Questions I Tire of Answering I

There is a series of half a dozen questions which almost all acquaintances have asked me by the time they have become my friends. These questions even tend to be asked in the same order. As the youngest member of my family, I am by now accustomed to asking a series of the same four questions in the same order twice annually, but unlike at the Seder, the answers to my personal questions are more complex, and not already known by the questioner. Although I understand that nobody who innocently poses these questions has any idea that I have already replied to exactly the same question within the past 48 hours, I am nonetheless becoming tired of answering them. Therefore, I have decided to post them permanently on my blog, if only so that somebody, somebody, among you who hasn’t already asked me these questions will settle with reading the answers online, and not need to hassle me. There are too many questions to list all in one blog post, so I have decided space out the answers over time, ordering the responses categorically. I will begin with by far the most frequent pair of questions.

Q: How long have you been a vegetarian?

JD: Approximately seven years.

Q: Why did you decide to become a vegetarian?
JD: There are many reasons. I will try to list them in approximate order of importance.

First of all, there is the element of animal rights. I believe that animals have certain rights, which are not identical to human rights. Although there is not enough room (or concurrence) for a complete listing of human rights, suffice to say that these rights involve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. My pursuit of happiness may look very different from yours, but we are equally entitled to our respective pursuits, insofar as they do not infringe upon the rights of others. The basis for a being to have rights is not intelligence; nobody would argue that Stephen Hawking has more rights than Joe Schmoe because Stephen is more intelligent than Joe. Their rights are equal, regardless of their respective IQs.

What, then, is the basis for human rights? Why is it that depriving my fellow human being of his life for my own enjoyment is morally wrong, whereas depriving a carrot of its life for my own enjoyment is morally neutral? Carrots and human beings are equally alive. We can thus establish that it is not the very fact of being alive that entitles one to rights. Following philosopher Peter Singer, I believe that it is one’s ability to feel pain that establishes one’s rights. The reason that the carrot has no rights is because it cannot feel pain; the same is true for the rest of the plant kingdom, as well as all inanimate objects.

There are two possible objections to this statement. First, you could argue that, by this logic, I am depriving brain-damaged people who have lost the ability to feel pain (they exist) to their rights. This is a fallacy. When I speak of pain, I am describing not only the physiological phenomenon associated with stimulated c-fibers, but also emotional anguish, etc. Suppose I were to cripple an aforesaid brain-damaged human for my own sadistic pleasure: my act would be morally unjust because I would be violating my victim’s right to liberty: a cripple is less mobile and capable than a human being with a whole body, and by depriving my victim of the advantages of a whole body, I would be committing a morally unjust action. The second objection (really just a vamped-up version of the first) is that this logic condemns to euthanasia brain-dead orphans with no ties to friends or family. This, anyway, is Peter Singer’s conclusion. Although this conclusion is rational, I object to it on the basis of human uncertainty: even medical experts may condemn a case as hopeless when it is not so. For instance, Japanese novelist and Nobel laureate in literature Kenzaburō Ōe’s eldest son Hikari was diagnosed as a human vegetable, and doctors suggested that he be allowed to die. Kenzaburō and his wife remained hopeful concerning in their severely handicapped son; despite his mental and physical limitations, he has gone on to become a successful composer.

Back to vegetarianism: I maintain that the ability to feel pain entitles one to rights. The animals that we raise for food are, biologically, as capable of feeling pain as are human beings (the relevant part of the brain is identical in mammals and birds). The factory farm conditions prevalent in United States agro-business are cruelly restrictive in ways that I believe cause animals physical and mental anguish. Hens are enclosed in individual cages too small for movement, steers are stuffed full of hormones and confined to live in pools of their own shit, and the living conditions of veal calves are too infamous for me to repeat them here. By choosing not to eat meat, I am refusing to finance such a system of animal abuse: I am eating my vote, and my form of protest is withholding my dollars from abusive enterprises.

