Studies in Social Justice Volume 4, Issue 1, 25-45, 2010 Correspondence Address: Shari Stone-Mediatore, Department of Philosophy, Ohio Wesleyan University, 61 S. Sandusky St., Delaware, OH 43015 USA. Tel: +1 740 368-3795, E-mail: ssstonem@owu.edu ISSN: 1911-4788 Epistemologies of Discomfort: What Military- Family Anti-War Activists Can Teach Us About Knowledge of Violence SHARI STONE-MEDIATORE, Department of Philosophy, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio, USA ABSTRACT This paper extends feminist critiques of epistemic authority by examining their particular relevance in contexts of institutionalized violence. By reading feminist criticism of “experts” together with theories of institutionalized violence, I argue that typical expert modes of thinking are incapable of rigorous knowledge of institutionalized violence because such knowledge requires a distinctive kind of thinking-within-discomfort for which conventionally trained experts are ill-suited. I turn to a newly active group of epistemic agents—anti-war relatives of soldiers—to examine the role that undervalued epistemic traits can play in knowledge of war and other forms of structural violence. There are a hundred ways to be a good citizen, and one of them is to look finally at the things we don’t want to see. Barbara Kingsolver (2003) Introduction For several decades now, feminist theorists have criticized modern epistemic norms, revealing male and upper-class biases beneath seemingly neutral epistemic standards. Theorists including Genevieve Lloyd (1984), Dorothy Smith (1987), Lorraine Code (1991, 2006), Sandra Harding (1991), Linda Alcoff (1993), Val Plumwood (1993), and Carol Cohn (1993, 2003), have made compelling cases that received epistemic norms over-value traits associated with upper-class men, such as emotional detachment, certainty, and abstraction, at the expense of the more engaged and exploratory ways in which we come to know the world. The result, they suggest, is not only that our professional institutions fail to give a fair hearing to people who are associated with the undervalued epistemic traits. Just as dangerously, those institutions tend to produce knowledge that is rigid, narrow in outlook, and inadequate for addressing human problems. 1 And yet, despite feminist criticism, modern epistemic norms continue to determine who gets authorized to speak on public affairs. In the context of war, such policing of public debate is particularly troubling, for it tends to reserve authority for detached 26 Shari Stone-Mediatore Studies in Social Justice, Volume 3, Issue 1, 21-36, 2009 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 professionals, who treat war as a rational means of policymaking, while people close enough to war to appreciate its horrors are denied authority to speak. In one case, for instance, when a Columbus Dispatch reporter was interviewing a young veteran, the reporter discounted any of the young man’s remarks that seemed to him coloured by the young man’s “anger at having been sent to Iraq.”2 I begin by reviewing feminist criticism of the institutions that regulate epistemic authority in our society. While feminist criticism of modern epistemic norms has been vast, I am particularly interested in critiques that address the social and cultural mechanisms by which epistemic authority has been produced and regulated, for these Similarly, when veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan gathered outside D.C. to present first-hand accounts of the violence, the veterans were virtually ignored by the mainstream media (Thompson, 2008). And in the early years of the war, when I proposed a campus forum featuring members of Veterans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), a colleague dismissed my proposal, commenting that such people are “not academically-oriented.” In response to this exclusionary character of public debate on war, this paper seeks to strengthen feminist critiques of epistemic authority, so that such critiques can be more readily brought to bear on public life. The project has both political and philosophical aims. Politically, I aim to help expose the limits of recent debates on war and open debate to new voices. Philosophically, I seek to enrich feminist critiques of epistemic authority by examining their particular relevance in contexts of institutionalized violence. My central claim is that responsible thinking about institutionalized violence, including war, demands a distinctive kind of thinking- within-discomfort for which conventionally trained public-affairs experts are ill- suited and for which undervalued epistemic traits play a crucial role. In essence, I argue that typical expert modes of thinking are not only biased in ways elaborated by the above feminist theorists. They are also particularly incapable of meaningful engagement with the violence of our own institutions. I draw on theorists of institutionalized violence, including Hannah Arendt (1953b, 1978, 1979, 1992, 1998), Simone Weil (1977), and John Glenn Gray (1998), to substantiate this connection between typical expert modes of thinking and failure to address meaningfully and rigorously institutionalized violence. In a more constructive vein, I turn to a newly active group of epistemic agents—anti-war relatives of soldiers—to examine the role that undervalued epistemic traits can play in rigorous knowledge of violence. My aim in examining the epistemic practices of these activists is not to reverse the hierarchy between experts and amateurs, but to contribute to a rethinking of epistemic authority in the domain of institutionalized violence in such a way that recognizes the potential epistemic value of closeness to and passionate engagement with issues and that distinguishes more (from less) knowledge-worthy forms of emotional engagement. Ultimately, these political and philosophical projects meet, for they are both efforts to elucidate and promote the responsibly engaged thinking that Arendt (1953a, 1953b) suggests is our best hope for resisting institutionalized violence. Feminist Critiques of Authority Epistemologies of Discomfort 27 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 explain how certain biases have become systemic to the people who get recognized as authoritative thinkers in our society. Smith, Code, and Cohn write from distinct theoretical perspectives (feminist sociology, analytic feminist philosophy, and cultural theory, respectively) but they offer similar insights into the institutions that train and regulate our society’s authoritative thinkers. Their analyses suggest that these institutions follow the paradigm that we might call the expert, by which the institutions train thinkers to claim authority by mastering received professional vocabularies and methods, restricting themselves to strictly professional (as opposed to personal) ties to their material, and assuming self-certain intellectual styles. Most importantly here, their analyses suggest that such training not only promotes facility with disciplinary knowledge and analytic discipline, but also sheltered, orthodox, and privileged-class biases. As Smith (1987) explains, the professional institutions that train our society’s aspiring professionals teach them to view their subject matter in terms of established discourses and methods. “A determinate conceptual framework” she says, “is identified with the discipline,” such that to explore different conceptual frameworks or methodologies “is to step outside the discipline” (p. 60). Academic and professional institutions, such as journals and professional organizations, regulate these frameworks, including “the topics, themes, and problematics” that define the discipline (p. 61). They do so, for instance, by identifying legitimate professional work and thereby determining the work that should be cited and engaged by other legitimate members of the discipline. As a result, in order to be recognized as a “proper participant” in one’s field, “the member must produce work that conforms to appropriate styles and terminologies, makes the appropriate references, and is locatable by these and other devices in the traditions” (p. 61). Moreover, although institutionalized discourses and methodologies may seem neutral, they actually tend to reflect the standpoint of people at the governing end of society, whose concerns to control and