Sunshine Recorder

Passive acceptance or even glorification of suffering can be adaptive when people have no choice. But why does so much religion — particularly Catholicism — fetishize pain? 

With a new Pope at the helm, the Catholic hierarchy has set about to polish its tarnished image. Can an increased focus on the poor make up for the Church’s opposition to contraception and marriage equality or its sordid financial and sexual affairs? The Bishops can only hope. And pray.  And perhaps accelerate the sainthood of Agnes Gonxha, better known as Mother Teresa.

In the last century, no one icon has improved the Catholic brand as much as the small woman who founded the Missionaries of Charity, whose image aligns beautifully with that of the new pope. In March a team of Canadian researchers noted the opportunity: “What could be better than beatification followed by canonization of [Mother Teresa] to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful, especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline?”

The question, however, was more than a little ironic. The team of academics from the Universities of Montreal and Ottawa set out to do research on altruism. In the process, they reviewed over 500 documents about Mother Teresa’s life and compiled an array of disturbing details about the soon-to-be saint, including dubious political connections and questionable management of funds—and, in particular, an attitude toward suffering that could give pause to even her biggest fans.

Passive acceptance or even glorification of suffering can be adaptive when people have no choice. As the much loved Serenity Prayer says, “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” This attitude of embracing the inevitable is built into not only Christianity but also other religions, especially Buddhism. But passive acceptance ofavoidable suffering is another thing altogether, which is why the prayer continues, “… the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” 

By even her own words, Mother Teresa’s view of suffering made no distinction between avoidable and unavoidable suffering, and instead cultivated passive acceptance of both. As she put it, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”  Or consider thisanecdote from her life:

 One day I met a lady who was dying of cancer in a most terrible condition. And I told her, I say, “You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus — a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you.” And she joined her hands together and said, “Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me.”

Mother Teresa’s outlook on suffering played out in her order’s homes for the sick and dying, which doctors havedescribed as deficient in hygiene, care, nutrition, and painkillers. Miami resident Hemley Gonzalez was so shocked by his volunteer experience that he has founded an accountable charity to provide better care. “Needles were washed in cold water and reused and expired medicines were given to the inmates. There were people who had chance to live if given proper care,” … “I have decided to go back to Kolkata to start a charity that will be called ‘Responsible Charity.’ Each donation will be made public and professional medical help will be given,” Gonzalez said after returning to the U.S. He also launched a Facebook page called, “Stop the Missionaries of Charity.”

Even her critics mostly believe that Mother Teresa was devoted to God as she understood him and that she was devoted to serving the poor. And yet, it would appear that her institutions have offered a standard of care that would provoke international outrage if it were provided by, say the United Nations rather than an affiliate of the Vatican. How are we to understand this paradox?

Mary Johnson is a former nun who joined Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, at age 19. For the next twenty years, she lived a life of service and austerity among the sisters, which she has described in her memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst. But beneath the stark simplicity of her daily routine stirred a host of emotional, interpersonal and spiritual complexities, including the order’s tangled view of love and pain. Johnson’s thoughtful observations offer a window into the woman who inspired her spiritual vows and who ran her order of women religious.

In recent decades, postcolonial theory has largely displaced Marxism as the dominant perspective among intellectuals engaged in the project of critically examining the relationship between the Western and non-Western worlds. Originating in the humanities, postcolonial theory has subse­quently become increasingly influential in history, anthropology, and the social sciences. Its rejection of the universalisms and meta-narratives associated with Enlightenment thought dovetailed with the broader turn of the intellectual left during the 1980s and 1990s.

Vivek Chibber’s new book, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, represents a wide-ranging challenge to many of the core tenets of postcolonial theory. Focusing particularly on the strain of postcolonial theory known as subaltern studies, Chibber makes a strong case for why we can — and must — conceptualize the non-Western world through the same analytical lens that we use to understand developments in the West. He offers a sustained defense of theoretical approaches that emphasize universal categories like capitalism and class. His work constitutes an argument for the continued relevance of Marxism in the face of some of its most trenchant critics.

Chibber was interviewed for Jacobin by Jonah Birch, a graduate student in sociology at New York University.

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Jonah Birch: At the core of postcolonial theory is the notion that Western categories can’t be applied to postcolonial societies like India. On what basis is this claim made?

Vivek Chibber: This is probably the single most important argument coming out of postcolonial studies, and this is also what makes it so important to engage them. There has been no really prominent body of thought associated with the Left in the last hundred and fifty years or so that has insisted on denying the scientific ethos and the applicability of categories coming out of the liberal enlightenment and the radical enlightenment — categories like capital, democracy, liberalism, rationality, and objectivity. There have been philosophers who have criticized these orientations, but they’ve rarely achieved any significant traction on the Left. Postcolonial theorists are the first to do so.

The argument really comes out of a background sociological assumption: for the categories of political economy and the Enlightenment to have any purchase, capitalism must spread across the world. This is called the “universalization of capital.”

The argument goes like this: the universalizing categories associated with Enlightenment thought are only as legitimate as the universalizing tendency of capital. And postcolonial theorists deny that capital has in fact universalized — or more importantly, that it ever could universalize around the globe. Since capitalism has not and cannot universalize, the categories that people like Marx developed for understanding capitalism also cannot be universalized.

What this means for postcolonial theory is that the parts of the globe where the universalization of capital has failed need to generate their own local categories. And more importantly, it means that theories like Marxism, which try to utilize the categories of political economy, are not only wrong, but they’re Eurocentric, and not only Eurocentric, but they’re part of the colonial and imperial drive of the West. And so they’re implicated in imperialism. Again, this is a pretty novel argument on the Left.

JB: What made you decide to focus on subaltern studies as a way of critiquing postcolonial theory more generally?

VC: Postcolonial theory is a very diffuse body of ideas. It really comes out of literary and cultural studies, and had its initial influence there. It then spread out through area studies, history, and anthropology. It spread into those fields because of the influence of culture and cultural theory from the 1980s onwards. So, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, disciplines such as history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, and South Asian studies were infused with a heavy turn toward what we now know as postcolonial theory.

To engage the theory, you run up against a basic problem: because it’s so diffuse, it’s hard to pin down what its core propositions are, so first of all, it’s hard to know exactly what to criticize. Also, its defenders are able to easily rebut any criticisms by pointing to other aspects that you might have missed in the theory, saying that you’ve honed in on the wrong aspects. Because of this, I had to find some core components of the theory — some stream of theorizing inside postcolonial studies — that is consistent, coherent, and highly influential.

I also wanted to focus on those dimensions of the theory centered on history, historical development, and social structures, and not the literary criticism. Subaltern studies fits all of these molds: it’s been extremely influential in area studies; it’s fairly internally consistent, and it focuses on history and social structure. As a strand of theorizing, it’s been highly influential partly because of this internal consistency, but also partly because its main proponents come out of a Marxist background and they were all based in India or parts of the Third World. This gave them a great deal of legitimacy and credibility, both as critics of Marxism and as exponents of a new way of understanding the Global South. It’s through the work of the Subalternists that these notions about capital’s failed universalization and the need for indigenous categories have become respectable.

(Source: new-resistance, via grandejouissance)

As a former philosophy professor, I’ve especially admired Larissa MacFarquhar’s profiles in The New Yorker. She takes her subjects’ ideas seriously and has an enviable gift for representing them in flesh-and-blood lives. Whether she’s writing about the crazy love of dogmatic materialists Paul and Patricia Churchland or the Aquinian rigor and Victorian piety of Derek Parfit, she reveals their character and motivations by clarifying for the reader why their work matters.

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with her at Stanford University’s Coffee House about her current book project, which examines cases of extreme moral virtue. She launched her research with a celebrated piece on people who have donated their kidneys to complete strangers. MacFarquhar was visiting campus to discuss her work later that evening at a Center for Ethics in Society event. Her talk focused on another of the book’s case studies: a Boston couple who live according to philosopher Peter Singer’s strict utilitarian constraints about relieving human suffering. Why do we feel ambivalent about those who would devote all their income and leisure time to ameliorating poverty—or, for that matter, those who would donate kidneys to strangers? Whatever the reason, MacFarquhar’s reporting promises to challenge our basic assumptions about moral outliers.

David Johnson: How did you become interested in extreme cases of moral virtue?

Larissa MacFarquhar: I’ve been interested in them for a long time, but one of the things I read that got me thinking in a more systematic way was the philosopher Susan Wolf’s essay “Moral Saints.” [PDF] She argues that our conceptions of perfect moral virtue (what she calls saintliness) and of a well-lived life are irreconcileable, so one of them has to go. She is basically anti-saint—she concludes that it’s our view of morality that has to go. I tend towards the other conclusion, but her essay was very useful in framing the question. It seemed to me, though, that you couldn’t think about the problem only in the abstract. If you want to consider the cost of making certain ethical decisions, you have to see how they play out in actual lives. So that’s why I decided to write about people who have a very demanding sense of moral duty and live their lives accordingly.

DJ: Some people think duty is overrated.

