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Weaponizing Antisemitism under the Guise of Care


A U.S. joint forces color guard displays the United States of America and Israel flags during a visit from Lt. Gen. Benjamin Gantz, IDF Chief of General Forces. 18th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey welcomes Israel Defense Forces Chief of General Forces Lt. Gen. Benjamin Gantz to the Pentagon, Jan. 8, 2014. DoD photo by Army Staff Sgt. Sean K. Harp/Released.*

The forests of the Amazon are burning. The lungs of the planet will collapse and take the rest of us with them. The United States government is detaining large numbers of immigrants, separating children from their families, deporting parents who work in this country, and planning to lift the limit on how long people can be detained. Americans are dying because they cannot afford their prescription medications, and mass shootings are on the rise while the government does nothing about gun control. But the current resident of the White House made some outrageous remark. Another outrageous remark, just one of several on any given day. And so, all the major news outlets shifted their focus from the enormity of climate change, the precarity of the human race, and our cruelty to each other. This time, the comment was about Jews in America. It was a troubling remark and one that recalls a long history of antisemitism. This kind of talk is dangerous. So, we are swept up by the news cycle and shift our attention to the agenda set by racism—again.

The current resident of the White House, a symptom of larger processes, proclaimed that Jewish Americans who do not vote for the Republican party are disloyal. Not disloyal to their country of citizenship. No, they are traitors to the state of Israel. By the time this post is published many readers will already have seen countless responses to the antisemitism inherent in the idea of Jews as disloyal. So, rather than focus on that specific comment, I want to point to a broader process underway: a shift in antisemitic rhetoric that might make it harder to recognize and therefore all the more dangerous.

Rep. Ilhan Omar speaking at a Hillary for Minnesota event at the University of Minnesota. Photo Credit: Lorie Shaull.

In addition to his remarks about disloyal Jews, the same man has also denigrated three junior members of Congress by weaponizing the accusation of antisemitism. He says that Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are antisemitic. These three junior congresswomen, women of color, include one Muslim woman of Palestinian descent, one Somali Muslim woman in hijab, and one Latina. They are outspoken in their opposition to Israeli policy. They call for the end of Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories and for human rights for Palestinians. The man in the White House calls them antisemites. He says that they hate Israel and that they also hate all Jews.

These accusations—one of disloyalty and the other of antisemitism—are themselves forms of antisemitism. This weaponized antisemitism is dangerous for all minorities and people of color. It calls out migrants, and Muslims in particular. It also participates in a much longer historical process of making Jews and Muslims enemies of Europe and of each other, while conflating Muslim with Arab in ways that continue to have serious consequences in Israel/Palestine. But it is especially dangerous for Jews. American Jews have long felt themselves relatively comfortable in their country, and relatively safe from antisemitic rhetoric or acts of violence. The current focus on Jews and the questioning of their loyalty reminds Jews of a long history of similar accusations.

The claim of disloyalty resonates profoundly with older antisemitic tropes. The Jews were accused of disloyalty in medieval Christian times, during the Inquisition, and, more recently, in pre-WWII Europe. Throughout history, Jews have been accused of disloyalty to the crown, the country, the Pope, or to Christ. But how can American Jews be accused of disloyalty to a foreign country? The idea is bizarre unless one presumes that all Jews should support Israel first and at all times because of some kind of tribal, ethnic, or religious affiliation. Should American Catholics be loyal to Rome? Should American Muslims support the governments of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia?

Beyond the absurdity lies the age-old accusation leveled against Jews everywhere: they are disloyal to their country of residence because they are Jewish. In part, this idea results from an inherent problem in the modern identity categories through which we generally navigate our social lives. These categories suggest that national belonging and religious affiliation are separate aspects of identity. A person can be French and Catholic, or Dutch and Buddhist at the same time. Scholars such as Charles Taylor contend that not only are these categories separable, but that in our modern, supposedly secular age, “religion” is a matter of personal choice. That means a French citizen can choose to be Catholic or Protestant or join some other faith group. And, a person can even choose not to be affiliated with any religion. The idea that such distinctions can be made is often considered a specifically Protestant understanding of the term “religion.” Whether or not one agrees with that analysis, it seem clear that such is not the case for the Jews. In the figure of the Jew, the categories of national and religious belonging are at once both separate and conflated. While a Jewish person might be non-observant, or practice another faith, the racialization of Jewishness has meant that no matter what they do, a Jew will always be Jewish. Importantly, Jewishness is understood as a national and religious category. Thus, regardless of their country of residence or their citizenship state, Jews are always and forever foreigners who cannot be trusted as patriotic citizens. They might be granted citizen’s rights, might completely assimilate to the local culture, and might even convert to Christianity. However, they will always be suspect.

Many Peoples One Nation: Let us Unite to Americanize America. Printed and published by Ray Greenleaf, 1917.

Hannah Arendt discussed this conundrum in a piece called “We Refugees.” In that 1943 article, Arendt wrote about the uselessness of attempts at assimilation. She spoke of a character she called Mr. Cohen who, when he lived in Germany was 150% German. When forced to leave Germany, he moved to Prague and became 150% Czech, and then 150% French and so on interminably attempting to demonstrate that he was forever everywhere and anywhere a loyal citizen; anything but a Jew.

Now, in the United States of 2019, we hear people opposing the current Republican administration by quoting another Republican, Ronald Reagan who once fondly quoted a letter he received that said, “You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.… Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.” It is impossible to repeat this quote without pointing out its erasure of the settler colonial past of the United States, its ongoing genocide of Native Americans, and the fact that the U.S. is a society that was built on the backs of slave labor, that is, people who did not just “come to live in America.” Beyond that, it seems clear that if Jewish Americans are called upon by their government to be loyal to the state of Israel, this picture of becoming American is nothing more than a myth, no different from Arendt’s assessment of the impossibility of assimilation.

But what does it mean to demand “loyalty” in the first place? Loyalty to whom? For what? Is loyalty the same as patriotism? Is it central to democratic living? Should we encourage unquestioning support of state policies? Or would we do better to encourage engagement and critique? The danger underlying this call to loyalty lies in its promotion of an ethno-nationalism that undermines the possibility of equal rights for all citizens in a multicultural society and the impossibility of achieving such rights based on our common humanity. Instead it reinforces the exclusionary nature of nationalism with all its precarity for those deemed outsiders.

This time, though, the accusation of disloyalty came wrapped in a kind of philo-Semitism. “We care about you,” it said. “We, the Republican party, are staunch supporters of Israel, and therefore, by definition, we are good for you. Good for the Jews. And you—Jewish Americans—would be doing the right thing if you supported our party.” The Republican party, or its leader in the White House, is now proclaiming who is a good Jew and who is not. When powerful gentiles begin deciding who is a good Jew, we should all be worried. The leader of the Republican party not only proclaims what counts as “good” Jewish behavior. He has gone one step further and determined that he, and not the members of the Jewish community themselves, knows what is good for them.

One of the things that is “good for Jews,” he says, is unconditional support for the state of Israel. Therefore, the three junior congresswomen are not good for the Jews. They are enemies of the Jewish people. These proclamations are all intended to garner support for his presidency, to appeal to his constituency, including Evangelical Christians (Christian Zionists), and maybe even to reach out to Jewish Americans. But they do something else, too, something more insidious. These comments say that all Jews are, or should be, of one mind. They should all share the same political opinions. In particular, they should all unconditionally grant their loyalty to a foreign country and oppose their own fellow citizens—in this case the representatives for which some American Jews voted—who dare to criticize that foreign country’s policies. In other words, because of who they are, Jews cannot and should not be allowed to identify primarily with their fellow Americans. They must be marked, themselves, as foreigners; their racial and national identity must be conflated again, still.

Close the Camps Rally, San Francisco, California. August 23, 2019. Photo Credit: Peg Hunter.

This notion of “all Jews,” of course, presumes a homogeneity that is very far from the truth. No religious or cultural group is homogenous, certainly not the Jews. To suggest otherwise encourages stereotypical ideas and is fundamentally racist. This notion of Jews as permanent foreigners, and inherently suspect, feeds into larger tropes of global Jewish conspiracies, of their worldwide power, and of their fealty first and foremost to eachother. Suggesting that Jews are disloyal to the modern state of Israel is a form of antisemitism, thinly veiled in terms of caring about Jews. This notion, together with accusations of antisemitism aimed at people of color and those who are critical of Israeli policy, combine to form a toxic antisemitism that stigmatizes some people while producing enemies of groups who might otherwise find shared interests.

When Republicans tell Jewish Americans, “we care about you, we know what is good for you,” they are not only infantilizing the entire Jewish population. They are repeating the two-millennium old tale of Christians having replaced Jews as the chosen people of G-d, the focus of His covenant with humankind. When they say, “we are looking out for you by pointing out antisemitism among others,” they are weaponizing antisemitism, promoting divisions, fear and hatred, that in the end are dangerous to the Jews. Thus the historical Jewish Question, which many expected would end with the establishment of the state of Israel, instead re-emerges and is transformed.We hear in this rhetoric of care echoes of the idea that Christians or Gentiles know better what is “good for the Jews” than do Jews themselves, as the promises and protections of citizenship are, once more, undermined by a toxic ethno-nationalism based in an idea of immutable difference.

 

*Department of Defense endorsement of the claims made in this essay is not intended in posting this image

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Joyce Dalsheim
Joyce Dalsheim is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor of Global Studies at UNC Charlotte. She is author of Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion and the Israeli Settlement Project (2011), Producing Spoilers: Peacemaking and the Production of Enmity in a Secular Age (2014), and Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self-Elimination (October 2019), all published by Oxford University Press.
Global Currents article

On Disloyalty and Dual Loyalty: Is President Trump a Brandeisean Zionist?


Alt-right counter protestors holding Israeli, Trump, and American flags and ‘Stop Holocaust Exploitation’ posters at the ‘Close the Camps’ rally at Farmington Holocaust Memorial Center, Michigan. August 20, 2019

President Trump’s comment last week that American Jews who vote for the Democratic Party are being “greatly disloyal” has sent shock waves through the Jewish world. What did he mean? Disloyal to whom? Isn’t the accusation of disloyalty an anti-Semitic dog whistle? By not initially defining the object of “disloyalty” Trump opened up various possibilities of how his comment can, or should, be parsed. Groups on the Jewish left such as Jewish Voice for Peace and J-Street to the center-right AIPAC contested this statement. President Rivlin in Israel contested this statement. The Likud-led government said nothing. The overt partisan overtones of the comment resulted in Jewish Trumpists defending the president, saying that, even if the comment may have been poorly articulated, American Jews who vote for “the party of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar” (this is how Trumpists are reconstructing “the Democrats”) are being disloyal to Israel and, given the current fusion of pro-Israelness and allegiance to the Jews, are being disloyal to the Jewish people.

Critics of the comment claim that the language of disloyalty is anti-Semitic. The problem is that in this case the “dual loyalty” equation implied in Trump’s “disloyalty” locution seems to be inverted. The anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty has historically been used to claim that the Jews are being disloyal to their country of residence in favor of their loyalty to the Jewish people. Later, the question of loyalty extended to the state of Israel. In the late 18thcentury, the question of Jewish loyalty was posed to the Jewish sages in France in the wake of their emancipation. Could the French Jews, who ostensibly had loyalty to another collective (the Jewish people), ever be fully loyal to France? The French sages responded that the Jews are a people of a religious tradition and not a nation and thus fidelity to the Jewish people does not stand in contradiction to allegiance to the French nation. On this basis they were emancipated.

The Trial of Dreyfus. Vanity Fair, November 23, 1899

This precarious equation lasted until it exploded with the Dreyfus affair in 1894 when French officer Alfred Dreyfus was accused and convicted of treason. (The conviction was later overturned.) A young Viennese journalist named Theodore Herzl covered the story and heard the reactions of many French men and women who were convinced of Dreyfus’s guilt. These men and women claimed that Dreyfus, as a Jew, could never give full allegiance to France. In some way, this gave birth to Zionism, which claimed in part that even the fully assimilated Dreyfus’s of the world will never be accepted as full citizens in their country of residence. That is, Jews could never fully shed the suspicion of dual loyalty.

While “dual loyalty” is indeed often an anti-Semitic canard, it is also a real challenge to all of Diaspora Jewry, especially after the establishment of the state of Israel. What is meant, for example, by the 1990s bumper sticker, “I Love New York but Jerusalem is My Home”? What if a passerby said to the driver of a car with such a sticker, “Go home”? Would that be anti-Semitic? In a way, yes it might be, but what about the bumper sticker itself, what is it trying to convey? Today, what does “home” refer to if not the capital city of another country? My point is that if Jews reflexively claim that the accusation of “dual loyalty” is anti-Semitic, we too easily ignore that it was, and remains, one of the great challenges of Jews in modernity.

