Remarks on "The Imperial Scholar" for "Bias in Academia - a Panel on the Politics of Citation" sponsored by the Pratt Institute Libraries

Remarks on "The Imperial Scholar" for "Bias in Academia" - A Panel on the Politics of Citation sponsored by the Pratt Institute Libraries

Bias in Academia
A panel discussion to expand consciousness of bias and discrimination in various academic practices and venues.
Organized by the Pratt Institute Libraries, the panelists include Janice Robertson, Ann Holder, Ric Brown, Minh-ha Pham, Mendi Obadike, Denisse Andrade, and Arlene Keizer and co-moderators Caitlin Cahill and Uzma Z. Rizvi.
This event is open to the Pratt community.
LOCATION: Alumni Reading Room, Pratt Library, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn Campus
DATE: September 12, 2018 at 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

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[[[Portions in brackets were not spoken due to time constraints]]]

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The sponsors and location of this panel have some significance to me since in the years before I became an academic, I was a legal reference librarian at a large firm in the City. It was during that time that many of the works of Critical Race Theory began to appear in the law reviews. So I had the luxury of easy access to the journals and read a fair amount over the 11 years I was a law librarian.

So it is because of this duel perspective that I want to stay fairly close to the texts that the organizers shared with us in preparation for today, particularly Delgado’s “Imperial Scholar” and also a later article that he wrote in response to the reaction.

I want to focus on these texts because they situate CRT in relation to a discussion of a politics of citation; because they expose issues that might otherwise be left aside or submerged in the desire to correct wrongs or to “make a difference” (and I use that phrase with all of its connotations in relation to CRT.

For Delgado, the context of Critical Race Theory lays within the bounds of the Law and problems within legal theory, particularly

“the exclusion of minority writing about key issues of race law…. [causing] “...blunting, skewings, and omissions in the literature dealing with race, racism, and American law.”

Delgado makes a demand for recognition and inclusion that I will return to in a moment

[[[but it is worth noting that at the time of his article, he counts the number of minority law professors at 233 out of the ABA’s 3,875 FT law professors.]]]

Ten years later, Delgado reflects on citation and the privilege to speak in the 1992 article “The Imperial Scholar Revisited,” which, like the first was originally published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (140 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1349). After a decade, Delgado finds that the important question has become “What happens when a group of insurgent scholars gains admission, gets inside the door, earns the credibility and credentials that warrant consideration by mainstream scholars?” (401)

His survey of this new terrain is subdued rather than triumphant.

[[[The inner circle of white legal scholars who had previously dominated the discussion of civil rights had now largely abandoned the field.]]]

Despite new voices and citations of new authorities, Delgado confronts what he calls a “melancholy truth”:

We take seriously new social thought only after hearing it so often that its tenets and themes begin to seem familiar, inevitable, and true. We then adopt the new paradigm, and the process repeats itself. We escape from one mental and intellectual prison only into a larger, slightly more expansive one….[[[We reject new thought until, eventually, it proponents are ‘elder states-persons,’ to be feared no longer”]]] (1992:407).

Should we be surprised by this given that CRT’s criticism never approached the level of a real critique of Justice and the system of Law [[[(by which I mean the discourses, techniques, bureaucracies)]]]? Now, CRT did offer fundamental challenges to legal theory, [[[court rules and procedures]]] and certainly gained the attention of academics in other fields. But, one can not separate CRT from its own constant references to the Law. It is all there in the footnotes, after all. CRT was deeply reformist in its demands for a fairer system and a better administration of justice.

At the same time we hardly need another “race theory” or “theory of race” with all of the historical/scientific references those phrases carry. As with the Law, CRT offered no real critique of “race theory”. Instead, its authorities often either naively or strategically Naturalize racial categories; making little or no reference to the work that has critiqued the scientific ideologies of race and racialism. But this is what one might expect of articles in elite law reviews.

So if CRT offered neither a critique of Law & Justice, nor a critique of race and racialism, then what did it offer? Nothing less than the demand for recognition and inclusion. Derrick Bell’s neo-conservatism, [[[and I dare say, his neo-segregationism,]]] is in some respects a reaction to the disappointing spoils of recognition [[[at the cost of am implicit acceptance of the system of Law and the administration of justice and punishment… maybe even with a dash of resentment and vengeance]]]. The replacement of one court by another, of one set of gatekeepers of a discipline by another set, of one Master with another, would go on, and so too would the constant assertion of privilege and of the right to judge, reward, and punish. When Audre Lorde asserted that one can not “Dismantle the Master’s House with the Master’s tools” she was in part responding to a very old and deeply ambiguous question that could be put to CRT:

“What are ye but the master’s tools?”

