats. If you have ever seen the almost sexual bliss distorting the features of a person deliberately inflicting pain on another human being, you will never be the same again. If you have the misfortune of being the victim on whom that pain was (and is) inflicted, then you will never be entirely free of it. However, you will always prefer even that suffering to the condition of the person inflicting suffering on others for pleasure. (Numerous errors have just been inserted into this text and corrected.)

What I feel is not so much frustration as sadness and bewilderment at the pointlessness of so much human cruelty.

September 4, 2007 at 10:37 A.M. I find new "errors" inserted in this essay since my last reading of it a few days ago. I will do my best to make the same corrections as often as necessary. Regrettably, this will slow down other writing projects. My discussion is based, mostly, on the following sources:

Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1-19, 79-88.
Charles Hampden-Turner, Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development (New York: Anchor, 1971), pp. 1-213.

A Hermeneutics of Freedom: "Hot Chocolate, No Whipped Cream."

I roll out of bed planning to head over to my local Dunkin Doughnuts coffee emporium. This elegant establishment is about a block away from my New York residence. I ask Jeeves, my butler, to lay out my weekend attire. We take turns in the butler role. I opt for soft khakis, a polo shirt with a discrete and minute emblem of an ape defecating on my chest (it's my own label), placed just over my heart. I slip on my leather loafers leaving the socks at home. Dark glasses -- to discourage autograph seekers -- complete the outfit. I purchase my newspaper with all the news that (liberals believe) is fit to print along with The Wall Street Journal, for the editorial page and display purposes.

During my one block morning stroll there will be dozens or hundreds of messages delivered to me, not all of them friendly or simple and easy to decode. A woman's perfume, as she stands next to me at the bodega ("What's a 'bodega,' Charles?"), her hair cut, even her shorts tell me: First, she's from the mid-west or "elsewhere" and is probably a student or young professional in New York; second, she has a graduate-level education and comes from a good home ("thank you, that's fine"); third, she's visiting a strange planet with weird brown people because, back in Wisconsin, everybody knows everyone else and looks the same; fourth, she likes this visit, because she's interested in anthropology; fifth, all of the magazines on the shelves are screaming messages about America's paranoia and sexual obsessions, which she pretends not to notice. Such things are not discussed in pleasant company back in Wisconsin or Idaho.

I am not surprised that Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about to appear in yet another movie version, this time starring Nicole Kidman. Communists have been replaced by terrorists, we know, but the deeper subtexts in that very disturbing work will be ignored by reviewers, also undiscussed will be the philosophical issues that the movie reflects and addresses. "There is no philosophy in The Matrix: Reloaded," opined David Demby of The New Yorker.

We are fortunate indeed to be instructed by such learned people about cultural and political matters. Naomi Klein's recent lecture carried on "Democracy Now" (one of my favorite news programs) brought tears to my eyes. Adam Gopnik's article discussing Philip K. Dick is best passed over in silence. Francis Fukuyama has nothing to worry about since Ms. Klein failed to understand what he said in his first book or why he said it. Anybody been to Long Island this summer?

Directly ahead of me is a huge sign on the side of a bus -- "Jason Bourne is back in New York!" The most significant religious symbol for many people in contemporary America is immediately ahead of me, the "Golden Arches" of McDonald's hamburger heaven, evoking the tablets of the law carried by Charlton Heston -- I mean Moses -- down from Mount Sinai: "So let it be written, so let it be done."

Huge signs invite me to sue my neighbors, using the services of "Mr. Rosman" ("litigation with a smile!"), a church down the street has a cross-shaped relic of the 9/11 tragedy on the front lawn. I always nod my head out of respect when I see it. As I cross the street, I see beautiful garments -- often much more beautiful than things sold in very expensive stores -- garments from India or China, Africa and Latin America -- placed on display in sidewalk stalls.

To see a woman I adore in one of those dresses made in India or China, in those colors and that inexpensive sidewalk jewelry, as we head off for a lunch in the park before attending a free performance of a Shakespeare play, then coffee in a special coffee shop with classic Opera recordings playing background music is a dream that never leaves me. The entire evening may cost no more than $20.00. The average couple sharing an evening together in Manhattan will spend that much or more on a cab ride to their destination. ("God is Texting Me!")

These inexpensive and lovely clothes are made, mostly, by women. They come from factories found in the poorest parts of the world. They are filled with the sweat of those lives and with their creative energies, as artifacts. However, because they are not expensive, they are not valued. I bought my daughter a small purse made by African women in Israel, sold at the wonderful Jewish Community Center (JCC) -- I think that's what it's called -- in Manhattan. You don't have to be Jewish to visit. She loved it more than any other handbag or purse I have ever given her. It is simple and beautiful with a residue of the life-hopes of the woman who made it.

A homeless man opens the door to this "Doughnut Paradise," offers a cheerful comment on the weather. He gets some money from me. Most people ignore him. I find it fascinating to ponder the semiotics of this encounter. This man has adopted the form and manner of the New York "doorman." All the fancy buildings in the city, especially the great hotels, feature splendidly attired doormen in uniforms worthy of German field officers in World War II, doormen whose mission in life is to bow and offer pleasant tribute to the thin and bejeweled matrons (of both or all genders) entering their multimillion dollar "homes" in Manhattan or equally pricey hotels.

Many of these doormen or -women are African-Americans or Latinos and Latinas. They tell me that the money (and sometimes other perks) can be really solid in that job, and "it ain't gonna kill ya." This homeless guy has figured out that people want to feel important, like those Upper West or East Side swells, so he behaves like the classic New York doorman. His tactic pays off. He gets good money in that spot. Perhaps it says something about his society and what has brought him to such visible agony that it is this humble and somewhat grotesque role that he is expected to play in life: "Yes, sir. Lovely day. You looking fine!"

My friend, Sam, has become an organ grinder's monkey because it is what he has been taught that he is by a racist society. At some point, this man stopped fighting the bullshit and died, spiritually, and now something that looks human, some small remnant of what used to be a person opens doors and smiles, commenting on the weather for us "rich people." Most of the censorship I am struggling against is aimed at turning me into something like that man. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")

No doubt my homeless friend is now fully "adjusted" to the role and status allotted to him in America. Unfortunately, I will not be adjusted to such a prescribed role, not even if it comes with the "status" of an "attorney." I will not bend or break or abandon my views because you -- America's or New Jersey's political-criminal elite -- have decided that my opinions and the learning and reasoning justifying them are not permissible for someone "like me" to put on display, usually at the cost of your far less "well-reasoned" and well-informed views. No wonder this essay and essayist are under attack. My greatest offense has always been who and what I am. Tough. My identity is not negotiable. My selfhood cannot cannot be tortured out of me.

He catches my eye. We smile. The message is: "I'm doing what I have to do with these people." My unspoken response is -- "me too." I dig in my pocket: "Here's some of what I have and thanks for not putting on the act with me. I think and feel what you think and feel." I know that he understood every word of that unspoken message. The sadness briefly seen in his features is a reversal of the mask of cheerfulness that he wears most of the time. That mask must get heavy on his face. He knows that he doesn't need the mask with me. There's just silence and a painful smile. We both say, silently: "I know what you're feeling." There are a lot more like us out there, getting angrier by the day. Closing off opportunities for expression may not be wise. (See my essay on the philosophy of Charles Taylor and the problem of recognition.)

I will never become violent or commit a crime because I will not give my torturers the pleasure of inducing or producing such conduct in me, despite their best efforts. Racists wish to produce violence in you, as a minority male, so they will be confirmed in their opinions of you and in order that their crimes against you may be excused in their own minds at least. Be a model citizen. Speak daggers to them, but use none. It helps to remember that the moral level of torturers and government censors is always roughly equal to what you scrape off your shoe, especially in New Jersey. In fact, in New Jersey much the same may be said of Superior Court judges. (See my forthcoming essay "Mark Baber and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Sybil R. Moses and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

Dunkin Doughnuts' employees have been issued new uniforms designed by someone with the old ABC tv show "Happy Days" in mind. A retro-faux-fifties-happiness is conveyed by mostly Latina and Indian women in tan polo shirts and paper hats, like children at a birthday party in 1957 caught in a time warp and placed in this demented setting: "America runs on dunkin!" Right. (An "error" was inserted in this last sentence since my last reading of it only a few hours ago.)

Two posters greet us as we enter this establishment: on my right is a woman smiling like an idiot and offering us a doughnut (vagina); on my left is another woman holding an ice cream cone, two scoops (penis). Charming. Pornography with your coffee and doughnut?

On my way back home, I stop at the Botanica downstairs at my building, catering to all of my spiritual needs. I purchase a small wooden statue of Ganesha, also a crucifix. I often see archetypal images from different parts of the world (some are very beautiful). I read the messages conveyed by those images. Sometimes these messages mean the exact opposite of what the proprietor supposes. I don't have the heart to tell him any of this. Some of those statues and images are meant to convey very unpleasant wishes. Perhaps I will send some of these art objects -- the ones conveying curses -- to New Jersey's well-fed judges. Visits to the MET museum should feature pauses at the famous canvases containing multiple messages, some of which are deliciously nasty.

"Primitive man had to see himself surrounded by a circle of forces -- demons, gods, friendly forces, impersonal forces. If I think of a primitive walking through a forest, I expect his movement to be different from ours. If we pass through the woods on an easy trail, we walk; if it's not open, we bushwack. But the primitive may have stopped before a certain tree and bowed. Before another, he may have lain prostrate, even abject, on the ground; where there was familiarity with a relatively modest divine force, just a nod of the head as he passed by. That was no more than was required unless the tree gave an indication that it was annoyed. How did it speak? By many shades of distinction in the rustling of its leaves."

