Fido the Yak

There you have it: Bergson as resonating existential. And now that my memory's been jogged, I recall having specifically rejected Bergson's idea of "inner experience," though why I should have rejected that idea while tolerating Husserl's "internal time consciousness" or Buber's ich-du (with which I am still in conversation, having reached no firm judgement) is not altogether clear, and quite probably groundless. In any case, my recent foray into the works of Paul Ricoeur has prepared me to revisit the duality of existence, which I might have come to by alternative routes, though Ricoeur's is as good as any and better than most, and that has reawakened my sublimated fascination with Bergson. Ricoeur, of course, being a serious thinker, repudiates Bergson in no uncertain terms--but that's neither here nor there. Actually, it may be instructive to back up and consider the paragraph immediately prior to the one quoted above, which is in fact one that roused my attention.

Inquiring then why this separation of duration and extensity, which science carries out so naturally in the external world, demands such an effort and rouses so much repugnance when it is a question of inner states, we were not long in perceiving the reason. The main object of science is to forecast and measure: now we cannot forecast physical phenomena except on condition that we assume that they do not endure as we do; and, on the other hand, the only thing we are able to measure is space. Hence the breach here comes about of itself between quality and quantity, between true duration and pure extensity. But when we turn to our conscious states, we have everything to gain by keeping up the illusion through which we make them share in the reciprocal externality of outer things, because this distinctness, and at the same time this solidification, enables us to give them fixed names in spite of their interpenetration. It enables us to objectify them, to throw them out into the current of social life.

(pp.230-231)

And henceforth. Here we see the problem for Ricoeur, namely Bergson's positing of Time as immeasurable, and probably the source of my initial dismissal of durée (le temps durée, to be clear) as constituitive of "inner experience." But I suspect it's not very kind to Bergson, certainly on my part, or true to what we might have discovered had we suspended judgement a while longer; because Bergson absolutely did not deny the measurability of le temps espace, and if Ricoeur didn't ponder the same sort of dilemma in a differnt key, I'm a monkey's uncle. Or a yak. Not just any yak, and not the Mad Yak, mind you, but Fido the Yak. I'm very particular about who I claim as relations, you see. So there you have it: Bergson as resonating existential.

I disagree with Guha-Sapir et al. on other key matters, such as the nature of the data from the Atrocities Documentation Team (ADT), the progression of events in Sudan which is crucial to their disaggregation of data, and how best to characterize the overall situation--pockets of high mortality that contain hundreds of thousands of people tell us more about the overall situation than pockets of stability that contain far fewer people. Therefore I am inclined to regard the CRED estimate as rather low, and the low estimate of the State Department as not particularly credible. However, as the CRED estimate appears to be rather credible at this stage--it is certainly well argued--and as it is significantly lower than my rough sense of how many people have died, I will have to reevaluate my views.

I am grateful to Guha-Sapir and her team for giving this matter the serious attention that it deserves.

Reviewing Freedom and Nature, I'm struck by a continuity in Ricoeur's life's work. Was he consciously striving to elaborate a monumental hermeneutic project, or was it more like revisiting themes out of habit--or, let's be honest about our thinking--an everyday kind of affection? (If Sisysphus smiles, it surely cannot be for quite the reason Camus offers--that really would be absurd.) With Ricoeur, I don't see the dilemma of the voluntary and the involuntary being dispensed with so easily. But it can't hurt to ask.

I just happened upon an apropos passage in Time and Narrative, Vol 3 (1988, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer):

This connection between self-constancy and narrative identity confirms one of my oldest convictions, namely, that the self of self-knowledge is not the egotistical and narcissistic ego whose hypocrisy and naiveté the hermeneutics of suspicion have denounced, along with its aspects of an ideological superstructure and infantile and neurotic archaism. The self of self-knowledge is the fruit of an examined life, to recall Socrates' phrase in the Apology. And an examined life is, in large part, one purged, one clarified by the cathartic effects of narratives, be they historical or fictional, conveyed by our culture. So self-constancy refers to a self instructed by the works of culture that it has applied to itself.

