This Roguish Commonwealth

Not a Wonk, or, Specialization is for Insects

2010-08-24T17:43:00.006-04:00

This blog has drifted away from its original piratical purpose (to which I very much hope to return in time for my capstone next semester), but since it's a convenient and publicly accessible platform, I'd like to use it to share my response to American University's new "wonk" marketing campaign. For some background, I'd encourage you to check out both the university's official website devoted to the campaign and The Eagle's coverage of its launch on campus.

‎"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

- Robert A. Heinlein

While I think the goals of promoting community spirit and pride in knowledge of American University's recent "American wonk" marketing campaign are commendable -- as may well be the attempt to reappropriate the term "wonk"-- I don't think this term conveys what's great about our campus community to people not familiar with what we are attempting to accomplish linguistically. As dictionary.com and Wiktionary.org reveal, the connotative meaning of the term -- to people not associated with AU -- is overwhelmingly negative, not to mention historically charged with racial and sexual orientation overtones. While AU is seeking to independently redefine the term, realistically, I don't believe we're in a position to accomplish that at a level that extends beyond the campus community and incoming freshmen who are not familiar with the term. Linguistic reappropriation tends to be most successful when it is broadly and intersubjectively undertaken. Is AU really in a position to effect that level of societal change? Think about the contemporary connotations of "queer" and the struggle to reclaim it as a term of pride outside of a limited community. The negative connotations of "wonk" may not be as charged or even as hateful, but they're present nonetheless, and I'm skeptical of AU's ability to single-handedly whitewash them away. Based on the interviews in the promotional video, the vast majority of students who were enthusiastic about the campaign had never heard the word "wonk" before. What of those who had and found "wonk" wanting? Anecdotal evidence from AU peers, alumni, and outsiders to the campus community indicates that the negative connotations of "wonk" are alive and well.

Furthermore, as a cultural practice, the reappropriation of formerly derogatory or inflammatory terms requires an honest acknowledgement of their status as hateful, mean-spirited, or biased. AU seems to have made no such effort with this "wonk" campaign, glossing over the negative connotations and handing down a brand-new definition of the word that may exhibit certain denotative similarities with its ancestors, but which does not confront -- and therefore cannot overcome -- the sins of its father.

The real-world uses of "wonk" being tracked by the American Wonks website are certainly a mixed bag in terms of whether they are used positively ("A reader is impressed with brainiac wonks Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor and asks if they are the future of conservatism") or negatively ("Speaking of nebulous politicospeak, Taegan Goddard's new wonk-tastic Political Dictionary is now available"). But more importantly, almost all of them are used to refer to professionals with narrow interests, often unable to communicate those interests to a wider audience or relate them to other fields: "Two researchers created an experiment that will be known beyond psych wonks." (Merriam-Webster concurs with this latter sense.) Is this really how we want AU graduates to be characterized? As (social) scientists or practitioners unable to make their work relevant, accessible, or interesting to those outside their field or professional circle?

More fundamentally, even if we accept the more charitable definitions of "wonk" as gaining some cultural traction -- and it's possible that AU is part of a broader movement in that direction -- I believe that the word's association with highly specific areas of knowledge is the wrong message for our university to be sending. An undergraduate institution, at least, should aspire to and take pride in cultivating well-rounded, critical, analytical thinkers -- not cranking out narrowly specialized pre-professionals. Indeed, that's the very goal of the General Education Program. It is explicitly anti-wonkish.

Finally, I'm troubled by the explicit focus on "universities as businesses." I understand that a great deal of marketing research was undertaken to produce this particular branding attempt -- and that a certain amount of advertising is absolutely necessary to let people know about the excellent classes, professors, and ideals AU has to offer -- but I think we make a mistake when we think of AU as something to sell, rather than as a place to come to learn -- and perhaps more importantly, to learn how to learn. When we "brand" and "label" (quite literally, in the case of the free t-shirts the university was handing out liberally on the quad today -- and at what cost?) our undergraduates as specialists, we're endorsing an idea and creating certain expectations about what kind of person we want students to become. Do we really want our undergraduates to be experts? Or would we prefer that they be educated in a variety of fields which will inevitably touch upon, influence, and inform their chosen field of work?

As AU seeks to define itself and identify its niche in the world of higher education, it is important that we do not lose sight of the broader goal of helping students learn how to learn, think, and act as responsible, ethical, and informed citizens. And if we've given up that goal in order to train students to get elected as politicians, hired as corporate executives, and appointed to diplomatic posts -- to sell our university to prospective students in the crudest sense of the term -- we've given up on all the things I know and love about American University.

VIII. Some olive branches and an end

2010-01-28T20:58:00.005-05:00

Erin:

Fair enough. It's certainly an appealing idea, but with language as a closed, self-referential system, I'm not yet convinced it's possible. I need to think about that some more and finish Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's War and Reason -- and my reading for Rational Choice week in philosophy -- before committing to even the theoretical possibility of social prediction given perfect information. Suffice to say, I'm more interested in what's possible given today's technology and relatively unconcerned with prediction.

For what? The truism that people don't always act in their own best interest and use language imprecisely?

Meh, I typo with some frequency. I like better the irony that your passionate advocacy of skepticism and unfettered inquiry does not extend to wanting to discuss heterodox knowledge claims …

(Alan Shore begs to differ, but that’s hardly the spirit in which I meant “with all due respect.”) Please believe me when I tell you I have incredible amounts of respect for someone who intelligently, critically, and civilly hashes out the nuances of science and religion with me via the comments sections of a Facebook post for an entire week. Seriously. That basically defines my standards of respect-worthy behavior. However, I don't respect your (or anyone else’s) strawmanning of postmodernism. It *is* intellectually cowardly and it shuts down the possibility of debate just as quickly as the hysterical wilderness cry of “Faith means I don’t need to think about your evidence!” rules out any discussion of the merits of evolution with a blindly faithful (and fearful) creationist. It’s not hard to make a case for postmodernism being cast as a secular version of religion’s blasphemy and heresy – arguments that can’t (won’t) be talked about because they are too repugnant or would undermine an established system of belief. That said, I accept that you weren’t directly critiquing my arguments or language. This is, more broadly, a frustration with many people’s outright dismissal of knowledge claims on the basis of labels. It goes for Prof. Jackson’s apparent hatred of all of economics ever, or my philosophy teacher’s mocking of feminism just as much as for categorical rejections of postmodernism. And if that frustration translated into an unnecessarily harsh condemnation of your position, I apologize.

Your contention that you just don’t like postmodernism is, at a bare minimum, more intellectually honest than claiming that it’s all bullshit – and it’s certainly legitimate to have some sort of intuitive reaction to a way of thinking about the world, as discussed before. Granted, I don’t understand how a heterogeneous agglomeration of theories and methods could so grievously offend someone to the point that they can’t even bear to discuss them. This is actually a question of no small interest to me, but if you’d rather not talk about it, I will certainly respect that. I aim to challenge, not to antagonize. (I sometimes fall short of this goal.) We’ve abstracted pretty far from the original conversation, in any case.

Summary: I respect you (unquestionably) and the tenor and thoughtfulness of your arguments right up to the postmodernism bit. If I was overly confrontational (and it wouldn’t be the first time), I apologize sincerely. An olive branch: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/spacestories-gallery/all/1 (Even though Wired Science plays fast and loose with science news sometimes.)

Chris:
All fair. As yet another sidenote, I would say that though postmodernism, like any intellectual philosophy, is fairly heterogeneous inasmuch as it is treated differently across each academic discipline, the common threads that run through all of the postmodern movements are strong enough to be criticized as a whole. To a certain extent, I can criticize the Harold Washington Library and constructivism in the same breath because of their shared qualities. Unfortunately, the connections that I see in this regard must be fairly "right-brained," so it is difficult to put them into the proper terms. In terms of postmodern architecture, I am at least adept enough to say that very vew architects successfully create something that is both intertextual and good looking. What's worse, they often build those buildings on top of old, interesting buildings. They do make good sets for fighting with Batman, though.

"Hubble is back!" at number 6? These guys don't know how to prioritize... Though I will agree that the transit photos are pretty amazing.

Erin:
Oh, sure. There's definitely value to having and being able to us terms like "postmodernism" and "constructivism" and "science" and "religion." Else we wouldn't be able to talk about anything at all. I just think they should be subject to the same skepticism and analysis as ... basically everything else in our experience (or claimed to be beyond it...).

The transit photos are way cool! But I cannot understand why the discovery extensive pure water sheet ice on Mars wasn't a top story. Or the one about smashing the spaceship into the moon to send up a plume of liquid water. Also, Mars is supposed to be pretty bright tonight. I hope you're able to see it, since Boris Johnson has once again failed to issue an edict banning all non-essential lighting within the London metropolitan area for a couple hours one night a week for stargazing purposes.

Chris:
Of course. At the same time, when I say a word like "constructivism" or "religion," I have an absolute meaning in mind. The trick is communicating to others exactly what I mean by those words, which is something different (and I believe, more useful) from a simple, self-evident statement that those words mean different things when used by different people.

As for Mars, no matter how bright it may be, it's a little darker today, as NASA's given up on freeing the Spirit rover.
Erin:
For it was star stuff and star stuff it remains. Requiescat in pace.

VII. What is language?

2010-01-28T20:49:00.002-05:00

Erin:

If you do come up with such an equation, let me know and I'll construct a multi-colored graphical representation of it :) However, I think that doing in doing so, I would miss the point just as much as J. Evans Pritchard, PhD does (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOENu0fK0uM). Much to the chagrin of the analytic philosophers, ordinary language, like poetry, simply doesn't map neatly onto the Cartesian coordinate system, let alone onto the elegant symbolism of first-order logic. But, as Wittgenstein points out, it still *works.* Stuff happens when we call something "religious," even if its meaning is contested and vague. (Or perhaps more accurately, stuff happens because its meaning is contested and vague). So for things other than making the initial acquaintance of a new term or structuring the framework of a formal debate, I don't think dictionary definitions are good for much. As far as analyzing the potential for the institutions of science and religion to coexist and work together in the real world, I think it's a lot more helpful to look at how the words are thrown about, as cavalierly as they may be. Then too, I have no particular investment in labeling Sagan as religious or not, since it doesn't really affect my position one way or the other. That's your and PTJ's fight and, as we lack a universal shibboleth for all religion (as opposed to Christianity's handy little test of faith: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5RGxE2_G0I ...), I fear such a debate is going to devolve into a speculative interpretive attempt at getting inside Sagan's head which seems to be an explicitly non-empirically verifiable exercise. As you point out, Einstein used religious language to legitimate his work to a popular audience; I don't think we can judge whether or not he (or anyone else) was ACTUALLY religious from his writing -- just whether or not he used the language of religion, then, more interestingly, what might have caused him to do so and what the effects of doing so were (are ...).

Didn't mean to imply the consumption of spaghetti was mean-spirited when I said it was mocking. (Tell me, though, was there transubstantiation involved or was it a symbolic act of consubstantiation? Or merely an instantiation of that age-old tradition of communion, in the original sense of the word? )

As for people being idiots, I don't think irrational decision-making, inaccurate risk-assessment, or poor driving skills is much of a defense of this position, since irrationality and misperception of risk are pretty much universal. They're puzzling phenomena, to be sure, but they don't have much (any-) thing to do with intelligence. And I don't think "people are idiots" is a particularly compelling account of such behavior. It's got about as much explanatory power as the version of rational choice theory that assumes all people are rational decision-makers then proceeds to explain how they act rationally in any given situation. I'm not convinced that parsimony (your Occam's razor account) is all that important an epistemic value in social explanation.

With regard to ketchup, there is clearly a difference between the two products ... but both are called "ketchup." Why? How were advertisers able to convert mustard into a Veblen good while still labeling it "mustard," but the same was not true of ketchup? Why do people think, as Moskowitz suggests at the end, "ketchup is ketchup" but not "mustard is mustard"? The only way to answer these questions is to look at how the words are used within the social context of the condiment market ... A dictionary definition of "ketchup" or "mustard" is not going to answer those questions anymore than an entry for "flipped" is going to mention the French Prince of Bel-Air: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1428

Chris:
Everything can be mapped into logical statements as long as they're precise enough. It's just a matter of finding all the lurking variables.

I used driving as a single example (not to mention the oblivious pedestrians and bikers one always sees, not to mention again the errors in planning the roads, not to mention the errors of people who don't pay for their roads to be maintained properly, not to mention the fact that the problem stems from improper training due to our low standards for drivers' tests set by idiots who decided that anyone should be able to pass them, a chain of idiocy that pervades almost everywhere). I don't really care if it's a compelling account of such behavior; it's easy to say and gets my point across exactly.

People are idiots; there's no way around that. P.T. Barnum once (probably) said, "Nobody every went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people," and I don't think anyone's improved upon that quip yet (maybe Dr. House, early seasons).

In terms of the epistemic value of parsimony - The point of the rule of parsimony is to get rid of stuff you don't need. It is therefore invaluable in any endeavor that either wants to be understood, wants to understand things, or both.

You know my favorite thing about any postmodern accounts of language? Actually, two: one, they completely ignore Chomsky or anyone intelligence; and two, like all postmodernists, they use deliberately confusing language to hide the fact that they're bullshitting people. The last piece of postmodernism I appreciated was Pulp Fiction, and that came out in 1994. I can't be bothered to engage postmodernism because I'm reasonably certain it will give me an unnecessary heart condition. Which, to be fair, science and not religion will eventually cure.
Erin:
No, you're wrong. First of all Frege invented and the Vienna Circle made use of formal logic as an alternative to and improvement on everyday language, not a representation of it. The logicians saw language as it is spoken as an impediment to philosophical inquiry, not as constitutive of it (except perhaps as constitutive of philosophical "problems" ...). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did see logic as the fundamental form of language, but such an interpretation is only useful for generating a theory of truth or a theory of language-- fun philosophical problems, if you're into that kind of thing, but certainly not explanatory theories of how the world works. They weren't intended to be. All of the hard core advocates and developers of formal languages I've read (/about) so far have seen their systems as heuristic devices for solving philosophical problems, not as accounts of the real world. Tarski, for instance, admits that there might well be insurmountable difficulties in applying his semantic conception of truth to ordinary language.

In any case, to map concepts like connotation and reference and "improper" or imprecise uses of language into a logical system would require so many logical operators (you'd need one for every way in which a word related to another word ...) that you'd just end up with a reproduction or translation of the language we speak today. Similarly, while accounting for all the variables that exert causal influence over how we use language might be theoretically possible, it is practically untenable. It's like Mill's argument that it is theoretically possible to predict an individual's actions if we know everything about that person and his or her context -- but that we can never, operating in the real world, know all that, so we need different methods for the social sciences.

I'm sure it was easy for you to say that "people are idiots," but I'm honestly not sure what the point of that sentiment is, besides misanthropy. You haven't defended it as an explanatory account of human behavior (as I argued before, in explaining everything, it explains nothing) -- and it certainly doesn't generate any insights, let alone predictions. Why didn't the US militarily threaten the UK during the Suez Crisis? Why did the US become involved with NATO intervention in the Balkans? "Because they were idiots"?

As for refusing to engage with anything you deem "postmodern," with all due respect, I think that's a pretty cowardly and intellectually close-minded position. I went into this at some length this summer, so I'll direct you here: http://roguishcommonwealth.blogspot.com/2009/06/dissent-dissent-on-pirate-blog.html as Thomson raises similar arguments to yours. By all means, critique the substance and merits of my arguments (as you have been) but don't slap the label "postmodern" on them and whine about confusing and obfuscatory language. I find advanced scientific language confusing and obfuscatory. Why? Mostly because a fairly sophisticated and specific vocabulary is needed to address complex subject matter, and I don't happen to be familiar with it. I know Chomsky claims he'd never be able to learn the language of postmodernism but a) I think that's laziness and b) I sincerely doubt I've used any such language in this conversation. If I have, by all means, call me out on some specific instances and we can talk about those! In any case, what I'm arguing for here is a method of understanding the social world that pays attention to the causal role the use of language plays in the social world, not a philosophical project of revealing hidden structures of violence and oppression, which is primarily what Chomsky's critique deals with.

Chris:
It's still interesting to me, as a thought experiment, to imagine the complexity of language broken down. As I mentioned, I am not prepared to actually do it. However, I do not believe in irreducible complexity; it seems to me that there should be some way to break things down. I do not mean to imply that I am rewriting the history of rewriting language. Again, it is a thought experiment.

As is, so far as I'm concerned, the idea that it is possible to predict an individual's actions. To me, that's more of an intellectual litmus test than a sincere endeavor. (I do not doubt, though, that we will eventually come up with technologies that can do exactly what we're describing. It'll just take a long time.)

"People are idiots" is shorthand.

I like the irony that I mis-typed the word "intelligent."

It is impossible to call someone a coward with "all due respect."

Like all things, postmodern writing follows a bell curve where most of the middle stuff is okay, but not particularly interesting. Those average people of all disciplines try to cloak their uselessness in confusing language. I just end up seeing more postmodern crap than other crap. I did not mean to accuse you of using such language.

On a deep level, I just can't stand postmodernism. It may be intellectually weak of me to not continue to engage postmodernism, but it will make me a small measure happier. You may treat this as intellectual weakness, primarily because it is, but I am ill-equipped to continue. Sorry.
TO BE CONCLUDED ...

VI. How do we define anything?

2010-01-28T20:39:00.005-05:00

Erin:

It's probably true that some people find the "atheist" label off-putting, but the comments I've heard have more to do with AURA's tendency to take a tone of intellectual superiority towards anyone belonging to a religious community and the attitude that all religious people must not understand what science is or why it is important. It's not so much the atheism that bothers people as the tendency of some of AURA's members (though I think not the group itself) to be anti-religion. Hard to start a dialogue premised on rejection of an entire group's identity.

Sure, dictionaries are handy things (as for how dictionaries get there definitions, I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dictionary/dp/0060839783 from when I went through my dictionary phase), but they're notoriously bad at speaking to the connotational dimension of language and when an issue is as ideologically and politically charged as "science v. religion," chances are that acknowledging something more than denotative meaning is going to be necessary to structure a productive debate. That's why I'm more concerned with how terms are actually used and what effect they have than how we ought to define them. Maybe Sagan's world view doesn't fit under Webster's "religion" entry (or maybe it does), but it still matters that people call his view religious. That's more interesting to me than the question of whether or not Sagan (or Einstein or anyone) is "actually" religious. And actually, I think a conceptual dictionary of family resemblances is a great idea: think about it! It would probably have to be digitally structured, but think of how you could link words and concepts to each other in a massive web of meanings and relations! It would probably look something like Wikipedia, though less encyclopedic and perhaps more visually oriented.

Sidenote: What class was the Great DiPrima-Jackson Religion Debate a product of? And why wasn't I in that class?
Chris:
Personally, I haven't seen AURA do the sorts of things that would lead to such a level of animosity, were they not self-identified as "no-religious." Then again, I wasn't here when it was founded and only started going to meetings this past fall. I know that they've co-hosted a debate or two, which could have been the issue, but since I've been going, it's been speakers and spaghetti.

Again, maybe it would help to inform my view by saying that I hate people and think that they're almost universally idiots - this has nothing to do with religion. I'm therefore completely uninterested in "how terms are actually used." Calling bird poop "droppings" doesn't make it any different.

The debate was a byproduct of Social/Science/Fiction in spring of 2008. I forget how we actually got into this, but it had something to do with Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. [It kills me, by the way, that you can't underline or italicize in Facebook, but I refuse to put book titles in quotation marks.] Excellent class, of course - it's on a two-year cycle and (apparently) quite different each time.

http://www.neatorama.com/2009/12/31/carl-sagans-apple-pie-recipe/
Erin:
Spaghetti is delicious, even when it is consumed with mocking intent. And if you ever get Dr. Tyson to speak, I'll absolutely show up (provided it's not this year).

I take a pretty dim view of cynicism among anyone under the age of 60, but I suppose if you want to hate humanity that's your prerogative. I alternate between being frustrated and fascinated by the fact that so few people seem to think like I think (not so much what I think but how), but I don't think that makes them idiots. Basically, I don't understand the social world particularly well intuitively and I appreciate intellectually the puzzles it presents. Looking at language and how it's used is an appealing way to cut into this puzzle as language mediates, if not defines, much of what happens there. But then, I think there's an irreducibly subjective basis to what approach people take to making sense of the world. That's not an argument for "anything goes" relativism -- there's still an imperative to conduct your inquiry according to rigorous standards that are, as Weber puts it, "valid for other people," and to be intellectually honest about your work (your "Don't lie!") and nor does it exempt any approach from skepticism and criticism -- but I cannot find another compelling argument for theoretical and methodological differences among people from similar backgrounds. At some level one mode of understanding is just more intuitive than another. (On an individual level, of course, I love some people very much, strongly dislike a smaller number and am more or less indifferent to the rest. Kind of like most people.)

One of the articles I just read for my International Security class (which is, you'll probably not be stunned to find out, taught by a constructivist) begins by taking a stab at defining religion. Perhaps you'll find their recognition of the heterogeneous character of "religion" (in the context of a justification for drawing upon Kierkegaard's understanding of faith) more productive than my imagined web of meaning. (My imagined web of meaning is pretty amazing, though; it's all glow-y and responsive and interconnected like the plants in Avatar.) Anyway, here's what Lausten and Waever say: "Once, in criticising Kant’s transcendental categories, Hegel ironically claimed that every time he asked for a piece of fruit at the greengrocers he got an apple, a pear, but never a piece of fruit. Like apples and pears we only have Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc., never religion as such. Nevertheless, Hegel’s argument was not that this prevents comparisons and the introduction of categories. The point is,
however, that one has to accept that our way to the universal (religion as such) goes through the particular (Christianity)." [Disclaimer: It is possible that the image of Hegel shopping for apples contributes to my interest in this point.] Maybe an understanding and acknowledgment the limiting context of our definition is a better appraoch than resorting to limitless families? Regardless, I think the strength of your reaction to calling Sagan's world-view a religion demonstrates pretty clear that it does matter (in the sense of generating observable effects) how words are used ...

Alas, it appears I'm missing that class this year too. I'll soldier on somehow.

Here, have some posty-toasty asteroid lit: https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0BwOyd8-QlWaTOGM3Y2NiNDAtMzk3YS00YjhmLThkYzEtOTI1MWE4ODAxYTQw&hl=en .
Chris:
My reaction to PTJ's calling Sagan's world-view "religious?" I looked it up and decided that it was possible but an incredible stretch. "If we are to call Sagan’s beliefs his religion, as we may do, we must include the caveat that those beliefs are nothing like the religions that we know." And then, of course, going into an abbreviated version of my whole point, that religion as defined and as practiced involves certainty and invocation of the supernatural, which aren't things that Carl Sagan does at all in his work.

I'm sure that given time and the Principia Mathematica, I could come up with a hilarious equation that takes into account the strength of a definition based on its position (1, 2, or in the case of the definition I thought supported the "Sagan's religious" argument, 3) and the number of words from that definition which support versus deny the claim, but I neither have the time nor the Britishness to do so. It would be fun, though.

In terms of mocking intent for the Flying Spaghetti Dinner? Eh. The flying spaghetti monster is, I think, sort of an icon of a few years ago. I think it's a character that stretches across the line of theism versus non-theism into the realm of "snarky kids" in general. And to boot, it's an open event that's advertised by AURA as an AURA event with spaghetti provided by AURA and a movie (Religulous) screened by AURA. Whoever went just for the free spaghetti and got offended deserved it. Also, they are idiots (not for their religion in this context, but because they didn't figure out that they might be offended by going to a meeting of people whose "beliefs" they are diametrically opposed to). And because there's nothing wrong with theists laughing at the Fred Flintstone world of the Creation Museum in Kentucky.... See More

Which is an excellent transition into my "people are idiots" thingy. I'm merely being realistic. I don't mean that people are without redeeming qualities; merely that on the whole, the vast majority of people are idiots. (Get into a car and drive around. You'll find them. They often hide in plain sight in the left lane of expressways or drive giant SUVs because they think that they're safer for their families. Occasionally, one will leap across four lanes of traffic to get to an exit. Or better, use an exit that's not actually there. I will grant that there are less idiots in Germany and the state of the Autobahn is an excellent biproduct.) Then, on the one end are the truly psychotic among us, whom I don't think count as idiots, and on the other end, there are the people who at least meet some minimum requirements for making 3.8 billion years of evolution worth it. Note: this does not mean that I agree with them.

To learn how the social world works, it's best to assume either the worst or the simplest (or both - they usually fit together quite well). It's not very difficult. And again, I don't think that's a cynical statement as much as one that's tried and true.

Barely related to all of this: http://gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html - There may not be a Platonic ideal of ketchup, but there's certainly a difference between ketchup the sauce and ketchup the condiment.

TO BE CONTINUED ...

V. How do we define "religion"?

2010-01-28T20:26:00.002-05:00

Chris:

Though Einstein uses the word "religion" there, I still don't believe he's using what most people would recognizably call religion. Though I'm not accusing you of this, theists (and especially the intelligent design community, realizing the value of trying to synergize science and religion) have made the "Einstein was religious" argument by either vastly expanding the definition of religion essentially to "numinousness" (which I think is poor, because of the reasons I discussed in reaction to Webster's definition of "religious" - what Einstein means by "ultimate reality" is not what a religion means, and I continue to hold that exploring that "ultimate reality" takes very different forms in the realm of science (=let's try to figure it out) versus religion (=what does the book say). I may be accused of oversimplifying, but again, this comes down to the idea of ultimate truth and the supernatural that religion expresses.)