Here is an example: I have friends—Modern Orthodox Jews—whose son was considering enlisting in the U.S. Navy. Almost everyone he shared his plans with at a Shabbat Kiddush said to him, “If you are going to serve in the army, why not join the IDF?” His response was, “because I am an American.” But what was behind the response of these American Orthodox Jews to this young man? “If you are going to risk your life,” they may have been thinking, “why do it for the U.S.? Why not do it for Israel?” Is this an instance of dual loyalty? If we deflect all accusations of dual loyalty, we miss the ways we practice it all the time.

Trump’s comment on Jews’ “great disloyalty” wasn’t accusing Jews of dual loyalty; in fact, he was suggesting Jews are not exercising dual loyalty enough! Can we thus say that this isn’t anti-Semitic at all? Yes. And no. In the wake of Trump’s comment, at a Close the Camps rally of liberal American Jews held outside Farmington’s Holocaust Memorial Center near Detroit, a white supremacist counter-demonstration showed white nationalists waving an American and an Israeli flag. White supremacists, whose worldview emerges from the KKK and other like-minded groups, are waving the Israeli flag to protest against liberal American Jews. Is there a connection between Trump’s comment and this phenomena?

One way to understand this is to look back at the American Zionism of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. In the teens of the 20th century when most American Jews were at best ambivalent about Zionism, precisely because it exacerbated the anxiety of dual loyalty, Brandeis stood as a proud Zionist. But Brandeis deeply understood the challenge Zionism posed to a Jewry desperately trying to become “American.”

In a lecture “The Rebirth of the Jewish Nation,” Brandeis said the following:

My approach to Zionism was through Americanism. In time, practical experience and observation convinced me that Jews were by reason of their traditions and their character peculiarly fitted for the attainment of American ideals. Gradually, it became clear to me that to be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.

In another essay “The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It,” presented to the Conference of Council of Reform Rabbis in 1915,  Brandeis wrote:

Indeed, loyalty to America demands rather that each American Jew become a Zionist. For only through the ennobling effect of its strivings can we develop the best that is in us and give to this country the full benefit of our great inheritance. The Jewish spirit, so long preserved, the character developed by so many centuries of sacrifice, should be preserved and developed further, so that in America as elsewhere the sons of the race may in future live lives and do deeds worthy of their ancestors.

Israeli and American Flags fluttering on mast. Photo Credit: James Emery

The fusion of Americanism and Zionism for Brandeis was his way of allaying the fears of dual loyalty among many progressive era American Jews. While I am quite certain Trump does not know of Brandeis’s Zionism, and Brandeis certainly did not intend his Zionism to be blind allegiance to a Jewish state (his Zionism was not even promoting a Jewish state), I think Trump is inadvertently using Brandeis’s logic to make two points. First, on Trump’s reading, American Jews are being disloyal to their people if they do not give full allegiance to the state of Israel and its government (Brandeis, of course, lived long before the state of Israel). And second, that such disloyalty is also disloyalty to America since, as Brandeis said, “to be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.”

So when those white supremacists waved an Israeli flag to protest against an American Jewish protest against detention centers in a Detroit suburb, the flag wasn’t about being pro-Jewish (one could reasonably assume some hold anti-Semitic views) or even pro-Israel in any conventional way. It was pro-American. Thus American Jews who support “the party of Tlaib and Omar” are not only disloyal to their people. They are also disloyal to America. Thus Trump’s inversion of the “dual loyalty” equation does not erase its anti-Semitic connotations; it merely recalibrates its implications. Watching white supremacists waving an Israeli flag, as jarring as it may look, is therefore not dissonant at all.

 

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Shaul Magid
Shaul Magid teaches Modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School and is a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard. His latest books are Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021), and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (New York: Ayin Press, 2023). He is an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the American Society for the Study of Religion.
Global Currents article

CRISPR-Cas 9, Practical Wisdom, and Human Identity


 

US Customs and Border Patrol chemist reads a DNA profile to determine the origin of a commodity. Photo Credit: CBP Laboratories Photography, 2006.

The scientific evidence suggests that the CRISPR technique is more precise than older, cruder techniques of genetic engineering.[1] Most scientific discussions about CRISPR are likely to lean towards medical applications, especially its seeming promise with respect to currently incurable human diseases and its use as a tool in the knowledge of human genetics. The broader public debate has narrowed its focus to application questions in human genetics alongside worries about the slippage towards human enhancement, and associated issues of justice concerning access. Many of the specific ethical questions that arise in advisory bodies are the same ones that are already all too familiar to those who have worked in the ethics of human genetics, namely those questions on safety, scope of usage, and means of achieving the end sought. That is, such bodies are most comfortable dealing with issues like safety, which amounts to a thin version of ethics that misses thicker ethical concerns.

What I want to offer here is not a claim to provide a possible consensus between such disparate groups, but rather a way of thinking which can help to rescue our ability to talk about more than safety and efficacy. This approach retrieves the virtue of practical wisdom, not least because I believe that it is relevant even more now that speculation about the possibility of accurate human gene editing is closer to becoming a reality.

Thomas Aquinas considered that there are small steps that ordinary people could take in order to acquire virtues, even those who did not necessarily have any particular religious faith. And crucial to those small steps is the exercise of practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is a source of insight and is a virtuous disposition that is particularly useful in the conduct of ordinary human affairs. As it is aimed at the common good, it can be applied in specific circumstances in different ways. Hence, a particular decision that follows the exercise of practical wisdom takes into account multiple factors in making that decision, even while keeping an open eye on whether that decision serves to achieve the goal of the common good.

While the moral virtues, such as justice and courage, on their own will incline their possessors towards right action, this inclination is not sufficient, which is why practical wisdom is so important. Practical wisdom helps to recognise those subtle differences that lead to a different course of action in given circumstances. Part of the challenge for CRISPR-Cas9, as with any other new and potentially influential technology, is that ethical decision making should not consider only the implications for one individual or family, but should also consider the wider socio-political implications. Truly moral decisions are not based on autonomy alone.

Practical wisdom, for Aquinas, has eight qualities, all of which are important in making a good decision. These qualities are: memory, teachableness, acumen, insight, reasoned judgement, foresight, circumspection, and caution. Memory (memoria) must be “true to being.” And it does not take long to realize that historical reflection forces a closer look at the long shadow of eugenics in the application of genetic science, a manipulation of human reproduction and discrimination against those with disabilities for ultimately political ends. Teachableness (docilitas), or open-mindedness, is a quality that many scientists will respect, since without open-mindedness discovery is much more difficult. But it is also a reminder that decisions are always embedded in complex networks of human needs and interests.

Acumen (solertia) includes the ability to act clearly and well in the face of the unexpected. Acumen makes it possible to act aright even when the time to make a decision is compressed. Insight and reasoned judgement, which are also in the list of intellectual virtues that practical wisdom requires, need to be brought to bear. Yes, some readers will now ask questions regarding, for example, whose insight and which reasoned judgements are assumed in such an account, but these questions do not undermine the effort to discern what should be done. What seems reasonable to one may not be to another, but in so far as prudential reasoning includes deliberation, it tries to take into account different reasonable points of view.

Bible, Photo Credit: MyfanwyX

What additional elements need to be in place for practical wisdom to be possible? The first element here is foresight, which is the human corollary of divine providence, since divine providence always aims at the ultimate good, while foresight seeks to imitate that orientation. Foresight is the ability to know if certain actions will lead to a desired goal. The judgements of practical wisdom are not fixed or certain in ways that might be the case if it were simply an application of rules or principles. This component is crucial for judgments about CRISPR-Cas9, especially in view of the fact that many of the so-called predictive beneficial effects have not come to pass in genetic medicine. Is this newest and what looks like the most promising technology an exception to that trend, or is this yet another example of over-enthusiasm in the wake of a new and exciting discovery? Are the uncertainties sufficiently strong to be tolerated or not? And who will be the major beneficiaries?

Human Genome, Photo Credit: Adam Nieman

Aquinas also includes circumspection and caution in the list of the components of practical wisdom. Circumspection is the ability to understand the nature of events as they are now, while foresight is the ability to understand events as they might be in the future. The difficulties with CRISPR-Cas9 are that it is very hard for a non-specialist to fully understand what is, in fact, certain knowledge and what is less so. Caution has to do with imprudent acts that are too hasty, and avoiding obstacles that might get in the way of sound judgements, though caution that leads to inaction is not really what Aquinas had in mind either. In this sense, freezing all action due to an over-inflated sense of caution may not be appropriate, but caution has to keep in mind the overall trajectory of scientific research in this field. Caution here refers not just to safety issues, but wider more substantial questions about the kind of human community that is envisaged—in other words, what human flourishing actually means. In addition, Aquinas also recognises the place of gnome, that is, the wit to judge when departure from principles is called for in given situations.

Practical wisdom as setting the mean of the moral virtues is concerned with individual prudential decisions. But practical wisdom reaches beyond this in order to inform political governance. While Aquinas’s discussion of practical wisdom bears some relationship to that in Aristotle, in this respect it is different, for Aristotle confined his attention to individuals. The common good is that which is related to the good of all and the good of each, and in Aquinas’s time it meant the state. While the rule of nation-states are more complicated now with international laws, and the power of transnational companies exceeds that of some states, the overall intention of political practical wisdom towards the common good still applies.

Part of the contestation of CRISPR is related to questions about what that good means, and for whom. In other words, what does it mean for a human community to flourish? Aquinas is also more communitarian compared with the individualism that prevails in the current climate, so when individual practical wisdom clashes with economic or state practical wisdom, the former has to give way to the latter. Distributive justice and political practical wisdom work together for the same end though they can be distinguished in their role. It may be that the rhetoric of the “common good” was once used to promote eugenic practices. But in the current context of deliberations over the use of CRISPR technologies, using such technologies to promote racial purity by a powerful elite for their own particular ends would be necessarily excluded. Hence, rather than opposing eugenic practices by avoiding any collective sense of what the good might require and resorting to individual autonomy as the way forward, a more promising approach is to insist on a greater scrutiny of what social, political, and collective goods require using the tools of distributive justice and political practical wisdom.

Just as individual practical wisdom sets the mean for the moral virtues, so political practical wisdom sets the mean for distributive justice. Distributive justice is concerned with the relationship between the community and individuals, but what this distributive justice might require is not self-evident in all cases, and needs to be supplemented by political practical wisdom in much the same way as correct decision making for the moral virtues must be supplemented by individual practical wisdom.

Political practical wisdom is one way of helping to heal the rift between public and private morality, and the false divide between a “subjective” virtue ethic that is concerned with individuals and principled “objective” approaches that are more often concerned with wider social contexts. This is particularly significant in adjudicating heated public contestations regarding CRISPR technologies, since much of the discussion seems, like many other controversial issues, to rest on key exemplars which provide the basis for lobbyists either in favor or against this technology. Take, for example, the case made by Erika Check-Hayden based on the example of Ruthie Weiss, who has albinism and who has appeared in media reporting on CRISPR. Check-Hayden reports that when you ask patients like Ruthie, or her parents, if they would they have used CRISPR to prevent albinism, the answer is a resounding No. Why? Because what makes Ruthie Ruthie is the challenge she has faced and the particular determination to live in spite of these disadvantages.

Poignant though this story is about the virtue of perseverance in the face of hardship, I am less convinced by arguments of this type. This is because the arguments rest on a particular subjective experience of an individual who suffers from a particular disability. Was it prudential for the parents to indicate that Ruthie should not have been engineered? Of course, simply from the parental perspective, given that Ruthie’s life was viewed as positive, they would not have wanted Ruthie to be anything other than who she is. Their memory of the positive aspects of her life informed judgments about what was right to do. But what if both Ruthie and her parents had suffered inordinately from her condition and could imagine doing virtually anything to change it? In that case, the option of CRISPR could well have seemed prudential to those parents. The point is that prudence takes into account not just our subjective feelings and experiences but wider societal constraints, circumspection includes knowing all the details from many different perspectives, so familial anecdotes are insufficient to make public policy. Further, assuming, as the parents did, that Ruthie would have been changed for the worse, does not really understand the nature of genetic engineering. Ruthie would have been a very different child if engineering had been permitted, so it would be virtually impossible to project back into the past and ask if some of her unique characteristics could thereby be compromised. The voices of those who have been excluded from discussion certainly need to be taken into account, but as a way of informing wider discussion rather than resting on a few emotively charged media-driven examples.