(p. 247)

Okay, so maybe "happened upon" is too handy. It seemed like at the moment I became fully conscious of the passage as speaking to me, I had reached for the book, opened it, and voila. But surely I must have made me happen upon it in such a way. I scan faster than I realize, percieve without affixing meanings, assigning great swaths of the conscious field to hums and blurs. This seems to be the normal state of consciousness, yet upon introspection it cannot be completely without purpose. It too is activity, composed of acts or gestures intended to facilitate meetings, what might be called experiences. If Buber is right that one can only experience its, that is if experience fundamentally occurs in the modality of a third-person relation which cannot be the whole of being or its relations (NB Buber speaks here of Erfarhung rather than Erlebnis), then the recognition of the happening upon as an experience requires a non-recognition of the conscious agency that enabled it, for otherwise it would not be an experience but some other sort of encounter, and the non-recognition may itself be arranged in such a way so as to avoid bumping into oneself--it could hardly be you, could it?--which may be as good as saying that serendipities are a perfectly normal feature of our everyday consciousness. It shouldn't surprise us, then, that although serendipities happen in the empirical space, we can't very well predict our own serendipities, allowing of course for certain deviations of personality type or modus operandi. On the other hand, who's to say that Buber is right? Paul Ricoeur? Well, he does insist on a certain duality of existence. Beyond that, I reckon he has his own story to tell.

What Fido the Yak is saying about Crash:

• If a hypermodern intertextualizing atom smasher didn't exist, it would have to be invented to explain Paul Haggis' new film. Resonances: Magnolia, Amores Perros, Do the Right Thing, 13 Conversations About One Thing, Traffic, Code Inconnu, Short Cuts.... The list goes on. The allusions to Magnolia are overdone, and perhaps unfortunate. Snowflakes possess a quiet thrill all their own.




• People still say that Lincoln freed the slaves, often right before they say that Lincoln didn't really free the slaves. (A long story, if you have to ask.) The dead presidents featured in Crash might be there by accident, but don't bet on it.




• Quilting, northstar motifs--not directly, but pointed to by the invisible traffic cops of the metaphoric.




• Haggis accomplishes through transposition what other storytellers accomplish through transformation. The characters survive being plugged into mythemes rather nicely. A testament to the power of fictions, good acting, and the close-up. Trajectory does not enter into it.




• Trajectory really doesn't enter into it, but Haggis plays with the viewer's expectation that it should--so it does enter into it. We could say this is a case of projection rather than trajectory, but I'm saying Haggis has calculated the trajectories of his film's many leads and their refractions through wetwire viewing apparati. These calculations do make it into the film, become part of what it means to see the film. What could possibly be left on the cutting room floor? The Uncanned.




• It would be really cool to instantaneously become aware of the totality of Ibn al-Haytham's optics. Crash's epiphanies occur against a panoptic horizon, absent fixity, immutability, or totality. Sometimes they are painted on a garage door, and we think we know the characters, where they live, but we don't. What exactly is it that we want our epiphanies to reveal? Ironies?




• Safety belts. One minute they save your life, the next minute....

Roger Thurow, writing for the Wall Street Journal, succinctly captures the systematic quality of the violence in Darfur:

In famines where drought has killed crops, farmers are largely able to recover when the rains return. Darfurians have had experience with this; they protect seeds for the next planting season and try to keep their animals alive. This time, the hunger has been willfully engineered by destroying all aspects of the agricultural system. Seed stocks have been burned, animals stolen or killed, and the tools of cultivation, such as hoes and tractors, smashed.

Donkeys are sometimes counted as livestock in agricultural or economic surveys, but a donkey may also be regarded as a tool, durable heavy equipment, or most often a mode of transport. As such, Donkeys are not only essential to the daily lives of rural people, they constitute a crucial element of the market infrastructure in Sudan and throughout the region. It may even be reasonably argued that donkeys have formed the backbone of civilization as we know it since the time of the Pharoahs. "I don't think it's wildly speculative to suggest that the use of donkeys, which were the first tamed transport animal, played an important role in the unification of distant cities," says Albano Beja-Pereira. "It marks the boundary between human societies concerned with survival and agriculture and stabilized people who wanted to explore and trade." Beja-Pereira directed a research team whose genetic study found that the donkey (Equus asinus) was first domesticated in Africa on two separate occasions, once from an ancestor of the Nubian wild ass, and once from an ancestor of the Somalian wild ass.