LM: Many do, many do. But I don’t think a life is necessarily constricted in the way Susan Wolf seems to think it is if it lacks things such as artistic hobbies, or the sort of spontaneity that spending money can bring you. Wolf places a great deal of value on well-roundedness, which is a nice thing, but it doesn’t seem to me to be one of the most valuable things about human existence.

DJ: So are you writing a defense of moral saints?

LM: More or less, yes. And part of the book will be a history of a kind of counter-morality that opposes what I’m calling saintliness. (Obviously that term has religious connotations, but I don’t intend those; I mean extreme morality.) I find the people I’m writing about extremely admirable, and I’m puzzled by the suspicion they attract. When I started working on this project I was simply interested in what a life lived according to certain kinds of moral strictures looked like. But when I wrote about people who had donated one of their kidneys to a stranger, I was astonished and fascinated to hear about how much hostility they had encountered, and I wanted to think about what was behind that.

DJ: Outsiders were suspicious.

LM: They were. But in all sorts of different ways. Some thought people who appeared to be extremely ethical must be somehow cheating—that they couldn’t actually be doing all those good things. Others believed they were doing those things, but they found that so weird that they thought they must have some kind of mental illness—that they must lack the ordinary component of desires or feelings, or that there was something robotic about them.

DJ: You’ve written a lot about extreme personality types or people who are very unusual, and not just in terms of their achievements but also in terms of their psychologies. For example, philosopher Derek Parfit or poet John Ashbery. Why have you chosen to focus on moral outliers, rather than other types of extreme personalities?

LM: Because moral behavior is what interests me. I’m not interested in extremism per se. Parfit and Ashbery are interesting because of their work, not because of personality quirks. To me, the compelling question here was not extremity as such, but whether there is any limit to what can be morally required of us, and whether there’s anything wrong with a life that’s lived according to extreme moral principles.

DJ: Susan Wolf is certainly right that we find moral saints problematic. But what are we getting wrong when we view them skeptically?

LM: If the suspicion is hypocrisy, I think we underestimate the sort of people I’m writing about—it’s entirely possible to live an extremely ethical life without being hypocritical. But besides that, I think people overvalue certain kinds of sins. For instance, many people have said to me, when they hear who I’m writing about, ‘Well, don’t they just act morally to make themselves feel better? Don’t they get all self-righteous and overly proud of themselves?’ I think that pride and self-righteousness are far less important than most people seem to think they are. I think that if you’re doing something that’s hard to do and good to do, and that makes you feel proud, I just don’t see why that’s so terrible. One kidney donor told me that his donation made him feel better about himself—that it was one really good thing he’d done in his life, which he had otherwise made a pretty complete mess of. Some psychologists think you shouldn’t donate in order to feel better about yourself, but it strikes me as an excellent reason!

What’s more, I think what is criticized as self-righteousness or preachiness is often the result of a desire to further whatever cause the person is engaged in. If a person held back from talking about his cause out of a desire to appear less self righteous, that would be its own problem—and a much more serious one. The people I’m going to talk about tonight encounter this problem all the time and they wrestle with it.

DJ: Whom are you talking about tonight?

LM: I’m talking about a young Boston-area couple who are utilitarians. They actually had not read Peter Singer until recently, but they came independently to more or less the same conclusions as he does about our duty to help others. They give away nearly all their money, to the charity that, according to their research, seems to improve the most lives for the least money. They struggle with the question of when and how to talk about what they do because, on the one hand, they know that people hate about talking about money, hate to be made to feel guilty, and hate people who seem to boast about doing the right thing. On the other hand, they wonder, well, am I entitled to worry about these social niceties? Because saving lives is more important than embarrassment.

DJ: And so do they think they’re being especially morally praiseworthy, or do they think we’re all getting it wrong and that we should be following their lead?

LM: The latter. They don’t think they’re saintly people; they think they’re just doing their duty. They think about it in the same way most people think about not stealing: we don’t get proud of ourselves for not stealing, because it just goes without saying. They feel like that.

DJ: But consider artists or athletes who lead very unusual sorts of lives in what they dedicate themselves to. The difference with morality is that people such as rigorous utilitarians believe everyone else ought to follow what they’re doing. It obviously generates a certain tension with ordinary folk like us. It’s not simply that they’re living this unusual praiseworthy life but that they think we ought to be living that way too—that we somehow got things wrong.

LM: That’s true, they do think that—though that’s hardly a thought unique to utilitarians. Many people believe that the way they live their lives is the right way to live, and what’s wrong with that? The opposite is obviously worse. But it’s important to remember that utilitarians aren’t focused on righteousness as such—utilitarians don’t care about personal qualities like perfection or purity. They’re focused on the fact that millions of people live awful lives because of poverty, and they believe that if we hoard resources for ourselves we’re refusing to alleviate their misery.

On the eve of the anniversary of Vonnegut’s death, I asked Ben Greenman, David Holub, Rick Moody, Josip Novakovich, and Avi Steinberg about their own memories of Vonnegut’s work and about why everyone else should remember it, too.

How has Vonnegut influenced or informed your own work?

Ben Greenman: Through moral rigor, though not in any of the predictable ways. As a younger reader, which is when I had my strongest connection to Vonnegut—maybe not my most meaningful, but my strongest, in the fashion of first love—I took a preteen tour through Mother Night and Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. The things that I dimly and germinally felt about war and technology and religion and the different—but similar—risks to humanity inherent in all of them were laid out quite clearly. As time has moved along, the sources of the risks have shifted slightly, for purposes of camouflage, but the risks remain. In my own work, I have moved between experimental fiction and straightforward fiction, between “funny” writing and “serious” writing—I put those words in quotes in Vonnegut’s honor, to show how absurd the division can be—but all along the way I have continued to feel that there’s something wrong, and that it needs to be addressed. Priorities are skewed. Power is misused. Attention is misdirected. Vonnegut’s influence works at the depths but also on the surface. Whenever I feel a piece of my own writing becoming too complacent as an entertainment, whenever it feels like a sugared pill going down too easy, I remind myself to disrupt the operation of the text a little to recall readers to themselves. That remains, for me, the best thing about reading Vonnegut. You know you’re having a good time, but you also know you’re not.

Rick Moody: I was, as a young reader, really moved by Vonnegut’s disregard for story structure in the usual sense. The long, genre-free introductions, the reliance on “subliterary forms”—science fiction, e.g., and the general absurdity of the action, these are all alien to the mainstream of literary fiction, and, to me, excellent, surprising, and singular. I think he was sort of an experimental writer avant le lettre, in the same way that the later Cheever appears to be an experimental writer, though never identified as such. Another way of saying it—he was kind of a gateway drug for me. He led straight to Pynchon and Brautigan and even Coover and Elkin.

Josip Novakovich: Vonnegut has influenced me but it’s hard for me to distinguish his influence from those of other war tragi-comedians—Jaroslav Hasek, Céline, and Joseph Heller, whose works have preceded Vonnegut’s. Vonnegut took the line duty dance with death from Céline to use as a subtitle to Slaughterhouse-Five. On a purely technical level, Vonnegut has influenced me. Unlike his predecessors, who after brilliant passages seem to get lost in their asides, Vonnegut, no matter how digressive, always arrives to his points of departure, with a light touch. Though yes, I think Catch-22 could have been edited to attain greater power and clarity, but it’s a fantastic and hilarious work nevertheless. Vonnegut’s sentences are graceful, sometimes minimalistic, and so are his asides, biographies, forays into science fiction, autobiography, and so on. What Elie Wiesel says, that there is a difference between a book which was 800 pages and is now 200 and a book which was 200 pages to begin with. In the first, the cut 600 pages are still there, exerting their influence, only you don’t see them. I am paraphrasing. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse, on which he worked on and off for twenty years, was at least 5,000 pages of effort, which he distilled into a single malt of 200 pages. That took an amazing amount of self-restraint and self-sacrifice. It helped that he wrote at least twenty more books, so he didn’t need to jam all his brilliance into one, although it feels he has. Yet his novel reads like a 5,000 page novel in terms of content—it’s a total novel, against totalitarianism. I heard Fuentes talk about Don Quixote as a total novel—historical, romance, satire, humor, a novel of ideas, and so on. Another novel like that is Brothers Karamazov—a murder mystery, a novel of ideas, a theological novel, a historical novel, a topographic novel—Dostoyevsky’s geography is always accurate and amazing—a romance, a comedy upon second reading, a psychoanalytic novel before psychoanalysis, et cetera. And Vonnegut’s novel is a whole world unto itself and unto us—fiction and nonfiction, novel and memoir, philosophical meditation, satire, comedic novel, psychoanalytic novel—sci-fi as an expression of post traumatic stress and brain damage—and, above all, antiwar protest novel. I have not written a total novel myself—and my philosophical passages from April Fool’s Day and the just completed novel about Russia have irked my potential editor, so they have been mostly gutted out for the sake of the aerodynamism of the narrative. I still have much to learn from Vonnegut—how to compress things and yet not compromise them, how to digress into history, quote from various historical accounts, and not stifle the narrative. The ease with which he writes is sheerly masterly, Mozartian.