regulate the social world have tended to dominate institutional arrangements as well as the basic logic and categories of professional discourses. The result is that the basic structure of professional fields, including their methods, conceptual tools, scope, and primary topics, tend to reflect the standpoint of ruling groups. Thus, professionals learn to direct their attention to data and problems that are of concern to rulers (Code, 2006, p. 77; Smith, 1987, pp. 54-65). For instance, in the field of mental health, both the field and its problems have been defined from the standpoint of “those whose professional business it is” to process mental illness and who do so through institutional structures that have separated mental illness from poverty (Smith, 1987, p. 63). And in defence policy analysis, Cohn (2003) finds that the field is governed by a techno-strategic discourse that presupposes the standpoint of the people who use weapons (not the people at the receiving end of weapons), a subject matter of weapons (not living beings), and a logic of the military’s zero-sum game (not the logic of ordinary people trying live their daily lives in a world shared with others). The structure of professional workplaces and the norms that guide professional practice also habituate professionals to disengage from the existential content of the material they study. For instance, the division of labour between higher- and lower- echelon workers accustoms the former to bypass flesh and blood phenomena for material that has already been transposed for them into analytic categories by technicians, nurses, social workers, and others who work more directly with living 28 Shari Stone-Mediatore Studies in Social Justice, Volume 3, Issue 1, 21-36, 2009 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 individuals. At the same time, epistemic norms that valorize abstract over experiential knowledge and that demand “professional distance” encourage professionals to treat their abstract categories as if they were more real than the living phenomena from which they were distilled. Such norms of detachment from the living world are enforced by the institutional regulation of the discipline described above as well as by professional cultures that degrade individuals who veer from these norms, often by invoking gendered conceptions of professionalism. For instance, Cohn (1993) recounts how a physicist who suddenly shifted from technical analysis and remarked on the horrific human impact of the bombs he was analyzing was met with derisive silence from his colleagues, making him feel “like a woman.” Such regulation of professionals’ emotional reactions to their material may seem to protect knowledge practices from bias. However, so-called professional distance does not really free expert thinking from bias as much as it promotes a standpoint of distance from and aloofness toward social suffering (Code, 1991, pp. 222-264; 2006, p. 43; Cohn, 1993; 2003, pp. 65-68; Smith, 1987, pp. 49-78; 1990, pp. 66-104). Academic and professional cultures also promote rigidity in thinkers insofar as they train thinkers to embrace institutionalized discourses and methods as a means to maintaining prestige within the discipline. Following the standard language and methods of the field, Smith (1987) explains, “is how we recognize ourselves as professionals” (p. 60). Cohn (2003) experienced this when (in spite of herself) she began to feel pride in her mastery of defence-policy jargon and when she realized that, after immersing herself in the jargon, a more human perspective on defence was not only difficult but would make her appear “inexpert, unprofessional” (p. 65). Closer to home, my students who have gone through our university’s economics program are often so identified with discourses of “comparative advantage”3 Finally, when epistemic norms that valorize certainty join with competitive professional cultures, they encourage peremptory and self-certain styles as a means to ward off criticism and speed professional advancement. Unfortunately, such professional pressures can make experts so concerned with appearing authoritative that they fail to admit their mistakes, to consider what they might learn from others, to address factors that might complicate their certainty, or to venture beyond orthodoxy (even when they may present their analysis as novel). Public expectations reinforce these tendencies, for we expect authorities to exhibit “the male-mode of self-assured, self-assertive, unqualified declaration” (Jones, 1988, p.122). In effect, like Plato’s Euthyphro (Plato, 2002), we confuse the self-confidence that can accompany intellectual pride with the defining mark of wisdom. A student of mine unwittingly attested to this confusion when she remarked on the “brilliance” of another professor, with whom she had never taken a class. When I inquired about the basis of her evaluation, she replied, “the way he holds himself when he walks around that, even when the students are presented with testimony from people who do not regard current trade institutions as to their advantage, the students resist even considering alternative narratives of the transnational economy, as if doing so would de-authorize them as economists. And my Environmental Ethics students last year initially refused to participate in a “guerrilla gardening” activity led by a local farmer, as their academic self-image seemed to be threatened by the playful and rebellious spirit of the activity, which they deemed “not appropriate for college.” Epistemologies of Discomfort 29 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 campus; he seems judgmental, superior, intimidating.” In such a context, aspiring experts may feel more pressure to appear all-knowing than to pursue honest inquiry into human problems. Feminist Critiques and the Possibility of Academic Authority Feminist studies of authority present not so much a rejection of professional authority as much as a provocation to consider more responsible forms of professional training and exercises of authority than those prescribed by the current paradigm of the expert. The studies challenge us to consider, for instance, how professional training could help us to become adept in professional discourses and disciplined analysis, while also sensitive to the historical and political dimensions of received discourses, the uncodified existential content of phenomena, the limitations in our own thinking, and the moral implications of our work. Such mindsets may be at odds with dominant professional norms but they are not impossible in professional contexts. Such epistemic humility and moral and political awareness might be cultivated, for instance, by training in the political and discursive dimensions of knowledge production4 and by greater openness about the practical-ethical motivations of our professional projects.5 Elsewhere, I have pursued the problem of alternative pedagogical practices that are more conducive to feminist and democratic values (Stone-Mediatore, 2007). I focus here, more specifically, on the way that dominant forms of epistemic authority have skewed public discussion of war and on the kind of knowledge practices that war and other forms of state-supported violence demand. My own claim to authority in this paper aims to follow this kind of professional practice that is explicit about its extra- academic sources and goals. In my case, these include the inspiration that I have drawn from veterans and family members of soldiers who have spoken out so that others might not have to suffer the consequences of militarism, my efforts to gain recognition on my campus for the educational value of discussions with grassroots activists, and my frustrations as an educator whose explicit orientation toward broad ethical goals and explicit situatedness within the community has often put me at odds with an academic culture that values detached and peremptory authority. Insofar as my personal and social concerns have motivated me to theorize alternative forms of authority, I cannot claim disinterest or neutrality in this research; however, I do claim to be addressing problems with immediate relevance to me and to be attentive to the moral-historical implications of my work. 6 To this end, I turn next to theories of institutionalized violence and to the dangers that typical expert modes of thinking present