Bookcase with Human Genome. Photo Credit: several_bees

Practical wisdom applies to different levels; the level of the individual, yes, but also at the level of the family, the community, and the state or system of governance. Such an approach which stresses a movement away from isolating the individual towards complex multivalent levels in envisaging the good applies whether or not a specific Christian and Thomistic understanding of that good is sought. To be clear: individual goods in the approach I am arguing for are not denied, but such goods are sought within a much broader context of what that good might mean as embedded in specific social contexts operating at different levels. Bigger questions that relate to that part of practical wisdom called foresight include taking account of broader consequences, such as whether the technology is desirable at all for the common good; thus, who is really going to benefit from the use of the technology, what implications are relevant for a given community, what impact such applications might have on the use of resources, and so on are just as important. Which population groups will be used in clinical trials that will inevitably be set up to test efficacy, such as gene technologies that work to “correct” AIDS or other immune deficiency diseases such as Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (SCID)? Single gene diseases such as Tay Sachs may seem obvious as a first step in the application of CRISPR-Cas9, and may even be preferable for conservatives since the manipulation will be on sex cells rather than the embryo, but a prudential decision in a given community will also place such seeming advantages in a wider social and political context. Practical wisdom also helps to judge what the virtue of justice requires in given circumstances in so far as it is orientated towards the common good. It seems highly likely that the most vulnerable will be the target of any such campaign for trials in the lead-up to large-scale application in therapeutic treatments. Are all such treatments necessarily desirable as ends to promote overall human flourishing or not? However, in the Thomistic tradition practical wisdom provides the means, at least, to attempt to take account of a multiplicity of factors in decision making, including what such “balance” might look like in practice; for example, by giving moral priority to the weak, but not just those who are suffering various diseases.

Practical wisdom is not a panacea, but it may be an important alternative to the idea that all we need to do is apply fixed principles such as individual autonomy to ethical problems that are, at root, the same. A broad framework for decision making through a prudential lens acts as a guide that is less about absolute rules of right or wrong and instead concerns taking appropriate responsibility for human flourishing as perceived according to specific virtues of the human community, namely those virtues of practical wisdom, charity, compassion, and mercy.

 

[1] This blog draws on ideas that are further developed in the following: Celia Deane-Drummond, “The CRISPR Challenge and the Beatific Vision: Recovering Practical Wisdom as a Guide for Human Flourishing,” in Eric Parens and Josephine Johnson, eds., Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing (Oxford University Press, 2019).

 

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Celia Deane-Drummond
Celia Deane-Drummond is Director of the Laudato Si’ Research Institute and Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, University of Oxford. She is also Visiting Professor in Theology and Science at the Centre for Catholic Studies, University of Durham. She was previously Professor of Theology and Director of the Center for Theology, Science and Human Flourishing at the University of Notre Dame. She holds two doctorates, one in plant science and one in systematic theology. Her research is at the intersection of theology and theological ethics and the biosciences, including evolutionary anthropology, evolution, genetics, psychology and ecology.
Global Currents article

Catholic Conceptions of Personhood and Gene Editing


Human Genome Project – Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Photo Credit: Richard Ricciardi

We live in an age where we have become accustomed to the constant onslaught of technological interventions in our lives. Some of it is positive, enriching, and conducive to our flourishing; much of it is frightening. In the arena of medicine, we fear the possible consequences of these interventions—consequences to our physical bodies, but also consequences to our identities. Our identities as persons cannot be separated from our bodies; nor can we imagine that they are formed in isolation from other persons. Yet, with knowledge of genetics we confront the reality that much of “who” we are is shaped by the matter that makes up our physicality. For that reason, interventions directed at our genes elicit great alarm, especially when those interventions tamper with germline cells ensuring that the effects will be passed on to future generations.

Genetic interventions are not new. Since at least the 1980s, we have been able to manipulate genes directly and indirectly. This manipulation is mostly driven by medical science with its goal of treating diseases and reducing human suffering. Yet lurking in the shadows is the worry that this goal could easily be put to nefarious uses. The most recent development in this arena is what is referred to as CRISPR-Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), a technique of genome editing[1] that provides an easily accessible way to directly change the makeup of individual genes. CRISPR has been described by many as a radical development in genetic engineering, mainly because unlike earlier interventions it allows us to modify individual genes in a highly targeted and cost-effective manner. As with all earlier advances in genetic technologies, the hype distorts the reality. For example, an online news account describing how CRISPR works has the following subheading: “Everything you need to know about the genome editing breakthrough that one day could cure disease, eradicate species and build designer babies.” One can see in such a quote the way that important distinctions, such as between treatment and enhancement, are elided.

In this brief comment, I will bracket the possibility of nefarious uses of this technology and ask instead how even positive uses of this type of intervention (to cure disease, for example) might affect human identity. My question will be framed by Roman Catholic conceptions of identity and personhood. Insight into the Catholic view is especially important in light of the perception that the Catholic church rejects bio-technological interventions. Understanding how this particular faith community navigates a path between fear of technological overreach and the pursuit of medical advances allows us to see the complexity of the relationship between human identity and genetic intervention. There are three features of identity central to the Catholic view that can also illuminate public discussions about the future of genomic editing and its impact on human identity. These are: humans exist in a tension between dependence and responsibility, humans are relational, and humans are embodied. As I shall argue, properly understood, all three of these features can serve as the scaffolding for a society that values justice.

Human identity in the Catholic context is derived from the understanding that humans are created in the image of God, meaning that humans possess rationality and the capacity to know and pursue the good. Humans exist in a tension between being creatures of God and “free” agents who are responsible for their actions. Hence, they are both dependent and free. This status grants humans the ability to pursue their moral good while also leaving them the possibility to turn away from it. Human identity and personhood are thus premised on this capacity. The choice to modify individual genes is a consequence of that fundamental freedom, but it also challenges the relationship of human dependence on God. Critics of genetic interventions often invoke the metaphor of “playing God” as a way to signal human overreaching, arrogance, and pride. This tension between dependence and freedom/responsibility ought to function as a sort of horizon against which to understand moral choices, both individually and communally. As individuals, our actions are constrained by this tension; yet when expanded to society, the tension forces us to reflect more deeply on what it means to be responsible to our fellow humans. Applied to genomic editing, this suggests a prudent course which expands the range of consequences of our actions that count as relevant. Thus, for example, responsibility to persons on the margins of society, who are least likely to benefit from these interventions, must be a driving force in our moral reflections on this issue.

Depiction of the Trinity on the portal of the Basilica of St. Denis, France. Photo Credit: Rebecca Kennison, 1990.

Also fundamental to Catholic conceptions of personhood is the connected idea that the person is relational and communal. The moral injunctions to love one’s neighbor and to do justice presume that human identity is shaped by and for interactions with and responsibility to others. For Catholics, there is a theological backdrop to this notion of relationality—one grounded in the idea of God as three persons in the trinity, suggesting that God, in his very essence, is relational. Yet, even without the theological backdrop relationality implies human caring. It connects caring for the other with the inclination of all humans to self-preservation. Our bonds with other humans drive us to pursue medical technologies. One common concern about recent developments in genomic editing is that they threaten to undermine our bonds to future generations by altering future genomic maps. This concern extends the idea of relationality to a different temporal horizon.

In some sense the most fundamental Catholic belief about the nature of human identity is the emphasis on the embodied nature of human existence. Beyond a mere statement of fact, this claim is normative insofar as morality is experienced in and through the body. Yet, making the body central is not to suggest that the human is merely a whole made up of its component material parts. The body is endowed with meaning and it also creates meaning. While the Catholic tradition’s relationship to natural law is complicated, there is strong agreement that the body can provide information, and perhaps even guidance, for determining morally appropriate actions. Exactly how this happens is complicated by the fact that bodies are mediated culturally and the meanings we derive from them are shaped by broader webs of meaning. It is possible to see this third feature as existing in tension with the other two.

All three of these features of human identity support the centrality of respect for human dignity to Catholic ethics. Genome editing’s ability to manipulate an individual’s genetic identity can easily be seen as an assault on human dignity, especially if dignity is conceptualized as material integrity or wholeness. Yet, a different picture emerges when one expands integrity to mean well-being and human flourishing in a community governed by the norms of justice. Put differently, we must be vigilant to maintain the first two features of human identity alongside the third one.

These accounts of human identity and dignity to tell us that tampering with the physical building blocks of the human person has far-reaching consequences that threaten to disrupt the essence of the person. Yet, do they provide us with sufficient evidence to support the view that genome editing ought to be morally prohibited? Earlier debates about the ethics of genetic technology focused on drawing lines between germ cells and somatic cells, and between therapy vs. enhancement.[2] Those lines were intended to protect any perceived threats to human identity—threats that might embolden humans, leading them to forget the tension in their relationship to God, or to lose sight of their fundamental relationality, or to mistake their embodiedness as a purely material construct. The news in late 2018, that scientists had succeeded in editing the embryonic genes of twins born in China suggests that this technology will not disappear. The question for moralists is whether or not the moral arguments deployed in earlier conversations about genetic technology will prove sufficient to the task of addressing this latest twist. My view is that drawing this line between shorter-term somatic cell interventions and irreversible germ cell interventions is still a prudent course of action as well as a morally sound one. The three features of Catholic thinking about human identity can function as groundwork for the line-drawing task by reminding us of human limits, communal commitments (to the present as well as future communities), and the meaning of embodiment. While the ease and availability of CRISPR technology makes the line both harder to draw and to hold, it is important that we not lose sight of these fundamental views about identity.

 

[1] It is referred to as editing since it enables the scientist to target specific parts of the DNA sequence that have been identified using letters of the alphabet. The question of the implications of the editing metaphor is important to consider. The Nuffield Council report issued in 2015 addresses this important point and draws attention to the reductionism as well as the “overstretching” that can result from relying too heavily on a metaphor. Nuffield Council on Bioethics, “Genetic Editing: An Ethical Review,” (London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2016).

[2] Kelly E. Ormond et al., “Human Germline Genome Editing,” American Journal of Human Genetics 101, no. 2 (August 3, 2017): 167–76, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2017.06.012.

Array
Aline Kalbian
Aline Kalbian is Professor and Chair of Religion at Florida State University. She has published on a range of issues in bioethics, sexuality, gender, and moral theology. She is also co-editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics.
Global Currents article

Unmasking Neoliberalism’s Invisible Grip: Homo Economicus and the Person in Bioethics


Biohacker’s Handbook with Oura Ring Size Kit, DanteLabs DNA Analysis Kit, 23andMe Saliva Collection Kit and Recover CBD. Photo Credit: Marco Vercho, 2019.

Much has happened with gene-editing since Contending Modernities’“Out of the Lab” podcast. Despite the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2018 recommendations that gene-editing should be stringently regulated and only used for a limited number of somatic diseases at this time, a surprisingly stunned world witnessed the birth of twin CRISPR-Cas9 edited girls in China in November, with a third baby on deck. Voices across the spectrum—scientific, ethical, theological, policy-oriented—excoriated the researcher, He Jiankui. Repeatedly described as a “rogue scientist,” it now appears that He may have had at least one US collaborator.

Listening to the above commentary, a trained ear might hear a pattern, a subtle but regular pulse, that signals the heart of the matter. Where Adil Najam fears a “gap” between the ethical, policy, and “entrepreneurial realities” surrounding technologies like gene-editing, I would suggest that these are, rather, all neatly aligned.[1] To put it pointedly: the CRISPR conversation makes clear that bioethics, as it has emerged since the 1980s, is a deeply neoliberal project.

This is a big claim—one that can hardly be thoroughly argued in a blogpost. A complete argument would require detailing the intertwined histories of neoliberal economics and bioethics as they emerged post-World War II. Here I will only point to four notes that resonate throughout the literature. When taken together, they sound the dissonant chord of neoliberalism. These are: CRISPR as a technique, concerns about commercialization, dyspepsia about regulation, and the framework of bioethics itself, particularly its understanding of the person.

Neoliberal Bioethics

First, the briefest primer on neoliberalism. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, in his important book Caring for Souls in the Neoliberal Age, defines neoliberalism as “the free market ideology based on individual liberty and limited government that connected human freedom to the actions of the rational, self-interested actor in the competitive marketplace” (2).[2]  Arising in the early 20thcentury, neoliberalism emerged in full force in the late 70’s-early 80’s with the Reagan-Thatcher era and the Washington Consensus. Central tenets include the liberalization of trade barriers, privatization of social services, globalization, and deregulation. In order to limit government, neoliberalism calls for sharply reducing or eliminating social services and welfare programs. The “social” is perceived as a mythic restraint on individual freedom. Neoliberalism aims to maximize the freedom of the individual, homo economicus—a person whose fundamental activity is choice and who chooses the good as she-or-he defines it based on a rational calculation of pure self-interest. Society is little more than an aggregate of autonomous individuals each pursuing their own good. Notably, however, freedom is redefined in market terms.

Vaccine-based cancer immunotherapy from novel nanoparticle systems. Photo Credit: NIH Image Gallery, 2016.