[[[A question also asked but answered in different ways by Aristotle, Jesus, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and every Slaver and slaver driver in the old South.]]]

Delgado’s “melancholy truth” suggests that if we want engage in a politics of citation, it may require either a compromise with the status quo, or a conscious sacrifice of status/privileges/reputation in order to undertake studies that are not mainstream, that probably will not be published in the recognized journals or by the best publishers, and that do not simply reproduce the established discourses. In other words, work that is “Untimely”. It is a matter of asking what is studied, why it is studied, and to what use, if any, one wants the work to be put. Of course, this would mean that search and tenure committees be guided by the same principles.

Let me just come back to where I began. In the second paragraph of the “Imperial Scholar,” Delgado mentions his assistant as having done most of the research for the article. At no point do we find out the name of this research assistant, nor are they actually thanked. Neither is the reference librarian who undoubtedly guided the research assistant in using the early Lexis database.

Delgado’s “Imperial Scholar” can take on many meanings and appear in many forms, even cloaked in the passion and rhetoric of an “Insurgent,” a “Nationalist,” or a “de-colonialist.”

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Jury Duty, June-July 2015: "Flawed system fails mentally ill killer and his young victim"

Note from the past 3 weeks of Jury Duty, (June-July 2015) - "'He should be alive: Flawed system fails mentally ill killer and his young victim'"

In 2015 I served on a jury for a murder/insanity trial.  After the trial ended, I wrote up my impressions and shared them with a limited number of friends.  Given the nature of the trial and the real issues it raised, I have decided to make those comments public.  I have also decided not to edit the text, even where there are minor typos or errors in the timeline since it represents my thinking at the time, and the errors suggest the stress that the jury was under during this trial.

BRBIII

February 2017

The title is taken from this Daily News editorial:

He should be alive: Flawed system fails mentally ill killer and his young victim http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/alive-flawed-system-fails-mentally-ill-killer-young-victim-article-1.459964

Cleared of Murder, a Man Punches His Lawyer http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/nyregion/cleared-of-murder-a-man-punches-his-lawyer.html?ref=nyregion&_r=1

Murder suspect slugs lawyer after he’s found not guilty http://nypost.com/2015/07/01/murder-suspect-slugs-his-lawyer-after-hes-found-not-guilty/

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July 2, 2015

Written in part because to write this is a way of freeing my mind from my need to consciously remember it all. You do not need to feel obligated to read it.

Anthony Mondenado

***
Here is what happened.  Or at least what was given to us a jurors. Unfortunately, the only people who know what happened in those few seconds to a minute are Anthony and AM. So much of the description of what happened between 2:30am and 3:30am are only from AM’s conversations with the psychiatrists and his confession, which was written out by the Detective “for clarity and logical sense” and videotaped after being questioned without a lawyer from 4:30am until 6pm.

***

At the age of 17 Alejandro Morales [AM] locked himself in the bathroom saying that there were demons trying to get him. His mother has to call EMS and that is described as perhaps his first psychotic break. He was diagnosed then as a paranoid schizophrenic with an anti-social disorder. That diagnosis was consistent through the years and with numerous Drs. His mother would hide the knives in the apartment because she once awoke to find him standing over the beds of his brothers holding a knife to protect them from the demons.


On at least two previous occasions, AM committed unprovoked attacks on a bus rider and on a subway rider. He was restrained and held by other customers both times. Both times, he was on his way to a psychiatric appointment. In the episode on the bus, he said that the victim spit on him, but not the kind of spit that is there when you touch it, but the kind that comes from angles. A consistent theme is that people are spitting on him from angles, but not the kind of spit you can see when you touch it. Rain is not rain but spit. He wrote to one Dr. that “when it rains, things get interesting. Run for cover.” The victim on the bus was knocked unconscious before AM could be restrained.


In the 2003 subway episode, AM said that a rider, who was apparently simply sitting and reading the newspaper, was “trying to intimidate me with his testicles” and so AM smashed him over the head with a bottle, requiring 40 stitches. The victim said that he “hoped that AM would get the help he obviously needs” and AM was convicted of assault and sent to Attica for 5 years. At Attica he was constantly moved back and forth from the general population to the psych ward and solitary.