in the context of such violence. Epistemic Practices and Institutionalized Violence The kind of biases that feminist theorists have found problematic in experts bear strong resemblance to the kind of attitudes that scholars of institutionalized violence have found in the ordinary people who comply with state violence. Just as feminist theorists have criticized experts for their tendencies toward overly abstract, managerial-minded, and peremptory thinking, so have theorists of institutionalized 30 Shari Stone-Mediatore Studies in Social Justice, Volume 3, Issue 1, 21-36, 2009 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 violence warned that similar modes of thinking that are prevalent in modern society, generally, have thwarted our capacity for understanding and judgment and thereby have helped to shield us from violence that is routine in our society. If we read feminist critiques of authority together with studies of institutionalized violence, we can appreciate the particular dangers of expert tendencies in contexts of institutionalized violence. Institutionalized Violence By institutionalized violence, I refer to harms that are systemic to established institutions and that are severe enough to be considered violent. Since the late 1960s, liberation theologists, peace theorists, and social theorists have employed this concept (or sometimes, structural violence or systematic violence) to identify severe harms that exist even in seemingly peaceful societies, and even when no one intentionally or directly harms someone else. Institutionalized violence, these theorists explain, results not from individual lawless acts, but from established social and political institutions that systematically offend human dignity, or systematically deprive certain people of the conditions necessary for physical and mental integrity. For instance, Paul Farmer describes how neoliberal economic policies, which subject all aspects of social life to the dictates of so-called market forces, have left hundreds of millions of people worldwide without access to health-care and other basic human needs. In this situation, Farmer argues, violence exists, even if no laws are broken and no bullets fired (Farmer, 2003; see also Galeano, 1997; Galtung, 1969; Gutierrez, 1983). In this framework, social injustice is a form of violence. The concept of “social injustice” directs our attention to the systematic privileging of some groups at the expense of others, to the centrality of economic inequities in problems from health care crises to the exploitation of young men as soldiers, and thus to the ways that struggles for human rights, democracy, and freedom mean “above all defending the rights of the poor” (Gutierrez, 1983, p. 211). In turn, the concept of “institutionalized violence” allows us to view such social justice struggles as struggles against violence. This latter concept implies that all significant and systemic forms of deprivation and offenses to dignity, even when they are routine to our institutions, demand the kind of moral, legal, political (and, I would argue, epistemic) responses that are called for by violence. Some critics have used the concept of institutionalized violence to broaden the scope of peace advocacy (Galtung, 1969). Others have used this concept to underscore the criminality of severe and systemic poverty. As these critics point out, everyday poverty-related suffering fails to garner the media and political attention of natural disasters, tyranny, and civil rights abuses. Nonetheless, “murder by poverty,” as Galeano calls it (1997, p. 5), is just as consequential as any kind of murder and more pervasive. It is also just as avoidable and therefore just as inexcusable as other forms of violence. Moreover, severe poverty and inequality often set the stage for more overt forms of violence, including military conflict and human rights abuses. The concept of institutionalized violence registers this moral and historical Epistemologies of Discomfort 31 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 continuity between economic injustice and more publicized forms of violence (Farmer, 2003, pp. 8-17, 29-50; Galeano, 1973; Gutierrez, 1983, pp. 132-135). The concept of institutionalized violence is useful to me here because it makes explicit the broader notions of violence and responsibility that are implicit in the work of Arendt, Fanon, Gray, and Weil and that form a common thread in their work. The vocabulary of institutionalized violence was not yet current when these philosophers wrote. Nonetheless, they each address forms of violence that are best understood as institutionalized violence, insofar as the violence of concern to them arose not mainly from direct and intended actions on the part of sociopaths and “evil- doers” but, rather, from the routine activities of ordinary people. For instance, Arendt (1978) focuses on the “administrative mass murder” of Nazism, which was enacted by ordinary professionals who served as accountants, technicians, and managers of the death camps. Fanon (1963) is concerned not only about the blatant violence of the French military, but also the economic violence of businessmen who managed the exploitation of African resources as well as the complicity of journalists, bureaucrats, and diplomats who went about their business indifferent to colonialist crimes. Similarly, Weil examines the brutality of modern socio-economic practices (1977, pp. 53-72, 126-152), and Gray stresses the dangers of indirect, aloof participation in violence by “normal” men (1998, p. xviii). When these theorists investigate the mindsets that have made possible such routine forms of violence, they are, in effect, investigating the cultural conditions of institutionalized violence. In addition, the concept of institutionalized violence enables me to link military violence with other forms of structural violence and to investigate the distinct epistemic practices that all such violent institutions demand. In effect, although my focus here is on war, the identification of war as a form of institutionalized violence enables me to consider how the epistemic practices demanded by war would also be demanded by other forms of systematic violence and injustice. Institutionalized Violence and Understanding Arendt offers a useful starting point for conceptualizing the kind of epistemic practices that meaningful engagement with institutionalized violence demands. All political inquiry, she explains, requires not only empirical and theoretical analysis but also engaged and particular-focused understanding, for the essence of political phenomena can be grasped only when we address their human content, their uniqueness, and their situatedness within our world. Unlike theoretical knowledge, understanding does not stand apart from its objects and locate them within preconceived categories and causal chains but instead attends to phenomena in all of their strange and disconcerting aspects and seeks to comprehend them as nonetheless human phenomena that are part of our world. Understanding is thus the activity by which we “try to be at home in the world,” not in the sense of being comfortable, but in the sense of reckoning with our connection to our world’s most odd and disturbing elements (Arendt, 1953b, p. 377). Although understanding never attains certainty or conclusiveness, the constant work of trying to understand strange political phenomena and to integrate them into a meaningful narrative of our world is necessary in order to orient ourselves in a complex and ever-changing world. Judgment, by which we bring understanding to bear on the evaluation of specific 32 Shari Stone-Mediatore Studies in Social Justice, Volume 3, Issue 1, 21-36, 2009 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 phenomena, is also necessary in order to participate actively and responsibly in public life (Arendt, 1953a; 1953b; 1992, pp. 294-297; Stone-Mediatore, 2003, pp. 38-43, 200).7 For instance, Arendt and Weil stress that we can face the horror of violence that has become routine in our society only when we judge the world for ourselves, based on our own sensitive engagement with specific phenomena. Such individual judgment of specific phenomena is avoided, however, when we confine our thinking to abstract categories and logics, for instance, abstractions of “democracy” or fixed formulas of “progress” or “class struggle.” Arendt and Weil (like Smith) recognize that some degree of abstraction from immediate experience, and some theorizing of patterns that provide coherence to particular facts, is essential to thinking. Their criticism is not directed toward abstraction, per se, but to our tendency to prioritize abstract categories over historical life and to treat abstract categories as if they were the material and motor of history. When we do this, they argue, we bypass the In this account, responsible knowledge-claims about political affairs must conform to conventional criteria of truth, including consistency with empirical facts and with the causal mechanisms that have produced the facts. In addition, however, they should also direct our attention in ways that help us to understand political phenomena in their existential richness and their relevance to our world. All genuine understanding is risky and discomfiting, as it challenges us to reconcile alien phenomena with familiar worldviews, and to adjust our sense of our identity and projects accordingly. Judgment is also risky, as it involves inserting ourselves into the world and exposing ourselves to judgment by others. Understanding of institutionalized violence, however, presents particularly acute cognitive and emotional unease, for understanding the violence of our own institutions defies euphemistic ruling discourses and disturbs flattering images of ourselves. At the same time, judgment of institutionalized violence interrupts any comfortable aloofness we might have from the political world and calls on us to denounce violence in our midst. Cultural Conditions of Institutionalized Violence Arendt’s account of understanding and judgment helps to identify the kind of intellectual practices whose absence she and others have found central to ordinary people’s complicity in violence. Arendt (1979), Fanon (1963), Farmer (2003), Gray (1998), and Weil (1977) address diverse manifestations of institutionalized violence, ranging from Nazi death camps to military brutality by the allied powers, from French colonialism in Algeria to economic violence in Europe and Central America. Despite their diverse historical focuses, they share common insights about the kind of mental practices that have enabled ordinary people to participate in violent institutions. Their studies suggest that certain modes of thinking that are prevalent in modern life—notably, mechanical thought processes that proceed without responsiveness or a sense of accountability to the living world—have thwarted our processes of understanding and enabled many of us to analyze and administer violent institutions without disturbing comfortable thought patterns or troubling our consciences. Epistemologies of Discomfort 33 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 complexities of historical life along with community discussion about such complexities in favour of conformity to abstract formulas, whose consistency and clarity “exists nowhere in the realm of reality” (Arendt, 1979, p. 471). We likewise begin to disengage from the existential content of our world and to subordinate living beings to abstract imperatives, while we gain a false sense of intellectual mastery that leads us to overlook phenomena that diverge from expected patterns. Thus, as Michael Ignatieff (2007) admits, ivy-league scholars tend to remain in esoteric realms, where particular facts can be viewed “as instances of some big idea” and messy and “unexpected” events can be avoided (p. 28). Abstract formulas may be safe, but when we employ abstract categories such as “democracy” or “socialism” without investigating their relation to particular historical affairs, those concepts become “vacuous entities” that “stupefy the mind,” for they serve as facile substitutes for examining the specific factors that harm and improve human life in specific contexts (Weil, 1977, p. 284). Most importantly here, when we allow such abstract formulas to replace individual reckoning with specific phenomena, we cannot evaluate critically practices that have become routine in our society. We may make moral evaluations (e.g., we may, like Ajami, 2003, 2005, evaluate the Arab world as “decaying” and U.S. military intervention as a “gift”), but our evaluations remain limited to those programmed into received political formulas (Arendt, 1953b, pp. 380-392; 1979, pp. 469-478; Stone-Mediatore, 2003, pp. 56-60; Weil, 1977, pp. 28-38, 269-284). Arendt and others also stress that understanding of violent institutions demands that we forgo professional distance and risk engaged, whole-person responsiveness to the phenomena we study, for only openness to the moral and emotional responses that violent institutions evoke in us can sensitize us to their human character (Arendt, 1953a; Fanon, 1963, pp. 77-78; Farmer, 2003, pp. 1-41). Weil (1997) suggests, further, that the social suffering that accompanies institutionalized violence can be recognized only with a kind of receptivity that is akin to love. Truth and affliction can only be heard, she says, with “intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention. . . . which is pure love” (p. 33). Such unbounded, whole-hearted attention is a kind of love in the sense that it involves a letting go of oneself and exposing oneself to strangeness and discomfort in order to be receptive to another person or phenomenon. By contrast, when journalists, administrators, or analysts maintain an “objective attitude,” they protect themselves from such receptivity. Bureaucratic and technical modes of thought help to maintain this thick skin, for they direct attention to aspects of the world that can be readily categorized and regulated without activating any personal relationship or response (Arendt, 1992, pp. 68-69, 105-110; Fanon, 1963, pp. 77-78; Farmer, 2003, pp. 10-17: Galeano, 1991, p. 120; 1997, pp. 266-67). Facing the violence of our own institutions also demands a willingness to accept some responsibility for social harms and for resisting those harms. Such difficult obligations are again avoided, however, by the common mindset that we have no accountability to the wider community. Contemporaries live “godlessly,” says Gray, in the sense that we feel no need to answer to anyone, including ourselves, for what we do (1998, p. xviii). Such moral apathy and denial of our spiritual embeddedness within the world is blatant in war, says Gray, but it also pervades civilian life, where we have become increasingly disconnected from our social and natural environments. Gray and others attribute this widespread social and moral alienation 34 Shari Stone-Mediatore Studies in Social Justice, Volume 3, Issue 1, 21-36, 2009 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 to the excessively abstract and sterile mindsets described above as well as to the modern separation between personal and professional life, by which we routinely leave hearts and souls at home when we go to work (Arendt, 1978, pp. 231-234; Farmer, 2003, pp. 1-28, 245-256; Galeano, 1991, pp. 106-107; Gray, 1998, pp. xviii, 8-9). These common intellectual modes—abstraction from historical life, clinical relation to the world, and separation between professional and personal life—may be justifiable as elements of a reflective process; however, when they dominate our thinking, the above theorists suggest, they divert us from the existential content of violent institutions and the moral demands that such violence makes on us as human beings. In other words, these epistemic approaches do not so much repress or deny violence as they direct our attention to more innocuous elements of the world that can be readily subsumed within received categories without challenging our intellectual mastery over or aloofness from the world we study. In effect, they enable us to analyze and administer violent institutions without risking understanding those institutions as human phenomena with ties to our own lives. Experts and Institutionalized Violence Because public affairs experts tend to be trained in excessively abstract, detached, and institutionalized modes of thinking, they are particularly prone to evade the disturbing content and moral pull of institutionalized violence. Granted, such experts are not so directly involved in violence as people who are designing bombs or administering death camps. Nonetheless, when public affairs