Neoliberalism is not simply an economic theory. It is a cultural project that subtly and pervasively organizes contemporary life. Rogers-Vaughn, in tracing how neoliberalism has transformed psychiatry, provides a template for making visible how it has likewise altered other areas of medicine and clinical research. CRISPR-Cas9 embodies a new approach to thinking about diseases, social problems, and human identity that he refers to as “methodological individualism.” Since roughly 1980, when mental illness was reconceptualized in the DSM-III, through “gene therapy,” stem cell therapies, the BRAIN initiative, neuroscience, and individualized or personalized medicine, a subtle shift has occurred that locates the source of diseases or problems within particular individuals rather than within social or political structures. Illness, here, is conceived as highly individualized, rooted deeply in the nano-loci of personal biology—genes or neural signatures. This new etiological framework drives a search for “biologically-mediated person-specific treatments.”[3] CRISPR envisages the human genome as a biological text that needs “editing.” There lies the problem. Having defined disease as biologically mediated, the medical-industrial complex then hunts for biological interventions that can efficiently fix mistakes that are located at the deepest level of our being—or, via enhancement, that shape our identities.

Though justified by the goal of reducing suffering, a second neoliberal commitment catalyzes the hunt: economic efficiency and maximizing profits. In the podcast, Maura Ryan raises concerns about “commercialization.” Aline Kalbian repeatedly refers to CRISPR’s “entrepreneurial aspect” and our free market, competitive context. He Jiankui’s motivation for creating the CRISPR babies was “personal fame and fortune.”  Others in the Contending Modernitiesseries raise concerns about commodification. But exorbitant prices, pervasive commodification, and a focus on market share and ROI are not accidental. They are the result of intentional neoliberal policies. The 1984 Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act transformed the pharmaceutical market. In 1985, the FDA approved, for the first time, direct-to-consumer marketing for medical products. In 1989, NIH established the Office of Technology Transfer to maximize the financial profits of government-funded research. The list could go on. Moreover, via Gary Becker and the Chicago School, the market extends to an ever-wider array of social realities; the market becomes, in the catchphrase of Freakonomics, “the hidden side of everything.”

Kalbian notes in the podcast that commercial aspects of new medical technologies are not being regulated. David Baltimore, chair of the National Academies’ committee on gene-editing, laments the “failure of self-regulation in the scientific community” in the CRISPR babies case. But we should not be surprised. As Michael Fitzgerald more realistically states in “Out of the Lab”: “regulation gets in their way.” Deregulation, as mentioned earlier, is a central neoliberal platform. Regulations, characterized as the demon of big government, constrain the market’s freedom. Rogers-Vaughn notes a concerted movement, beginning in the late 70s, to make “governments reduce or withdraw laws and rules requiring corporations to consider any purposes other than pursuit of profit.” In the mid-1990s, when I served on the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, Big Pharma was a visible presence at our quarterly meetings, exercising a watchful eye over ethicists or community members who might seek to put limits on R&D.

Almost to a point, current analyses of gene-editing reprise those 1990s debates. CRISPR-Cas9 is essentially gene therapy 2.0. New technologies are more efficient and likely more efficacious than adenovirus vectors. But the same ethical arguments were made in the 1990s as now; the same guidelines were put in place. The bioethical framework has not changed. From the National Academies to ethicists and analysts, the debate remains mapped by beneficence, non-maleficience, justice, and respect for persons, pastiched over a bedrock of utilitarianism. Or…is it respect for persons? As I have narrated elsewhere, 1980 is not only a key moment in the history of neoliberalism. It is also a key moment in bioethics. For in 1979, another subtle but important shift occurred: Belmont’s respect for persons morphed into Beauchamp and Childress’ respect for autonomy.

The “person” as a regulative concept in medical ethics emerged at a particular historical moment: post-War Europe, first gestured at in the Nuremburg Code in 1948.[4]  (Is it a coincidence that second phase of neoliberalism begins around 1950?) Imported to the US in the late 1960s after a series of research scandals, “personhood” becomes integrated into the emerging bioethics discourse with Paul Ramsey’s Patient as Person in 1970. Initially, “personhood” was protective—seeking to stem research abuses against vulnerable populations (children with mental illnesses, African-Americans), to counter medical paternalism, and to resist the ‘‘depersonalization’’ of modern medicine. From Nuremburg through Paul Ramsey to the Belmont Report, the term “person” was invoked to ensure that autonomous persons were given the right to informed consent—whether for research or medical care—and non-autonomous persons (or “all who share human genetic heritage” in the language of the National Commission’s 1975 Report and Recommendations: Research on the Fetus) were protected, even to the point of excluding them from research that could potentially benefit others.

From Personhood to Homo Economicus

But in 1979, almost before the ink is dry on the Belmont Report, respect for persons transmutes in Beauchamp and Childress’ first edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics into respect for autonomy. Henceforth, talk of persons becomes largely “permissive”—we now have to determine who counts as a person before we can determine what, if any, responsibilities we owe them. Knowing who counts as a person helps resolve dilemmas around abortion, end of life, organ transplantation, stem cell research, etc. Most interestingly, “persons” for bioethics come to be defined as autonomous subjects who express their agency through the rational act of choosing whichever ends further “their own good,” maximizing their own self-interest. Social determinants of health, social location, social structures, even family members rarely enter this calculus. The “person” of bioethics post-Beauchamp and Childress, post-1980, is homo economicus.

In the gene-editing podcast, Aline Kaliban asked “what is it, exactly, that ethicists bring to the table?” While often the dignity or sanctity of persons is held up as a hedge against the endless encroachment of market forces in medicine, the attitude Pope Francis so aptly names as “the throw-away culture,” it may well be that the principles of bioethics subtly serve not as a corrective but rather as a tool of the market.[5] Lisa Cahill depicts science, economics, theology, and liberal democratic political discourse as “thick worldviews” that compete in our engagement around bioethics and health policy. But it’s not an equal playing field. History suggests that the thick worldview of the neoliberal paradigm underlies them all. It shapes bioethics, medicine, scientific research, and medical technologies. This is why it’s often hard to see what bioethics brings.

For-profit blood center in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. Photo Credit: EX22218 – ON/OFF, 2016.

Clarifying the neoliberal structure of bioethics and emerging medical technologies not only helps us understand the contours of the CRISPR landscape. It illuminates other disquieting dynamics. For example, certain technologies, once approved, become cast as morally normative. If one could eliminate a defective gene from your children using CRISPR, is one not morally obliged to do so? Belying the rhetoric of individual liberty, as neoliberalism evolves in the late 20thcentury, homo economics becomes subservient to that sovereign master: the economic dogma of rational, utility-maximizing self-interest. In a troubling inversion, what must be free now is not persons but the market.

Or why is it so difficult to advance the notion of the common good?  Perhaps the answer lies in one of the first steps in the creation of modern capitalism, that original act of privatization, the literal enclosure of the commons in England from the 16th century forward. Step-by-step, material “commons”—even our genomes—are no longer shared. They are patented, commodified (23andMe!), and used as raw materials to create new products for profit and consumption.

If this is the case—if biotechnologies and bioethics and bioethics’ concept of the person are intrinsically shaped by neoliberalism—where are we left with a technology like CRISPR? Such an angle doesn’t yield a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or “we must stringently regulate this new and powerful technology.” Perhaps He Jiankui is not so “rogue” after all. Rather, perhaps the CRISPR babies provide a road-to-Damascus jolt to make us analyze not only a particular technological innovation but the way the infrastructure of bioethics may have enabled it. Let me point to three avenues forward.

Towards a Systems Analysis

First, it is time to begin to make these economic dynamics of biotechnology and bioethical issues visible. The Catholic social tradition is one of the main voices that has begun to do so. Beginning with the liberation theologians in the 1970s, through John Paul II who named the structures of sin of money, power, and idolatry especially in relation to globalizing technologies, to Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ (following Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate), Catholic social thought critiques the practices and effects of neoliberalism—particularly commodification, consumerism, and the exacerbation of economic inequality.

This lens needs to be brought to bear on bioethics. Few Catholic bioethicists have yet done so. These two “doctrinal” areas have too-long been siloed.[6] A social lens asks about the historical and social contexts of concepts. Why did a particular concept arise when it did? Whose interests did it serve? It uses not only the tools of theology and philosophy, but also carefully attends to history and the social sciences. It presses for analyses that are, in the words of Paul Farmer, “historically deep and geographically broad.” One central tool of this “social-analytic mediation” (as liberation theologians call it) is economics, particularly political economy. My colleague Michael McCarthy and I have begun to address this gap in our recent book Catholic Bioethics and Social Justice: The Praxis of US Healthcare in a Globalized World. Catholic social thought here joins an emerging cadre of secular thinkers.[7]  But much more work needs to be done.

Second, we need to move away from “single-issue” analyses that have long shaped bioethics (“Is CRISPR ethical or not?”) to broader systemic analyses. What are the connections between the CRISPR babies in China, the new career path of the “professional guinea pig”[8] in the US, the skyrocketing numbers of human research subjects globally,[9] and the serious toll that neoliberal economics has taken on health outcomes around the world by decimating social programs and local economies, just to name a few? (Rogers-Vaughn, for example, sees neoliberalism as causally responsible for an increase in mental health issues). The list could go on.

These issues are all of a piece, pointing to ways in which human bodies become the raw material for profit-making (or cost-savings), a reality woven into the fabric of bioethics and biotech itself. Coming to see this requires, as Pope Francis notes in Laudato Si’, not only hard intellectual work but also moral and spiritual conversion. Can bioethics be converted? Religious traditions—with their vision of thickly connected persons who develop and flourish integrally in communities—could well provide the lever to begin to shape a bioethics that privileges persons over profits. This would move away from a bioethics dominated by the methodological individualism of autonomy and enamored of the methodological individualism of technologies. It would provide a starting point for a radical conversion of our hyper-individualistic and extractive economic philosophy that inflicts austerity on the poor while licensing the almost unbridled creation of biotech products for consumption by the wealthy few.

But it is not only bioethics that needs to be converted. Conversion calls us to a new way of living. Might we declaim against the neoliberal splinter in the eye of He Jiankui while remaining happily blinded by the log of contemporary economics in every other aspect of our own lives?  The lens we turn on him, we must also turn on ourselves. As this conversation among Contending Modernities unfolds, it seems an opportune time to reflect on how not only religious convictions (i.e., about persons) but embodied religious practices, such as silence, simplicity, fasting, almsgiving, prayer, the Eucharist, offer the potential for unshackling us from the subtle but pervasive ways that neoliberalism shapes our lives. Perhaps here is the starting point for beginning to come to see the underlying engine driving ourselves, our culture, our bioethics, and biotechnology, and to thereby begin to unhand these interventions and very selves from neoliberalism’s invisible grip.

 

[1]  Contending Modernities,“Science and the Human Person Podcasts.”

[2] This definition draws on Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

[3] Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn: Depression as Political Resistance,” Pastoral Psychology 63, no. 4 (August 1, 2014): 503–22, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0576-y.

[4] Joseph J. Kotva and M. Therese Lysaught, On Moral Medicine, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans: 2012).

[5] Charles Camosy, Resisting Throwaway Culture, (New City Press, 2019).

[6] Maura Ryan, “Bridging Bioethics and Social Ethics,” Contending Modernities, September 27, 2013,

[7] Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices, eds. Adriana Petryna et al., (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

[8] Carl Elliot, White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, (Beacon Press, 2011).

[9] M. Therese Lysaught, “Docile Bodies: Transnational Research Ethics as Biopolitics,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 34 no. 4 (2009).

 

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M. Therese Lysaught
M. Therese Lysaught, PhD, is Professor at the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Health Care Leadership at Loyola University Chicago, Stritch School of Medicine.  Her books include Catholic Bioethics and Social Justice (2019), On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives on Medical Ethics, 3rd edition (2012), and the forthcoming Chasing After Virtue: Neuroscience, Economics, and the Biopolitics of Morality, with Jeffrey P. Bishop and Andrew A. Michel will be published with the University of Notre Dame Press.  For more on her work, visit: https://mthereselysaught.com/.
Global Currents article

Turkey, White Supremacy, and the Clash of Civilizations


Civilization board game. Photo Credit: Syvanen

“Teddy, how can one obtain a fair maiden?” asks a white supremacist playfully to a toy teddy bear in a YouTube video. He then reports the teddy bear’s answer to his viewers: “in order to truly understand the nature of women, one must first retake Constantinople from the Ottoman Empire.” The connection between the sexism expressed in “obtaining” a “fair maiden” and the vanquishing of a “civilizational” enemy is a recurrent theme in contemporary white supremacy that flourishes online. This quest for civilizational/racial purity combines an interest in white women’s reproductive and sexual availability with concerns about demographic “replacement.” Consider one of Republican Rep. Steve King’s many controversial tweets: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” Consider the anger the Tree of Life synagogue terrorist felt towards the Jewish congregation, not simply because they were Jews, but also because they were progressive Jews, helping refugees to safety in the United States. Consider the title of the Christchurch terrorist’s manifesto: “The Great Replacement.” In the contemporary United States, such statements, openly identified as extremist, operate alongside state-sanctioned racial policies with similar demographic targets, including attacks on women’s reproductive rights, endless wars on terror, the racialized criminal justice system, and immigration policing, all of which are all taken to be politics as usual.[1]

Building on the presentations and discussions that took place during the April 16 flash panel organized by Atalia Omer, “Interrogating the Christchurch Shootings,” this blog post connects the gendered/sexualized nature of white supremacist theorizing to its mobilization of civilizational discourses. I argue that at this intersection of civilization talk and obsession with reproductive purity, one finds a toxic passion for an imagined Medieval past and an obsession with the Ottoman Empire/Turkey that echoes the “Clash of Civilizations” rhetoric promoted by earlier civilizational theorists such as political scientist Samuel Huntington. This conjunction raises important questions about how respectable forms of scholarship and white supremacist ideologies may bolster each other. In fact, this discursive continuum parallels the continuum operating between racist state policies and “lonewolf” racist violence considered beyond the pale of the law and requires inquiry alongside it.

