My profile of anthropologist Gabriella Coleman in The Chronicle of Higher Education opens with a scene from the New York City memorial service for Aaron Swartz in January:

The forces that seem to have hastened Swartz’s death were very much haunting the room. In the audience was a mischievous, greasy-haired hacker known as “weev,” who faces as much as a decade in prison for embarrassing AT&T by publicizing a flaw in its system that compromised users’ privacy. A member of Occupy Wall Street’s press team handed out slips of paper about the case of Jeremy Hammond, an anarchist and Anonymous member who was in prison awaiting trial for breaking into the servers of the security company Stratfor. There was Stanley Cohen, a civil-rights lawyer representing some of Hammond’s fellow Anons, and there was a T-shirt with the face of Bradley Manning, the soldier charged with passing classified material to WikiLeaks.

Just behind weev sat Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist, occasionally jotting notes in a notepad. She teaches at McGill University. Coleman first met Aaron Swartz when he was just 14, and over the years she had come to know many others in the room as well. Even more of them were among her 17,500-strong Twitter following or had seen her TED talk about Anonymous. Part participant and part observer, she began fieldwork on a curious computer subculture while still in graduate school. Now, more than a decade later, her work has made her the leading interpreter of a digital insurgency.

Read the article at The Chronicle. And download Coleman’s new book,?Coding Freedom, for free at her website.

The urge for this first came from a frustration with the same old tactics that Natasha Singh had been feeling for a while. “The marches were pointless,” she says. Then, just after the incident in Oakland, her friend and artistic collaborator Amin Husain returned from a World Social Forum meeting in Brazil, where he learned about the Chilean student movement’s creative tactics. He wanted to bring some of that home. The two of them recruited others and settled on a name: “+ Brigades.” They scoured photographs of movements through history at the New York Public Library. The goal, says Husain, is “addition and supplement rather than negation, opposition and subtraction.” Thus their answer to all the worry about black blocs: create blocs of your own.

Husain, who with Singh was one of the earliest OWS organizers, took part in the first intifada as a teenager in the West Bank. But he identifies neither with principled nonviolence nor, for instance, anarchism. The movement’s problem, he and Singh thought, wasn’t a matter of violence or not; it was a lack of imagination. There was too small a repertoire.

“Don’t negate the things you don’t like,” said Austin Guest at that inaugural + Brigades meeting in the church basement. “Add the things you do, so we can get a real diversity of tactics.”

Read the rest of the article at The Nation.

At a time when, in the United States, majority opinions—like the need for tax increases, military-spending cuts, clean energy, and campaign finance reform—don’t seem to even be on the table in Washington, when?whole neighborhoods and cities seem to have fallen off the political map, one might find oneself wondering:?Where did our democracy go?

Today at Religion Dispatches, I interview Princeton philosopher of religion Jeffrey Stout.?(This is a guy to look out for. His 2007 talk on “The Folly of Secularism” is probably the only academic lecture that has brought tears to my eyes.) We talked about about his latest book, Blessed Are the Organized, which came out last year—though it has been never been so relevant as now. Blessed Are the Organized?is an unusual kind of book in academic philosophy; Stout dwells in stories more than theories, recounting his travels among people doing local grassroots organizing in cities around the United States. Here’s how the interview got started:

Why are the organized “Blessed”?

Well, one definition of “blessed” is fortunate. In a shallow sense, the new elites are as fortunate as anyone has ever been. They practically monopolize society’s blessings. If we ask where the “happiness” of the 400 wealthiest Americans comes from, the answer has a lot to do with power, which is rooted in organizational structures. The CEOs of the mega-corporations acquired their power through some combination of luck and organizational skill. The elites are organized, and politicians are responsive to the organized. The richest among us are calling the tune while the politicians dance. Deregulation, the Bush tax cuts, and?Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission?all make sense when viewed in this context. The transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the rich in recent decades is so enormous as to be hard to fathom. But that transfer—like the wealth itself—is a product of organizational activity.

Unhappy are those who are scattered and isolated. Unhappy are those who are weakly linked. Democratic power is an organizational, relational affair. If there is any hope of creating a balance of power in our society, one that can hold elites accountable to the rest of us, it will have to come from grassroots organizing.

Read the rest at Religion Dispatches.