experts approach the world with deliberately detached, rote, and managerial mindsets, they practice a particularly strong evasion of human content and denial of their human ties to the world. And when they confine their analysis to institutionalized discourses, they exhibit a particularly strong tendency to avoid phenomena that are incongruent with ruling worldviews. As a result, they play a particular role in glossing and thereby maintaining violent institutions. Expert Standpoints on the War: Ignatieff and Ajami The recent political context, in which war has been so readily used as a means of policymaking and public debate on war has been so limited, makes urgent the need to bring critiques of authority to bear on public discussion of war. I contribute to this project by tracing the expert-related biases in two influential foreign-affairs experts, Michael Ignatieff and Fouad Ajami. Ignatieff, who in 2007 withdrew his support for the war, is currently a Canadian Member of Parliament and leader of the Liberal Party, former Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, a Carnegie Institute “expert” on war and ethics, and a regular contributor to The New York Times. Ajami, who continues to support the U.S. military presence in Iraq, is a political conservative who directs the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University, appears regularly as “Middle East expert” on television talk-shows, and contributes regularly to Foreign Affairs, The Epistemologies of Discomfort 35 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal. Despite their political differences, their writings on the Iraq war exhibit striking similarities that illustrate the war- rationalizing tendencies of much expert thinking. Although presumably addressing the concerns of the general public, both public affairs experts presume an elite standpoint, from which war is less a living phenomenon than an opportunity for projects and policymaking.8 In addition to glossing violence with managerial language, both experts demonstrate greater commitment to neoliberal and neo-colonialist discourses than to the complexity of the situation on the ground. Ajami, for instance, has described the war as “a reformist project,” in relation to which Iraq is not so much a living community as a “starting point” from which the United States can “modernize and transform the Arab landscape” (2003, pp. 7, 17-18). Ignatieff, in turn, has described the invasion as a means of governing, characterized by “manag[ing] the insurgent zone,” “bringing order” to a “vacuum of chaos,” and “polic[ing] the world” (2003). Although typical of political discourse, their construction-project and law-and-order metaphors have little relation to the insecure and chaotic reality of war, which in the case of Iraq has involved an undermining of order and security so severe that unemployment has risen to an estimated 50-70 %, many Iraqi men working for the U.S. military have been forced for safety reasons to abandon their families and live in hiding, some parents lacking basic resources have been compelled to abandon their children, and women cannot go to work or walk the streets, without fear of being kidnapped by gangs with police complicity (Anderson, 2006; Finer, 2006; Sandler, 2003; Tavernise, 2007). 9 For instance, in accord with neoliberal narratives of freedom and democracy, Ignatieff reduces these broad political aims to U.S.-style markets and elections, such that, despite the devastating effects of U.S. military activities on Iraqi family, civic, economic, and cultural life, he can equate the U.S. intervention with the promotion of “free markets, human rights and democracy” (Ignatieff, 2003). Both experts also invoke colonialist stereotypes that present gross violence on the part of Western nations as part of a civilizing mission. For instance, widespread lawlessness and abuse on the part of the U.S. military has been well documented; as one soldier put it, U.S. soldiers “freak out and beat the crap out of people all the time . . . [Iraqi] people are just constantly getting their asses kicked over there, for no reason” (Jamail, 2008, p. 28; Kramer & Glanz, 2007; Thompson, 2008). And yet Ajami describes the U.S. occupation as “noble” work, a “gift” to a “decaying,” hopelessly backward Arab world, who need the “reforming” influence of Americans (2005; 2003, p. 2). Similarly, Ignatieff (2003) describes the occupation as a “noble (albeit dangerous) mission” to civilize a “combustible region of Islamic peoples” who are hopelessly unable to create “competent, rule-abiding states” on their own. 10 Experts do sometimes relate stories of specific individuals. For instance, Ignatieff (2007) refers to his Iraqi exile friend who, at the onset of the U.S. invasion, regarded the war as his generation’s “only chance . . . to live in freedom in their own country” (p. 27). As in this example, however, experts tend to use individual stories only in safe and superficial ways, to support general claims; not as a source of nuanced and unpredictable perspectives on the world that spur new thinking. 11 Ignatieff’s formulaic interpretation of the war is reinforced by his concern for his reputation. Despite increasing Iraqi opposition to the U.S. occupation and the war’s exacerbation of Mideast instability and international terrorism, 12 Ignatieff continued 36 Shari Stone-Mediatore Studies in Social Justice, Volume 3, Issue 1, 21-36, 2009 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 through 2005 to rationalize his stance that the war was “spreading democracy’s promise” (2005b). Rather than re-examine his position in light of increasing problems with the occupation, he defended his pro-war stance as brave and unorthodox while he dismissed critics of the war as “ideological fools” who support the insurgents (2004, 2005a).13 In 2007, amidst spiralling home-front anti-war sentiments, Ignatieff finally acknowledged the war’s failure; however, he devoted his first major essay on the war in two years not to examining Iraqi reality but to showcasing his own “daring” vision and “good judgment” (2007, pp. 27, 29). Notwithstanding his shift of position, he retains (with Ajami) the narrative of America seeking to grace Iraq with an American-style “free state,” even if he now considers that mission to have been thwarted by Iraq’s sectarianism (2007, p. 29). Tellingly, one Iraqi man interviewed on CNN after the 2005 Iraqi elections stressed that freedom and democracy must also include jobs that enable people to feed their families. And other Iraqis have protested foreign oil contracts and demanded control over their country’s resources (Jasiewicz, 2008). Both experts, however, have ignored such concerns and have restricted debate to whether or not Americans have the might and right “to sponsor liberty in the Middle East” (Ignatieff, 2005b). Vital questions related to the meaning of liberty and democracy, the specific effects of U.S. military activities on Iraqi communities, and the specific conditions necessary for all Iraqis to freely and self-consciously govern their lives remain unasked. Military-Family Activists and Engaged Authority While experts tend to restrict themselves to questions formed within ruling discourses and to shield themselves from any cognitively or emotionally threatening phenomena, the military-family activists who have been most effective at invigorating public debate have done the opposite: driven by their closeness to and care about the issues, they have turned attention to “things we don’t want to see” and questions we feel uncomfortable asking. Military family activists have not claimed epistemic agency easily. When, for instance, Ohio military mom Teresa Fowler Dawson first began to examine critically the Administration’s case for invading Iraq, her husband asked dismissively, “What could you know about Iraq that the President doesn’t?” Cindy Sheehan faces similar dismissals of her epistemic agency, with pundits from all sides claiming that she is being manipulated by ideologues and “pontificat[ing] on subjects beyond [her] expertise” as a mother (Barsamian, 2006, p. 38; Houppert, 2006, p. 13). Despite the obstacles, however, military-family activists have persisted and have begun to interrupt debate as usual. In addition to their insider-critic status, their success seems to lie, as well, in their challenge to basic epistemic premises of public debate. Mother- and wife-identified activists, perhaps because their feminine roles have pitted them against norms of expertise, have been particularly bold in this challenge. When anti-war mothers and wives of soldiers assert authority as family members driven by their concern for loved ones to face war honestly, they defy epistemic norms and demonstrate the role that emotional closeness to and care about issues can play in rigorous thinking about discomfiting phenomena. Epistemologies of Discomfort 37 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 Irresponsible Uses of Emotion Clearly, personal and emotional closeness to war do not guarantee either critical or nonviolent thought. Indeed, fear, anger, and even love can sometimes fuel fanaticism and even murder: “We are following our hearts,” said one Israeli settler, as he explained his family’s efforts to terrorize their Arab neighbours.14 And, as wartime atrocities have made only too clear, soldiers’ grief for fallen comrades often transposes into rage that spurs frenzied killing. 