Norman Mailer goes on to point out:

"If we accept these suppositions, then consciousness had to be more intense for the primitive. He was always a protagonist. His day was heroic or ghastly. For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself. Terrified and heroic, it is no wonder that the life span of primitive man was shorter than ours."

The Spooky Art (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 148.

Most people are oblivious to these signals and symbols, except for the obvious commercial ones, which are ignored. Many New Yorkers seem to be sleepwalking. The more educated people claim to be, the more likely it is that 90% of what is communicative or symbolic around them will be ignored or not seen at all. Life will be ignored. Art will not be seen or appreciated, especially when it is found in unexpected places. People make themselves stupid. Incidentally, in an era threatened by terrorists, this lack of feeling is the opposite of intelligence. Most of what the CIA will need to know about people who mean to harm us will not be found in a lab report. This information will not be detected by a satellite. Luckily, we can rely on the wisdom and astonishing intellects of persons like Anne Milgram, Esq. to keep us all secure. ("Another Mafia Sweep in New Jersey and Anne Milgram is Clueless.")

The so-called scientific approach in the social sciences and professions is about not being distracted by the "irrelevant" (like life), in order to focus on discrete, atomic propositions, usually directed at specific "issues" and "problems" to be dealt with in a "professional" manner. "What's the bottom line?" "What's on the bar exam?" "What is the specific research agenda?"

There is an ideology, falsely associated with science, of exclusion and diminution instilled in young people by the educational and political establishment. This is part of what is meant by the suggestion that "scientism" -- a kind of religion of science which is destructive of the spiritual and aesthetic capacities of humanity -- is now triumphant in America. Hence, the wars against traditional religions. The result is adding both to the unhappiness reported by Americans and to our troubles in the world. This is something else that is not seen. Our dominant methodology in the social sciences works for some purposes, not for others. American scientism is producing a condition, among a materially and culturally rich people, of spiritual destitution.

Unfortunately, hackers have altered the spacing of paragraphs in this essay as proof of America's undying commitment to free political expression for all dissidents, everywhere -- except New Jersey.

You cannot understand the mind and emotional core of a person, even when they are captured in art, by placing such items under a literal or figurative microscope because your relation to what you seek to understand is part of what you must appreciate. You getting this, Tuchin? Is Diana busy raping an unconscious woman? Have New jersey's judges been interrupted in their thievery? Please feel free to carry on.

"The existential knower cannot by definition practice the traditional scientific detachment. He is studying relational facts, and the attempt to detach himself could destroy these. Even where he is observing the mutuality of others, the source of his insight will run dry with the source of his concern, since his own feelings and powers of identification are important clues to the shared human condition. If man exists he inevitably influences what he studies, and his only choice is to become aware of what he contributes to the relationship and to ensure that it facilitates the developmental process in which he himself is involved." (Radical Man, at p. 33.)

The response to these accusations will be a quotation from Richard Dawkins and the shout: "I am against the war!" Me too. I am also against theft in New Jersey politics and many tortures in that state that has been controlled by Democrats since long before Iraq and Abu Ghraib. I am against interference with religious or other philosophical expressions of people by party hacks or "experts" presuming to tell others what to believe or how to live. I don't like people destroying my written work. Curiously, I object to being tortured. Finally, I have a reservation or two about mafia/mob involvement in politics, whether it is Cuban-American or Russian organized crime is irrelevant. Italian-Americans have mostly moved on to the much more evil work of making movies and lots of money in business.

I don't want your opinions of me or your approval in New Jersey's legal circles. I don't want your friendship. I don't want to associate with you. I don't want to "cooperate" with you. I am not interested in your opinions on any subject. Your hypocrisy at the New Jersey Supreme Court sickens me. I want my rights.

Millions of people are saying exactly this in every way that it can be said to American officials: "We respect and want science and technology; we also respect and need religious wisdom and meaning." Any questions? The judicial robes that you are wearing on the New Jersey Supreme Court are a lie. New Jersey's justices are living a lie. Every day that the cover-up of these atrocities continues is a further befouling of your oaths and the institution that you serve. Ethics? You're kidding, Mr. Rabner?

I will comment on the new scientism, which has reached epidemic proportions today, offering some suggestions about what we can do to improve things, only to return to Dunkin Doughnuts for a "croissant" by way of conclusion. A hermeneutic circle? As New Jersey's new attorney general (Anne Milgram) might say, "Whatever."

"Scientific materialism asks us to believe in a world of objects without subjects -- and since we are subjects asked to do the believing -- that proposal makes no sense." (Mary Midgley)

I am not an electrical appliance. I am not exclusively a material object to be fixed from the outside by replacing external visible parts. To be sure, I am a material entity. I have a body. This body needs maintenance and repair. I am, however, more than this body. I am conscious, aware, sentient. It is certainly true (as far as we know) that without my body, there will be no sentience; no awareness; no experiencing nature. However, it is a profound error to suppose that my experiencing nature or the rich technicolor subjectivity that I am, as a freedom in the world, is reducible to what is observable, externally, and therefore alterable from the outside.

An "error" -- previously corrected by me -- has been reinserted in this essay. I have now corrected it once again. I want you to have a feel for my writing experience.

To view another human being in exclusively external terms, as a thing, is to dehumanize that person. It is a terrible insult and injury which is also stupid if your goal is to understand him or her. Among the "things" that I am is a moral subject with legal rights and fundamental dignity, including autonomy. Rights and dignity, however, stand in the way of scientific "control." I am not something to be "controlled" by you or anyone in a free society. The essence of the scientific religion is the assumption by self-professed "scientifically rational" types of authority to control, improve, instruct defective or inferior non-criminal "others." The same error is committed internationally, at the level of foreign policy, with disastrous consequences which we see all around us. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

"When science spreads its mantle of prestige over all of those aspects of social life which lend themselves most easily to observation, then outward behavior and appearance are elevated above inner conviction. It is no use for Martin Luther King to declare movingly, 'I have a dream that one day men will be judged not by the color of their skins, but by the content of their characters;' as any proponent of the scientific method will explain, content of character and dreams are extremely inferential and represent at best 'soft data.' In contrast, skin color, ethnic group, income position and role in the organization, property and concrete behavior are all visible, measurable and therefore the potential ingredients of a science. There are twenty research programs which deal with physical externalities for every one that attempts to explore the depths of human feelings and experience."

Notice the key point:

"We know from the every day social judgments that we make of people that their external appearances are not only misleading, but often trivial compared with deeper knowledge of their character."

Radical Man, p. 10.

Science focuses on such externals and quantifiable material, then dismisses or denies (at least, some "scientists" do) the importance of all that is excluded by this so-called scientific approach, such as purpose or meaning. The glories of scientific achievement and the world-view accompanying science that made those glories possible must not obscure the equally glorious achievements in the non-scientific realms of subjectivity (humanities, religion) leading to very different objective truths.

Science must not lead us to forget all that art and religion have accomplished. Yes, religion has caused warfare and inquisitions. But then, science has created gas chambers and nuclear weapons. In both instances human choices are to blame for the evil to which each kind of knowledge has been put. The fault, dear Brutus, is in ourselves -- not in our stars, microscopes, or libraries.

Much the same may be said today concerning behaviorist psychological techniques and all externalist social science which, perhaps with good intentions, have become instruments of hideous tortures or ways of misunderstanding human beings that are brutally destructive of human psyches: "The habit of scientific analysis has led investigators into the 'Humpty Dumpty dilemma.' ..."

What is the "Humpty-Dumpty dilemma"?

"... Humpty Dumpty not only labeled social reality unilaterally and arbitrarily, 'the question is which is to be master, that is all,' he finished up in thousands of fragments which no one could put together again."

Radical Man, p. 12.

"Humpty Dumpty' is the external material subject postulated by contemporary social science in America: a body with a brain, but only the illusion of a mind; conditioned by advertising and political slogans; molded by economic pressures and sociological categorizing; subject to complete comprehension and control in terms of stimulus and response. I suggest that this construct is a far more unreal and much less useful model than Kant's "transcendental ego." It is also unlivable and evil because of its brutal reductivism. ("Behaviorism is Evil.")

This so-called "scientific" image of what persons are and of the scientifically rationalized society horrifies millions of people in this country and all over the world. I can see why so many feel this way. America is not best thought of in such terms. America may best be found in its organic documents, like the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. The American idea is that you are not a "thing" to be conditioned from the outside by paid "experts" in torture chambers, but a priceless locus of rights and dignity whatever your economic status may be. American foreign policy reflects these values in foreign aid -- which was just offered to Mexico after terrible storms -- and (paradigmatically) in the post-World War II "Marshall Plan." That's the United States of America, Marshall Plan not Abu Ghraib. I hope. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

The homeless men and women in our city streets are a powerful criticism not of those values at the heart of the society, but our failure to live up to them and (often) of the cover ups and hypocrisy that accompany such failures. My subject is science as religion and the ominous spread of scientism. What is scientism? What objections can be made to the universalizing of scientific method, particularly in the areas of human subjectivity? I will focus on three issues: 1) neutrality; 2) observation; 3) control.

A. Scientism.

William Barrett comments:

"What is this peculiar phenomenon we call scientism? It is not science, any more than the shadow is anywhere identical with the substance of a thing. Nor is science ever evidence of scientism. At most, science merely serves to heat up the imagination of certain minds -- and they are not few -- who are too prone to sweeping and unqualified generalizations in the first place. Scientism is pseudoscience or misinterpreted science. Its conclusions are sweeping and large, and therefore sometimes pretend to be philosophical. But it is not a part of philosophy, if by philosophy we mean the effort to think soberly within the restrictions that human reflection must impose for itself. No; scientism is neither science nor philosophy, but that peculiarly modern invention and malady -- an ideology. [A religion?] And as such, along with other ideologies that beset us, it has become part of our modern culture."

Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer (New York: Doubleday, 1986), p. xv.