One of the most interesting facets of Vonnegut’s humor—perhaps the most interesting facet—is its ability to make the reader laugh while informing a very serious commentary. Can you share your thoughts on this?

Ben Greenman: Well, think of Bokonon. Think of how the idea of Bokononism—the fictional religion Vonnegut invented for Cat’s Cradle and returned to occasionally—both lampoons the idea of religion and also, gently, justifies it. Bokononism is a religion that suggests that religion has no essential truth, except for the fact that believing in harmless untruths may make you a better person. This is a wonderful idea, humorous in the best sense, playful—silly, even, at times—but also deadly serious. With so much cant encircling contemporary culture, with so many malicious lies whizzing by at the speed of media, the notion that faith should be a kind of self-improving fancy is a godsend. I should say that it is hard for me to talk about Vonnegut without beginning to sound a bit preachy. It’s not hard to read him and resist that temptation, but when I start to discuss the books, I quickly find myself infuriated at the way that satire, gentle and not-so-gentle, and clear thinking, both positive and negative, and the toppling of terrible things in our culture and our media are all out of step with the times. There is a strain of Look at Me, and another strain of Beat the Competition of the Story or Nonstory, and another strain of Subtlety Is Everyone’s Enemy, and another strain of Toxic Self-Importance. See—the preachiness is happening again. It’s not his fault. It’s mine.

Avi Steinberg: Vonnegut once told an interviewer that the UFO rides in Slaughterhouse-Fivewere intended to simply lighten the mood, to give us a break. That may have been his intention but it isn’t quite the effect. Those comic jaunts through time-space end up being a dramatization of the author’s conflict with and ultimately of his inability to face the horror of the Dresden bombing. On the page, we witness Vonnegut deploying all of his comic skills to escape the trauma of that place—and the fact that he doesn’t succeed, and that his escapism fails even as it reaches the edges of the universe, is what makes the story work. The humor doesn’t dare to fully enter the scene of massacre but exerts a powerful enough force that the reader can orbit around it. The seriousness of that book isn’t to be found in its ethical poses or in its reportage but in the brave and risky ways in which it uses humor to let the questions remain unanswered.

David Holub: Imagine a bird, something exotic and frightening, blackish purple from afar and oily iridescent up close. The bird is deviant and mercurial and elusive. You might see it, but never for long. Sometimes you’ll happen upon it by accident, you on a dumb stroll, the bird caught by surprise in a bush. The bird flutters away, its wings maniacally percussive. You were so close but the look you got was not good. It never is. Which is why we need our Vonneguts, their humor in particular. There are these things we create, these exotic birds difficult to get close to in understanding—war, racism, religion, sex, inequality, taboos, and sacred cows galore—until a Vonnegut comes around. Through irreverence, guts, hijinks, and charm, Vonnegut’s humor disarms and debilitates the bird long enough for us to come close, to pick up the bird, hold it in the air and examine it, ridicule it without anxiety, grief or fear, starving it, if only for a moment, of its power.

Josip Novakovich: Vonnegut’s humor made it possible to analyze publicly and frankly the American role in World War II, which was sanctified and glorified as heroic and pristine, to examine the way wars are fought, lives are neglected, and so on. And so on, and so it goes—his favorite phrases—give us a sense of no particular blame but a nature of things, of the universe, of evil, which comes everywhere. So his dark naturalistic metaphysics permeate his humor, and without his humor they would sound too dismal and alienating, but with his humor, which is like a Trojan horse, we enter the realms of patriotic absurdities and see how amidst of good-doing we resort through stupidity and evil into evildoing. Hiroshima was a well-known historical event, but until the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, the firebombing of Dresden and mass murder of old people and children in it, Hiroshima seemed unknown and classified, strictly military information. Of course, it helped that America was waging a dirty war in Vietnam to realize that perhaps in other wars too we were dirty. Just as Heller used World War I as a groundwork for critiquing American involvement in later wars, just so Vonnegut in some way, although not talking much about Vietnam, used Slaughterhouse-Five as a platform for cautioning us about what we were doing in Vietnam. Vonnegut has liberated many of us to write in a nonpartisan way, to read through patriotism and nationalism, to find the core of military stupidity, “collateral” damage, as not collateral but essential. The fact that wars are fought by mostly children—for eighteen-year-olds are but children—that lingers on in my head after my reading of Slaughterhouse. Wars may be designed by old men but they are done by innocents abroad. Innocence of eighteen-year-olds is a dangerous phenomenon, and reading books like this one might be the best education for the kids. But how much is such an influential book still being read? Anyway, I have assigned it to many people in my classes, and even the ones who don’t like to read seem to be lit up after reading the novel. I don’t have that luck with Catch-22, although I love it as much, and I must conclude that it has to do with the craft. Vonnegut has gemmed the dirty rocks of our past. The merciless sense of absurdity is the cutting knife for the stone, and you can see just from this quick quote how Vonnegut can strike all notes at once—absurdity, sadness, humor, despair. “Children’s Crusade started in 1213, when two monks got the idea of raising armies of children in Germany and France and selling them in North Africa as slaves. Thirty thousand children volunteered, thinking they were going to Palestine … Most of the children were shipped out of Marseilles, and about half of them drowned in shipwrecks. The other half got to North Africa were they were sold.” Actually, that’s not funny when I think about it, but at first, the absurdity of it made me laugh and then gasp as though I was drowning in a shipwreck. Vonnegut points out that it took two million lives to hold on to Palestine for a hundred years in the Middle Ages. The main character, hero/anti-hero of the novel, is Billy Pilgrim, one of those kids drifting through Dresden and to Vietnam-era America. I am reading the book in Jerusalem, 100 yards away from the Eastern Wall, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the book resonates as I listen to the call to prayer from a couple of nearby minarets. Maybe we should all pray, or pray and joke in resignation at the same time, as Vonnegut seems to have done. And amazingly, what he has not done, he has not passed judgment, and it has to do with this kind of wisdom, which he has absurdly and humorously summarized as what he basically learned at the University of Chicago—“I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still. Another thing they taught me was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting.”

Rick Moody: As he said himself, there’s a relationship between his humor and Twain. The humor punctures the sanctimony of American culture, and that’s perhaps why Vonnegut was so controversial after a time. The guardians of “high art” found Vonnegut’s satire and absurdism hard to take. But I find them rather genuine, especially when rendered in his world-weary voice. Moreover, he was writing about very serious topics—war, death, sexuality, depression, mental illness, et cetera. These things are hard to address head on. An oblique approach, which is what humor allows for, is more graceful. More compelling.

The use of humor to treat such serious issues is fraught with complexities though, isn’t it?

David Holub: If fiction makes the familiar unfamiliar, so does much of Vonnegut’s humor, especially in the most outwardly funny attempt of Vonnegut’s I’ve read, Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut’s approach is rather straightforward, easily tallied in the “Oh, why couldn’t I have thought of that first” category. Vonnegut’s chief humor device in Breakfast is where he describes everything from the humdrummity of humanity to the oddities of our creations, as if we were encountering them for the first time—“Girls concealed their underpants at all costs, and boys tried to see their underpants at all costs. Female underpants looked like this …” Or introducing an electric chair—“The purpose of it was to kill people by jazzing them with more electricity than their bodies could stand.”

Treating the familiar as unfamiliar draws out the absurdity in the world we have created, allowing us to see our existence anew. It makes our objects and actions seem silly in some cases and ridiculous in others. What has been hidden in normality is exposed. This fresh context brings surprise, and surprise mixed with the absurd usually results in humor.

Avi Steinberg: There are complications inherent in approaching mass murder, mass extinction, through humor. A scene in Cat’s Cradle spells it out. “I found my apartment wrecked by a nihilistic debauch,” our narrator tells us. “Krebbs was gone; but, before leaving, he had run up three-hundred-dollars’ worth of long-distance calls, set my couch on fire in five places, killed my cat and my avocado tree, and torn the door off my medicine cabinet … There was a sign around my dead cat’s neck. It said, ‘Meow.’ ” There are times when Vonnegut’s humor feels exactly like that, wrecked by its own raging nihilism, leaving us a mere crime scene. In these brutal turns, we see evidence of the author’s anger, his unreformed pessimism run amok. His humor doesn’t always work but it always boldly strives to best its demons. It’s an occupational hazard for a writer who’s trying to make us laugh in a world run by savages.

Between September 1941 and January 1944, Leningrad was besieged by Nazi Germany, during which time three-quarters of a million inhabitants starved to death. The Nazis “prosecuted a classical siege, preventing, so far as possible, all movement of people and goods in and out of the city, using air and ground bombardment to destroy food stocks, utilities, factories, hospitals, schools and housing,” writes Anna Reid in “Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944” (Walker and Company), the first full-scale narrative of the event in more than four decades.

“The siege of Leningrad has been paid rather little attention in the West … despite the fact that Leningrad was the first city in all Europe that Hitler failed to take,” offers the author in the book’s introduction. Part of the reason is that the Soviets actively obscured the truth, while military historians have long preferred to focus on the battles for Stalingrad and Moscow. Reid’s history addresses everything from the Nazis’ deliberate decision to starve Leningrad, to the incompetence and cruelty of Soviet leadership, to the terrible details of life in the blocked city.