To a certain extent, I can agree with your point about "getting people onboard" from a practical standpoint, but only as a Tyson-esque backdoor way to get them to acknowledge that there is absolutely no evidence for the supernatural. Yes, I think that some people understand that there's no evidence - that's where "faith" comes in - but nearly every piece of evidence I see tells me that even more people do believe in miracles. Half of Americans believe in guardian angels, after all. And getting those people into science can show them that there is no such thing as a miracle. (Is it any surprise, by the way, that the US Air crash has been dubbed "Miracle on the Hudson?")

But I don't believe that using religion is a good way to get people into science. Dr. Tyson discusses one of those reasons in the person of Newton, who stopped thinking when he decided to invoke God tweaking the motion of the planets. As he says during his "Beyond Belief" speech (a variation on the "Perimeter of Ignorance" essay), the man who invented calculus on a dare could easily have figured out Laplace's math, but he didn't because he solved it with magic. Map this problem onto every lab in the country, and you're going to have a bunch of people who just stop after they hit a big problem or make enough money. The last chapter of all of their giant, unreadable books will be, "Well, I couldn't figure this one out and I'm retiring, so God." And then it'll take a while for the next person to pick up the work because of it.

Part and parcel of religion, in the way that it is practiced recognizably today, is a belief in the supernatural. We can correlate higher degrees of religiousity with higher belief in the supernatural, and I would argue that there is a causal link there because of the content of religion - it tells people about magic, an infallible immortal guy, and argument from authority quite literally as gospel.

Now, you or I may be able to hypothesize a version of religion that doesn't have these things. As I argued in my response to "Carl Sagan's Religion," such a religion is "indeed a set of beliefs surrounding an ultimate truth; however, they are markedly different from conventional religion because they do not proclaim to know or have a monopoly on the truth. Where traditional religions are conservative in that they are loath to consider new evidence that would suggest their fallibility, Sagan’s view of the universe is progressive, inviting new ideas about the nature of nature. If we are to call Sagan’s beliefs his religion, as we may do, we must include the caveat that those beliefs are nothing like the religions that we know." We may be able to use Einstein's "religion" in our hypothetical (again, though, most of his biographers would have huge problems with our calling Einstein "religious"). We can end up with a definition so close to Sagan's "numinousness" that it's not worth even redefining religion. But to get people to "believe" in that religion, I think, is just as difficult in getting them to "believe" nothing at all, and nothing at all comes with way less baggage.

You write of the alternative I'm proposing. I'm not proposing a specific practical alternative. It is not (nor is it virtually ever) my goal to create the world I would advocate for. Rather, I am espousing my belief (which certainly could be wrong) based on my available evidence that religion is unnecessary and incompatible with the practice of good science.

In summary, then, there is a definite advantage to getting more religious people into science. I don't think, though, that there's any chance of doing it while preserving religion in a recognizable form. My thoughts are mainly of the dangers of bringing religion into science in the same way the writers of the US Constitution feared the dangers of bringing together religion and state - the two would tend to have this awful habit of turning into some kind of scary hybrid that's just completely unproductive.

Erin:

Yeah, everyone wants to have Einstein on their side. (WWED?) I only brought him into the debate because of my fondness for “holy curiosity,” which I feel is an elegant phrasing of my belief that scientific (and social and philosophical and theological …) inquiry can indeed be a holy pursuit insofar as it can motivate us to do everything we can to push the limits of our understanding and abilities within some sor t of ethical framework (the sort of ethical framework that says “love thy neighbor” and that teaches us that secular pursuits [like science] can also be vocations that demand a full commitment of one’s intellectual energies.) Variations on the Protestant Ethic, I suppose, if I’m going to be scrupulous about citing my influences. I understand “holy” is not vocabulary you’re comfortable with, and with the intelligent design community seeking to appropriate Einstein to legitimate teaching the very definition of pseudoscience as science, it’s not hard to see why, but I’m not going to let a bunch of disingenuous anti-science activists claim that term any more than I’m going to let Republicans claim the “values voters” label. And I’m going to continue to resist your simplification of religion as a recommendation to “look to the book” (or stone tablet or papyrus scroll or whatever) for answers, when a scientific vocation would demand quite the opposite and the imperatives of liberation theology make demands which science and technology can (*can,* if religion lets them) answer.

So, clearly defining religion is a subject on which we differ at this point -- and I’ll come back to that later – but first let me address this question of getting people on board with science. I like Tyson’s methodology of education which essentially exhorts people to think skeptically and critically for themselves (instead of, say, placing antagonistic signs on public buses) – and I agree that a desirable consequence of that is likely to be a rejection of pseudoscience (though not of religion qua religion). However, those methods only work if people are listening, and the people Tyson needs to convince are probably not going to show up to a lecture at the Hayden Planetarium on rejecting the supernatural, leaving him preaching to the choir (sorry …). Thus my desire to promote some common ground between religion and science – not on an epistemological basis but on an ethical one. That is, the common ground isn’t one of “different ways of knowing about the world” – while that’s an interesting debate to have (QED), it absolutely does run the risk of confounding the two and letting people think God lies just beyond the perimeter of ignorance so they can stop asking questions. And that’s bad. Instead, I think highlighting overlapping ethical imperatives (“sometimes religion and science tell us to do the same thing”) is a much more effective means of creating the conditions of possibility for a genuine conversation that’s needed to change minds (citation: Habermas). In addition to the tangible results in terms of alleviating human suffering, such a conversation would mitigate current misunderstandings of science (as unethical) and religion (as anti-curiosity) that characterize the relationship today.

Why go through all this work rather than just marginalizing the fundamentalists and excluding them from conversations entirely? It would certainly be simpler and probably scientific progress would go faster and more smoothly. But in the final analysis, the speed of scientific progress isn’t my overriding concern. Such a line of thought is just too reminiscent of libertarians who think economic efficiency should be the ultimate goal of society. As frustrating as attempting to engage intelligent design proponents (those who seek to represent intelligent design as science, anyway) can be and as threatening as such people’s position really is to science, I don’t think science as an institution is ever important enough to justify treating people in what is essentially a dehumanizing, silencing manner. Beyond being counterproductive to skeptical project (try asking the AU Episcopalians how they feel about AURA sometime, and I think you’ll see what I mean), discourse about the faithful’s intellectual immaturity makes it all too easy to treat them as inferior. Please understand that I’m not accusing you of doing this (nor am I suggesting some sort of slippery slope leap to a mass genocide of the Methodists at the hands of the astrophysicists -- I’m aware of the shades of Godwin’s Law here), I’m simply stating my position that marginalization is not a good or right way to treat people. Too, I’m aware that “marginalize the fundamentalists” is an exaggeration -- if not outright misrepresentation – of your own position. But I do think it’s a consequence of your general orientation. It may be that science needs champions who do see it as the summum bonum of human activity, but as much as I love science and as much potential for good as I think it contains, that’s never going to be me. I’m not trying to convince you that religion is necessary -- that's never been my position; I am going to stick by my claim that religion can be compatible with the practice of good science.

As for defining religion, I don’t think you’re ever going to arrive at a definition of religion that doesn’t exclude people who consider themselves religious (me?) or include people who don’t want to be considered as such (Sagan?). Wittgenstein (guess who we studied last term for three weeks in Analytic Philosophy?) has a handy method for dealing with such hard-to-define words which involves admitting that there is no “essential” or “objective” – or dictionary – definition of a term like “religious.” (How could there be, for something that is fundamentally a human construction? We can’t even define “chair” particularly well.) Instead, he recommends looking to how a word is used to determine its meaning. “Religion” is obviously used in ordinary language as both as a means of legitimation (Einstein!) or delegitimation (Dawkins!) -- and while the claim that it means different things to different people is trite, it’s also true, and given the power of the label, relevant. Of course, what you’d end up with if you were to map out all these uses of “religion” would be a series of meanings, linked by family resemblances where Islam overlapped with Judaism on the question of (mono)theism and Judaism overlapped with Catholicism on the importance of ancient writings and Catholicism with Protestantism on the question of original sin and Protestantism with Buddhism in a conceiving of a life after this one and Buddhism with Hinduism on the matter of karma … Eventually we’d get to something that overlapped with Sagan’s numinousness (via pantheism if nothing else) with none of these criteria as a necessary or sufficient to demarcate “religion” as it is actually used. The point being, I don’t think your -- or Prof. Jackson’s (“Ultimate significance?” What does that even mean? How would that not include ethics [which are often wholly secular?]) -- attempts at defining religion are particularly useful. Given that people who consider themselves religious do – in practice – use their religious beliefs as motivation for relentless scientific enquiry, I think this is something to be championed, publicized, and celebrated, as it can generate results both in accordance with my ethical views (Further human knowledge! Help people!) and my intellectual views (Debunk pseudoscience! Show people science is a tool for good!).

Chris:

I would argue that the AURA people would seem antagonistic merely by putting "atheists" in their moniker. For many and varied reasons, people get a very negative reaction from "atheist" that they don't even get from "Muslim" in this country. Michael Shermer discusses this in his study of the horribly unsuccessful attempt to create a new label foratheists. In my opinion, this is why they should call themselves a skeptics' society.

Putting all practical concerns aside (because they're boring and insanely speculative), it should come as no surprise that I think the definition nonsense is pure crap. We're really good at defining things incredibly specifically; we're just not good at transmitting those definitions to others. I would agree, of course, that there is no Platonic essense of a word's definition, but I think it would be profoundly unproductive to leave it at, "We use words to mean different things, so the words mean different things." Each word would have an entire class of definitions. What a horrifying world this would be! Rather, we have these wonderful things called dictionaries, and if we could teach people to use them, we might be a little better off (And how do those dictionaries get their definitions, I might hear one asking? Smart people with lots of time on their hands figure them out. Experts, I think they're called.). Perhaps then we as a society could get out of this nonsense about "ooh, I want to be called this, but I'm not really, so I'll just call myself this anyway." But people suck. That's why I have no concern about the practical. To quote Dr. House (who was clearly just quoting me from my early childhood - that's actually true), "People are idiots." (And we can all find a lot of evidence to support that.)

As a sidenote, I believe that PTJ and I explored what our definitions of ultimate significance are in our back-and-forth. Ultimate=fundamental (M-W); significance=meaning/conveying meaning. If we didn't explicitly discuss it, it's because I think it was at least clear to the two of us. And despite the fact that it's posted online, our primary audiences were essentially each other. (PTJ posted his thing essentially as a response to something I was talking about in class, though he had already started writing it; I posted mine in direct response.)

TO BE CONTINUED ...

IV. Interlude: What about the social sciences?

2010-01-28T20:10:00.006-05:00

Chris:

99% of social science is not science. And Einstein was not religious in any meaningful way, unless you similarly overdefine religion as "anything that makes us feel wonder at the bring of our understanding," which is weaker even than PTJ's "Carl Sagan's Religion."

(I think that this is getting a bit unwieldy - unsurprising considering how many directions we've gone toward.)
Erin:
[Separate discussion... I'll reserve judgment on whether social science is science till after I've finished my course in Philosophy of the Social Sciences (though so far that's been more concerned with the ontology of the "social' than the definition of "science"). At this point, though, I'm with Weber in saying that whatever it is (and for Weber at least, an interpretive element does not stop the social sciences from being "strictly empirical sciences"), its methods are (or should be) scientific. If someone wants to claim social science isn't science, I'm ok with that so long as they recognize that it still represents a valid, empirically rigorous way of knowing about the world. I'm comfortable with the social as a knowable realm that does not operate according to scientific law. But perhaps that's best left for another time ...]

As for Einstein, what's relevant is that his religious views motivated his scientific inquiry: "Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion."

Again, not my view of the world, nor the only possible religious motivation for the practice of science, but why not take advantage of such sentiments to work together? I'm not a huge fan of naive syncretism, but I *am* all for getting people on board with science and very much opposed to the alternative you're proposing.

(And, yeah, it is. Massively unwieldy. I'll also maintain it's been a much more productive/educational use of my study time than most of the work I've been assigned this week.)
Chris:
[I would argue that social scientists usually are not rigorous enough to have their work considered "good science," though they certainly at least pay lip service to scientific methods because it helps ground their work in the language of science. Again, the problem is when social science treats its conclusions as more accurate than they really are. As I'm fond of saying, it's too bad that 99% of social scientists give the other one percent such a bad name.]

[Also, is that course being taught by someone who has a vested interest in calling the social studies sciences? Could be dangerous.]
Erin:
[Oh, I understand why many social scientists have dogs in the "is social science science?" fight; the "science" label confers a great deal of legitimacy to their work and when people exhibit a tendency to dismiss anything that isn't science as sophistry and illusion, it's no wonder everyone's so intent on subsuming their methodology under the science rubric. I guess what primarily concerns me in the debate is establishing that, whatever we call them, there *are* empirically rigorous, appraise-able, causal explanations of the social realm that are uniquely preferable to a wholesale application of the methods of the natural and physical sciences as a method of problem-solving. As I'm not trying to publish or sell anything at this point -- and as I don't need to convince most of my professors of the legitimacy of these other ways of knowing -- it doesn't really matter to me whether what Catherine and I did with our pirate research project this summer, for example, or what Jutta Weldes does in her Cuban Missile Crisis book is "science" or not. I do know that our methods were rigorous, conceptually coherent, reproduceable, and applicable to many other social phenomena -- and that they generated new understanding of a genuine puzzle that can be held up to the qualitative empirical data we used. Those qualities matter to me much more than earning the "science" label or generating falsifiable predictions.

As for the class, the lecturer is a very open-minded philosopher of science who has done a lot of work with the evolution of morality and applying game theory and computational methods to the evolution of norms. The class teacher's research interest is evolutionary psychology, but again, from the perspective of philosophy of science. Not my cup of tea -- by any means -- but as both of them are philosophers, not social scientists, their interests are considerably less vested than if they were practicing evolutionary and social psychologists. Again, the question of whether or not what we call the social sciences is "really" science is largely bracketed in that class: We did spend several weeks on the subject of objectivity and values in the social sciences, but questions of whether the social sciences are (can be, should try to be) objective and what objectivity actually means (probably not value-free, as it turns out) are distinct from questions of scientific-ness. Plus, give me some credit for thinking for myself here! I always treat my professors' philosophical and definitional commitments with a healthy level of skepticism.

Digression: It was with incredible amounts of agonizing, soul-searching, discomfort, and sharply critical thinking that Catherine and I embraced a relational methodology for the pirates this summer, and while our decision to do so was absolutely influenced strongly by working with Prof. Jackson, we had come up with the idea of a discourse analysis of piracy before ever meeting him. Of course, this idea did not predate our taking a research methods class with Prof. Howard who was Prof. Jackson's PhD student, and rest assured, we're very much aware of that. All the same, if we'd found another methodology more compelling, we could easily have sought out a different professor to work with. So there was -- as ever -- an interplay of influences and personalities at work, and if anything, the fact that we were working with a professor who has the strongest vested interest in selling one particular methodology (let's not pretend last year's IR Theory -- at least the second half -- was anything else) I've come across made as look at what we were doing even more critically. End digression. I just figured since you'd already dragged space into this, I'd put in a pirate plug as well :) ]
Chris:
[Sounds interesting. Didn't mean to put your professor on trial.]
Erin:
[I always put my professors on trial.]

TO BE CONTINUED (and returned to science and religion) ...

III. ... and Einstein doesn't help.

2010-01-28T20:00:00.006-05:00

Chris:

1. Evolutionary biology does give us predictions which we're able to test (for example, what we've just found out about the Y chromosome).

2. The God of the gaps is one of the most common apologist ways to get religion back into line with science, and it never works.

3. Newton's concept of gravity is that of a physical law, not of a theory, so he only gave us a measurement system, not a theory. Quantum gravitation and the GUT will give us more recognizably testable outgrowths.

4. Einstein's hallmark was that nothing was holy. He often used language that would make him sound more accessible (i.e. "God does not play dice."). One always needs to put that caveat in when bringing up Einstein in a theism debate.

5. This still goes back to one of the hallmarks of religion: you learn things based on faith, not observation. Science (and many other fields of human inquiry that are historically far less destructive than religion) can tell us to keep asking questions. Most of the wiseass atheists I know were at Sunday School at some point in their lives when they were forced to shut up because they were asking too many questions. Now, as you point out, this does not have to be the case, but when you're asking people to take the words of thousand years-dead people as fact, you'll always tend to run into this problem.

5a. Which is not to say that I'm advocating for the wholescale demolition of anything that has to do with religion. Just the religion part. Sure, we can keep the books around to study. We just shouldn't be using them as history books or as infallible texts. And whatever you can say about "it doesn't have to be" whichever way, the major religions (not the marginal ones like Buddhism, which isn't generally even a religion) take their texts as infallible. I think it's probably easier to completely marginalize those bodies that to get them to admit that their stories are actually fairy tales.

6. Again, religion can't, by itself, generate an ethic. Of course, there's interplay between what you've read in the past and what you want to do with your future, so it's a two-way road, but if we decide that asking questions and creating an "ethic of human progress" is a good idea, we can probably reread some religious text to tell us that same thing. But as long as something like that is taught to us like dogma, as religion is, we're going to run into the same massive problems that religion always (=99%) brings.

P.S. In TNG, people are able to work to better themselves and generate human progress without religion, and I don't think anyone watching the show thinks that's an absolutely ridiculous notion, or that it would be impossible for humans to actually do. So, the next random thing I would post would be that scene in ST: First Contact where Picard explains to Lily what the future's all about.
Erin:
1. We can get some testable predictions out of evolutionary biology but much of the (scientific!) work it does is descriptive not predictive in orientation. This is true of the behavioral sciences and economics as well. Lack of predictive power doesn't make an enterprise inherently unscientific. My intention here was just to push a little on your contention that "Science is that which generates testable predictions and this makes it superior to all other modes of understanding." Science is not (just) that which generates testable predictions. Your conception of empiricism as a value-neutral, ahistorical, unproblematic solution to knowledge claims is an oversimplification and idealization of science that ignores the empirical reality of how science is and has been practiced. For more on the contextual location of empiricism (from today's reading for one of my IR classes ...) see Williams, 1998: http://spejt.highwire.org/cgi/content/abstract/4/2/204, pages 210-215. Again, I'm not saying, "reject science"; I love science. I'm the daughter of a scientist. I want to be a (social) scientist when I grow up. I spend my spare time reading National Geographic and watching Cosmos online. I *am* saying that you should subject empiricism and the scientific method to the same rigors of skeptical inquiry that you advocate so ardently. Empircism is every bit as much a context-driven human construct as religion.

2. Please listen to what I'm saying! I never made this argument, I agreed that it's flawed, and it doesn't interact with my thesis that science and religion can produce overlapping ethics in any way.

3. Newtonian physics is not a theory but a research program. At the core of that research program were assumptions that were exempt from empirical refutation if research within that program was to be productive. Yes, science has progressed beyond Newtonian physics (which is why Lakatos uses it as an example in his account of how scientific knowledge changes over time), but that doesn't make it "unscientific" -- except, perhaps, if you define "science" in a narrow, contextually specific, non-empirical way that I'd argue is rather useless. Again, the point here is that science is not a monolithic, exclusively empirical enterprise. Again, that doesn't mean it's "wrong" and it doesn't mean it's inferior to religion -- or even competitive with it. It does mean the debate doesn't end with "science is empirical."

4. Einstein did use religious language to make his arguments more accessible. He was also a brilliant scientist who self-identified as a religious man and a deist. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1607298,00.html.

5. This is an argument against dogma and against lousy Sunday School teachers. It is not an argument against religion. I went to Sunday School and I was explicitly encouraged to engage in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. The anecdotal evidence cuts both ways. If you choose to define religion as "dogma which discourages free thinking and requires that ancient texts be taken as fact" then you're going to win the debate before it begins, simply by framing things in your own terms. But you're going to exclude all non-fundamentalist religion (and yeah, it's out there) from your analysis so your conclusion's going to be pretty damn weak in scope.

5a. The major religions, excluding Islam, do not take their texts as infallible, and I'm not sure what your warrants for this argument are. There are plenty of non-fundamentalist Christians out there who do not think the Bible is the literal word of God and who acknowledge its many contradictions. And, right, by all means, let's marginalize the fundamentalists. They're clearly too stupid and underdeveloped to even try teaching or communicating with. Savages. Plus, marginalizing those we disagree with has a really super track record throughout all of human history ...

6. Religion, in its interaction with practice, does generate an ethic. People act in accordance with religious teachings because they deem them to be adequate guides for moral behavior. It's not a matter of re-reading texts as a post hoc religious justification for action: It's a matter of ethical imperatives that are already there, that encourage questioning and research, and that point in the same direction as science.

Finally, I agree that religion is not a necessary condition for progress or improving the human condition. But given that a great many people are religious, and that religion can serve as a handy heuristic device for promoting scientific research, why not team up when religion points in the direction of pushing ever further the limits of our knowledge?

TO BE CONTINUED ...

II. Religion and science are not unproblematic ...

2010-01-28T19:35:00.004-05:00

Erin:

A word of clarification, then a line-by-line (without wading into your epic debate with PTJ which, while I wish I could have witnessed it, is somewhat separate from the point I was trying to highlight in posting this article): As someone whose only firm commitments at this point are to humanism, the explicitly non-theist (though not non-religious) principles of Unitarian Universalism, and the brilliance of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, I have very little interest in defending religion as a way of knowing about the great cosmic mysteries and am not about to do so. “Militant atheist” wasn’t my wording and wouldn’t have been. I am, however, utterly uninterested in Dawkins’ brand of evangelical atheism. I agree with Sheiman (and I suppose with Prof. Jackson) that continuing to cast religion and science as antagonists is not only a poor representation of reality but is counterproductive to the promise that both institutions hold for human progress. At some level, when you assert that there is something inherently violent and destructive about religion, you commit yourself to opposing it through means that can well become militant. Telling people they’re stupid for believing in God certainly isn’t physical violence, but to the extent that religion *is* an identity for many people, this kind of approach is a form of (admittedly posty-toasty) violence (to their subjectivity). By no means should religious belief be treated as some sort of sacred cow (oof, sorry) exempt from criticism, but nor is “religious faith is stupid, immature, and harmful” a legitimate starting point for debate.

As for Dawkins, he is indeed a brilliant old British biologist. He is also someone who has chosen to devote a significant portion of his life to converting the world to his version of atheism through a variety of disrespectful (and therefore fairly hypocritical, not to mention ineffective) means. He stays in my post. Anyway, he wants to be there, adorable grin and all.

On, as you say, to Sheiman’s arguments and your responses. I’m not particularly invested in defending the totality of his article (just his main thesis about partnership), but such an exercise seems like more fun than writing 1200 words on Marx’s and Smith’s theory of value, so here we go. You’re halfway right that religion doesn’t define human norms or behavior; it certainly doesn’t do so in any deterministic way, but it absolutely *influences* norms. Do you really think that norms of US foreign policy are not influenced by our historically Christian identity and idea that we’re somehow God’s chosen people? (Please understand that this is in no way a normative endorsement of said identity; merely an observation that it exists.) At that same time, as you point out, norms of behavior shape religious belief. There are a lot of very good contextual reasons for my religious identity based solely on the fact that I grew up in a liberal academic 20th century American household. That’s historical contingency and mutually constitutive causality for you (in case you’d been yearning for some social constructivism of late). More broadly, my point here is that religion’s influence on social norms is in no way lessened by its not being handed down on stone tablets: it has real influence because people believe it does and act accordingly. Why does this matter? First, because it points to the pragmatic absurdity of trying to eradicate religious belief: It’s not just a product of society but also a cause of it. And second, because recognizing that religion is not simply a mechanical effect of time and place means acknowledging that there’s nothing inherent in the institution of religion that stops people from thinking. Some religions do seek to do just that; many others do not. Blanket attacks on religion as coercive and unthinking, however, represent a fundamental misunderstanding premised on generalizations built on a few (admittedly really loud) manifestations of the phenomenon of religious belief. Take a moment to listen to the quiet faiths – the Quakers, the Buddhists, the Unitarians, among others for – that do indeed encourage free thinking.

Ok, on to science. Your claim is that science and religion are incommensurable approaches to our knowledge of the universe, to which I have two responses. First, claiming that, “Faith is not a way of knowing about the universe because it’s not based on empirical science” is a classic example of begging the question. Your assumption that empiricism is the best or only means of knowing things predetermines the outcome of any debate just as much as the theist’s claim that, “Faith means I don’t need empirical evidence for anything I claim to know” does. I happen to find empiricism pretty damn attractive, but that’s not to say there are not all sorts of philosophical problems with knowledge claims and justified true belief that cannot be answered with a simple appeal to empiricism (Gettier problems and all that). And, much of contemporary philosophy of science further complicates the situation by observing that while Popperian falsifiability is a tidy improvement on verification, scientific theories aren’t actually (empirically …) thrown out on the basis of contravening evidence. Hence Kuhn’s paradigms and Lakatos’ research programs, which are defined by a core set of assumptions, propositions, and beliefs that are, by definition, empirically irrefutable. Empiricism does not unambiguously mean knowledge, and science does not unambiguously mean empiricism: my point here is that championing “science” as the apex of epistemic perfection is every bit as dishonest and misleading as Sheiman’s strawmanning of militant atheists.

My second response to this incommensurability claim – and the one I’m most comfortable with – is the one you essentially cede later on: that science and religion are asking different questions and are seeking different kinds of knowledge. Yeah, some religions have a bad habit of stepping on science’s turf, but again, there’s nothing inherent in religion that says this has to be the case. Criticize specific instances of this epistemic infringement if you like, but don’t target the institution of religion.