My second reason is environmental. As food writer Michael Pollan has well expressed in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the American beef industry floats upon a sea of fossil fuels. A plate of meat costs twenty times as much energy to produce as a plate of vegetables; the world is facing an energy crisis, and even if you reject the anthropogenic nature of climate change, there are many reasons to avoid wasting the fossil fuels that remain, in part because many of the countries which benefit most from their sale are repressive and hostile towards democratic government. There is no good reason to encourage wastefulness and overconsumption: although our consumer economy is full of the pitfalls of planned obsolescence and waste, these business strategies, however profitable they may be for the corporations which employ them, result in the increase of pollution and the swelling of landfills. By choosing not to eat meat, and trying to eat locally, I have tried to reduce my own environmental footprint, in order that my lifestyle might be sustainable. Although there is not enough room to describe it now, my environmentalism is neither environmentalism-for-environmentalism’s sake nor environmentalism-for-natural-beauty’s sake: I hold my environmentalist beliefs because I wish for future generations to be able to enjoy the same style of life on the same planet as I do. I am an environmentalist for the same reason that I have placed my savings in a mutual fund: I do not want my children to ever know want, or hunger, or thirst, or sickness.

My third reason is religious. As an observant Jew who tries to obey the rules of Kashrut, it is far simpler to exclude meat from my diet. I never need worry about the amount of time that has elapsed since I last ate meat, I do not need to worry about the relative unavailability of kosher meat, and, when I become older, I will not need to have a kitchen with four sets of dishes.

These are the main three reasons why I choose not to eat meat. As you might have noticed, my argument is incomplete: I glossed over climate change, and have not discussed sustainable fishing. There is one point, however, that I must make before I sign off. This essay is not meant to convert any of you to my cause: it is merely my own justification for my behavior. I was never particularly attached to meat, anyway, and do not suffer from the cravings which I know some would if they were constrained to avoid meat. Eschewing meat is easier for me than others, cognizant of this, I realize that my academic treatment of the subject seems far to abstract to seem convincing. I wish only to avoid the kind of harassment I have experienced from acquaintances who treat my dietary choices with disdain and contempt.

~JD

“The Vatican ordered bishops to take an oath of loyalty to the state and agreed to the dismantling of the church’s temporal organizations… The Nazis had gained another important prop for their regimes. Almost immediately, the Nazis began to go back on the agreement, principally by harassing priests who were seen as hostile” (Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History, 152).

JDMeme

This is what we call "setting the record straight."

~JD

In Touch With the Past

Some of you may know that I’m currently taking a course on history methodology, in preparation for writing my senior thesis next year. If you do know, however, you probably didn’t remember until I mentioned it just now: it’s a somewhat boring class, which could and should last one hour every other week, rather than two hours every week. The students and professor alike do their best to keep the conversation dynamic, but if, at the end of each class, you asked me what I’d learned, I’m not certain what I’d answer. Perhaps I’ve just been spoiled with good seminar; after all, discussing historical methodology at a party won’t get you a date, in the way discussing the Enlightenment or European Fascism will. Although I’m looking forward to finally reading Edward Saïd’s Orientalism, and Natalie Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, there is one topic definitely missing on my syllabus, covered only vaguely in the first week’s reading, and tangentially in one article in the fifth week.

That topic is what I call concreteness in history. It has to do with a very delicate balance in historical writing. When historians seek to describe the events of the past, they information they present falls somewhere on a scale of specificity, ranging from the anecdote on the one side to the generalization on the other. Although I emphasize that this is a scale, and that there is a well-sized grey area, most event can be classified without much difficulty as one or the other. Whereas an anecdote (from Greek, “unedited”) is a specific event involving or in the presence of a certain individual or group at a particular time and place, a generalization (from Latin generalis, in contrast to specialis) sweeps anecdotes into a blender, sets it to “purée” for ten minutes, and tells you how the smoothie tastes, thus “editing” the unedited. If a generalization is quantitative, we call it a statistic. When selecting, interpreting, and presenting the primary sources that reveal the events of the past, historians must write in both anecdotes and generalizations. This is a fine balance to strike: how often to generalize, and how often to recount anecdotes.