Perhaps most notably, Reid contends that the death toll would have been far lower under a different sort of government, one better prepared and more responsive to the challenges faced by the city’s citizens. “Failing to empty Leningrad of its surplus population before the siege ring closed was one of the Soviet regime’s worst blunders of the war, leading to more civilian deaths than any other save the failure to anticipate Barbarossa itself,” writes Reid, who graciously took the time to answer Failure’s questions about the siege.

Why has the siege of Leningrad received relatively little attention from historians?

In Russia, this isn’t true: the siege has received lots of attention, just attention of the wrong sort. Under Communism, honest history-writing was pretty much impossible on any subject, of course, but especially so on the siege of Leningrad, since the vast civilian death toll begged so many questions about the competence of the wartime leadership. Why was the German invasion such a surprise? Why were the German armies allowed to encircle the city? Why weren’t more food stocks laid in, or surplus civilians evacuated, before the siege ring closed? How fair was the rationing system? What did Leningraders really think of Andrei Zhdanov and the city’s other Party bosses?

Until Gorbachev’s glasnost Russian historians had no hope of addressing these kinds of questions: their job was to polish an uplifting story of heroic national resistance amidst extraordinary suffering. This didn’t require them to make things up—the heroism and the suffering were real—but it did mean leaving a great deal out. Taboos included the shocking waste of the People’s Levy (a 135,000-strong civilian militia thrown into the front line, without weapons or training, from late July 1941), the encirclement and loss of the Second Shock Army in the spring of 1942, the deaths of tens of thousands on the chaotic Ice Road, endemic theft and corruption within the food distribution system, and continuing political repression. (Ordinary, patriotic Leningraders continued to be arrested by the thousands, even as they died of hunger.) Also left out were the inevitable pathologies of all starving societies: murder, mugging and looting, the collapse of families and friendships, and most notoriously, the scavenging of corpse-meat for food. The distortions and exclusions didn’t only serve a political purpose, they also gave genuine psychological comfort to the three generations whose lives were blighted by the war. Even today, siege historians—mostly themselves St. Petersburgers—feel constrained by a deep sense of respect towards the dwindling band of siege survivors. Debate may become franker, ironically, when the last blokadniki have passed away.

On coverage of the siege in the West: until the last fifteen years or so, the whole Eastern Front was hopelessly under-reported. Partly this was because we were more interested in the campaigns—France, Italy, North Africa—in which our own troops fought; partly because Soviet censorship blocked access to Russian primary sources. It’s nevertheless extraordinary that my book is one of only two general histories of the blockade (the other is Michael Jones’s “Leningrad: State of Siege”) to have come out since Harrison Salisbury’s “900 Days” in the 1960s.

Inside the city, which people were most likely to survive? Who was at the bottom of the food hierarchy?

At the top of the food hierarchy, predictably, were staff at the city Party headquarters (a trades union official’s recently released diary lovingly describes the bread and butter, pork and steamed cabbage on offer in the canteen), and people who worked within the food distribution system, within which theft and corruption were widespread. Many diarists complain of bosses skimming their allotted rations, or of “plump” and bejeweled girls behind the counters in the bread shops. Also privileged—though far less so—were factory workers and the staff of prestigious institutions such as the Academy of Sciences and the Hermitage. Their workplaces were less likely to close down, condemning them to a “dependent’s” ration card (nicknamed the smertnik, from the Russian word for “death”). They were also likelier to have some sort of light and heat, and access to food parcels sent by air from Moscow. The poet Olga Berggolts, for example, was able to distribute coffee, chocolate, oranges and other luxuries to friends thanks to her job at the city radio station.

At the bottom of the food hierarchy came the poor and unskilled (in apartment buildings and offices, janitors and cleaning ladies were often the first to die), the peasant refugees who arrived in the suburbs with their carts and cattle ahead of the German armies, and teenage “factory-school boys”—village boys sent to board in the city and train as industrial workers. These latter groups were more or less abandoned by the authorities. (The Party archives are full of examples of food allotted them being skimmed or stolen.) The very earliest reports of starvation deaths come from the suburban towns in which peasant refugees were penned (they were not allowed into the city center), and factory-school boys became notorious for mugging for bread. There are no reliable figures for the death rate amongst either group, but it was certainly well above the average twenty-five or thirty percent. 

To what extent was crime and cannibalism a problem during the siege?

One of the regime’s most remarkable achievements was that while crime—including the looting of bread shops and bread-carts—was widespread during the siege, Leningrad never descended into lawlessness. Survivors’ recollections of the first, mass death siege winter are not of disorder, but of emptiness and quiet. One told me that yes, she had been afraid when walking through the streets alone, but not because she feared crime—in fact, she only learned that there was any long afterwards, by reading about it. At the time she felt “alone in the city, absolutely alone. I would walk to the shop and back, enter our courtyard, climb the stairs and go in my door. If anyone had wanted to they could have pushed me over with their little finger. But I never met a soul.”

The most notorious crime of the siege was cannibalism, but it was not widespread. A total of 2,015 people were arrested for “the use of human meat for food” between December ’41, when the first cases were reported, and the end of 1942, when they finally petered out. Even taking into account under-reporting (rank and file police were starving too) this represents less than a thousandth of a pre-siege population of 2.5 million. And the vast majority of “cannibals” were not the bestial lowlifes of Soviet legend, but the respectable poor. Sixty-four percent, the police reports tell us, were women; over ninety-percent had only a basic education, forty-four percent were jobless, and only two percent had a criminal record. Case reports also often mention—perhaps in an unspoken plea for clemency—that the arrestee was unsupported (her husband being dead or at the front) and had children. “Cannibals,” in other words, were ordinary working-class women, scavenging protein to feed their families.

“The Colour & The Fire” is a 2000 interview of Boards of Canada by Steve Nicholls. It originally appeared in HMV magazine, February 2002.

As a corollary to Brian Eno’s famous rumination on Velvet Underground’s first record (“I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band”), it might be time to draw a link between Boards of Canada’s seminal 1998 debut Music Has The Right To Children and the reams of nurturing, organic electronic music that have since followed. After a brief survey of the current experimental electronic music scene, it’s difficult to make the case that many more are as influential as Boards of Canada. Perhaps more striking than the advent all this subterranean success is the way in which Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison have arrived there. Even within comparatively anonymous electronic music circles, Boards of Canada are commonly regarded as nothing short of an enigma, an inscrutable pair who rarely disperse release information, grant interviews or perform live. It is generally accepted that the duo record from a secluded studio nestled somewhere in Scotland’s Pentland Hills; we also know that they tend to litter their fiery, kaliedoscopic records with oblique references to various mathematical phenomena, the Branch Dividians and (as their name implies) snippets from the curiously gauzy soundtracks that accompany National Film Board Of Canada documentaries circa 1970.

What follows is the unabridged transcript of a one-pass e-mail interview we recently conducted with Eoin and Sandison, where the refreshingly articulate pair gave us their thoughts on the state of electronic music, eBay bidders, their long-awaited Geogaddi and “cosseted suburban American internet music-pirating kids.” Naturally, the honour was all ours:

Geogaddi was one of the most highly anticipated electronic records in recent memory. Be honest: were you aware of the pressure?

“Mike: We try not to pay attention to it. I think the best music we’ve made previously was written when there were no expectations on us. So now we just imagine nobody’s going to hear it. The moment you start thinking about people waiting for your music, that’s when you start damaging your creativity.”

With Music Had The Right To Children, you had the luxury of plucking and/or reworking songs from previous, lesser-heard records. With Geogaddi, you were faced with the prospect of having to fashion a new record from scratch. Did this pose a problem at all?

“Mike: Not at all because we recorded a hell of a lot of tracks in that period. The only difficult part was selecting them down to the tracks that worked well together on the record.”

From a stylistic standpoint, there has been a consistency to Boards of Canada’s work over the years. The conscious inclusion of certain signature elements (samples of children’s voices, specific analog synth sounds, etc.) on Geogaddi implies that you went into this record with the intent to further build on your own established identity as artists. Is that a fair assumption? Is this a difficult thing to do without seeming regressive?

“Marcus: I don’t think it’s as studied as that. We didn’t consciously try to use signature sounds, because that’s just the way we’ve always made our music. But I suppose maybe deep down we did want to reinforce the sound of the last album, because it has ended up sounding quite consistent with it. It kind of acts like a partner record to the last one before we do what we do next.

The general consensus seems to be that Boards of Canada labour over their work. Is your creative process really as difficult as it seems to the outside world?

“Mike: Not especially. We write lots of tracks simultaneously, I mean hundreds, that’s what uses up our time. We’re a lot more prolific than we let on. In the time between the last two albums we sketched out something approaching four hundred tracks, that’s enough to put together several records. Some of the tracks on Geogaddi took quite a while to put together, maybe a few months, but there were also one or two tracks recorded in a day.”