In 2009 he was released on probation and into a half-away house and a drug treatment program. He had, according to the Drs. tried early on to self-medicate using marijuana, and that it had probably helped at first in the time before his first psychotic break, but that as his condition worsened, it actually became a trigger for his psychotic delusions. Throughout the records, the various Drs note that AM has no insight into his being ill, that he constantly goes off his meds and even when he is on them, does not acknowledge or understand that he has a problem.


Through Serendipity – really, that’s the real name of his half-way house – he gets psychological treatment and supervision, but constantly goes on and off his medication. He is hospitalized or sent to ERs for medication several times between May and November 2009. He is long been taking two anti-psychotic medications, Halenol and Abilify, but in November, his dosage is increased and he is put on a third anti-psychotic drug. All told at this point he is on three anti-psychotic drugs and three drugs to deal with the side-effects of the anti-psychotic drugs. It is unclear whether he had taken his medications before the attack, or the correct dosage of them, etc.


Just before Christmas, he walks away from the half-way house (he also skips two sessions with his psychologist at Canarsie Aware). Around December 20th, he comes to his mother’s apartment in the Grant Houses in Harlem. He tells her that he wants to be home for the holidays and she lets him stay, trying to supervise as best she could his taking his meds though she is at work and AM’s younger brothers are at work or often away looking for work. Most of this time, AM stays in his room or sits around watching the others play video games. He never actually plays one himself. He has delusions about the characters, that there are gang members outside the windows spitting on him from angles, voices are talking to him and everyone is speaking to him only by rapping, that the Bloods and the Crips are coming to get him, that the “whole universe is trying to humiliate him” etc. But he does not tell anyone about this. AM’s brother Aaron would later be asked by the DA “Did your brother seem normal?” and Aaron said “My brother has never seemed normal. That’s just who he is.”


Anthony’s favorite uncle Carlos was also living with AM’s mother, and so Anthony, who had in fact gotten a playstation 3 for Christmas, though this has less importance than then press reports, wanted to go over to spend time between Xmas and new years with Carlos, and his mother said yes. Carlos did not know that AM had arrived.


Sadly, because they did not think that AM was really capable of such an act as he obviously was to commit, AM’s mother did not warn Anthony’s mother about his being in the apartment.


On Christmas night, AM’s brother’s Aaron and Chris take AM to the movie Sherlock Holmes. It was raining and AM ran away twice to avoid the spit that he says is falling on him when it rains. Aaron calms him down, though not without AM smashing him against a car during the second chase. They go to the movie as Aaron thinks that AM has calmed down, but in the theater, AM starts screaming about the Bloods and the Cripps (not the thing to do there as there might actually be some of them in the audience!) Aaron is worried for their safety and takes AM home.


Things are mostly fine until News Years Eve, 2009. AM has been mostly by himself and his brothers and Anthony have been together. There is some indication of jealousy about the attention that Anthony was receiving, but nothing really discussed by either the people or the defense.
Anthony is suppose to return home for New Years Eve with his mother, but he calls her to ask if he can stay until Sunday because his is having a good time and school starts Monday. His mother still has no knowledge of AM being there. Anthony is also spending time at his Grandfather’s nearby apartment.


On the Afternoon of December 31st, AM has an appointment with his psychologist at Canarsie Aware in Brooklyn. He has skipped or failed to appear at the last two, so Aaron goes with him. As he describes his present condition to the psychologist, she immediately goes to her boss and summons the EMS and NYPD to have him taken to Woodhull hospital because he is “acutely psychotic” and “a clear danger to himself and others” at that time. She writes to the Woodhull Drs saying this explicitly and this is 12 hours before the murder.


At Woodhull, he is evaluated by the ER psychiatrist who finds that he is acutely psychotic, but at this point AM is denying having said anything to the Canarsie psychologist. The Woodhull ER Dr. goes to Aaron and asks him if he thinks AM is OK to go home. Aaron responds “I don’t know. You tell me. You’re the Dr.” The Woodhull DR. then writes prescriptions for two of AMs anti-psychotic drugs and releases him to his younger (and much smaller, I might add) brother.


Aaron and AM return to the Grant House apartment. AM keeps to himself (says later that he hangs a shirt over the door so that he can know if someone is trying to come into the room. Continues to have auditory, visual, and tactile hallucinations.