Too many anecdotes, and too few generalities, leaves the reader uncertain just to what he should importance, and how much. Herodotus is a classic example of this (Ibn Daud is too, but less well-known, and a certain neighbor of mine might not appreciate criticism of Sefer HaQabalah). The man just loved anecdotes. For instance, he tells us, the names of the bravest soldiers in every battle, and of individual acts of heroism. For instance, at the battle of Plataea, the Athenian Sophanes “wore an iron anchor, fastened to the belt which secured his breastplate by a brazen chain; and this, when he came near the enemy, he threw out; to the intent that, when they made their charge, it might be impossible for him to be driven from his post: as soon, however, as the enemy fled, his wont was to take up his anchor and join the pursuit” (Histories 9.74, where there follows a second, contradictory story about Sophanes). Even Herodotus’s generalities are more curiosities to be admired than meaningful topical summations. For instance, he describes non-Greeks to his all-Greek audience in part by their foreign eating-habits: Assyrians lived exclusively on fishcakes; Massagetaeans were cannibals, milk-drinkers, and lacked agriculture; and Persians were unmatched in the decadence of their cuisine (Histories 1.200, 1.216, and 9.82, if you don’t believe me). Although the citations reveal that I’m pulling these from different books, my point is that these may be generalizations, but by the time you pull up Facebook again, you’ll have forgotten these passages. This is the problem of Herodotus: though his descriptions of battles are riveting, and his anthropological observations are fascinating, one week from now, you won’t remember who Sophanes is, nor will you know anything about Assyrian eating habits.

The opposite problem is much more common among contemporary historians, particularly (in my own experience), those who study East and Southeast Asia. For instance, all I remember about the Tang Dynasty (618-907) from a semester-long class on premodern China and Japan is that some people played polo in the North. So that I won’t be comparing apples and oranges, I’ll choose a written source, instead. Seymour Drescher wrote the most boring assigned course reading I have ever read, the introduction to a book-long debate over the precise connection between capitalism and the abolition movement (the same people involved, the best example being the Quakers). Throughout the entire Introduction, only the name of a single historical actor (a wealthy British merchant) is ever mentioned, and the non-scholarly reader is left clueless as to just what the natures of the abolitionists and capitalists were like. All I can remember is the premise of the article: I derived no benefit, because there were only generalizations, no anecdotes.

John Lewis Gaddis, in his Landscape of History (don’t bother reading it), writes that historical writings are to the events of the past as maps are to a landscape. Historical writing cannot describe all aspects of the past without becoming as vast, clumsy, and “unedited” as the past itself (or, rather, the vestiges it leaves behind, which Gaddis calls “relics of the past,” which, upon historical scrutiny, become primary sources). To borrow a statisticians’ adage about models, all historical writings are false, but some are very useful. Anecdotes must be selected, and generalizations must be made; major questions remain which ones, how many, and in what proportion to each other (bearing in mind, of course that no single historian, no matter how dedicated, can ever exhaust all primary sources on a subject). Many students of the past have successfully struck this balance over the years. To name just a few, Edward H. Schafer (The Vermillion Bird), Thomas Cahill (How the Irish Saved Civilization), Arturo Valenzuela (The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile), Benedict Anderson (“Census, Map, Museum” in Imagined Communities), Mark Kurlansky (Cod), Philip Deloria (Indians in Unexpected Places), Joseph Ellis (Founding Brothers), Belinda Davis (Home Fires Burning), Ada Ferrer (Insurgent Cuba), John Ellis (Eye-Deep in Hell), David Fromkin (A Peace to End All Peace), and every contributor to The Cultures of the Jews have all produced excellent, informative, well-written, and well-balanced works.

My favorite example, however, of balanced historical writing, is Thucyidies.. In Book I of his sadly-unfinished History of the Peloponnesian War, the old Greek general establishes the great conflict, that all Greece ought to have seen coming. Athens and Sparta had been on a collision course since the Persian Wars more than a half-century before: the Delian League had become the Athenian Empire, and every year, more poleis were joining, ever increasing the Athens’s resources of ships, warriors, and treasure; before long, Sparta, long the most fearsome Greek polis, would be in an obvious position of inferiority: Athenian power posed a direct threat to Spartan hegemony, and Athenian coercion of traditional Spartan allies, most importantly Corinth, and most cruelly, Megaros. But though Thucydides’s political acumen was great enough to write such cogent generalizations of international relations in Classical Greece, he was also capable of including the anecdotes necessary to make the generalities stick. One of Thucydides’s famous contrasts between Sparta and Athens, for instance, is that the former’s power is land-based, and the latter, naval. This is best illustrated in his numerous descriptions of battles. For instance, early in the war, an Athenian fleet fights a group of enemy ships, who are so frightened by the Athenians’ navy, famed as the mightiest across the Hellenic world, that they form an outward-facing circle, and back water to maintain a safe distance. The Athenians threateningly close in circularly, and, eventually, their enemies bump into each others, their sterns and riggings tangle, and they surrender to the Athenians. The ease with which I just wrote this passage (notice the lack of citation) should convey Thucydides’s ability to make his ideas memorable. What he has done is make history concrete: the reader understands larger themes (generalizations), through specific incidents (anecdotes).