Can you recall one standout moment during the process of recording this record that was completely fulfilling from a creative standpoint?

“Marcus: Yeah for me it would be the track Gyroscope. I dreamed the sound of it, and although I’ve recreated dreamt songs before, I managed to do that one so quickly that the end result was 99% like my dream. It spooks me to listen to it now”.

“Mike: We played out an early version of the album to some friends at a beach bonfire back at the end of last year before it was cut. It was a great night and now when I listen to those tracks I think about that night. That’s how music should be.”

Like many of your contemporaries, you’ve gone to great lengths to maintain a certain degree of anonymity. Is music tangibly better when it’s faceless?

“Mike: We don’t crave publicity. I suppose it can go too far, you know, sometimes these faceless bands are only like that because they don’t have personalities in the first place. I think in a lot of pop and rock there’s nothing wrong with a bit of glamour and personality because it’s all fun, and it inspires people. But I think that with largely instrumental electronic music like ours, it just seems to sound better when you’re not thinking about the people behind it. For us the whole point of writing music is to get something infectious into the back of the listener’s mind, something that feels so personal to you that you couldn’t even possibly convey it in words to a close friend….There’s a sort of knowing connection there between the listener and the musician that ordinary language would never be able to achieve. In a way it’s like the closest you’ll ever get to being psychic.”

Your reticence to talk to media outlets has resulted in a lot of conjecture about your origin and day-to-day lives. What’s the most popular misconception about Boards of Canada? Do you enjoy the mystery?

“Marcus: There are tons of misconceptions about us, but it just makes us laugh. Some of the most common ones are based on complete misunderstandings of what we’re about, and people missing our sense of reference and irony. Another popular misconception, particularly amongst cosseted suburban American internet music-pirating kids, is that bands like us are making a lot of money. Those kids are probably getting more pocket money.”

You’ve probably had this one many times, but I’d be remiss for not asking. Radiohead name-dropped you on numerous occasions during the Kid A/Amnesiac rigamarole. Were you honoured, irritated or somewhere in between?

“Mike: It’s great… I’d have to admit that neither of us were fans of their early stuff, but their last couple of releases are great records. I think they come across as some of the most decent people in music. They got so much flak just for having the balls to do something different.”

How different would your music really be if you were creating it from the belly of some urban, metropolitan area? Is isolation always good for the creative process?

“Marcus: We don’t hate the city, just the homogenized culture you get in urban areas. I think for musicians, being isolated away from certain scenes can keep you focused doing your own thing.”

The sounds on this record imply a particularly high level of craftsmanship. How long do you spend programming synths and toying with samples to achieve the BOC sound?

“Marcus: A long long time. Usually I start with a sound that is half way towards what I want it to be, and I can spend days tweaking it until it’s right. A lot of the synthetic-sounding things you hear are actually recordings of us playing other instruments, pianos, flutes or twanging guitar strings or field sounds we get from walking around with portable tape recorders, like electronic beeps in shops, or vehicles, then they are mangled beyond recognition. We have an arsenal of old hi-fi tricks up our sleeves and we basically destroy the sounds until they’re really lovely and fucked up. So we’re using sounds that are totally our own thing.”

Which do you hear quoted back to you more frequently: “Orange!” or “Yeeeeeah, that’s right!” (Two vocal samples featured prominently in BOC’s landmark track ‘Aquarius.’)

“Mike: ‘Orange’, definitely.”

One of the Chinese government’s social media shills explains how they distract the public from bad news. A fascinating look at propaganda in the 21st century. 

In February 2011, Ai Weiwei tweeted that he would like to conduct an interview with an “online commentator”. Commentators are hired by the Chinese government or the Communist Party of China to post comments favourable towards party policies and to shape public opinion on internet message boards and forums. The commentators are known as the 50-Cent Party, as they are said to be paid 50 cents for every post that steers a discussion away from anti-party content or that advances the Communist Party line.

Below is the transcript of Ai’s interview with an online commentator. As requested, an iPad was given as compensation for the interview. To protect the interviewee, relevant personal information has been concealed in this script.

…

When and from where will you receive directives for work?

Almost every morning at 9am I receive an email from my superiors – the internet publicity office of the local government – telling me about the news we’re to comment on for the day. Sometimes it specifies the website to comment on, but most of the time it’s not limited to certain websites: you just find relevant news and comment on it.

Can you describe your work in detail?

The process has three steps – receive task, search for topic, post comments to guide public opinion. Receiving a task mainly involves ensuring you open your email box every day. Usually after an event has happened, or even before the news has come out, we’ll receive an email telling us what the event is, then instructions on which direction to guide the netizens’ thoughts, to blur their focus, or to fan their enthusiasm for certain ideas. After we’ve found the relevant articles or news on a website, according to the overall direction given by our superiors we start to write articles, post or reply to comments. This requires a lot of skill. You can’t write in a very official manner, you must conceal your identity, write articles in many dif­ferent styles, sometimes even have a dialogue with yourself, argue, debate. In sum, you want to create illusions to attract the attention and comments of netizens.

In a forum, there are three roles for you to play: the leader, the follower, the onlooker or unsuspecting member of the public. The leader is the relatively authoritative speaker, who usually appears after a controversy and speaks with powerful evidence. The public usually finds such users very convincing. There are two opposing groups of followers. The role they play is to continuously debate, argue, or even swear on the forum. This will attract attention from observers. At the end of the argument, the leader appears, brings out some powerful evidence, makes public opinion align with him and the objective is achieved. The third type is the onlookers, the netizens. They are our true target “clients”. We influence the third group mainly through role-playing between the other two kinds of identity. You could say we’re like directors, influencing the audience through our own writing, directing and acting. Sometimes I feel like I have a split personality.

Regarding the three roles that you play, is that a common tactic? Or are there other ways?

There are too many ways. It’s kind of psychological. Netizens nowadays are more thoughtful than before. We have many ways. You can make a bad thing sound even worse, make an elaborate account, and make people think it’s nonsense when they see it. In fact, it’s like two negatives make a positive. When it’s reached a certain degree of mediocrity, they’ll think it might not be all that bad.

What is the guiding principle of your work?

The principle is to understand the guiding thought of superiors, the direction of public opinion desired, then to start your own work.

Can you reveal the content of a “task” email?

For example, “Don’t spread rumours, don’t believe in rumours”, or “Influence public understanding of X event”, “Promote the correct direction of public opinion on XXXX”, “Explain and clarify XX event; avoid the appearance of untrue or illegal remarks”, “For the detrimental social effect created by the recent XX event, focus on guiding the thoughts of netizens in the correct direction of XXXX”.

What are the categories of information that you usually receive?

They are mainly local events. They cover over 60 to 70 per cent of local instructions – for example, people who are filing complaints or petitioning.

For countrywide events, such as the Jasmine Revolution [the pro-democracy protests that took place across the country in 2011], do you get involved?

For popular online events like the Jasmine Revolution, we have never received a related task. I also thought it was quite strange. Perhaps we aren’t senior enough.

Can you tell us the content of the commentary you usually write?

The netizens are used to seeing unskilled comments that simply say the government is great or so and so is a traitor. They know what is behind it at a glance. The principle I observe is: don’t directly praise the government or criticise negative news. Moreover, the tone of speech, identity and stance of speech must look as if it’s an unsuspecting member of public; only then can it resonate with netizens. To sum up, you want to guide netizens obliquely and let them change their focus without realising it.

Can you go off the topic?

Of course you can go off the topic. When transferring the attention of netizens and

blurring the public focus, going off the topic is very effective. For example, during the census, everyone will be talking about its truthfulness or necessity; then I’ll post jokes that appeared in the census. Or, in other instances, I would publish adverts to take up space on political news reports.

Can you tell us a specific, typical process of “guiding public opinion”?

For example, each time the oil price is about to go up, we’ll receive a notification to “stabilise the emotions of netizens and divert public attention”. The next day, when news of the rise comes out, netizens will definitely be condemning the state, CNPC and Sinopec. At this point, I register an ID and post a comment: “Rise, rise however you want, I don’t care. Best if it rises to 50 yuan per litre: it serves you right if you’re too poor to drive. Only those with money should be allowed to drive on the roads …”

This sounds like I’m inviting attacks but the aim is to anger netizens and divert the anger and attention on oil prices to me. I would then change my identity several times and start to condemn myself. This will attract more attention. After many people have seen it, they start to attack me directly. Slowly, the content of the whole page has also changed from oil price to what I’ve said. It is very effective.

Given the relation between economic production and ecological degradation, Joshua Farley is convinced that economic growth must stop. It is just a question of when. And whether cooperation will displace competition as the dominant concept in the economic paradigm.

Almantas Samalavicius: The concept of ecological economics differs fundamentally from that one of neoclassical economics. However, it is the latter that seems to dominate globally, despite its obvious failings in dealing with present crises, and construct a longitudinal perspective of sustainable economy. All of which inevitably effects economic activities worldwide, and contributes to what sometimes strikes me as being somewhat akin to colonization – the colonization of economic thought. So why are the concepts and suppositions of neoclassical economics still so powerful, despite their obvious drawbacks and limitations? What is being done and what can be done to shake off the false theoretical premises on which the thinking of the majority of professional economists rests? Are there groups of economists (other than ecological economists) who dissent from this stale approach to understanding economy and its functions?