When the ball drops, Carlos and AM’s mother Antonia go to bed. AM is by this point in the living room watching his brothers, some of their friends, and Anthony play video games. Says later that they are walking all over him and humiliating him and spitting on him. Characters in the video game turn and speak to him. Everyone only speaks to him in rhymes. He is listening to music, on his head phones, but he says that he does not know where the music is coming from. At other times, he will be angry at his brothers or his mother about being mean to him, and then switch almost immediately to saying that they were always nice to him. He says at one point during the interrogation that his mother had been sawed in half – and in fact, he had been, too – the night before night by the Crips, but a moment later asks if she has been able to go get him a burger from McDonalds. Then saying that Carlos rapes his mother, but that Carlos was nice to her and never aggressive or mean to AM.


AM goes back to his room. Anthony’s grandfather goes home at some point. Complains later that he goes outside with his brothers to smoke but that they will not share their pot with him (they only smoke outside because Mom would get mad about pot in the apartment) and so he goes out to buy some himself, but then says he is outside smoking with them and gets mad at them because they still will not share, though he has just said that he had purchased some. (Family says that he had no money of his own.) He is angry particularly at Aaron’s friend “J.V.” and thinks about stabbing him, but doesn’t because Aaron would be mad at him. He goes back to his room. Aaron and everyone else think that he has gone to bed.


At about 2am, Aaron takes Anthony to bed, telling him to get to sleep but leaving him playing on a gameboy. Aaron, Chris and a couple of friends decide to go to the local 24 hour burger place to get some food. They leave sometime between 2 and 2:30am. At 3:30am, as they are leaving, Chris gets a call from Carlos, drops the food on the ground and without speaking to Aaron, begins to run home. Aaron follows him.


After they leave, AM says that he gets up to go deal with JV, maybe stab him, but finds everyone gone. He says that he calms down and goes out to smoke pot in the hallway. He says he takes a knife to protect himself from the people who want to get into the apartment. At various times he will say that he was attacked by either a white male or a black male, either before or after the stabbing of Anthony.


AM says that he smoked, threw the rest of the pot down the “incinerator” and went back inside to sit in the living room. He said that he was “just chilling listening to music” and "trying to get an angle" when the murder unfolds. He told various accounts, though in general the story was the same in broad outline. He was sitting in the living room. Anthony, who seemed larger and stronger than he was, went by at superhuman speed and while sexually assaulting AM. AM had the knife that he had taken into the hallway. He slashed and stabbed at Anthony to protect himself from Anthony, or so he thought. Later he will say that “Xavier Gilmore” was with him at the time. There were 10 wounds, mostly defensive, but one through the arm and one in the chest that was the fatal one. Anthony got free and ran to knock on Carlos’ door saying “Uncle, Uncle. I’ve been stabbed!” or “Alex stabbed me!” and he collapses in the doorway. AM’s mother says she hears the front door slam and Carlos tries to give first aid while she calls 911. They are nearby and are there within four minutes but by then it is too late. Anthony is taken to the hospital and pronounced dead around 4:20am.


AM, saying that he is afraid that Carlos will be mad, runs up the stairs to the 17th floor from the apartment on the 6th floor. Sometime during this time he is suppose to have disposed of the knife down the compactor. The NYPD finds a knife in the compactor that is consistent with the kitchen knife that is thought to have been used to kill Anthony, but extensive testing revealed no fingerprints, blood, or human DNA on the knife. Six other knives were found, some on the scaffolding below their 6th floor apartment, and two in the kitchen sink, but none of these were ever tested for blood or fingerprints. They are very generic kitchen knives that one might buy anywhere. AM was shown the knife during his confession and he identified it as the weapon, and that is what the cops went with. They did no analysis of the living room for blood, as they only examined the blood found on AM’s clothes and in the hallway and floor of the apartment leading to Carlos and Antonia’s bedroom. AM’s pants had the blood of Anthony and one other unidentified male, but no blood from AM.


So, AM leaves the apartment without his shoes (which are by the couch in the living room) or coat. It is snowing outside. He says he goes up to the 17th floor either to visit a friend or to buy shoes from a crackhead for $10. The NYPD note that he had no money or weapon on him when he is arrested in the next few minutes.