To return to Gaddis’s metaphor of historical-writing-as-map, if generalizations are the paper of the map, then anecdotes are the pushpins which “fix” it, and prevent it from curling up around the edges as the map ages. With no generalizations, pushpins in the wall are boring things; with no anecdotes, maps, no matter how valuable, will remain forever furled in the corner.

Concreteness is the effect of a proper balance between anecdote and generalization: it is not the balance itself. When the two are in proper proportion, one knows the physical, visibly human actions on a small scale, as well as the significance of these actions to a larger historical narrative. What many modern historians fail to do, in their generalization-based history, is remind the reader what his generalizations mean, and what they look like. When I was in France, studying at the Sorbonne, I vigorously studied the Finance Ministry of Louis XIV. I read and reported on the entire process of direct (and indirect) tax collection and assessment. The different courts and tribunals, the various officers and commissars, the lands of election and of estate, their calendars and timetables: all I tried to explain to my classmates, with my friend Pauline Renoir, in 20 very, very short minutes. Throughout the project, though, I was bothered by two closely-related questions as to the historical relevance and importance of the presentation I was crafting and the material I was sifting through. The first was: was any individual involved in this hierarchy of transfer actually aware of any of the other actors? My conclusion, at the end, was a tentative no: the higher-ups didn’t care how each receveur particulier (the crucial intermediary link in the chain) came up with the money he delivered to the receveur general, and the humble collecteur had no way of knowing what happened to the tax money he levied. My second question still remains unanswered: how did the average taxpayer physically pay his taxes? Would twelve soldiers, armed to the teeth, knock on his door demanding money, the way so many bad Robin Hood films have taught us to imagine tax collection? Or was he obliged to visit the collecteur and his staff with a purse of silver coins at some sort of regional office?

The negative answer and non-answer to my questions reveal that the books I was reading lacked concreteness: I could not ascertain the physical, visible aspects of the actions described therein. Concreteness is important for two reasons. First, it forces you to understand what you are saying when you are making historical claims. If, for instance, I made the sweeping claim that “in its early years, Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile was particularly brutal,” something I learned from my course on Latin America, and somebody pressed me for examples, I would know how to respond. I could say: “The day after Pinochets’s September 11^th 1973 coup, approximately seven thousand known supporters of the just-murdered democratically-elected president Allende, were rounded up, and detained in the stadium in the capital city of Santiago. Many of these people were beaten, tortured, and executed by machine gun fire.” Here, I not simply using a blanket statement, such as “coup,” “repression,” or “military crackdown.” If pressed for details, I could provide the example of Víctor Jara, the famous leftist folk singer, most of whose upper body was broken in the severe beating he received, who was taunted by his tormenters to try to play his guitar in such a state, and who began the composition of a poem (successfully smuggled out), unfinished because he was dragged away to be executed by machine gun.

Such an event is as vivid as it is shocking; and this brings me to my second point: concreteness is necessary in order to “fix” certain events and milieus in the mind of the reader. Just as medical students have their mnemonics (“On Old Olympus’s Topmost Top, A Fat-Eared German Viewed A Hawk” in order to memorize the names of cranial nerves), history students need their mental pictures, sound bytes, and video clips to prevent what they are learning from dribbling out of their ears. For instance, I still bear in my head the vivid picture of a housewife in wartime Berlin smacking an offending policeman with her milk pot. This instantly summons forth a host of other images and ideas: starvation and shortage, the colored rationing cards, steaks cut out of every horse which collapsed in the streets, the terrifying gun-toting and sword-wielding German police, the vast slaughter of one third of Germany’s pig population, the “turnip winter,” public kitchens, black market butter, k-bread and double-k bread: I suddenly recall the milieu of starvation in Berlin in World War I. Like turning over a seemingly ordinary stone, only to reveal a scuttling swarming universe beneath, each one of these scenes (and I have collected many, over the years), “reveals” a throng of interrelated images.