15 Arendt, Weil, and Gray suggest some ways that we might distinguish uses of emotion that promote understanding of historical phenomena and awareness of our ties to other living beings from uses of emotion that obscure relevant phenomena and alienate us from our neighbours. Emotions have obfuscating and alienating effects, they explain, when they take shape not from individual reckoning with specific phenomena, but from set reactions to oversimplified entities; for instance, love for “the free world” or hatred toward “the enemy” (Arendt, 1998, pp. viii; Gray, 1998, pp. 133-135; Weil, 1977, pp. 270-276). Such “abstract emotions,” as Gray calls them, remain oriented by mechanical formulas, even when they may be accentuated by a personal grievance. Thus, although the person guided by abstract emotion is more passionate than the aloof expert, he is equally “insulated against experience and free reflection” and “more or less an automaton” (Gray, 1998, p. 158). Ultimately, abstract emotions stifle intelligence because, like overly abstract reasoning, they bulldoze any subtleties of historical life that do not fit received categories while they gain clarity and certainty at the expense of “the very elements of [historical] intelligence,” namely “the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency,” which are the only ways by which abstract terms apply meaningfully to rich and varied historical phenomena (Weil, 1977, p. 271). Thus, before turning to responsible uses of emotion, I specify the character of irresponsible uses of emotion, so that the two can be more systematically distinguished. Ignatieff acknowledges his susceptibility to such crude emotions when he attributes his overconfidence in the war to his emotional reaction to Saddam-ruled Iraq (2007, p. 29); however, whereas Ignatieff blames emotion per se, Weil and Gray allow us to specify Ignatieff’s judgment-impairing emotion as an abstract emotion that is complicit with his overly abstract thinking: both Ignatieff’s emotions and intellect presuppose a stereotypical “combustible region of Islamic peoples” whose disorder is defined against a mythic democracy-spreading America, with the result that, even when Ignatieff acknowledges the war’s failure, he retains those facile stereotypes. Emotions also impede rigorous thinking when they substitute for critical reflection on our historical responsibilities and projects. For instance, when love is expressed as unconditional loyalty to the mission that a loved one serves or the identity to which a loved one belongs, such love transposes into group allegiance. Such group- allegiance-oriented love is not only divisive but dulls thinking, for it avoids examining critically group identities and missions. Grief can have a similarly dulling and myopic effect when it is channelled into rage and violence. Such grief-turned- vengeance seeks to escape the pain of losing a loved one by immersing oneself in revenge, as if one’s loss could be cancelled by inflicting loss on others; in the words of one settler, “they kill our children, so we kill theirs.” Ultimately, such emotions 38 Shari Stone-Mediatore Studies in Social Justice, Volume 3, Issue 1, 21-36, 2009 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 not only erect barriers between people but avoid the difficult task of understanding past conflicts and building less violent futures. Emotional Engagement and Rigorous Thinking Although some uses of emotion cloud thinking and fuel ideological divisions, the activists who have turned attention to the war’s complex and discomfiting elements demonstrate that the solution to emotionally fraught zealotry is not to purge emotion from our thinking–a move that only further alienates us from the living world–but to allow ourselves to feel deeply our love, grief, and even anger, and then to use those feelings to know the world more fully and intimately as a world to which we belong and are accountable. In effect, they practice and further elucidate the kind of responsibly engaged and situated thinking called for by Arendt, Weil, Fanon, and Gray. On one level, these activists demonstrate how personal ties to war, when combined with a concern for honesty about the world that homes loved ones, can help them to face vexing realities, even when this exposes them to intellectual uncertainty and social ostracization. For instance, Dawson’s ties to her children in the military led her to shed the safety of her military and Republican upbringing and to study reports from around the world in order to be able to evaluate for herself the reasons for her children’s possible deployment. As she put it, “with two children in the reserves, I made it my business to know about the war.” Military wife Christine Langer has similarly forgone the comforts of certainty and clarity in order to struggle with the contradictions of a war that called her husband to service. She underscores the role that love has played in her resistance to mental indolence: Military families are trained to follow mechanically the military’s cut and dried logic, Langer explains, so that your mind becomes attached to the seeming certainty of that logic and its simple explanation for your sacrifices, even while “in your true heart” you know that the issues are not as simple as the military would have you believe (cited in Houppert, 2003, p. 14). Candace Robison confirms the heart’s role in critical thinking. “I needed more evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction,” she says, “before I was ready to accept that my husband might come home in a body bag” (cited in Houppert, 2003, p. 13). Granted, the historical insight that Langer attributes to her “true heart” seems to include intellectual understanding of the issues while the investigative impulses of Dawson and Robison are actualized with cognitive and research skills. Nevertheless, when Langer identifies her critical distance from military logic with her “heart” and when Dawson and Robison emphasize their personal ties to the issues that they scrutinize, they indicate that the kind of mental alertness, or “waking up,” that philosophers throughout history have associated with critical thought is not merely intellectual but is enlivened by a passion-motivated concern for truth. They remind us, in other words, as Socrates suggests in his cross-examination of Meletus, that sound understanding of an issue has a lot to do with caring about it (Plato, 2002, p. 30). Thus, Dawson and Robison cannot rest content with vacuous abstractions about the war, but demand historical precision, when their families are part of that history. “If the intention is to bring ‘democracy,’” says Dawson, “then get them water, Epistemologies of Discomfort 39 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 power, infrastructure. That’s what my son’s unit is trained to do. They are ‘can-do’ people. If [democracy] was a priority, it would have been done.” In addition to driving them to examine critically the relation of abstract claims to historical reality, the activists’ personal closeness to the war has also helped them to appreciate human dimensions of the conflict, which, while not hidden, escape detached and managerial mindsets. The activists’ awareness of the war’s human elements may begin on a personal level; however, when combined