 

The Will to Clash of Civilizations

In one of the (generally positive) reader responses to my book manuscript, an anonymous reader noted I had made rather too much of an outdated concept that had already been criticized to bits:

“I do think discussing Huntington is fine (though it is a bit well-worn), though I was surprised when I came across phrases such as ‘the current popularity of Huntington’s thesis,’ which felt a bit dated.”

The reader was referencing my conclusion, where I emphasized how Turkey’s history of transculturation and prevailing debates about “westernization” in the country defied  Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, which claimed that the world consisted of “seven or eight major civilizations” whose culture-driven conflicts could be traced throughout history and would determine post-Cold War era politics. Huntington’s broad “cultural” categories mimicked prevailing ideas of race and, where they differed, were reducible to religion. In revising for publication, I changed the conclusion to acknowledge that academia had both thrown the book at, and closed the book on, Huntington. I noted that almost immediately after his thesis appeared, experts rallied to demonstrate how Huntington had underplayed “intracivilizational” conflicts as well as cultural hybridity, and had done so at a time considered the high age of globalization. Countering Huntington’s thesis with data was indeed low-hanging fruit for anyone who had studied any “civilization” in any depth. Moreover, scholars such as Mahmood Mamdani had come to question whether “culture” could ever be an explanatory factor for political conflicts. In revising, I acknowledged the strength of these critiques, but hinted that the scholarly reports of the death of “Clash of Civilizations” may have been premature:

“The sharp divide between the West and the rest distorts reality, but rhetorical attempts to locate such a divide are real enough. Culture Talk influences politics.”[2]

The afterlives of Clash of Civilizations have indeed been robust, with extremism, the security state, the military industrial complex, and knowledge-production boosting each other at a dizzying rate. Polemics around the civilizational status of Turkey vis-à-vis Europe have transitioned well into the new century, flourishing in peer-reviewed scholarship as well as in white-supremacist YouTube comments.

 

Istanbul, not Constantinople?

Turkey appears as a recurrent headache in Huntington’s work. In his 1993 Foreign Affairs article, Huntington called Turkey of the 1990s—a laicist, Muslim-majority NATO ally and a candidate for European Union membership—“the most obvious and prototypical torn country,” which could not decide whether it belonged within “Islamic” or “Western” civilization. Despite claims to objectivity and descriptiveness, his 1996 book turned prescriptive when it suggested that Turkish leaders might soon be ready to stop their “frustrating and humiliating” attempts to join “Western civilization.” Instead of acting like “beggars,” he predicted, the country would do well to “resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West” (178). This piece of unsolicited advice did make Huntington some strong “civilizational” enemies in Turkey, although perhaps not of the kind that he had imagined. Instead, Huntington’s words got incorporated into Kemalist and leftist conspiracy theories, which claimed that the United States was overseeing a plot to “Islamicize” Turkey through the leadership of the “moderate” Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in order to weaken the country.[3]

And voila, Turkey was Islamicized and became more antagonistic towards the West, right? Although the current AKP regime might have pleased Huntington in many ways with its “neo-Ottomanist” policies, it does not fulfill his thesis either. After all, it was under AKP’s early rule that major human rights packages were passed in order to make Turkish law comply with the Copenhagen criteria for membership in the European Union. Similarly, the regime takes as many pages out of the Western playbook—referencing the U.S. presidential system to justify the latest turn to an executive presidency, for example—as it does from age-old Ottoman legends. Moreover, the vision of the Ottoman Empire as somehow the antithesis of Western civilization itself would be contested by any serious historian who has passing familiarity with the cultural exchange and military alliances forged between European countries and the final Muslim Caliphate.

Yet, in Huntington’s suggestion that Turkey give up its “westernization” policies lies a reality more powerful than all our footnotes and primary documents can suppress: over the course of the twentieth century, “Western civilization” has become both a substitute and an alibi for “whiteness” and “Christianity” and Turkey constitutes a problem for all of these categories.

Hagia Sophia at Night. Photo Credit: Simon Q

“UNTIL THE HAGIA SOPHIA IS FREE OF THE MINARETS, THE MEN OF EUROPE ARE MEN IN NAME ONLY,” wrote the Christchurch terrorist in all caps in his manifesto, referencing a Byzantine cathedral that had been converted to a mosque under the Ottoman Empire and is now a museum. The phallus, the cross, and the sword: A mythic civilizational formula based on an an intersection of racism, sexism, and Islamophobia and, like the vision of a pure white Europe of the past, exists more in the minds of white supremacists than in historical reality.

In fact, the terrorist’s manifesto contains an entire section titled “To Turks.” Here the terrorist orders all Turks currently living in Istanbul (my city of birth and where my close relatives live) to retreat to the Asian side of the city, or face violence: “FLEE TO YOUR OWN LANDS, WHILE YOU STILL HAVE THE CHANCE.” He calls Erdoğan “the leader of one of the oldest enemies of our people, and the leader of the largest Islamic group within Europe,” in language recalling Huntington’s insult/praise for the Ottoman Empire as “the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.” References to Turks (and to massacred Bosniaks, whom he considered Turks) also decorated his assault weapon.

Why would an Australian terrorist living in New Zealand, a world away, be so obsessed with enforcing the boundaries between “Europe” and the Republic of Turkey? Because in our contemporary era, “Western civilization” operates as a code for whiteness and Christianity articulated in geographic and world-historic terms. As Alastair Bonnett notes in The Idea of the West, the concept of Western civilization has particular purchase in white supremacist theories about racial replacement because, in pointing to great achievements, it offers a fig leaf of loftiness to the insipid category of whiteness.[4] Thus, a simplified history of Ottoman clashes with nations mythologized as European ex post facto, with symbolic focus on Vienna and Istanbul, has gained new charge. In this construction, Turkey’s ambivalent status vis-à-vis the geographic subcontinent of Europe appears as an irritant.

In contemporary white supremacist theorizing, what does not belong in “Europe” must be excised at the altar of this construction that was never pure but must somehow be made pure. What Huntington once called “the bloody borders of Islam” turn out to be non-existent borders to be drawn in Muslims’ blood.

This is not to defend the now-excised phrase about “the current popularity of Huntington’s thesis” in that earlier draft of my book. The reader was right at the time. However, the so-called “Trump era” has clarified more than ever just how popular (in all senses of the term) calls to man the barricades of Western civilization have become in the present. In the age of social media, Huntington’s argument, itself a rehashing of older civilization talk, has found its viral legs and assault weapons.

Why did the solid scholarship that closed the book on Huntington’s thesis not work for so many? Is it because globalization turned out not to be the panacea it was promised to be? Or because our white supremacist political and socioeconomic structures necessitate the continuous redesigning and dissemination of white supremacist discourse? If historical and geographic reality are not enough to crush the Clash of Civilizations thesis, what is?

New Zealand has banned the circulation of the Christchurch terrorist’s manifesto, and Erdoğan has rightly been criticized for showing video footage of the massacre at campaign events to whip his supporters into a nationalist fervor. Yet censorship is not a safe option either. These texts travel, and so do their proponents. The Christchurch terrorist himself traveled around Europe and visited Istanbul several times. Whereas I see a complex racial and civilizational merging that can never be reversed in my city of birth, he saw a mistake to be turned into a battle cry. How do we deal with the convergence between Huntington’s subtle advice to Turkey and this terrorist’s threat “to Turks”?

 

Make Istanbul White Again

Figure 1. “Wait for us Istanbul.” Viral pro-CHP meme from early April 2019, comparing the appearance of the two mayoral candidates and their wives.

I end with a couple of memes and on a note of irony, as befits our terrifying hyperreal era: the racial/civilizational language that animated the Christchurch terrorist flourishes among Turks as well. In the lead-up to the recent municipal elections that led to AKP losing its hold over Istanbul for the first time in the party’s history, supporters of the opposition party CHP began circulating memes that praised the new mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoğlu, and his family for the way they look.

One meme contrasted a daytime image of Imamoğlu and his slim, youthful, blonde wife with a nighttime photo of the stout, mustachioed AKP candidate and his headscarf-wearing wife. “The candidates for Istanbul mayor and their partners,” it read, “On the one side, light; on the other side, darkness” (Figure 1). The light/dark metaphors did multiple duty here much in the same way they do in Western politics, referring to the timing of the two photos, mobilizing connections to modernity and backwardness, and dogwhistling colorism.

Figure 2. Viral Turkish meme from early April 2019, celebrating the new mayor of Istanbul and his family for looking like Northern Europeans.

A post-election meme celebrating Imamoğlu’s victory depicted his fair-skinned and light-haired family wearing “modern” clothing and exclaimed, “Bro, look at the family! In one instance, we progressed 100 years. We became like Finland, Sweden and Norway!” (Figure 2).

Expressing a half-earnest yearning to be finally become “like Finland, Sweden, and Norway,” such texts of digital folklore demonstrate that Turks themselves will not be left behind when it comes pushing back against Turkey’s well-earned racial and civilizational ambiguity.[5] However, while Western white supremacists insist Turks can never belong within whiteness and must be pushed out of Europe, Turkish white-supremacists see uncontested whiteness as within grasp, pending the election of political representatives with the right/white look. In both cases, women’s bodies are made to bear the burden of racial/civilizational proof.

[1] Scholarship investigating this continuum with regards to the War on Terror includes Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” UCLA Law Review 49, no. 5 (2002): 1575-600, Michael Welch, Scapegoats of September 11th : Hate Crimes and State Crimes in the War on Terror (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006), and Inderpal Grewal, Saving the Security State : Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-first-century America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).

[2] Gürel, The Limits of Westernization, 188. See Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand, The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (Florence, Ky.: Routledge, 2013).

[3] Gürel, The Limits of Westernization, 136. See also Emre Kongar, ABD’nin Siyasal Islam’la Dansı (Istanbul: Remzi, 2012), 28-34.

[4] Alastair Bonnett, The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 26-8.

[5] For an excellent historical discussion of the Turkish will to whiteness, see “Is the Turk a White Man?”: Race and Modernity in the Making of Turkish Identity by Murat Ergin (Brill, 2016)

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Perin Gürel
Perin E. Gürel is associate professor of American Studies and concurrent assistant professor of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (Columbia University Press, 2017), explores how Turkish debates over “westernization” have intersected with U.S.-Turkish relations in the twentieth century. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, American Literary History, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of Turkish Literature, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a second book project on the impact of U.S. political discourses on Turkey-Iran relations from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Gürel is also faculty fellow for the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame. 
Global Currents article

De/Provincializing Europe


One of the most curious aspects of the Christchurch mosque shootings is that Brenton Tarrant, the twenty-nine-year-old accused of murdering fifty-one worshippers, was so obsessed with medieval Crusades, as well as early modern clashes between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Yet Tarrant’s infatuation with these histories, coupled with his unstinting allegiance to far-right extremism, is by no stretch unique. Indeed, Tarrant’s embrace of “ethno-nationalism” echoes the re-emergence in the 1910s of the U.S.-based Ku Klux Klan, which modeled its uniform on the confraternity robes worn by members of Christian religious orders hundreds of years earlier. White supremacists reasserted this dubious connection to the Catholic Church in the 1960s when the murderous White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan named its Mississippi chapter after religious military orders such as the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitallers.

Pieter van Laer, The Flagellants (c. 1635), Munich, Alte Pinakothek

Despite Tarrant’s seeming awareness of these and other futile attempts to rationalize racial violence via Christianity, his overall comprehension of the particulars and nuances of European social history is utterly lacking. A telling excerpt suggesting as much from Tarrant’s seventy-four-page manifesto posted online prior to the Christchurch massacre stated: “The origins of my language is European, my culture is European, my political beliefs are European, my philosophical beliefs are European, my identity is European and, most importantly, my blood is European.” As these distorted ascriptions illustrate, Tarrant’s identification with the continent posits that the essence of European heritage is effectively synonymous with his own mythic “whiteness.”

