Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Gendered Conference Campaign Goes to Russia

I'm back to making trouble in the comments sections again. There appears to be a controversy between the Russian organizers of an upcoming Hume conference in Moscow and some of the prospective Western participants, concerning the under-representation of women among the speakers in the conference. The Russian organising committee, headed up by Elena Vostrikova, sent a letter to the complainants, in which she maintained, among other things, that "we consider your proposal to influence our conference by pressing the invited speakers to cancel their participation in it a manifestation an anachronistic colonial behavior which we also deem inappropriate." To see the entire letter, go here. My comment at the same site is reproduced below.

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I agree with Mme. Vostrikova that this is, in a certain respect, colonial behaviour. You cannot operate as philosophers at the international level, organising events that involve cultural exchange, without taking into consideration the differences between the cultures. In this instance, I believe that Western Europeans and Americans tend to see their cultural difference from Russia as less significant than the Russians themselves see their cultural difference from the West. (This is perhaps the only case in the world in which a group others itself even as those from whom it is self-othering in turn refuse to other it.)

Now, for better or worse, an entirely different history of gender politics in Russia has had as a consequence that, today, different cultural attitudes prevail concerning the 'natures' of men and women, and concerning the social roles to which these natures make them suited. Are these attitudes correct? I don't believe so, and I don't believe any of the readers here do either. But having spent a year and a half in Russia, I will confess that I have indeed sat silently through many conversations that reproduced essentializing commonplaces about gender difference: conversations which, had they taken place in the West, would have caused me to intervene in opposition. Why did I not intervene? Because unless something truly criminal is going on I believe in the edifying effect of quiet participant-observation, and because under the circumstances it would have been arrogant to do so, and in any case ineffectual. It would have been a small-scale instance of the sort of geopolitical manoeuvre to which Vostrikova and the others allude (it would say, like Jeffrey Sachs in another sphere of public life, 'We know better').

Now Russia also has an entirely different history of gender in public institutions, including the academy. There are indeed very high percentages of women in most scientific fields, as Vostrikova et al. point out, and this has in large part to do with the legacy of the Soviet commitment to advancing the representation of women in high-status fields (a top-down commitment that never succeeded in transforming popular attitudes about men and women).

Today, however, I fear that the high representation of women in the humanities has to do with the fact that financially the institutions where these are housed have been completely gutted, while simultaneously, in the post-Soviet era, ideas about what constitutes status have been completely reversed: leaving a peculiar situation in which women entered into high-status jobs because of a certain sort of Soviet progressivism, but now hold those same jobs in such large numbers only because Russian society as a whole has lost this progressive momentum: popular attitudes have proved much more enduring than when the Bolsheviks came up with that hapless phrase "The woman is also a person", and now the status of the jobs into which women were promoted has gone from one extreme to the other. They remain there largely because of the low status of these positions.

I'm not necessarily sure cultural exchange is always worth it (I declined an invitation to a conference in Iran a few years ago), but if you're going to go ahead with it then you would do better to not blunder in there with a Besserwisser attitude and start telling your local hosts how to do things, especially if you have no knowledge of or interest in the history that led them to do things this way in the first place. Russia is part of a different cultural-historical sphere than the one familiar to most Hume Society members (it has had, to be sure, a prominent Westernizing elite since Peter the Great, and a proper Enlightenment for the elite under Catherine, which tend to obscure from view this deeper cultural difference at the popular level: during the Enlightenment, the 'people' were serfs). Yes, I know there is feminism in Russia, but I would argue that as in Catherine's era it is salon feminism, and that in everyday use the word has a fundamentally 'importny' (imported) ring to it, like, for that matter, 'jeans' or 'Coke'. Perhaps someday things will be different, but the change is not going to be quickened by a group of Western philosophers chastening their Russian hosts for not adhering to the norms that prevail at APA-sanctioned events. Moscow is out of that jurisdiction.

Revisiting Egypt

I spent a month or so wandering around Egypt in the late spring of 1998. I went there from Germany, where I had been studying for the previous year. I did not inform anyone of where I was going, not my roommates in Münster nor my parents in California, and this charged the trip with a tremendous extra dose of intrigue and excitement. It also exposed me to intense crises of existential loneliness. A few dozen German tourists had been mowed down the month before by Islamists while walking through the Valley of the Kings, and the conventional wisdom was that you were not supposed to be wandering around at all, let alone wandering around without having left the proper emergency-notification information.