1). neutrality.

The posture of detachment, "professionalism," indifference adopted by self-defined scientific types is helpful when examining the objective processes of nature, but inhumane when observing the meaning-systems and all products of the "life-world," especially when such entities exist to injure people. This scientific attitude is the indifference of the observer at a trafffic accident who takes no action to help victims because by observing and taking careful notes, he can learn exactly how long it takes the victim to die and how that dying takes place. "We can learn from ya." Right, Tuchin? ("What is it like to be tortured?")

For any healing professional to adopt such an attitude is the negation of the concern and empathy dictated by medical tradition for centuries in every civilized society. This Mengele-like scientific "observer" of human suffering is a new horror in the contemporary world that arrives with the totalization of scientific control in the nightmare societies of the twentieth century and beyond. Even worse are persons -- like Tuchin and Riccioli -- who cause suffering to victims or collectivities in order to "learn" how persons suffer. Worse is any judge or tribunal allowing such cruelty to take place or making it possible for others to be brutalized in such ways in order to perfect methods of social control. ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

Only one newly-inserted "error" is not too bad. 

2). observation.

The omnipresence of observation is the death of privacy. Technology has intruded the observing eye of Big Brother everywhere in our societies. If you can see the Empire State building in Manhattan, then you can be sure that you are on screen in a tape being made somewhere, by one of the hundreds or thousands of cameras capturing people's lives (without their consent) every day, from every angle, for the benefit of government agencies and corporate masters. America is a reality show and every single person in the country is Kate Winslet or Leonardo Di Caprio -- not for fifteen minutes, but 24 hours per day, seven days a week.

Every casual conversation, kiss, weekend plan made in a whisper on the sidewalk can be captured on videotape and replayed by men and women in blue suits and uniforms for purposes that have nothing to do with you or your life. Persons are raped in institutions, tormented in indescribably horrible ways for purposes never disclosed by "scientists" incapable of the minimal decency of an introduction or explanation. The resulting emotional damage is discussed in seminars by these monsters. We find ourselves living inside a moral dungeon derived from nightmares shared by Kafka, Orwell, Foucault and maybe, Peter Handke. Apes do not seem to object, so why should we? Are we not apes of a larger growth and nothing more? Are we not "rats on a carousel"? "Sacks of protein and water," Larissa? "Slaves?" ("Master and Commander.")

I am sure that my Internet research and writing is monitored. I have lost count of the number of hackers and government computers accessing these blogs. No consent, warrants, identifications are needed. Welcome to the People's Republic of the United States. Incidentally, these enhanced security methods are accompanied by criticisms of other countries, like China and Cuba, as violators of human rights. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

3). control.

Science as religion -- like all political ideologies -- is aimed at controlling or eliminating the inner lives of persons, total dominance, absolute subjectivation or acculturation. Persons are to be molded to purposes which are not their own in order to achieve "socially desirable objectives" as defined by these faceless and nameless "others." Spirituality and creativity are powerful and uncontrollable forces in the human psyche. Hence, they are to be eliminated or directed in harmless paths -- towards pop culture, obscenity as opposed to erotic art, mindless consumption.

Spacing has been affected by New Jersey hackers again, as new "errors" were inserted and corrected. ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me'" and "Babalu and Free Speech Too!")

The Grand Inquisitors of the scientific-corporate-governmental establishment aim at creating a Winston Smith-like servile, sub-human subject, grateful for his conditioning, thoroughly defeated and submissive to the instructions of power, never presuming to ask annoying questions or challenging authority. Ironically, civil libertarians and liberals in America are often the greatest defenders of this ideology of scientific control, usually without realizing what they have unleashed on the world. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

"The scientists and the promethean engineers, these lieutenants of the technocracy have done the most to transform our culture into the push-button Tower of Babble we inhabit. They have habituated us to apocalyptic vistas."

Theodor Roszack defines the new scientific-religious notion of "reality":

"Matter, we have learned, is a vibrant jelly of energy; the universe a burst balloon of galactic fragments; thought itself a mere feedback in the cerebral electronics; life a chemical code soon to be [and by now] fully deciphered; all seeming law nothing but the large-scale likelihood of basic chaos. No absolutes. Nothing sacred. Any day now homunculus in a test tube -- cyborgs made to order -- interstellar tourism -- the doomsday bomb. [Oh, joy!] Why not? What is possible is mandatory?"

Sources (New York: Harper-Collophon, 1972), pp. xv-xvi.

Efforts to write this essay have been obstructed by hackers, difficulties with my security system, letters deleted from this essay as I worked on earlier drafts have become routine aspects of my writing experience. (I just corrected another "error" inserted in this last sentence.) Uncertainty and anxiety as well as disgust accompany my efforts to create my work, every day, because I expect unwelcome company at my computer. I think this proves much of what I am saying. ("How censorship works in America.")

On August 20, 2007 at 9:13 A.M. I am blocking, once again, http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90... (NJ)

People engaging in these efforts to censor and destroy protected speech in deliberate violation of criminal laws in order to further injure a person, who has been deeply hurt already by such tactics, will no doubt go home and pet their dogs, read their newspapers in the evening, enjoying "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" on television without detecting any moral issues arising from their oppressive conduct. (Spacing has been affected again.)

What have you become? What are we not seeing about the moral reality before our eyes and why are we not seeing it? Is morality an illusion, for you, only because morality is not quantifiable? Are you or your relationships "quantifiable"? Does this explain your antipathy to religion, romantic love, or all altruistic ideals? What do we not see that the rest of the world sees all too well about Iraq and Guantanamo, also about ourselves as a nation? How would we react to efforts to condition our reactions and national policy on the part of other nations pursuing their national interests with disdain for our self-determined goals and values?

One more "error" to be corrected today. Words removed and restored.

"If the choice is between a clenched fist, machines, gold, or Christ -- I choose Christ." (Malcolm Muggeridge)

An old-fashioned humanistic psychiatrist interviewing Herman Goering at Nuremberg was struck by what was missing in the personality of the "Reich Marshal" (Unfortunately, spacing has been altered, again):

"... Goering was a 'brilliant, brave, ruthless, grasping, shrewd executive.' He also found Goering charming, persuasive, intelligent and imaginative. The one characteristic that set Goering apart from the urbane personality ... was his complete lack of moral discrimination, his absence of any sense 'of the value of human life.' [human suffering?] In this Goering was as candid as in all else. When [the psychiatrist] asked him why he had ordered the murder of his friend Ersnt Rohm during the purge of the SA on 30 June 1934, Goering stared at him as if he were 'not quite bright,' and replied, 'But he was in my way ...' "

Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands (New York & London: Penguin, 2004), p. 149. ("'The Prisoner': A Review of an AMC Television Series.")

Goering's engineering bakground had prepared him for such instrumental challenges. Murder was simply a "means and ends problem" of a technocratic sort to be "resolved" without squeamishness. From a scientific perspective "valuing" neutrality, there is no basis for disagreeing with this attitude. At the point when scientific method reaches this level of disconnection from human meanings and purposes in order to become totalizing, science has become a kind of religion.

If science is to compete with traditional religions and ethical systems -- not as a means of providing knowledge to serve human values developed elsewhere in the culture, but as the only source and legitimator of action in the State -- then I will opt for more traditional value systems to guide meliorative efforts. Better flawed religious institutions and attempts to face honestly the mysteries of life than the denial of those mysteries by self-professed "scientists." As an agnostic and free person, I will choose the example of Christ over Dr. Mengele any day. ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")

I apologize to readers for the deformations of this work (and of my life) by hackers or "experts" affiliated with New Jersey's mafia-controlled government. This form of censorship and induced frustration is a crime and unconstitutional. This is known to the authorities. The applicable laws are simply not enforced. Please see again: "What is it like to be tortured?"

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

More Incompetence and Unethical Conduct in New Jersey!

"Trenton: More Than 600 Arrested," in The New York Times, August 15, 2007, at p. B7. (Feds)
"Trenton: Tracking Sex Offenders," in The New York Times, August 15, 2007, at p. B4. (NJ)

Gee, I wonder why I am having so many problems seeing my second book distributed to book sellers and why the numbers do not seem to match up with the actual visitors to that site? Probably just a coincidence.

August 19, 2007 at 2:42 P.M. I am blocking:

http://view.atdmt.com/MSN/iview/msnnkhac00172
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3285.msn_cusa/B2 (Cuban American National Foundation?)
http://www.unc.edu/~cshowden/mx/839.gif (Howard Dean?)

August 18, 2007 at 4:51 P.M. I am blocking hackers and spyware:

http://view.atdmt.com/MON/iview/msnnkss07600
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001160x600
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90



In the paper there are two items placed on the same page and next to one another that are very revealing of the situation on the ground in New Jersey law enforcement. The stories were found in close proximity so that readers might assume that the federal successes belong to New Jersey's attorney general, Ms. Milgram. (This last sentence was just corrected after hacking last night.) First, a story detailing yet another success for the United States attorney (the feds), Christopher J. Christie:

"Federal agents arrested 626 people yesterday as part of a sweep seeking sexual offenders, violent criminals and gang members."

These are the kind of arrests normally made by state law enforcement everywhere else. Zulima Farber, as New Jersey attorney general, made numerous such arrests. No wonder they had to get rid of her. However, Ms. Milgram -- who has very little or no criminal experience in the state system or anywhere else -- has made no such sweeping arrests. No wonder they appointed her. A judgeship is next for Ms. Milgram. Maybe a spot on the Supreme Court, if she proves her loyalty to the powers that be in Trenton -- which she will -- as Stuart Rabner did. How come Ms. Milgram missed all of these crimes and criminal organizations? We do not know. She does not know.