Sudan's historical importance as a crossroads of trade between subsaharan Africa and the ancient oikomene is perhaps well known. Certainly the routes of the camel caravans have been studied in depth. Donkey trade routes have been relatively understudied. However, at least one major artery passing from Darfur to Dongala in Northern Sudan is known. Currently in Darfur trade routes of all kinds have been disrupted, as no path appears to be safe, leading to the collapse of some smaller markets, and erratic supplies in large markets, with corresponding extreme fluctuations in prices.

Is this a proper scale on which to assess the catastrophe of Darfur? What does the history of civilization matter to the living? I see connections between the roots of civilization as it has developed over the past five millenia and the existential dilemmas faced by the victims of genocide in Darfur, but I can't say that I've made the case in any scholarly sense. Call it a suggestion, then, a point of view on the crisis that complements what we learn from personal narratives without presuming to stand for them, to say "this is what such stories must really be about."

So how exactly does the donkey figure into the existential dilemma of Darfuris who have fled their homes? In brief, when your household's been dispossessed of everything except what you and your donkey can carry, you quickly run out of resources to maintain both the donkey and the household, and yet the donkey is crucial to your ability to gather resources. Consider the situation of displaced people in Mornay, as reported by an MSF fieldworker last year. If you've been lucky enough to make it into the camp with your donkey, and you've recieved some WFP rations, you still need to gather firewood. The armed men who patrol the camp charge 200 dinars for the privilege of being allowed to collect a donkey load of firewood. That payment is no insurance against being beaten, raped or killed. "Every hundred yards, the carcass of a donkey lies contorted in the sand," we are told.

An even clearer picture comes from Adrian McIntyre of Oxfam, who describes a Darfuri woman's dilemma:

In the grey light that comes just before dawn, 38-year old Muna awakens to a heart-wrenching choice. Should she leave the relative safety of this camp for displaced people in the Wadi Salih region of West Darfur and go out into the surrounding plains and forests to collect firewood for cooking and grass to feed her donkey? If she does, there's a chance she will be attacked, beaten or raped. If she doesn't go out, she won't be able to cook breakfast for her five children. Even the donkey might starve. The piles of rotting carcasses along one edge of the camp are a constant reminder that many other animals have suffered a similar fate.

Not collecting firewood or fodder would have other consequences as well. Like hundreds of thousands of families in Darfur, Muna and her children receive monthly food distributions from the World Food Programme. The staple grains, protein-rich flour (a blend of corn and soya) and cooking oil are a welcome contribution, but Muna needs a few other ingredients to prepare even the most basic meal. So she will sell some firewood in the local market to earn a few extra dinars to buy onions, tomatoes, dried okra or chillies to supplement her family's diet. Without the firewood, she will have to sell a portion of the food ration itself in order to buy the additional items‚ but the amount she receives each month is already barely enough to survive.

The donkey fodder is also very important, since Muna needs her donkey to carry water from the nearby well several times a day. When that well runs dry, as it often does this time of year, she must travel even farther to fetch water. This, too, can be a perilous journey that exposes her to potential violence.

Some readers may be familiar with an issue of interpretation surrounding the poem "so much depends" (aka "The Red Wheelbarrow") by William Carlos Williams. Williams, a practicing physician, had been called to a farmhouse to treat a young patient who hovered between life and death. As Williams gazed out the window, the poem occured to him. Does that tell us anything essential about the poem? Is the red wheelbarrow really simply what it is? What, if anything, does the poem say about life and death?

And so what does one make of the image of a collapsing donkey? It cannot bode well for the people whose lives depend upon it. And it cannot bode well for the future of our common civilization--which isn't to deny that a donkey is what it is, or even to weigh in on matters such as whether the internal combustion engine will ultimately provide more benefits to humanity than the domestication of pack animals. Simply as a matter of how we will live with each other and with ourselves, the massive dispossession and violence signified by the collapse of a donkey indicts us all. Will we allow whole worlds to be swept away? Will this be our legacy? To put our fragility on display, forsaking bonds cultivated over millenia? Can this really be who we are?