I’m not sure where your claim that religion doesn’t tell us how to act or what is good or evil comes from: It absolutely does. Most of the Christian Bible can be divided into one of those functions or the other. Religion is by no means a necessary condition for morality but it certainly functions as a sufficient one. And so too does science – and it’s in this appropriation of traditionally religious turf that religion feels threatened. Unfettered scientific enquiry is and must be its own imperative: Keep asking questions ad infinitum. And it creates its own narratives (albeit very narrow ones) of “how we should act”: We should seek out scientific and technological solutions to human problems because we can. By creating narratives of humanity as its own salvation, scientific inquiry does indeed offer up a version of what is “good.” Secular, sure, but no less ethical because of its empirical basis. And for progressives like Sheiman, this “infringement” is a space of possibility. Science’s version of what’s good and religion’s version of what’s good can and in many cases do overlap. To the extent that both can buttress improvement in the human condition, there’s ample room for dialogue and good cause for abandoning the dichotomous characterization Dawkins – and plenty of evangelical Christians – are so eager to preserve.

As for religion being an early phase of intellectual development in individuals, again, this presupposes that empiricism is a “better” way of understanding the world than religious belief. That religion chronologically precedes empiricism in an individual’s epistemic commitments is an empirical claim; that empiricism is a better way of understanding the world is a normative question and not subject to the rigors of empirical verification. In any case, I think the pragmatic argument carries the day here: Even if it’s a developmentally prior form of understanding, religious belief is a subjectively legitimate path to knowledge for those who hold it and as such, it’s going to influence their patterns of action in a way that will leave them unpersuaded by allegations of their intellectual immaturity. Hardly a good means of converting the faithful to skepticism. Which, as you point out, Tyson pretty much gets. Other than that, I’m not sure how this immaturity argument interacts with the claim that science and religion can team up to do good things in the demon-haunted world.

Your next point, however, is pretty hypocritical. You criticize Sheiman for a narrow definition of “nature” then go on to define religion as “Don’t worry about it. You’ll meet magical people when you die.” I understand that was probably for rhetorical effect, but as we’ve both pointed out, tone and characterization matter in these kind of debates and that’s hardly an understanding of religion that’s going to get you very far in convincing the faithful of the merits of scientific empiricism. First, not all religions include, nor are most religions defined as, metaphysical conceptions of an afterlife. The religious enterprise concerning our aversion to death that Sheiman is speaking to is not one of a celestial afterlife in the clouds but one that argues for creating the kingdom of heaven on earth: for doing what we can so that our neighbors don’t die unnecessarily. Science too, insofar as it does not happen in a social or ethical vacuum, compels us to do the same – and gives us the technological means to do it. Why breed wheat with a greater yield? Why work harder to get the jump on quickly mutating viruses? Why develop better genetic tests for life-threatening diseases? Because in doing so we can push the limits of our understanding of the world. Because it improves people’s lives. Because Christ tells us to take care of the poor and the sick. These reasons aren’t incompatible at all and the potential they create for the alleviation of human suffering and the furthering of human knowledge is something that should be acknowledged and celebrated. And while it’s hardly likely to solve the epidemic of pseudoscience or get intelligent design OUT of our science classrooms, it just might facilitate the discursive climate and common ground that I imagine would be a prerequisite to these kinds of moves.
Chris:
Better off continuing Dr. Tyson-penned works. http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/essays/nathist/perimeterofignorance
Erin:
I agree that God isn't necessary to fill in the gaps of human knowledge. (But I kind of suspect that's not how many contemporary theists conceive of the divine in any case.) And as I said earlier, you don't need to convince me that science is a better way of understanding the universe. (But this is a more complex claim to make that "science wins because it's empirical and predictive!" I mean, evolutionary biology's not explicitly predictive, and I'm still down with that. Within Newtonian physics, universal gravitation isn't subject to falsification and that's probably ok too.) And yeah, it is bad news when religion tells us to stop asking questions. But Sheiman's contention -- and mine -- is that this doesn't have to be the case: religion can encourage us to keep asking questions too (Einstein's holy curiosity). And it doesn't refute the idea that science and religion can generate overlapping ethics of human progress and that this is fundamentally a good thing.

TO BE CONTINUED ...

I. Can religion and science be partners?

2010-01-28T18:23:00.008-05:00

Early last week, I came across this article on the UU World website, which argues that "both science and religion have something meaningful to contribute to a universal ethic." I found this idea novel and appealing, so I posted the link on Facebook. This post caught the attention of Chris DiPrima and sparked a week-long debate on science, religion, the social sciences, knowledge claims, campus politics, language, and human nature. Since then, our debate has come up in conversation with several people who do not have Facebook accounts, and by popular request (and with Chris's permission), I'm posting a transcript of our conversation in several installments here on the pirate blog. Out of fairness to both parties and an attempt to preserve the coherence and flow of our rather unwieldy dialogue (and mostly laziness) I've left it largely unedited.

***************************************************

Erin Lockwood:

Richard Dawkins, et al., please take note:
http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/151704.shtml.

"It can be claimed that science does not speak to ethics and values, but that is not entirely correct. The scientific method is truly values-neutral, dedicated only to understanding the natural world. The institution we call science, on the other hand, is motivated by a genuine desire to improve the human condition: increasing food yields, curing disease, overcoming the conditions that foster poverty, understanding the reasons for criminal behavior, distributing low-cost personal computers to poor children—the list of science’s humanistic aims is endless.

Thus, the two disciplines—science and religion—continue to express humanity’s teleological quest for progress and perfection: 'the best and most complete form of goodness,' in Aristotle’s words. Science and religion come from the same human aspiration—the quest for transcendence and salvation. Both disciplines strive to understand the essence of the universe, the 'language of God.' And in a sense, both seek to recover humankind’s 'lost divinity.'"

Chris DiPrima:

http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/essays/nathist/holywars

Erin:

Given that Sheiman's claim is that "both science and religion have something meaningful to contribute to a universal ethic," not that religion has anything to begin to counter science's predictive and empirical value, I think he (and I) would agree with pretty much all of Tyson's points except the following: "Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion." First of all, it is not clear that this is true even if we were to define the practice of science solely in terms of methodology. See, for example, the work of Heather Douglas: http://www.jstor.org/stable/188707. But, as Sheiman points out, beyond the scientific method, non-epistemic values undeniably influence the current practice of science in all kinds of ways: This is his argument about science being motivated by improving the human condition, and it is at this nexus of the empirical and the ethical that there is room for science and religion to not only talk but to work as partners. ( I'd also argue that even ostensibly "pure" science works to improve the human condition by increasing what we know [*know*, not believe or accept on faith] about the world, but I'm not sure Sheiman goes quite that far ...)

Chris:

First, straight-up, Sheiman characterizes the debate in a way that I feel is dishonest. I don't believe that there is such thing as a "militant atheist:" to be militant, I think one has to do the sorts of things that qualify you as violent, and atheists generally don't burn down churches. In fact, atheists tend not to be predisposed to war-like tendencies. I've argued in the past that questioning one's religion is one of the ways to automatically get a viceral response because it is a chosen identity which people treat as some sort of in-bred one. But this is a discussion for another time.

My point here is that Richard Dawkins is an adorable, grey-haired British man who is one of the greatest biologists of all time, and somehow he has been categorized as militant for much of his career (even before The God Delusion). Now, Dr. Tyson takes Dawkins to task for the way people react to him, which hits on the idea that as long as you directly criticize religion, you will be thought of as "militant." Which is why, by the way, Dr. Tyson avoids making his "Perimeter of Ignorance" speech these days, preferring to introduce skepticism to people and letting them figure out that there's no such thing as the supernatural on their own terms. But again, this is a discussion for another time.

So, to Sheiman's actual arguments. First, religion does not define human norms or behaviors. If that were true, we would still have the Ultimate 747 conundrum of who made the religion (but then, this would bring up the problem of appeal to inappropriate authority - those guys have been dead for a long time). Rather, operational human norms define what parts of religion people agree with at any particular time of human culture. The danger, of course, is that people don't realize this, then pick up on the crazy shit (like the "no mixed fabrics" section), and finally start blowing people up because they're wearing nylon. Because the problem with using religion as the backdrop for your social norms is that it stops people from thinking.

Sheiman insults both science and religion in the last statement of the first section. True believers really do believe that the Big Bang did not happen; this is the ignorance that religion teaches. When atheists say that science invalidates the supernatural, they are correct. There is no way to believe in both the supernatural and science, which states that the universe is knowable through the methods of empiricism alone. This is not a belief for belief's sake; it works, and that is why scientists still use it. If it didn't, the method would need to be changed and scientists would do so. The great thing about science is that it is always open to new ideas, as long as they are based on evidence.

It is true that science cannot say for certain that there is no spiritual world. However, it can demonstrate that there is no mind-body duality and other testable claims that religion makes about the world. As my friend Andrew put it, "Indeed, the problem of getting along with religion is that religion won't play with its toys. it has to keep trying to play with science's toys, which is a bad idea if there ever was one." The bigger point is that science tells us not to believe something until we have evidence for it. The idea that we should believe in something until we prove that it doesn't exist is rather strange, from Russell's Teapot to WMDs. Scinece, on the other hand, is not infringing upon religion's domain. Science does not tell us how to act, or what is good or evil. However, as I have noted above, neither does religion.

Next, Sheiman essentially recapitulates the "God of the gaps" argument that Tyson debunks in his "Holy Wars" essay. If we declare God as the creator of the universe, we are doing so only because science has not yet shown us how the Big Bang started. As Tyson explains, this is not a new idea, and the problem with it is always that human knowledge eventually fills in the gaps. (Meanwhile, it just makes it much harder to get things like the Copernican model of the solar system or evolution accepted by the masses.)

Actually, there is a very good argument about religion being not a vestige of earlier phases of human development, but as a result of early phases of individual development. This is not a hypothesis that leads to the idea that religion will wither away; rather, it explains why our brains fire for religion. Because humans are born with underdeveloped brains, they need to learn from adults. Therefore, the early human brain is predisposed to have a certain amount of credulity so that children will accept whatever their parents say. It is an unintended consequence of this development that leaves the door open for us to remain credulous throughout life, believing in the supernatural. (How is it that nearly every major newspaper has an astrology section, but none have an astronomy section?)

"Science may tell us that nothing exists beyond the natural realm, but at the same time it seeks to push humanity above nature" - I don't see how this has any bearing on the argument whatsoever. Yes, the methods of science allow us to understand the (natural) world around us to the point where we can then improve the world and ourselves (in natural, not supernatural ways. I think that Sheiman is using a deliberately narrow definition of "nature" to prove his point, which I again think is dishonest.). How does this mean that it is comparable to the religious enterprise, which is essentially, "Don't worry about it. You'll meet magical people when you die." Yes, both speak to us about immortality because we don't like to die, but one is a real way to become "immortal" and the other way is a lie. Just because science and religion speak to the same human concerns does not mean that they are compatible; in fact, the opposite is more likely to be true, especially if science and religion are fighting over the same turf for the same money and the same minds.

So, finally, Sheiman uses dishonest rhetorical techniques to try to equivocate the pursuits of science and nature. The bottom line, though, is that religion makes claims about the physical world, which is definitely within the realm of science. Therefore, both cannot be accepted. A God of the gaps, meanwhile, has proven useless over the last few hundred years, so it is foolhardy to invoke it again. The only possible redeeming value of religion would be the invocation of a moral code, but as I have mentioned (and Dawkins et.al explain quite well), religion does not give us a moral code.

For more (since this response is not even long enough to scratch the surface of this sort of thing), PTJ and I had a debate about this during our Social/Science/Fiction class.

PTJ: http://profptj.blogspot.com/2008/04/carl-sagans-religion.html
Me: http://backyardrocket.blogspot.com/2008/04/we-are-star-stuff.html

TO BE CONTINUED ...

Descending from the heights, part Zombie!

2009-08-18T11:46:00.008-04:00

Nope, we're not talking about "cruel, demented, vicious pirates who cannot be killed," though that's interesting too:

But rather, as has been extensively well-documented on the pirate blog, Catherine and I are perhaps understandably concerned with being taken seriously, not in spite of, but rather because of, our study of something as popular as pirates. So we're always on the look-out for cases where popular culture is treated as analytically relevant to scholarly research, and the BBC today was happy to oblige. According to an article entitled "Science ponders 'zombie attack'," mathematical researchers at the University of Ottawa have used the hypothetical scenario of a zombie attack as an exercise in infectious disease modeling.

Professor Robert Smith? (the question mark is part of his surname and not a typographical mistake) and colleagues wrote: "We model a zombie attack using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions."

The researchers only considered old-school slow zombies, but even so, the results were worrying:

... their analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable. In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often". They added: "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble." According to the researchers, the key difference between the zombies and the spread of real infections is that "zombies can come back to life".

This study (available in full here) is an example of the "popular culture as a mirror" approach outlined in the introduction to Harry Potter and International Relations (11-13), as can be seen from the article's abstract:

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

Meanwhile, on his Foreign Policy blog, Daniel Drezner briefly and light-heartedly applies some theories of International Relations to a zombie attack. While Drezner's analysis is not fully fleshed-out (sorry!), a brief survey (n=3) I conducted in the last 5 minutes unanimously suggests that zombies should probably be considered alongside Kosovo to understand IR theory. As Daniel Nexon and Iver Neumann write, "The mirror approach is broader than simply deploying popular culture artifacts as a teaching aid. IR scholars can examine popular culture as a medium for exploring theoretical concepts, dilemmas of foreign policy, and the like" (12). As an important caveat, 2/3 of respondents conditioned their response on zombie attacks, unlike extraterrestrial visitations, remaining confined to the realm of hypothetical thought experiments.

How do you hide an elephant?

2009-08-12T15:01:00.004-04:00

The Maltese-flagged, Finnish-chartered ship that reported being attacked by pirates in the Baltic sea on July 24 has apparently disappeared. The Arctic Sea, a cargo ship carrying 6,500 tons of timber, was supposed to have reached Algeria on August 4 and was last spotted on July 30 when it passed through the Bay of Biscay, but the Portuguese naval commander states that, "We can guarantee that the ship is not in Portuguese waters nor did it ever pass through Portuguese waters." This bizarre occurrence has sparked confused debate about whether or not the ship could have fallen victim to a pirate attack. Some maritime experts are hesitant about attributing the disappearance to pirates, suggesting a commercial dispute instead. From today's AP article:

"There have been no attacks in European waters," said Pottengal Mukundan, director of the London-based International Maritime Bureau. "It's not the kind of area where pirates would find it easy to operate." Nick Davis, the chief executive of the Merchant Maritime Warfare Centre, told the BBC that if anything had happened to the ship, cargo would have been found. "I strongly suspect that this is probably a commercial dispute with its owner and a third party and they've decided to take matters into their own hands," he said Wednesday.

Other maritime security experts have labeled this scenario "a new type of piracy" and have expressed amazement at the disappearance of a 4,000 tonne ship in the world's best-traveled shipping route:

Graeme Gibbon-Brooks, managing director of Dryad Maritime, an intelligence company specialising in piracy, said that if the ship may have been the victim of a new kind of piracy.

“If this is a criminal act, it appears to be following a new business model. It seems likely that the vessel will head to the west coast of Africa,” he said.

Mark Dickinson, general secretary of seafarers’ union Nautilus International, said: “It is alarming that, in the 21st century, a ship can apparently be commandeered by hijackers and sail through the world’s busiest waterway with no alarm being raised and no naval vessel going to intercept it.

“It is unbelievable that a ship can sail around for more than a fortnight with no one seemingly knowing its precise location or who is in control.”

The International Maritime Bureau, for its incredulous part, has not classified the incident as piracy: "We are not going to classify this as a piracy event, mainly because of the location and circumstance," he [Jeremy Harrison of the British Chamber of Shipping] said. The bureau is unaware of any piracy in recent memory in the waters off Sweden," spokesman Cyrus Mody said.

The Russian navy has joined in the hunt for the ship, and its warships and nuclear submarines have have been told to “take all necessary measures to find and free” the ship and its 15-man Russian crew. According to CNN, Mikhail Voitenko, editor of the Russian Maritime Bulletin Web site said he believed the vessel was carrying "some kind of secret cargo" which made it attractive to potential hijackers. The crew's account of the July 24 attack suggests a drug connection, a possibility the Telegraph has speculated about.

The New York Times reports that Maltese officials believe the ship to be headed out into the Atlantic.

Somalia and its pirates - back in the news again

2009-08-12T13:43:00.006-04:00

While in Kenya last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged greater support for Somalia's incredibly weak transitional federal government, met with Somali president Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, and threatened sanctions against Eritrea for supporting al-Shabab and the other Islamist militias which are reported by the Somali president himself to control all but a few city blocks of Somalia. In keeping with the tone of Clinton's remarks (including those made after the meeting), much of the recent coverage of Somalia has been focused on the threat of terrorism (including this interesting story about an attempt by a Minneapolis radio station to counter extremist propaganda with Somali-language VOA news coverage; apparently airing a program in produced by US public diplomacy is illegal in the US).

However, the renewed discussion of Somalia's identity as a failed state has obvious implications for addressing piracy off its shores. The recent rebirth of the Somali navy has attracted a moderate amount of news coverge, though a Coast Guard anti-piracy task force might be more effective. This BBC article on Somali's new Navy chief highlights the absurdity of commanding a Navy in the absence of a government, ships, equipment, and control of the coastline, but the Somali government has long maintained that training such a force is the best way to prevent piracy. Writing for Information Dissemination, Robert Farley suggests that the need for training represents an opportunity for the US to "influence the institutional development not just of the Somali Navy, but also of the various other navies of East Africa, and the rest of the world." The EU has already announced its plans to train a Somali anti-piracy security force, but it appears this would be distinct from the nascent Navy.

The relationship between shoring up Somali governmental institutions and the media focus on piracy cuts both ways. In a briefing on the semi-autonomous Puntland region published today, the International Crisis Group states that:

The [Somali] government must take advantage of the piracy-driven international attention to mobilise funds and expertise to carry out comprehensive political, economic and institutional reforms that address the fundamental problems of poor governance, corruption, unemployment and the grinding poverty in coastal villages. The international community needs to refocus on the long-term measures without which there can be no sustainable end to that practice or true stability. Equipping and training a small coast guard is obviously a necessary investment, but so too are other steps, such as to improve the general welfare and help impoverished fishing communities.

Meanwhile, a Turkish frigate working with NATO forces in the Gulf of Aden captured five suspected pirates today and is claiming to have prevented a possible ship hijacking, and the Hansa Stavanger, the German ship released last week, is headed home to Germany where Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung has called for a constitutional amendment giving German armed forces a greater role in hostage rescue situations, citing the length of time it took for German police forces to deploy to the Horn of Africa after the Hansa Stavanger was hijacked.

US officials too are worried about the threat of piracy in the Gulf of Aden. Citing dangers to US shipping (and thereby linking pirates to the "trade" commonplace in our analytical model), Elijah Cummings, Chair of the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, recently wrote an op-ed about his amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that "would require the Department of Defense to place small teams of armed security aboard those few U.S. flagged ships truly at risk of being boarded when they carry U.S. government cargo through an area where there is a high risk of piracy." The House passed the Act and Cummings's amendment last month.

Pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden are expected to increase in coming weeks with the end of monsoon season in east Africa.

We made a movie!

2009-08-12T02:47:00.006-04:00

The video below demonstrates the ways in which a finite number of rhetorical commonplaces (morality, romance, law, marginality, history, trade, nation, and violence) were configured during five eras of the pirate tradition (the Golden Age of Piracy, the period between the Golden Age and the Civil War, the Civil War era, the 20th century, and today). The straight lines represent links made between commonplaces; the dashed lines represent distancing mechanisms, that is, when the commonsensical link between two commonplaces was severed. For instance, in the first slide, the commonplaces of "marginal" and "nation" are both linked and distanced. This is because some key texts from that period articulate a link between pirates' marginal identity and a given nation, while others carve out space for pirates within the national discourse. The linking mechanism occurs in a 1699 letter, published as a broadsheet, and calling upon Parliament to stamp out piracy in the Americas by "bring[ing] all these Colonies to a more immediate dependence on the Crown." Distancing can be seen in the preface to the second edition (1684) of Buccaneers of America, which talks about "the unparallel'd, in not inimitable, adventures and Heroick exploits of our own Countrey-men ... whose undaunted and exemplary Courage, when called upon by our King and Country, we ought to emulate."

(For some reason, creating an animated version of the rhetorical topographies we drew up last week seemed like a good project to start around 11:30 last night ... When I finished in the wee hours of the morning, I couldn't figured out a better way to turn a PowerPoint presentation into a video than the following, though clearly it has some problems. We are, of course, working on a formal analytical write-up of this complex process during the daylight hours.)

Book Critique: The Invisible Hook

2009-08-10T18:13:00.014-04:00

The following critique is from a first draft of our literature review. It is deliberately analytical, rather than normative, in keeping with the orientation of our own research project. This is why, instead of objecting to Leeson's characterization of torture as rational on normative grounds, I have pointed out the empirical contradictions in his analysis of torture and looked at his arguments as a means to undermine the explanatory power of rational choice theory on this subject. This is not to suggest that I in any way agree with the normative implications of Leeson's hagiographic treatment of pirates, but merely that for the purposes of our project, it made sense to confine my critical reading to the analytic realm.
***
In his 2009 book The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, economist Peter T. Leeson argues that rational choice theory is the only way to understand “flamboyant, bizarre, and downright shocking pirate practices” of the 18th century (6). Leeson’s thesis is that ostensibly modern societal ideas such as the democratic process, power-sharing, and racial equality emerged not as liberal ideological ends, but as rationally efficient means by which pirates could operate as a successful criminal social group. Leeson offers an economic basis for accounts of piratical democracies, codes of conduct, and racial tolerance; presents flying the Jolly Roger and torturing captives as rationally-motivated examples of economic signaling; and argues that conscription was the inefficient exception, not the rule, aboard pirate ships. However, because Leeson begins with the assumption that pirates were rational actors (5), his subsequent empirical proof of how pirates’ actions were rational is unnecessary, rendering his analysis an unimpressive contribution to understanding the pirate tradition¹. Indeed, The Invisible Hook is better viewed as a particular configuration of commonplaces than as a conceptual history of piracy (Hansen 2006: 81). There are three main problems with Leeson’s work as a piece of analytical literature: flawed reasoning; empirical errors; internal inconsistencies.

Leeson’s account is unique among modern sources on historical piracy in its acknowledgment of the important role perception plays in the pirate tradition. He argues that pirates deliberately crafted a terrifying image of themselves in order to more efficiently elicit information from hostages, punish government officials, and regulate conduct on board the ship. “Pirates skillfully deployed their infamous instruments of terror, generating a reputation for cruelty and madness that spread throughout the maritime world” (108). Similarly, by flying the Jolly Roger, pirate ships signaled their identity to merchant ships in order to minimize resistance (90), and to capitalize on the fact that merchants were less likely to resist pirates than state-sanctioned attackers (99). Leeson’s research suggests that pirates quite deliberately linked their marginal identity to a discourse of barbarism and excessive violence. Although this argument reveals a particularly interesting rhetorical positioning of piratical identity, as an analytical justification for pirates’ rationality, it is fundamentally tautological. If we begin with the assumption that pirates are rational actors, then of course pirates’ actions can – indeed, must – be read as rational, but this is little more than an elaborate definition of the original assumption, akin to Leeson’s statement that “Pirates’ system of private governance was highly successful, a fact reflected in the success of piracy itself” (79). In addition to being a tautology, the conclusion of this statement is not entirely true. By the late 1700s, piracy would be virtually eliminated as large-scale threat for close to 300 years. The Invisible Hook only explains a discrete moment in the pirate tradition; it does not consider how interpretations of the threat of piracy changed over time nor does it explain how piracy ceased to be regarded as a credible threat at all.

Leeson’s empirical evidence for his claims about pirates’ rational actions is flawed or incomplete in several places. Many of his arguments about piratical democratic institutions and systems of governance are based on so-called pirate codes (58). While there is indeed evidence that pirates drew up such agreements, there is much less to suggest these codes were reliably enforced. There are three reasons to regard the presumed adherence to these codes with skepticism. First, Leeson presents Charles Johnson’s account² of such articles aboard Captain Robert’s ship as evidence for pirates’ private governance (62). Aside from the obvious point that existence of an ostensibly liberal democratic constitution does not in any way guarantee liberal democratic rule, there is textual evidence in the Johnson account itself which suggests that the articles enumerated therein were incomplete and probably whitewashed:

These, we are assured, were some of Roberts's Articles, but as they had taken Care to throw over-board the Original they had sign'd and sworn to, there is a great deal of Room to suspect, the remainder contained something too horrid to be disclosed to any, except such as were willing to be Sharers in the Iniquity of them ... (Defoe 1724: 233)

Second, Leeson also offers Alexander Exquemelin’s description of 17th century buccaneers’ articles of agreement as further evidence of the triumph of piratical private governance. However, if Johnson expressed doubts about the content of the articles aboard Roberts’ ship, the anonymous author of the preface to the 1699 edition of Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America specifically calls into question the enforcement of the articles designed to prevent negative externalities:

However it is very remarkable, that in such a lawless Body as these Bucaniers seemed to be, in respect to all others; that yet there should be such an Oeconomy (if I may so say) kept and regularity practiced among themselves, so that every one seemed to have his property as much secured, as if he had been a member of the most Civilized Community in the World; tho at the same time when I consider of some of their Laws, such as those against Drunkenness and the like immoralities, I believe I have a great deal of reason to remain suspicious of their Sincerity. (Esquemeling 1699: 5. Emphasis added)

Although neither of these quotations specifically says that pirates’ compliance with their articles of confederation was less than exemplary, they do indicate that even pirates’ contemporaries had reason to doubt the adherence to liberal democratic norms aboard pirate ships. Leeson’s uncritical acceptance of piratical obedience indicates a lack of analytical rigor for the sake of theoretical coherence, since rational choice theory only tells us something about pirate laws if these laws were actually obeyed.