"The operation arrested 35 people wanted on sex offenses, 244 on drug charges and 36 on weapons violations, officials said. ... 118 suspected gang members were also arrested. Christopher J. Christie, the United States attorney, said the investigation had lasted about a month."

Ms. Milgram's office is probably looking into the possible use of the "b-word" by high school seniors throughout the state. Offenses against political correctness are taken very seriously in the Garden State. Doesn't New Jersey have laws against cyberstalking and Internet crime? Oh, they don't care about real crimes -- especially when such crimes are committed by persons affiliated with the Trenton government. Second, here's what law enforcement is up to in New Jersey -- hang on to your hat:

"The operators of the social networking Internet site 'Facebook' have agreed to cooperate with a request from New Jersey officials to help identify convicted sex offenders who MIGHT be participating in online chats. ... Last week [New Jersey's attorney general, Anne Milgram] sent a letter to Facebook and 11 other meeting sites asking for THEIR help finding sex offenders online."

Ms. Milgram wants to go on a fishing expedition for persons who MIGHT be sex offenders, violating everybody else's civil rights at Facebook (whatever that is), so that maybe, just possibly, somebody from one of these sites can help her to find someone online who MAY be a sex offfender. Any sex offenders who read the newspapers will now take off and never again be "seen" at Facebook. "Whatever," right Anne? Anybody, including Ms. Milgram, MIGHT BE a sex offender. There are other crimes out there, Anne -- like political corruption. Duh ... Here is what should concern the boys and girls in New Jersey government:

"More than one-quarter of New Jersey's 2,430 public schools were cited yesterday for failing to meet federal education standards after too few of their students passed state reading and math tests this spring, state education officials said yesterday." [sic.]

Maybe the 51 MILLION dollars that disappeared last year from programs for children with special needs, never reaching those needy children, has something to do with this little problem. You looking into that issue, Anne? Even among those who pass such a test, achievement is low and morale among teachers is dismal. No amount bullshit "spin" placed on these facts diminishes in any way the shameful disgrace of this disclosure, which is surpassed only by the grotesque levels of corruption and incompetence among New Jersey judges and legal officials of all sorts -- including Anne Milgram. You can imagine the number of innocent persons convicted and guilty persons set free (or made judges!) in New Jersey:

"A total of 618 schools failed to meet annual testing benchmarks established under No Child Left behind, which was a slight improvement over the 643 schools [left behind] the year before."

Winnie Hu & Ford Fedessen, "New Jersey Schools Show Small Gains in Standards," in The New York Times, August 17, 2007, at p. B5 and Winnie Hu, "New Jersey Education Dept. Has Problems, Audit Finds," in The New York Times, August 18, 2007 at p. B2.

Yes, I'd say New Jersey education has a few problems. But then, the entire state of New Jersey has "problems."

The solution is not to have more p.r. nonsense spouted by Washington or Trenton bureaucrats. It is not to try to silence critics, like me, with illegal censorship tactics. This is a generation of Americans ill-equipped to compete with rivals in the industrialized economies, something which is already evident to many corporate employers. Things will get worse before they get better. True, New Jersey's legal system is the very bottom of the barrel. Other states are also much better at educating their children. However, the problems are pretty universal.

One step towards a solution is to pay teachers salaries appropriate to their professional status. Pay teachers what judges make. Get rid of paperwork as much as possible, allow teachers to make professional evaluations and set up educational methods and goals, collaboratively and without interference from politicians. Concentrate the money and effort where it is needed, with minority children, make the university education of African-American children a national moral obligation. It is the least -- and I mean the least -- we can do at this point in history for those children.

The solution, as I continue to insist, is not to commit further crimes against me, not to hack into my computer to delete letters from my essays. It is time to deal honestly with these issues and try to cope with burning problems with something other than insults, threats in the media against rival politicians, destruction of professional lives of critics, or any of the other tactics used by the mob in New Jersey government. Let's all stay off the Garden State Parkway and wear our seatbelts, after criticizing New Jersey's powerful machine politicians or we will live to regret it. Right, Anne?

Lots of luck, Anne. No wonder they made her attorney general. New Jersey's precious resources are spent in worrying about and violating the protected political expressions of dissenters. In a state where so-called "forensic psychiatrists" (like Diana Lisa Riccioli and Terry Tuchin) torture victims and sell their services to the highest bidders -- including "offenders" of all kinds, especially if they work for the government -- this is not only laughable and absurd, but sad and dangerous. Where are those reports, Terry?

What have you become, Stuart Rabner?

More bad news for New Jersey!

"A man was sentenced yesterday in Federal District Court to two and a half years in federal prison for making false bomb threats concerning the Hoboken PATH station, prosecutors said."

Once again New Jersey was "a day late and a dollar short," as the saying goes, missing the operations of this defendant. If his threat had been genuine, thousands would have died. New Jersey's attorney general is concentrating on J-walkers in Trenton, especially if they are males. Thank God, the feds are on this.

The citizens of the Garden State would be at the mercy of those 600 or so criminals arrested only by the efforts of federal law enforcement officials, who are the only people interested in punishing theft among New Jersey politicians. ("Errors" have already been inserted in this last sentence and corrected by me.) New Jersey's Anne Milgram heads an office with nearly twice the staff of the federal prosecutors, but only a tiny fraction of the fed's competence and no achievements at all to speak of -- except for censorship efforts aimed at critics, perhaps -- and more politically correct bullshit for the newspapers. (I expect letters to be deleted from these essays on a daily basis.)

I bet you're really "chummy" with Diana, right Anne? You two "pal around" a lot?

The New York Times, August 22, 2007 at p. B6.

"Former Mayor Sharpe James says he does not have enough cash to hire one of the high-profile lawyers who represented him at his arraignment last month, according to court papers filed yesterday."

The New York Times, August 22, 2007, at p. B6.

If Mr. James does not have enough money for his defense, how do you think the average person can defend him- or herself in a criminal case against the resources of the state? Not very well. Public defenders are understaffed, underpaid, grossly deprived of resources to do what they are expected to do -- and people's lives are on the line. No wonder New Jersey's legal and political system is a travesty and den of thieves. Politicians can get away with crimes because nobody has the time to notice what they're doing. They may be in for a surprise. The only person who won't notice what's going on is Anne Milgram.

Time for a competent attorney general and some honest judges for a change at the New Jersey Supreme Court. For now, like Stuart Rabner, we can only "demur."

Friday, August 10, 2007

Is Western Philosophy Racist?

Introduction: "You've been bamboozled ..."

Philosophy is a neglected subject in American universities. Most young people in the U.S. have zero exposure to the subject and tend to associate philosophical thinking with the power of crystals and Oprah Winfrey. Other countries make philosophical thinking, logic and expression central to educational efforts at secondary and university levels -- France, for example.

The U.S. is now 29th in the world, by some reckonings, in reading levels in the general population and in "literacy" skills or "cultural awareness." (28% of Americans identify Andrew Lloyd Weber as the author of "A Midsummer Night's Dream.") The U.S. was 17th among developed nations in educational level when I was in law school. Dr. Ben Carson noted that out of 22 countries competing in math and science knowledge among university students, the U.S. was listed 21. Only one country had lower scores than the U.S. -- Look up the statistics. These are the numbers I remember.

At a party recently, an asshole who thought highly of himself, explained that what he knew of Hegel is only that the name "rhymes with bagel." He was proud of his ignorance. Here is another statistic that stayed with me. When I was an undergraduate student, then in law school, the U.S. automobile industry was surpassed in terms of the quality of its products by Japanese car makers. However, sales by Japan's auto makers totaled about 50% of global U.S. car sales. Recently, Japan became the world's largest maker and seller of cars. Japan is a fraction of the size of the United States. Japan should never out-produce or out-sell the United States of America. Japan is doing both today, deservedly.

Is there a connection between this lack of reading and widespread scientific ignorance by Americans and these developments? How many students are aware of these statistics or find them alarming for their future prospects? They should be alarmed. I promise you that this is an issue that should concern people much more than the fate of Ms. Hilton at the L.A. County Jail, the "cleavage issue" regarding any candidate's attire, or the fashion choices of a candidate's spouse. If I have to hear about another O.J. Simpson trial, I am moving to the North Pole -- but not New Jersey. I can't wait for Bill Clinton, as "First Spouse," to provide television viewers with a tour of the White House and descriptions of the new China in the blue room.

Graduates of elite colleges, as I can attest, are often shockingly ignorant of fundamental areas in the sciences and humanities. They are also, often, arrogant and dismissive of what they do not know, which is most things. All of this adds to the hostility against the U.S. in the world. To be patronized and insulted by people who then ask you to explain things to them that seem trivial enough not to require explanation, items of common knowledge, is a surreal and increasingly familiar experience. I have endured such experiences. They aren't pleasant.

I have been treated like shit by people who are barely capable of holding a conversation with me. I can imagine the reactions of persons in different parts of the world to such encounters. Americans are reputedly idiots. "They don't know anything." This is what is said (privately) in many parts of the world. This is not accurate. However, there are factors contributing to this misperception -- and, occasionally, accurate -- view of Americans, factors which can be remedied.

Whoever you are, you can read A People's History of Science or Carl Sagan's books. I promise that you will be fascinated by the beauty and elegance in nature revealed by science. If you are hostile to traditional religions, then the study of science -- even as an amateur -- will help get you to some of the deepest insights and wisdom found in religious experience. This wisdom is not science, but it can be a fringe benefit of doing science. If you are religious and hostile to science, please believe that your faith can be illuminated by the joy in scientific learning. Don't be frightened of science. Science is a human achievement that confirms much of what you believe for non-scientific reasons. Science is great. Scientific study and work, like anything else, can be a kind of devotion.

"The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments," Albert Einstein writes, "are given to us in the Jewish-Christian [and Islamic] religious tradition. [Or traditions.] It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations."