Joshua Farley: This question is one that has baffled me and other ecological economists for some time. I knew very little about neoclassical economics before I started my economics PhD, not even realizing that it relied so heavily on mathematics. My undergraduate degree was in biology, which gave me an appreciation of the scientific method, and I like math, so I was initially enthusiastic about this seemingly scientific approach. During my first semester however I realized that seriously flawed assumptions invalidated all the sophisticated math. Neither people, society, nor nature behave as the economic models require. The scientific method demands that we empirically test both our assumptions and our models, and reject them if they do not conform to reality. I found that economists either failed to test their models, or else when reality contradicted them, argued that we should reshape the world to conform to their assumptions. Economic textbooks even try to teach students to “think like an economist”, which means they seek to change human behaviour to match their models! In retrospect, I realize that my scientific background inoculated me against belief in neoclassical economics. However, I also rejected economics on moral grounds, first because I did not believe that people were perfectly selfish, second because I did not believe that the goal of ever greater consumption was appropriate, and third because I believed that the physiological needs of the poor should take precedence over the luxury consumption of the rich. Talking with my peers in the program, it was evident that many of them shared my views. However, the sceptics either dropped out or changed their views over time. I only finished the programme because I won a fellowship to spend 15 months in Brazil explicitly to cultivate an interdisciplinary approach to economics, and while there discovered ecological economics.

I have several different theories concerning why economists stick so vehemently to their views. First, I was told that my criticisms reflected my lack of understanding, and that I would only be qualified to criticize the discipline after I had mastered it. However, it takes years of study to master the discipline, at which point if you criticize it, you are basically admitting that you wasted years of your life studying something that is simply not true. It’s actually even worse than this. Many people earning PhDs in economics, including myself, do so in order to become professors. An economics PhD primarily qualifies you for a job in an economics department, and in order to get tenure, you must publish in mainstream economics journals. You won’t get published if you criticize the discipline, so you have to muffle yourself for seven more years. By the time you are a tenured professor free to openly discuss what you believe, you have spent at least 11 years following the party line. This is a problem inherent to modern academics, not just economics. I knew I could never work in a mainstream economics department, but was fortunate to find one job opening specifically in ecological economics, in Far North Queensland, Australia.

Second, neoclassical economic theory is very appealing to people who are uncomfortable with uncertainty. Because it is based on mathematical models, there is a right or wrong answer to most questions – no shades of grey or value judgments. The model is based on negative feedback loops (i.e. an increase in price leads to a decrease in demand and an increase in supply – The Law of Demand) that lead inexorably to market equilibrium. All resources are substitutable, and the price mechanism will always provide incentives to create substitutes, so resources are in effect infinite. The single goal is to maximize economic surplus subject to the constraint that no one is made worse off, and the free market utilizes the decentralized knowledge and personal preferences of individuals to achieve that goal. Economic growth always increases economic surplus. The discipline bears the trappings of science, and is often held in higher esteem than other social sciences. In science however, we carefully observe a system, form a hypothesis about how it works, then try to find evidence that proves the hypothesis wrong. If we fail to do so repeatedly, the hypothesis becomes a theory. After decades or centuries of continual failure to falsify a theory, it becomes a law. Economists however tend to leap from observation directly to law!

Ecological economists in contrast believe that humans are complex creatures with a variety of needs and wants. Society has multiple economic goals about which reasonable people can disagree. All economic production requires energy and raw materials, and generates waste. The raw materials we use also serve as the structural building blocks of ecosystems, and their conversion to economic production and hence waste inevitably degrades the life-sustaining services provided by healthy ecosystems. These services are largely non-substitutable. The ecological economic system is highly complex, characterized by both positive and negative feedback loops, emergent phenomena and surprises. For example, under some conditions, an increase in prices will lead to a decrease in demand, but under other conditions, such as we recently witnessed with speculative investments in land, food, and oil, rising prices increase speculative demand, leading to further price increases. Positive feedback loops in a finite system are self-limiting, and must ultimately collapse in another positive feedback loop where falling prices reduce demand. Facts are scarce and uncertain, and both the economic system and the global ecosystem that sustains and contains it are rapidly evolving. As one example, 40 years ago stocks were held on average for seven years and the vast majority of foreign currency purchases were used to buy real goods and services. Thanks to high speed trading, stocks are now held on average for less than 30 seconds, and there is an estimated $5 trillion per day in currency purchases, almost entirely for speculative purposes. Speculation feeds positive feedback loops, creating a disequilibrium economy. This is a fundamental change in the global economic system, and we cannot apply the same models we used 40 years ago. The result is a much messier system in which policy prescriptions are not always clear. We lose the comfort of certainty.

Third, economics has always appeared to me to be more of a religion than a science, and religious convictions are not easily shaken. In spite of frequent speculation bubbles that completely disrupt the economy, market equilibrium remains at the heart of neoclassical economic theory. Much of market economic theory is by its very nature faith based. Neoclassical economists recognize that the real world does not conform to their theories. Government regulations inhibit free entry and exit of firms in the market, we lack perfect information about the products we buy and sell, producers and consumers are able to “externalize” many of the costs of their activities, and so on. What economic theory says is that if we eliminated these and other problems, then the invisible hand of the market would maximize economic surplus. We cannot even test the theory until we eliminate all the obstacle to perfect competition. The discipline is therefore more prescriptive than descriptive. This religion is taken to an extreme in the United States, where it is sacrilegious to even question the superiority of market allocation.

A number of schools of economic thought, often lumped together under the heading heterodox economics, also challenge neoclassical theory. Few of these fields however challenge the goal of economic growth.

There is nonetheless hope that we can change the economic paradigm as more and more evidence piles up that the core assumptions are flawed. The financial crisis of 2008 did lead many economists to change their views on the fundamental efficiency of unregulated markets. Judge Richard Posner, a public intellectual and formerly dedicated adherent of neoclassical economics, recognized that the market crash was the result of systemic failures inherent to capitalism. Behavioural economists are empirically testing many neoclassical assumptions about human behaviour and proving them wrong. Rapidly rising food and energy prices coupled with worsening environmental crises may soon be shaking neoclassical economists’ faith in perfect substitutability of resources. There are even a growing number of economists questioning both the desirability and possibility for continued growth. Perhaps the process of change will be similar to the recognition of anthropogenic climate change, where recent heat waves and storms seem to be shaking the faith of climate change sceptics. However, it will be extremely difficult for many neoclassical economists to abandon their life’s work, and there has been little change in how neoclassical economic theory is taught in universities. To paraphrase Max Planck, advances in economics may come one funeral at a time.

“What we would call capitalism he despised”

David Barsamian: One of the heroes of the current right-wing revival… is Adam Smith. You’ve done some pretty impressive research on Smith that has excavated… a lot of information that’s not coming out. You’ve often quoted him describing the “vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all for ourselves and nothing for other people.”

Noam Chomsky: I didn’t do any research at all on Smith. I just read him. There’s no research. Just read it. He’s pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.

He did give an argument for markets, but the argument was that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality. That’s the argument for them, because he thought that equality of condition (not just opportunity) is what you should be aiming at. It goes on and on. He gave a devastating critique of what we would call North-South policies. He was talking about England and India. He bitterly condemned the British experiments they were carrying out which were devastating India.

He also made remarks which ought to be truisms about the way states work. He pointed out that its totally senseless to talk about a nation and what we would nowadays call “national interests.” He simply observed in passing, because it’s so obvious, that in England, which is what he’s discussing — and it was the most democratic society of the day — the principal architects of policy are the “merchants and manufacturers,” and they make certain that their own interests are, in his words, “most peculiarly attended to,” no matter what the effect on others, including the people of England who, he argued, suffered from their policies. He didn’t have the data to prove it at the time, but he was probably right.

This truism was, a century later, called class analysis, but you don’t have to go to Marx to find it. It’s very explicit in Adam Smith. It’s so obvious that any ten-year-old can see it. So he didn’t make a big point of it. He just mentioned it. But that’s correct. If you read through his work, he’s intelligent. He’s a person who was from the Enlightenment. His driving motives were the assumption that people were guided by sympathy and feelings of solidarity and the need for control of their own work, much like other Enlightenment and early Romantic thinkers. He’s part of that period, the Scottish Enlightenment.

The version of him that’s given today is just ridiculous. But I didn’t have to any research to find this out. All you have to do is read. If you’re literate, you’ll find it out. I did do a little research in the way it’s treated, and that’s interesting. For example, the University of Chicago, the great bastion of free market economics, etc., etc., published a bicentennial edition of the hero, a scholarly edition with all the footnotes and the introduction by a Nobel Prize winner, George Stigler, a huge index, a real scholarly edition. That’s the one I used. It’s the best edition. The scholarly framework was very interesting, including Stigler’s introduction. It’s likely he never opened The Wealth of Nations. Just about everything he said about the book was completely false. I went through a bunch of examples in writing about it, in Year 501 and elsewhere.