One night, on top of Mt. Sinai, I tried to sleep, shivering in a sleeping bag, as a group of Chinese evangelicals sang 'Amazing Grace' around a campfire, in Chinese, for hours on end. I decided to walk back down to the settlement at the base of the mountain. It was terribly cold and dark and I could not see the trail. There were flighted creatures --bats or birds, I don't know-- swooping down as if to harass me, and I quickly grew uncertain that I would find my way. No one I knew had any idea what country I was in. Was this an enjoyable sensation? It was a sort of epitome, in the old sense of encapsulation, of the generally manic-depressive condition that had brought me there in the first place, which might be summed up by the motto: I'm free! I'm free! I'm alone.

There were camels along the highway of the Sinai --real camels, not show camels, let out to graze by their Bedouin masters-- and the driver we hired to take us from Sharm El-Sheikh to wherever it is up near Israel that you can sleep on the beach for cheap (who the 'we' is is a question I might not have time to get to here, in any case it didn't last for the duration of the journey), he didn't think the prospect of hitting one of them was an important enough reason to turn on his headlights. He said it's inconsiderate to oncoming drivers to make them drive into the glare. There's the fatum mahometanum Montesquieu wrote about, I thought.

I had left Cath Neumann back in Cairo. She was a punk from Leeds, and had spent the previous eight months hitching from South Africa to Egypt, by herself. She was slowed down in Botswana when two adolescents held her up at knife-point and forced her to hand over her earthly belongings. Though an anarchist, she pressed charges, and the next she knew she was testifying in a drawn-out trial, which ended in the sentencing of two sixteen-year-old Africans to something like forty years in prison for stealing a white girl's backpack.

Anyway this is just to say that Cath had been around, and was not afraid to mingle. I, being utterly afraid or at least loath to mingle, really did not belong in Egypt at all. I was younger then and unlike today --I am now as good as invisible on the streets of any city-- easily got wrapped up in pointless and often dangerous conspiracies with just-met coevals. By the end of my first day in Cairo I had been talked in, by some smoothie named Hamdi with a bit of English, to going to the state-run liquor store, at which one needs to show a foreign ID in order to enter, to make some provisions for his cousin's wedding. It quickly came to seem to me that everyone in Egypt has far more cousins than I do, and they are all perpetually about to get married.

I had been pressured by Hamdi into this errand, pressured into a taxi with him to some squalid quarter of the city, into strained fraternity of a sort I would never even think of attempting with my own countrymen, until at some point I reached my limit of tolerance and began to yell at him: I don't know you. I don't care about your cousin's wedding. You have your alcohol, now have fun. I'm going back to my hotel.

On my way back, walking down a narrow alley just near Tahrir Square, I was accosted by a group of urchins. Their leader looked to be about sixteen; he had some sort of grease in his hair and a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his t-shirt. "I hear you've been to the liquor store with Hamdi," he said. Yes, I replied, I suppose I have been. There was a tense silence, and I imagined he was about to pull a switchblade or something, but then he cracked a smile, and said, as if quoting a line from Menace II Society, or The Outsiders, or West Side Story: "You know what? I respect you."

I'm honored, I said, and I started walking. I entered the lobby of my hotel, a cut-rate and dusty but still majestic colonial-era building, and I started to walk up the spiral staircase. The kid followed me in and rushed to hit the buttons for the old cage elevator. "I'll bring the elevator for you. You wait," he said. I told him I preferred to walk. "I am getting the elevator. It is coming. You wait." I kept walking. When it arrived he got in and, moving up through the middle of the stairs, quickly caught up with me. "I did this for you," he pleaded through the wire mesh of the cage. "Why didn't you wait?" Old elevators scare me, I explained as I continued to move up the stairs. "You disrespected me," he said.

When we arrived at the hotel level an employee saw the kid in the elevator and began yelling at him in Arabic. The question of respect and disrespect ended right there, as my would-be blood-brother, Hamdi's rival, a familiar nuisance to the hotel staff, darted out of the elevator and disappeared down the stairs. The employee went back to the dingy desk and sat down. Behind the counter he had a black-and-white TV, on which he was watching a public address from Hosni Mubarak. Cath was sitting on a sofa in the corner writing post cards.  She was wearing a t-shirt with a quotation from Oscar Wilde: "I have nothing to declare except my genius."