After going up to the 17th floor, he goes back down the stairs to the 7th to see if he is in trouble. He believes that he has hurt Anthony, but does not think that he has really hurt him. “I thought I got him in the side” he said to one of the psychiatrists.


He calls the elevator to the 7th floor and gets in.


In the elevator are cameras operated by the NYPD Viper squad. The tape shows the door open on 7, then close, then open again. AM gets in pushes the button and fiddles with his hands. He does this three or four times on the way down. The Viper camera operator has been talking to the patrol cops as the 911 call has already been relayed to them. The Viper camera operator follows AM’s movements for the next few minutes. He is seen walking out of the building and down a pathway in the snow as two NYPD run up, one with his gun drawn. He puts his hands up and says that a white guy (or a bunch or white guys) had just tried to rob him and he punched him in the nose and that is why there was blood on his pants but they took his shoes. Four more NYPD run up and they begin to walk him back to the building. At this point, his brother Chris runs to him and gets right in his face, something that surprised many on the jury that the cops let him get so close to someone that they had arrested less than 45 seconds before. Chris yells “Alex, what did you do?!” or “Why did you do that” and AM responds calmly “Don’t worry, he’ll [or it’ll] be alright” and is taken to the precinct. Aaron and the mother go to the precinct while Chris and Carlos go to the hospital. There is an older sister who was not living there with them. She and their mother were in court most days.


The police photograph AM, who has no injuries to his hands or body, and take his clothes. They begin to question him and question him from about 4:30am until the confession at 6pm. He is immediately then taken to Bellevue where he is found to be acutely psychotic at the time.

The psychiatrists will note that it is rare that you have detailed records from the 24 hours before, during, and after an acutely psychotic episode that results in a murder or assault.


AM can not be arraigned for several days until he is stabilized and then he is returned immediately to Bellevue after his hearing. On Jan. 6th Dr. Goldsmith sees him as he will again on the 13th and 25th. He reported being taken aback by the broad range of symptoms that AM displayed (Goldsmith was head of psychiatry at Kirby State Hospital on Wards Island). That on the range of paranoid schizophrenia, AM was an extreme outlier. In fact, every doctor back to 2003 said this, except the Woodhull ER doctor, unfortunately.


For the next 5 years, AM moves back and forth between Kirby, Bellevue, and Rikers. He is committed twelve times. During Sandy, he was in Bellevue, which flooded and had to be evacuated. Most of those on his ward were sent to other hospitals. He and a few others were sent to a special secure ward at Kirby. He is never really stable enough to stand trial until there is an order to compel him to take his medication. Once that happened, the DA sent their psychiatrist, Hershberger, to examine AM in October 2014. Hershberger does not dispute Goldsmith’s view that AM “lacked substantial capacity to understand the nature and consequences of his actions” when he attacked Anthony. In fact, several jurors noted that over the course of five years, the DA had not been able to find any psychiatrist to dispute that finding and that their own psychiatrist had testified for the defense. Next month, we were told, he would be testifying for the prosecution against an insanity claim. He has already testified for the DA two or three other times this year. But this time, he felt that he could not go along with the DA’s view.


The key pieces of evidence for the jury were the DNA on AM’s pants and the testimony of the two expert psychiatric witnesses, especially Hershberger. He also said that in all of his years of experience, he had rarely met someone as profoundly disturbed as AM. During their session, AM was medicated and yet obviously “acutely psychotic” and that several times Hershberger felt in danger. In his opinion, AM would never get better, only worse.


Sloppy police work, and nothing to do with the efforts of the DA, undermined the murder in the second degree charge. There was just no evidence as to his intent to kill, but for Manslaughter in the 1st degree, there was plenty.


Contrary to reports, AM did not reek, though he did wear the same green light winter jacket every day. He always wore sweatpants, but they did change. There were other “incidences” during the trial, but we were not told about them.


The playstation/video games only came up in the context of what was going on at the time in the apartment. There was never any mention of an argument over the video games. In fact, the crimescene photos show the living room with the TV and gaming center turned off, and with AM’s shoes and jacket by the couch as well as bloody footprints probably left by a cop but again, never tested or noted in the reports later.  Many details in the press are inaccurate or incomplete. No reporters mention Hershberger, for example.