I was over there in Rome this summer visiting those people. It was fantastic. They are all laypeople; they have no priestly leadership, though they’re approved by the Catholic Church as a lay association. They meet for prayer, for Bible study, and to share a meal. Part of their discipline is making friends with poor and lonely people in Rome. Then they spread out all over the world and help to negotiate major conflicts. I think they’re a model, and they’re not the only one.

Before talking with Cox, I had heard about Sant’Egidio’s remarkable work before—I walked by their church in Lucca, Italy, countless times, for one. They have been involved in peacemaking efforts in trouble spots around the world, in addition to working with the poor closer to home. But what he said made me eager to talk with Andrea Bartoli, Sant’Egidio’s representative in the U.S. and a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University. Our interview, “Religious peacemaking in a secular world,” appears today at The Immanent Frame. In his gracious way, Bartoli took some issue with Cox’s characterization that sets a grassroots lay group like Sant’Egidio in opposition with the hierarchy of the Church. After all, last December, Pope Benedict XVI dined with the poor at a Sant’Egidio house in Rome. Bartoli explains:

I admire Harvey Cox. His book The Secular City captured our attention when we were young, as did his later books that spoke about the liveliness of the spirit. But Benedict, I think, cannot be easily caricatured as a pope who is simply trying to reimpose an outdated kind of Christianity. Benedict is clearly aware that the Church doesn’t have control of the political machinery, especially through the papacy, as it once did. He also speaks about Christians as a creative minority, and Sant’Egidio exemplifies this for him. We have always been careful about being part of the Catholic Church—that is, not inventing a new church, but being an expression of a 2,000-year-old tradition. When Benedict XVI comes to eat at the soup kitchen the Community runs for the poor, he’s saying that the Church actually starts with the poor. In his encyclical Caritas and Veritas, there is a call for a global social policy that is far to the left of any progressive policy. This is something that is difficult to appreciate if you look at the world only from a U.S./Western perspective, but it’s much easier to understand if you’re in Africa, Latin America, or Asia, where the majority of the human family is. The Catholic Church, these days, is one of the most powerful forces for the representation of the poor in the world.

There is lots more about Sant’Egidio’s important work in the full interview.

Extra! Extra! In the Ideas section of today’s Boston Globe, I’ve got a new article. Read all about it!

RELIGION CAN BE good for more than the soul, a growing number of studies seem to say. Over the past decade, academic research on religiosity has exploded, and with it has come a raft of publications suggesting that spiritual beliefs and practices can add years to life, lower blood pressure, or keep at-risk kids on the straight and narrow.

As sociologists, psychologists, and physicians turn their attention to measuring the effects of religion, often fueled by grant money from private foundations, the results have percolated swiftly through weekend sermons and the popular media. Being nonreligious, one might conclude, looks more and more like a danger to your health.

That’s right. I’ve jumped cheerfully on the religion-and-health bandwagon. But don’t worry, it gets more interesting than that. Beginning in conversations with the sociologist Phil Zuckerman several months ago, I found a pretty wide spread of folks who are actively (1) trying to bring non-religious people into the focus of quantitative sociology and psychology and (2) trying to discredit claims that religion is good for your health. This article focuses mainly on the first group.

This trend toward the non-religious is a direct reaction to the return of religion to academia in recent years. Here’s a quotation from my interview with the leading sociologist of religion Christian Smith, which I wish had made it into the article:

In the old days, among people at universities, being skeptical or being nonreligious was more taken for granted. So that was a more invisible category. The more religion has had a resurgence, if you think it has, the more being not religious has become interesting.

One of the highlights of my trip up to Brown last week was the chance opportunity to hear Stout speak again, on March 6th. This time, his title was “It’s a Boy: How Militarism Has Corrupted the Republic.” Again, I am deeply grateful to see him taking up this matter—it comes at a time when I am in the process of finding ways to engage militarism in my own work. To find him with the same things on his mind is deeply encouraging. Stout exercises philosophy of a kind that gives me hope for the whole enterprise—that it might be heartfelt and engaged while also, as a matter of course, rigorous.

Stout’s title repeats the short message sent by physicist Edward Teller at the successful detonation of the first hydrogen bomb in 1952: “It’s a boy.” The phrase is, I can’t help but notice, a far cry from what Robert Oppenheimer famously muttered seven years earlier at the Trinity test (pictured above), invoking the Bhagavad Gita: “I am death, destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer’s words attempt to grapple with the human consequences of the event. Teller’s jauntily embrace them. Since the Founding Fathers, who knew from experience the dangers of imperialism, Stout argues that our politics has grown far too casual about dominating others militarily. The public’s willingness to not only accept the false premises of the 2003 invasion of Iraq but, a year later, to reelect its perpetrators, is the most astonishing symptom of our civic atrophy. We have set a very dangerous precedent.