with a sense of their situatedness within history, such awareness does not remain merely personal but guides them toward important but often-overlooked historical phenomena. For instance, having experienced directly the strain of the war on her marriage, Dawson was intrigued to research the subject further and found, amongst less publicized statistics, that since 2003 the divorce rate amongst active duty personnel has risen 300%.16 Many such human elements of the war should not be unexpected or difficult to comprehend, and yet they challenge our comfort level and mastery, so that we attend to them only when an emotional connection jars us into addressing things that we otherwise conveniently ignore. The grief of those who have lost loved ones in the war underscores how emotional responsiveness to the issues can spark an awareness that is missing from institutionalized thinking; in this case, an acute awareness of the value of individual lives and their irreducibility to abstract causes. When we allow “intense, generous attention” to expose us to the preciousness of the lives that are damaged and destroyed in war, we do not gain easy answers to conflict; however, we do unsettle comfortable attachments to “projects” and “missions” and are moved to consider profound effects of the war—the destruction of families, the loss of loved ones, the life-long psychological damage to Iraqi children—that are too easily overlooked by detached theorizing. Sensitive to the effects of war on everyday life, she has also seen beyond project sites and “combustible regions” to Iraqi people, not so different than herself. For instance, when the United States military implemented “Shock and Awe” (a strategy based on overwhelming and spectacular uses of force, which included intensive bombing of Baghdad) Dawson’s youngest son was still a toddler, whose fears she had to quell every night before he would go to sleep. From her mother’s perspective, Dawson wondered how mothers in Iraq could possibly relieve their children’s bedtime fears in the context of Shock and Awe. Not surprisingly, Iraqi caretakers attest to the war’s damage to Iraqi children’s basic psychological well- being (Finer, 2006). Emotional Engagement and Historical Responsibility Finally, the more effective activists demonstrate how emotional closeness to the issues can enhance our sense of connection and responsibility to the historical world. Although not all emotional responses ground us in the world in responsible ways, precisely targeted emotions can generate the sense of historical responsibility that both abstract emotions and detached analysis lack. Carefully focused anger, for instance, affirms that comfortable aloofness is not adequate, but that we need to denounce wrongdoing and demand better behaviour from our fellows. Feminist theorists help to distinguish such “corrective-surgery” anger (as Audre Lorde puts it) from hatred and rage. Hatred seeks destruction and rage is hurled without focus or 40 Shari Stone-Mediatore Studies in Social Justice, Volume 3, Issue 1, 21-36, 2009 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 attempt at communication. By contrast, anger that is “focused with precision” and expressed within a community of peers serves positive growth, for it identifies intolerable practices and enjoins others’ participation in change (Lorde, 1984, p. 127; also Spelman, 1989, pp. 270-272). Thus, the rage of frenzied soldiers, which is expressed indiscriminately at anyone who fits a vague notion of the enemy, promotes only crude categorizing and destruction. By contrast, when Dawson responds angrily to her community’s naive “support-the-troops” gestures—“those yellow ribbon magnets won’t keep my son safe from sniper bullets” (often written on cards left on car window shields)—and when Sheehan makes clear that someone is to blame for her son’s death—“Casey wasn’t lost; he was killed by George Bush’s murderous policies,”17 they target specific contradictions in their own communities. In so doing, they stir uncomfortable controversy but also provoke us to account for our slogans, symbols, and national policies. Grief, when not lost in feel-good abstractions of pride or revenge, can also awaken community awareness and responsibility. On one level, grief that is faced as both a personal and historically situated experience can heighten our sense of historical responsibility. As Sheehan put it, the emotional knowledge of “know[ing] how much it hurts to have a child killed” led her to the sense that she was embroiled in the issue and had to “do something” to prevent others from experiencing such pain (cited in Barsamian, 2006, p. 38). Moreover, although George Bush may think that Arlington Cemetery is watered by “silent tears,” 18 Such grief-awakened and historically grounded sensitivity to our common vulnerability to violence may not yield certain knowledge but it is not “mere feeling” either. It directs our thinking toward vital human patterns and problems that both ideologically formed emotions and institutionalized discourses neglect; in particular, our common humanity across differences and our need to find ways of living some relatives of buried soldiers have openly expressed their grief and thereby affirmed the political relevance of war’s personal toll. Sheehan underscored this point when she mourned publicly outside Bush’s Crawford ranch and demanded an explanation from Bush as to why her son had to die. In so doing, Sheehan disrupted norms that would have us accept passively the death of soldier-kin. She thereby created a context in which others, too, could experience their grief and anger as legitimate reactions to the death of loved ones in the military and as politically relevant speech to which policymakers must respond. Of course, not all grieving mothers react with the same kind of communal awareness. As Sara Ruddick observes, our concern for our own children often contends with our concern for the well being other children (1984, p. 39). Nonetheless, even if they cannot avoid entirely the tension that Ruddick identifies between “the demands of one’s own and the demands of the whole,” Sheehan and other Goldstar Mothers for Peace demonstrate how the sharing of grief across communities can help to surpass the narrow loyalties that sometimes consume grieving parents. Through sharing feelings of fear and loss, they have not only forged human-level connections with other parents but have gained appreciation for our common vulnerability to violence across continents and have been moved to organize on behalf of the security of all families. Thus Sheehan and her peers have joined with women around the world to “end this madness” because, whatever their cultures and languages, their “hearts understand the pain . . . caused by this war” (Sheehan cited in Barsamian, 2006, p. 38). Epistemologies of Discomfort 41 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 together without inflicting massive violence on one another. Not distance and disinterest but only emotional responsiveness, combined with a sense of historical situatedness and responsibility, can turn our attention to such challenging human projects. Conclusion: The Need for Epistemologies of Discomfort Military-family activists have highlighted crucial aspects of the Iraq war that public affairs experts regularly overlook; for instance, the long-term psychological damage that the war inflicts on soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict, the dubious commitment of the U.S. government to support their own troops or to protect the infrastructures of democracy, and our responsibility as members of the human community to make all families safe from violence. The virtual absence of these issues from most public debate on the war reflects not only the limits of ruling discourses on war but also general cultural tendencies to avoid phenomena that might disturb ingrained beliefs or trouble our consciences. Much like the dominant culture’s inattention to the working poor or to homeless people (many of whom are veterans), our inattention to the profound damage of war seems to arise less from the obscurity of the issues than from our self-protective evasion of phenomena that make us uncomfortable. With homelessness as with the horror of war, full and receptive attention would likely threaten comfortable worldviews and raise tough questions about our