Many historians write concretely, consistently: others do not. Some professors at Cornell include concreteness in their lectures: many others do not. In less than one year, I will, for the first time ever, be in the position to write as a historian does: I only hope that my writing will be as concrete as it is insightful, and as original as it is interesting.

~JD

“A salient feature of the plantation period is the number of European accounts that actually credit slaves with the introduction of specific foods to the Americas, all previously grown in Africa” (Judith Carney, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s botanical legacy in the Atlantic World, 123).

Pox

Hello, everyone, I’ve decided to revive my blog, at least for the time being. Although I don’t expect the entries to be as long, I hope to keep the style enjoyable and entertaining.

As some of you may already know, Gannet Health Services diagnosed me with chickenpox, and have put me in quarantine in my room for a period of six days, until this coming Wednesday, February 22^nd. This has forced me to sit tight and read. I devoured books three, four, and five of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, and have also read about rice planting techniques in West Africa and South Carolina, Jewish discrimination in Paris under the Vichy Regime, Robert Boyle, the disintegration of democratic regimes in the 1960s and 70s in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s s foreign and domestic policies… I could go on, but to no purpose.

I’ve also been wasting a fair amount of time on the Internet. The final hours of the Order of the Stick Reprint Drive at Kickstarter have had me at the edge of my seat, trying to snag some signed books, I’ve read articles by my friends Judah Bellin (on Technion, in the Cornell Daily Sun) and Sam Moss (on nuclear Iran in the Cornell Progressive), listened to a lot of reggae on Pandora, found Arlo Guthrie singing “Alice’s Restaurant” on YouTube, tried to catch up on some e-mail backlogging.

In some ways, I feel as I did back in France -- lonely, most of the time, and immensely happy whenever somebody has taken time out of his or her day to reach out and make human contact. I don’t feel sick, beyond the itchiness of the rash itself, and the worst part of this whole situation is the quarantine — apparently, you can catch chicken pox just by being in the same movie theater as someone else who has it, so that means no guests inside of my room, and I can’t go and sit in the living room downstairs, either.

This gets me to thinking of the story of another student, who lived more than eighteen centuries ago. I sadly don’t know his name, or any details about his life, except this one, which the Talmud relates: “It once happened that one of Rabbi Akiva’s students became sick, but none of the sages went to visit him. Rabbi Akiva, however, went to visit him. Because he swept and cleaned the floor for him, the student recovered. The student said to him ‘Rabbi, you have revived me!’ (Nedarim 40a).

On the surface, what Rabbi Akiva did for his student in visiting him was really quite modest: a bit of cleaning. (Though if his student were as messy as some Cornell Students, sweeping and cleaning might have been a strenuous task for the aging teacher.) Like Rabbi Akiva’s student, I have been helped by the kindness of a few people who have made the effort, going above and beyond, to make me feel better about my situation. Unlike him, I am not serious ill, but this does not exempt me from gratitude, and I’d like to thank everyone who has made a special effort of kindness over the past five days, in no particular order.

Dad, thank you so much for calling: it was the best part of my whole weekend. Josefin, thank you so much for buying me groceries: I would be out of food if it were not for you. Victor, thank you for delivering my Shabbat dinner. Mom, thank you for your unceasing support, and your concern. Peninah, thank you so much for stopping by my door, and engaging me in normal conversation, lending me just a bit of your unflagging optimism. Aaron and Nick, I really appreciate your offering to take notes for me, so that I don’t fall behind in my studies. Elliot, thank you for the favor that required you to know my Hebrew name. Sam, thank you for your article, and for speaking with me over the phone. Also, thanks to everyone who has wished me well by e-mail, or anyone whom I may have forgotten (you know who you are).

I’ve got to get back to work (or to sleep, rather, by now). Regardless, on Wednesday, I’m free. See you all soon, and love to you all.

~JD

“Whether at a crucial moment for Jacobin hegemony in the French Revolution, at the point of Stalin’s bid for controlling authority, the implementation of Nazi policy in Germany, or the triumph in Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeni, emergent ruler have justified dominion… as masculine, and made that code literal in laws that put women in their place” (Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, 1072).