The details are fuzzy but soon enough Cath and I were setting out to Giza to see the pyramids. Now she had seen the Nubian pyramids of Sudan and for her there was something far too easy about this quick jaunt out of Cairo. But the ease of it, and the conventionality, lent it a sweet character, something almost like what could be called a 'date', if the two daters' politics and personalities weren't so stubbornly exceptional.

We took a bus, and along the way she told me about a costume party at her commune in Leeds where she went as the 'personification' of the Situationist slogan: Sous les pavés la plage. Soon enough we were accosted by another young man who wanted, somehow, to implicate us in his life. He happened to live in Giza, and before we knew it we were sitting on the dirt floor of his parents' home. His mother and sister cowered in the kitchen, and periodically darted out to serve us bean paste, bread, and tea, without ever looking us in the eyes. The young man showed us his Boney M cassette. A donkey stuck its head in through the sheet that hung in place of a front door.

I have no memory at all of how we extricated ourselves from that meeting, nor of the subsequent visit to the pyramids.

Throughout my time in Egypt I was struck by the uniformity of men's hairstyles: short, parted on the side, moustaches without beards. I couldn't detect the existence of even the most marginal fashion subculture, or of any diversity of taste or manner at all. This impression of homogeneity contrasted with the rich internal lives of the characters in Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, which I had bought at L'Orientaliste and had been reading during the trip.

At times it struck me that I would have felt I understood things better if I had remained content to read an Egyptian novel or two in Germany. The only encounters I had had in Egypt were these aggressive, almost menacing attempts at immediate friendship on the part of young Egyptian men. I have never been an easy friend to anyone, and I had no point of reference in my previous experience for what they seemed to be proposing.

I was not aware at the time that the superficial impressions I was forming were the superficial impressions of a dictatorship. There ought to be a word for it, oughtn't there: these oppressive regimes that nonetheless manage at the same time to convince Westerners that they stand for nothing so much as fun-and-sun (and perhaps a bit of edifying antiquity). It is interesting that the first two countries to catch fire in the wave of Arab revolutions currently underway, Tunisia and Egypt, are the two that have most successfully coupled base kleptocracy and pseudodemocracy with vapid and lucrative tourism industries.

I realize of course that one should not expect to learn much from the superifical impressions of a young flaneur. But I also think that the respects in which I was wrong might be more revealing than the reports of an expert traveler with some reason to believe he is right. In particular, I think my inability to relate much of what I saw --the desperation, the uniformity-- back to politics resulted from the mystified status of Egypt (like, perhaps, Thailand) in the traveller's imagination (even that of the not-totally-idiotic traveller, the traveller who would really like to learn): the impression based on the richness of antiquity, and sustained by the tourism industry, that the political reality of life in these places is somehow a parallel universe, even a distraction from their deeper nature. 

Anyway the stunning revolutionary outburst of the past week has made all that seem more naive than ever before. I imagine it is boys like Hamdi and the kid and the Gizan who are most likely to get hurt by Mubarak's thugs, and that their willingness to throw themselves into such danger is born of the same desperate willingness they had to make friends with me. I am thrilled that they have finally arrived at a moment when their wills can be turned to a better cause.

A Conversation

DHS Agent Baca: “What is the purpose of your trip?”

Me: “I’m going to Indiana University in Bloomington. You know, Hoosiers?”

Baca: “What will you be doing there?”

Me: “I’ll be delivering a paper.”

Baca: “What is the value of the paper?”

Me: “Oh, it’s incalculable.”

Baca: “Sir, if you’re delivering paper in the United States, I’ll need to know the value of it.”

Me: “Well, I suppose the paper itself is worth next to nothing.”

Baca: “Sir, what kind of paper salesman are you?”

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: A Kropotkinite Perspective

For some years now, fear of being asked a certain snide question has held me back in my desire to come forth as an anarchist: "So what, then, you don't like roads?" But I've finally come up with an answer: No, as a matter of fact I don't. I think they are evil. Trails are alright, paths just fine, but the corridors of asphalt that cut through ecosystems and that play host to hundreds of thousands of bloody human deaths every year, those I definitely do not like. 

There is a certain fallacy, which I'm sure has by now been given a name by someone else, according to which some human invention is good if it satisfies some human need, even if that human need was a human invention to begin with, rather than a basic condition of our existence. There was a time when no one felt the need for highways (or for commuting by airplane), and there are countless inventions that have not yet been brought forth, whose non-existence does not cause us to feel any concrete lack, even if we do feel wonder at the possibilities of the future. 

