Long Sunday

The White Messiah Complex

Who would have thought that it would take the block buster film Avatar to get David Brooks, condescending spokesman for the establishment, and Slavoy Zizek, the hyper caffeinated Marxist, to agree on something.  First, here is David Brooks apparently offended by the cliche of simple primitives unable to make their own destiny:

"It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration."

No to be out done, Monsieur Zizek sees the film, despite its sympathies with the aboriginy Na'vi, as the clear expression of neoimperialist racism:

"Avatar's fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the aboriginal princess and becoming king, make it ideologically a rather conservative, old-fashioned film. Its technical brilliance serves to cover up this basic conservatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the politically correct themes (an honest white guy siding with ecologically sound aborigines against the "military-industrial complex" of the imperialist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of abeautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man's fantasy."

No doubt Zizek would be amused by this dialectical unity of opposites.  Both the defender of the status quo and the radical critic agree that the portrayal is racist and simplistic.  But that is as far as I think they can agree - for example Brooks has to slip in the fact that "The plotline gives global audiences a chance to see American troops get killed."  When I saw the film the first thing I thought of this was "Blackwater vs. Indians" but I suppose that isn't much of a difference. 

As usual Zizek uses the film as an opportunity to make his larger ideological critique. Just in case we forget, there are always real life wars of resistance whose the plot lines are not as easy for us to digest; he refers to Arundhati Roy's recent account of the Dongria Kondh people's uprising that is currently taking place in India.  The Hills that they inhabit in the state of Orissa "were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded:"

"The Indian prime minister characterised this rebellion as the "single largest internal security threat"; the big media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about "red terrorism", replacing stories about "Islamist terrorism". No wonder the Indian state is responding with a big military operation against "Maoist strongholds" in the jungles of central India. And it is true that both sides are resorting to great violence in this brutal war, that the "people's justice" of the Maoists is harsh. However, no matter how unpalatable this violence is to our liberal taste, we have no right to condemn it. Why? Because their situation is precisely that of Hegel's rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are starving tribal people, to whom the minimum of a dignified life is denied.

So where is Cameron's film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself - the film substituting for reality."

While I appreciate the larger point Zizek is making, I have to say I really enjoyed the film.  Besides it being visually stunning, I also liked the mercenaries getting their asses kicked.  I suppose that means I am merely reinscribing the current neoliberal ideological coordinates - but it's still just a movie, right?

Quotidian Nihilism

Over at Broken Power Lines, there is a very interesting interview with Wendy Brown:

CPS:  You have argued, speaking of neoliberalism, you have argued that neoliberalism does not simply promote economic policies but to quote you “disseminates market values into every sphere of human activity.”  What distinguishes your perspective here from the despair found in someone like Adorno?  What would it require to translate the despair that many people experience in very personal and de-politicized ways into a form of political mobilization?

Wendy Brown:  That is an interesting question because it assumes that neoliberalism produces despair.  I wish it did but I am not convinced that it does.  I think that the process that some of us have called neoliberalization actually seizes on something that is just a little to one side of despair that I might call something like a quotidian nihilism.  By quotidian, I mean it is a nihilism that is not lived as despair; it is a nihilism that is not lived as an occasion for deep anxiety or misery about the vanishing of meaning from the human world.  Instead, what neoliberalism is able to seize upon is the extent to which human beings experience a kind of directionlessness and pointlessness to life that neoliberalism in an odd way provides.  It tells you what you should do: you should understand yourself as a spec of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things. Those things can range from choice of a mate, to choice of an educational institution, to choice of a job, to choice of actual monetary investments – but neoliberalism without providing meaning provides direction. In a sad way it is seizing upon a certain directionlessness and meaninglessness in late modernity.  Again, I am talking mainly about the Euro-Atlantic world: without providing meaning, it provides direction.  So I think it is quite a different order of things from the one that Adorno was describing.

I am in charge

Of course much has been made of Al Haig's attempted coup after President Reagan had been shot, but I think Larry David does a great job of analyzing it in real time.  (Thanks to Dennis Perrin for the link)

Haiti Latest Target of the Shock Doctrine

In a very disturbing blog post over at the Nation, Richard Kim discusses how the IMF has agreed to an emergency loan to Haiti of $100 million.  The bad news is that this comes with restrictions like pay freezes for all public employees and an increase in the retail price for electricity.   As Klein argues in the video, it is up to us to insist that Haiti receives grants, not loans. 