Finally, because Leeson walks a fine line in his analysis (pirates were only just violent enough to craft a public identity for themselves as violent), he ends up undermining his initial claim that adherence to pirate codes was purely voluntary. Leeson contends that private governance is superior to state governments, and he alleges that the primary difference between the two is that governance is voluntary while government is characterized by coercive force (47-50). It is therefore essential that he prove that pirate codes were consented to voluntarily, an argument he makes in his application of Tiebout model to competition among pirate crews (61). Actually, because Tiebout competition describes how governments (not forms of governance) compete for citizens, this concept directly refutes Leeson’s earlier assertion that “If you don’t like the rules government sets up, it’s too bad. You don’t have the choice of saying … ‘no thank you, I don’t much care for your rules, so I’m going to take my money and live according to my own rules’” (50). Tiebout competition assumes citizens can, to use Leeson’s formulation, say, “I don’t much care for your rules, so I’m going to take my money and live according to some other rules.”³

Leeson’s initial assertion is not only a questionable application of social contract theory⁴ and theoretically inconsistent with his use of Tiebout competition, but most importantly it is empirically refuted in his chapter on impressments. Leeson begins this chapter by asserting that conscription and forced adherence to pirate law was seen as inefficient and therefore rare aboard pirate ships (136). However, the empirical accounts he uses to support this assertion suggest that coercive force played a significant role even in “voluntary” adherence to pirate codes:

When Edward Low captured Philip Ashton, for instance, he began with the pirates’ traditional inquiry of the captured crew about who would join them. As Ashton put it, “according to the Pirates usual custom ... [he] asked me, If I would sign their Articles and go along with them.” A man of strong moral fiber, Ashton declined. When this failed Low returned to him later and “asked the Old Question, Whether we would Sign their Articles, and go along with them?” When Ashton refused again, Low waited and then reapproached Ashton, this time demanding “with Sterness and Threats, whether I would Joyn with them?” On his third refusal the pirates “assaulted” Ashton -- but not with fists. Rather, they subjected the upright sailor to “temptations of another kind, in hopes to win me over... [they] treated me with an abundance of Respect and Kindness,” offering Ashton a drink and doing all they could to “sooth my Sorrows.” Only when Ashton rebuffed the fourth advance did a frustrated Low resort to violent intimidation, declaring, “If you will not sign our Articles, and go along with me, I'll shoot you thro' the Head.” Much to Low's consternation, Ashton remained obstinate, and the pirate captain dragged Ashton with him anyway. (137-138)

Though Leeson inexplicably reads the repeated attempts to convince Ashton to sign the articles as evidence of the high value pirates placed on volunteers, there can be no clearer articulation of coercive force than, “If you will not sign our Articles, I’ll shoot you through the head.” The bizarreness of this interpretation is underscored by Leeson’s earlier statement that, “Voluntary choice requires that our options aren’t framed under the threat of force” (50).

Leeson goes on to say that “Some prisoners ‘converted’ because pirate crews denied conscripts the rights afforded to volunteers, such as participation in the ship's democratic decision making, the right to their shares of plunder, and the right to settle disputes with other crew members by duel” (141). However, the denial of rights to those who will not adhere to the laws is yet another example of the sort of coercive force Leeson so strongly objects to in governments (50-51). Despite his professed preference for private governance, Leeson does seem to tacitly admit the necessity of government in some cases. In his chapter in the rational applications of torture, Leeson writes that “In terms of the costs and benefits they faced of bringing justice⁵ to abusive merchant ship captains on the high seas, pirates were better suited to this task than government” (127). However, he later notes that “absent any controls, pirate justice could be unfair, excessive, and in more than a few cases was probably totally unwarranted” (132). This is essentially Hobbes’ argument for why coercive government is necessary.

In addition to being empirically weak and internally inconsistent, Leeson’s book ends up telling us little more than the following: If we assume pirates were rational actors, then we can construct rational explanations for their actions. Leeson has attempted to do this, resulting in an analytically empty tautology that says that rationally self-interested cooperation can lead to ostensibly democratic social groups, excessively brutal torture, racial equality, participation in the slave trade, and colorful flags.

¹Furthermore, Leeson concedes that rational choice theory fails to account for all piratical actions, noting that “although pirates overwhelmingly tortured ‘with purpose,’ there are cases that were no more than sadism as well” (132). The distinction between “rational” torture and “sadistic” torture is left wholly unclear.

²Some editions of A General History of the Pyrates have been inaccurately attributed to Daniel Defoe. Although present-day research indicates that Defoe was not in fact the author, our citations reflect the author listed on the edition being cited.

³Or more formally, “In a Tiebout model, local jurisdictions compete for citizens by offering bundles of public goods. Citizens then sort themselves among jurisdictions according to their preferences.” (Ken Kollman, John H. Miller and Scott E. Page. “Political Institutions and Sorting in a Tiebout Model.” The American Economic Review, Vol. 87, No. 5. Dec. 1997: 977)

⁴For example, Rousseau argues that sovereign authorities only gain their authority from the general will and that when the people are displeased by a law, they can dissolve and reconstitute the existing sovereign and its laws. The distanced formulation “I don’t much care for your rules” is meaningless in such a government. Indeed, most social contract theorists articulate answers to the question of individual disagreement with societal laws. For instance, one can construct a defensible reading of Locke’s Second Treatise on Government that says it is entirely possible and acceptable for people to remain outside a government they have no interest in joining. “This [forming a civil society] any number of Men may do, because it injures not the Freedom of the rest; they are left as they were in the Liberty of the State of Nature” (John Locke. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 331). However, a further extension of this kind of critique is rendered largely unnecessary by the internal contradictions in Leeson’s work.

⁵Leeson is apparently condoning torture as an acceptable form of justice. Although my present critique is deliberately analytical, not normative in orientation, it is worth noting how Leeson’s application of rational choice theory positions piracy as outside the realm of ethical judgment.

Salayan sailors and Somali swashbucklers

2009-08-06T09:58:00.004-04:00

While there have been several news and human interest stories about US and European victims of piracy -- and several articles about the Somali pirates themselves -- the perspective of non-Western victims of piracy has not received the same level of coverage. However, the BBC has a radio report here about the plight of one Gujarati community whose maritime economy is being impacted by Somali pirate attacks, offering a more poignant perspective on the impact of piracy than that of higher insurance premiums and multi-million dollar ransom payments from large shipping companies.

An alarming amount of our project can be illustrated using Dinosaur Comics

2009-08-06T00:11:00.009-04:00

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=209

Debatable indeed.

Anti-whaling pirates

2009-08-04T11:41:00.015-04:00

Whales and whaling seem to have worked their way into our project in a variety of subtle ways this summer, beginning back in May with our theory and methodology reading, when we read Charlotte Epstein's The Power of Words in International Relations: The Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse. This book is not only an excellent example of how to conduct a discourse analysis in International Relations, but also examines what James Rosenau would call a "genuine puzzle": how the anti-whaling discourse became dominant and created normative changes that then made certain national and international policies possible.

We ran into whales again in Mystic Seaport (after we had finished our time in the archives) where we watched a video on whaling practices explained through passages from Moby Dick (a significant work in the construction of the anti-whaling discourse for the way in which its representation of whales creates a distance between actual whales out in the ocean and the whale in the story -- a narrative reappropriated by anti-whaling activists) and handled a bronze whaling gun:
However, perhaps the most interesting pirate-whaling link we've come across has been the appropriation of pirate imagery and identity by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the organization featured in Animal Planet's popular show Whale Wars (a connection we found out about from this Foreign Policy photo essay). Apparently some members of this society have taken it upon themselves to harass Japanese whaling vessels which they believe to be whaling for commercial rather than research purposes (though they would clearly object to the latter as well). This show is of note, first of all, for the extent to which it vividly illustrates Epstein's thesis about the "real-world" power of the anti-whaling discourse and the construction of (disputed) political space for non-governmental environmental actors. It's hard to see the same show being made with another environmental discourse (I can't see the Environmental Liberation Front's burning down of a Colorado ski lodge to save lynx habitat mobilizing quite the same level of enthusiasm), and even more challenging to envision a non-environmental non-state illegal group garnering such wide-spread popularity.

But, an even more interesting twist (at least from the standpoint of our research), involves the deliberate appropriation of the pirate identity by the Sea Shepherds. Faced with accusations of piracy by Japanese whalers, Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson asserted his pride in being a "pirate of compassion" in an op-ed published in the Guardian. The op-ed is worth reading in full, but several points jump out.

First, Watson deploys the "pirate as (national) hero" commonplace that enjoyed great popularity in the early 18th century with English descriptions of Captain Morgan and again in the early to mid 19th century in American representations of John Paul Jones and, later, Jean Lafitte. Indeed, these are the pirate heroes that Watson cites:

At least proper piracy has a long list of renowned and admirable practitioners: John Paul Jones, who founded the navies of both the US and Russia; Jean LaFitte, who stood with General Andrew Jackson in defence of New Orleans; and Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, knighted by Elizabeth I. I stand in honourable company as a modern-day pirate, though I've not shot anyone, burned any ships, looted any cargos or kidnapped anyone.

Watson's grasp on history is tenuous (he denies the British Navy had anything to do with the suppression of 18th century Caribbean piracy, attributing it instead to Henry Morgan), but his strategic deployment of the same pirate-legitimating commonplaces used centuries ago is quite interesting to observe.

Second, having made note of the pirate imagery used by the Sea Shepherd and Whale Wars, I was intrigued to read about both the deliberately defiant way in which it was deployed and also the popular appeal it lent to the Sea Shepherd's controversial cause:

My ship, the Steve Irwin, does fly a modern version of the Jolie Rouge, the original name of the banner that evolved into the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger. We decided years ago that if people were going to call us pirates, we would adopt our own version, and designed the crossed Neptune trident and shepherd's staff with the skull.
As soon as we hoisted that black flag, kids from around the world began to write to us in support. Our Jolly Roger hats and shirts have become our most popular merchandise. Why? Because there is a romance associated with piracy that is separate from the reality. Some pirates were noble heroes and some were dastardly villains. It's all a matter of perspective. If you love whales, we be heroes; but if you eat whales then we be pirates.

Finally, the introductory paragraphs of Watson's op-ed suggest he is aware of just how persuasive the popular imagery and language of pirates can be in summoning up enthusiasm:

Shiver me timbers, boys and girls, we is awash in a sea of pirates down here in the Southern Ocean and it's time for a parley to do a little 'splaining on the subject. This ocean now rivals the 17th century Caribbean for reported acts of piracy. The only thing lacking is the Sea Shepherd member Orlando Bloom.
Japanese whalers are accusing the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Greenpeace crew members of being pirates. Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace are accusing the whalers of being pirates. The whalers and Greenpeace are accusing Sea Shepherd of being pirates. The Japanese government is throwing the word piracy about as freely as the governor of Jamaica once did.
No one has sunk any ships, looted any cargos, kidnapped any damsels (just a couple of blokes) or forced anyone to walk the plank yet - but listening to the rhetoric, the public could be forgiven from thinking these activities are ravaging the Southern main.

That the deployment of pirate rhetoric is being used to legitimate (some) illegal non-state actions in the 21st century is a striking illustration of the extent to which the pirate discourse has shifted throughout history. That the deployment of the same word -- and some of the same commonplaces -- would, at the exact same time, be used to delegitimate other illegal non-state practices (most notably Somali piracy) indicates that, like Epstein, we too have an IR maritime puzzle to explain.

(Photo from: http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/uploads/sea_shepherd_in_hobart_dec_06.jpg)

Pirates of the Baltic?

2009-08-04T10:37:00.004-04:00

While some are looking back to the Barbary Wars to make sense of the Somali pirate attacks, the tempting parallel for recent events in the Baltic Sea dates back to the Viking Age. According to Bloomberg, the Arctic Sea, a Finnish cargo vessel carrying a shipment of wood from Finland to Algeria, was hijacked in the Baltic Sea on 24 July. The crew was tied up and beaten while the pirates searched the ship, though it is not clear if they what they were looking for:

The Arctic Sea was en route to Algeria from Finland with timber when it was boarded between the Swedish islands of Oeland and Gotland in the Baltic Sea on July 24 by the group who identified themselves as police officers, Swedish police said in a statement today. The ship is owned by Oy Solchart Management AB, sails under Maltese flag, and has a crew of 15 Russians.

Sweden has provided warships and soldiers to the European Union’s anti-piracy operation, Atalanta, in the Gulf of Aden. Pirates have attacked vessels off the coast of Somalia 130 times so far this year, with 28 ships seized, the U.S. Navy has said.

Incidents like the detention in the Baltic Sea have never happened “in my life,” Victor Matveev, chief executive officer of Solchart, said in a telephone interview from Helsinki today.

“We’ve operated this vessel for many, many years on a consecutive voyage basis between Finland and the Mediterranean, and this is more than disturbing,” Matveev said. “All the crew members have been working for our company for several years, they’re professional, well educated, and there are no newcomers. It makes us wonder what happened.”

Monsters and Critics has a bit more detail:

According to the ship's 15-member Russian crew, the armed men claimed to be drug enforcement agents and thoroughly searched the ship, reacting violently to anyone who got in their way, including using a rifle butt to knock out teeth from one crew member. The ship was held for 12 hours before the hijackers men left again without taking anything. Investigators speculated that the 'pirates' may have actually been a drugs gang that was acting on a tip to search for contraband.

Meanwhile, in the Gulf of Aden, Somali pirates released a German ship, the Hansa Stavanger, and its 24-man crew after receiving $2.7 million in ransom from the owners. On Monday, a Malaysian-owned tugboat was also released.

Captain Blood .... in Space!

2009-08-01T11:20:00.007-04:00

We've been meandering our way through some famous pirate movies of the early 20th century this summer (since the pirate discourse shifted to the silver screen from the 1920s onward) and one of the less interesting pirate movies we've watched has been Captain Blood. Although it held great promise, what with the dashing charms of Errol Flynn, the background of the Monmouth Rebellion, a man named Blood, and swashbuckling on the high seas, it was actually marked only by the quicksilver shifting of the protagonists' motivations and character, the incomprehensibility of the plot, and a grand total of one somewhat lackluster sword fight. (Please note this is not a sneering condemnation of old movies held up against the glittering, CGI-enhanced jewel of Pirates of the Caribbean; The Black Pirate from 1926 was an infinitely more exciting film with several way-cool sword fights.)

However, in complete disregard for my lousy review, it turns out that Warner Brothers are playing to remake Captain Blood ... by setting it in outer space! Producer Bill Gerber explains:

"When it comes to swashbuckling, you just couldn't go back to the pirate era, not once you've experienced the juggernaut that is 'Pirates of the Caribbean,' '' he explains. "So we needed to find a new way to tell the story."

For Gerber, the best option was not a present-day story involving the Somali pirates -- who are probably too vile and desperate to base an entertainment around -- but a story set a couple of hundred years in the future. "It's still the classic 'Captain Blood' storyline: Peter Blood has been wronged by the powers-that-be and he wants to get even. But the best way to recreate that is by putting it in space, where you can have a totalitarian style of government that's actually pretty similar to what England was like in the 17th century."

This is some pretty informative commentary, as it notes both the shifts that happened in contemporary pirate discourse that accompanied Pirates of the Caribbean as well as the Somali pirate attacks. And while I'm a bit skeptical of sword fights in outer space, there's precedent for space pirates and Geoff Boucher imagines a "live-action version of the Disney film Treasure Planet" which was sort of ok. Ultimately, there's no doubt that, far from being "a partnership that never should have begun," the new Captain Blood has the potential for great box office success, bringing together as it does three of America's favorite things to watch on screen: space, pirates, and (if this LA Times blogger has his way) Robert Pattinson.

Here, for your entertainment, is the swashbuckling scene from the 1935 Captain Blood (skip ahead to 3:44):

Cutthroat Capitalism: too soon?

2009-07-28T15:30:00.004-04:00

Wired magazine recently published an article called "Cutthroat Capitalism: An Economic Analysis of the Somali Pirate Business Model." There's nothing particularly novel here: that historical pirates are economic actors has already been observed, and this article is a clear-cut analysis of how that applies to Somali pirates. The article is based upon an interview with a Somali pirate and includes some rather nice charts and graphs. (I would like to contest, however, the idea that just because pirates are economic actors that this makes them capitalists: Like their historical antecedents, there is no production or exchange of goods and services going on; just extortion and robbery.) Wired has included "Cutthroat Capitalism: The Game" along with their article. Computer games about pirates are hardly new, and indeed, LucasArts has a new Monkey Island game out, but the goofy Guybrush Threepwood from Monkey Island is a far cry from today's Somali pirates.

In the Wired game, you are a pirate captain in the Gulf of Aden, sailing around and attacking different vessels. After a successful attack, you are supposed to negotiate for the release of the ship and hostages by choosing different tactics that include beating and killing your hostages to prove to the pirate negotiator you are serious about your demands. If you "successfully" negotiate, you are allowed to go back to roving the high seas. There are no EU or NATO ships, monsoon weather patterns, or possibilities for shipwreck and drowning in the game, and while not all attacks are successful, every vessel is presented as a potential target.

It's probably a testament to my incredibly limited experience with computer and video games that it took me six or seven negotiations before I overcame my squeamishness about clicking "beat" or "kill" as a negotiation tactic even for purely experimental purposes, but even without doing so, the whole game seemed more than a little sick to me. (Notice to potential voters in the incredibly unlikely event I ever run for anything ever: I do not think playing violent video games makes you a bad/evil/violent person.) So why am I perfectly happy to fire cannons at the bad guy pirate LeChuck in the Monkey Island game and so incredibly uncomfortable hijacking colored dots in the Cutthroat Capitalism game? The obvious difference has to do with the tone of the two games: Monkey Island is silly while Cutthroat Capitalism is deliberately realistic in approach (if not in graphics). Although both actions are something pirates "actually do/did," Somali piracy has yet to be tempered with that temporal distancing that we have identified as a condition of possibility for the romanticization of Golden Age piracy. Until this happens, I suspect the game will continue to feel a bit "off" to me, though judging from the comments posted below the game, this is not the case for many people who have played it.

That the game would involve acting as a pirate rather than as a US Navy SEAL or a NATO commander was equally puzzling to me, since first of all, there's precedent for this kind of thing and second, increases in piracy have historically resulted in nationalist opposition to the threat. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that this happened when the Somali pirates hijacked the Maersk Alabama, Captain Phillips and the Navy SEALS were frequently described as heroes, and the media response was quick to draw upon the "pirate-fighters as patriotic heroes" commonplace we identified as prevalent in the early 1800s, with TV shows and movies featuring the Somali pirates as the villains. I think a possible answer to this puzzle is that the "pirates as cool and edgy" and "pirates as free from the constraints of society" commonplaces that coexist today alongside the "pirates as a security threat" have created conditions of possibility for the appeal of this game, since they have opened up a space in which pirates can be protagonists -- and enviable ones at that. If this is indeed the case, "Cutthroat Capitalism" is a telling example of how our perceptions of contemporary piracy are shaped by historical representations, since I do not think that this game (or a non-electronic version of it) could have enjoyed the same popularity before piracy came to be seen as a purely historical phenomenon.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, we've already written an article!

2009-07-28T14:36:00.007-04:00

If you count each circle in this conceptual diagram as a picture, that is! (Click here for a slightly more legible version.)

My, uh, artistic endeavors tend to feature geometric shapes and arrows with not infrequent forays into the Cartesian coordinate system, and even when color is involved, the result is something like this:

So when my mildly awe-inspiring friend Fletcher generously offered to make the header thingy for this blog look much cooler, there was really very little reason not to accept. I would also like to take this opportunity to tell you to read his blog, Orbital Eccentricity, as it also features an aesthetically pleasing header, in addition to thought-provoking and insightful commentary on space policy legitimation.

That thing you've been waiting for? It'll happen today!

2009-07-26T12:45:00.007-04:00

Here it is, cats and kittens! The definitive* list of rhetorical commonplaces swirling around "pirate." A conceptual map/topography will appear soon-ish, but it is currently more in the "different-colored-shapes-and-arrows-on-a-white-board-in-an-undisclosed-location-on-the-AU-campus" stage of development. So without further ado, we give you:

THE LIST!
The pirate as ...
1. uncivilized, savage, lawless (modern version: piracy as a result of weak or failed states)
2. evil, sinner, against divine law
3. hostis humani generis/enemy of all mankind
a. active form (pirates declare themselves as such)
b. passive form (pirates declared as such by others)
4. Romantic protagonist
5. fictional villain
a. really actually very evil (PG-13, R)
b. Capt. Hook (PG, G)
6. practical (not moral) problem
a. strictly legal
b. negative externality as relates to trade and commerce
7. cool, edgy (Jack Sparrow, ambiguous morality)
8. absolutely harmless (Sesame Street fare)
9. tool of nationalism
a. hero (English, American, French)
b. villain (Spanish, English, American)
10. (inter)national security threat (pirate-terrorist conceptual nexus)
11. Goth/counter-culture symbol
12. libertarian wet dream
13. sex symbol
14. temporally/spatially distanced from the here and now
15. excessively violent actor (torture, murder, rape, etc.)

The list is in no particular order. It is worth noting that Catherine and I have adopted the numbers as shorthand for these commonplaces. Our conversations these days sound like this:
"There's definitely some '1' in this trial transcript, don't you think?"
"Yeah, plus that's an explicit reference to '3b' in the second paragraph."
"Sure but it's refuted by a deployment of '6a'."
"Beautiful! That explains the odd lack of '15' except by negation."

*ha. But we do have a considerable and comprehensive if not completely exhaustive amount of empirical and original archival research to back up this list.

Pirates in church?

2009-07-26T11:40:00.021-04:00

Well, in a UU church, anyway! Last Sunday, Rev. Louise Green at All Souls Unitarian Church gave a sermon on "The Inconvenience of Compassion" which began with an anecdote about feeling compassion for the Somali teenager, Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, who is being tried in New York for piracy. The sermon went on to play the rhetorical commonplace of "pirates as godless and evil" against teachings on compassion, and included a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk, poet, and peace activist:

Please Call Me By My True Names

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to
Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea
pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my
hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my
people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

I don't actually like the poem very much, but I have included it here as an example of a contemporary deployment of the "pirate as ultimate evil/hostis humani generis/enemy of all mankind" commonplace. That this common understanding of pirate is, to varying degrees, deliberately contested and refuted, both in the poem and in the wider context of the sermon, is actually further evidence of its being a rhetorical commonplace: In Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson takes great care to establish that a rhetorical commonplace is only weakly shared; it is a "potential resource," and "not a univocal, completely fixed bit of meaning that is identically possessed by multiple people; that would be a strong form of shared meaning, and ... would also have the logical consequence of making debate and discussion unnecessary: if we already agreed in this strong sense, why would we have to talk about it?" (28; 44; 50). Indeed, the sort of contentious conversations about representations of actors that Charles Tilly talks about in Stories, Identities, and Political Change are only possible with what he calls a shared set of idioms and history (116-118). Using pirates to demonstrate the possibilities of human compassion is an attempt to redefine the meaning of pirate, but such redefinition is only possible given that "pirates as evil" is already weakly shared among the congregation.

I feel like T-Rex explains this concept pretty well. (click to enlarge)

Pirates in the news

2009-07-25T19:40:00.002-04:00

http://thisisindexed.com/2009/04/less-booty-to-go-around/

Actually though, it's probably just the weather.

Research trip, part VI: Harry Potter and International Relations

2009-07-21T19:06:00.012-04:00

(This is unfortunately not Platform 9 3/4)

As Catherine noted some time ago, this project draws upon, among other analytical tools, the theoretical approach of popular culture as constitutive that is articulated in the introduction to Daniel Nexon and Iver Neumann's Harry Potter and International Relations. Primed as I was by a midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at the Morehead City, NC cinema, I decided to read it was my turn to read HP and IR on the train ride back to DC. One can only spend so much time pretending that the Carolinian is the Hogwarts Express, after all, especially as Amtrak refuses to serve pumpkin juice and chocolate frogs in its snack car. My reading generated the following uh, articulation of righteous indignation, posted here as I am not sure what else to do with it. Caveat lector: There are virtually no pirates whatsoever in this post.
***
For the record, I do not automatically critically object to everything I read, my comments regarding Peter Leeson's op-eds, Janice Thomson's footnotes, and deconstructionism notwithstanding. In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed many of the chapters in Harry Potter and International Relations, especially Ann Towns and Bahar Rumelili's chapter on the reception of Harry Potter in Sweden and Turkey; Maia Gemmill and Daniel Nexon's chapter on the religious politics of Harry Potter; Iver Neumann's chapter on the mythical geography of the magical world; and Martin Hall's chapter on mythology as methodology. However, Jennifer Sterling-Folker and Brian Folker's chapter, "Conflict and the Nation-State: Magical Mirrors of Muggles and Refracted Images," got my goat.