The jury was a very diverse set New Yawkers. They eliminated every potential juror who was in the mental health fields. Mostly middle to upper-middle class, with at least a BA or BFA and about 1/3 of these with a MA or PhD. About 1/4 working class. So no really rich or really poor people. A complete mix of ethnicity, but all but one has lived in the city more than 5 years. I was juror Seven, though I was the eleventh selected after about 150 had been rejected before me. There were four alternates and 12 jurors.  I was later told that I was selected because of my having already served on a criminal, plus also having been a legal reference librarian for many years, and now a professor of sociology, I was a ideal juror in the eyes of both sides.


The attorneys were both excellent. If I were on trial, I would want Sosinsky, and if something this horrible had happened to one of my loved ones, I would want a prosecutor like Casolaro.

[After the verdict was reached and we were taken to the jury room, we were prevented from leaving because AM, once he understood that the insanity verdict would mean that he would likely remain in the psychiatric hospital for the rest of his life, he violently attacked his attorney, Sosinsky, and had to be restrained by several officers.  We only found out about this later, but the uniforms of the court officers who escorted us out were noticeably disheveled.  Newspapers reported the incident the next day: 

Cleared of Murder, a Man Punches His Lawyer
"It took more than two dozen court officers to subdue the defendant, Alejandro Morales, 31, as he crashed around the Manhattan courtroom, swinging wildly at the officers, slamming into the prosecutor’s table and ending up sprawled face down in the jury box, witnesses said.

“He’s a very disturbed and volatile man, and we saw stark evidence of that, unfortunately,” said the defense lawyer, Frederick L. Sosinsky, who was not seriously injured. He added that Mr. Morales became violent after being told he would not go home immediately. "
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/nyregion/cleared-of-murder-a-man-punches-his-lawyer.html ]

Now, I have written down the most important points so that I don’t have to remember them. This was a bad set of circumstances for everyone involved. Nothing good can come of it except that AM will be under care and supervision for the rest of his life. The mental health system failed and I keep being reminded of a scene in Yes, Minister where it is explained that the health service is not there to make people better, it is there so that people who are not sick can rest easy thinking that something is being done for sick people. We must be helping the mentally ill because, after all, there is a mental health system.


There is no making up for the loss of Anthony Mondenado, who was from all reports a beautiful and loving child with devoted relatives.

Photo: An anti-poaching team guards a northern white rhino..

"'Rhino Wars': An anti-poaching team guards a northern white rhino, part of a 24-hour watch, at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya last July. The park is home to four of the world's remaining eight northern white rhinos." Daily Mail
 http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/11/09/article-2230601-15EFB28F000005DC-377_964x634.jpg

Two notes by Rosa Luxemburg on Revolution that are relevant to the Revolts of 2011

"During the revolution it is extremely difficult for any directing organ of the proletarian movement to foresee and to calculate which occasions and factors can lead to explosions and which cannot. Here also initiative and direction do not consist in issuing commands according to one’s inclinations, but in the most adroit adaptability to the given situation, and the closest possible contact with the mood of the masses. The element of spontaneity, as we have seen, plays a great part in all Russian mass strikes without exception, be it as a driving force or as a restraining influence. This does not occur in Russia, however, because social democracy is still young or weak, but because in every individual act of the struggle so very many important economic, political and social, general and local, material and psychical, factors react upon one another in such a way that no single act can be arranged and resolved as if it were a mathematical problem. The revolution, even when the proletariat, with the social democrats at their head, appear in the leading role, is not a manoeuvre of the proletariat in the open field, but a fight in the midst of the incessant crashing, displacing and crumbling of the social foundation."

The final paragraph "Organizational Questions...." Dick Howard's translation reads better, but I guess this one from the Marxist Archive will have to do. Too many of the Marxist Archive translations give everyone, including Luxemburg, a "Bolshevik" tone and style. Howard's translation are much preferred. Her friend and biographer, Paul Frolich included many substantial passages in his Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work which is translated by Johanna Hoorweg.