This worldview, and its intersections with a global uptick in racial terrorism, underscores how deadly the resurgence of white supremacy and separatism in recent years has become. And in the case of Europe, various manifestations of these patterns suggest the risk of failing to acknowledge the continent’s history of social, cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity.

Despite marked progress since the 1960s in dismantling colonial frameworks as the predominant mode for interpreting European history—including Europe in the world—“clashes” rather than pluralism remains a standard trope across popular discourse. Referring to the “early success of multiculturalism in Britain,” and that nation’s attempt to “integrate, not separate” in a 2006 essay published by the Financial Times, Harvard University economist Amartya Sen lamented the abandonment of what he summarized as greater Europe’s “championing of every form of cultural inheritance.” Sen also warned: “The current focus on separatism is not a contribution to multicultural freedoms, but just the opposite.”

Fifteen years later, on the eve of Britain’s disorganized separation from the E.U., transmitting Europe’s complex, deeply interconnected multiracial heritage has never been more pressing. Because a small but growing cohort of scholars are already doing this work, there are several groundbreaking, positive, and multi-faceted studies from which to draw in pushing back against the spread of xenophobia. Moreover, despite a vague undercurrent of cynicism in the academy—e.g. political scientist John T. Scott’s review of historian Catherine Fletcher’s masterful study, The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici—recovering and amplifying non-white voices, experiences, and representations in European Studies remains popular both in and well beyond the ivory tower.

Although Fletcher’s study—of the first black head of state in the modern Western World—does not make this connection, Alessandro de’ Medici’s African mother, Simonetta da Collevecchio, was likely named after Simonetta Vespucci (1453–1476), the Florentine model who was famously the muse of Giuliano de’ Medici. By the end of the fifteenth century, as the flourishing of black artistic representations of St. Maurice (like the two handsome images below), and an array of other cultural ephemera indicate, “whiteness” was far from the only standard of beauty in Europe on the eve of the so-called “High Renaissance” (1500–1530).

St. Mauritius (Inside) and St. Sebastian (Outside). From the former Marienaltar from St Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg (c. 1498), Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere
St. Maurice. Statue from a niche in the central panel, Altarpiece of the High Altar (c. late XV – early XVI century), Halle (Saale), Church of St. Maurice

While the Renaissance was indeed more racially pluralist and sophisticated than is commonly assumed, the cosmopolitan habits and perspectives associated with this period were not new. In fact, both the medieval and early modern periods are especially powerful time periods through which to understand Europe’s heterogeneity—not least due to the continent’s burgeoning fascination with African wealth, characteristics, and civilization from the late thirteenth century onward. Centuries before the ascendance of scientifically-based racism that followed the onset of the Atlantic slave trade, blacks were welcomed, if not cherished, at royal courts throughout Europe. And as the story of Alessandro de’ Medici’s marriage to Margaret of Austria (1522–1586), the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V affirms, “blackness” was clearly compatible with divine rule and princely virtue across greater Europe.

As Ivana Čapeta Rakić, Yona Pinson, and other scholars have pointed out, the Roman Catholic Church encouraged the positive incorporation of Africans and especially those who were Muslim—arguably the best evidence researchers have of uneven commitments to this ideal is iconography from the late medieval and early modern periods. Not only did a wide range of these artifacts mythologize the epic reach of the Catholic order, their promotions of a religious imaginary often stretched across three continents (e.g. the Biblical Magi, or Three Wise Men or Kings featured in the image below). However imperfect these gestures were, they symbolized the potential power of a global, egalitarian Catholic future, and a broader European interest in commemorating people of African descent that deserves more attention.

Detail Master of the Gereon Altar [Mary’s altar with Saints from St. Gereon at Cologne] detail (ca. 1420-1430), Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
Such initiatives were not extrinsic to the European Renaissance that Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt famously rediscovered in the nineteenth century. As Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Alessandro de’ Medici’s uncle, Pope Clement VII were certainly aware, evidence of steadfast, interethnic bonds stretched back to Greco-Roman civilization. Yet even more so than the early modern period, twenty-first century misconceptions that these ancient civilizations were both “white” and “European” are even stronger. Modern societies need more scholars, educators and popular commentators challenging this outmoded paradigm. When the Roman Empire comes up in my undergraduate courses, the overwhelming majority of my students have never been taught that the post-Roman Republic stretched well into Africa. (Here too it is worth remembering that Alessandro de’ Medici was the second head of state in Italy with African heritage—Roman Emperor Lucius Septimius Severus [145–211 AD] was the first.) I also make it a point to explain that, one thousand years later, the Ottomans saw themselves as the inheritors of the Roman emperors, and perceived the Hapsburg Empire as infringing on this claim, especially after the seizure of Constantinople in 1453. Moreover, I qualify that in border communities, cultural practices between the Ottoman and Christian empires were rarely as divergent as dramatized histories of their geopolitical skirmishes in films and other forms of popular culture suggest.

Given the tendency of scholars and commentators alike to emphasize the enslavement, oppression, and defeat of people of color by—“white”—Europeans, it is easy to see how Tarrant fell for the overwrought cliché of the totemic clash between the Ottoman Empire and Europe. We can safely assume that Tarrant remains completely unaware that the Dutch Republic—led by the highly-commercialized County of Zeeland, which New Zealand is named after—began trading directly with Asia in the seventeenth century to ensure its own religious freedom.

In addition to the internally displaced Dutch populations who escaped religious persecution by moving from the southern to northern Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century, Jewish communities expelled from the Iberian Peninsula were also beneficiaries of this haven. And the sheer abundance of this nation’s striking late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century paintings of black Africans and other populations of color suggests that appreciating cultural pluralism was a standard rather than an exception in the early Dutch Republic.

Jan van Kessel the Elder, The Continent of Africa, detail (c. 1664-66), Munich, Alte Pinakothek

Recalling these progressive intentions is not an apologia for the ineffable destruction Europeans caused in the early modern period. While Portugal’s seizure of major centers of the Asian spice trade between 1507 and 1515—most notably in the Malaysian city of Malacca, the Iranian island Hormuz, and the Indian city of “Old Goa”—was devastating, Dutch rule was even more brutal. And the commercial trade in black bodies beginning in the fifteenth century is a chilling reminder of why visual culture could never challenge large-scale human degradation.

Inspiring and downright horrific legacies of the first era of globalization should not be presented in zero-sum terms—especially given how interconnected civics, economics, politics, religion, and culture were in this period. More so than any other purpose, the brief reflections above suggesting a roadmap for “deprovincializing” early modern social and cultural history are driven by my own commitments not to echo a standard trope: that the history of Europe is synonymous with a history of “whiteness.” Not only has this tenacious, yet incorrect, understanding skewed the public’s intellectual development, it continues to support exclusionary social norms that neglect the histories, presence, representations, and experiences of non-white persons altogether.

 

Suggested Further Reading:

F. Earle, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Reissue edition (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Catherine Fletcher, The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici (Oxford University Press, 2016).

David Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, Eds. Ben Vinson III, Joaneath Spicer, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Kate Lowe (Walters Art Gallery, 2012).

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Korey Garibaldi
Korey Garibaldi is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently working on a book project, tentatively entitled, Before Black Power: The Rise and Fall of Interracial Literary Culture, 1908–1968. The study traces six decades of fitful yet dynamic cross-racial literary collaborations, with a particular focus on projects authored and produced by black and white Americans. Most recently, Korey has co-authored an op-ed on access to Level-1 trauma care published by  The Chicago Tribune, and an article reconnecting Henry James and Gertrude Stein in the Fall 2018 issue of The Henry James Review. His book chapter, “Sketching in an Age of Anxiety: Henry James’s Morganatic Baroness in The Europeans” in Reading Henry James in the 21st Century: Heritage and Transmission  (Cambridge, 2019) will appear in July.
Global Currents article

Islamophobia Beyond Christchurch: Muslims as Tamed Others


Ruined building converted into a modern market (Bali). Photo Credit: Siegrid Saldaña

As Islamophobic tragedies grow more and more frequent and “normalized” in our day-to-day life, it has become easy for us to set aside “smaller” Islamophobic incidents while our attention is diverted to large-scale tragedies such as Christchurch. The New Zealand attack was easy for the media to digest, for it featured a white nationalist shooter who killed many Muslims while deliberately presenting a clear Islamophobic and racial motive. However, we also know that structural violence like Islamophobia does not only come up when a white racist opens fire in two packed mosques in the midst of Friday Prayers. Rather, Islamophobia is intertwined with state-sponsored violence and securitization, narratives of nationalism, and the flows of the global market and commodification. Drawing from my reflections at an April 16 panel on the Christchurch shooting, this essay will discuss how state securitization and market commodification perpetuate Islamophobia.

Today’s Islamophobia is more than just a specific form of racism. The scholar-activist Arun Kundnani and scholar of Islamophobia Tania Saeed argue that we should expand our understanding of racialization within hegemonic Islamophobic societies. Kundnani is concerned with the “racialization of socio-political, religious, and cultural contexts” that expands the exclusionary boundaries of Islamophobia. In this case, the definitions of “Islam” and “Muslim” are being re-drawn based on what is to be protected, and no longer on what is to be excluded. This means that we can no longer attend to one generic Islamophobic exclusionary line around “Muslim minorities in a White-Christian majority country,” but rather we must attend to multiple specific exclusionary lines that are drawn based on different threat perceptions in Islamophobic societies. In addition, this also means that “Islam” and “Muslim” have multiple meanings and signifiers (skin colors, attire, languages, customs and traditions, etc.) that are perceived as objective threats against the said Islamophobic society.

Looking into those contextualized boundary-drawings, Tania Saeed uses the term “degrees of alterity” in order to show the different limits of accommodation—or should we say “tolerance”?—that an Islamophobic society would express when dealing with those who deviate from the dominant normative order. In this context, the benchmark of acceptance would be the White Male Universal Self against whom the Others must be judged based on their “likeability”/ “acceptability.”

Seeing “alterity” on a spectrum, rather than in absolute binaries, allows us to probe the grey areas where Islamophobia is not readily apparent due to its intermingling with other forms of structural violence, such as those sponsored by both modern nation-states and the global market. This is the case because the spectrum of alterity takes into account the superficiality of “tolerance” and “diversity” that rarely genuinely embraces the presence of the Others, but rather commodifies it within the context of the Global Cultural Bazaar. This bazaar is understood as the global marketplace where global images and global dreams are disseminated and consumed through films, television, music, fashion merchandise, and other products. Furthermore, the spectrum of alterity is also useful in understanding a form of Islamophobia that comes into being within the framework of state-sponsored violence and securitization, which I will elaborate on later in the essay.

The Global Cultural Bazaar also can be seen as a globalized context in which articles and expressions of “cultures” and “religions” of the marginalized Others are sold and consumed by the privileged Self (Mohanty, 2017). The Global Cultural Bazaar is a perfect, abstracted context in which we can see how the “tamed alterities” of Muslims are commodified as products to be consumed. From Rumi’s poetry to designer-labelled sarongs, “Muslimness” can be tolerated (or even embraced) in so far as it is presented in neat consumer goods that serve to remind consumers of their positions as the Subject, that is, as owners of capital who are allowed to objectify those goods. In other words, reproducing the violent binary of “good Muslims, bad Muslims”, the Global Cultural Bazaar uses Islamophobia as a filter to distinguish tolerable alterities from intolerable ones.

In my field research among Indonesian female migrant workers (FMWs) in Singapore, I found that the expansion of Islamophobic commodification into the field of unskilled labor has turned even the Muslim FMWs’ religious praxis into yet another factor that reduces their “marketability” in the global market. Women I spoke with shared how Muslim FMWs are prohibited by their agencies or employers to wear their hijabs inside the employer’s house (their workplace as caregivers) in order to exude a “friendlier” face in their non-Muslim workspace. Other workers are tricked into and/or forced to eat pork in order to accommodate employers who find their unwillingness to consume a specific kind of meat to be somehow threatening. As the process of commodification can practically turn almost everything into products to consume, these FMWs are obliged, due to their positions as laborers in the global market, to increase their “market value” by taming some of their Muslim alterities.

“Say No to Burkas” Mural in Newtown Australia. Photo Credit: Newtown Grafitti

The oxymoronic tension between the voyeuristic preservation of Others in the Global Cultural Bazaar and the taming of absolute alterities is brilliantly encapsulated in Sara Ahmed’s term “stranger fetishism.” This specific way of relating to Others (or “aliens” in Ahmed’s language) allows for the Human Self to perceive the threats posed by the presence of the “aliens,” yet it also enables him, from a comfortable position, to admire the “non-human” qualities that the Others espouse. Not unlike a museum specimen, the Others in this context are to be seen, touched, discussed, and pondered, but never to be engaged with in human conversation.