Setting aside for a moment the theoretical conclusions they draw by equating the conflict with Voldemort with a nationalist war, my first gut-level reaction to the chapter concerned the authors' unqualified use of the term "mudblood" to describe Muggle-born wizards (117). As anyone who has even skimmed Chamber of Secrets ought to know, "mudblood" is an incredibly derogatory term in the wizarding world, inciting a violent response from the entire Gryffindor Quidditch team when Malfoy uses it against Hermione. There are numerous other examples of the non-neutral connotations of the term from Snape's calling Lily Potter a mudblood in a remembered scene in Order of the Phoenix (a key plot point) to its wide-spread use in the Ministry of Magic after Voldemort seizes control of that particular state institution (more on that later). The obvious equivalent in the muggle world is, of course, the word "nigger," and the parallel becomes particularly acute with Hermione's bold and deliberate reappropriation of the term in Deathly Hallows.

It is odd, then, that not only do the authors cavalierly use the word "mudblood" when "Muggle-born" is clearly the appropriate term within the fictional social context the authors are analyzing, but they go on the explicitly equate the widely-used and value-neutral term "Muggle" with "nigger" (119). While I will grant that wizards often take a paternalistic tone in describing Muggles (and a downright evil one in the 7th book, though the authors could not have known that when writing the chapter, of course) the term "Muggle" itself is widely used by good and evil characters alike in the wizarding world. Indeed, the paternalistic tone the authors refer to is, I would argue, a deliberate literary device that adds some humor to the books (Mr. Weasley doesn't know how electricity works! Archie can't figure out the vagaries of Muggle dress!) and even a way to get young muggle readers thinking critically about their own taken-for-granted cultural norms in the tradition of "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema." Hermione, who clearly loves her parents very much, refers to them as Muggles; Hogwarts offers a class in Muggle Studies; the pre-Thicknesse Ministry of Magic had departments with "Muggle" in the name; even Dumbledore, the embodiment of goodness, talks of Muggle knitting patterns. Indeed, the lack of another term for non-wizarding humans points to the innocuous ubiquity of the term "Muggle." In short, there is nothing to support the authors' statement that "Muggle" is in any way a derogatory term.

These are two fundamental errors of empirical analysis in this chapter of Harry Potter and International Relations. There is no real question of interpretation here; while the precise wizard-Muggle relationship is debatable, that "mudblood" is "a disgusting thing to call someone" and "a really foul name" is not. This type of misreading has two implications: First, it seriously detracts from the authors' credibility in their analysis of Harry Potter and international relations. Either they did not read the books at all and relied instead on secondary sources, or their reading was superficial and ignored the nuances of wizarding social identities. My insistence on this seemingly small linguistic point may sound laughably nerdy and pedantic -- and indeed a social science analysis of a transparently constructed fictional world is always going to be subject to that sort of critique -- but the authors' decision to treat the world of Harry Potter as worthy of academic analysis effectively moots such critiques in this debate. I also felt this misuse of terms detracted from the overall credibility of the book; that sort of misreading should have been flagged by an editor or reviewer. Since the editors of the book were clearly targeting a Harry Potter-literate audience, they should have known to hold their contributors to the same standard.

The second implication of this linguistic imprecision is that it is indicative of a deeper misreading of the Harry Potter texts. Chief among these is the authors' equation of the wizarding world's conflict with Voldemort with identity-based (nationalist, religious, ethnic) conflict in the Muggle world. The authors argue that the fundamental difference between the liberal IR fantasy of the wizarding world and the realist reality of the Muggle world is that in the wizarding world power inheres to the individual and therefore the need for collective action is minimized. The authors' then state that there should be "relatively little cause for collective conflict among wizards and witches themselves as a result," and use this as evidence of the logical inconsistency of Rowling's "ultimate fantasy of liberal philosophy." They are correct in stating that there should be little collective conflict; in fact, there is not.

The problem lies not in Rowling's logic but in their reading of Voldemort's war against elements of the wizarding community as a collective conflict, on par with the Nazis' quest for racial purity. There are parallels, to be sure, and the Harry Potter series is nothing if not a call for greater tolerance in the world, but Voldemort's primary concern is not with creating an exclusively pureblood race (Voldemort himself is a half-blood). While blood purity is certainly the goal of the Death Eaters whose service he needs, Voldemort himself is obsessed with becoming the greatest wizard of all time by overcoming death. (In Rowling's fictional universe, it is occasionally possible to determine a character's motivations directly, but even without relying on a motivational account for Voldemort's actions we can conclude that the image he has crafted for himself is that of a wizard obsessed with power at all costs). The conflict in the Harry Potter series is not between purebloods and half-bloods (in any case, that only starts to become the case in the 7th book, which the authors did not know about); it is between Harry and Voldemort. It is a highly individualized conflict and whether or not that is a liberal fantasy, it is emphatically not an identity-based conflict in the model the authors envision.

The authors' concluding point is that the wizarding world has no link between identity and collective political structures, and this is why Voldemort and the Death Eaters never make an attempt to "seize the reins of power that the state embodies." But if the conflict in the series is read as something other than a collective identity-based movement, there is no immediate need for its instigators to gain state control. It seems to me that a more apt reading of the conflict is that of a lone wolf terrorist or a small guerilla movement that is intent on achieving a deluded, highly individual goal or acquiring power with no wider social agenda. This does not imply that Voldemort's actions do not have broader societal implications; because he does not care who gets hurt in his pursuit of power and because a climate of fear only makes his exercise of power easier, many, many people can and are maimed, killed, and tortured along the way.

The authors of the article write that "the seizure or control of the state is the means whereby muggle collectives can obtain goals such as racial purification and oppression that involve violence en mass [sic]" (122). But since racial purification and oppression are not Voldemort's chief concerns, except as means to an end, it makes sense that taking control of the Ministry of Magic would not be his primary goal, particularly since, as the authors note, the Ministry has only limited power in the wizarding world anyway. Here is where the inevitable and admittedly mediocre pirate reference comes in: desperate for to obtain some sort of power (at least of the economic flavor) but largely unconcerned by larger identity-based social concerns, the Somali pirates are not targeting the incredibly weak Somali government or any government at all. I do not in any way want to equate the Somali pirates with Voldemort's evilness; I merely wish to point out that targeting the state is not always the best way to become powerful, especially when you are starting from ground zero.

Ultimately, of course, Voldemort and the Death Eaters do gain control of the Ministry through holding Thicknesse under the Imperius Curse, literally turning the Ministry into a puppet government and the wizarding world into a police state, though -- in fairness -- the authors of the chapter could not have known this when they were writing. Once the wizarding world accepts that Voldemort is back, spreading fear is a good way for Voldemort to gain power, and control of even weak state institutions helps make this possible. That it would take so long for Voldemort to infiltrate the Ministry is thus indicative of the following: his primary concern with personal power and thus his relative unconcern for collective identity politics (personal power, at least in its early stages, does not require control of the state); the physical and social limitations of his power in the earlier books (does anyone really think Voldemort could infiltrate the Ministry of Magic when he didn't even have a body of his own?); and presumably also the fact that control of state institutions is a subject of little interest to most 10-14 year olds: the audience of the earlier books.

The broader point I wish to make here is that a cursory or incomplete reading of text to support a broader theoretical commitment fails at creating a compelling case on two levels: First, it destroys a scholar's credibility and authority on a given subject; and second, it leads to empirically flawed analysis that does little to support the theory in question. And on a much lower third level, it opens you up to criticism from 20 year-old IR students who grew up reading and re-reading the texts in question and do not like to see them carelessly wielded.

On that note, this quote from Dumbledore seems a particularly apt way to end this post, with its wonderful constructivist overtones* and its recognition the power of myth and story:

That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped. (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 710)

*Dumbledore himself might be more of an interpretivist, however:

"Tell me one last thing," said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?” “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

Research trip, part V: North Carolina

2009-07-21T18:09:00.016-04:00

Our trip to down to North Carolina was a pleasant change from the long days we spent overly air-conditioned windowless reading rooms on our earlier academic voyages. (Though as should be evident from the slew of posts below, I clearly have no shortage of affection for the resources such halls contain.) We traveled to Beaufort, North Carolina to talk to David Moore, an nautical archaeologist who is currently excavating Blackbeard's flagship the Queen Anne's Revenge and an expert on Blackbeard. Because the popular imagery and myths surrounding Blackbeard have exerted a considerable influence on contemporary conceptions of pirates and piracy, Blackbeard, like Buccaneers of America, makes a good case to trace through history.

We learned several interesting and significant things in the course of this interview, including changes made to the 2nd edition of Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates which point to increased dramatization of the subject matter. At one point, the first edition has Blackbeard marooning some men on an island with no inhabitants or provisions; in the second edition, this account has been embellished to say that there was neither bird, beast, or herb for their subsistence -- an unlikely story given the presence of fresh water on North Carolina's Outer Banks. Even Johnson's famous description of Blackbeard indicates considerable dramatic excesses:

So our Heroe, Captain Teach, assumed the Cognomen of Black-beard, from the large quantity of Hair, which, like a frightful Meteor, covered his whole Face, and frightened America more than any Comet that has appeared there a long Time. This beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravegant Length; as to Breadth, it came up to his Eyes; he was accustomed to twist it with Ribbons, in small Tails, after the Manner of our Ramilies Wiggs, and turn them about his Ears. In Time of Action, he wore a Sling overe his Shoulders, with three Brace of Pistols, hanging in Holsters like Bandaliers; and stuck lighted Matchs under his Hat, which appearing on each Side of his Face, his Eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such a figure, that Imagination cannot form an Idea of a Fury, from Hell to look more frightening.

According to Moore, the only eyewitness account of Blackbeard is in Henry Bostock's deposition where the pirate is desribed merely as "a tall, spare man with a black beard which he wore very long." We were also intrigued to learn that Moore knows when a new Pirates of the Caribbean movie has been released based on the sudden spike in interest in his work, mainly among schoolchildren working on history projects. He also equated the enthusiasm and excitement surrounding the finding and excavating of the Queen Anne's Revenge with the similar emotions evoked by Pirates of the Caribbean, which indicates just how strongly the contemporary popularity of pirates is linked to their historical origins (however historically inaccurate current representations may be). Moore also kindly provided with an excellent annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources on piracy, making note of the ones that had passed his litmus test of credibility by getting the sections on Blackbeard right.

The interview was productive, the North Carolina Maritime Museum both free and informative, and the free day we spent at the beach sunny and relaxing. We also took a great deal of delight in the pirate-themed atmosphere that pervades the town of Beaufort:

The following day we headed back up to Raleigh, where the North Carolina Museum of History has an exhibit on piracy called Knights of the Black Flag, skillfully curated by the Maritime Museum who donated many of the artifacts on display from the Queen Anne's Revenge. We didn't learn much relevant to our project at the exhibit -- not through any fault on its part, but because we have spent the last three months immersing ourselves in this very material. In that sense it was a gratifying visit, and we certainly enjoyed seeing depictions of and artifacts from the stories we've been treating with such academic disinterest. Here is the pirate flag we designed on a computer there, using common symbols of piracy:

The definite highlight of the exhibit, however, was the hands-on section where they had pirate costumes to try on and a model pirate ship to clamber upon -- clearly necessary components of our research. Here is Catherine as Blackbeard:

And here are some pictures depicting serious scholarly investigation at the history museum:

Research trip, part IV: Civil War-era pirates in Mystic

2009-07-20T17:55:00.014-04:00

The final broad category of pirate-related documents I looked at in Mystic, CT (home of the way-cool bascule drawbridge seen above) was Civil War-era accounts of privateering and piracy. These mostly pertained to perceived violations of British neutrality during the American Civil War, and all of them were concerned with the bounds of state authority.

English Neutrality: Is the Alabama a British Pirate? (1863)
This pamphlet deals with the case of two Confederate ships, the Oreto (later the Florida) and the Alabama, both of which were built and anchored in Liverpool after Britain had declared its neutrality. However, the author of the pamphlet categorizes the neutrality declaration as an empty -- and in fact counterproductive -- move in terms of non-involvement in American hostilities:

Upon the breaking out of the rebellion, the British government made haste to concede belligerent rights to the insurgents, and to declare its intention to observe strict neutrality. The state of English law was such that this proclamation was entirely uncalled for, as it could neither increase nor decrease legal obligations or penalties; and its only effect was to guarantee to adventurers, who might wish to enlist with the rebellion, that they should thereby undergo no greater risks than the ordinary chances of regular war. The promulgation of the first proposition was generally taken to be, and perhaps was, intended to relieve such persons from the character and ugly responsibility of pirates and freebooters. It became, in fact, an invitation, as it did not, on the other hand, enjoin vigilance upon officials or threaten punishment to offenders.

The question of whether or not these vessels, sailed as they were by almost exclusively British crews for the Confederate side, were pirates is a secondary one to the author of the pamphlet. He is much more concerned with documenting America's superior observance of the principles of neutrality when compared to Britain's allegedly profligate ways:

Thus stands the record of American neutrality. History may be fairly challenged to show another instance of such magnaminity, consistency, and fairness. Should we examine thoroughly the record of Great Britain upon this matter of maritime neutrality, it would be found entirely consistent on one point -- 'Britannia rules the wave.' To express the probable reasons for whatever inconsistencies on other points history might discover, would necessitate harsh allusions to that national greed and arrogance which the traditions of mankind have ascribed to that insular kingdom.

Towards the end of a rather lengthy rant on American superiority, the author does address the question of piracy, as follows, concluding that the question hinges on the status of the Confederacy -- much as Tindall's 1694 analysis of the legal status of sea robbers holding letters of marque from a deposed king, James II, depended on the monarch's sovereign authority. This pamphlet concludes that the Alabama was a pirate, but with little analysis of the Confederacy's sovereignty, other than to make note of its not being recognized by other states:

The English sea-rovers claim, doubtless, to cruise under some kind of commission from the self-styled and unrecognized 'Confederate States.' I do not propose to discuss, with much seriousness, here, a question, which being in this place of little import, may hereafter, in a different discussion, become of the first magnitude; still, I am compelled to say that, by the law and practice of nations, it appears that no commission from an unknown, unrecognized authority can relieve the persons upon those vessels from the character of pirates ...

The author concludes his essay, perhaps predictably by this point, with the following condemnation:

But, whatever may be the correct judgement on this point, one thing is certain, that all the character these vessels possess is British; and that if they are pirates at all, they are BRITISH PIRATES, roaming the seas, with the implied permission, if not actual connivance, of that government ...

Interestingly, one of the exhibit halls within Mystic Seaport itself had a short display on the CSS Alabama, with a sign explaining that "Rather than pirates, most of the Alabama's officers were southern gentlemen and skilled naval officers..." While this line made me laugh aloud, it is interesting that even today, the utter incompatibility of the identities of "pirate" and "gentlemen" remains commonsensical.

United States vs. William Smith on charges of Piracy, Speech of Hon. William D. Kelley (1861)
If the author of the pamphlet on the Alabama was comfortable sidestepping the question of Confederate legitimacy, William D. Kelley clearly felt differently. In his speech of over 20 pages, Kelley devotes considerable time to berating the unconstitutionality, illegitimacy, and general traitorousness of the Confederacy. The case in question involved an American merchant schooner called the Enchantress which was boarded by a ship falsely flying the French flag in 1861. The defendant, William Smith, allegedly participated in capturing the crew and transporting them to Cuba to be sold as slaves, all the while carrying a letter of marque from the Confederate States. Kelley directly speaks to why such a letter does not make Smith a privateer:

But it is said ... that the Southern Confederacy is an existing government, fostering the arts and sciences, administering law, and having its own system of revenue and finance; that foreign nations long since recognized it as a belligerent power, and that its people have been treated as belligerents in our own civil courts; and can it not, you are asked, grant letters of marque? No, gentlemen, if all this be true -- and for argument's sake I admit it all -- it gives no validity to the letter of Mr. Davis. Letters of marque can only be granted by a member of the family of nations -- by a State whose national existence is recognized, and which as, or may have, diplomatic relations ... [W[hat nation has recognized the Southern Confederacy? None.

But in addition to its head-on tackling of Confederate legitimacy, Kelley's speech is notable for several other reasons. First, it is one of the only legal documents I read (the other being the Savannah trial documents discussed below) which purposively eschewed applying the now-familiar hostis humani generis designation to pirates. Kelley deliberately sought to avoid the legal excesses that this term makes possible (see Jody Greene's "Hostis Humani Generis"):

The sole question for you to decide, I repeat, is, has this defendant been guilty of piracy under the laws of the United States, -- not under the common law, -- not is he the general enemy of the human kind, -- not has he the highwayman's heart and habits; -- but are you as a jury, satisfied that he has violated the laws of the United States for the prevention and punishment of piracy.

Second, Kelley displays an acute awareness of the fuzziness of the "pirate" label, and pre-empts any possible defense that would invoke patriotic pirates like John Paul Jones. While his reasoning here is not particularly strong (it assumes the same jury would have convicted Jones on charges of piracy when the defense rests on the shared understanding that Jones was a Revolutionary War hero and not a pirate), that he rebuts this argument is indicative of the continued existence of acceptable non-fictional forms of piracy even into the mid-nineteenth century:

Is not Smith's case, you are also asked, precisely analogous to that of Paul Jones, and are you prepared to say that he should have been hung as a pirate? Let me answer that question, so adroitly put, by asking another. Is any one of the counsel for the defence prepared as a lawyer to say, that if before the recognition of our independence, Paul Jones had been taken on board a privateer by a British cruiser, the English law would not have condemned him as a pirate? The truth is, gentlemen, that Paul Jones, and all the American privateers of that day knew very well, that if they were taken, they would go into England and be tried for the crime of piracy.

Third, one section of the speech has absolutely nothing to do with our pirate research project at all but is such a striking and beautiful example of American patriotism that, reading it as I did right after the Fourth of July, I felt the need to make it more widely known. Here 'tis, and a very belated Happy Independence Day:

And what defence is set up and how is it received? It is that this defendant was aiding the cause of those who are arrayed in arms against our brethern; that he was aiding the cause of those who thus punish our people for loyalty to their government; that he was aiding the cause of those who have stricken down and dishonored the flag of our country, and made war upon its institutions and people. And that defence is pressed and listened to, and weighed, and strengthened even by presumptions. It is right that it should be so. Such scenes as this, will redeem our generation in history. They prove that it is not our democratic republican institutions, that have begotten a tendency to barbarism among a people once civilized, generous, and humane; that the love of law and order, justice, truth and right, still dwells in the hearts of the American people, and are the sure pledge of the ultimate realization of the best hopes of those who have most faith in man's capacity for self-government.

Trial of the Officers and Crew of the Privateer Savannah, on the Charge of Piracy, in the United States Court for the Southern District of New York. (1862)
The case of the Confederate privateer the Savannah is better known than the trial of William Smith, but much of the argumentation falls along the same lines (it is not surprising to find that Kelley references the Savannah case in at least one place in his speech). The library had the complete records of this trial, and while much of the several hundred pages of argumentation was long-winded and repetitive, the case really was a debate about what it is to be a "pirate" and was therefore absolutely fascinating, not to mention incredibly relevant to our project. On the matter of pirates as "enemies of all mankind," the District Attorney makes clear from the get-go that this is not the issue that the jury is asked to decide:

You have all, undoubtedly, heard more or less of the crime of piracy as generally and popularly understood. A pirate is deemed by the law of nations, and has always been regarded as the enemy of the human race, -- as a man who depredates generally and indiscriminately on the commerce of all nations. Whether or not the crime alleged here is piracy under the law of nations, is not material to the issue.

However, immediately thereafter, the defense blatantly ignores this statement and frames the debate precisely in terms of popular understandings of piracy:

And when the first deed of wickedness has been done which makes pirates and outcasts of the men who perpetrated it, what is their career from that moment to the time when they end their lives, probably on the scaffold? Is it not one of utter disregard to the laws of God and man, and to those of humanity? Is it not a succession of deeds of cruelty, of rapine, of pillage, of wanton destruction? Who ever heard of pirates who, in the first place, commenced the execution of their design by public placards posted in the streets of a populous city like Charleston, approved of by their fellow citizens of a great and populous city, and not only by them, but by the people of ten great and populous States? ... the Jury must certainly have seen how utterly preposterous it is to characterize as piracy acts of this kind.

The defense also evokes the spirit of John Paul Jones and the pirate heroes of the Revolutionary War, equating the crew of the Savannah with other, revered non-state actors:

But it is not necessary that the nation under whose commission he acts, shall be one which is already established and acknowledged among the family of nations. It may be a colony struggling for independence, and not yet recognized by the nations of the earth. Our own Courts years ago decided this case with a liberality which has eminently distinguished them, and established the principle in respect to the South American colonies -- colonies at that time not acknowledged by our Government as independent nations. So, gentlemen, it was with regard to the powers of Europe during the days of the American Revolution ... Their [American] letters of marque were recognized because they were the letters of a de facto Government ...

At this point, the trial turns into an incredibly protracted (though certainly Civil War-defining) debate on the precise legal and sovereign status of the de facto Confederate government and whether or not it could issue letters of marque. That debate, while quite engaging, does not really bear further summary here.

A final observation I took from the Savannah proceedings was the direct use of popular narratives in the lawyers' argumentation. While the defense's allusion to popular understandings of piracy drew upon several of the pirate-related commonplaces discussed on this blog before (pirates as violent agents of destruction; pirates as outside both human and divine law), they also make direct use of narrative when quoting from William Wordsworth's poem "Rob Roy's Grave." As a brief contextualization of the quote, Wordsworth presents the highwayman Rob Roy as a Scottish Robin Hood (interestingly, the pirate-as-Robin-Hood defense is used today in the context of Somali piracy) who lives by no law but that "graven on my heart" (surely an allusion to a Rousseau-ian conception of natural law). The verse cited by the defense in the Savannah case is as follows:

For why? Because the good old rule
Sufficeth him: the simple plan
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.

But, intriguingly, rather than deploy this verse to equate the accused pirates with heroic Robin Hood figures, the defense uses the verse to show that the Savannah's crew are not pirates at all since they do obey a human law: that of the de facto Confederate government.

A Treatise of the Relative Rights and Duties of Belligerent and Neutral Powers in Maritime Affairs, by Robert Ward, Esq., Barrister at Law (1875)
If the intimate connection between fictional narrative and state policy regarding pirates seems weak in the Rob Roy/Savannah trial example cited above, the introduction to this treatise offers a true "smoking gun" example of the influence that popular culture can have on official policy. According to the author of the introduction, one Lord Stanley of Alderly, popular novels were directly responsible (or at least created the condition of possibility) for the delegitimation of privateering in England by equation privateering with the well-established evil practice of piracy. Here is Lord Stanley at his plummiest. It's a long excerpt, to be sure, but well-worth reading:

The prejudice against privateers arises partly from ignorance of the safeguards provided by the Law for the protection of vessels which are not lawful prize, and partly from the writings of officers of Royal Navies who have been unconsciously biassed by a prejudice similar to that which is felt by regimental officers against militiamen, volunteers, and irregular troops. The following is a passage taken at random, which may serve as a specimen of this kind of writing: 'There is but a slight step from the privateersman to the pirate; both fight for the love of plunder; only that the latter is the bravest, as he dares both the enemy and the gallows.' It was only after such sentences had been written, and the nation prepared by a course of such romance reading, that Lord Aberdeen told the people of Aberdeen that privateering was the last shred of barbaris, and that the only difference between a pirate and a privateer was that the latter bore the Queen's Commission. A similar comparison might be made between brigands and soldiers. If the subject had been studied in law books and not in novels, Lord Clarendon could not have based his attempted defence of the Declaration of Paris on the proposition that England obtained a valuable consideration for the acknowledged loss incurred by the giving up of her right to seize enemies' property in neutral vessels, by the abolition of privateering! The paragraph from a novel above quoted is followed by another, which shows how the false notions generally entertained on the subject of privateers, have been fostered by confounding the deeds done in former times with those done in the days of our grandfathers: 'But in whatever school they had been taught, the Buccaneers who kept about the English colonies were daring fellows and made sad work in times of peace among the Spanish settlements and Spanish merchantment.'" (vi-vii) [Emphasis added. The novel in question is Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon (Washington Irving), vol. ii. pg. 241)]

Lord Stanley is, of course, violently opposed to the provision of the Declaration of Paris that outlawed privateering, calling it "the resignation of the means that had made England great and powerful." Undoubtedly his statement about the influence of novels is mildly hyperbolic but that he draws a direct connection between popular portrayals of piracy and something as undeniably "real-world" as the Declaration of Paris is very good evidence for the interconnectedness of cultural and legal understandings of piracy.

Research trip, part III: Fictional pirates in Mystic, CT

2009-07-20T17:00:00.007-04:00

The first books I looked at in the Mystic Seaport library were a couple early editions of Treasure Island (first published in 1883), one from 1931 and one from 1949. The 1931 edition included a rather romanticized biography of Robert Louis Stevenson ("He inherited from his father a genial humor, a touch of Celtic melancholy, a sensitive conscience, a fondness for dogmatic statement, and a love for romance and for open-air activity; from his mother, a brilliancy, vivacity, and native grace, and a feminine sensitiveness to impressions; from her, likewise, a frail body and a predisposition to pulmonary disease, which he never outgrew, and which condemned him to a life of invalidism.") and also speculated as to popularity of Treasure Island at the time of its writing:

The major passion ... found little place in his stories; and his few women were not altogether satisfactorily drawn. For it was not love with its rewards and circumscribed plots and self-sufficiency that set best Stevenson's genius; but life with a hazard -- life kinetic under an open sky and on a broad field, full of struggle and "tailforemost morality"; life so circumstanced that the characters, driven forward through clean open-air adventure, act their parts in obedience to natural impulses and practical intelligence without the hesitations of conscience or the halting at questions of conduct ... Stevenson came at a time of 'spiritual fatigue'; when literature had lost much of its freshness and vigor, and was busy puzzling out the weightier problems of existence ... And the world, long since wearied by introspections and abstractions, was ready to turn away from gloomy forebodings to a more joyous mood.