Out of My Later Years (New York: Castle Books, 2005), p. 21. (I include all of the world's religions as a single tradition of human speculation on ultimate matters.)

We are perceived as stupid and selfish, obsessed with what the Japanese call, "creature comforts." We want our gadgets, toys, gizmos, flashy SUVs, trinkets, as the world burns and billions of people suffer needlessly because of our alleged insensitivity. The damage Americans do to the environment alone should give us pause. I am planning to read Al Gore's book. I saw and admired Mr. Gore's film on global warming -- which featured the insights of another Gore, the exalted one, Gore Vidal. (Unfortunately, an "error" was inserted in this paragraph since my previous review of the essay. I have now corrected it.) Cosmos is being re-broadcast on the Science Network. See it.

Rage, resentment, the crafty and committed hatred of dispossessed and tormented millions directed at their tormentors is beyond the comprehension of many Americans. We have allowed some of the world's worst oppressors and tyrants to define us to billions of people in the world as the evil enemy to be feared and fought against because we have too often been unwilling (or unable) to engage in philosophical debates erupting right now among the brightest and most adept young people in the world. America is what props up men like Mubarak or Gaddafi to billions of persons in the world.

What do you think the Internet is for? Do we wish to be seen censoring and suppressing the speech of some writers, while providing much worse writers with forums to spout banalities? The New York Times?

The reaction to my attempts to explore these issues in a humble way in a far corner of the electronic landscape is a daily struggle with censorship and oppression on the part of ass-covering imbeciles from New Jersey and/or elsewhere. If such people are typical of government and security officials in the U.S. -- I fear that they may be! -- we are in deep trouble. (This last sentence was just corrected after the insertion of new "errors," since yesterday, then corrected again.)

No wonder the rest of the world thinks that we are fascistic assholes and hypocrites. I think of us that way. Take a look at the hackers identified on a daily basis by me, seeking to destroy or suppress the writings of a tortured intellectual in a society that claims to protect freedom of speech. This is not the nation envisioned under the U.S. Constitution. On June 16, 2009 at 4:05 P.M. I am furious at being denied access to my home e-mail after another intrusion into my computer and further violations of my privacy.

Do you understand why people see us as oppressive? I do. Perception becomes reality -- unless it is challenged. Antiamericanism is a serious problem for U.S. foreign policy and economics. Antiamericanism will result in the loss of many American lives and billions of dollars to the U.S. economy. We ignore this problem at our peril. Middle-aged professionals, academics, students -- all are engaged in these polemics concerning modernity and postmodernity; ideology and its future; economy as science and moral concern; culture as religion; science as religion; religion as science. These are philosophical debates, involving urgent, potentially life-altering issues for billions of intelligent people on the planet. We are making ourselves irrelevant to this global discussion, except as a source of vilification and hatred or ridicule. We better wake up.

The answer to these criticisms is not to deface my writings. It is not to further torture or torment critics, like me, who have been deeply injured for decades. It is not sophomoric insults and threats, further harming me. (I have just corrected this sentence again.)

We need a respectful effort to address genuine concerns and doubts expressed by many people in the world, including Americans, about who we are today and what we really believe -- if we believe anything -- and what our lives are about. I sometimes think that we do not believe very much anymore and that this loss of faith and values is a big part of our trouble. ("Civilization and Terrorism" and "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

Is it O.K. that the U.S. tortures people? Does it matter to you that it is mostly brown people adhering to different religions or American dissidents whom we are torturing? Do you believe for one second that torturing other people makes us safer? These tortures are taking place in your name, if you're an American. How do you feel about that? Do you believe that censorship can be contained once it is permitted to flourish? Violating my free speech rights is equal to violating your rights.

This morning several young women in Newark, New Jersey got into an argument over seemingly trivial items that ended with the shooting of three women in the head and the stabbing of one college student in the face. Nihilism is just as lethal to inner city young people as drugs and crime, since it produces both drug use and criminality. Why are we making young people insensitive and ruthless? What does it say about us that these incidents occur on a daily basis?

U.S. crime rates are vastly disproportionate compared to other advanced nations. The solution is not more prisons. Our ideas, how we see and think of ourselves, are relevant to these troubles. Those connections between systems of ideas and deeds are rarely traced in the writings of philosophers. Why is that? Not "rigorous" enough? No tenure in such efforts? Isn't that "idealism" which is "out of fashion" among academics who have no understanding of what is idealism or why it still matters?

You cannot escape metaphysical assumptions or foundations for your views in life. The only question is how you will arrive at those metaphysical foundations, intelligently and knowingly, or with complete ignorance of the literature dealing with the subject. Norman Swartz, Beyond Experience: Metaphysical Theories and Philosophical Constraints (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1991), pp. 9-23.

One place where this discussion should and must take place is popular culture. American pop culture is abandoning the field to others, as we wallow in ever more predictable second-rate fare, especially during the summer "blockbuster season." Where are the great novels of ideas today? Not more books about who got laid last summer in a rented house somewhere in Long Island, or is having an affair on campus this year, or has just discovered feminism. An exception to this is "The Bourne Ultimatum," which is a great action movie raising genuine issues.

We need real philosophy. We need real literature. We need to find both philosophy and literature in good cinema. We need international perspectives. We need wide reading and cultural experience, imagination and cultivation of feelings. All of these areas of human intellectual and spiritual development are neglected in contemporary America, especially by young people who think they're getting an elite education. The results of this "necrosis of the spirit" are all around us. ("Is Humanism Still Possible?")

Is the intellectual project of our civilization fatally contaminated by racism and imperialist ambitions? Is thought, as we have understood it, pervaded by notions of gender-oppression, binary oppositions that are invidious and self-undermining? Is Western logos only the "prison house" of intellect to be transcended by its finest flower, science? Science has no answers to these questions. Is it necessary to engage in self-flagellation to demonstrate our hipness or excellent prospects for tenure at our local university? Must we swear an oath in academia to hate Republicans and struggle against them at all times?

Here is a future loyalty oath in academia: "I am not now, nor have ever I been, a member of the Republican party." These questions are mostly unrecognized by graduates of elite schools in my society. When they are recognized, they are usually discussed incompetently, sometimes for several hundred tedious pages. Those of us with fire in the belly and the necessary training to engage in this debate are relegated to irrelevance, denied opportunities to be heard. We see our writings destroyed, publicly, by persons incapable of understanding them. We see our books suppressed, censored, burned or stolen. We are reproducing injustices beyond and within America's borders, while throwing away lives by the millions -- including the lives of persons who may have useful suggestions to make for how to cope with our most pressing troubles. ("Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison.")

Each time that I have read this essay, I am forced to correct the same or additional inserted "errors" meant to destroy work that is meaningful for me and others. To deny words and speech to survivors of great trauma is to attempt to obliterate their experience and capacities to cope through finding meaning. Such an attempt amounts to erasing a person's significance and humanity. Censorship is the final denial of all human dignity to tortured persons seeking to articulate what has happened to them. Slaves learning to read and write were threatened even with death. I will continue to write.

The person with the ideas we need at this crucial moment in our history may not be the person you think of as "smart" -- i.e., a skinny person dressed in black, residing somewhere on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, majoring in Women's Studies at Brandeis University, interning at the Nation magazine, and saving whales. This may be true even if such persons are offered the opportunity to write reviews in The New York Times or a "thought piece" in The New Yorker. Naomi Klein, Adam Gopkin, Susan Faludi -- the usual suspects come to mind.

The same book is being written by the same sort of person every year, the same thoughts are repeated by predictable "pundits" in chi-chi magazines. We are wallowing in an ideology of antiamericanism as enemies are planning to eat our lunch at recess. We better open our eyes. Originality and intellectual brilliance have become categories of guilt for entire segments of America's population, including many women -- women who write about menopause and a brief lesbian affair are welcome on ABC's "The View." Women who challenge oppression and economic injustice, who rail against the intellectual and philosophical prisons built for women's minds, are not so welcome. Anger is not "televisual." Television is a "cool medium." (McLuhan)

Worse, are alleged "sub-humans" (like me) occupying a status roughly equal to that of the most despised women in society -- like sex workers and women of color -- who must be destroyed "for their own good," for their truth-telling and freedom, qualities which are unforgivable faults among the lower-orders. I am about to do a little of both. What follows is an example of truth-telling and a display of one man's freedom. I will make people angry with what I am about to say and have said already. This is part of a philosopher's and writer's job description -- to make people uncomfortable and angry enough to think and take action.

Is Western thought inevitably racist? Is all philosophy saturated with racism and worthless? No. Is racism a part of our civilization and heritage? Yes. Does it exist and is it found even in some of the best philosophical thought? Yes. However, the ideas of freedom and equality leading to the most effective forms of opposition to racism -- universal ideals of human equality and concerns with social justice -- also emerge from our Western heritage.

Philosophy, like any other important area of culture is a locus of struggle, where abiding tensions between competing values will always be found at an abstract and, therefore, discussable level. American cinema at the moment is divided and uncertain about its loyalties. The Bush Administration is universally disliked, but the real threat from terrorism and antiamericanism is also seen. Hence, politics is (mostly) a forbidden subject in this summer's movies.

Philosophy should concern persons of African ancestry as much as anyone. Africa has been a player in the Mediterrenean world from antiquity, contributing philosophers to the roster of great Western thinkers from Augustine to Camus and Derrida. In defending philosophy from charges of racism, the question is what do we mean by philosophy? What kind of racism are we primarily concerned to examine? What is the role of philosophers in this daily struggle against the evil of racism? Whose Western philosophy do we celebrate and how are we to do that celebrating? Racism includes both the attitudes of the Abu Ghraib torturers and of the men flying airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9/11. (See "Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")

Numerous errors have been inserted in these sentences already, as I say, as part of the continuing effort to silence and further torture me. "Errors" are corrected each time that I read this work-in-progress. I try to make a little more progress towards completion every day. I will not stop writing. How many people are destroyed by discouragement, insults, frustrations, denigration of intellectual abilities, assault, rape, destruction of relationships? How many are deformed and diminished in their capacities, by constant belittling, racism, sexism? Many.