John Ralston Saul and weak thought

After all of the talk of what is 'critical' about Axel Honneth’s Pathologies of Reason it represents a bit of transition to read John Ralston Saul's most recent book A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada (Viking: 2008). In a word, his book is not critical in the technical sense of a rejection of dogmatism and an effort to constantly 'tarry with the negative'. Rather, Saul's book is for the most part just a bad book in nearly every way a book can be bad -- moralistic, elitist, boring, repetitive, one-sided, etc. But it might be said that the book is arguably built on an interesting idea, and, that is, that Canada is a 'Métis civilization'. The book's main strength is contained in this provocation, but it appears to have failed there too since the response to the book so far have been minimal if non-existent beyond the occasional remark in The Globe and Mail. One can find glowing reviews out there, but they are far from critical and for the most part do not address Saul’s exaggerated and over-blown thesis. The overall reaction appears to be that ‘oh my, Ralston Saul is at it again. Duck!’.

There is much to be explained about the main idea, but the gist of it is that Saul is enticed by the idea that Canada was created as a product of negotiation between aboriginal peoples and the 'newcomers'. He argues that even though most Canadians, particularly its elites in government and the Universities, may not admit it, Canadians love to negotiate and basically reject war. The Métis, as a distinct people, are the direct outcome of Canada’s ongoing love of negotiation that goes back to the beginning of the world and continues to characterize the country to this day. One gets the feeling that Canada will always love to negotiate for as long as the world lasts. Saul finds evidence of his thesis everywhere – in various aspects of colonialism, in the way that many Canadians reject and exclude the First Nations today, the way Canadians reject certain forms of European progress and embrace a hybrid form of citizenship, the ‘obsession with egalitarianism’, the ‘minimal’ approach to environmental protection, and the list goes on and on. As the reader learns, if Canada has any good ideas or practices they are due to its Aboriginal cultural roots, and if it has any bad ideas or practices these have to do with various Canadian elites who long for Canada to express its connection with Europe or with the US (via Europe). So, when Canadians ignore issues of Aboriginal poverty or when they disregard and exploit the environment this is because it is following Euro-centric principles. But, when it gives way and realizes its ‘true self’, this is because it is following Aboriginal, holistic principles stating that ‘everything is one’. (This obviously downplays the holism that is part of major tenants of European theory, but that issue is for another day).

One of the ‘truths’ that Saul discovers is that Canada rejects linear thinking (history, progress) and instead embraces ‘an ever-enlarging circle’. This, again, is the specific form of egalitarianism in Canada that is derived from Aboriginal ideas. The circle is inclusive and tolerant, whereas the linear line is not. Here is how Saul puts it:

The original party, the Aboriginal, is built upon a philosophy that has interdependence at its core. This is the opposite of such European ideas as the melting pot, which was picked up by our neighbour as a way of explaining how you could get a new kind of European-style purity out of a mix of peoples. The idea of difference is central to indigenous civilization. These differences are not meant to be watertight compartments, not vessels of purity. It is all about working out how to create relationships that are mixed in various ways and designed to create balances. It is the idea of a complex society functioning like an equally complex family within an ever-enlarging circle. That is the Canadian model.

In other words, this perspective wishes to bring Aboriginal ideas to the forefront and to then render contingent those ideas and practices that are connected to Europe in any way (which are not clearly defined, except as caricature, including several derogatory statements about Kant and the US). The intention is clearly strategic: to generate a dialogue about what is working in Canada and what is not according to the author’s perspective. However, the effect of this strategic effort is a major polemic and eventually an exaggeration about how Canada was formed as a nation-state at least since the late nineteenth century.

To idealize both sides of the equation – to claim that Francophone and Anglophone ideas are equally racist and that Aboriginal ideas are essentially open and morally superior – seems to amount to little more than the standard Canadian version of American bashing. The elephant in the room of the book seems to be that Canada is better than the US on almost any issue. For example, Saul believes that the Canadian principles of ‘Peace, Order and Good Government’ are flawed primarily because it includes the word ‘order’. A belief in ‘peace’ and ‘good government’ perhaps characterizes Canada, but ‘order’ does not. The latter, largely a legal construct, was only incorporated into the motto to appease the (Tory) Loyalists coming into Canada from England and the US. It ‘was their myth, not ours’, he writes.