I'm not sure about the "spiritual fatigue" of the world, but certainly the association of pirates with a life of freedom from societal constraints has enjoyed long-standing popularity, manifesting itself today in insane libertarian schemes as those of the Seasteading Institute.

The early 20th century offered much in the way of speculation as to the popularity of pirates. Joseph Lewis French's 1922 introduction to Great Pirate Stories offers several interesting insights. The first of these is French's recognition of the important role temporal distancing plays in the romanticization of the men he himself calls savages:

There may be a certain human perversity in this, for the pirate was unquestionably a bad man -- at his best, or worst -- considering his surroundings and conditions, -- undoubtedly the worst man that ever lived. There is little to soften the dark yet glowing picture of his exploits. But again, it must be remembered, that not only does the note of distance subdue, and even lend a certain enchantment to the scene, but the effect of contrast between our peaceful times and his own contributes much to deepen our interest in him.

A second point to take from French's introduction is that in the early 1900s, piracy was seen as an almost exclusively historical phenomenon:

It is said that he survives even today in certain spots in the Chinese waters, -- but he is certainly an innocuous relic. A pirate of any sort would be as great a curiosity today if he could be caught and exhibited as a fabulous monster.

A final work of fiction worth mentioning was "The Pirate," published in an 1836 collection of stories entitled The Naval Annual: Or, Stories of the Sea. Both the description of the pirate ship and of the pirate captain (one Captain Cain) are indicative of the imagery associated with pirates at the time and that continues to hold sway. First, the description of the pirate ship the Avenger, which calls to mind Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, both in name and insofar as it is a former slaveship:

Alas! she was fashioned, at the will of avarice, for the aid of cruelty and injustice; and now was even more nefariously employed. She had been a slaver-- she was now the far-famed, still more dreaded, pirate schooner, the 'Avenger.' Not a man-of-war which scoured the deep but had her instructions relative to this vessel, which had been so successful in her career of crime -- not a trader in any portion of the navigable globe but whose crew shuddered at the mention of her name, and the remembrance of the atrocities which had been practised by her reckless crew. She had been every where -- in the east, the west, the north, and the south, leaving a track behind her of rapine and murder.

If the description of the ship likely drew upon the QAR, it's not hard to see traces of the following description of Captain Cain in Errol Flynn's 1935 silver screen portrayal of Captain Blood (disregarding the beard, of course, about which I imagine Jutta Weldes would have something to say):

In person, he was above six feet high, with a breadth of shoulders and of chest denoting the utmost of physical force which, perhaps, has ever been allotted to man. His features would have been handsome, had they not been scarred with wounds; and, strange to say, his eye was mild, and of a soft blue. His mouth was well formed, and his teeth of pearly white; the hair of his head was crisped and wavy,, and his beard, which he wore, as did every person composing the crew of the pirate, covered the lower part of his face, in strong, waving, and continued curls. The proportions of his body were perfect; but, from their vastness, they became almost terrific. His costume was elegant, and well adapted to his form: linen trousers, and untanned yellow leather boots, such as are made at the Western Ilser; a broad-striped cotton shirt; a red Cashmere shawl round his waist as a sash; a vest embroidered in gold tissue, with a jacket of dark velvet, and pendant gold buttons, hanging over his left shoulder, after the fashion of the Mediterranean seamen; a round Turkish skull-cap, handsomely embroidered; a pair of pistols, and a long knife in his sash, completed his attire.

Research trip, part II: The BPL, continued

2009-07-20T15:42:00.005-04:00

Buccaneers of America aside, one of my most interesting finds at the lion-guarded BPL was a 1726 publication entitled A Discourse of the LAWS Relating to Pirates and Piracies, and the Marine Affairs of Great Britain. This was one of the few documents we've come across that offers an explicit definition of piracy, which is, of course, very useful to tracking changing perceptions of piracy. The author of the booklet begins with the now-familiar exhortation of British maritime supremacy:

The Sea was given by Almighty God for the Use of Man, and is subject to Dominion and Property, as well as the Land … the Kings of Great Britain have a Right to the Sovereignty or Dominion of the British Seas … But if any Nation shall presume to deny it, and actually go about to dispossess the Crown of this undoubted Right, or shall usurp or incroach upon the British Sovereignty of the Seas, which it so highly concerns the Honour and Safety of the Nation to maintain; the Crown of Great Britain will, without a doubt, be never unprovided with a Fleet, nor backward of putting them to Sea, to vindicate the Right which all our Kings have insisted upon, which the Laws and Customs of this Kingdom have ratified and confirmed, and which all Foreign Nations have, one Time or other readily acknowledged.

The introduction goes on to specify that piracy is a crime subject to universal jurisdiction by virtue of its well-documented, historically-evidenced heinousness:

Piracy and Robbery at Sea is an Offense of that Nature, and is so destructive of all Commerce between Nation and Nation, that all Sovereign Princes and States have thought it their Interest, and made it their Business, to suppress the same; this they have done from the Time of Minos King of Crete to this very Day, as it testified by most Historians.

Finally, pirates are explicitly referenced as "enemies of all mankind" (hostis humani generis) and effectively dehumanized as follows:

A Pirate has been always deemed, by all civilized Nations, to be one who is a Rover and Robber upon the Seas; and Piracy is termed committing Robberies upon the Seas; and from the Nature as well as the Wickedness of the Offence, a Pirate is looked upon as an Enemy to all Mankind, with whom neither Faith nor Oath is to be kept; and in our Law Books they are term’d Brutes and Beasts of Prey; and it is allowed to be lawful for those who take them, to put them to Death, if they cannot, with Safety to themselves, bring them under some Government to be try’d.

[As an interesting side note -- and perhaps a future blog post -- Matthew Tindall's fascinating 1694 Essay Concerning the Laws of Nations and the Rights of Soveraigns has this to say about the long-standing international legal norm of piracy as a crime against humanity: "Hostis Humani Generis, is neither a Definition, or as much a Description of a Pirat, but a Rhetorical Invective to shew the Odiousness of that Crime." This insightful observation was clearly still relevant in 1726, and as Jody Greene argues in "Hostis Humani Generis" (Critical Inquiry 34, Summer 2008: 683-705), remains so today. She writes, "Even if we cannot determine what precisely a pirate is, even if pirate is nothing more than a term of opprobrium, the place occupied by the pirate in legal discourse can nonethless produce measurable effects." Greene makes a comparison between the catachrestic historical usage of "hostis humani generis" and today's usage of "war on terror" as "endlessly generative fictions." While I don't completely agree with her comparison of pirates and terrorists -- even as legal categories (the idea that the terms are misapplied troubles me as it suggest there is an objectively "correct" application of these terms) -- her statement that the deployment of the term "pirate" creates observable conditions of possibility for state action is compelling and, I would argue, should be expanded beyond its narrow legal implications.]

But, I digress. The 1726 booklet in question goes on to document laws for punishing pirates and accessories to piracy; laws punishing ship capitains who fail to fight back against attacking pirates; laws rewarding commanders and officers for successfully defending their ships against pirate attacks (as the author notes, "In the time of King Charles II, it was common for masters and commanders not to fight back, even if they had sufficient force to defend themselves."); and laws against trading with pirates and receiving stolen goods; and laws aimed at deterring people from becoming pirates.

The conclusion of the pamphlet leaves little doubt as to the author's (rather non-legal) opinion of pirates:

It is a melancholly Consideration, that any of those Persons, who have given themselves over of late Years, to the committing of Robbery on the High Seas, should not have been content with taking what Money they have found, or Things they might stand in need of aboard of any Ship which has fallen into their Hands; but run into such Extravagancies, as to throw the rest of the Goods into the Sea, set fire the Vessels, and murder the Company, without any manner of Provocation, on the Part of those they have destroyed. This many of the piratical Crews have done, in cold Blood, and as if it were only for Pastime, and for their Diversion …

This is followed by a lengthy religious condemnation of piracy, promising firey hell to sea robbers and concluding that "whosoever sheddeth Man’s Blood, by Man shall his Blood be shed."

A second, more entertaining find was the 1824 masterwork The Atrocities of the Pirates; being a Faithful Narrative of the Unparalleled Sufferings Endured by the Author during his Captivity among the Pirates of the Island of Cuba; with an Account of the Excesses and Barbarities of those Inhuman Freebooters. By Aaron Smith, (Who was himself afterwards tried at the Old Bailey as a Pirate, and acquitted.). Really, the title itself should be give you a pretty good sense of the general tenor of this, uh, faithful narrative, but in case there was any doubt, it is chock full of "horrid cruelties," "merciless monsters," brutal torture scenes, and an angelic Spanish maiden named Seraphina. Smith's physical description of the Pirate Captain offers clear evidence of the "pirate as uncivilized savage" commonplace that was so prevalent in the early 19th century:

He was a man of most uncouth and savage appearance, about five feet six inches in height, stout in proportion, with aquiline nose, high cheek bones, a large mouth, and very large full eyes. His complexion was sallow, and his hair black, and he appeared to be about two and thirty years of age. In his appearance he very much resembled an Indian, and I was afterwards informed that his father was a Spaniard and his mother a Yucatan Squaw.

Smith's descriptions of the pirates' actions are similarly fraught with inhumanity:

I saw that his brutal temper was excited by this information; his eyes flashed fire, and his whole countenance was distorted. He vowed destruction against the whole party, and rushing upon deck, assembled the crew, and imparted what he had heard. The air rang with the most dreadful imprecations; they simultaneously rushed below and dragged the helpless wounded wretch upon deck, and, without taking into consideration that the accusation against him might be unfounded, proceeded to cut off his legs and arms with a blunt hatchet, then mangling his body with their knives, threw the yet warm corpse overboard.

The doubtful historical accuracy of Smith's yarn aside, it is nonetheless a useful articulation of the popular mythicization of the pirate at the time of his writing.
And as a final note on the subject of pirates in fiction, the Mystic Seaport bookstore provided ample evidence of the enduring popularity of pirates in children's fiction: the legacy of works like Peter Pan and Treasure Island:

Research trip, Part I: Buccaneers of America at the Boston Public Library

2009-07-20T12:45:00.016-04:00

My quest to trace the evolving presentations of Alexander Exquemelin's Buccaneers of America took an exotic turn with the BPL's French-, Spanish-, and Dutch-language copies of this work. The French edition (Histoire des Aventuriers, des Boucaniers et de la Chambre des Comptes établie dans les Indes 1686) was from 1686 and the translator's note and preface were much more concerned with establishing the veracity of the account and explaining its utility both for voyagers to the West Indies and armchair travelers -- probably the influence of the early Enlightenment:

Car on peut dire en passant qu’il [Exquemelin] n’avance rien dont il ne rende raison bien éloigné de la manière de certains Autheurs, qui reduisent ceux qui les lisent à deviner ou du moins à les croire sur leur parole.
[Incidentally, we note that the author presents nothing that is not grounded in reason, as opposed to certain other authors who force their readers to guess or even just to take them at their word.]

The translator's brief mention of the buccaneers themselves makes clear their heroic virtues:

Il nous convainc encore par beaucoup d’exemples, de la valeur & de l’intrepidité de ces mesms Avanturiers, qui seulement avec des fusils, des sabres, & d’autres armes ordinaires, prennent des Navires, des Forts & des Villes, qu’on ne pourroit prendre qu’avec des Armées & des Sieges, qu’avec du Canon, des Mines, & d’autres moyens semblables qui sont d’un grand secours à la guerre …
[Using numerous examples, he (the author) convinces us further of the bravery and intrepedness of these adventurers, who took ships, forts, and towns with only rifles, swords, and other small arms when they ought to have needed armies and sieges, cannons, mines, and other such arms of war.]

The illustrations of this edition stuck to this theme; whereas English-language editions from the same time period depicted almost exclusively the pirates featured in Exquemelin's account and their more memorable atrocities (sacking cities, cutting out people's hearts), the 1686 French edition included only three illustrations: one of a sea turtle being stabbed, one of what I think was a manatee, and one of a buccaneer roasting meat over an open fire. This edition also contained a beautiful fold-out map the Caribbean with a detailed map of Tortuga:

I also read a Spanish-language edition from 1793 (Piratas de la America y luz a la defense de las costas de Indias Occidentales) which was notable chiefly for its (predictable) nationalist appeal to the strength of Spain. As noted in the title, its brief translator's note includes a description of how the work will help Spain continue to defend its North American territories as well as several verses (the latter presumably written by the translator himself) highlighting Spain's brave and warrior-like fight against pirates:

Nunca el Leon se muestra temeroso,
Aunque tenga ventaja el enemigo:
Siempre Espana al Pirata cauteloso,
Aun rugiendo da horrífero castigo.
[The Lion never shows fear
Even if the enemy has the advantage:
Spain is always on guard, roaring against pirates,
Even when it brings about horrific punishments.]

and

Tú, ó Alonso, mas doctor y verdadero,
Descbribes del América ingenioso
Lo que asalta el Pirata codicioso:
Lo que defiende el Espanol guerrero.
[O Alonso, truthfully and wisely
Describe the America
That the covetous pirate attacked
And the Spanish warrior defended.]

I also took a look at a 1931 Dutch-language edition of Buccaneers of America (De Americaensche Zeerovers). The introduction begins by noting the enduring popularity of the book, its many reprints and translations, and its influence on pirate and adventure stories, as well as the difficulty of tracking down the original:

Het boek, dat hier voor het eerst sinds 1709 herdrukt wordt, is de Hollandsche "oer-tekst" van het over de geheele wereld vermaarde werk, door Exquemelin over de bedrijven der vrijbuiters in de West-Indische wateren geschreven, een tot op heden nog veel gelezen, in de Fransche, Engelesche, Duitsche en Spaansche vertalingen nog steeds herdrukt avonturen-boek, dat in de latere jaren de stof heeft geleverd voor tallooze piraten- en avonturen-romans. De populariteit van dit boek maakte het des to opvallender, dat van de oorspronkelijke, door een Hollander in het Hollandsch geschreven uitgave, nog steeds geen nieuwe herdruk bestond, te meer waar die oorspronkelijke eerste uitgave vrijwel onvindbaar is geworden en slechts enkele bibliotheken ten onzent er een exemplaar van bezitten.
[This book, which is reprinted here for the first time since 1709, is the Dutch "ur-text" which is known throughout the whole world, written by Exquemelin about the buccaneers of the West Indies, most often read until now in the French, English, German, and Spanish translations, and that in later years provided the material for countless pirate and adventure stories. The popularity of this book, written originally by a Dutchman in Dutch, makes it all the more surprising that there have been no recent reprintings. The original first edition has become almost impossible to find and only a few libraries have a copy of it.]

The introduction goes on to attempt to figure out who Exquemelin really was and to document the history of the book's translations and reprintings. This edition included many illustrations, all done in a black-and-white cartoonish style that indicates that by 1931 in the Netherlands, pirates were well-established in the realm of children's stories and buffoonery (though it should be noted that the illustrations of Lolonois cutting out a man's heart and beheading captives aboard a ship remain thoroughly macabre):

Finally, we took a look at a 1914 English-language edition of Buccaneers of America intended for a young audience, as the George Alfred Williams, the author of the introduction notes:

In arranging this edition, the original English text only has been used, and but a few changes made by cutting out the long and tedious descriptions of plant and animal life in the West Indies, of which Esquemeling had only a smattering of truth. But, the history of Captain Morgan and his fellow Buccaneers is here printed almost identical with the original English translation, and we believe it is the first time this history has been published in a suitable form for the juvenile reader with no loss of interest to the adult.

As is so often the case in reprintings of Buccaneers of America, this edition too was at least partially motivated by current geopolitical events:

The world wide attention at this time in the Isthmus of Panama and the great canal connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean lends to this narrative an additional stimulus.

The most striking elements of this edition, however, were the wonderful illustrations by George Alfred Williams, which appear to be strongly influenced by those of Howard Pyle and help show where modern ideas of what a pirate looks like come from:

We're baaaaaaaaaack!

2009-07-20T10:13:00.001-04:00

Catherine and I are now happily back in DC after several long weeks of research travel. We visited the Rare Books Department of the Boston Public Library as well as the G.W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport's Museum of America and the Sea in Mystic, CT, and interviewed David Moore, an expert on Blackbeard and nautical archaeologist with the North Carolina Maritime Museum who is currently excavating Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge in Beaufort, North Carolina. While in North Carolina, we also delighted in our visit to the Knights of the Black Flag exhibit at the North Carolina History Museum, where we discovered just how much we have learned about pirates, demonstrated an uncanny ability to correctly identify the source of a good 80% of the pirate images used in the exhibits, and conducted important pirate research in the hands-on dress-up-like-a-pirate-and-play-on-the-model-pirate-ship section. Rather than post an extensive run-down* of the results of our whirlwind of archival work (we're only just starting to organize, analyze, categorize, et ceterize our veritable library of reading notes right now), I'll post a series of highlights from my findings and some pictures to illustrate them (click here to see photos from our Boston and Mystic trips and here for photos from North Carolina).

*Update: It appears that my attempted series of highlights predictably and more closely resembles an extensive run-down. Apologies.

Deconstructing the vegetable-pirate nexus

2009-07-02T14:19:00.012-04:00

Aaargh-tichokes, Piradishes, and Cuke-aneers: Deconstructing the vegetable-pirate nexus
Erin Lockwood, American University
From: The Journal of Critical Leguminous International Inquiry, 1, (2009): 1-2.

Introduction
Political discourse and official policy have shown an increased openness to discussions of fruits and vegetables previously considered outside the boundaries of civilized consumption practices, often rhetorically delegitimized through the heteronormative interpellation of such legumes as "crooked," or, colloquially, "wonky." Taking advantage of this recent discursive trend towards the re-introduction of vegetable-based rhetoric into the political sphere and drawing exclusively upon the methodologies of scholars whose names begin with "J" -- specifically J. Weldes, J. Derrida, J. Bially-Mattern, J. Butler, J. Baudrillard, J. Habermas and, perhaps unconventionally, J. Child -- this article analyzes the nexus between the identities of two intersubjectively constituted and otherized social actors -- pirates and vegetables and, more significantly, suggests that the deployment of rhetorical linkages between pirates and vegetables is no different from a patriarchal hegemonic deployment of traditional, weapons-based forms of "power" and "control."

Literature Review
A Google Scholar search of pirate + vegetable reveals that there is no current scholarship on this subject. A troubling find, and one indicative of the extent to which the association of pirate with vegetable has become one characterized by the Gramscian conceptualization of "commonsense."

Methodology
This study is occasionally a small n (n = 2) case study of cultural representations of pirates and vegetables and draws upon the theories and methods of the scholars whose names start with "J" cited above, some of whom say that methodology is inherently Western and rational and that deconstruction is non-method, and some of whom think this is pretty silly. In a performative acknowledgment of the aporetic interpretations of "method" and the liminal identity of both pirates and vegetable in the contemporary collective consciousness my meta-(non)method is therefore to oscillate very quickly between method and non-method while eating my not organic-certified carrot sticks in a politically aware manner.

Findings
Case 1:
One of the seminal basic disourses of the pirate-veggie nexus is found in a deceptively simple 20th century cinematic work of neo-Christian theology ostensibly aimed at children (though like so many other instantiations of so-called popular culture, this work is, to my mind, indicative of much more deeply buried -- indeed, repressed -- processes of repression and dehumynizaton) . This minimalist musical performance rhetorically links these societally marginalized identities with Weber's conceptualization of the capitalist-enabling Protestant work ethic -- or rather, in the Hegelian tradition, with its antithesis. But my interpretation -- indeed, any interpretation -- can only take us so far. Here is the piece in contention:

Case 2
The second basic discourse examined in this study engages in a similarly cartoon-like visual depiction of vegetable pirates -- a form of representational distancing between the perceived "reality" of the politically problematic nature of vegetable consumption and violent non-state actors and the harmless simulacra of the cultural deployment of these identities:

If you have fond memories of playing Pac-Man in your youth, your kids now have an opportunity to discover the fun of controlling a large-mouthed character who likes to eat. With Namco Bandai's The Munchables for the Nintendo Wii, kids come to the rescue of a world being attacked by alien veggies and fruits.All this eating is done in the context of a story about the peaceful but voracious Munchables society whose food is provided to them in great abundance by a set of Legendary Orbs. Space pirates shaped like fruits and vegetables and led by Don Onion have attacked the Munchables' world and stolen their Orbs. These bad guys are now arriving in hordes to put down their vegetarian roots. Luckily, they taste good to your Munchable character who has been recruited by the Great Elder to save the Munchables' world.

But whereas the previous discourse playfully acknowledges the religious origins of modern capitalist oppression by poetically and rhetorically linking the antithesis of the Weberian ethic to vegetable simulacra in a Christian-infused hyperreality, the second case deploys similar representations in a normatively hegemonic wielding of inherently Western nutritional values. By exploiting the commonsense associations of pirates with vegetables, this text implicitly but transparently associates the forbidden fruit (if you will) of these otherized identities with its aggressive imperialist vegetable-consumption agenda while normalizing violence by reifying the character of postmodern warfare in a seductively deceptive simulation of death and destruction:

Like Pac-Man,The Munchables creates addictive game play — it's fun to eat everything in sight. For parents concerned about violence, this is an E-rated game. But it does contain mild violence because you do eat cute anthropomorphized fruits and vegetables. There is no blood or agony — the interloping pirates just disappear into your character's maw as you become the hero for restoring order in your world.

Conclusions
I need to spend less time in the library.

Newport News Part II: The People

2009-06-29T19:39:00.006-04:00

So, this is my second, more travel-memoir style post on our adventures in Newport News. I think it's safe to say that Erin and I got a very entertaining introduction to southern culture.

We arrived in Newport News in the evening only to discover that our hotel, the always popular for the budget conscience Super 8, was on the wrong side of the tracks. Literally. There were train tracks, and as far as we could tell, we were on the wrong side of them. The woman who handled our check-in at said Super 8, provided our first encounter with the supremely friendly Newport Newsians. She wanted to know all about why we were visiting Newport News, while at the same time telling us that the motel was unusually full thanks to a weekend jazz festival, and trying to ply us with brochures to area attractions such as Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg, which we had no way to get to given our car-less situation. After insisting (at least three times) that yes, we would for sure call her if there was anything we needed once we got to the room, Erin and I settled in for our first night on the road.

The next morning, we arose bright eyed, bushy tailed, and more than ready to take on the Newport News public transportation system and the Mariners' Museum archives. A rather uneventful bus ride landed us at the front of Christopher Newport University, a lovely campus with a spectacular library where the Mariners' Museum archive is housed. Upon arriving at the campus, Erin and I asked one of the people working on the summer landscaping if she could point us in the direction of the library. The woman did us one better and got her companion to drive us right to the library in his golf cart. This ride, while welcome, was slightly uncomfortable as all three of us were squished into the front seat due to the plants that were occupying the back area of the vehicle.

Once we were deposited at the library, Erin and I were able to quickly make our way to the archive, where we met Mr. Bill Edwards-Bodmer, the library researcher. Mr. Bodmer turned out to be a lovely person and a great help to our project. He provided us with a list of all of the library's piratical materials and was more than happy to let us look at anything we wanted to. He even gamely put up with our very un-library appropriate excitement over the many editions of Exquemelin's Buccaneers of America and constant habit of reading especially good bits of what every document we happened to be working on out loud.

The seven hours we spent in the Mariners' Museum archive that day passed by in the blink of an eye and Thursday evening found Erin and I wandering the grounds of the Mariners' Museum itself. During our exploration, we stumbled upon a lake where we were presented with the opportunity to set sail in a pirate paddle boat for $5 per half hour. Given the subject of our research, how could we refuse? Erin and I quickly boarded our craft after the wonderful paddle-boat people snapped a photo which can be seen here. Our trip took us past charming bridges, mysterious coves, and a really oddly shaped tree. We briefly entertained the idea of trying to take the other paddle boat on the lake as a prize, but lack of speed and any real navigational talent persuaded us not to proceed in this endeavor.

Paddle boating is hard work, and after this adventure Erin and I decided that it was time to hunt down some victuals. The first restaurant we came across was the Warwick Restaurant, a local diner which provided us with a truly unique and entertaining dining experience. The meal began with a perusal of our menus where it was stated that with our entree we would have our choice of two vegetables. The veggie choices were as follows: mashed potatoes, french fries, potato salad, cole slaw, apple sauce, pickled beets, baked potatoes, and "vegetable of the day", which turned out to be collared greens. The experience only got better from there. Our waitress was a fabulous woman who took our order in an exceptionally friendly manner, and then proceeded to ask if we had hear about the death of Michael Jackson. Since Erin and I had been holed up in the library all day, this was news to us, and we had a nice bonding moment as the three of us commiserated over the loss of the controversial legend. Our waitress then proceeded to personally break the sad news to every other individual table in the diner, and soon a restaurant wide discussion of Michael Jackson ensued. After learning some valuable lessons about life, death, and the importance of cable television from the locals, Erin and I called it a night and headed back to the Super 8.