Why are the powers that be so frightened about one voice crying in the wilderness? Why do I frighten you? How does it hurt you for me to post images at my blog or profile? Why are you frightened by what I have to say?

My concern in this essay is with charges of racism brought against philosophy. I will focus on the greatest philosopher of the modern period, Immanuel Kant. I will defend both philosophy and Kant against these charges, arguing that such charges presuppose values for which all opponents of racism must be indebted -- especially as regards Kant -- to Western speculative thought. We need Kant in the fight against all forms of racism and sexism.

I contend that in framing this accusation of racism against philosophy, one is already drawing on philosophical notions, developed by philosophers (such as Immanuel Kant) that make racism or the denial of universal human dignity unacceptable. The rejection of philosophy makes us philosophers. Accusations of racism against any philosophy may amount to a defense of the importance of philosophy in our thinking about the evils of racism. Kant's Critical theory is one of the most powerful systems of thought constructed AGAINST racism and in defense of the universality of human freedom.

I write these words in a communicative environment that can only be described as a "torture chamber," something I always believed would be impossible in America, confident that whatever happens to these sentences, my freedom to write them and their truth will not be diminished. Philosophy is too vital a weapon in the struggle for social justice and freedom to allow anyone to deny it to us, ordinary people, by defining the subject in such a way that it becomes a kind of parlor game for affluent intellectuals in very comfortable settings.

I begin by stating the issue with some care. I then set forth the evidence and arguments in support of these charges. Next I will offer opposing arguments and evidence relevant to the racism charges. Finally, I will argue that we need a revised reading or "interpretation" of Kant's Critical philosophy in the continuing struggle for freedom with equality.

If you are reading this essay, then you are sharing a philosophical dialogue with a person choosing to transform the pain of torture into reasoned discussion, not violence. For this choice, I am being censored and attacked. Power wishes and intends minority males to choose violence, so as to confirm demeaning stereotypes. I refuse to give the power-elite any legitimation for their racism and hatred, to say nothing of their crimes. I refuse to legitimate what they have done to me and others. In response to this stance, more efforts will be made to destroy this text and its author. ("America's Holocaust" and "Racism on New Jersey's Roads and Highways.")

Before participating in such an effort at destruction of anyone's creative work, I ask you to ponder the alternatives for people all over the world. If reasoned debate is forbidden, if the crimes to which billions are subjected every day are ignored, if further censorship and silence is imposed on the angry and wounded masses of humanity -- is it likely that the future will be peaceful? I doubt it. Eric Hobsbawm, On Empire: America, War, and Global Suppremacy (New York: Pantheon, 2008), pp. 44-45, pp. 52-57.

I. Is Western Philosophy Racist?

A. A Sidebar on Words and Things.

Opposition to racism has led to an example of the sort of stupidity to which I object because it is clearly produced by philosophical ignorance. Race is inevitably a construct. Bear this point in mind. Today's New York Times contains two articles that the average reader will see as totally unrelated. In fact, both reflect ignorance of a massive number of issues in epistemology, linguistic theory and metaphysics (to say nothing of the "nominalist controversy"). First, Michael M. Grynbaum, "It's a Female Dog, or Worse. Or Endearing. And Illegal?," in The New York Times, August 7, 2007, at p. B1; second, Dennis Overbye, "What's in a Name? Parsing the 'God Particle,' the Ultimate Metaphor," in The New York Times, August 7, 2007, at p. F3.

The first article discusses a proposal in New York's City Council to adopt a city-wide ban on the "b-word," following a "successful" city-wide ban on the "n-word." The second article explores, in a whimsical way, the controversy among scientists resulting from the use of the "g-word." Talk of a "God-particle" is only a kind of shorthand for the quest for a "Higgs-field-constant" or the so-called "Higgs boson." Peter Higgs, an English physicist conceived of it in 1964, as the term to designate the foundation stone of matter. In other words the particle responsible for endowing the other elementary particles in the universe with mass.

If you examine the medieval literature of alchemy, you will find nearly identical descriptions in the search for a "philosopher's stone" containing the power to "transmute" base metals (including lead) into gold. This trick of turning lead into gold could only be achieved with the unity of masculine and feminine principles in the magical ritual of love-making, the "Chymical Wedding" (yes, that's how it is spelled). See Lyndsey Clarke's Chymical Wedding (New York: Fawcett, 1989). For an up to date version of this philosophical-scientific-magical thinking, do not pass up this gem of a scholarly work: Fiona Horne, Bewitch a Man: How to Find and Keep Him Under Your Spell (New York: Simon Spotlight, 2006). Now I know how she did it!

For those who really want to know more, see Carl Jung's The Psychology of the Transference and Mysterium Coniuncionis which are the best places to start researching that dissertation in P.C. feminist theory. (This last sentence was altered and corrected since my most recent reading of this work.) For serious feminist scholars and historians as well as theologians, see Stanislas Klossowski de Rola's Alchemy: The Secret Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973).

All words are symbols. Words designate the things they stand for and are, to that extent, metaphorical. You will not do away with racism or with the ugliness designated by some people's use of the "n-word" by forbidding the use of this word. These are make-believe solutions designed for an ignorant and politically correct public square. The "n-word" used by African-Americans -- with very few exceptions, I refuse to use that word for personal reasons -- may have a totally different meaning, a meaning that undermines racism by reappropriating the label as a source of pride.

The same may be said for the word "fag," or any number of other slurs and insulting terms. I am against any proposed "words that wound" exception to First Amendment protections. It is not words that should concern us, but the intention governing usage of a word that is worrisome. Isaiah Thomas recently made the same point in court testimony concerning the use of the "b-word" by white males as opposed to African-Americans. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")

Scientists are disturbed by the "g-word" in physics because they associate this term with fundamentalists and archetypal representations of an old man in the sky. However, the order and beauty which entrances them (think of how Carl Sagan used the word "cosmos") is close to what many religious people mean by using this short word. People use this word "God" because there is no other word to do the job. Social ills cannot be cured by policing language. Such restrictions on speech curtail priceless freedoms necessary for science, causing rather than resolving social troubles. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Censorship, even when it is well-intended, smells no-so-sweet -- to me.

The nominalist controversy deals with whether "universals" (essences) are only names or whether they are "real" entities, existing beyond or as more than names. Neglected in the medieval discussion of this issue is the Kantian observation that arrives with modernity: We may construct as we perceive such entities, making them as real as cancer. Cancer is a word and concept. The disease identified by this word and concept would be just as real under another term -- although, I must admit, cancer is a name that seems to fit the entity very well. Racism is like cancer. It is something that we construct as we identify this diseased tendency in human nature. How do our words hook up with the world?

"A ... decision of the Supreme Court," Gore Vidal writes, "leaves to each community the right to decide what is pornography. Speaking for the majority of the Court, [then Chief Justice] Warren Burger admitted that although no link has yet been found between the consumption of pornography and antisocial behavior, any community may assume that such connection exists if it wants to -- in other words, an outraged community may burn a witch even though, properly speaking, witches do not exist."

Pay attention as genius kicks in:

"The Court's decision has, of course, alarmed and confused the peddlers of smut, who claim, disingenuously, that guidelines are now lacking. They complain that the elders of Drake, North Dakota, may object to the word 'damn' in a novel while the swingers in L.A. may want to read even worse words. Must the publisher, they ask, bring out two editions, one for permissive L.A. with the word 'damn' and another for high toned Drake with the word 'darn'? Or settle the matter by publishing only for Drake?"

Vidal has a keen analytical mind that resolves these difficulties with ease:

"This is a deep problem which I have solved. Wanting in every way to conform with the letter as well as the spirit of the Court's decision, I have carefully eliminated from this book" -- Myron, a novel -- "those words that might cause distress to anyone. Since books are nothing but words, a book is pornographic if it contains 'bad' or 'dirty' words. Eliminate the 'bad' or 'dirty' words and you have made the work 'clean.'"

"In this novel, I have replaced the missing bad words with some very good words indeed: the names of the justices who concurred in the Court's majority decision. Burger, Rehnquist, Powell, Whizzer White and Blackmun fill, as it were, the breach; their names replace the 'bad' or 'dirty' words. ... " ("Metaphor is Mystery.")

Vidal's characters then "Burgered" each other. A name is not to be confused with the object to which it is attached and which it may create. Think of the implications in our consumer society. I purchase a polo shirt that has no trademark on it for $7.00. The identical shirt with a small polo player in the chest area can be sold for $75.00. This is because wearing such a shirt will tell our neighbors that we like to play polo at the country club to which we belong. Naturally, this is when we are not residing in our one bedroom apartment in the barrio. For $75.00, we get instant social pedigree. Incidentally, both shirts are made in China, at the same factory, at identical cost. Marx and Mailer on "surplus value" will be illuminating on this idiocy.

What are we inventing by wearing this shirt? An identity? How do we perceive African-Americans in "hip-hop" gear as opposed to Brooks Brothers suits? Why and how are we "conditioned" to make these language-like associations between or among symbols coding messages and identities? Race may have become one such symbol, an increasingly ambiguous one, even for racists. Is race a brand label?

Klan members cheering for their favorite football players, who happen to be African-Americans, must experience an identity crisis. I am wearing a polo shirt with an alligator on my chest that looks more like an armadillo. (I have just corrected a new "error" in the foregoing sentence.) My shirt was actually more expensive without this creature on my chest. What does this shirt say about me? Nothing, I hope. Jean Baudrillard, "From the System of Objects to the Destiny of Objects," in The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotexte, 1988), pp. 78-95.