Remarkably, modern history since the 16th century seems to have consisted largely in the creation of new needs: needs for plants and goods that do not occur naturally in Europe, needs that make us forget entirely that Europe did just fine without them for millennia. The democratization of the automobile in the 1920s led directly to the need for workers to commute, and it is this need, much more than the facilitation of the 'freedom' to travel, that necessitated the building of a massive system of asphalt roads throughout the developed world. This need, it seems to me, is part of the same continuous development that earlier made the world dependent on sugar and tobacco. 

The fallacy I've described is on most vivid display in attitudes toward air travel. Now it could have happened that features of the atmosphere had brought it about that aviation should never get off the ground: if, say, clouds harbored giant hail balls that brought down every tenth plane. It is a contingent fact about the world that air travel is --just barely-- possible. Occasionally, it really does become impossible, as when Europe is covered by clouds of volcanic ash, and then the people cry: I have to be in Paris in twelve hours! But who ever guaranteed that intercontinental travel should take place in a matter of hours? Nature certainly never guaranteed it. Profit-driven companies did, and shortsightedly. The airline industry is forced to uphold the illusion that the system it makes possible --in which people depart from one continent in order to attend meetings a few hours later on another-- is the natural and normal order of things, when in fact it is an extreme and precarious order. 

It is an order I hope to see collapse, and to see replaced by the early 19th-century technologies of the steamship and the railway. Currently, rail travel in Europe is being destroyed by those vulgar upstart companies, the so-called low-cost airlines, that have in just a few years brought us to the point where it is now seen as quirky to prefer to take the train between, say, Budapest and Bucharest. I have just done precisely this, and very much enjoyed looking out the window of my private, first-class sleeping compartment. The whole thing cost me just a little more than a ticket on Bloo Air or Fizz Air or whatever the hell they're called. It left just a fraction of the carbon trace that the plane journey would have emitted, and it took roughly six times as long. I'll leave it to you to do the cost-benefit calculations; my concern is more moral, even cosmological, than it is pragmatic. My concern is with the recalibration of needs so that they suit our individual temperaments, in contrast with the general expectation of our society that we adopt the needs that have been created for us by others in search of profit. Such autonomy is, I take it, a core element of anarchism. 

My train journey took me twelve hours, but it did not at all feel as though it was taking too long, since it never occurred to me to compare it with the airplanes that take only two, any more than air-travellers feel that they are moving too slowly in comparison with instantaneous teletransportation. Now of course some might detect a certain arbitrariness in drawing the line between trains and airplanes; after all, railways are just as much a product of that noxious mix of state control and profit-seeking as are airlines. A few comments are in order. First, I would have been just as happy to have travelled by carriage (if, that is, I were convinced that the horses were happy to pull me), and indeed just as happy to have been born into a world where no one could reasonably expect of me that I make appearances in a dozen or so countries over the course of a year. But I have a career to pursue, and conferences are simply part of the regle du jeu. 

Second, I sincerely believe that flying is wrong in a way that train travel is not. Rolling along a flat surface on wheels, even at relatively great speeds, is more or less continuous with what we as bipedal primates have been doing all along: the wheel came along to supplement our bipedalism roughly 10,000 years ago, and quickly diffused from the Pontic steppe (not so far from the place of my recent train journey) after that. It was one of the great motors, along with pastoralism, agriculture, and writing, of the rapid complexification of human society that would ultimately issue in air travel; yet it was, if I may speak with Marx and Engels for a second, qualitatively different from its latter-day descendant. One thing that often strikes me when I am in an airplane is how many precision operations have to be carried out in order for me to walk safely away from the circumstances I am in. A runway has to be found, which then has to be approached at just the right speed and angle, and so on. In order to walk away from a moving train, one need only cut the power that is causing it to move. This is an arrangement I think any higher primate could understand and consent to, and it could not be more different from flying. 

Naturally I admire the aviation pioneers, the death-defying astronauts and cosmonauts who have pushed the limits of what it is a human body can go through. But again, what I can't stand is when pioneering gives way to blind, unquestioning dependency. 

In a subsequent post, I will address some of the possible points of criticism --which I can already hear buzzing in your head, dear reader-- having to do with the numerous performative contradictions of which I stand guilty: the careerism that is so incompatible with the true anarchist spirit; the blogging that depends upon a technology first developed for purposes of war; the elitism implicit in the contempt for low-cost airlines; and so on.  But for now I have to go to the well to pump some water, as the municipal government in this provincial post-communist town has bungled things again, and the bathroom tap runs dry. 

--Bârlad, Romania