Once we reached the hotel, we quickly realized that our room keys had been demagnetized and I headed downstairs to get them fixed. Our friend from the night before was once again manning the desk and was more than happy to help me. She was thrilled that Erin and I seemed to be enjoying our stay in Newport News. The highlight of our conversation came right as I was about to head upstairs when she called after me with the words, "Child, do you know that Michael Jackson passed?". And on that rather odd note, our first and only full day in Newport News ended.

The next morning passed much in the same fashion as the first, with a bus ride and hours spent buried in the Mariners' Museum archive feverishly trying to work our way through all of the great pirate resources available to us before our inevitable trip back to DC. Erin and I quitted the library, in sort of a dazed state of pirate overload later in the afternoon. We made it safely to the Amtrak station where we boarded our train back to the big city and proceeded to spend our journey refusing to read, or even look at anything with the word "pirate" in it.

So ends our great adventure in Newport News. Stay tuned for the next installment of our travels, detailing what is sure to be a thrilling expedition to Boston and Mystic Seaport!

Newport News Part I: The Archives

2009-06-29T17:51:00.007-04:00

While Erin was occupied with every edition of The Buccaneers of America ever printed in English, I spent my two days in the Mariners' Museum archives reading 30 page pamphlets from the early 19th century chronicling the trials and executions of various pirates.

I won't subject you to all of the many wonders included in works such as: Mutiny and Murder- Confession of Charles Gibbs: a native of Rhode Island- Who, with Thomas J. Wansley, was doomed to be hung in New-York on the 22nd of April last, for the murder of the Captain and Mate of the Brig Vineyard, on her passage from New Orleans to Philadelphia in November 1830. Gibbs confesses that within a few years he participated in the murder of nearly 400 human beings! or A Most Wonderful Providence, In Many Incidents at Sea: An Engagement with a Pirate and a Mutiny at Sea, of Board Ship Ann of Boston, Commanded by Captain Eliah Holcomb: Written By Himself, And to the Truth of which he is willing to qualify at any time. Instead, I will be treating you to a cliffnotes version of my most interesting findings.

Because most of the documents that I read were all published around the same time, the first half of the 19th century, I was able to notice several interesting continuities between the ways in which pirates were portrayed in each of the works. As Erin pointed out in her earlier post, pirates and privateers were viewed as something akin to national heroes in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Well, let me tell you, by the time the 1800s rolled around there were no references to the "Heroick exploits of our own Countrey-men, and Relations". Instead, the forces of Victorian era were in full swing and a pirate was much more likely to be described as, "an active participator in the commission of crimes that are stamped with the most shocking barbarity!" (a particular gem taken from the trial of Charles Gibbs).

The accounts of trials and executions that I read were probably one third actual fact, one third sensationalized fiction, and one third warnings against the complete moral depravity of piracy. The authors seemed to relish reporting the heinous crimes committed by these pirates. For example, during the trial of Charles Gibbs, the pirate was reported to have recounted the following passage relating to the treatment of the crews belonging to ships captured by pirates:

"...as soon as we got a ship's crew in our power, a short consultation was held, and if it was the opinion of a majority that it would be better to take life than to spare it, a single nod or wink from our captain was sufficient-- regardless of age of sex, all entreaties for mercy were then made in vain-- we possessed not the tender feelings to be operated upon by the shrieks and expiring groans of the devoted victims!-- there was rather a strife among us, who, with his own hands, should dispatch the greatest number, and in the shortest period of time."

It was also impossible to miss the religious undertone that ran through almost all of these accounts. A plan to mutiny that resulted in the death of the captain and and several officers aboard the Plattsburg in 1816 was described in the following words: "...which, from its diabolical nature, we think ourselves warranted in saying, must have had Lucifer for its projector!", and the judge in the Charles Gibbs case followed his sentence of death with the advice that the convicts should use their time in prison to "seriously think and reflect on their FUTURE STATE!".

The authors of these pamphlets also took every opportunity to issue "Solemn Addresses to Youth" in order to entreat upon the youngsters of America to never turn to piracy as a means of seeking their fortune. All of these addresses cautioned youth to show "filial respect" to their parents and act wisely in "choosing your connexions". Above all though, these addresses stressed the merits of virtue and the necessity of this trait in living a successful, fulfilling life (or in other words, one that doesn't end with a trip to the gallows).

I think that this poem included at the end of The Pirates- A brief account of the HORRID MASSACRE of the Captain, Mate, and Supercargo of the Schooner Plattsburg of Baltimore, on the High Seas in July 1816 By a part of the crew of said vessel really sums up the spirit of my findings quite nicely.

Written on the Condemnation of the Pirates

How my heart with bitter anguish
Sinks in melancholy gloom;
Pensive and sad my muse must languish
As I sing the Murderer's doom.

Lo! In gloomy cells confined,
Shut from light and wholesome air,
Are four Outlaws, in chains entwined,
Who must for speedy death prepare.

All moral ties they burst asunder,
No laws could these vile wretches bind;
For nought but murder, guilt, and plunder,
In their vile hearts could refuge find.

As on Ocean, in soft slumber,
Three devoted victims sleep;
Ah! their hours are few in number,
Soon they're destined for the deep!

Ere the midnight watch is called,
Sudden alarm is quickly spread;
The victims rise- they are enthralled,
Soon to be numbered with the dead.

Cruel ruffians now surround them;
In vain for mercy do they cry;
With heavy blows the fiends astound them;
All hope has fled- alas!-- they die!

But what a final retribution
Soon the murderers will await;
Speedy, for their vial pollution
Will the wretched meet their fate.

Let our youth by them take warning;
Shun the path those murd'rers trod--
Lest, they should be by virtue scorning,
Call'd to the awful bar of God.

Channeling Indiana Jones in the Mariners' Museum archives

2009-06-29T14:13:00.019-04:00

Catherine and I have returned from a riotously absurd trip to the Mariners' Museum Library in Newport News, Virgina, safe, sound, and bursting with exciting findings on matters piratical. I'll leave the eccentricities of the good hamlet, its residents, and its public transportation to Catherine to recount and concentrate on what I spent most of my time reading while there: Six editions of what is today known as The Buccaneers of America by Alexander O. Exquemelin (though the title and the author's name have undergone several shifts since the book was first written in Dutch in 1678). I had the distinct pleasure and privilege of reading English translations from 1684, 1699, 1741, 1856, 1891, and 1924 (in addition to the 2000 Dover publication I had already read from the AU library).

While I did not have time to compare the various translations themselves, I spent an extensive amount of time reading and taking notes on the different introductions and prefaces to each edition. The manner in which the exact same work was presented varied incredibly dramatically and provided a better means of tracking changes in the pirate discourse than we had expected to find (though not necessarily how those changes happened). Here are some of my excerpts from, and notes on, each edition:

1684: Exquemelin's account was presented as an exhortation to the bold and adventurous English national spirit in the face of the devious Spanish. From the Translator's Note to the Reader:

The present Volume, both for it's [sic] Curiosity, and Ingenuity, I dare recommend unto the perusal of our English Nation, whose glorious Actions it containeth ... and besides, it informeth us (with huge novelty) of as great and bold attempts, in point of Military conduct and valour, as ever were performed by mankind; without excepting, here, either Alexander the Great, or Julius Ceasar, or the rest of the Nine Worthy's of Fame ... We having here more than half the Book filled with the unparallel'd, if not unimitable, adventures and Heroick exploits of our own Countrey-men, and Relations; whose undaunted and exemplary Courage, when called upon by our King and Country, we ought to emulate.

To be clear, the "Countrey-men" in question include, most notably, Captain Henry Morgan, perhaps best known for his brutal attacks on Maracaibo and Panama that left hundreds of men dead and entire towns burned. In the preface to the second volume (Containing The Dangerous Voyage and Bold Attempts of Captain Bartholomew Sharp, and others; performed upon the Coasts of the South Se, for the space of two years, &c. From the Original Journal of the said Voyage. Written by Mr. Basil Ringrose, Gent. Who was all along present at those Transactions.) the anonymous publisher addresses apparent inaccuracies in Exquemelin's account of Morgan's burning of Panama thusly:

And what disgrace were it, to that worthy person, if he had set fire unto it, for those reasons he knew best himself? Certainly no greater dishonour than to take and plunder the said City. Thus are these persons so far transported with passion towards Sir Henry Morgan, as to bereave him of the glory of his greatest Actions, whether true or false ... Thus both the English Nation, and the Spanish having agreed, to give the honour of this Action either truely or falsely, unto Sir Henry Morgan, I cannot but admire those who pretend to be the greatest admirers of his merits, should endeavour to devest him of it.

1699: The preface to the 1699 edition echoes the 1684 admiration of Morgan and the buccaneers, but it is more qualified than the earlier praise, providing a glimpse of the characterization of pirate as immoral savages that will later become dominant in the pirate narrative:

It would be superfluous to say much by way of Preface to the following Work, since a great part of it has some Years ago been Exposed to Publick view with a general Applause; and indeed the wonderous Actions and daring Adventures therein related, are such as could not but transport the most stupid minds into an Admiration of them, tho many times they were not attended with that Justness and Regularity that became Christians, or even men of any Tolerable Morals.

However, the passage from the 1699 edition that caught my attention most acutely (which is a professional way of saying that I lept up from the table and shouted in excitement) was as follows:

I will not take upon me to Apologize for many of the Actions done, and here related, since even in the most regular Troops and best disciplined Armies, daily Enormities are committed which the strictest vigilance cannot prevent; However it is very remarkable, that in such a lawless Body as these Bucaniers seemed to be, in respect to all others; that yet there should be such an Oeconomy (if I may so say) kept and regularity practiced among themselves, so that every one seemed to have his property as much secured, as if he had been a member of the most Civilized Community in the World; tho at the same time when I consider of some of their Laws, such as those against Drunkenness and the like immoralities, I believe I have a great deal of reason to remain suspicious of their Sincerity. But be these things as they will; a bolder Race of Men, both as to personal Valor and Conduct certainly never yet appeared on the liquid Element, or dry Land; and I hope it will be taken neither for an Affront nor a Complement, to say the English were always the leading and prevailing party amongst them.

This passage represents an elegant distillation of so many pirate tropes (some abandoned, others still very much around) that I could hardly sit still. In it we have not only the distinction between pirates and the "civilized world" that later became so dominant, but also an appeal to the greatness of the English identity, and, perhaps most remarkably, a 17th century nod to the political economy of piracy that so fascinates Peter Leeson today. Incredible!

1741: But the plot thickens! The next edition the library had was one from 1741. It appeared to have the identical preface to that of the 1699 edition but on closer examination I noticed that the phrase that read "tho at the same time when I consider of some of their Laws, such as those against Drunkenness and the like immoralities, I believe I have a great deal of reason to remain suspicious of their Sincerity" was entirely gone from this edition, thereby significantly strengthening the preface's (non) apology for piratical atrocities. It's worth noting too that the earlier appeals to English nationalism were well intact, and that the 1741 publication date occurred not insignificantly right in the middle of the English War of Jenkins' Ear against their old enemies the Spanish and which had included, in 1739 a state-based capture of Porto Bello, Panama by the British navy.

1856: The 1856 American edition of Buccaneers is most notable for its distancing of the contemporary world from the piracy of old. Piracy here is presented as an historical phenomenon. The 1856 edition kept the 1699 preface (and the line about being suspicious about the sincerity of pirate codes has made a miraculous return), but added an introduction lauding the civilized age in which its readers lived:

Read the following pages, and compare the state and transactions of the world at the times on which it treats with those of the present. If, when they have done this, they are not satisfied that the general character of mankind has been greatly ameliorated within the last three centuries, nothing, it is thought, would satisfy them of the fact... there has been a complete revolution of the seas. Sea-kings are no longer known or acknowledged ... it is only necessary to survey our own American coast within the space of two hundred years after its settlement by Europeans, to learn what terrors awaited all those who attempted voyages by sea.

By now, the perception of pirates as dangerous and acting well outside the bounds of acceptable behavior is well in place -- a startling contrast with the hero-worship of the same actions from a century before. We've gone from references to "the valour of our famous Bucaniers" (1684 translator's note) to stating that "the records of our admiralty courts are full of trials of pirates, with the most revolting accounts of their cruelties and their executions."

1891: This edition was the second one which led me to jump up and exclaim aloud, so incredible a find was its introduction by editor Howard Pyle. Listen to how it begins:

Why is it that a little spice of deviltry lends not an unpleasantly titillating twang to the great mass of respectable flour that goes to make up the pudding of our modern civilization? And pertinent to this question another -- Why is it that the pirate has, and always has had, a certain lurid glamour of the heroical enveloping him round about?

As early as 1891, Pyle was asking (in unfortunately purple prose) some of the same questions we were about the romanticization of piracy! And he goes on:

Is there, deep under the accumulated debris of culture, a hidden ground-work of the old-time savage? Is there even in these well-regulated times an unsubdued nature in the respectable metnal household of every one of us that still kicks against the pricks of law and order? To make my meaning more clear, would not every boy, for instance -- that is every boy of any account -- rather be a pirate captain than a Member of Parliament? And we ourselves; would we not rather read such a story as that of Captain Avery's capture of the East Indian treasure-ship, with its beautiful princess and load of jewels ... than -- say one of Bishop Atterbury's sermons or the goodly Master Robert Boyle's religious romance of "Theodora and Didymus? It is to be apprehended that to the unregenerate nature of most of us, there can be but one answer to such a query.

Courage and daring, no matter how mad and ungodly, have always a redundancy of vim and life to recommend them to the nether man that lies within us, and no doubt his desperate courage, his battle against tremendous odds of all the civilized world of law and order have had much to do in making a popular hero of our friend of the black flag. But it is not altogether courage and daring that endears him to our hearts. There is another and perhaps a greater kinship in that lust for wealth that makes one's fancy revel more pleasantly in the story of the division of treasure in the pirate's island retreat, the hiding of his godless gains somewhere in the sandy stretch of tropic beach, there to remain hidden until the time should come to rake the dubloons up again and to spend them like a lord in polite society, than in the most thrilling tales of his wondrous escapes from commissioned cruisers through tortuous channels between the coral reefs. And what a life of adventure is his to be sure! A life of constant alertness, constant danger, constant escape! An ocean Ishmaelite, he wanders for ever aimlessly, homelessly; now unheard of for months, now careening his boat on some lonely uninhabited shore, now appearing suddenly to swoop down on some merchant-vessel with rattle of musketry, shouting, yells, and a hell of unbridled passions let loose to rend and rant. What a Carlislean hero! What a setting blood and lust and flame and rapine for such a hero!

It's not that Pyle's answers to these questions are convincing or even entirely helpful to our research program, but the fact that he thought to ask them indicates a fascinating degree of self-awareness -- even 100 years ago -- of the grip piracy held on the popular imagination. Too, Pyle provides a wonderfully clear and detailed articulation of what "pirate" meant at the end of the 19th century:

During the early eighteenth century the Spanish main and adjacent waters swarmed with pirate crafts, and the fame of their deeds forms a chapter of popular history that may almost take rank with that which tells of Robin Rood, Friar Rush, Schinderhammes, and other worthies of the like kidney of a more or less apocryphal nature. Who has not heard tell of Blackbeard? Who does not know of the name of the renowned Captain Kid? Who has not heard the famous ballad which tells of his deeds of wickedness?

The introduction is quite lengthy and dominated by the twin themes of "savagery" ("Among the buccaneers were to be found the off-scourings of all the french and English West Indies -- a mad, savage, unkempt phase of humanity, wilder than the wildest Western cow-boys -- fierce, savage, lawless, ungoverned, ungovernable") and "blood" ("In ten or twelve years Spain had lost millions upon millions of dollars, which vast treasure was poured in a golden flood into those hot fever-holes of towns, where Jews and merchants and prostitutes battened on the burning lusts of the wild hunters whose blood was already set aflame with plunder and rapine"), repeated over and over again. Finally, Pyle's explanation of why he has kept the original translation of Buccaneers largely intact bears repeating:

One touch of the modern brush would destroy the whole tone of dim local colours of the past made misty by the lapse of time. It needs the quaint old archaic language of the seventeenth century to tell of those deeds of blood and rapine and cruelty, and the stiff, formal style of the author-translator seems in some way to remove those deeds out of the realms of actuality into the hazy light of romance. So told the adventures of those old buccaneers still remain a part of humbler history, but they do not sound so cruel, so revolting as they would be told in our nineteenth-century vernacular.

Incredible! The temporal distancing that is evident beginning with the 1741 edition, but most notably in the 1856 one is self-consciously and deliberately articulated here.

1924: The 1924 edition includes a remarkably awful introductory essay by Andrew Lang, noteworthy first of all for its Cordingly-like approach to the putative gap between the "romance" and "reality" of piracy:

Most of us, as boys, have envied the buccaneers ... The buccaneers is 'a gallant sailor,' according to Kingsley's poem [Canon Kingsley, "The Last Buccaneer"] -- a Robin Hood of the waters, who preys only on the wicked rich, or the cruel and Popish Spaniard, and the extortionate shipowner. For his own part, when he is not rescuing poor Indians, the buccaneer lives mainly 'for climate and the affections'... Yet the vocation [!] was not really so touchingly chivalrous as the poet would have us deem ... The buccaneers were certainly models of diligence and conscientiousness in their own industry, which was to torture people till they gave up their goods, and then to run them through the body, and spend the spoils over drink and dice ... they were the most hideously ruthless miscreants that ever disgraced the earth and the sea.

The second element of note in Lang's essay is the unremittingly negative light in which the buccaneers are portrayed and his efforts to warn youth that "pieces of eight do not grow on trees." This compulsion to warn youth against the temptations of piracy is something that Catherine noted in much of the reading she did, especially in sensationalist 19th century accounts of the lives and trials of some famous pirates, but I'll let her tell about that.

The various editions of Buccaneers of America were not the only readings I did at the Mariners' Museum -- Catherine and I read and took notes through a fairly impressive collection of piracy-related documents -- but this post has gone on for far too long, so I think I'll wax enthusiastic over such masterpieces as The Life, Trial, Confession and Execution of Albert W. Hicks, The Pirate and Murderer, Executed on Bedloe's Island, New York Bay, On the 13th of July 1860, For the Murder of Capt. Burr, Smith and Oliver Watts, on Board the Oyster Sloop E.A. Johnson. Containing the History of his Life (Written by himself) from childhood up to the time of his arrest. With a full account of his piracies, murders, mutinies, high-way robberies, etc., comprising the Particulars of nearly One Hundred Murders another time.

To conclude, here is a picture of Catherine and I with our trusty pirate-themed pedal boat (ahem, hijacked sloop) at the lake outside the Mariners' Museum after a long day in the archives:

Real pirates always wear their life jackets. For further photo documentation of our trip (and an unwarranted number of pictures of trains and Leifr Eiriksson) click here.

Something for everyone!

2009-06-24T10:39:00.002-04:00

Pirates can, in fact, be connected to pretty much anything, but to demonstrate pirates' broad-based appeal, a quick round-up of piracy headlines, before we head to the collections of the Mariners' Museum in Newport News.

For the military technology geek: The Vienna-based company Schiebel Group, known for its work with mine-detection and UAV technology is, as Danger Room notes, advertising a robotic helicopter as a pirate detection system.

The three-year-old Camcopter design is popular with organizations working to “de-mine” old battlefields, and with oil companies, for pipeline monitoring. But the 10-foot-long, 200-pound bird, can also be flown from tankers and other large vessels, in order to search ahead for pirates, according to Schiebel. The company told Aviation News, in June, that a Saudi tanker operator has already “shown interest” in buying Camcopters for Somalia duty. But it’s worth noting that the US Coast Guard stresses alert watchmen, sailing fast, and pulling up a ship’s ladder — not some expensive technology – as the best methods for beating pirates.

For the type of people who read the Foreign Policy blogs every morning: Japan's parliament has authorized the use of force by the Japanese Navy against Somali pirates, raising more questions about the future of Japan's pacifist constitution.

For people interested in international maritime law: A NATO warship recently captured a group of pirates who tried to hijack a Singaporean freighter, stopping the hijacking with no casualties but later releasing the pirates. NATO has been criticized before for being too gentle with captured Somali pirates, and the organization does not have a detainment policy; the arresting warship must follow its own national laws.

For readers of biography: The Providence Journal published a biographical sketch of Thomas Tew, a late 17th century pirate and privateer, who operated off the coast of Africa, raiding Mughal ships. Probably.

In the 17th century there was a pirate from Rhode Island. Or perhaps he was a privateer. Maybe he wasn’t from Rhode Island after all. These are the kind of “facts” that float to the surface when one stirs the murky brew of hand-me-down history that has fermented for centuries, from a time when legend often was prized over fact, and records, if kept, have crumbled to dust.

As Catherine noted the other day, however, the beauty of our project is that it doesn't actually matter who Tew really was or what he really did. Intersubjective understandings and cultural representations of piracy are based on myth-making. What's interesting here is the continued interest in Tew's roguish deeds -- not whether Tew actually did them.

For the history buff: There's a movement afoot in Scottish Parliament to clear Captain Kidd's name following research that indicates that Kidd may have been framed by King William III, "who wanted to appear tough on piracy but who also stood to profit from the goods which Kidd seized." The tale of Kidd's hanging is pretty grisly -- the rope snapped the first two times -- and his body was tarred and hung along the banks of the Thames as a warning. The Scottish MP behind the motion has cast it in terms of justice, noting the problematic ambiguity of the privateer/pirate distinction:

"I think these types of incidents, whenever they happen, have a lesson and a morality for all time because otherwise we allow people to get away with breaking the law and breaking rules and we allow governments to get away with punishing people wrongly. I don't expect that there's going to be a mass campaign in the streets for something that happened 300 years ago but I do expect that people are going to be worried about the fact that someone can be used and abused in that way by the state, whatever time in history. If someone is accused and hung for something that he didn't actually do, when he was operating for the government and he was doing the job properly, that comes down to a criminal act on the part of the government not on him."

For the local TV viewer like you: The Discovery Channel and the Military Channel recently aired a program on the capture and rescue of the captain and crew of the Maersk Alabama, with a local man from Norfolk, VA playing the role of Abduwali Abduqadir Muse, the accused pirate awaiting trial in New York.

Piratz!

2009-06-22T16:42:00.006-04:00

Last Friday, Erin and I decided to emerge from our little world of discourse and try our hand at an ethnography. By this I mean we finally managed to make it to Piratz Tavern, an honest-to-God pirate bar located in Silver Spring. The bar is everything that one would expect of a pirate themed establishment, so, in other words, totally campy and utterly fabulous! The walls were decorated with a variety of skulls and crossbones, complete skeletons, swords and other weapons from bygone eras, and a general mishmash of Caribbean-style decorative ornaments. Erin and I were seated in the bar underneath florescent lights covered with historical pirate flags and a giant vulture named Sweetness, as our roguishly garbed server informed us.

The waitstaff were all dressed in true pirate style with leather boots, three cornered hats, billowing shirts, striped pants, and velvet jackets. The women were wearing gowns with appropriately large amounts of cleavage bared and patrons at the bar were allowed to tip by putting dollars...well, I'm sure you can guess where. The drinks (which unfortunately Erin and I are not old enough to partake of) were all fruity concoctions or full of potentially lethal amounts of rum.

Erin and I also had the singular good luck of being at Piratz the same night as a troupe of pirate actors known as The Vagabonds. From what we could gather based on conversations with a couple members (who were very happy to chat after hearing about our research) these people are masters of pirate history, weaponry, and culture. One man is a fight choreographer who lost sight in one eye during a practice duel, and if that's not hard core, I'm not entirely sure what is. Erin and I bonded with one pirate in particular after he teased us for being sober and pronounced our lack of fake IDs as truly against the pirate lifestyle. The Vagabonds were at Piratz Tavern to provide the evening's entertainment which took the form of pirate drinking songs and chanteys, some of which required audience participation, and most of which were well past PG in content.

Now the thing is, neither Erin nor I are "pirate people". I was not the kid who lived for treasure hunts and begged my parents for toy swords at Christmas. As a high schooler, I was not the girl who could quote lines from Pirates of the Caribbean verbatim and had a life size cardboard cut out of Johnny Depp in my bedroom. My favorite ride at Disney Land was so Splash Mountain, and I have felt no compulsion to change my facebook language settings to pirate. In fact, Erin and I have actively resisted becoming pirate people, partly because we like to actively resist things, but mostly because we don't want it to give the appearance we decided to do this project because "pirates are awesome!" or something... Even so, the evening at Piratz Tavern was a lot of fun. It was nice to leave the academic focus of our research behind for the night and let ourselves enjoy the cheesy, cliched, and more than a little ridiculous side of things. Just as the Piratz Taveren website advertises, it was most certainly an "escape from the ordinary"!

Dissent! Dissent on the pirate blog!