But even more interesting in some ways was the index. Adam Smith is very well known for his advocacy of division of labor. Take a look at “division of labor” in the index and there are lots and lots of things listed. But there’s one missing, namely his denunciation of division of labor, the one I just cited. That’s somehow missing from the index. It goes on like this. I wouldn’t call this research because it’s ten minutes’ work, but if you look at the scholarship, then it’s interesting.

I want to be clear about this. There is good Smith scholarship. If you look at the serious Smith scholarship, nothing I’m saying is any surprise to anyone. How could it be? You open the book and you read it and it’s staring you right in the face. On the other hand if you look at the myth of Adam Smith, which is the only one we get, the discrepancy between that and the reality is enormous.

This is true of classical liberalism in general. The founders of classical liberalism, people like Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is one of the great exponents of classical liberalism, and who inspired John Stuart Mill — they were what we would call libertarian socialists, at least that ïs the way I read them. For example, Humboldt, like Smith, says, Consider a craftsman who builds some beautiful thing. Humboldt says if he does it under external coercion, like pay, for wages, we may admire what he does but we despise what he is. On the other hand, if he does it out of his own free, creative expression of himself, under free will, not under external coercion of wage labor, then we also admire what he is because he’s a human being. He said any decent socioeconomic system will be based on the assumption that people have the freedom to inquire and create — since that’s the fundamental nature of humans — in free association with others, but certainly not under the kinds of external constraints that came to be called capitalism.

It’s the same when you read Jefferson. He lived a half century later, so he saw state capitalism developing, and he despised it, of course. He said it’s going to lead to a form of absolutism worse than the one we defended ourselves against. In fact, if you run through this whole period you see a very clear, sharp critique of what we would later call capitalism and certainly of the twentieth century version of it, which is designed to destroy individual, even entrepreneurial capitalism.

There’s a side current here which is rarely looked at but which is also quite fascinating. That’s the working class literature of the nineteenth century. They didn’t read Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt, but they’re saying the same things. Read journals put out by the people called the “factory girls of Lowell,” young women in the factories, mechanics, and other working people who were running their own newspapers. It’s the same kind of critique. There was a real battle fought by working people in England and the U.S. to defend themselves against what they called the degradation and oppression and violence of the industrial capitalist system, which was not only dehumanizing them but was even radically reducing their intellectual level. So, you go back to the mid-nineteenth century and these so-called “factory girls,” young girls working in the Lowell [Massachusetts] mills, were reading serious contemporary literature. They recognized that the point of the system was to turn them into tools who would be manipulated, degraded, kicked around, and so on. And they fought against it bitterly for a long period. That’s the history of the rise of capitalism.

The other part of the story is the development of corporations, which is an interesting story in itself. Adam Smith didn’t say much about them, but he did criticize the early stages of them. Jefferson lived long enough to see the beginnings, and he was very strongly opposed to them. But the development of corporations really took place in the early twentieth century and very late in the nineteenth century. Originally, corporations existed as a public service. People would get together to build a bridge and they would be incorporated for that purpose by the state. They built the bridge and that’s it. They were supposed to have a public interest function. Well into the 1870s, states were removing corporate charters. They were granted by the state. They didn’t have any other authority. They were fictions. They were removing corporate charters because they weren’t serving a public function. But then you get into the period of the trusts and various efforts to consolidate power that were beginning to be made in the late nineteenth century. It’s interesting to look at the literature. The courts didn’t really accept it. There were some hints about it. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that courts and lawyers designed a new socioeconomic system. It was never done by legislation. It was done mostly by courts and lawyers and the power they could exercise over individual states. New Jersey was the first state to offer corporations any right they wanted. Of course, all the capital in the country suddenly started to flow to New Jersey, for obvious reasons. Then the other states had to do the same thing just to defend themselves or be wiped out. It’s kind of a small-scale globalization. Then the courts and the corporate lawyers came along and created a whole new body of doctrine which gave corporations authority and power that they never had before. If you look at the background of it, it’s the same background that led to fascism and Bolshevism. A lot of it was supported by people called progressives, for these reasons: They said, individual rights are gone. We are in a period of corporatization of power, consolidation of power, centralization. That’s supposed to be good if you’re a progressive, like a Marxist-Leninist. Out of that same background came three major things: fascism, Bolshevism, and corporate tyranny. They all grew out of the same more or less Hegelian roots. It’s fairly recent. We think of corporations as immutable, but they were designed. It was a conscious design which worked as Adam Smith said: the principal architects of policy consolidate state power and use it for their interests. It was certainly not popular will. It’s basically court decisions and lawyers’ decisions, which created a form of private tyranny which is now more massive in many ways than even state tyranny was. These are major parts of modern twentieth century history. The classical liberals would be horrified. They didn’t even imagine this. But the smaller things that they saw, they were already horrified about. This would have totally scandalized Adam Smith or Jefferson or anyone like that….

The coolest and most influential leftist in Europe tells Salon he battles depression — and those who worship him.

Almost 25 years ago, philosopher Slavoj Žižek broke through the intellectual cul-de-sac of Slovenian academia — making his mark on the English-speaking world with “The Sublime Object of Ideology” (1989), a wily fusing of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Frankfurt School idealism, and reflections on the 1979 blockbuster horror flick “Alien.”

Today, he’s everywhere. The notoriously unkempt “radical leftist” philosophe has become the unlikeliest of celebrities: a cult icon and spiritual guide for Europe’s lethargic left.

Žižek has published more than 50 books (most recently: “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously”) and starred in several documentaries. A journal, The International Journal of Žižek Studies, is devoted to his works. Žižek has been called “the Borat of philosophy,” “the Elvis of cultural theory,” and “the world’s hippest philosopher.” These are titles he abhors.

Salon caught up with Žižek, who still calls Ljubljana home, over Skype. On the agenda: the improbable celebrity of Slavoj Žižek.

You’ve said this before. And you have noted the tendency for journalists to portray you as clownish or buffoonish. But I have to wonder: To what extent are you flirting with that?

You know why I do it? Because I’m terribly afraid that if people were to see me, to put it naively, how I really am, they would be terribly bored.

You know, in my private life I am an extremely depressed guy. Look where I am now! Look around. I’m in Paris.

[Žižek lifts his laptop, turning it to reveal his surroundings: a sparse hotel room, with simple bedding and a single window.]

You see? I’m in a small hotel room. I escaped my home for a week; I needed it. Here, I go out just once or twice a day to eat. Except for you, and another friend with whom I Skype, I haven’t spoken to a living person for a week. And I like it so much!

My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up.

This is why, incidentally, I claim that reality TV is so boring: because people are not themselves. They are acting a certain image of themselves, which is extremely boring and stupid and so forth. I cannot see why people are attracted by reality TV. I think it should be prohibited. And I think Facebook and Twitter should be prohibited. Don’t you think?

You know, the only photos I have of myself are on official documents, like my passport.

But wait! This doesn’t mean that I massively despise myself. No, I like my printed work. I live for that — for theory, really. And shamelessly. I hate this leftist humanitarian attitude: People are starving! Children in Africa! Who needs theory? No! We need useless theory more than ever today, I claim.

… Let’s run with that. You have said before: “I am a philosopher, not a prophet.” And yet, your followers are remarkably pious; many worship you as a prophet. Why?

Well, I’m ambiguous on this. On the one hand, I return to a more classical Marxism. Like: ‘It cannot last! This is all crazy! The hour of reckoning will come, blah blah blah.’

Also, I really hate all of this politically correct, cultural studies bullshit. If you mention the phrase “postcolonialism,” I say, “Fuck it!” Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.

So you offer respite to the 20-something who wants to escape the fruits of postmodernism: political correctness, gender studies, etc.? 

Yes, yes! That’s good!

But here I also have a bit of megalomania. I almost conceive of myself as a Christ figure. OK! Kill me! I’m ready to sacrifice myself. But the cause will remain! And so on…

But, paradoxically, I despise public appearances. This is why I almost stopped teaching entirely. The worst thing for me is contact with students. I like universities without students. And I especially hate American students. They think you owe them something. They come to you … Office hours!

… When you write the popularbooks that you claim not to like, who do you imagine to be your reader? 

Prohibited! I never ask this question. I don’t care. Another prohibition is that I never analyze myself. The idea of doing psychoanalysis on myself is disgusting. Here, I’m sort of a conservative Catholic pessimist. I think that if we look deep into ourselves, we discover a lot of shit. It is best not to know.

In “Zizek!” I was very careful that all the clues about my personality are misleading.

Why bother? For fun? 

Because they are idiots! I hate journalists! Filmmakers! I think there is something obscene about it. Of course, now you catch me again: Because if I’m really indifferent, then why do I bother to lie? Yes, there is a problem there…

You know, when I got married in Argentina, I was very embarrassed. People thought I orchestrated the leak of my wedding photographs. It’s not true!