As a pragmatist, he calls for us—not the leaders but us—to step up with more robust “practices of accountability.” Citizen institutions must act as a “counter-power,” preventing those in government from exercising force arbitrarily. Only through them, our potentially-despotic republic can become, truly, a democracy. The consequences of failing—which may now be already inevitable—are drastic, far more than any of the far-flung conflicts that defined the “American century.” As countries like China and India grow ascendant, the world will hold them, at the very least, to the standards of the superpowers that preceded them. If we cannot show that a democratic, just exercise of strength is possible in this world, we may suffer the consequences firsthand at the mercy of others.

One might quickly ask: To what standards do we hold leaders accountable to in the first place? How do we agree? Stout, for instance, evaluates Iraq from the perspective of just-war tradition, while I would push for a more radical pacifist ideal. Fortunately, one need go little farther than Stout’s earlier writings, such as Ethics after Babel and Democracy and Tradition. There, he offers compelling accounts of how the very process of democratic institution-building can create—and has often created—the conditions necessary for a habitable agreement.

My favorite moment in the talk was Stout’s response to a question about what advice he would give Obama. He started trying to answer, then stopped himself. As appealing as it seems to have the ear of the Commander-in-Chief, his argument isn’t meant for the president alone. Far from it. The work of establishing these conditions, and of reconciling moral traditions, is anything but a gnostic exercise to be carried out at the highest levels. It cannot be worked out by professional philosophers alone, nor by benevolent leaders. All people share in the burden of philosophy, in the responsibility to hold those in power accountable, and in the opportunity to enact their philosophies through civic institutions. After all, we can only know the truth of what we actually try, and democracy will only come when we act democratically.

Like Edward Teller, American democracy, such as it is, still takes its bombs far too lightly. As citizens, we have failed to own up to the responsibility we bear. The consequence has been a far too casual habit of violent domination, with military abroad and prisons at home. Benevolent pronouncements, which we hear much of lately, are not enough. Says Stout, rightly, America’s enemies “mock our talk of liberty because our bases speak louder than our words.”

That’s a funny statement for a writer to deal with. What do I have but words and theories? Well, the difference between Oppenheimer and Teller was so plainly evident in their words. Their theories unleashed nuclear force. In theories and words, one can at least take the means and ends of destruction seriously, for what they are, never permitting them to slip into the disguise of lightness.

Meanwhile, my head has of course been rapt in theories of nonviolence, inevitably summarized in Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha—truth-force—as well as in American adaptations. The overlap between this classic pragmatism and satyagraha are considerable. And indeed, both played central roles in the making of 20th century American progressive politics, in progressivism and the civil rights movement, respectively. Both, furthermore, play a part in the politics promised by the Obama administration. Think, for instance, of Obama’s well-acknowledged debt to the nonviolent legacy of civil rights and his pragmatist penchant for constructing public truths out of performance.

The connection between these systems breaks down—and for roughly this reason a friend recently described pragmatism to me as “demonic.” Menand puts the problem this way:

Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one. (p. 375)

In the brand new book Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy, Joseph Kip Kosek adds:

The radical Christian pacifists found the pragmatist view incomplete, despite their alliances with Dewey and other pragmatists on specific issues. They held that the method of weighing relative moral goods and reserving absolute commitment provided a shaky foundation during crises, namely crises of violence. (p. 9)

There is, at the heart of the pragmatist philosophical program, a fatal flaw of nihilism. In the end, it offers nothing to which we can hitch our lives. But can truth-force save pragmatism? Should we bother trying?

To begin, I’ve been assembling a list of common patches of ground shared by pragmatism and nonviolence.