2009-06-22T13:17:00.009-04:00

As the Great Howard-Jackson Academia Debate of 2009 shows (see here and here and here and here and even here), a good knock-down, drag-out battle of hearts and minds makes for fascinating reading, so I've decided to drag some more controversy aboard the pirate blog by taking another PhD'ed scholar to task. This project and I thrive on dissent, discussion, and debate, so lest a reader be inclined to think that the whole wide world endorses our non-traditional research inclinations, I thought I would post a critique of the methods of discourse analysis from Janice E. Thomson's Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-building and extraterritorial violence in early modern Europe. Thomson's book deals with the fundamentally constructivist problem of how the system of state sovereignty that realist theorists treat as an exogenous assumption was, well, constructed:

If all of these boundaries are contested and contingent, the question is, How are they produced and reproduced such that they appear permanent, fixed, and natural? Why do we think we know what sovereignty is? Put differently, how are Ruggie's 'hegemonic form of state/society relations' or Ashley's 'hegemonic exemplar' of 'a normalized sovereignty' constructed? (18)

Thomson recognizes that sovereignty is variable, social, and contingent (12-13) but rather than treating discourse as a constitutive site of sovereignty, she discounts it entirely as such:

Textual (intertextual, contextual) interpretation, discourse analysis, and other deconstruction methods are not the necessary or only alternative. It is not clear that these methods will generate a 'productive' research program in the Keohanian sense ... Moreover, by adopting such unconventional methods, critical theory allows or forces mainstream scholars to dismiss postmodernism based on its research designs, methods, and data. It hardly helps matters that much of postmodernist discourse is opaque (thus, largely meaningless) to ordinary international relations scholars ... Beyond this, the postmodernist focus on discourse poses the danger of diverting attention from the reality of state power to the discourse about it. States are now massive, physical, bureacratic, and coercive institutions that have been developing for some six centuries. While postmodernists are surely right to claim that discourse is the deployment of power, it is implausible to argue that the exercise of power in this form is of central importance to, much less decisive in, world politics. Discourse may contribute to the construction of the state but I am not convinced that the state might be fundamentally altered if the discourse on the state changed or that it would vanish if we stopped talking about it. (161)

These are pretty damning charges that strike at the heart of our research project, especially given the overlap between the construction of sovereignty and the construction of pirates, that Thomson herself observes and analyzes (hence the book's title). My response* to this footnoted assault on my summer's work, then, is four-fold:

1. Thomson questions whether discursive analyses can generate a productive research program, citing Robert Keohane's critique of reflectivism in "International Institutions: Two Approaches." However, Thomson herself, writing in 1994, dismisses this critique on empirical grounds in an earlier footnote, noting that "this charge is unfair to the extent that these scholars have spawned the deconstructionist project in international relations" (160). Fifteen years later, the empirical argument against claims of "no research agenda" is even stronger. IR scholars such as Jutta Weldes, Charlotte Epstein, Neta Crawford, and Janice Bially Mattern have written post-structuralist analyses that explicitly focus on discourse and rhetoric using a coherent and rigorous --if unapologetically non-positivist -- methodology. The theory and methodology informing such works present an implicit research model, and in Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War, Lene Hansen offers an explicit description of how to conduct quality discourse analysis research. Works like Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea's Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn represent contemporary attempts to develop a set of serious guidelines around which to orient such textually focused research methods.

As for Thomson's charge that such "unconventional" methods force mainstream scholars to dismiss such research, again, that is a norm that is changing, and articles such as the extended exchange in International Studies Quarterly between Robert Keohane (!) and J. Ann Tickner (see here and here and here and here) indicate that conventional scholars are indeed seriously engaging with non-mainstream methods, even as they critique them.

Next, it is unclear to what extent Thomson herself follows a clearly defined "productive" research program. Her rejection or realist and liberal assumptions about sovereignty puts her squarely outside the realm of mainstream IR theory, and her use of an interpretive institutionalist "protoparadigm" (14) seems open to much the same critique that she levels at postmodernism.

2. Thomson states that postmodernist discourse tends to be incomprehensible to IR scholars. First of all, the arguments above about how unconventional methodologies are theories are becoming increasingly conventional applies here. Second, I would suggest, that this is a relatively silly, red herringish, reason to dismiss such methods. I'm sorry they are difficult to understand, but a methodology that dismisses parsimonious covering laws is bound to be a bit complicated. I'm sorely tempted to say that this criticism has nothing to do with the merits of postmodernist methods, but I'm afraid it would be obnoxiously hypocritical to exempt postmodernist discourse from a critique of postmodernism. A better response is that every discipline has its vocabulary and Thomson's book -- particularly her theory and method chapter -- would be quite difficult to the policy-makers whom she briefly addresses in the final chapter (151-152) if they had no knowledge of academic IR theory. The best response would be to not prejudge the question; we have no intention of gratuitously using esoteric academic jargon -- from any discipline -- in our paper and to the extent that we do, we intend to clearly and concisely define our terms (or at the very least, present an argument for why we don't).

3. Thomson's argument that focusing on discourse about power takes attention away from "the reality of it" is powerfully discounted by every one of the rhetorically-focused constructivist authors whose theory and methods we draw upon in our research. Such authors argue that discourse and policy are mutually constitutive: that there is no brightline between discourse and reality. In "Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric," for example, Ronald Krebs and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson outline a particular mechanism (that of rhetorical coercion) by which state power can be discursively deployed. Further blurring the putative line between rhetoric and reality, Jutta Weldes explains how official discourse shapes the national interest and creates the conditions of possibility under which force can and cannot be deployed:

Drawing on and constrained by the array of cultural and linguistic resources already available within the security imaginary, state officials create representations that serve, first, to populate the world with a variety of objects, including both the self (that is, the state in question and its authorized officials) and others ... Second, such representations posit well-defined relations among these diverse objects. These relations often appear in the form of quasi-causal arguments such as ... the domino theory ... Finally, in providing a vision of the world of international relations— in populating that world with objects and in supplying quasicausal, or warranting, arguments— these representations have already defined the national interest.

Weldes argues that examining state discourse helps understand why claims about national interest and threats to state power are believed and thus legitimate state action, using the discursive construction of the Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba as a "crisis" as a case study. In a similar tradition, Janice Bially Mattern makes the case in Ordering International Politics: Identity, Crisis, and Representational Force that language power is every bit as "real" as military strength and that representational force (what she calls a "threat of potential violence to the victim's subjectivity") can coerce "real" state action just as effectively as the traditional mechanisms of power politics. Specifically, she argues that the mechanisms of language power and rhetorical links between concepts like "betrayal" and "Dulles" made it impossible for the US to intend to use force against British cooperation with the nationalization of the Suez Canal.

Arguments like these demonstrate that discourse is indeed deeply relevant and even decisive in the exercise of world politics. To bring the discussion back to pirates, the fact that the United States can call the Somali hijackers "pirates" makes possible and rules out specific military and non-military reactions to what can be constructed as a threat. It's not as simple as labeling anyone the Navy SEALS want to snipe as a "pirate" -- prior understandings of the word determine whom we can label as a pirate -- but the deployment of the term itself does legitimate "real world" responses.

4. Thomson's final point here is that nothing would change if we altered our discourse on the state and the state would not vanish if we stopped talking about it. In response to the first half of the statement, the above argument applies fairly well. Again, because our use of discourse analysis rests on intersubjective understandings of various rhetorical commonplaces, we are not making the argument that a change in discourse can cause a change in state (or non-state) identities. The causal relationships we are analyzing are not one-directional independent-variable/dependent-variable type mechanisms. Rather, they deal with conditions of possibility and contingent configurations: because we understand a "pirate" to be someone who hijacks ships in international waters (to use a crude definition) based on a series of historical experiences, we can then deploy the term "piracy" to what we understand some Somalis to be doing in the Gulf of Aden. Then, because the term "piracy" carries with it a history of sanctioned state responses, we can respond "appropriately."

Thomson is correct; a deliberate and unilateral (or, I would argue, exclusively academic) change in state discourse -- in and of itself and devoid of the social context that gives it meaning -- would not inevitably change our understanding of the state. But, a change in the discourse about states that resonates with the public or that makes use of rhetorical coercion or deploys representational force -- such a shift in discourse could well change our understanding of states. States, to misquote Wendt, are what states make of them, but states cannot be made infinitely many things.

Thomson's claim that the state would not vanish if we stopped talking about it is a similar sort of perversion of (our flavor of) constructivist thought. It's a silly argument, because in today's political and international context we could not just decide to stop talking about the state. That's why all this constructivist talk of context and intersubjectivity matters; the state-based international system may be a social construction, but, as Thomson notes, we function as though it were real. Discourse does not independent produce or cause the state any more than the state independently produces or causes discourse. Discourse and the state exist only in relation to each other.

Epilogue: Finally, Thomson is correct that the knee-jerk reaction to the label of "postmodernism" by a certain, often generationally-defined, segment of academia (my father, for example) tends to be outright dismissal. Indeed, by labeling all textual and discursive analyses as postmodern, Thomson herself manages to confound theory and method and throw baby and bathwater out the window. Discourse analysis, of course, is a methodological tool that can be used to serve different theories and what Catherine and I are doing is actually constructivist rather than postmodernist in intention, to the extent that our concern lies much more with explicating contingent conditions of possibility and turning points than with revealing hidden structures of violence. But that would have been the easy response to all this and sometimes my own buried identity as a policy debater with eightminutestofillwithrapidfirespeechandnodroppedargumentsontheflow is revealed (I had to work very hard not to type TURN! before the third paragraph of subpoint 1) ...

*Maybe a footnoted methodological criticism doesn't really deserve an extended line-by-line rebuttal. On the other hand, maybe it really, really does. I adhere to the latter position. Additionally, I expect this will come in handy for our lit review.

Threat of piracy ballooning off Africa's eastern coast

2009-06-21T18:40:00.003-04:00

We recently finished a (very) rough draft of our theory and methods section, so rather than a post involving actual words and ideas, here's a cartoon instead, courtesy of Fletcher.

http://www.marriedtothesea.com/061109/somalian-balloon-pirate.gif

Reporting live from Puntland

2009-06-18T10:00:00.005-04:00

Al Jazeera's English-language series of reports on piracy called "Pirates' Haven" is one of the best in-depth account of Somali piracy that I have come across. Al Jazeera's East African correspondent Mohammed Adow travels to Bossasso and Eyl to interview pirates, governmental officials, and others in an effort to contextualize more fully the pirates that, as Adow notes, have been captured mainly in the headlines.

The first part takes a look at the Puntland region and the conditions that originally facilitated piracy as a business and continue to fuel it today:

Part 2 examines the system of hostages and ransom payments inherent in piracy, and Adow documents local reactions -- and objections to -- piracy in the town of Eyl.

BBC's Africa correspondent Andrew Harding also visits Puntland to report on the fight against piracy in Somalia:

Meanwhile, anti-piracy efforts continue apace outside Somalia as well. Interpol is currently working on compiling a database of Somali pirate suspects:

"Without systematically collecting photographs, fingerprints and DNA profiles of arrested pirates and comparing them internationally, it is simply not possible to establish their true identity or to make connections which would otherwise be missed," Interpol's Executive Director of Police Services, Jean-Michel Louboutin, said in a statement released Wednesday at the agency's headquarters in Lyon, France.

On a lighter note

2009-06-15T23:28:00.005-04:00

From the funny papers:

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-06-15/

Piracy as the high-profile tip of the Somali iceberg

2009-06-14T12:12:00.008-04:00

The BBC recently published an excellent article and accompanying radio report on the hijacking of the Danish merchant ship the CEC Future. Rob Walker interviews both the ship captain and crew, some incarcerated pirates, and Ali Mohamed Ali, the same pirate negotiator that struck up an unlikely friendship -- reported by NPR -- with shipping executive Per Gallestrup. He goes on to detail how the ransom payment was parachuted down to the hijacked vessel (a surprisingly tricky business), the dynamics between the pirates' captain, Omar, and his crew, and the economic benefits the Somali port town of Eyl has accrued as a result of piracy. Information about the mechanics of Somali pirate attacks can also be seen in Eagle1's post about the attack on the Dubai Princess which includes a series of photos capturing exactly what an attack by RPG-armed pirates in a speedboat looks like. The upcoming Samuel L. Jackson action movie about pirate negotiator Andrew Mwangura demonstrates a similar interest in the workings of the Somali piracy phenomenon.

John Boonstra, from UN Dispatch, would perhaps approve of this interest to the extent that it ultimately draws attention to Somalia's growing humanitarian crisis, which has resulted in over 100,000 internally-displaced persons. Boonstra quotes Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini:

"Piracy is only the tip of the iceberg," Frattini said. "We are convinced that piracy is related to the political and socioeconomic crisis on land, not on the sea.

Boonstra notes, however, that the iceberg is "much, much bigger" than current steps (calls for international coordination, the establishment of pirate courts, and a Somali coast guard) are addressing, and he states that, "Compared with the widespread travesties faced by these thousands of Somalis, the international community's focus on piracy, whatever its impact on the global economy, seems almost an affront to human dignity. " But as Frattini's statement hints at, continued interest in the region and the piratical tip of the iceberg -- whether expressed in respected news media, the blogosphere, or Hollywood -- carries the possibility of increased awareness of the wide-spread human rights violations, violence, and war crimes. Given that the Somali pirates continue to hold a large number of vessels and appear to be expanding their range of attacks to the Persian Gulf, piracy is likely to stay popular in the news and culture, but whether the attention given to Somali's humanitarian problems will go beyond the following prerequisite cursory nods remains to be seen:

"Somalia has been without a stable government since 1991, allowing piracy to flourish." (BBC)

"The pirates in the recent string of attacks are all from Somalia, an extremely poor African country that hasn't had a stable government in decades." (Washington Post)

"Piracy has become a multimillion-dollar business in Somalia, a nation that has limped along since 1991 without a functioning central government." (The New York Times)

"Murdered by pirates is good!"

2009-06-13T21:25:00.010-04:00

Last week Catherine and I sort of* kicked off our watching of pirate movies with an old favorite and one of the cleverest works of modern cinema: The Princess Bride. We were, of course, observing carefully the representation of the Dread Pirate Roberts (quite possibly an homage to Bartholomew Roberts), and this line, in particular, caught our attention: "Then he explained that the name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear. You see, no one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Westley." This was welcome -- if happily non-academic -- support for our strong conviction that names matter. Below, for your unmitigated enjoyment, is the scene from the Fire Swamp where Westley explains the history of the Dread Pirate Roberts (beginning at 1:20):

Also, because I cannot resist the pairing of narrative, pirate, and the Princess Bride, xkcd brings us:

*Actually, for geneaological purposes, Variety Pirate Theater 3000 (as one friend has termed it) will proceed in chronological order beginning with the 1921 silent film The Sea Lion. The Princess Bride was mostly just for fun. Below is our list of films:

1921- The Sea Lion
1926- The Black Pirate
1933- In the Wake of the Bounty
1935- Captain Blood
1935- Phantom Ship
1936- Captain Calamity
1938- The Buccaneer
1939- Mutiny of the Elsinor
1940- The Sea Hawk
1942- The Black Swan
1948- The Pirate
1950- Buccaneer’s Girl
1950- Double Crossbones
1952- Against All Flags
1952- Blackbeard the Pirate
1952- Mutiny
1952- Pirate of the Blackhawk
1952- Yankee Buccaneer
1953- Peter Pan
1955- Long John Silver
1956- Manfish
1956- The Buccaneers (The Complete Series)
1982- The Pirate Movie
1987- The Princess Bride
1991- Hook
2003- Peter Pan
2003- Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
2004- The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
2006- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
2007- Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

Happy Rhode Island Anarchist Pirate Day!

2009-06-10T16:54:00.002-04:00

From Wonkette via one of our faithful readers:

Today is a very important day in Rhode Island history, because it commemorates the occasion 237 years ago when a bunch of Rhode Island nuts totally stuck it to the man and shot a British captain, IN THE GROIN, with a musket ball. (Then they burned his ship down.) It was among the very first incidents of truly violent colonial insurrection against the British, and of course the attack on the British trade-monitoring schooner Gaspee was led by a band of piratical (and likely drunk) Rhode Islanders who were just sick of having some Teabag all up in their business, inspectin’ their cargos for contraband.

The full article is available here. Some more scholarly information on the Gaspee and the events surrounding its attack is available here.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be pirates

2009-06-02T10:18:00.004-04:00

The BBC has an excellent report about local anti-piracy efforts in Somalia's Puntland region. The article offers some interesting insights into how piracy is viewed in Somalia and offers a sobering account for why perceptions of piracy matter very much in the "real world." While we may amuse ourselves with kid-friendly portrayals of pirates on Sesame Street, in Somalia, a "kid-friendly" image of a pirate is deeply troubling:

The 40,000 people who live in camps like 100-Bushes across Puntland have drifted in over the years, seeking refuge from the apocalyptic horrors in southern Somalia - civil war, drought and famine. Out here, there are no jobs. Only one in three children are in school, and the future for most is anything but promising.

No wonder then that mothers like Mumena Abdur Qadir are worried about their children - either that they will end up just as poor and destitute as their parents or that they will become pirates. "They drive around in expensive cars, they offer our sons lots of money, so of course piracy is an exciting option," she says. "But nobody likes them any more, and now it's really dangerous. The (French and the Americans) have been killing pirates, so we think it's a really bad thing to do."

Mumena Abdur Qadir's worry is valid, as a recent Reuters article discussing Somali perceptions of piracy indicates:

Abdihafid, 13, dropped out of school, ran away from home and has taken up chewing khat and smoking cigarettes like the many brigands he sees in Hobyo."I want to be a commander of a pirate group," he said. "I know I am far too young, but I will wait until the right time."

The Reuters article also discusses the, well, romantic implications of the romanticization of piracy, echoing earlier reports on pirates' sex appeal:

An extravagant convoy of forty 4x4s and four motorbikes escort a young bride to her nuptials at a sandy beach in the Somali village of Hobyo and are used to light up the twilight celebration.Her pirate commander groom has no eye patch -- but a sword and knife hanging from his belt do create a swashbuckling effect. "I am proud to be the leader's wife," said Sahra ... [L]ocal girls are finding it hard to resist the monied pirates. "I don't want to marry a pirate but time is flying and pushing me to have a pirate boyfriend because he is rich," said Halima, who at 24 is considered a bit too old to be single.

According to the BBC article, Abdifatah Hussein Mohamed, an activist with the Puntland Students' Association, objects to this idealization of piracy and has been working hard in the region to convince other young people to just say no to piracy by deliberately reshaping the image of a Somali pirate:

When they began, Somalia's pirates cast themselves as "Robin Hoods of the sea" - as defenders of the nation's fisheries, first chasing away and later capturing foreign trawlers that had been looting the country's rich and unpoliced seas. Much of the money they took as "fines" went back into local schools, hospitals and businesses. No longer.
"They're responsible for so many problems," said Abdifatah Hussein Mohamed. As an activist with the Puntland Students' Association, Abdifatah and his friends have created a multi-media empire. From their stuffy, cramped headquarters in central Bossasso, they churn out TV programmes, radio shows, magazines and websites with a single, simple message - piracy is out.
"First, they are responsible for inflation," he complained. "Now, food, land, cars are all too expensive for ordinary people. It used to be that you could hope for these things, but not any more. Then, they bring in prostitutes, they take drugs, they crash their cars. They rape whoever they want and nobody can do anything about it. Nobody wants them around any more."
His friend, Mohamed Jama agreed: "They are causing a lot of problems in the family. Sometimes women go with them because they promise lots of money. But they also divorce their wives very quickly too. It's bad for everybody."

As the article notes, however, rhetorically and socially isolating pirates is not likely to solve the problem on its own. International efforts are needed, and while many international associations (most recently the G8 and the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia, which comprises the US, the UN, the EU, and NATO) have agreed with the need to coordinate responses, the Puntland administration maintains that working with the transitional federal government in Mogadishu is, for obvious reasons, unlikely to have much effect:

"So many governments promised to help fight piracy on land, and that's a good thing," [President Abdirahman Mohamed Farole] said. "But they are all talking to the central government in Mogadishu. That's a policy decision, but it is a waste of time.
"The TFG (transitional federal government) only controls a piece of Mogadishu. They have no authority up here. So the rest of the world has to recognise that there are two legitimate governments in northern Somalia - Puntland and Somaliland - and deal directly with us if they want anything done."

And while both the US and the international community are claiming (limited) success in the war against piracy, this report from the Christian Science Monitor indicates that piracy continues to be profitable. If it's any consolation to the US Navy (here is an in-depth if slightly sprawling analysis of the modern role of the Navy in a purportedly post-naval era), anti-piracy efforts in the Straits of Malacca appear to be working, though as Elizabeth Dickinson points out, these successes are unlikely to be repeated off the Horn of Africa:

First, none of the countries in the Pacific are failed the way Somalia is -- meaning that the countries could also combat the core of the problem on land, without fearing a "safe haven" ashore. Not so in Somalia, where pirate havens are essentially untouched.
Even more important, while lots of countries want piracy in the Gulf of Aden to stop, no one or two of them are at such peril that they want to invest the resources to get the job done. In the Pacific, the three countries' economic survival as port hubs depended on their safety. No such pressure in Somalia.

Except, perhaps, from a small, student-led group of anti-piracy activists, whose concern with the perception of contemporary piracy goes well beyond our own academic puzzlings. We wish them the best of luck.

Did you just walk out of The Pirates of Penzance?

2009-05-31T14:36:00.021-04:00

Last night, my keen sense of duty overcame any general lack of enthusiasm for musical theater that I may occasionally express, and I went (with catlike tread) to see the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players perform The Pirates of Penzance at Wolf Trap. It was quite fun to see it performed live with great gusto, good humor, strong voices, and a few updated jokes for the DC crowd. According to my thoroughly unscientific survey of the crowd on the lawn, there was at least one large group of people in full pirate dress and several spectators sporting pirate hats and skull-and-crossbones head scarves, which, in addition to to full house, indicates pirates are as popular as they were in 1879.

David Cordingly, author of Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates, notes that the operetta is a deliberate parody of Victorian-era melodramas featuring pirates as villains who terrorize the sea and discusses Penzance's influential role in shaping contemporary images of pirates:

The story is sheer nonsense and revolves around the mistake made by Ruth, "a pirate maid of all work," when she apprentices Frederick [sic], the hero, to a pirate instead of a pilot. The pirates themselves are as genial and ineffective as the policemen who are sent to catch them, but a complicated plot ends happily with Frederick marrying the Major-General's pretty daughter, Mabel, and the pirates revealed as patriotic noblemen who will no more go a-pirating. In spite of its lighthearted approach to the subject, The Pirates of Penzance has had a considerable influence on the way many people view pirates today. For more than a hundred years it has been performed by amateur and professional companies around the world, and its cast of hearty and good-natured fellows have contributed to the illusion that pirates were really misunderstood ruffians who never meant to harm anyone. (25)

Whether because of its piratical theme or the influential (and G-rated) wit of Gilbert and Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance has clearly endured better than the melodramas it set out to parody; The West Wing, for example, would not have had much luck working The Red Rover, or The Mutiny of the Dolphin (which was immensely popular in 1829, though described by one critic as "arrant trash") into its scripting, though it had no such trouble with Gilbert and Sullivan's works in "And it's surely to their credit."

And, given its longevity and silliness, it is perhaps unsurprising that The Pirates of Penzance has itself become the object of parody (and subject to the same confusion with H.M.S. Pinafore -- "they're all about duty") by none other than the Animaniacs in "H.M.S. Yakko."

Piracy hits the suburbs

2009-05-29T23:47:00.005-04:00

From this week's New Yorker magazine:

Oh, the other kind of RPG

2009-05-29T11:26:00.009-04:00

With contemporary piracy still very much in the news (though bad weather may change that) and insurgents in Mogadishu further tearing apart the minimal trappings of Somali state authority while threatening to turn the country into a proxy war for Ethiopia and Eritrea, the popularity of pirates continues unabated. Given stories like this one:

it is not surprising that my first thought upon reading a headline about pirates and RPG's went to weapons technology and not entertainment. However, it appears that Disney has announced the creation of a role-playing game (RPG) called Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned that they will release in 2010. The game seeks to capitalize on the popularity of the movies and (one assumes) on the recent upswing in piracy news, but according to Game Director Alex Peters, the idealization of individual liberty associated with pirate identity is also an important part of the game:

[W]e want to make sure our game creates a sense a freedom in how you decide to live your pirate life ... Since the player is cast in the role of a pirate, they may choose to involve themselves in situations that pique their interest or serve their own purposes.*

The game is not aiming for historical accuracy, but it does acknowledge the moral ambiguity of piracy, the prevailing economic conditions, the historic distribution of state power in the Caribbean (or lack thereof), and the importance of a pirate ship's crew.

In an even more explicit Hollywood connection, Columbia Pictures acquired the rights to the story of Captain Richard Phillip's capture by Somali pirates and subsequent rescue by US Navy SEALS (answering a question posed on the Duck of Minerva and discussed here a couple times in the past month). Here's a brief statment about how Columbia Pictures plans to narrate the story:

"We were drawn to this remarkable story of heroism and courage as events were unfolding off the coast of Africa," Doug Belgard, co-president of Columbia Pictures, said in a statement.

This suggests that the Somali pirates will be cast fairly unambiguously (and unsurprisingly) as the bad guys, in stark contrast with their role in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, highlighting the gap between perceptions of contemporary pirates and portrayals of historic ones.

Finally -- because pirates are still kid-friendly --LEGO has a new pirate ship set out, reviewed by John Baichtal at Wired. He thinks the set's pretty great (and with good reason -- this LEGO pirate ship actually lets you fire cannon balls!), but can't help noting how it fits into the greater construction of piratical identity:

Speaking of soldiers, like many LEGO sets, Brickbeard’s Bounty comes with a readymade conflict. The cartoon storyline depicted in the instructions shows a pair of hapless soldiers arriving in a rowboat with a chest full of gold and jewels, which they give to the pirates in exchange for the Admiral’s daughter. Any question who the real stars of the line are? (And does anyone else find it ironic that LEGO is selling a toy that shows authorities ransoming a hostage from a group of pirates?)

Yes. Yes, they do. Competing and dynamic narratives of piracy are the essence (eeps!) of this project, though, so more than ironic, I find it a fascinating puzzle.

*I'll have more on libertarianism and pirates in a future post.