moral obligations. Avoidance of these phenomena is, thus, a common tendency. Nonetheless, experts tend to exacerbate these common self-imposed ignorances. With their commitment to established discourses, to intellectual mastery over their subject matter, and to professional distance, experts are particularly prone to avoid phenomena that defy ruling conceptual frameworks or that make claims on us as human beings situated amongst other living beings. If we are to confront the current wars—or any violence or injustice of our own institutions—in a rigorous and responsible manner, then we will need to face phenomena that are discomfiting and that call attention to our own moral and historical responsibilities. The success of some military-family activists in bringing public attention to difficult aspects of the Iraq war suggest the importance in this endeavour of closeness to and care about the issues. With their explicitly passion- driven concern for truth and their grounding of historical reflection in the intensity and complexity of troubling experience, activists like Dawson, Sheehan, and Langer have exceeded established discourses and comfortable aloofness so as to identify violence in which their own lives are entangled and to sketch historical projects that are vital to human security but that escape managerial and nation-based logics. Academics can contribute to the revitalizing of security debates initiated by these activists by registering the authority of their voices and by affirming the need for all of us to risk reckoning on a human level with uncategorized and uncomfortable phenomena, if we are ever to face the intellectual and moral challenges that the current wars—and any institutionalized violence or social injustice—present. 42 Shari Stone-Mediatore Studies in Social Justice, Volume 3, Issue 1, 21-36, 2009 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 Notes 1 I thank Catherine Hundleby, Phyllis Rooney, and the anonymous journal reviewers for thoughtful and illuminating criticism of earlier drafts of this paper. 2 My own interview with the veteran’s mother, Theresa Fowler Dawson, April 21, 2005. All subsequent quotations from Dawson are from my interviews with Dawson in April 2005, July 2006, and December 2007. I have written about Dawson and other military-family activists before in “Examined Lives in the Shadow of Iraq,” The Humanist (March/April 2006) and “Military Families Speak Out and the Challenge to War Epistemology,” Bridges: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Theology, History, and Science (Summer 2007). 3 In economics, the so-called “law” of comparative advantage posits that all individuals and communities benefit when each specializes in the goods that they can produce at the lowest relative cost. As my students seem to understand this law in the context of the current transnational economy, it posits that all nations (and people within nations) benefit when we implement the current set of neoliberal trade rules, which prohibit regulations and tariffs that could impede transnational trade. 4 For instance, in my Critical Thinking course, students gain understanding of the political and cultural dynamics of knowledge production by studying Karl Marx, Roland Barthes, Arundhati Roy, and Aldous Huxley, and then applying these theorists’ insights to analysis of contemporary texts, including professional texts from their other courses. Students also gain appreciation for open-mindedness by reading, and then participating in exercises that challenge them to practice and extend Immanuel Kant’s theory of enlarged thought. 5 See, for instance, Farmer (2003, pp. 1-28, 137-138), Harding (1991, pp. 296-312), Plumwood (1993, pp.189-196), and Smith (1987, pp. 151-255). 6 By knowledge practices I refer broadly to all of those modes of inquiry that inform how we think about the world, including empirical investigations, theoretical analysis of causal mechanisms, and also the interpretive practice that Arendt calls understanding, by which we come to terms with the significance of phenomena as living phenomena of our world. I include the latter because (as Arendt argues and as I discuss below) an interpretation of the moral and emotional meaning that political phenomena have for us is central to all substantive knowledge-claims about the political world, even when such knowledge-claims present themselves as objective analysis. 7 In Arendt’s account, understanding is achieved through the practice of storytelling. A full account of Arendt’s notion of storytelling is beyond the scope of this paper but, in brief, storytelling, for Arendt, is a disciplined, empirically accountable interpretive activity that is also engaged and creative, insofar as it articulates vivid metaphors and beginning-ending sequences in attempt to present political phenomena in terms of their human content and ties to our own world. Storytelling can be held to standards of rigor and accountability but is nonetheless always partial and community-situated, insofar as the story is always only one way of transforming a living phenomenon into an articulate narrative. See Arendt (1953a, pp. 777-781; 1953b, pp. 388-390; 1958, pp. 184-192) and Stone-Mediatore (2003, pp. 26- 94). 8 This elite standpoint passes unnoticed because the same standpoint is shared by their audiences. For instance, a glance at the advertisements in the journals in which Ignatieff and Ajami publish makes clear that their audiences are upper-echelon professionals who own or manage businesses, whose worries about the future centre on stock growth and retirement plans, and who view the globe in terms of investment and travel opportunities. In one particularly revealing Foreign Affairs advertisement, Guardsmark Security Services appeals to business executives and refers to national and international violence as a threat to business operations. “War, terrorism, workplace violence, sabotage, theft,” the advertisement reads, “the list of security-related worries preoccupying today’s executive seems to grow each year.” It urges readers to consider “the costs of crime and terror—the human tragedy, the liability expenses, the legal fees, the public relations, management costs, the increased insurance premiums, the lost revenue from business interruption.” 9 In fact, Ignatieff and Ajami each combine neoliberal discourse with an updated Cold-War discourse. Both discourses identify freedom with the spread of Western institutions, but Cold-War discourse is more explicit about the role of military intervention in achieving this political hegemony. For instance, in Cold-War fashion, Ignatieff claims that “America,” Epistemologies of Discomfort 43 Studies in Social Justice, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2010 through military intervention, can “help other people attain their freedom,” even if we cannot always control the outcome (2003). Ajami likewise invokes typical cold-war metaphors of America’s role in fighting freedom-threatening forces: He describes a “furious Islamism [that] blew in like a deadly wind,” whereupon America responded with “regime change and ‘rollback’” (2003, p. 3). 10 On the wider prevalence of white-man’s-burden rhetoric in expert discussions of the Iraq war, see Monthly Review (2003). 11 I discuss this problem further in Stone-Mediatore, 2003, p. 62. 12 See, for instance, Paley (2006, p. A22), Rothschild (2007, p. 9), Jasiewicz (2008, p. 27) and Whalen (2006, pp. 11-18). 13 For instance, rather than engage critics’ concerns about U.S. oil interests in Iraq or about the inability of the U.S. military to bring democracy, Ignatieff caricatures critics as belonging to the “Michael Moore-style left” (2005b). Ignatieff seems particularly unfair when he describes the war’s critics as “anti-war ideologues” who cannot admit that “positive outcomes can result from [the Bush Administration’s] bad policies and worse intentions” (2005a); for, a year earlier, Ignatieff himself asserted that “intentions do shape consequences” (2004). 14 This and all subsequent references to Israeli settlers are from the documentary “Frontline: Israel’s Next War?” 15 Frank 1971, p. 459; Gray, 1998, p. 139; and Major Robert Hanafin, presentation at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio, April 21, 2005. 16 Dawson’s statistics are from www.military.com. 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