• Means cannot be subjugated to ends; see my earlier discussion of this for nonviolence and, for pragmatism, I’ll quote Menand:
  

  The [pragmatist] solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. (p. 432)

• The imperative of freedom of ideas and the longing for openness to possibility
• One’s own beliefs must be treated as provisional and incomplete; particularly in James’s “pluralist” pragmatism, one must paradoxically respect the truth held by those one disagrees with
• A tendency toward radical pacifism (Jane Addams, William James, sometimes Dewey, among pragmatists)
• Truth can arise through performative acts—often it must
• We arrive at truth through a process of experimentation, trial and error, lending opportunity for analogies with Darwinism—though satyagraha alone lends it a deeper sacredness, even divinity

The way I’m thinking, it is this last point that is the crux of the difference, and of what satyagraha can lend to American pragmatism. In a limited sense, it already did, through the Christian nonviolence tradition that Kosek chronicles in Acts of Conscience (more on that to come). What it means is the conviction that there is a truth above all, within all, pervading all. Pragmatism is the story of our grasp of it. Satyagraha is the story of its grasp on us. The love of that truth is the best love out there. It’s a love you can hitch your life to. And because it’s truth, it’s true.

So what, then, might pragmatism have to offer in return? A language, one that is deeply resonant with American modernity, in all the places that a Gandhian primitivism doesn’t fit.

Thanks for your patience with these scattered notes. Next, I’m on to Rorty, to see what archaeology can be done there.

There was an interesting tension running through the discussion, one not uncommon among moral philosophers eager to work in a world of reasons—of “higher” human faculties, rather than lower ones like emotions, dreams, delusions, and what-have-you. The well-known scholar of modern militancy Mark Juergensmeyer alluded to a world beyond reasons, to a sense that some actors commit violence not in terms of just war but “cosmic war.” Another panelist, Scott Davis, began the open discussion by reprimanding Juergensmeyer for his talk of violence. Talking about war that way, Davis suggested, restrains the debate about reasons.

Yet, today as much as ever, the insufficiency of reasons thrown about to justify conflict is arresting. In the present Iraq War, for instance, the reasons given for war turned out to be entirely absurd, while the violence of it is undeniable. At the end of the talk, Kelsay gave a list of forces beyond reasons that he admitted to being “not quite sure how” to address—scriptural imagery, fetish violence, moral outrage, “the zeal of Phineas,” and so forth. But how can you talk about war without speaking of these things, which so often seem to drive the reasons later used to justify it? Philosophy needs a way.

A slight about-face. I’ve lately been reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (see this excerpt at The New York Times). Though far from perfect and far from rigorous in itself (it was written for a general audience), the book enacts a kind of philosophy, an ethics, perhaps capable of entering the territory into which Kelsay feared to tread. Appiah’s sources come from far and wide. In addition to the classics of moral philosophy, he is deeply rooted in the experience of growing up in Ghana, the son of an African father and an English mother. He quotes literature from far and wide. And more recently, he has become involved in the “experimental philosophy” movement, an effort to generate empirical data that can accompany discussion of philosophical questions.

Appiah’s plea for a new ethic of cosmopolitanism in this globalizing world speaks of reasons, but he doesn’t put all his faith in them. The very need for cosmopolitanism, as he frames it, is not one grounded in abstract ideals or categorical imperatives. It comes rather, as a way of living in the circumstance of globalization. Appiah doesn’t so much call for a totally new theoretical construction as welcome us to embrace what is already occurring.

The place of reasons for him isn’t easy to wrap one’s head around. On the one hand, he is a philosopher, and wields reasons for his claims like one. Reasons make up the intellectual worlds we inhabit, and we can’t escape the need for them—nor should we want to. On the other, though, “theories,” he writes, “are underdetermined by the evidence” (p. 40). What this means is that a variety of intellectual and cultural constructs can be adequate descriptions of the world.

This sounds a lot like crass relativism—where every theory is basically equivalent to every other—but in fact Appiah claims from the outset to be after something quite different. “There are some values,” he writes, “that are, and should be, universal, just as there are lots of values that are, and must be, local” (xxi).

The truth Appiah is after, ultimately, is a pragmatic one, a truth in practice. What matters to him is not when people from different backgrounds can agree on the same reasons, but when they can agree to coexist and cooperate for different reasons. For instance, the well-meaning urbanite might advocate creating a nature preserve in order to enjoy the place on vacations, while someone living near the site might support the preserve in order to keep a water source from being contaminated by the mining operations that want to move into the area.

That such practical and practicable agreement actually equals truth is not an innovation with Appiah. It goes at least back to William James’s writings about the meaning of truth, and is at work in the operational wisdom of the American pluralist tradition.

Inscribed in this approach is the recognition that there is more at work in human reasons than pure reasoning itself. We build our reasons among webs of emotion, history, imagery, and politics. We use them, but we cannot expect everyone else to embrace ours. Taking this to be the case, I would add, reasons for war are impoverished in the absence of an account of its violence in practice.