"In Lenin’s overanxious desire to establish the guardianship of an omniscient and omnipotent Central Committee in order to protect so promising and vigorous a labor movement against any misstep, we recognize the symptoms of the same subjectivism that has already played more than one trick on socialist thinking in Russia.
It is amusing to note the strange somersaults that the respectable human “ego” has had to perform in recent Russian history. Knocked to the ground, almost reduced to dust, by Russian absolutism, the “ego” takes revenge by turning to revolutionary activity. In the shape of a committee of conspirators, in the name of a nonexistent Will of the People, it seats itself on a kind of throne and proclaims it is all-powerful. [The reference is to the conspiratorial circle which attacked tsarism from 1879 to 1883 by means of terrorist acts and finally assassinated Alexander II. – Ed.] But the “object” proves to be the stronger. The knout is triumphant, for tsarist might seems to be the “legitimate” expression of history. In time we see appear on the scene an even more “legitimate” child of history – the Russian labor movement. For the first time, bases for the formation of a real “people’s will” are laid in Russian soil. But here is the “ego” of the Russian revolutionary again! Pirouetting on its head, it once more proclaims itself to be the all-powerful director of history – this time with the title of His Excellency the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Russia. The nimble acrobat fails to perceive that the only “subject” which merits today the role of director is the collective “ego” of the working class. The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn the dialectic of history.
Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."

[Howard: "Finally, we must frankly admit to ourselves that errors made by a truly revolutionary labor movement are historically infinitely more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of the best of all possible 'central committees.'" Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Political Writings, Monthly Review Press, 1971]

Spartacus Revolt

Cairo

Placebo Effects and Policy Limits or what Olivia Judson can teach David Brooks

The May 4th New York Times Op-Ed section presented us with a great contrast between scientific thinking and pseudo-scientific ideology in the columns by Olivia Judson and David Brooks. I am sure you can already guess which one is which, but lets go through it anyway because when the Times inadvertently gives us such a useful contrast, it is well worth paying attention.

So, Brooks' piece first and he begins, of course, with the Northern European as a standard. Swedes in Sweden and Swedes in the United States have the same rate of poverty, 6.7% "Two groups with similar historical backgrounds living in entirely different political systems, and the poverty outcomes were the same." Brooks further notes that the average life expectancy of Swedes has not changed much since 1950 despite their commitment to build "a large welfare state with a national health service, while the U.S. did not." In 1950 Swedes lived an average of 2.6 years longer than Americans, and now live 2.7 years later.

Of course, the second thing to note is that Brooks is using averages rather than differences between the mean life expectancy. But this is not so much my problem with his piece, although it would be useful to compare the results of we used mean rather than average. Instead, the thing that can be pointed out in this little post is the stark contrast between the essays by Brooks and Judson.

Brooks tells us that:

"Ethnicity correlates to huge differences in how people live.....All we can say for sure is that different psychological, cultural, and social factors combine in myriad ways to produce different viewpoints. As a result of these different viewpoints, the average behavior is different between different ethnic and geographical groups, leading to different life outcomes.... So when we're arguing about politics, we should be aware of how policy fits into the larger scheme of cultural and social influences. Bad policy can decimate the social fabric, but good policy can only modestly improve it." [Notice that average has appeared again, as in the "average behavior" of the bodies that make up a population.]

So let's take three concepts that Brooks uses: ethnicity, culture, and politics. What exactly does he mean by these terms in this little article.

POLITICS: is for Brooks simply the means to institute social policy for the control of a population. The problem is that social policies can do very little to affect social change. Social change comes from elsewhere, if it comes at all, and it comes from the internal forces within populations, or "tribes of people," to use Brooks' phrase. Thus, politics and social policy can have only modest effects on the lives of the humans in a given population. Politics, on the other hand, is not about social change, it is about articulating the "viewpoints" of various "ethnic and geographical groups". Politics is about which group can enforce its "viewpoint" and the first rule of the policies that flow from these viewpoints is "don't promulgate a policy that will destroy social bonds" because these bonds are the foundation of politics. At bottom, all politics is rooted in ethnicity and emotion, as in "emotional bonds".

If each "tribe" is given a "basic level of economic and physical security" they will each "create a culture of achievement --- if you are lucky." And if the policy can strengthen the "emotional bonds" of a people, all the better. Brooks cites two examples of successful policies that have strengthen emotional ties: "preschool and military service" but in the end, "we should all probably calm down about politics. Most of the proposals we argue about so ferociously will have only marginal effects on how we live, especially compared with the ethnic, regional and social differences that we so studiously ignore."

So politics is in the end arguing from our ethnic, regional, and social "viewpoints" about policies that will not really help very many people, but might at least strengthen the "emotional bonds" that unite different tribes, or keep them in their place. It is a good argument for the status quo, and that is exactly the kind of argument one can expect from the "progressive conservatism" that Brooks claims to support.