I won't display here the pictures I have seen because some of them are deeply disturbing, too disturbing for me to impose upon you. At your discretion, then, see the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library's collection of photos and documents pertaining to Eisenhower's reaction to the Holocaust, more briefly Ike and the Death Camps from the Eisenhower Memorial, Holocaust Encyclopedia: Ohrdruf from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ohrdruf Forced Labor Camp from scrapbookpages, Liberators: Stories and Photos from the Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust, and finally The Ohrdruf Photos.

What was it like to be behind the camera? David Cohen was with the 4th Armored at Ohrdruf on the 12th of April. He recounts:

I saw many buildings with bodies stacked in them. The first time I went in and walked out. I couldn't take it; I was sick; I felt like throwing up. I walked in three times; each time I became ill. I wanted to take pictures, but I couldn't. One of my buddies pushed me back inside to take the pictures.

I imagine Cohen would have empathized with the experience of William A. Scott III of the 183rd, one of the men who liberated Buchenwald:

I took out my camera and began to take some photos--but that only lasted for a few pictures. As the scenes became more gruesome, I put my camera in its case and walked in a daze with the survivors, as we viewed all forms of dismemberment of the human body. We learned that 31,000 of the 51,000 persons there had been killed in a two week period prior to our arrival. An SS trooper had remained until the day of our arrival and survivors had captured him as he tried to flee over a fence. He was taken into a building where two men from my unit followed. They said he was trampled to death by the survivors.

I began to realize why few, if any, persons would believe the atrocities I had seen. HOLOCAUST was the word used to describe it--but one has to witness it to even begin to believe it--and, finally after going through several buildings, with various displays--lamp shades of human skin, incinerators choked with human bones, dissected heads and bodies, testes in labeled bottles, so that they could be seen by the victims on a shelf by the door as they went in and out of the barracks (after two weeks of this procedure, they would be killed, but, we arrived before this ritual could be continued), my mind closed the door on this horror.

Eisenhower more than any one understood the importance of directly observing the horrors of the Nazi camps. He wrote to General Marshall on the 15th of April:

But the most interesting--although horrible--sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."

Four days later Eisenhower telegrammed Marshall:

We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail. I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you could see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of Congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C-54's, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps. I am hopeful that some British individuals in similar categories will visit the northern area to witness similar evidence of atrocity.

The townspeople of Ohrdruf were marched through the camp, an event which prompted the mayor and his wife to commit suicide. Their last words to the world: "We didn't know--but we knew."

Today, according to Carl Peterson of the 83rd, there is no memorial for the victims at the site of Ohrdruf. The town of Ohrdruf continues to celebrate its heritage as a home to Johann Sebastian Bach. History records April 12th, 1945 as the day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. Buchenwald has supplanted Ohrdruf in the popular consciousness as the place where Americans first uncovered the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. Even Eisenhower seemed never to have quite remembered the name of the place where he "first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality." And yet it is largely because of Eisenhower that we undeniably know what took place at Ohrdruf.

Unfortunately for Guha-Sapir's argument, Reeves conclusions are not especially inconsistent with the scientific data, and some experts have looked at the data and confirmed Reeves' high estimates of the death toll. Furthermore, since we have opened up the question of bias, it may be worth noting that the group of experts who express the most reticence about providing global mortality estimates tend to have a professional stake in the business of providing humanitarian aid, as does Guha-Sapir. Their reticence may be motivated by factors such as a need to demonstrate the effectiveness of an aid agency, or the need to avoid taking sides in political disputes, especially in countries like Sudan where the government is apt to expel, detain, harass or otherwise impede the work of humanitarians. Of course that does not mean that reluctance to provide estimates is not reflective of a genuinely scientific approach to the problem. However, it may be both scientific and biased, and we should therefore be cautious about accepting this opinion as the truth of the matter, especially since other experts disagree.

One study that has been cited by Reeves (and a handful of journalists) as confirming his dire view is the one done by Dr. Jan Coebergh, "Sudan: Genocide has Killed more than the Tsunami," in Parliamentary Brief, Feb 2005 (large pdf, also reposted as html without graphics here). Coebergh I don't believe is completely unbiased, but he has done us all a service in constructing three alternative models for interpreting the available data, and offering a reasoned defense of each. Regarding the death toll between February 2003 and December 2004, Coebergh concludes:

Many people have died as a result of conflict in Darfur. Figures of 218,449, 253,573 or 306,130 deaths since April 2003 are very rough estimates, but considerably more accurate than the numbers currently quoted in the media.