So, in one sense this book is an ongoing contribution to Canada’ distinctive form of nationalism. It is a form of nationalism that is resolutely anti-American, and which is hard to overstate or really even come to terms with. But, in another sense, this book reminds one of just how nasty and passive-aggessive Canada’s nationalist scene can really get. Unrelenting in its effort to portray Canada as the best place on earth (rather unfairly on most issues), the insidious form of nationalism in Canada becomes dangerously uncritical and dogmatic in the worst senses of those terms. But, according to the former Viceregal Consort John Ralston Saul, Canada’s nationalism is the best thing its got.

Honneth Elsewhere

Luke Mergner at the Decline has commented on our recent Honneth posts.

Back to Reason (and the future of Critical Theory)

Critical theorists often claim to be clearing up mistaken, confused, distorted, or fragmented forms of thinking about and acting in society. One of the major tasks at hand for Critical Theory (CT), then, as it has come to be known in some strands of social theory, is at least implicitly to presuppose a model of society predicated on a certain conception of rightness or reason. Axel Honneth's Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (Columbia, 2009) in this regard is no different from most of the major strands of CT in the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas, as well as others. The book is written in many ways as a treatise to today's 'younger generation' of critical theorists who, as he writes, wish to carry on 'the work of social criticism without having much more than a nostalgic memory of the heroic years of Western Marxism' (19). Thus, in the context of the current heterogeneity or 'market' of critical approaches, Honneth begins with a thorough and incisive interpretive reconstruction of Kant's critical project, discussed by Roger Whitson in a previous post. Honneth's reading of Kant links up with the later critique of the idea of social progress found in Walter Benjamin and other approaches influenced by the neo-Kantian critiques of historicism.

In Chapter 2, already discussed by Craig McFarlane, Honneth provides his clearest overall statement about how to rethink the possibilities of critical theory without remaining content to rest finally on Foucault's genealogical method (found in that of James Tully, for example (21)) that he complains implies many concepts that ‘can hardly be empirically measured’ (190). On the contrary, Honneth contends that CT find the steam move beyond that as well as other rival critical approaches to develop forms of social criticism that aim to transform public opinion. His point is that we take the time to discover what each of the critical perspectives hold in common ‘from a practical point of view’ (21). For Honneth, and whether ‘the youth’ know it or not, the critical project is united around what he calls ‘historically effective reason’ or rationality (20). He stresses, on this basis, the need to understand history in a practical way and to conceptually oppose 'socially effective rationality' to that of 'socially defective rationality' (as Craig mentioned). The former designates critical practices that should not necessarily be reduced to a positive form found in the theories of Horkheimer, Marcuse, or Habermas. But neither should CT necessarily be reduced to the negative dialectics of Benjamin or Adorno. Rather, according to Honneth, CT is united in an empirical or meta-theoretic project aimed to develop critical practices to oppose those 'social relationships [that] distort the historical process of development in a way that one can only practically remedy' (21). One of the most important words in this sentence is ‘practical’, which, as we shall see, borrowing from Adorno, Honneth will eventually call ‘preintellectual’ or ‘intramundane’.

What's so critical about critical theory?

A quick inventory: critical race theory, critical discourse analysis, critical food studies, critical animal studies, critical security studies, critical legal studies, critical social theory. Some more: Critical Studies, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Critical Studies in Education, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Critical Studies in Television. There are even departments of critical studies (for instance, at UBC Okanagan, which is the first to show up in Google). You can't go on a campus (or, for that matter, read an academic or political blog) without being confronted by critique and criticism. Originally connected to the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, around the works of Adorno, Horkeimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Lowenthal, Fromm, Neumann, Oppenheimer, and its successors--such as Habermas and Honneth--the "critical" in "critical theory" has achieved a remarkable degree of autonomy from its origin and, now, we can all be critical without having allegiance whatsoever to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School or its proponents. Indeed, I was even able to write a doctoral comprehensive exam in "critical social theory" a few years back with only having a couple of pieces from Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas on the list.