When a Muslim Other does not live up to the benchmark of “likeability” (i.e., when a Muslim is a “bad Muslim” according to white, neo-liberal societies), her/his presence would fall under the securitization narrative that identifies him/her as the embodiment of everything that is “beyond human.” This means that the very embodiment of “Muslimness” is the ultimate signifier of everything that is foreign and hostile. It is also important to note that the identification of a Muslim as the ultimate other is gendered, both in its framings and in its implications.

The recent accusations of anti-Semitism against Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar illustrate this final point well. Vanessa Taylor, in her analysis for The Intercept, argues that the singling out of Ilhan Omar in this case cannot be separated from the reproduction of imageries of an “angry black woman” with an anti-Black Islamophobia that associates Black Muslims with anti-Semitic tendencies. Furthermore, as a hijabi woman of color who was also a refugee, Rep. Omar could only be two things in an Islamophobic lens. She is either an oppressed Muslim woman of color whose “freedom” is curtailed by her innately patriarchal faith, or she is a “double-agent” whose hijab is the very reflection of her disloyalty to the cause of the modern nation-state.

Securitization of “Muslimness” (understood widely here as any sociopolitical, religious, and racial signifier that makes a person “Muslim” regardless of her/his real religious belongings or lack thereof) is a mechanism that nation-states employ in order to keep these ultimate Others in check, or worse, to completely eliminate them from within their borders. From body surveillance to ethnocide and genocide (think about the Chinese Uighur Muslims and the Myanmar Rohingya Muslims), many nation-states are committed to constructing “Muslimness” as one of the biggest “threats” to their existence, in spite of the many Muslims doing their best to showcase their national loyalties. From this perspective, the point is not whether or not Muslims are patriotic, but rather that their “Muslimness” renders them to be repositories of all that is alien. The Muslim Others will never be “Us.”

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Lailatul Fitriyah
Lailatul Fitriyah is a Ph.D candidate and Presidential Fellow at the World Religions and World Church Program, Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She holds a MA in International Peace Studies from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her current research is focused on the construction of feminist theologies of resistance in post-colonial Southeast Asia, feminist theologies of migration, and feminist interreligious dialogue.
Global Currents article

Beyond the Performance of Interfaith Solidarity


“Jews in solidarity with Muslims (and Mexicans, LGBT, womens’ rights…)”—placard on the anti-Trump Muslim ban march in London. Photo Credit: Alisdare Hickson

Religious communities, places of worship, cemeteries, wedding celebrations, and other sacred events and places have become targets for spectacular terrorist violence. It is hardly shocking news anymore. Most likely people will ask in the aftermath of a news story about killing in places of worship “how many?” rather than “why?” Such incidents are so routine that we no longer seek to understand them.  Sacred spaces, times, and rituals (such as parades) have long been sites and occasions for communal violence and for generating exclusionary nationalist narratives and a broad spectrum of political violence. Stanley Tambiah, Michael Sells, and many other students of religion and violent nationalist discourses have noted the complex intersection of selective retrieval of religious traditions and the production and reproduction of chauvinistic accounts of peoplehood. Such retrievals have provided rationales for exclusion and xenophobia, as well as the delegitimization of the citizenship rights of supposedly non-normative citizens. Hence, for example, Hindutva nationalist discourse renders Muslims not really Indians. As Olivier Roy laments in a recent volume, the same pattern can be found in case after case where appeals to exclusionary citizenship build upon racialized and/or ethnicized interpretations of religion as belonging.

While targeting religious communities in moments of vulnerability and communal engagement raises profound questions pertaining to the relation between religion and violence, it should also force us to interrogate the responses of religious actors and communities to such violence. It has become almost as routine as the terrorist acts themselves for visible religious leadership to offer condemnation of such seemingly senseless acts of violence and declare that any invocation of religiosity in authorizing murderous acts of terrorism, in effect, represents a departure and perversion of authentic religious traditions. As historian Anthony Marx noted, the language of authenticity undergirded the political projects of modernity, which included the nation-state’s instrumentalization of cultural others for the purpose of consolidating and reproducing national coherence. It precludes openness for internal pluralities and reifies traditions by employing colonial taxonomies, standardization, and complex institutional reproductions of religions as features of “culture” and “national heritage” with fixed boundaries that must be policed. The latter coalesces with biologized and racialized conceptions of national or ethnic reproduction. Authenticity and (blood) purity constitute pivotal dimensions of modernity.

The performativity of interfaith vigils to express solidarity with the victims of terrorist actions that clearly target people gathered in their religious and communal spaces offers a profound expression of interfaith solidarity only if it disrupts the deep legacy of the construction of “faith” as an instrument of empire. The fact that, in addition to the Sri Lankan churches targeted on Easter Sunday 2019, luxury hotels designed to entertain foreigners were likewise targeted is telling of the symbolic association of Christianity with colonial violence and neoliberalism. Even if the churches in the previously colonized world have become indigenous over the centuries, the discourse of authenticity that indeed afflicts those who interpret their actions as anti-colonial renders such churches symbols of the colonial past and its presences. These colonial presences also manifest in the global neoliberal exploitative order. By fixing the meaning of Christianity as “foreign” and “violent” the discourse of authenticity renders Christianity, just as much as the sites of luxury hotels in the midst of poverty and marginalization, a symbol of colonization. Indeed, the modernist discourse of authenticity that has characterized the colonial enterprise and its fluctuating foci on classifying people, defining their boundaries, and identifying their “religions” or lack thereof, facilitated the process of converting, controlling, enslaving, and eliminating them since the fifteenth century. Now, in the neoliberal stage, integrating the global South and the previously colonized into the global economy through ensuring hospitable institutions and political leaderships also engenders simplistic and vague resistance through the targeting of Christian and neoliberal symbols.

The conflation of these symbols foregrounds the requirement to interrogate the roots of the contemporary violence in the enduring legacies of coloniality, nationalism, and the role of religion therein. This concept, which originated with Aníbal Quijano, recognizes the interrelation between “modernity” as a narrative of progress and the labor of slaves and the logic of displacement and extermination of indigenous communities. It is also a concept that shares elective affinities with the earlier narratives of conversion and totalizing Christian cosmology, which eventually morphed into a totalizing secularist temporality. Without a robust account of the Christian tradition’s complicity with the persistent legacies of coloniality, efforts for religious peacebuilding and interfaith performativity of solidarity are lacking. Indeed, Christian feminist postcolonial theologians have long recognized the necessity of linking decolonial and feminist theological work with an intersectional capacity for social and political solidarity. In the same way that culturalist explanatory frames (that attributes causality to culture/religion/civilizational identity) engage in abstraction and betray an underlying orientalist perspective when they interpret Muslim violence without attending to geopolitics, Christians engage in abstraction when they disown claims to their tradition by white nationalists who commit murderous actions. Instead, it is critical that scholars and religious actors examine the interlacing of religion and race in the construction of belonging and non-belonging in the “nation” and even more broadly “humanity.”

U.S. Islamic World Forum on May 30, 2012. Plenary II: Social Change: The Power of Non-State Actors moderator. Pictured here (in middle): Yemen Rami Nashashibi, Executive Director, Inner-City Muslim Action Network, United States. Photo Credit: PM411528

Indeed, scholars have long identified the complicity of the comparative study of religion (together with anthropology, sociology, and other social sciences) with the construction of the (Christian) modern West and its political projects. Critical accounts of the construction of “religion” and “modernity” require interrogating, therefore, the complicity and entanglements of such approaches with global patterns of racialization, slavery, genocides, and capitalist exploitation. Rather than reclaiming a supposed authentic account of one’s faith (itself a modernist construct), intercommunal and interfaith solidarity that moves beyond performance focuses its critique on the modernist buttressing of communities and the employment of religion in the ghettoization and patterns of domination these communities experience. Hence, grassroots interfaith solidarity refuses the modernist logic of domestication and ghettoization of religion precisely through recognition, emerging on the ground in the inner cities as well as at the margins of religious communities themselves. As Ginna Green from Bend the Arc said in an interview for NPR: “we are not safe unless we are together.” The commonality among the acts of terrorism against communities of faith, even when Christians themselves are targeted in Sri Lanka, is their respective relation to the entanglement of Christianity with colonialism, white nationalism, orientalism, and modernist patterns of racializing and nationalizing religion. Therefore, even if, under one scenario, acts of targeted violence are intended to embolden antagonism and enhance communal divides, the response to such violence cannot settle into the existing frameworks that perpetuate such violence. Activist Rami Nashashibi, head of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network on the south side of Chicago, lucidly dispelled the modernist ghettoization. “Both the physical and spiritual well-being of our communities,” he told the interviewer in the same NPR piece, “depend on how well we are connected to one another.” This means, he added, that “Our isolation, our disconnection from one another only makes us that much more vulnerable to the forces of evil.…To the forces of hatred and bigotry that either want to silence us, intimidate us or pit us against one another to carry out really insidious agendas.” This important insight informs his and other grassroots faith-based activists’ coalition and solidarity work with one another.

This work moves beyond the imperial performance of vigils designed to reassert “authenticity.” It requires a deep intersectional analysis of the interlocking matrices of power, and a recognition that overcoming the logic that such matrices are built on requires not only exposing oppression, but also imagining cohabitation and solidarity outside the logic of imperial and domesticated religion. It is the same very insight that has animated Jewish activists in the aftermath of Charlottesville in 2017. When white nationalists marched with Klan-like torches, chanting “Jews will not replace us” as part of a protest against the supposed erasure of an icon of the Confederacy, (some) American Jews resolved to enhance their commitment to co-resistance against white supremacy (also tackling the construction of Jews as white) by deepening their understanding of the complex relations between anti-black racism and antisemitism. Similarly, Muslim community organizing excelled and exceeded organizers’ fundraising goals to help American Jews repair vandalized graves in Jewish cemeteries. In a different context, but one that nevertheless contained similar dynamics, in 2018 a six-day Emergency Religious Delegation to Honduras—comprised of fifty faith and civil leaders from the U.S., Canada, Colombia, and Argentina—accompanied human rights protectors, witnessed state violence, and reported about it through their local and global channels. Likewise, faith-based actors have persistently spent time at the US-Mexico border, calling out the geopolitical violence at the heart of the despair of asylum seekers and refugees. These are just a few (prophetic) examples that illuminate pathways for religious agency and expressions of interreligious solidarity that also centralize critical engagement with the violent legacies of modernity. These are forms of intercommunal solidarity that move beyond merely expressing surprise and indignation at the supposed perversion of religion manifested in such spectacular terrorist acts like those that occurred in Christchurch, Colombo, and at The Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Such expressions of indignation reflect little interrogation of religion’s complicity in global and local patterns of racialization, marginalization, and nationalist violence.

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Global Currents article

Something Else A’Comin’ . . .


Dance of the Starlings, Photo Credit: Conni Nielsen

This paper was originally conceived of as a response to an important panel conversation at the American Academy of Religion in Denver, Colorado on November 17, 2018. Moderated by Professor Atalia Omer, the panel was the occasion for a conversation between leading scholars on the theme of “Moral Obligations, Prophetic Actions, and the Search for Solidarity from Historical, Transnational, and Global Perspectives.” The panelists were Professor Daniel Boyarin (in abstentia; UC, Berkeley), Professor Farid Esack (University of Johannesberg), Professor Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College), and Santiago Slabodsky (Hofstra University).

The to-and-fro and the back-and-forth of the dialogue suggests a conversation that took with the utmost seriousness the intellectual and ethical urgencies of the subject matter, particularly as it relates to the specific cases of South Africa, Palestine, and Israel. These places and cases command and demand our attention today, especially the attention of those of us who work in religious studies inasmuch as the drivers of the devastation and death, both spectacular and slow, monumental and everyday, in these places in the world are inextricably bound up with questions and the very meaning of religion and life together. And now to my response…

While I am unable to do justice to all of the nuances of the panel conversation, I would like to surface an issue that moves at the oblique edges of the discussion. This is the issue not just of colonialism, which was explicitly invoked and theoretically attended to, but of settler colonialism. Here we might think of settlerism along with enslavement as modernity’s inner logos or meaning, the pillars that stand up the modern world as an arrangement or an economy and ecology that, with Cedric Robinson, also bears the name “racial capitalism.” As such settlerism (or land theft) with enslavement (labor theft) is that through which modern consciousness, modern desire, and modern life emerges. It is that through which Western life and thought lives and moves and has being. It is the practice of a violent and limited, an appropriative and expropriative, a thieving and exclusionary “We-ness.”

Putting a fine point on this, Iyko Day observes that “settler colonial racial capitalism is [neither] a thing” nor is it adequately understood as a historically isolable event or series of events. Rather, “[settler colonialism] is a social relation.” That is to say, settler “colonial capitalism is more appropriately figured as an ecology of power relations than a linear chain of events” (112-13). This ecology manifests in relation to that Westphalian international system of states associated with what has come to be called the West and whose activity is carried out under presumption of a particular figure.