I’ve seen those photos. For someone who describes love as violent and unnecessary, you seem to have pulled off quite the affair. Your wife [Argentinian model Analia Hounie] wore a long white dress and held a bouquet. How traditional! 

Yes, but did you notice something? If you look at the photos, you can see that I am not happy. Even my eyes are closed. It’s a psychotic escape. This is not happening. I’m not really here.

I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the “portrait of Stalin.” And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.

So you did it for your wife, this big wedding?

Yes, she was dreaming about it.

You know what book I really didn’t like from this perspective? Laura Kipnis’ “Against Love.” Her idea is that the last defense of the bourgeois order is ‘No sex outside love!’ It’s the Judith Butler stuff: reconstruction, identity, blah, blah, blah.

I claim it’s just the opposite. Today, passionate engagement is considered almost pathological. I think there is something subversive in saying: This is the man or woman with whom I want to stake everything.

This is why I was never able to do so-called one-night stands. It has to at least have a perspective of eternity.

… It’s been doing this for a long time in the case of Israel and Palestine, expressing disapproval of the occupation but doing almost nothing to bring it to an end. Is there anything Europe can do to exert pressure on Israel?

Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time, damaging Palestinians and damaging Israel without running any risk. However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage. If the EU said: ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t have the privileges of partial economic membership, you can’t have internal trading rights, you can’t be part of the EU market,’ this would be a huge issue in Israel, second only to losing American military aid. We don’t even have to talk about Gaza, just the Occupied Territories.

Why do Europeans not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of Israel, we can’t use our strength as a huge economic actor to pressure the Jewish state. Why? Because of Auschwitz.’ I understand this argument very well. Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz. However, this is ridiculous. Europe can’t live indefinitely on the credit of someone else’s crimes to justify a state that creates and commits its own crimes. If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. People will say: ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya? Yemen? Burma? China? All of which are much worse.’ Fine. But we are missing two things: first, Israel describes itself as a democracy and so it should be compared with democracies not with dictatorships; second, if Burma came to the EU and said, ‘It would be a huge advantage for us if we could have privileged trading rights with you,’ Europe would say: ‘First you have to release political prisoners, hold elections, open up your borders.’ We have to say the same things to Israel. Otherwise we are acknowledging that a Jewish state is an unusual thing – a weird, different thing that is not to be treated like every other state. It is the European bad conscience that is part of the problem.

…You’ve written that an idea of radical progress crumbled with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. If we can no longer believe in the inexorable laws of history, or the certainty of a socialist future, on what basis can a progressive politics be established?

I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else, as we saw, but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old or between those with different skills or from different regions of a country. It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent. It can’t be an economic language since part of the problem is that we have for too long spoken about politics in an economic language where everything has been about growth, efficiency, productivity and wealth, and not enough has been about collective ideals around which we can gather, around which we can get angry together, around which we can be motivated collectively, whether on the issue of justice, inequality, cruelty or unethical behaviour. We have thrown away the language with which to do that. And until we rediscover that language how could we possibly bind ourselves together? We can’t come together on the basis of 19th or 20th-century ideas of inevitable progress or the natural historical progression from capitalism to socialism or whatever. We can’t believe in that anymore. And anyway, it can’t do the work for us. We need to rediscover our own language of politics.

What are the differences in the ways different societies conceptualize punishment? What are the differences in the ways they enact it? And what can be learned by looking at other systems of punishment about the contingency and potential for transformation of our own system? Ancient Athens has often served as a model for certain of the modern world’s deepest aspirations in democratic government and philosophical rationality. At least since Nietzsche, it has also sometimes been approached as an extremely foreign land, whose values and practices, in their strangeness, can at the same time show just how strange our own are. How, now, does Athens look when we turn our attention to its conceptualization and enactment of punishment?

Danielle S. Allen is a political theorist who has addressed these questions in her work on both ancient Athens and modern America. Author of The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton University Press, 2000), Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Why Plato Wrote (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Allen is UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Justin E. H. Smith spoke to Allen by phone about the relationship between justice, punishment, and citizenship.

Your book The World of Prometheus offers a perfect way of giving historical depth to this issue on punishment, but it may also be interesting to reflect on how punishment in ancient Athens is relevant to our understanding of punishment in the contemporary world and, in particular, in the US. I’ve read both Prometheus andTalking to Strangers, your more recent book on Brown v. Board of Education, and one thing that struck me is how many of the same themes run through both books. You observe in Prometheus that the value of approaching punishment through the Greeks is that we’re able to “sharpen our thinking about punishment on the stone of the unfamiliar ancient world.” Does this remain for you the ultimate reason for studying ancient conceptions of punishment: that it gives us a point of access for understanding the problem of punishment itself by looking at an unfamiliar conception of it?

I can tell you the origin story of the book, which is simply that, as an undergraduate, I took a class on Athenian politics in which we read a lot of the speeches that were given in Athenian law courts. I was really taken aback by the fact that there was very little mention of imprisonment in those speeches, and I suddenly realized that I couldn’t imagine a world where prisons weren’t a major part of how we think about punishment. That captivated me, and I wanted to understand a world where imprisonment was not the dominant mode of understanding punishment. In that regard, the origin of the book was absolutely the shock of discovering, by looking at the ancient world, that our world is contingent, and that one particular contingency is the degree to which we use incarceration. It bears some thinking as to how we got there and what a world without extensive incarceration looks like.

Well, that might be right about our contemporary context; the ancient story is somewhat different. Generally—there are minor exceptions to this—Athenian methods of punishment strove to protect the body of the citizen, and this established a distinction between citizen and slave, between citizen and foreigner, resident alien, and so forth. The citizen stood out as having that bodily protection. In the early phase of the democracy, the main modes of punishing were monetary fines and exile. What happened, though, was that poorer citizens would find themselves imprisoned indefinitely: there were monetary penalties, and you would be thrown into prison until you’d paid them. So imprisonment wasn’t itself a penalty, except that poorer citizens began to have these indefinite periods in prison because they couldn’t actually pay the fine. Imprisonment as a penalty seems to have been developed in order to equalize the penal system, so that poorer citizens could pay with their bodies. In that regard, it was a different approach to the body than the physical punishment used for slaves and foreigners. It wasn’t really so much a matter of chastising or wounding the body, but rather of accepting the idea that the body could stand in for property. That’s what happened at that historical moment: the body became a form of property, and the person could use that property to pay their debts. Only the citizen had such rights and control over his own body.

Of course, a later development would be further equalization by stating that the rich can in fact no longer pay their way out with money.

Right, and that did not happen in Athens. There do seem to be some wrongs for which imprisonment became the basic penalty, and in that regard there was a bit of an additional equalizing, but for the most part there was still a differential situation where the rich could pay penalties and get out of things.

The central concern of the book is to discuss punishment as “a practice of constructing authority,” as you put it, and you are also concerned with what you call “the construction of desert.” This involves, as you describe, a good deal of contestation. It’s not that the authority of the state to punish in this or that way is just something the state announces, but it’s rather something that is always being contested. In part, the perpetual contestation in ancient Athens had to do with the absence in their judicial system of the role of public prosecutor. Everyone acts as their own prosecutor, and that’s always a form of contestation: everyone who wanted to see someone punished had to be able to make their case on their own. I’m wondering if you can say a bit more about how that worked, and also about the concern in the book to show the way in which authority was constructed in ancient Athens.

If you don’t mind, let me answer that in reverse, since the argument I wanted to make about authority—in its relationship to ideas of desert and contested notions of desert—I meant as a general idea. That is, I take it to be true of all political systems that punishment rests, to an important degree, on the ability to cause people to be quiet, to acquiesce. In fact, that idea is even built into our own language of punishment. We hear it in the language of “appeals.” When you appeal something, you keep calling out until there’s a moment where someone is forced to be silent. But that silence lasts only if we actually can maintain a silence more generally in the culture, which requires people to accept that this was deserved. And let’s leave out here the case of totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, and those that use terror. We can see the dynamic I am talking about actually in the recent Trayvon Martin events, where the state made a decision, but people were not quiet. People were so loud about it that the state had to return to its processes and to engage with them. And there will be a very real question all the way to the end of the process as to whether or not it will be possible for the state to achieve silence at the end.

But let’s get back to Athens. Athens was an interesting case-study because the fact of contestation, which was central to the construction of the desert that grounds the moment of silence at the end of punishment, was itself, precisely as you said, a result of the fact that everybody was responsible for prosecuting their own crimes. Right from the start, when the person got to court, they had to justify the fact that they were there, since of course to be a plaintiff also prosecuting a crime is an ethically complicated position. Are you really there because you’re prosecuting a wrong? Or do you just dislike this person, or they’ve got things that you want and this is a way to get them? Are you just using the court as a way to attack them? There are a lot of reasons to suspect anybody coming forward in this way, and so that generates a framework of suspicion that makes questions of desert very alive. Nothing is really assumed about the outcome. So I think the relationships among desert, authority, contestation, and silence apply in all penal systems, outside of the context of totalitarian regimes, but in Athens, it was particularly explicit and so that made it a little easier to think about.