CULTURE: is for Brooks, at least in this piece, about the habits of different ethnic, cultural, or emotional tribes or populations. But it exists in a tautology for him. Namely, Culture rests on ethnicity, but ethnicity is culture. Culture consists of the habits and material production of tribes, and you can define a tribe, an ethnicity, by its habits and material production. Emotional bonds are between families and tribes, and families and tribes are defined by the extent of their emotional bonds. None of this tell sus very much except again that acceptance or restoration of the status quo is always the point of Brooks'commentary.

ETHNICITY: Really, the talk of tribes and emotional bonds, of the importance of the status quo would not be so disturbing if it were not in the context of Brook's use of the concept of ethnicity as a stand in for race. Whenever Brooks discusses differences, he relates those differences to ethnicity and geographical differences, but ethnicity clearly is for him the most important factor. In fact, the Times accompanied the commentary with the blurb "How ethnicity swamps politics." When Brooks wants to talk about ethnic differences, he uses for his evidence data based upon racial differences, in particular the differences between what Cuvier called the three primary races of man, European, African, and Asian. Native Americans and Hispanics make appear only to to compared to the other three "ethnic... tribes".

One can not be sure of what Brooks means by ethnicity, but certainly it does at points stand in directly for race, just as "viewpoint" stands in for "ideology". "The influence of politics and policy is usually swamped by the influence of culture, ethnicity, psychology, and a dozen other factors." The other factors are not worth naming, as apparently culture, ethnicity, and psychology predominate.

And this takes us back to the Swedes that Brooks began with. There is something that makes a Swede a Swede whether they are in South Dakota or Stockholm. Policies, he says, will not change the basic "ethnic" disposition of a Swede.

But let us look just across the page to Olivia Judson's commentary on the placebo effect.

If policy and politics can not trump ethnicity, one might expect that the placebo effect would suffer a similar failure. Swedes in Sweden should respond to a placebo just as Swedes in the US, to follow Brooks' reasoning about ethnicity.
In fact, Judson does not mention Swedes, but she does mention Germans. However, the results are not what one would expect if we followed Brooks on ethnicity/race/tribe/nation. Let us allow her to speak for herself regarding the ethnic/tribal differences and the placebo effect.

Different studies of the placebo effect report wildly different results. One survey of 117 trials of two ulcer drugs found that, depending on the trial, patients in the placebo group had anywhere from zero to a 100 percent recovery rate.

The drugs also varied in their effectiveness from one trial to the next; sometimes patients on the placebo did better than those on the drug. Intriguingly, the results varied from country to country, with Brazilians showing no placebo effect and Germans having a strong one. Why? No one knows, but it doesn’t appear to be because of anything inherently German: trials of drugs for hypertension found a weaker placebo effect in Germany than in other countries.

The problem is that humans are not machines, and emotions are not abstractions. Hope and expectation, anxiety and fear, trust and suspicion — these cause physiological changes in the brain that can interact with drugs, changing their effects.

Given that Brooks wants to hide the workings of power behind the mask of culture and ethnicity, it is remarkable how Judson almost relpies to his avoidence of power. It is power, and not ethnicity, that has the strongest influence on the placebo effect.

...the most reliable source of a strong placebo effect appears to be: the doctor.
Placebo treatments are more powerful if your doctor believes in them. They are also more powerful if the doctor tells you so. In one study, for example, patients who had just come out of surgery were given a saline infusion, and — whenever they asked for it — the pain killer buprenorphine. However, some patients were told the saline infusion was a powerful painkiller, others that it might be one, while a third group wasn’t told anything. Over the course of three days, those in the “know-nothing” group asked for more buprenorphine than those in the “maybe” group, who in turn asked for more than those told they were getting a real drug.

Finally, Judson, whose blog is one of the best from the New York Times, comments on these differences

Differences in hopes and fears, and the resulting physiological changes, may explain why the placebo effect varies so much: individual experiences matter. Some people are more anxious than others, or may find the thought of a particular disease especially alarming. Moreover, in different cultures, similar diseases may be treated with different degrees of gravity.

So different cultures matter, but not in the way that Brooks would have it. And what matters most is the power relationship of those confronting a problem, whether medical or political, and not the ethnic differences between them, even if we could detach Brooks' use of ethnicity from his silent deployment of racialist thinking.

Only those in power would have the "viewpoint" that politics is not about power, or believe that social change is not possible.