What is it, then, that we mean by critical when we say "critical whatever studies"? This isn't always clear, if it ever is. More often than not the word "critical" appears to function more as an indicator of club membership than with any actual critical activity (whatever that may mean). The club, in this case, seems to mean something like "theoretically sophisticated" and "holding the right political opinions," opinions which tend, for the most part, towards wishy-washy liberalism and can't-we-all-just-get-along cosmopolitanism. Even though we are critical, we don't want to be too critical, because, if we are sufficiently critical and achieve the social change we strive after (or at least advocate), we could very well be out of our jobs! Afterall, who needs a critical theorist in utopia? Better an employed critical theorist in a liberal capitalist regime than a useless critical theorist in paradise. When I was in the first year of my doctoral program, a tenure-track line opened and we, in the doctoral program, would get to select our priorities with respect to hiring. We elected to search for a social theorist. But not just any social theorist: a critical social theorist. It was never clear what we meant by that and it was never clear what the interviewed candidates understood it to mean (one candidate spoke about Durkheim and Tarde and another spoke about his deep desire to anthologize and translate critical theory from Africa as part of his commitment to cosmopolitanism). Aren't we all critical now? (Except, of course, for those naive positivists and empiricists who can't help themselves and who are lost to the flow of history--even if they get far more research funding than we do.)

So, again, what do we mean by critical? A vulgar sense of critical meaning something like "questioning received opinion" is not unique to any form of critical theory. Take the criminological school of left realism--thoroughly empiricist and positivist (bad! bad!) but also critical of mainstream criminology. (Left realism usually advances, among other things, a program of decarceration.) It would seem that you can be critical without being critical.

For these reasons, it is refreshing to read the second, "A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory", and third, "Reconstructive Social Criticism with a Genealogical Proviso: On the Idea of "Critique" in the Frankfurt School," chapters of Alex Honneth's recently published collected, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory. In these two chapters, Honneth lays out what he takes to be two core concepts in Critical Theory: the idea of a social pathology of reason and, of course, the idea of critique. Honneth clearly recognizes these problems, "With the turn of the new century, Critical Theory appears to have become an intellectual artifact." We can be critical without being critical. This critical-without-being critical fully demonstrates the "intellectual gap separating us from the theoretical beginnings of the Frankfurt School. [...] Today a younger generation carries on the work of social criticism without having much more than a nostalgic memory of the heroic years of Western Marxism" (19). The gap is so great--between us and the Frankfurt School style of social criticism--that is has been more than thirty years since Marcus and Horkheimer have been read as contemporaries. As discussed by Roger in his post on the first chapter, and in ensuing discussion, history as a progressive movement guided by reason is a concept very foreign to us, especially to those of us who (such as myself) who view Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida as our nearest ancestors. I confess: reading Honneth's essays makes me feel rather uneasy. How could he believe in historical progress? How could he believe in reason? Afterall, as I like to point out, we kill and abuse more animals absolutely and relatively now, at the start of the twenty-first century, than we did a hundred and twenty years ago when the doctrines of "animal welfare" were first created. How can anyone seriously suggest that reason and progress and are both operative in history without sounding as crass as someone like Richard Dawkins who assures us that historical-moral progress is real despite the temporary setback of the Holocaust? How can we take Honneth's suggestion that capitalism blocks the development of historical progress and reason seriously? How can this be anything other than naive belief and ideology in the face of all facts? When was the last time history progressed? Kojeve-Fukuyama has won; Horkheimer-Honneth have lost. Why does Honneth persist in his belief of a "socially effective rationality"?

As-if Honneth were one Kant (and not another)…

It is quite serendipitous to me that Axel Honneth begins his book Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory with a look at Immanuel Kant’s essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.” As an undergraduate, I lived and breathed Kant’s transcendentalism. I kept my heavily underlined copies of the Meiklejohn translation of Critique of Pure Reason in my backpack. “As-if” was my mantra, as one professor or another listed their arguments against Kant. “You make ethical decisions as-if you could will them universally.” “Judgments of taste are subjective, they are only willed as-if everyone would agree.” The Kantian world I inhabited was a mystical place of uncanny “as-ifs” and sublime negative pleasures connecting harmoniously with scientific reason and synthetic a priori knowledge.