And which ever total you go with, it is an ever increasing one. This year looks worse than last.

Reeves' estimate for that time period was 370,000 dead, 64,000 more than Coebergh's highest figure, which is the one Coebergh favors, and 152,000 more than the lowest estimate. The differences--duly noted--seem rather huge, and yet compared to the estimates repeated in the news media at that time (variously "as many as 70,000," "up to 50,000" or "tens of thousands"), Reeves and Coebergh at least appear to be discussing the same phenomenon.

Still, I hestitate to accept Reeves' estimate as even roughly accurate without considering all of the arguments put forward by Guha-Sapir which call into question the extrapolations of Reeves, the Coalition for Justice, and also those used by Coebergh to obtain his highest estimate. A primary point of contention concerns the ratio of people killed by outright violence as opposed to starvation and disease attributable to unsanitary conditions in camps for the displaced. Guha-Sapir expresses the view held among some social scientists that normally in situations of armed conflict deaths due to starvation and disease greatly outnumber deaths due to violence. This begs the question of whether the situation in Darfur can be accurately descibed as essentially an armed conflict, much less a normal armed conflict. To support her view, Guha-Sapir adds that only 15% of the people killed in the Rwandan genocide were killed by outright violence. That's an extremely remarkable claim, as the commonly accepted estimate for the number of people butchered in the Rwandan genocide is about 800,000, and it seems unlikely Guha-Sapir is claiming that an additional 4.5 million people died in the events that followed the hundred days of mayhem (see Rwanda census puts genocide death toll at 937,000, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda: The Numbers from Human Rights Watch, Oxfam: What Happened in Rwanda in 1994?, Ghosts of Rwanda: Timeline). Reeves incidentally has cited and discussed the report from Human Rights Watch. Guha-Sapir cites no sources. On this point, then, Guha-Sapir's particular expertise may actually be preventing her from accurately assessing the facts more than it helps her to clarify them.

Nevertheless, there are a couple of respects in which I believe both Reeves and Coebergh may be unnecessarily leaping to conclusions about the number of deaths due to outright violence. In the first place, both examine the WHO retrospective mortality survey and assume that "the WHO figure did not include violent deaths." Reeves attests that Dr. Nabarro had confirmed this fact to him, and indeed Dr. Nabarro has said as much to the press. Nonetheless, my reading of the survey is that deaths due to injury or violence were in fact tallied. Thus the exercise of adding to those figures an additional figure of deaths due to outright violence would appear to be erroneous. (All of the other caveats Reeves adds to that report I agree with.) Alternatively, the report itself may be in error, or I may be missing something obvious. As it is, I cannot fully accept the interpretation offered by Reeves.

In the second place, Reeves' extrapolations from the survey by the Coalition for International Justice rely upon an assumption of average family size. As the AP reported, "projecting a precise death toll estimate from the survey is problematic because there is no certainty about the size of the group each refugee would consider to be 'family' — a key element in the calculation. Refugees included extended family — such as uncles and cousins — in their answers, said Stefanie Frease of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Coalition for International Justice, which conducted the survey with the U.S. State Department." Reeves' response to that criticism misses the point, in my view, although he is certainly correct to raise the other issues. Since Reeves projects in terms of deaths per family, it makes a huge difference whether one million people represent 200,000 families as according to his figures, or 85,000 families, for example.

For these reasons, I regard the high estimate offered by Coebergh and the estimate offered by Reeves with some skepticism. Conversely, their willingness to grapple with all of the available data concerning deaths due to outright violence has shown that death tolls improperly extrapolated from limited samples are clearly inadequate to convey the magnitude of the tragedy in Sudan. But if we would do well to regard all current mortality estimates as somewhat doubtful, surely there must be some range of doubt that can be applied to keep us from sliding into pure cynicism or ignorance.