Tampering with this title or deleting letters or any other "errors" inserted in these writings will not slow me down. Joel T. Leyner, Esq. is next to be profiled. Preventing me from accessing my e-mails will not stop me. More N.J. judges and their disgusting sex lives will be profiled soon. What you put out to me, I will return to you.

If love is a kind of language, then maybe hatred is also a kind of language. Both may be associated with our richest symbols, with race, gender, and (today) with national flags of one kind or another. Symbols of hatred have also metastisized in a philosophical setting made up mostly of symbols and symbol-clusters, a media-defined universe of images, created by us and now universal, where indirection becomes the optimum mode of relations. Paul Ricoeur's discussion of our "truncated ontology" and need for "indirection" or misdirection in confronting ultimate issues -- including political issues -- comes to mind. You can't go to the store to get a sandwich today without engaging in hermeneutics. Welcome to postmodernity. ("'Are You Cukoo for Cocoa Puffs?' -- How to be a Postmodernist.")

Guess where we "are" right "now"? Are we lost in the fun house? Have our symbols become so real that we can no longer be sure of what, if anything, our lives are about other than such symbols? See "The Stepford Wives." Has race become only symbolic? Is race now a product "label" whatever else it may be? Can you go to the mall and buy some African-American identity? There are some African-Americans who will be happy to sell you the look. Anybody seen Puffy? Have we become only symbolic? Think of 9/11 again. Why the Twin Towers? Why America? ("'The Prisoner': A Review of the AMC Television Series" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")

Not only ideas, but all of us are in danger of becoming symbols coding ideas? (See "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.") Has race become a code for things demonized in the general culture? Is race now a kind of trademark-like identification of persons where what is coded is fought over, challenged by African-Americans struggling to define themselves? Racism cannot be eliminated from society unless there is a philosophical struggle as well as a political one. Are you sure that we can dispense with the insights in philosophical idealism in this new struggle against racism? (This last sentence has been corrected, yet again, since last night.)

Dr. King and Malcolm X spoke of the need to end what I call the "philosophical slavery" of an oppressed people. What would those men say about my daily struggle to speak freely?

Not all persons regarded as "black" in America will be African-Americans. Not all persons described by the "n-word" in the U.S. today will have dark skin. Guess what that makes me? If you are a middle class Latino -- despite your white skin -- you better think about this. By the way, this caution is especially aimed at Cuban-Americans. Senator Bob? Go to the wrong country club and you'll find out quickly enough that everybody thinks you, Senator Bob, are the caddie.

If you wish to see human evil, then all you need to do is give people secret power over others. Even the best persons are then tempted to delight in hurting others because they can get away with it. One way to do that hurting today is by means of the labeling game. You are a "n-----" in America, if someomebody calls you a "n-----." Congratulations.

None of what I am saying in this essay is refuted by the repeated insertion of "errors" and destruction of written work with meaning for others. You do not disprove my contentions or invalidate an argument by further harming me. In fact, you may be proving my point by doing so. I don't know how else to say this so that it will be understood, so I will simply repeat that you cannot beat up ideas.

II. Human Nature and Racism.

"Is modern philosophy racist?" Professor Andrew Valls raises this question in his important recent collection: Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy (New York: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 1-15:

"Does it matter that Locke defended slavery and helped to run companies involved in the slave trade? That Berkeley owned slaves? That Hume thought blacks inferior to whites? That Kant agreed with Hume, and developed elaborate theories of the various races of humans? Are these facts merely incidental, calling for no thorough examination of the views of these figures? Or do the facts reveal something deeper about their philosophies, and about modern philosophy itself?"
I will be focusing on Kant and Western thought's emancipatory mission:

"... Kant's views on the inferiority of nonwhites show that he intends his universal moral theory to apply only to white Europeans -- that only these people count as persons for Kant."

Marxists should not be jumping for joy:

"Marx agreed with Mill that European civilization is superior, and with Hegel, that history itself, in a strict sense, takes place only in European society."

Before turning to the excellent paper by Professor Mills in this collection, I wish to be clear about what I understand by the philosophical endeavor and the task of evaluating philosophical work. Philosophy is thinking. If you've ever sat down with family or friends to try to figure out what you think about life or meaning, God or ethics, politics and justice then you are a philosopher. Everyone is and must be a philosopher to some degree. (Antonio Gramsci)

Everybody also dances. Some people dance like Fred Astaire or Bill "Bojangels" Robinson, Margo Fontaine or Ginger Rodgers (going backwards and in high heels). Most of us don't dance that well. Some people have very orderly and powerful minds that also welcome chaos and deep diving into the subconscious. If they happen to be highly articulate and have read many books, they may become good philosophers.

Philosophers are suggestive thinkers because they articulate and clarify, anticipate as well as formulate intellectual currents and developments in a culture, while connecting such forces to personal autobiographical perspectives. No philosopher, not even the very greatest, is right about everything for everyone. However, great philosophers will be better (more systematic and powerful) thinkers than most of us. Philosophers will have persuasive and insightful comments on most issues -- many of which have been absorbed from the culture by their own critics, who are often unaware of being influenced by their targets.

You cannot get away from Kant or Hegel, Marx or Freud, James or Dewey in contemporary U.S. society, Latin America, or Europe (where additional thinkers will be important), even if you have never heard of these people or read their books. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. must be seen as American philosophers whatever political roles they played. Philosophy is an attempt to theorize our historical moment and the human condition. With the arrival of modernity this challenge becomes crucial since what defines us, as persons, is precisely this transcendental move to the status of humanity per se. (An "error" was inserted in this sentence since my last reading of this essay.)

Notice that, if humanity becomes an abstract category, then "sub-humanity" will also become an abstract category, a category to which anybody may be assigned. Before you become a racist, you better remember that next week it may be you or your loved-ones who will be ostracized. If you feel threatened by people of different races, the answer is to join them in fighting against all forms of racism, no matter who is the victim. Think of Rawls. ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")

A quick recap is in order: We used to believe that what made us special or unique is our divine origins and place in a universal structure ordained by God. After the Renaissance and scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, these ideas became somewhat difficult to sustain, especially when we ran into weird people from "new worlds" who had never heard of the Bible and yet thought that they were pretty special. Bartolomeo de Las Casas is not mentioned by scholars addressing this racism issue as often as he should be. For that matter, neither is Marco Polo.

We moderns wanted to think about humanity in "new" ways -- the idea of the "new" is crucial in the modern world -- while still trying to make sense of our predicament. What is it that makes us worthy of moral consideration? Set aside God and different understandings of religion -- which led to a number of bloody European wars after the crusades -- how should we think about other people?

A fascinating conversation about this question unfolding over several centuries takes place between two groups of guys and gals, one group saying: "Hey, let's actually look at people and take lab specimens and do science stuff, then we'll be able to answer our question concerning what are the races of 'man' and how we should treat 'inferior' races or beings, assuming that we know who they are." This is the "empirical" team. By the way, this is the sort of thinking found in people like Josef Mengele, not just Charles Darwin.

Another group of thinkers, culminating with Kant's synthesis, answered by saying: "We challenge your so-called scientific approach because just looking at people and doing experiments and all that disgusting stuff isn't going to answer our moral question. This empiricist guy, Hume, is all bent out of shape about facts and values. We have our doubts about whether there really is a difference between those two things, facts and values. We're not so sure that you can exclude as 'non-factual' everything that isn't revealed by empirical methods, especially in the realm of values as facts. What is a human being or person in a moral sense? How should or must we treat persons?" Let's call these boys and girls the "rationalists."

I can hear the psychobabblers whining about how values are not facts. Says who? Whatever judgment you make concerning a value question is itself a fact to the extent that you have made it. As for the defense of moral rationalism, see Christopher Peacocke's The Realm of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 198-226 and my essay on "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism."

A distinction emerges between two rival discussions, overlapping in some areas and not in others, from the explosion of the Florentine Quatrocento until about 1945. This distinction is not always borne in mind by the rival philosophers, disagreeing without understanding that the subject-matter of their conversation is quicksilver, shifting from one setting to another before their eyes, as philosophers and scientists are increasingly puzzled about their irrelevance in light of the alternating purposes of the dialogue, often speaking at cross purposes. Steven Toulmin's recent book on modernity is very useful in exploring this issue. (Another new "error" has been found and corrected.)

At the center of this shifting dialectic are the concepts of human nature and race. One debate is conceptual; the other is empirical; both come together, as it were, in discussions of race, slavery and modernity's "reconceptualizing" of the relationship between individuals and others in the form of Law or the State. The trajectory, remember, is from Machiavelli's Prince to Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Often the conversation does not come together at all because philosophers and scientists are discussing the topic of humanity for different purposes, in opposed vocabularies, misleadingly making use of the same terms, concerning different entities and with opposed definitions. Intellectuals are often unaware of their different purposes when arriving at this Western psychological fault line of race.

No amount of empirical examination of people, for example, will answer the conceptual question concerning "What is a person?" This is because a person is a moral and forensic, also a theological concept. What is a human animal is a biological question. No amount of philosophizing will tell you how the pancreas works because a biological animal called a human being's pancreatic functions will need to be examined empirically. Each of these endeavors, conceptual analysis and empirical examination, involves both facts and values. We will need both science and philosophy to understand people. We will require each approach to fulfill different roles in variable settings. As in dancing, first one partner leads; then the other leads. Science (Scully), being more rigorous, may be thought of as female; philosophy (Mulder) -- being often in need of directions -- may be thought of as male. Racism cuts across all disciplinary boundaries, so you better do the same if you plan to understand racism. Time to remove another letter from one of my words?