Matt Taibbi on "The Great American Bubble Machine"

Oh, I'm a huge fan of this guy's investigative journalism, published today "on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression."  (Cue emphatically vague, prosaic protests from the PR wing of Goldman Sachs.)  Especially as at times he seems like the only one who is effectively doing this: translating our reality of economic-apartheid/corporate dictatorship/organized crime to a popular audience, and with proper pathos of indignation.  Taibbi may not have been possible without the likes of Chomsky, but he sure does a better job keeping us awake.  (Needless to say, part of this work is holding otherwise sympathetic but obviously worn-down, increasingly platitudinous critics-become-automatons to a higher standard, which Taibbi also does pretty well.) His conclusion under the fold:

WILL THE CAT ABOVE THE PRECIPICE FALL DOWN?

The following is Zizek's response to the events currently taking place in Iran.  Surprisingly, they seem rather banal and uncontroversial.  I am curious what people think of his view that "we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists."

The Idea of "Tradition" and Animal Studies

Being the sort of person who reads - and comments - at blogs, I've found myself in discussions from time to time regarding the morality of animal use. Lately, the context has been the Canadian seal hunt and efforts by Native advocates to justify one form of seal hunt (traditional), but condemn another form (capitalist). Notably, the major American animal welfare organizations also make this distinction between traditional use and commercial exploitation. I am in the minority, it seems, as I am opposed to animals being slaughtered by Mr. Money-bags just as much as I am opposed to animals being slaughtered by Noble Savage.

Advocates of the "traditional" hunt will routinely make reference to using much more of the seal's carcass than what is found in the "capitalist" hunt. (Although the reason why Mr. Money-bags doesn't use the entirety of the carcass is likely because there is limited potential for commercial exploitation (e.g., meat, oils, by-products) and, if there were, seals would be rounded up and placed in factory conditions.) Of course, the advocates of "tradition" usually forgot that a commodity, the base unit in capitalist economies, is any good produced for sale. The seal is, indeed, largely slaughtered for sale - the "traditional" hunt is as capitalist as the "capitalist" hunt.

But, from the theoretical standpoint, that isn't the most interesting thing - fetishizing cultures isn't really an academic interest in mine (although one has to wonder if the fetishization of Noble Savage as engaged in an authentic lifestyle outside of capitalism has something to do with a feeling of inauthenticity experienced by many living in large cities where no outside of capitalism can be seen; it is the urban advocates of the "traditional" seal hunt that are interesting). What is interesting is the recourse ostensibly "progressive" people have to defenses of "tradition."

Why do self-named "progressives" find security in tradition? What is so "progressive" about tradition? The question I put to them is quite obvious: how do you justify one form of "tradition" for the very reason that you perceive it to be "tradition" but condemn another form of "tradition" because you just don't like it? How can the seal hunt be defended because it is "tradition" but anti-semitism, homophobia, racism, sexism, and the like cannot? How can you say Noble Savage is a being who finds his moral core in the traditional hunt while at the same time condemning marital rape or genital mutilation? How do you distinguish between "good" traditions and "bad" traditions? Can that even be done? Once you've defended one thing "because it is tradition," it seems that only logical position one can adopt is to defend all practices deemed traditional.

The only response I ever get is that I am being shrill.

Notes from the Long Sunday Beginning June 7, 2009

Entry 11 – June 8, 2009:  This evening, my outreach team spent a half an hour guiding a staggering Tamil man down Yonge Street and across Queen to Fred Victor, the shelter at which he is living.  Nevertheless, he wound up conked out in a bus enclosure across the way.  The building was surrounded by fire trucks, cop cars, and news reporters and a second floor room was gutted and still smoldering.  D., the brief flame of I.’s around the time she took the broken bottle to her previous boyfriend’s neck, happened to be hanging out at the bus enclosure.