One other issue raised by Guha-Sapir concerns the dangers of extrapolating from non-representative samples. That's generally a valid concern, however, by choosing to argue on the basis of anectdotal or hypothetical evidence rather than engage with the actual data, Guha-Sapir gives the impression that those who give high estimates are not basing their inferences upon statistically significant samples. That's simply not the case. Guha-Sapir mentions the work CEDAT (Complex Emergency Database) has done to survey mortality and morbidity in Darfur, and claims that they are "piecing together more than 30 survey results." The only CEDAT analysis of mortality in Darfur (pdf) of which I'm aware presents a table of mortality data from 12 samples collected by various agencies at various locations in Darfur. This is a smaller data set than Reeves et al. work with, but it nevertheless provides a basis for drawing reasonable conclusions about the mortality rate among Darfuris who have been displaced into camps administered to by international relief agencies. The average CMR (crude mortality rate, measured in number of deaths per 10,000 people per day) for all twelve samples was 2.65, while the median CMR was 2.15. There appears to be no evidence of improvement or deterioration over time, but rather unexplained variance. Therefore, I see no compelling reason not to regard the average CMR of 2.65 as more or less representative of mortality among Darfuris residing in displacement camps. (The median value tells us about the conditions at a typical camp, but not about the overall mortality rate.)

How many Darfuris have been displaced? Conservatively, there are now more than 2 million Darfuris internally displaced, and several hundred thousand who have fled into Chad. If we assume that (a) conditions have neither substantially improved nor deteriorated over the last nine months --my sentiment is pessimistic although there are contrary indications; (b) that mortality inside camps accessible to aid workers is equivalent to mortality in areas aid workers cannot reach, which is preposterous but warranted only insofar as actual mortality in such places is unmeasured; and (c) that excess deaths among non-displaced Darfuris are not due to same causes that displaced 2 million people into camps; then based on the CEDAT data we can reasonably estimate that the displaced people inside Darfur are dying at a rate of 530 per day, or about 16,000 per month. That number would be higher if we add in the refugees in Chad, although the CMR in those camps is probably a bit lower.

In sum, Reeves' estimates of total mortality in the Darfur genocide seem a bit high to me, but because he attempts to methodically account for every single person affected by the violence, he achieves a greater verisimilitude than many who have confined their projections to the small universe of people in camps accessible to aid workers, greater than those who have wrongly taken those projections as representative of Darfur as a whole, and far greater than those who have turned their backs on strong, statistically meaningful evidence of deaths immediately caused by violent attacks. We have seen over the past year abundant evidence of episodes of extreme violence, during which many people are killed, many of whom may not be well accounted for if at all. I fear that a large portion of the number of people reported missing have in fact been murdered.

My own best sense of how many have died is 300,000, give or take 100,000. I freely admit that this estimate is based upon attitudes, prejudices, assumptions and interpretions, rather than a rigorous analysis of statistical data, although I have also looked at the data and drawn conclusions from it. I don't believe at this time that precision is entirely warranted. I do however strongly feel that serious observers have an obligation to exercize their judgement and to the best of their abilities bear witness to the atrocities that are taking place in Sudan. I commend those who have done so.

I cannot fully comprehend why an epidemiological expert such as Guha-Sapir would suggest that Robert Zoellick's ridiculously low estimate is acceptable, whereas the high estimates provided by Reeves and others are misleading and unhelpful. She offers no real estimates of her own. Perhaps the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters will see fit to put online its Darfur mortality data instead of Guha-Sapir's opinion pieces, but as that work was described by Guha-Sapir in the same terms as the work published by CEDAT, I doubt whether it would truly back up Guha-Sapir's claim. What reasons and data she has put forward might tend to justify Zoellick's highest estimate of 160,000 dead, were she to make the case. But she doesn't. Guha-Sapir rests her case on her expert authority, without fully applying her expertise to the most urgent task at hand: telling the world approximately how many people have died in Darfur.

In the works:

• A reading of Arendt's "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," her reply to criticisms of Eichmann in Jerusalum. How that bears on current debates.




• Do numbers take up space? An aggressively naive probing of the Pythagorean worldview. Getting hung up on Derrida's intro to Husserl's "Origins of Geometry," Husserl himself, high energy physics, some Gabirol, a need to actually read and understand Aristotle's Metaphysics.




• Aristoxenus' Elements of Rhythm. This is leading me to reconsider Pythagoras, which I hadn't imagined, and also Kofi Agawu's critique of Africanist musicology. A note on the connection between schema and habitus. Need to reread Panofsky and Bourdieu.