This is the figure of “the settler.” Within (post) enlightenment philosophy the settler is known as the sovereign, self-determined subject, and within political thought as the “citizen.” As normative citizen, the settler indexes or represents and even stands as a proxy for what is proper, indeed, for the properly human whose standing is over and against those imagined as Man’s nonhuman or less-than-human Others, those, that is, who fall short of the human as such. If the settler as citizen embodies propriety and proper (political) subjecthood and thus embodies proper life and thus is properly human, then the Other to the citizen gets cast as nonhuman or less-than-human or marginally-human or infra-human and ultimately a threat to the political economy of citizens or those deemed properly human, the community of the human “we.”

However, what philosopher and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter gives us to understand about this imaginary of the human is that it is an “overrepresentation.” By this she means that rather than being made to the measure of the world, this specific genre or version and historical unfolding of the human has come to stand in the place of the human as such. This is the genre whose spatiotemporal and geographical and even geological unfolding is named (Western) Man.

In “worlding” himself, Man enacts two things. On the one hand, Man seizes, settles, or acts to possess the earth for himself. John Locke gives us the philosophy of this settler colonial seizure of the earth through his theory of property. On the other hand, precisely in his geopolitical and geological rupturing or “anthropocening” of the earth, Man also registers the biopolitical production or “massification,” as Jasbir K. Puar has recently put it, of populations. The point of Man’s conversion of populations into unhuman masses is so that total value or total life might be seized or cannibalized, indeed extracted from them for the founding and sustaining of the settler state and for the general sustaining of its central, normative figure, namely, the human (homo politicus, homo economicus). In other words, Man is a figure of ontological and planetary terror, as Calvin Warren powerfully argues. The terror of Man both produces and targets the nonhuman or the less-than-human mass(es) figured as the Racial Other.

The ongoing attacks against black life and native peoples in the United States, along with the specific cases of South Africa and Palestine in the latter’s ongoing struggle against Israeli settler colonialism, I contend, showcase the problem of the human as the central problematic internal to settler colonialism. But also, I would argue, it is at this site of the unhuman, the loci of an “inhuman” darkness, that we find a strange, queer diaspora that, precisely in its unhumanity, its parahumanity, its humanimality, indeed, in its adjacency to the mushroom—which, as Anna Tsing elaborates, finds a way to survive devastation—bespeaks an alternative: Modes of life beyond or in excess of the temporality of Man. Let us, again, call this the mass(es), that dark swarm whose movements are like the murmuration of starlings, a murmuring mass. Like the wandering monks of old (I mean the “gyrovagues” who freaked out St. Benedict and against whom he wrote his “Rules” of obedience), the murmuring mass is a wandering, borderless, non-settler “we” whose very presence unsettles every property line, every boundary that the settler imposes. This is a different kind of “we,” one not centered on the human. This is a ”we” that is before, after, and beyond every state-sanctioned or exclusionary “We the People…” We need a language for this different, non-statist we-ness.

A murmuration of starlings at Gretna, Photo Credit: Walter Baxter

When Professor Boyarin calls for a “deep theorization of diaspora” that is neither the same as a “statist nationalism,” with its racism and violence, nor like a “denatured German-style Reform in which ‘Judaism’ is a faith, or a ‘religion,’ or even a prophetic turn of mind, as per the American Council of Judaism,” but rather is a diaspora devoted “not to the government” but to an otherwise we-ness, a we that is “both here and elsewhere” and that is also Palestinian inasmuch as the Palestinian “we” is a “we” “whom ‘we’ [Jews] . . . oppress”—when Professor Boyarin says these things he is pointing to something like the alternative we-ness of which I speak and that settler colonialism seeks to arrest through the imposition of state logics. The alternative isn’t elsewhere, but instead is an elsewhen marked by a kind of quantum communion that is irreducible to statist or biopolitical logics, including statist or settler colonial logics of religion and the settler gods. Professor Boyarin, in effect, calls for the decolonization of time itself. As Caribbean-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip puts it, our moral obligation is to “snap the spine of [humanist] time” (141) inasmuch as within settler colonial or humanist time support for racist, statist, anti-Palestinian Zionism, which must be rigorously distinguished from Jewish identity, in effect operates as an extension of white supremacy into the Middle East in the name of supporting the state of Israel and in complex ways reverberates back into the U.S. in both antisemitic and antiblack ways.[1] This is the circuitry of settlerism as political theology.

This all brings me to something Professor Heschel says. I am thinking of moments in the course of her comments in which she takes us into what might be thought of as the spirituality of the issues at hand. Her comments are powerful and, in a good way, absolutely arrested me.

After talking about her sojourn through the 1960s and about how hearing Dr. King affected her so, Professor Heschel asks the question, “What does it mean to be moved?” This is a powerful question, worthy of just sitting with, brooding with, dwelling with, as we meditate on our moral obligations in this moment of settler colonial devastation of peoples and of the earth itself.

“What does it mean to be moved,” she asks?

This question is utterly bound up with social movements as historical-empirical phenomena, movements like Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But also what emerged out of May 1968, such as what traveled under the name “Black Power.” And more recently, what is called “the Movement for Black Lives” and the movement for a free Palestine. But never taking her eye off of social movements in their phenomenal appearing, Professor Heschel invites us, as it were, to look inside of such movements to ask a question, to catch sight even if only in a flash of another order.

Hers is the question of how a movement moves you. What in a movement moves you? What gives itself through a movement even as it exceeds the mo(ve)ment? What moves (within) the movement? This is a question of the sacred interior, which is not the interior of the would-be sovereign individual or the settler-as-citizen subject. This is the interior of the mass(es), an interior mass whose fundamental entanglement manifests the sacred and bespeaks a poetics of the social. Perhaps when Frantz Fanon inquired into “that within,” the gulf or abyss or the indefineable vanishing point that exceeds racialization or what epidermal blackening and browning as cultural operations aim to arrest,[2] he too was approaching the question of what moves subterraneously, underneath, and in excess of the political.

“What does it mean to be moved,” Professor Heschel asks.

It’s then that just as her listeners, an audience of scholars, might expect her to offer your classic or scholastic (read: typically academic) answer to the question she poses, she pulls back. She refuses to answer—at least in such a way that would freeze the question in answering it. What comes through is that it is not so much about the answer as it is about keeping the question alive in whatever answer one gives. It’s, in other words, about the ongoing quest(ion)ing.

And so, immediately following upon her asking her moving question, Professor Heschel says that to be moved in social movement is to undergo something. It is to be set in flight, to be set roaming and roving and wandering, to be opened out into what exceeds you, to move into the open, to have one’s limits crossed, all borders breached, the very notion of “world” broken open. In short, it’s to be “in the break.” This Heschel calls “religious experience,” about which she says, “I need that.”

Finally, Professor Heschel caps her reflections by further saying, in effect, that to undergo social movement is precisely to not give into despair, knowing (and this is very deep) that “there is something else coming.” Affectively caught in the wave, so to speak, in the sensation, carried by the feeling of what’s coming, to be touched by and to haptically surrender to that something else beyond the political as we know it—about this Professor Heschel says, “I have to hold onto that,” for “that I guess is what keeps me going with the praxis.”

There is a terrible beauty borne in what Professor Heschel, I think, is getting at. Here we glimpse social movement as an anticipatory praxis of something else coming, manifest in a kind of ante-political assembly, a mode of gathering or assembly or commune-ion that falls outside of though it surges through the violences of state time and history. Her words are a kind of “sorrow song” that celebrates the mass(es) or social movement even if that celebration is singed with some sort of sadness. This all arrested and moved me, I must say, inasmuch as I’ve been thinking a lot about what spirituality means in settler colonial times, about the “mysticism” of social movements, something I’ve recently called the “the mysticism of the riot” and the spirit(uality) of the general strike. What if spirit is of the riot? What if spirit is the general strike, ritual of an alternative cosmology?[3]

To be moved by the more-than-now, by a wholly-other, something-else-future is to be under fugitivity’s sway. Per the black radical tradition’s meditations on the historical figure of the fugitive and the arts of escape, fugitivity here bespeaks an other order of time. This other temporality bespeaks, as Melissa Louidor puts it as she thinks with Fred Moten, a certain “mobilization of black vitality.” It is a “futuristic impulse to claim the not-yet-forged possibilities of existence.” That impulse, to stay with Louidor a bit longer, might be thought about in terms of certain “biomechanic and metaphysical forces [that] activate” imagination, which is to say “effort, an effort that is integral to claiming survival.” To dwell within fugitive time or to be fugitively on the move is to resonate with, indeed to reside or tarry with, the im/possibility of other worlds. I’m talking about new ways of dwelling with and being on the earth. This is a kind of quantum communion, the veritable entanglement of all things precisely at the level of thingliness itself, at the level of base matter or raw vitality. In short, the modernity of fugitivity names the mobilization of a queer vitality, an “aliveness,” Kevin Quashie might say, beyond racial category.[4] While constantly engaging politics and maneuvering with respect to state structures, that which moves in fugitive time moves under the sociopoetic propulsion of an uncaptureable force that is irreducible to political ontology and its presumption of the human. As such, fugitivity is an insurgent practice of prophesy, though without the figure of the singular or sovereign prophet. For in fugitive time the prophet is the mass(es), the swarm of social movement as such.

I cannot help but hear Professor Heschel’s question—What does it mean to be moved?—in conversation with a tradition of black radical thought and the distinct notion of the sacred that is internal to this tradition and that drives its arts of escape, the arts of black rapture. The something-else-future that Professor Heschel’s language conjures or is reaching for is, like black radicalism’s poetics of the sacred, of an insurgent, dissident, rebellious, anti-doctrinal, and non-teleological future. Felt in the present, Professor Heschel’s question registers as a disturbance that is always already in play and that as such witnesses to an alternative present. Such a temporality, such a future, is radical. It is a future without frame, without foreclosure, marked by a peculiar kind of nonhumanist dispossession, movement outside of propertied self-possession.

To be under the claim of such a future is to be indebted to a future of something else coming, Heschel says, or that is “a’comin’,” to purloin from Judith Weisenfeld. And because it is a’comin’, it moves one into a different kind of now, a now that, again, exceeds the time of the human. This revised understanding of the future where the future is not merely what follows past and present suggests what might be called, defying grammatical convention, the tense of the future-now.

What might the future-now mean, where both “the now” and “the future” are unmoored from liberal humanist progressive narratives or temporalities (of death), unhooked from time schemes that presume the settler, or the sovereign, individuated subject? What could freedom released from settler time mean? And, what does this all mean for social movement(s), for a free Palestine, for Palestinian life in its adjacency to black life, and for a Jewishness released from Zionist-statist-settler logics and thus thought of as conspiring with, literally breathing with, blackness and Palestinianness, a Jewishness entangled in “blackpalestinian breathing”?

With Professor Heschel, I offer this answer which is not and cannot be one. At a minimum the tense of the future-now might be thought of as the opening of the imagination to the impossible. The tense of the future-now brings into view what settler time forecloses as not possible. Nevertheless the impossible surges through, fracturing time and history to announce another beginning. Genesis otherwise. The tense of the future-now is the tense, to borrow from Dawn Lundy Martin, of “unforeclosure” and the unforecloseable.

Unsettling settler time or the time of patriarchs and sovereigns, the tense of the future-now is marked, as experimental film maker and video artist Arthur Jafa has put it, by both tension and potential. Beyond time as given to us to shut down imagining the im/possible, the future-now discloses every instant as measureless, saturated by “potension.”

Could this be what moves a mo(ve)ment? Could it be that the tense of the future-now is nothing less than the tense of spirit-time, what is of the life (and) times of the unhuman wherein we are given to dwell with the earth even as we work to survive the settler world (of Man)? The riot, the rebellion then, is a threshold of the sacred where in passage we dwell in fugitivity’s future-now, rhythming “freedom time,” an alternative conception of time that presences an alternative present. Music-ing fugitive time is the creative, the ethical, the “poethical” task. . .Task of a homiletics of the unhuman, witnessing to a wounded, unspeakable joy . . . Task of something else a’comin’ . . .

(I dedicate this essay to a free Palestine)

—

[1]See Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “Black and Palestinian Lives Matter: Black and Jewish America in the Twenty-First Century,” in On Anti-Semitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 31–41.

[2]Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1967), 71.

[3]J. KameronCarter, “Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred).” Social Text 139 (forthcoming).

[4]The idea of “vitality” and “aliveness” reflects conversations with Quashie around his forthcoming book, Black Aliveness; or, The Being of Us.

 

*The opinions expressed in this piece do not represent the official opinions of Contending Modernities research initiative and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies or their faculty and staff.

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J. Kameron Carter
J. Kameron Carter is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He works in black studies, theology and philosophy of religion, and literature and poetry. His book is Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008). He’s just finished a book manuscript titled American Religion: White Supremacy as Political Theology and he is in the final stages of another book project whose topic is blackness and/as the sacred.