The Idea of "Evil" and Animal Studies

Elsewhere, in a discussion about using the word evil in relation to factory farms, I brought up an incident from the class for high school students I taught a month or so ago. We had just finished watching the documentary "Death on a Factory Farm" (if HBO asks "HBO Canada or HBO USA," choose the latter) and I was trying to impress upon them a significant point: they needed to video of a pig being killed via hanging in order to proceed with animal cruelty charges. They didn't understand why the hanging was so important. The reason they needed to video of the hanging is, in simple terms, that if the practice is generally accepted, then it cannot by definition be cruel. Hence, regardless of how horrible generally accepted practices are, they are completely legal. So, just providing footage of gestation crates, of piglets being thrown up to ten feet into a cart, tossed by their tails or ears into the back of a school bus (what they used to move animals on the farm), segregating dying animals among themselves without food or water or medicine, not providing medical assistance to sick or injured animals, use of electric prods, etc. is not sufficient because these are the normal practices of all pig farms. Cruelty, under the law, requires exceptional cruelty. Thus, the investigation focused on getting footage of the favoured method of euthanasia on this farm: hanging pigs by chains from forklifts. Once I had established this point, the students wanted to know if the people working on the farm were evil - only an evil person would willingly act this way. I wasn't expecting that question and I wasn't sure how to proceed.

Now, this is important. In much animal rights/animal welfare literature, the concept of evil is strongly resisted, largely for rhetorical rather than theoretical reasons: if you are trying to convince someone to change the way they live their life, calling them evil is likely not especially productive. My first attempt to answer their question was to point out a series of incidents in the documentary: the defense lawyers and many locals attending the trials would routinely point out that these are radical animal rights activists coming in from California (the farm was in Ohio) to tell them how they should live their lives. They experienced the animal cruelty charges as an attack on their lifestyle. To an extent this is true. Afterall, most of the people in this community are farmers and all of them had come from farming families. Generations of their families had lived in this way. What they were doing - raising animals for slaughter - was completely normal to them as were the practices entailed in raising animals for slaughter. In effect, to accuse one of them of acting cruelly was to indict the entire community for being cruel and evil. This led the students to consider if evil was dependent upon one's standpoint: how could what they do seem evil to use but seem absolutely normal to them?

After this line of discussion, I tried pushing it a little further and asked them what would mean if the farmers - even the ones charged with animal cruelty - weren't evil. What if it is the system as a whole that is evil, but that the individuals themselves are not necessarily good or evil? The point here, in part, being that if they want to call the farmers evil and if they themselves eat meat, then there is a good chance that they are also evil. The students certainly didn't feel evil even though many of them ate meat, besides they would know - or so they thought - if they were evil or not.

I then pointed out that all of us have incredible capacities for violence and cruelty without even being aware that we are acting in violent and cruel ways. I told them about the Stanford prison experiment. The basic conclusion of the experiment is that so long as an authority is telling us to do it, we tend not to experience the action as evil or cruel. This, in turn, led to another unexpected development. A student who was Jewish - she had previously talked about kosher restrictions on her diet - said this sounded a lot like the Holocaust. I agreed with her that it did, but I didn't push the point. She went on to say that it was hard to call individual Germans evil and that it would be hard to distinguish between death camp guards and regular Germans, but that she also wanted to call the Holocaust as a whole one of the greatest evils ever perpetuated by humans against humans. I agreed with her: it is hard to say that every individual German suddenly became evil in 1933 and suddenly became normal again at the conclusion of the war. Given this, how are we to think about the Holocaust? Surely, we want to call it evil but doesn't that also mean that millions of regular, everyday Germans went into a decade long trance of ultimate evil and then came out as normal as ever? This hardly makes sense.

The conclusion they came to, it seems, is that we need to differentiate between "subjective evil" (the evil individual) and "objective evil" (the evil institution). People can operate within objective evil without themelves being subjectively evil. However, that does not mean that all people in an objectively evil system are more or less good - there are surely subjectively evil people too: those who derive a great deal of pleasure from cruelty. The advantage of this, they agreed, was that we could also talk about incidents of subjective evil admidst a generally objectively evil situation - Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, for instance.

The question they unfortunately never raised was the relation between the objectively evil institution of the factory farm and the rest of society: without the factory farm, societies as they currently exist could not exist. In order to consume nearly 60 billion animals annually worldwide, it is necessary to produce animals under factory conditions. Does that mean that if our societies cannot exist without these objectively evil insitutions that we ourselves are all subjectively evil?