• Fido the Yak v. Wendy Hamblet on Levinas' ethics. It's virtually a tko for Hamblet at this point, but Fido the Yak perseveres, confident that he has the superior reading of Totality and Infinity despite all evidence to the contrary. Definitely need to study the Cartesian Meditations, possibly Edith Stein as well.




• George Herbert Mead's The Philosophy of the Present. Can probably be folded into "Personal Responsibility" without recourse to Minkowski space-time.




• War of Visionaries: Francis Deng v. Jean-Loup Amselle. Actually more binocular than oppositional. Actually, actually more embyonic than anything at this point. We'll see.

Yoo presents the alternative framings as a difference between a Kantian view exemplified by Waldron and a consequentialist view, which he claims is typical of policy makers at all levels of government. It would seem as if the two sides were talking past each other--but that would not be entirely accurate. Consider one point on which Yoo engages Waldren, in response to Waldron's argument that to entertain the notion that a prisoner can be tortured, one must imagine changes in the culture of the military and the legal establishment that can only have deleterious moral and political consequences for the United States, and that indeed such appears to be the case:

About the culture arguments. I mean I think it's a, again, I think it's a very rhetorically powerful argument. It's a very difficult one to prove or to disprove, right? How do you prove or disprove that people who worked at Abu Ghraib were affected by the culture of the changes that the government sought after 9-11 to fight Al Qaeda. Alright, it's something that's inherently disprovable or provable one way or the other, because it depends on sort of this abstract culture which is hard to pin down. So he can say, "I think," if he wants to, "that we're engaged in this big cultural change that's going to have lots of negative effects on everything else the intelligence agencies, defense agencies, that law enforcement does." I can also say that "I think that would be quite limited, because the purpose is limited and we haven't seen its widespread use yet." But how would we prove or disprove it causally, one way or the other? It is a plea I think, a more of an emotional or rhetorical plea about culture than something that actually gets to the facts.

One problem here is that Yoo's position can and perhaps must be understood within something approximating a Kantian framework, rather than the purely consequentialist view he invites us to consider. His appeal to reason in this context is surely consistent with Kant's idea of a practical reason which governs moral conduct, and there are plenty of indications that Yoo has an understanding of duty that would not be unfamiliar to Kantians. Here's the rub: Yoo would like us to believe that culture belongs to the purely theoretical in this case, and yet he himself had previously invoked an aspect of the cultural as a contingency bearing on the interpretation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 for the protection of victims of war, and other prior international law. So the logic would seem to be that when one wishes to emphasize discontinuity with historical tradition, the cultural context of a law or treaty is of immediate, practical concern; yet when one wishes to emphasize continuity, it suddenly becomes hard to pin down and not very useful. That strikes me, to be perfectly quaint about it, an instance of special pleading. (And indeed were I to dwell on it I might discard my criticism as too, too quaint, but I'll record my impression regardless as it may yet point to a worthy argument.)

When it comes to interpreting the applicability of the Geneva Conventions, it's perhaps not particularly germaine whether those who drafted and ratified them held to a Kantian view of moral reason. It does seem highly relevant, that, as Waldron argues, such laws as prohibit torture were intended to be of consequence to the culture and social-psychology of military institutions. So indeed there would seem to be an imperative against torture in international law which envisions a cultural horizon as a practical matter and not merely in the abstract, and, for whatever reason, this imperative is not inconsistent with Kant's second categorical imperative, "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case an an end withal, never as means only."

Yoo puts himself in a tough position for while refusing either to affirm or deny something akin to Kant's second imperative, he accepts the legal (and probably moral) imperative against torture, but wishes to limit its meaning and applicability based upon changing circumstances. On what philosophical grounds then? As I've indicated, I don't believe Yoo makes a case based upon genuine pragmatist thinking, but instead uses consequentialism to disguise an instance of special pleading. Nevertheless he does press good points and raise compelling questions, so that by the end of the debate Waldron's position is not as firm as human rights advocates might wish it to be. It is not clear at all that members of international terrorist networks should enjoy all of the rights commonly afforded to combatants who wear the uniform of a nation state. What imperatives or practical considerations should govern our conduct towards those accused or convicted of terrorism? Waldron and Yoo contribute a lively installment to this ongoing public debate.