This is the opposite of a fact/value distinction. It is an argument for a unification of factual-evaluative discourses in order to provide simultanaeous multi-perspectival views of humanity in an age of surfaces or images, fractal subjects, compartmentalized identities. Don't think "outside the box," but think from within and outside the box at the same time. My sources for these ideas, which I develop in a postmodernist direction, are Ricoeur and Gadamer, Davidson and Putnam, Rorty and Butler, Davis and West.

Do these ideas frighten people so much that, even in the formulations of a powerless and shattered -- also marginalized -- intellectual they must be suppressed, even as he is further damaged? Why? What is so frightening about these ideas? Is it the demonstration of the absurdity and evil of racism? If so, then please believe that you will not destroy ideas -- or philosophical opposition to racism -- by further hurting me or altering and defacing these essays on a daily basis. You are hurting those who may benefit from reading these essays as much (or more) than you are injuring me. You are also hurting yourselves in New Jersey worse than any other party. ("What is it like to be tortured?")

Race reflects a division of human beings based on pre-existing conceptual categories (often subconscious ones) that then make observable biological features relevant, like skin color and/or facial characteristics, or gender. These pre-existing categories are arbitrary. A society may wish to make baldness the relevant feature for purposes of establishing the moral superiority of persons. In such a society, race is a trivial factor (like baldness for us), but in my alternative planet -- let us call it "New Jersey 2" -- bald persons are discriminated against, enslaved, possibly sent to concentration camps as the obvious moral inferiors of the hairy members of the species, such as myself. Think of Dick Cheney.

It is obvious to everyone in "New Jersey 2" that some people are bald and others are not. This is a natural, empirical fact. This fact is "scientifically" undeniable. However, the ethical significance attached to this fact is totally arbitrary. It just happens that persons who are bald are traditionally thought of as evil and intellectually inferior in this hypothetical society. True, there are unusual examples of bald persons who happen to be geniuses, but this is clearly anomalous. Such persons are the exception that proves the rule. Some of your best friends may be bald, but would you want a bald guy to marry your sister? Obviously not.

A. Professor Charles Mills Judges Immanuel Kant's Philosophy.

"Kant's pivotal place in the Enlightenment project," Charles Mills writes, "and the modern canon locates him strategically. If Kant is central as an emblematic figure, and if racist ideas were central to his thought, then this obviously implies a radical rethinking of our conventional narratives of the history and content of Western philosophy. And such a rethinking, as said, is precisely what I am arguing for." (p. 169.)

Professor Mills points to evidence from Kant's letters, not primarily his published texts, that this thinker -- who lived one of the most sheltered lives of any of the great philosophers -- had doubts about the intellectual capacity of Asians and non-Europeans, so that his egalitarian notions were not meant to apply or were doubtful, as far as Kant was concerned (privately), outside the European context. (pp. 170-171.)

Professor Mills may be relying on a mistaken understanding of Kant's project. Critical philosophy cannot be racist, even if Kant held racist views. If a racist says 2 + 2 = 4, this statement will be true, even if the racist's ideas concerning race are mistaken. Kant's abstract transcendental ego has no race or gender. It may be that Kant was mistaken in his assumptions concerning whether all persons would be encompassed by this concept. This is irrelevant to the validity of the concept, which today is seen as applying to all of humanity as rational agents. Kant's goal was to specify the morally essential criteria of humanity, universally, not to say whether this or that person or group of persons met the standard. The analogy to the U.S. Constitution is obvious. Professor Mills writes:

"The position that Kant's defenders have taken is not to deny Kant's racial views, but to deny that they have the philosophical implications claimed by Eze, Bernasconi, and others (such as myself). So either Kant's racial views do not affect his philosophy at all (the extreme view), or they do not affect it in its key/central/basic claims (the more moderate position). (p. 175.)

This is to make a profound error, in my opinion, because Kant's Critical Theory is not a theory of human nature or race. Kant may have been a racist, from our perspective today, but his philosophy cannot be racist -- just as it cannot be made of peanut butter. Critical theory is a philosophical description of the transcendental subject as knowing agent. It is an epistemological theory with humbling metaphysical implications which leads to a theory of the foundations of morals.

This distinction and critique of philosophical views as racist -- and therefore, suspect -- is a Kantian critique. It is the sort of criticism that only becomes possible in the modern world, when the essential criteria of personhood and humanity are removed from the realm of empirical "racial" considerations (skin color, baldness) and made a matter of a priori moral/epistemological concepts. Race, gender, sexual-orientation then become irrelevant to the subject's capacity for autonomous action (freedom) and thought. And freedom and thought are held to be the essential criteria of humanity, in a moral sense, and to follow from the capacity for "rational agency."

When I say that philosophy is a locus of struggle, I mean that opposition to faulty philosophical ideas is also part of philosophy. All philosophical criticism is itself philosophy. Neither racism nor anti-racist views define philosophy. Philosophy is something much bigger and more inclusive than critics realize.

The issue is not whether Kant's views of race affected his philosophy, but whether his philosophy was applied incorrectly by Kant himself in formulating his own racial views. My answer to that question is that, for historical reasons, Kant screwed up his interpretation of his own principles. Kant may be the greatest philosopher who ever lived. However, Kant might have made a bad judge. It should be noted that most (or all) judges in Kant's day would have agreed with his racial views. Judges held far worse views. Kant may well be wrong about whether a person or group has this capacity for autonomy, which would be an empirical question based on observation. This is irrelevant to the objective standard concerning "the transcendental unity of apperception" derived from the first Critique. Thus, Kolakowski writes:

"Kant's insistence on considering people as ends in themselves, and thus on considering each person separately" -- in abstraction from empirical reality -- "postulates that no human being may be the property of another and that slavery contradicts the concept of being human. If we deny, however, the pretense of common humanity in the name of the concrete human being, we thereby also deny the single foundation of the principle of human rights. This principle is valid only under the precondition that rights exist to which every individual may lay claim simply by being human, under the preconditions of everyone's equal participation in human nature or, in other words, on the basis of the 'abstract human being.' ... " (emphasis added)

A Kantian subject, like the "average reasonable person" in common law, has no race or gender, no nationality or religious preference -- until applied as a standard. Kant's application of the standard is no better or worse than anyone else's in his day. Kant lived at a time when people owned slaves. Furthermore, Kant's intent in 1786 is not dispositive regarding the meaning of his philosophy today, as evidenced by the use to which that philosophy was put in the works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, Charles Fried and Ronald Dworkin. Kolakowski concludes:

"The concrete human being, on the other hand -- as the word is commonly used -- is concrete only in the sense that he is determined, not by his human nature, but by a more specific category." [Like nationality, gender, race and so on?]

Leszek Kolakowski, "Why Do We Need Kant?," in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997), pp. 49-50.

Kolakowski closes with some memorable sentences, given his own experience of totalitarianism: "Humanity is a moral concept. Unless we recognize that, we have no good reason to challenge the ideology of slavery." (p. 54.) (Or racism?)

Notice that this point is philosophical, not scientific. Incidentally, Kant liked women and was more respectful of women's intellects than most philosophers of his era. Kant pondered a marriage proposal, philosophically, only to discover that when he made the offer, the lady in question was already married and had three children. Kant's brilliant advice to offer women tea with cheese and honey has yet to be surpassed by any philosopher as a sure-fire aphrodisiac. Antonio cologne also works in seduction efforts, allegedly, although I lack empirical verification of this fascinating principle. There is always a possibility of a Popperian falsification of this postulate concerning Antonio cologne and a subsequent testing of the maxim concerning cold showers, as anti-stimulus or as a "deflationary" agent, as it were.

The idea of human nature did not, formally, exclude persons on the basis of nationality or race -- nor as women, for Kant -- since the "transcendental move" located the human essence in abstract properties deemed essential to humanity, such as autonomous decision-making, intelligence, and moral capacity. Physical characteristics, again, are irrelevant. This point may become doubtful in amorous situations.

I would be surprised if anyone living in the eighteenth century -- including the framers of the U.S. Constitution -- could avoid all racist notions by our standards today. Kant's Critical philosophy is not racist and cannot be racist, by definition, since unlike Kant's personal opinions about concrete individuals, it is not empirically-based, even if it is compatible with empiricism. Kant's philosophy is a conceptual-structure, like the U.S. Constitution. It is the conceptual structure that provides the ultimate arsenal against all forms of racism or slavery. Like a bridge that must move with the winds to remain stable, such conceptual structures are always evolving, usually dialectically. Roger Scruton writes:

"Kant repeatedly emphasizes that the theory is not to be construed as empirical psychology. It is not, nor does it purport to be, a theory of the workings of the human, as opposed to some other, intelligence. It is a theory of the understanding as such, telling us what it is, and how it must function if there are to be judgments at all. In all philosophical discussions of these matters, Kant argues, we are talking 'not about the origin of experience, but about what lies in it' And he compares such purely philosophical questions to that analysis of concepts that has since become so fashionable. Kant wishes to draw the limits of the understanding. If there are things that cannot be grasped by the understanding, then all assertions about them are meaningless."

Roger Scruton, Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 32-33.

"What is the perfect or best race of humans?" This question falls under the category of meaningless or absurd metaphysical speculation because it seeks answers to what cannot be known in metaphysical thinking because it is beyond the grasp of the human mind. To formulate the question is, surreptitiously, to put yourself in the category of those qualified to determine the matter. Isn't that convenient? This point is established by Kant's meaningful epistemological, metaphysical and moral speculation that sets limits on the knowable. What we cannot know, we may nevertheless understand.

Questioning the existence of racism in philosophy is a defense of the importance of all philosophical speculation and a vindication of the philosopher's capacity to transcend racist conditions and conceptual tools. Reasonableness is the right balance between what is meaningful and (therefore) understandable and the knowable, which is often quite different. Some philosophers may be racists. Philosophy cannot be racist.